(This is the text of a keynote talk I just delivered at the IT Futures conference held by the University of Edinburgh Informatics centre today. NB: Some typos exist; I'll fix them tonight.)
Good morning. I'm Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I write fiction—deliberate non-truths designed to inform, amuse, and examine the human condition. More specifically, I'm a science fiction writer, mostly focusing on the intersection between the human condition and our technological and scientific environment: less Star Wars, more about bank heists inside massively multiplayer computer games, or the happy fun prospects for 3D printer malware.
One of the besetting problems of near-future science fiction is that life comes at you really fast these days. Back when I agreed to give this talk, I had no idea we'd be facing a general election campaign — much less that the outcome would already be known, with consequences that pretty comprehensively upset any predictions I was making back in September.
So, because I'm chicken, I'm going to ignore current events and instead take this opportunity to remind you that I can't predict the future. No science fiction writer can. Predicting the future isn't what science fiction is about. As the late Edsger Djikstra observed, "computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." He might well have added, or science fiction is about predicting the future. What I try to do is examine the human implications of possible developments, and imagine what consequences they might have. (Hopefully entertainingly enough to convince the general public to buy my books.)
So: first, let me tell you some of my baseline assumptions so that you can point and mock when you re-read the transcript of this talk in a decade's time.
Ten years in the future, we will be living in a world recognizable as having emerged from the current one by a process of continuous change. About 85% of everyone alive in 2029 is already alive in 2019. (Similarly, most of the people who're alive now will still be alive a decade hence, barring disasters on a historic scale.)
Here in the UK the average home is 75 years old, so we can reasonably expect most of the urban landscape of 2029 to be familiar. I moved to Edinburgh in 1995: while the Informatics Forum is new, as a side-effect of the disastrous 2002 old town fire, many of the university premises are historic. Similarly, half the cars on the road today will still be on the roads in 2029, although I expect most of the diesel fleet will have been retired due to exhaust emissions, and there will be far more electric vehicles around.
You don't need a science fiction writer to tell you this stuff: 90% of the world of tomorrow plus ten years is obvious to anyone with a weekly subscription to New Scientist and more imagination than a doorknob.
What's less obvious is the 10% of the future that isn't here yet. Of that 10%, you used to be able to guess most of it — 9% of the total — by reading technology road maps in specialist industry publications. We know what airliners Boeing and Airbus are starting development work on, we can plot the long-term price curve for photovoltaic panels, read the road maps Intel and ARM provide for hardware vendors, and so on. It was fairly obvious in 2009 that Microsoft would still be pushing some version of Windows as a platform for their hugely lucrative business apps, and that Apple would have some version of NeXTStep — excuse me, macOS — as a key element of their vertically integrated hardware business. You could run the same guessing game for medicines by looking at clinical trials reports, and seeing which drugs were entering second-stage trials — an essential but hugely expensive prerequisite for a product license, which requires a manufacturer to be committed to getting the drug on the market by any means possible (unless there's a last-minute show-stopper), 5-10 years down the line.
Obsolescence is also largely predictable. The long-drawn-out death of the pocket camera was clearly visible on the horizon back in 2009, as cameras in smartphones were becoming ubiquitous: ditto the death of the pocket GPS system, the compass, the camcorder, the PDA, the mp3 player, the ebook reader, the pocket games console, and the pager. Smartphones are technological cannibals, swallowing up every available portable electronic device that can be crammed inside its form factor.
However, this stuff ignores what Donald Rumsfeld named "the unknown unknowns". About 1% of the world of ten years hence always seems to have sprung fully-formed from the who-ordered-THAT dimension: we always get landed with stuff nobody foresaw or could possibly have anticipated, unless they were spectacularly lucky guessers or had access to amazing hallucinogens. And this 1% fraction of unknown unknowns regularly derails near-future predictions.
In the 1950s and 1960s, futurologists were obsessed with resource depletion, the population bubble, and famine: Paul Ehrlich and the other heirs of Thomas Malthus predicted wide-scale starvation by the mid-1970s as the human population bloated past the unthinkable four billion mark. They were wrong, as it turned out, because of the unnoticed work of a quiet agronomist, Norman Borlaug, who was pioneering new high yield crop strains: what became known as the Green Revolution more than doubled global agricultural yields within the span of a couple of decades. Meanwhile, it turned out that the most effective throttle on population growth was female education and emancipation: the rate of growth has slowed drastically and even reversed in some countries, and WHO estimates of peak population have been falling continuously as long as I can remember. So the take-away I'd like you to keep is that the 1% of unknown unknowns are often the most significant influences on long-term change.
If I was going to take a stab at identifying a potential 1% factor, the unknown unknowns that dominate for the second and third decade of the 21st century, I wouldn't point to climate change — the dismal figures are already quite clear — but to the rise of algorithmically targeted advertising campaigns combined with the ascendancy of social networking. Our news media, driven by the drive to maximize advertising click-throughs for revenue, have been locked in a race to the bottom for years now. In the past half-decade this has been weaponized, in conjunction with data mining of the piles of personal information social networks try to get us to disclose (in the pursuit of advertising bucks), to deliver toxic propaganda straight into the eyeballs of the most vulnerable — with consequences that are threaten to undermine the legitimacy of democratic governmance on a global scale.
Today's internet ads are qualitatively different from the direct mail campaigns of yore. In the age of paper, direct mail came with a steep price of entry, which effectively limited it in scope — also, the print distribution chain was it relatively easy to police. The efflorescence of spam from 1992 onwards should have warned us that junk information drives out good, but the spam kings of the 1990s were just the harbinger of today's information apocalypse. The cost of pumping out misinformation is frighteningly close to zero, and bad information drives out good: if the propaganda is outrageous and exciting it goes viral and spreads itself for free.
The recommendation algorithms used by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter exploit this effect to maximize audience participation in pursuit of maximize advertising click-throughs. They promote popular related content, thereby prioritizing controversial and superficially plausible narratives. Viewer engagement is used to iteratively fine-tune the selection of content so that it is more appealing, but it tends to trap us in filter bubbles of material that reinforces our own existing beliefs. And bad actors have learned to game these systems to promote dubious content. It's not just Cambridge Analytica I'm talking about here, or allegations of Russian state meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. Consider the spread of anti-vaccination talking points and wild conspiracy theories, which are no longer fringe phenomena but mass movements with enough media traction to generate public health emergencies in Samoa and drive-by shootings in Washington DC. Or the spread of algorithmically generated knock-offs of children's TV shows proliferating on YouTube that caught the public eye last year.
... And then there's the cute cat photo thing. If I could take a time machine back to 1989 and tell an audience like yourselves that in 30 years time we'd all have pocket supercomputers that place all of human knowledge at our fingertips, but we'd mostly use them for looking at kitten videos and nattering about why vaccination is bad for your health, you'd have me sectioned under the Mental Health Act. And you'd be acting reasonably by the standards of the day: because unlike fiction, emergent human culture is under no obligation to make sense.
Let's get back to the 90/9/1 percent distribution, that applies to the components of the near future: 90% here today, 9% not here yet but on the drawing boards, and 1% unpredictable. I came up with that rule of thumb around 2005, but the ratio seems to be shifting these days. Changes happen faster, and there are more disruptive unknown-unknowns hitting us from all quarters with every passing decade. This is a long-established trend: throughout most of recorded history, the average person lived their life pretty much the same way as their parents and grandparents. Long-term economic growth averaged less than 0.1% per year over the past two thousand years. It has only been since the onset of the industrial revolution that change has become a dominant influence on human society. I suspect the 90/9/1 distribution is now something more like 85/10/5 — that is, 85% of the world of 2029 is here today, about 10% can be anticipated, and the random, unwelcome surprises constitute up to 5% of the mix. Which is kind of alarming, when you pause to think about it.
In the natural world, we're experiencing extreme weather events caused by anthropogenic climate change at an increasing frequency. Back in 1989, or 2009, climate change was a predictable thing that mostly lay in the future: today in 2019, or tomorrow in 2029, random-seeming extreme events (the short-term consequences of long-term climactic change) are becoming commonplace. Once-a-millennium weather outrages are already happening once a decade: by 2029 it's going to be much, much worse, and we can expect the onset of destabilization of global agriculture, resulting in seemingly random food shortages as one region or another succumbs to drought, famine, or wildfire.
In the human cultural sphere, the internet is pushing fifty years old, and not only have we become used to it as a communications medium, we've learned how to second-guess and game it. 2.5 billion people are on Facebook, and the internet reaches almost half the global population. I'm a man of certain political convictions, and I'm trying very hard to remain impartial here, but we have just come through a spectacularly dirty election campaign in which home-grown disinformation (never mind propaganda by external state-level actors) has made it almost impossible to get trustworthy information about topics relating to party policies. One party renamed its Twitter-verified feed from its own name to FactCheckUK for the duration of a televised debate. Again, we've seen search engine optimization techniques deployed successfully by a party leader — let's call him Alexander de Pfeffel something-or-other — who talked at length during a TV interview about his pastime of making cardboard model coaches. This led Google and other search engines to downrank a certain referendum bus with a promise about saving £350M a week for the NHS painted on its side, a promise which by this time had become deeply embarrassing.
This sort of tactic is viable in the short term, but in the long term is incredibly corrosive to public trust in the media — in all media.
Nor are the upheavals confined to the internet.
Over the past two decades we've seen revolutions in stock market and forex trading. At first it was just competition for rackspace as close as possible to the stock exchange switches, to minimize packet latency — we're seeing the same thing playing out on a smaller scale among committed gamers, picking and choosing ISPs for the lowest latency — then the high frequency trading arms race, in which case fuzzing the market by injecting "noise" in the shape of tiny but frequent trades allowed volume traders to pick up an edge (and effectively made small-scale day traders obsolete). I lack inside information but I'm pretty sure if you did a deep dive into what's going on behind the trading desks at FTSE and NASDAQ today you'd find a lot of powerful GPU clusters running Generative Adversarial Networks to manage trades in billions of pounds' worth of assets. Lights out, nobody home, just the products of the post-2012 boom in deep learning hard at work, earning money on behalf of the old, slow, procedural AIs we call corporations.
What do I mean by that — calling corporations AIs?
Although speculation about mechanical minds goes back a lot further, the field of Artificial Intelligence was largely popularized and publicized by the groundbreaking 1956 Dartmouth Conference organized by Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, and Nathan Rochester of IBM. The proposal for the conference asserted that, "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it", a proposition that I think many of us here would agree with, or at least be willing to debate. (Alan Turing sends his apologies.) Furthermore, I believe mechanisms exhibiting many of the features of human intelligence had already existed for some centuries by 1956, in the shape of corporations and other bureaucracies. A bureaucracy is a framework for automating decision processes that a human being might otherwise carry out, using human bodies (and brains) as components: a corporation adds a goal-seeking constraints and real-world i/o to the procedural rules-based element.
As justification for this outrageous assertion — that corporations are AIs — I'd like to steal philosopher John Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment and misapply it creatively. Searle, a skeptic about the post-Dartmouth Hard AI project — the proposition that symbolic computation could be used to build a mind — suggested the thought experiment as a way to discredit the idea that a digital computer executing a program can be said to have a mind. But I think he inadvertently demonstrated something quite different.
To crib shamelessly from wikipedia:
Searle's thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has constructed a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer comfortably passes the Turing test, by convincing a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking human being.
The question Searle asks is: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese?
Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient papers, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.
Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing a behavior which is then interpreted by the user as demonstrating intelligent conversation. But Searle himself would not be able to understand the conversation.
The problem with this argument is that it is apparent that a company is nothing but a very big Chinese Room, containing a large number of John Searles, all working away at their rule sets and inputs. We many not agree that an AI "understands" Chinese, but we can agree that it performs symbolic manipulation; and a room full of bureaucrats looks awfully similar to a hypothetical Turing-test-passing procedural AI from here.
Companies don't literally try to pass the Turing test, but they exchange information with other companies — and they are powerful enough to process inputs far beyond the capacity of an individual human brain. A Boeing 787 airliner contains on the order of six million parts and is produced by a consortium of suppliers (coordinated by Boeing); designing it is several orders of magnitude beyond the competence of any individual engineer, but the Boeing "Chinese Room" nevertheless developed a process for designing, testing, manufacturing, and maintaining such a machine, and it's a process that is not reliant on any sole human being.
Where, then, is Boeing's mind?
I don't think Boeing has a mind as such, but it functions as an ad-hoc rules-based AI system, and exhibits drives that mirror those of an actual life form. Corporations grow, predate on one another, seek out sources of nutrition (revenue streams), and invade new environmental niches. Corporations exhibit metabolism, in the broadest sense of the word — they take in inputs and modify them, then produce outputs, including a surplus of money that pays for more inputs. Like all life forms they exist to copy information into the future. They treat human beings as interchangeable components, like cells in a body: they function as superorganisms — hive entities — and they reap efficiency benefits when they replace fallible and fragile human components with automated replacements.
Until relatively recently the automation of corporate functions was limited to mid-level bookkeeping operations — replacing ledgers with spreadsheets and databases — but we're now seeing the spread of robotic systems outside manufacturing to areas such as lights-out warehousing, and the first deployments of deep learning systems for decision support.
I spoke about this at length a couple of years ago in a talk I delivered at the Chaos Communications Congress in Leipzig, titled "Dude, You Broke the Future" — you can find it on YouTube and a text transcript on my blog — so I'm not going to dive back into that topic today. Instead I'm going to talk about some implications of the post-2012 AI boom that weren't obvious to me two years ago.
Corporations aren't the only pre-electronic artificial intelligences we've developed. Any bureaucracy is a rules-based information processing system. Governments are superorganisms that behave like very large corporations, but differ insofar as they can raise taxes (thereby creating demand for circulating money, which they issue), stimulating economic activity. They can recirculate their revenue through constructive channels such as infrastructure maintenance, or destructive ones such as military adventurism. Like corporations, governments are potentially immortal until an external threat or internal decay damages them beyond repair. By promulgating and enforcing laws, governments provide an external environment within which the much smaller rules-based corporations can exist.
(I should note that at this level, it doesn't matter whether the government's claim to legitimacy is based on the will of the people, the divine right of kings, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster: I'm talking about the mechanical working of a civil service bureaucracy, what it does rather than why it does it.)
And of course this brings me to a third species of organism: academic institutions like the University of Edinburgh.
Viewed as a corporation, the University of Edinburgh is impressively large. With roughly 4000 academic staff, 5000 administrative staff, and 36,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students (who may be considered as a weird chimera of customers and freelance contractors), it has a budget of close to a billion pounds a year. Like other human superorganisms, Edinburgh University exists to copy itself into the future — the climactic product of a university education is, of course, a professor (or alternatively a senior administrator), and if you assemble a critical mass of lecturers and administrators in one place and give them a budget and incentives to seek out research funding and students, you end up with an academic institution.
Quantity, as the military say, has a quality all of its own. Just as the Boeing Corporation can undertake engineering tasks that dwarf anything a solitary human can expect to achieve within their lifetime, so too can an institution out-strip the educational or research capabilities of a lone academic. That's why we have universities: they exist to provide a basis for collaboration, quality control, and information exchange. In an idealized model university, peers review one another's research results and allocate resources to future investigations, meanwhile training undergraduate students and guiding postgraduates, some of whom will become the next generation of researchers and teachers. (In reality, like a swan gliding serenely across the surface of a pond, there's a lot of thrashing around going on beneath the surface.)
The corpus of knowledge that a student needs to assimilate to reach the coal face of their chosen field exceeds the competence of any single educator, so we have division of labour and specialization among the teachers: and the same goes for the practice of research (and, dare I say it, writing proposals and grant applications).
Is the University of Edinburgh itself an artificial intelligence, then?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say " not yet". While the University Court is a body corporate established by statute, and the administration of any billion pound organization of necessity shares traits with the other rules-based bureaucracies, we can't reasonably ascribe a theory of mind, or actual self-aware consciousness, to a university. Indeed, we can't ascribe consciousness to any of the organizations and processes around us that we call AI.
Artificial Intelligence really has come to mean three different things these days, although they all fall under the heading of "decision making systems opaque to human introspection". We have the classical bureaucracy, with its division of labour and procedures executed by flawed, fallible human components. Next, we have the rules-based automation of the 1950s through 1990s, from Expert Systems to Business Process Automation systems — tools which improve the efficiency and reliability of the previous bureaucratic model and enable it to operate with fewer human cogs in the gearbox. And since roughly 2012 we've had a huge boom in neural computing, which I guess is what brings us here today.
Neural networks aren't new: they started out as an attempt in the early 1950s to model the early understanding of how animal neurons work. The high level view of nerves back then — before we learned a lot of confusing stuff about pre- and post-synaptic receptor sites, receptor subtypes, microtubules, and so on — is that they're wiring and switches, with some basic additive and subtractive logic superimposed. (I'm going to try not to get sidetracked into biology here.) Early attempts at building recognizers using neural network circuitry, such as 1957's Perceptron network, showed initial promise. But they were sidelined after 1969 when Minsky and Papert formally proved that a perceptron was computationally weak — it couldn't be used to compute an Exclusive-OR function. As a result of this resounding vote of no-confidence, research into neural networks stagnated until the 1980s and the development of backpropagation. And even with a more promising basis for work, the field developed slowly thereafter, hampered by the then-available computers.
A few years ago I compared the specifications for my phone — an iPhone 5, at that time — with a Cray X-MP supercomputer. By virtually every metric, the iPhone kicked sand in the face of its 30-year supercomputing predecessor, and today I could make the same comparison with my wireless headphones or my wrist watch. We tend to forget how inexorable the progress of Moore's Law has been over the past five decades. It has brought us roughly ten orders of magnitude of performance improvements in storage media and working memory, a mere nine or so orders of magnitude in processing speed, and a dismal seven orders of magnitude in networking speed.
In search of a concrete example, I looked up the performance figures for the GPU card in the newly-announced Mac Pro; it's a monster capable of up to 28.3 Teraflops, with 1Tb/sec memory bandwidth and up to 64Gb of memory. This is roughly equivalent to the NEC Earth Simulator of 2002, a supercomputer cluster which filled 320 cabinets, consumed 6.4 MW of power, and cost the Japanese government 60 billion Yen (or about £250M) to build. The Radeon Pro Vega II Duo GPU I'm talking about is obviously much more specialized and doesn't come with the 700Tb disks or 1.6 petabytes of tape backup, but for raw numerical throughput — which is a key requirement in training a neural network — it's competitive. Which is to say: a 2020 workstation is roughly as powerful as half a billion pounds-worth of 2002 supercomputer when it comes to training deep learning applications.
In fact, the iPad I'm reading this talk from — a 2018 iPad Pro — has a processor chipset that includes a dedicated 8-core neural engine capable of processing 5 trillion 8-bit operations per second. So, roughly comparable to a mid-90s supercomputer.
Life (and Moore's Law) comes at you fast, doesn't it?
But the news on the software front is less positive. Today, our largest neural networks aspire to the number of neurons found in a mouse brain, but they're structurally far simpler. The largest we've actually trained to do something useful are closer in complexity to insects. And you don't have to look far to discover the dismal truth: we may be able to train adversarial networks to recognize human faces most of the time, but there are also famous failures.
For example, there's the Home Office passport facial recognition system deployed at airports. It was recently reported that it has difficulty recognizing faces with very pale or very dark skin tones, and sometimes mistakes larger than average lips for an open mouth. If the training data set is rubbish, the output is rubbish, and evidently the Home Office used a training set that was not sufficiently diverse. The old IT proverb applies, "garbage in, garbage out" — now with added opacity.
The key weakness of neural network applications is that they're only as good as the data set they're trained against. The training data is invariably curated by humans. And so, the deep learning application tends to replicate the human trainers' prejudices and misconceptions.
Let me give you some more cautionary tales. Amazon is a huge corporation, with roughly 750,000 employees. That's a huge human resources workload, so they sank time and resources into training a network to evaluate resumes from job applicants, in order to pre-screen them and spit out the top 5% for actual human interaction. Unfortunately the training data set consisted of resumes from existing engineering employees, and even more unfortunately a very common underlying quality of an Amazon engineering employee is that they tend to be white and male. Upshot: the neural network homed in on this and the project was ultimately cancelled because it suffered from baked-in prejudice.
Google Translate provides is another example. Turkish has a gender-neutral pronoun for the third-person singular that has no English-language equivalent. (The closest would be the third-person plural pronoun, "they".) Google Translate was trained on a large corpus of documents, but came down with a bad case of gender bias in 2017, when it was found to be turning the neutral pronoun into a "he" when in the same sentence as "doctor" or "hard working," and a "she" when it was in proximity to "lazy" and "nurse."
Possibly my favourite (although I drew a blank in looking for the source, so you should treat this as possibly apocryphal) was a DARPA-funded project to distinguish NATO main battle tanks from foreign tanks. It got excellent results using training data, but wasn't so good in the field ... because it turned out that the recognizer had gotten very good at telling the difference between snow and forest scenes and arms trade shows. (Russian tanks are frequently photographed in winter conditions — who could possibly have imagined that?)
Which brings me back to Edinburgh University.
I can speculate wildly about the short-term potential for deep learning in the research and administration areas. Research: it's a no-brainer to train a GAN to do the boring legwork of looking for needles in the haystacks of experimental data, whether it be generated by genome sequencers or radio telescopes. Technical support: just this last weekend I was talking to a bloke whose startup is aiming to use deep learning techniques to monitor server logs and draw sysadmin attention to anomalous patterns in them. Administration: if we can just get past the "white, male" training trap that tripped up Amazon, they could have a future in screening job candidates or student applications. Ditto, automating helpdesk tasks — the 80/20 rule applies, and chatbots backed by deep learing could be a very productive tool in sorting out common problems before they require human intervention. This stuff is obvious.
But it's glaringly clear that we need to get better — much better — at critiquing the criteria by which training data is compiled, and at working out how to sanity-test deep learning applications.
For example, consider a GAN trained to evaluate research grant proposals. It's almost inevitable that some smart-alec will think of this (and then attempt to use feedback from GANs to improve grant proposals, by converging on the set of characteristics that have proven most effective in extracting money from funding organizations in the past). But I'm almost certain that any such system would tend to recommend against ground-breaking research by default: promoting proposals that resemble past work research is no way to break new ground.
Medical clinical trials focus disproportionately on male subjects, to such an extent that some medicines receive product licenses without being tested on women of childbearing age at all. If we use existing trials as training data for identifying possible future treatments we'll inevitably end up replicating historic biases, missing significant opportunities to improve breakthrough healthcare to demographics who have been overlooked.
Or imagine the uses of GANs for screening examinations — either to home in on patterns indicative of understanding in essay questions (grading essays being a huge and tedious chore), or (more controversially) to identify cheating and plagiarism. The opacity of GANs means that it's possible that they will encode some unsuspected prejudices on the part of the examiners whose work they are being trained to reproduce. More troublingly, GANs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks: if the training set for a neural network is available, it's possible to identify inputs which will exploit features of the network to produce incorrect outputs. If a neural network is used to gatekeep some resource of interest to human beings, human beings will try to pick the lock, and the next generation of plagiarists will invest in software to produce false negatives when their essay mill purchases are screened.
And let's not even think about the possible applications of neurocomputing to ethics committees, not to mention other high-level tasks that soak up valuable faculty time. Sooner or later someone will try to use GANs to pre-screen proposed applications of GANs for problems of bias. Which might sound like a worthy project, but if the bias is already encoded in the ethics monitoring neural network, experiments will be allowed to go forward that really shouldn't, and vice versa.
Professor Noel Sharkey of Sheffield University went public yesterday with a plea for decision algorithms that impact peoples' lives — from making decisions on bail applications in the court system, to prefiltering job applications — to be subjected to large-scale trials before roll-out, to the same extent as pharmaceuticals (which have a similar potential to blight lives if they aren't carefully tested). He suggests that the goal should be to demonstrate that there is no statistically significant in-built bias before algorithms are deployed in roles that detrimentally affect human subjects: he's particularly concerned by military proposals to field killer drones without a human being in the decision control loop. I can't say that he's wrong, because he's very, very right.
"Computer says no" was a funny catch-phrase in "Little Britain" because it was really an excuse a human jobsworth used to deny a customer's request. It's a whole lot less funny when it really is the computer saying "no", and there's no human being in the loop. But what if the computer is saying "no" because its training data doesn't like left-handedness or Tuesday mornings? Would you even know? And where do you go if there's no right of appeal to a human being?
So where is AI going?
Now, I've just been flailing around wildly in the dark for half an hour. I'm probably laughably wrong about some of this stuff, especially in the detail level. But I'm willing to stick my neck out and make some firm predictions.
Firstly, for a decade now IT departments have been grappling with the bring-your-own-device age. We're now moving into the bring-your-own-neural-processor age, and while I don't know what the precise implications are, I can see it coming. As I mentioned, there's a neural processor in my iPad. In ten years time, future-iPad will probably have a neural processor three orders of magnitude more powerful (at least) than my current one, getting up into the trillion ops per second range. And all your students and staff will be carrying this sort of machine around on their person, all day. In their phones, in their wrist watches, in their augmented reality glasses.
The Chinese government's roll-out of social scoring on a national level may seem like a dystopian nightmare, but something not dissimilar could be proposed by a future university administration as a tool for evaluating students by continuous assessment, the better to provide feedback to them. As part of such a program we could reasonably expect to see ubiquitous deployment of recognizers, quite possibly as a standard component of educational courseware. Consider a distance learning application which uses gaze tracking, by way of a front-facing camera, to determine what precisely the students are watching. It could be used to provide provide feedback to the lecturer, or to direct the attention of viewers to something they've missed, or to pay for the courseware by keeping eyeballs on adverts. Any of these purposes are possible, if not desirable.
With a decade's time for maturation I'd expect to see the beginnings of a culture of adversarial malware designed to fool the watchers. It might be superficially harmless at first, like tools for fooling the gaze tracker in the aforementioned app into thinking a hung-over student is not in fact asleep in front of their classroom screen. But there are darker possibilities, and they only start with cheating continuous assessments or faking research data. If a future Home Office tries to automate the PREVENT program for detecting and combating radicalization, or if they try to extend it — for example, to identify students holding opinions unsympathetic to the governing party of the day — we could foresee pushback from staff and students, and some of the pushback could be algorithmic.
This is proximate-future stuff, mind you. In the long term, all bets are off. I am not a believer in the AI singularity — the rapture of the nerds — that is, in the possibility of building a brain-in-a-box that will self-improve its own capabilities until it outstrips our ability to keep up. What CS professor and fellow SF author Vernor Vinge described as "the last invention humans will ever need to make". But I do think we're going to keep building more and more complicated, systems that are opaque rather than transparent, and that launder our unspoken prejudices and encode them in our social environment. As our widely-deployed neural processors get more powerful, the decisions they take will become harder and harder to question or oppose. And that's the real threat of AI — not killer robots, but "computer says no" without recourse to appeal.
I'm running on fumes at this point, but if I have any message to leave you with, it's this: AI and neurocomputing isn't magical and it's not the solution to all our problems, but it is dangerously non-transparent. When you're designing systems that rely on AI, please bear in mind that neural networks can fixate on the damndest stuff rather than what you want them to measure. Leave room for a human appeals process, and consider the possibility that your training data may be subtly biased or corrupt, or that it might be susceptible to adversarial attack, or that it turns yesterday's prejudices into an immutable obstacle that takes no account of today's changing conditions.
And please remember that the point of a university is to copy information into the future through the process of educating human brains. And the human brain is still the most complex neural network we've created to date.
The first thing I would add is that AI doesn't just launder out unspoken prejudices - often those prejudices are completely unknown.
As Amazon found with their AI recruitment tool - their entire structure was biased against women but not just in the ways they had identified but even more so in ways they hadn't themselves identified.
That was a great talk, Charlie. Thanks.
As I mentioned at the break, it may be interesting to see how this affects distance learning. E.g. will we see facial recognition used to verify identity in online exams, and will this be countered by real-time deepfake video? Will bots take the entire course and gain the qualification on the student’s behalf?
And then the bots get the jobs?
And in an ideal world this is the point, to free up people's time for something they consider worthwhile rather than for something somebody pays them for.
I also suspect that we don't get that world.
I like this essay, how was it received by the audience ? How much feedback did you get ?
While I agree entirely with the overall drift of that analysis, I don't think the problem is all that new. We already have plenty of "black box" components in our IT systems. I may have a notion of the general principles of how a modern CPU works, I have no idea what assumptions (possibly unconscious ones) are built into the specific architecture of the chip in the machine I am using -- assumptions which make it vulnurable to various exploits. Similarly, various libraries I use in programming and which are used in various software packages I use are effectively black boxes, which may (and often do!) contain assumptions about what combinations of inputs and context may arise, leading to effective mulfunctions.
Another example of neural network distraction:
Somebody tried to train a neural network to identify skin cancer, and ended up with a neural network which almost perfectly identified rulers graduated in millimeters
It's not new, but it wasn't always the case. Even as late as the end of the 1970s, software was engineered and its maintainers at least identified almost every bug/problem/'feature' they looked into. They didn't always FIX them, of course. But now, software is 'bred' and 'trained' and the objective of the developers is simply to ensure that the worst bugs/problems/'features' do not show up in the new version. They may still be present, but unlikely, or may reappear for some data.
One point that I noted, and would be interested in an expansion of is "90% here today, 9% not here yet but on the drawing boards, and 1% unpredictable. I came up with that rule of thumb around 2005, but the ratio seems to be shifting these days."
I agree with that and, thinking back, it's been true for a LONG time, but don't see a change. Is it really shifting? And, if so, how? What I do see is that it's increasingly hard to identify the 9% because it is buried under so much more crap.
This reminds me of some debates I've had with colleagues about modeling biological systems. Some people want the models to be as accurate as possible. For instance, there's current a model cell that can, in principle, replicate normal cellular processes. The problem with such models, of course, is that no one can actually explain how they arrive at any particular end result.
My argument has always been that this kind of modeling misunderstands the purpose of modeling. A model, as the word implies, is not supposed to be The Real Thing. It is supposed to be a simplified version of The Real Thing, that captures the essence of whatever behavior it is you're trying to understand in a way that allows it to be explained. And, if it's a good model, that explanation will have some predictive application to The Real Thing.
I agree with what I take to be the main point of this essay: that the big problem with AI (or "Machine Learning", in the jargon that is currently fashionable in the Applied Mathematics Department of which I am a member) is the lack of transparency. It produces machines that work (for some values of "work") but can't be explained.
I wonder if there might be a future in modeling AIs? Perhaps one could even develop an AI approach to modeling AIs? There are enough AIs out there for a decent-sized training set. But to produce it, someone would have to produce explanations of them (in some mathematical or controlled vocabulary form). Which, IMHO, might be a useful exercise in itself.
Explainable AI, and more specifically turning large opaque boxes into smaller less opaque boxes is one of the hottest fields in AI right now. See https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8939263267074417112 for the 2587 papers (as of right now, climbing most days) citing the 2014 paper on distillation by Hinton et al., as just one illustration. Your concerns are shared by many researchers.
Charlie makes an important point: we incorporate features of our present society into the systems we build (good and bad features both), and those systems serve to entrench and perpetuate those features. This can be a way to achieve some resilience against excessive institutional change, but it is also a way to ossify broken assumptions into unchangeable rules. (Also, this doesn't just apply to machine learning, although it perhaps appears most acutely there.) I'm reminded of an essay that turns this observation into a somewhat coherent argument against automation, ostensibly wrapped up as a book review of the Dune books: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TifG2m7BYW2sGmAoR/leto-among-the-machines
Interesting. Thanks.
Smartphones are technological cannibals, swallowing up every available portable electronic device that can be crammed inside PROVIDED, of course, that you can get the fucking thing's programmes to work as expected, or even find a set of comprehensive instructions ... grrr.
OK - what is the most recent "peak" number now? Over or under 10 billion? All this helps, provided we can get past that peak - as it interplays with global warming.
"GAN" ?? General Algorithmic Network maybe?
LAvery @ 8 And let's not even think about simply turning an "AI" loose & letting it "learn" - whatever that means ... [ Given some outputs of late, which have produced alarming results ] And/Or allowing it to modify itself by "evolving" as has already been troed ( IIRC ) in electronics, which has come up with some truly wierd ( as well as wired ) cicuits that WORK - but no-one seems to be able to understand hoiw ( or why ) they work. Now there is real "black box" electromechanical/computing evolution blindly b making its own watches, maybe.
Peak population estimates: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth (depending on how several critical factors turn out, including possibly some not yet well-understood ones, peak is anywhere from 8.1 billion up to no limit).
XKCD: DNA
While this is true, the really amazing truth is that biology is, in fact, explainable. We do it all the time, both intuitively and professionally. If I ask you "Why does your cat jump on the kitchen counter?" or "What does a heart do?" or "Why did Boris Johnson say such-and-such?", you will probably have an answer. (Ignore for now the fact that 100 different people will give 99 different answers.) There is no simple reason why it had to be. "Explainability" is not one of the variables natural selection optimizes (unlike engineering as done by human engineers).
This gives me hope that taming the opacity of AIs may not be an intractable problem.
Er, no, sorry. The best we can say is that we can explain some phenomena, and will be able to explain more in the future. I have a friend who is a professor of immunology, we were talking about this a year ago, and agreed (on different grounds) that it's not plausible in the foreseeable future.
The following is the fundamental (mathematical) reason:
It isn't possible to build a Turing machine that can predict all emergent behaviour of another, arbitrary, Turing machine (the halting rule is a special case). Gödel's result is more-or-less equivalent. Unless you are following Penrose into quantum gravity woo, the human species and all of its engineered tools is effectively a Turing machine, and (most) biological systems are other ones.
There is a niggle here, which I posted on the last thread. The Turing/Gödel limits do not necessarily apply to sufficiently complicated extensions of the numbers, which MIGHT be used by biological systems - but the smart money is on there being an equivalent limit even for those extensions, and certainly for biological systems.
I want to pick up on the algorithmic targeting of fake news. Maybe this falls into the 9%, but I have a nasty feeling its going to be one of the big ones.
From Wikpedia:
Legitimation crisis refers to a decline in the confidence of administrative functions, institutions, or leadership. The term was first introduced in 1973 by Jürgen Habermas [...]. With a legitimation crisis, an institution or organization does not have the administrative capabilities to maintain or establish structures effective in achieving their end goals
In The End of History and the Last Man Fukuyama argued that history is tending towards liberal democracy because it is the only system of government that is immune to crises of legitimacy; if the current rogues lose legitimacy then they get voted out and new rogues put in their place. This is in contrast with every other system in which the establishment hangs on by its fingernails until forced out by violent revolution, at which point the cycle repeats until democracy asserts itself and becomes the new stable state.
However liberal democracy requires the population to have a common understanding of the world. People might disagree about the best government policy, but they still agree about the broad issues, the shape of the problem, and who won the last election. This used to be true because everyone watched the same TV programs and read a small number of newspapers (and whatever you may think of the way the front page stories were chosen, those papers did not routinely propagate outright fiction). However with algorithmic targetting we are heading into a world in which those things are no longer true because people are being given radically different views of the world, and there are small but growing minorities who have accepted fictions deep into their world views. Charles mentions the antivax movement. Flat earthers are another one, as are the alt-right. Who knows what new kooky conspiracy theory will jump out and become a fundamental part of the world view of some minority.
This can be weaponised, so of course it is being. If you want to paralyse an opponent nation then getting them arguing, or better yet fighting, over whether the sky is blue or pink could be a very effective tactic. If you can get them to do something nationally self-destructive then even better. Confusion to the enemy!
The question then is, can liberal democracy avoid a legitimation crisis, not of the current leaders, but of the concept itself. When most people view most other people as not merely mistaken, or even deluded, but actually malign, how can anything like democracy survive?
China believes it has the answer; control the flow of information to the people in order to enforce the single world view that the government wants. It seems to be working; ask anyone in China about the Hong Kong situation and you will hear a list of government talking points. However this takes us back to Fukuyama; such a system is not stable in the long term; sooner or later it will suffer a crisis of legitimacy and be overthrown in violent revolution.
(Aside: USA Civil War 2 and Chinese Revolution 2 are my big predictions for the next 50 years).
So, what happens to our civilisation if anyone who stands up and says "follow me" is instantly de-legitimised?
Given the hypothesis that liberal democracy is immune to legitimation crises is severely damaged by contact with things like "the opinions of the average taxi driver" ("they're all the bloody same, those politicians") or "an episode of Yes Minister," I suspect we shouldn't waste too much time regarding it.
Paul China believes it has the answer; control the flow of information to the people in order to enforce the single world view that the government wants. Exactly the same idea that both the Nazis & the "old" CP ( Like Stalin or Mao ) used ... We saw how well ( or not ) that worked.
"GAN" ?? General Algorithmic Network maybe? Generative Adversarial Networks The generative network generates candidates while the discriminative network evaluates them.[1] The contest operates in terms of data distributions. Typically, the generative network learns to map from a latent space to a data distribution of interest, while the discriminative network distinguishes candidates produced by the generator from the true data distribution. The generative network's training objective is to increase the error rate of the discriminative network (i.e., "fool" the discriminator network by producing novel candidates that the discriminator thinks are not synthesized (are part of the true data distribution)) There are other descriptions out there that might be clearer to you. TBH it took me a while to understand the details.
Michael2Bec: the audience appreciated it. I didn't get much feedback at the time (I nearly overran my slot), but as the next talk was "a history of Artificial Intelligence" by a professor at the oldest AI faculty in the UK (Edinburgh University), and he kept interjecting "... as Charlie said earlier ..." in his talk, I suspect I stuck the landing :)
Charlie --
Apologies for an unrelated comment; please delete it if you feel it needs to go. I do not see any way to send you a private message, so have to resort to asking the question this way:
Do you consider Laundry to be science fiction or fantasy?
If you prefer to answer outside this blog, my email is ilyatay@gmail.com
Thank you beforehand!
As you say, AI is an immense danger. I'd be totally against it, but I think that it's less of a danger than leaving humans in charge with civilization-lethal weaponry.
Additionally, there are other problems that may be insoluble, but perhaps not with properly coordinated action, but which people seem unwilling of effectively coordinate action against. Global warming is the type example here, but it's not the only one. It's not clear that an AI could solve the problems, but it has become clear that people can't. They'll take short term gains instead. I've seen several examples in various places around the world where resources are accumulated to address a problem, and then siphoned off into private pockets.
As for the form of the AI... I expect multiple variations to show up, plausibly not competitive with each other. On form might well be similar to Athene from Rule 34. Another to the Collegatarch from Alan Dean Foster's I-Inside. Conscious awareness would be hard to demonstrate in most of the forms, but may show up in a few. (It will usually exist, but be very non-human in form. In fact non-chordate.)
The significant problem will be if any of these have non-bounded goals. That could be lethal. And we probably wouldn't notice because of the prevalence of the bounded forms generating lots of social alterations. (I'm counting increased inflexibility as an alteration.)
Calling these AIs (any of them) super-human would be a justified as calling a calculator super-human...and just like a calculator, they'll be able to do things that (just about?) nobody human can do. They won't be as limited as a calculator, but even the more general AIs will have radically different goals. If survival is one of them, it will be an emergent property.
The problem with comparing a corporation with a computer based AI is that corporations are run by people who have many basic understandings that other people share, and computers don't. AFAIKT so far AI programs that learn, learn optimization patterns within a context, and then naively generalize it outside that context. I'm certain this is being worked on now, but with what success is questionable. Additionally, a lot of the things that are called AI in the news aren't, except in the sense that Eliza and Sargon were. I.e. they are pattern recognizers, but they can't learn new patterns. This makes it difficult to realize what the characteristics of current AI programs are. A better clue is give by Tesla's "auto-pilot", or by (whatever the current company name is)'s Big Dog. But again, robots is not where most of the development is happening. I've seen a chart saying that during Alpha-Go's development since first public release it's power has increased dramatically, while it's hardware requirements have decreased dramatically. Maybe that was correct. That's certainly one component of a general intelligence...but I'm not certain how significant a part. Still, that kind of change is significant, and perhaps to be expected as each component is developed.
When HR says "the computer selected candidate X", it's more significant whether the candidate is qualified than whether the selection was unbiased. It's desirable that the selection be unbiased, but bias that isn't worse than the current biases can yield a workable society. And it's probably impossible to come up with selection criteria that are actually unbiased and also yield a candidate that suits the job. (We could certainly do better, but not doing better should not be civilization lethal...or even company lethal.)
That said, if the criteria are not transparent, expect them to be hacked. If they are transparent, expect them to be gamed. People generally seek their own advantage above those of society. When uniform tests were imposed on public education here (well, in California) teachers started being required to teach only what was on those tests. So if AI has determinable criteria, expect people to fake adherence to those criteria...when possible, of course. But if it isn't possible, isn't that when we start leveling accusations of bias?
OTOH, HR has been inscrutable my entire work history. I did not, and in retrospect do not, understand their criteria. This may be a necessary part of their job (though I'm sure they don't know that) to avoid the system being gamed. Or because when people need to work closely together, they work better if they've got more commonalities.
They'll take short term gains instead. I've seen several examples in various places around the world where resources are accumulated to address a problem, and then siphoned off into private pockets.
IIRC this has been studied quite a bit as part of the Free Rider Problem in economics.
My personal experience is that you can predict where the siphoning will happen next by looking at where those in charge have cut oversight and accountability. (Because we know that "the market" doesn't enforce honesty and integrity — if it did we wouldn't need food safety inspection etc.)
I first heard of unknown/unknowns in the 90's. Usually the first 3 of 4 are mentioned:
1) known/knowns 2) known/unknowns 3) unknown/unknowns
Am rather intrigued by the rarely unmentioned
4) unknown/knowns
From a personal level, the unknown/knowns are those tip-of-tongue names of famous people or high school friends -- we know when we are reminded. From a royal "we" perspective, the unknown/knowns are the facts which go unreported.
News organizations used to report on unknown/knowns until it began it became more profitable to report on unknown/unknowables. Where the decline of religion has become supplanted by Faith News.
There is a crypto method of transforming unknown/knowns to known/knowns. Search on "How to play ANY mental game" by Goldreich, Micali, Wigderson. Somewhat akin to John Searle's "Chinese Room" where a system may anonymously produce a solution without knowing the problem.
I wonder what economic incentive would promote the wholesale transformation of unknown/knowns to known/knowns?
Do you consider Laundry to be science fiction or fantasy?
They're fiction. Period.
(I don't consider genre tags like "science fiction" or "fantasy" to be terribly useful; after all, almost all science fiction is actually fantasy when you scratch and sniff -- from the flagrant stuff like "Star Wars" (Wizards in Space!) to more plausible works, there's usually an element of the impossible or implausible in there. All genre tags do is tell the bookshop clerk where to shelve the product with similar stuff.
Thank you! Somehow I thought you would say something like that :)
All genre tags do is tell the bookshop clerk where to shelve the product with similar stuff.
FWIW, the Library of Congress lists Occult fiction and Fantasy fiction as the Form/Genre for The apocalypse codex. The Atrocity archives are classified as Fantasy fiction and Horror fiction. Accelerando is straightforwardly Science Fiction.
The subject classifications are fun. For instance, here's what they have for The annihilation score
Howard, Bob (Fictitious character)--Fiction. Intelligence service--Great Britain--Fiction. Husband and wife--Fiction. Women violinists--Fiction. Demonology--Fiction.
And these posts are the reason why I love you (in a totally heterosexual way, of course (Cit.)).
I love the analogy between artificial intelligence and corporations/government bureaucracies. But it feels like it either goes too far, or not far enough. I think the latter, and it's going to tak a long comment to explain what I mean.
You wisely restrict the analogy historically to the modern era (i.e., the past few centuries). But if I look at the government of ancient Egypt, it sure looks a lot like what you're describing. And when we go earlier than the past few centuries, our modern-era distinctions between government bureaucracies, religion, and culture become more and more anachronistic (today's scholarly consensus on religion, for example, in the sense we mean it today in Western culture, is that it is a social construct that emerged during the early modern ear in Europe, partly as a way of justifying colonialism, i.e., as a way of justifying governmental and economic actions).
So I would say there's a strong case to be made that you could extend your argument about artificial intelligence back to the governmental/religious/cultural bureaucracies of ancient Egypt, the Zhou dynasty in China, the ANE, etc. Interestingly, I suspect that such bureaucracies were made possible in part by an innovation in information technology, i.e., the invention of written records.
Even if we stick to the modern era, there seems to be a big difference between Qing dynasty China on the one hand, and the squabbling warlords of far western Eurasia, er, the emerging nation-states of Europe. Here again, we can point to at least one innovation in information technology, double-entry bookkeeping, which empowered European corporations in some interesting ways. But another information technology innovation, the printing press, did not take off in China the way it did in Europe, raising the question: what's the difference? And why didn't China exploit many other technological innovations, such as the sailing rig of their junks, which was superior in many ways to the sailing technology of early Europe? There's no easy answer, but one thing that I'd point to is the difference in outlook between Confucian China and Western Christian Europe -- and if you're tempted to call that a religious difference, think again, because although the Jesuits who went to China in the early modern era wanted to call Confucianism a religion, their Chinese interlocutors said no it wasn't (and remember, what we can "religion" is a merely recent social construct).
But still, there's a big difference between the long-term stability built into government/religions/cultures like ancient Egypt and pre-twentieth century China, and Western culture. I think the distinction that Jonathan Z. Smith proposes for religions is useful here, as a distinction between two types of "maps" of the world, the locative "map" vs. the utopian "map." Smith writes:
"One finds in archaic cultures [which use a locative map] a profound faith in the cosmos as ordered in the beginning and a joyous celebration of the primordial act of ordering as well as a deep sense of responsibility for the maintenance of that order through repetition of the myth, through ritual, through norms of conduct, or through taxonomy." [Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 1978]
Although it's not an archaic culture, Chinese government of the Qin dynasty and earlier and its associated Confucianism, with an emphasis on order, continuity, stability, used what looks to me like a locative map. (And so did the Roman Empire, as Robert Silverberg captures in his Roma Eterna series.) After describing what locative means, Smith goes on to describe the utopian map:
"But it is equally apparent that in some cultures the structure of order, the gods that won or ordained it, creation itself, are discovered to be evil and oppressive. In such circumstances, one will rebel against the paradigms and seek to reverse their power." [Ibid.]
This accurately describes Western European, and later North American, maps of the universe: the map that we use, and that we take for granted, is a utopian map: for us there is something wrong with the world that needs changing, so we constantly seek rebellion or reversal.
The problem with AI, then, is not so much the technological/social innovation of AI (or earlier, of corporations, or governmental bureaucracies) but rather AI (or corporations or governments/religions/cultures) in combination with a utopian map. By contrast, with a locative map, i.e., if everyone's major concern was order, continuity, and stability -- then first of all developing the technology that makes bureaucracies possible would be a low priority, and second of all if we humans did develop such technology it would be used to reinforce stability, which we would all like.
To make things more complicated, we Westerners believe in the inherent worth of individuals, a new belief that grew out of the utopian map of the early Enlightenment. And because those of us who are products of Western culture believe strongly in the value of the individual, we also believe we have personal rights. Thus if we don't personally like a religion, we leave; if we feel a government bureaucracy stomps on our rights we take to the streets of Hong Kong; if a corporation uses a new information technology called "AI" that violates people's human rights by being prejudiced in favor of white men, we're outraged. Yet in the last case, the development of that AI is driven by exactly the same kind of utopian as the impulse that make us believe in human rights. This is a big problem with our utopian map: one person's successful rebellion or reversal becomes another person's target for reversal or rebellion.
In short, the problem isn't AI as such, nor bureaucracies nor religions nor cultures as such. The problem is that we both use a utopian map, but your utopia might be my dystopia. This doesn't change the basic argument in your talk, by the way -- it just extends it.
FWIW, as a footnote, Jonathan Z. Smith points out that there are other possible "maps" humans have used. Some human cultures use maps "that are more closely akin to the joke in that they neither deny or flee from disjunction, but allow the incongruous elements to stand" -- I think of these as Terry Pratchet cultures. Other human cultures "play between the incongruities, and provide an occasion for thought" (a few of Ursula K. LeGuin's stories head in this direction). And presumably, over the millennia of human history, there are many other "maps" beyond these....
I was told that Utopia wasn't science fiction by an English master at school. One could add Erewhon, Brave New World, Butler and large chunks of Swift, Conan Doyle and Haggard to the opus of "something that passes the duck test for science fiction, but isn't called that".
And, as you say, the boundary between science fiction and fantasy is a trifle vague ....
The AI-vs-tank story was around at least when I was a Comp Sci undergrad in the early 80's, so it wasn't a modern neural net. My memory of what the story was jibes with the Minsky quote in
https://www.gwern.net/Tanks
But Artificial Neural Nets aren't the only ones that can be led astray by biased training data. In WWII, the Russians trained dogs to run and crouch under tanks. Once they could do that perfectly they were taken to the battle front, in a region where the Germans had tanks but the Russians didn't. The dogs were fitted with explosive vests and released.
Humans are very good at differentiating tanks from trucks: they look nothing at all alike. Dogs are very good at differentiating Russian vehicles from German vehicles: they smell nothing at all alike (diesel vs petrol?). So the dogs faithfully ran to the vehicles that smelled most like what they had trained on, crouched under them, and blew up.
Or that's the story I heard.
"They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair."
"They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair."
Neuromancer or Count Zero?
Count Zero
Most, not all, but most, of the singularity predictions I have read, fiction or supposedly serious, all suffer from the same "thiefs assume everybody steals" attitude, where they assume the runaway-(A)I behaves incredibly human with respect to both desires and methods.
But with the possible exception of FaceBook, none of the current runaway-AI corporations seem to have realized their own identity or potential as such.
This leads to what one could call the "Who? Me? Singularity", where some our newborn superhuman AI suddenly discovers the fine print in the job description.
It has come as a big awful surprise to most of these companies that people assumed them to be responsible for solving, or at least mitigating very, very hard problems, such as recognizing propaganda, preventing or disrupting mass-psycoses (from dangerous diets to facism) and worst of all, the genericly impossible "do the obvious right thing in this case", where the case is everything from missing children over sex trafficing to 4chan.
(I single out FaceBook, because sound-bites exist which indicates that their Dear Leader fully understands and intends to exploit the potential of his pet-AI.)
The right to human appeal of an algorithmic decision is baked-in to European law, in a directive - the General Data Protection Regulation - which every member state has enacted in domestic law.
Someone was thinking ahead, when that provision was drafted: it deserves to be better known.
It might be more accurate to say that people assumed them to be responsible for not making those problems significantly worse than they previously were.
That people would object when they discovered those problems have become markedly worse does not seem surprising to me, although it may have been surprising that Facebook et al would worsen them.
But Artificial Neural Nets aren't the only ones that can be led astray by biased training data.
A friend's daughter was going to a private elementary school (I think it was Montessori, but it might have been Waldorf). They used difference colour numbers to help the kids learn mathematical properties — primes were red, non-primes blue or something like that. The kids were supposed to discover a mathematical pattern and the numbers were a prompt.
I wasn't at all surprised when his daughter, who was a bright girl, learned that red numbers couldn't be evenly divided by other numbers but blue ones could — and associated the mathematical property with the colour rather than the primeness. Black numbers she didn't know the rule for yet…
“we incorporate features of our present society into the systems we build (good and bad features both), and those systems serve to entrench and perpetuate those features.” Very true of transportation infrastructure.
"And/Or allowing it to modify itself by "evolving" as has already been troed ( IIRC ) in electronics, which has come up with some truly wierd ( as well as wired ) cicuits that WORK - but no-one seems to be able to understand hoiw ( or why ) they work."
Half a page of A4 covered in a dense and impenetrable spider-on-acid tangle of gates and interconnections in configurations that make no sense, that against all expectation produces pulses at regular 0.1ms intervals... The evolutionary algorithm explores all of the behaviour space of the circuit elements, rather than the limited region of safe and predictable behaviour prescribed by the datasheets, and can even interconnect them in ways not represented by the circuit diagram or the FPGA's routing logic - not merely relying on a race condition that happens to come out right because this particular FPGA cell has 0.1ns less propagation delay than the next one along, but relying on being able to change that behaviour by dissipating power in some other nearby cell and changing the temperatures of the cells in question.
They are superficially difficult to understand because they are being represented in an inappropriate symbology, that misrepresents the behaviour of elements, assumes a uniformity of behaviour which does not exist, and leaves a whole shitload of necessary information out entirely. But that can all be resolved by doing a bunch of mindbuggeringly tedious and exhaustive measurements on the FPGA to quantify the unspecified behaviour the evolutionary algorithm has found and made use of, and redrawing the diagram in an appropriate manner... as long as they are not too big.
Where they are really difficult to understand is in continuing to keep a handle on how all that information interacts as the scale increases, and that is just as true if you constrain the evolutionary algorithm to stick rigidly to datasheet behaviour and thereby avoid the preliminary step of finding out what behaviour it actually has used. So if you have an evolved circuit that produces 10kHz pulses you can trog through it and figure out how; if it produces the waveform corresponding to "Hello Greg, are you going to ask me some questions again?" in the voice of Neil Pye, you probably can't; and if it starts answering them in the character of Neil Pye, you are almost certainly fucked.
Things like Charlie's racist face recognisers are at that next level up. We know exactly how the basic elements work, with a certainty of 1 in 10 to the lots, but we have no means of discovering that the spiderweb tangle of zillions of them all doing their incredibly-well-defined thing is going to turn out to be racist except by doing the experiment (and finding that the real world does it a lot more thoroughly than the lab can manage).
The problem is that we simply do not have any decent toolkits for handling complexity, and what toolkits we do have tend to embed their own opaque complexity so it doesn't really solve the problem, it just moves it next door. And this applies not just to understanding the behaviour of... well, it's not AI; of stuff called AI, but to designing it in the first place, and indeed also to having a proper idea of what we're supposed to be designing at all. We end up not just with the brute force and ignorance approach, but with recursive brute force and ignorance - "if it doesn't work, hit it with a hammer; if it still doesn't work, use a bigger hammer to hit the first hammer with".
Charlie cites Google Translate being sexist as an example of what goes wrong with this kind of approach, but the same deficiencies cause it to fail on the scale of entire languages. It tends to pick "he" in association with some professions and "she" with others because it's doing a kind of Markovian probability context-sensitive-dictionary thing, comparing sequences of words in one language with sequences that mean the same thing in another language and working out that this word appearing in the source language, given these other words around it, is most likely to correspond to that word appearing in the target language where it has those other words around it... therefore it automatically adopts the sexist bias of typical English usage when translating into English from a neutral language. But another limitation of this technique is that how well it works depends on how similar the rules of the two languages in question that determine word order are. So with French or Spanish, it does pretty well. With German, it gets its knickers in a twist over the big pile of verbs at the end of the sentence and gets all the various clauses they refer to mixed up. With Latin, it basically hasn't got a clue and spits out a bunch of words that may or may not translate any of the Latin words in an order that makes no sense. (There was me thinking that the rigidly logical structure of Latin would make it a natural for machine translation... only the machine translation doesn't know what it's doing so what we get is "slrug eht fo secoiv teews eht vul attoC dna sublaB".)
Hi Charlie, love everything you write (and have lurked here for years now).
A little bit of pedantry: you seem to be using the term GAN for any kind of deep neural network task, but GANs are not classifiers. A GAN is a specific kind of neural network that has the goal of generating new outputs that are like the inputs it was trained with. So, you train a GAN with a bunch of cat pictures, then use it to generate new cat pictures that weren't in the training set; or train it with a lot of SFF stories and it might generate new bits of text that are SFF story-like; etc.
So you might use a GAN to generate new CVs that get past the HR AI, but the HR AI won't be a GAN. It's certainly a deep neural network of some sort, though; probably a Convolutional Neural Network, yes, abbreviated as CNN. GANs are sometimes used to help train deep neural nets when you don't have enough training data (or enough labeled training data) and also in some Deep Fake systems. But they wouldn't be applied directly to most of the tasks mentioned in your lecture.
“governments provide an external environment within which the much smaller rules-based corporations can exist.” And when the larger corporations grow larger than the smaller governments you get tax havens. I suspect that’s just the beginning, and a whole bunch more “interesting” symbioses and parasitisms will arise in years to come.
"if everyone's major concern was order, continuity, and stability - then first of all developing the technology that makes bureaucracies possible would be a low priority, and second of all if we humans did develop such technology it would be used to reinforce stability"
Well, you don't need a whole lot of technology to make a bureaucracy possible - assuming you have enough food surplus to allow for the bureaucrats to sit on their arses all day, then all you need is some durable method of symbolic record keeping, writing or clay tablets or notches in sticks or Tzimptzon's Individual Stringettes or whatever; once you have the concept of a symbol at all, it's kind of hard not to invent it. And AIUI it was originally invented for (or else extremely soon adopted for) such thoroughly order/continuity/stability-related matters as keeping records for astronomy, calendars and trading accounts. And as noted above, bureaucracies do tend to enforce stability by incorporating fossilised representations of the way things were when they were created.
Pratchett has one of Vetinari's insights as being that, never mind all the shouting and placard-waving they get up to, what people really want is for tomorrow to be pretty much the same as today.
Just consider the old fables. About the jenni who grants three wishes, or the fool who thinks he has a foolproof deal with the devil. They never end well.
We are dealing with powerful, nonhuman entities that do not have our interests at heart. Or a heart
A few disjointed thoughts:
B. If computer science is about training AIs and explaining their actions, it will increasingly have the problems associated with sciences like sociology and ecology, which are pretty good at explaining the actions of complex systems, but not so good at predicting future states. That's not necessarily a good thing from an engineering standpoint.
III. There's something to be said for the basic Buddhist truth that life is unsatisfactory, transient, and egoless. The unsatisfactory part should be self-evident with current politics. Transience is that nothing lasts forever (which agrees with basic physics). The egoless notion actually appears to be correct, that there is no "soul" that marks a thing as unique. Every thing is an aggregate of smaller things. Living things are especially frought, as they are metastable processes that depend on the constant intake and expulsion of matter to continue their existence. With organisms like humans, we're utterly dependent on both a whole ecosystem of bacteria within us, and also a bigger ecosystem that includes other humans around us.
AIs, whether bureaucratic or electronic, conform to this view of individuals. SO rather than expecting them to develop individuality or the illusion of an ego, we need to deal with them as the are.
D.4. Just as human systems can be derailed by a wasp sting, or a dose of LSD, or toxoplasma, or rabies, or ethanol, or a peanut allergy, AIs can be derailed by tiny things that cause problems that may not be obvious to their designers. Yes, I do think it's entirely possible that future AIs can make our lives effing miserable or end them all together. However, we've already seen many, many ways that a small number of people (right now, those with a lot of money) can derail rather large AIs. And I don't think that problem's going away.
Indeed, we often can create useful and sometimes surprisingly simple explanations of biological systems. The same would apply to many artefacts produced by machine learning. For instance, many neural networks are really just overcomplicated regression classifiers. However, the skills to perform the analysis are different to those required to build the artefact, and take time, so currently we have lots of opaque gee-whiz boxes which seem mysterious because we don't yet have off the shelf tools to automate the analysis. In contrast, creation is supported by a massive ecosystem.
Interesting things will emerge from this primordial soup. But right now weird monsters are more visible than things like little tweaks suggested by LCZero to the evaluation function of Stockfish to improve its strength markedly. We can see The Weights at https://lczero.org/networks and get a sense of their heft (100MB or so) but the shape of things they represent is still murky.
A silly example:
XKCD.
More seriously, this shouldn't surprise anyone - everything humans create carries their biases with them. From Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries (Artificial Condition):
"I guess you can’t tell a story from the point of view of something that you don’t think has a point of view."
What are we not thinking of, because it's just not part of our worldview?
Dan The invention of written records .... which were for the purposes of ... Accountancy. At first, anyway. They had not invented "money" but they had invented accountancy. Um. [ See also: Pigeon @ 41 ] Printing Press in China .... because of theor ideographic system - actually. Whereas, in the "West" you only need copies of 26 symbols to write anything at all - simples. In such circumstances, one will rebel against the paradigms and seek to reverse their power. Too rignt, cobber. The Greeks were right (again) - stealing fire from the "gods" was what made us different. As two very different SF authors have noted: H Beam Piper - "Talk-&-build-a-fire?" _ They're sentient! R Kipling - only Mowgli will handle the Red Flower
EC "Utopia" was satire - like Swift's work. Except, of course, Swift went on to envision Laputa.
PHK Hmm - is Zuckerberg an actual fascist, or something else - is he "just" a panopticon-autocrat, for instance, or is there (as yet) no classification, or we haven't looked doen the right rabbit-hole in the past for his label? I'm reminded of the quote on ultra-protestantism under Calvin: "It was as if all the walls of the houses in Geneva had been turned into glass"
RvdH That transport infrastructure quote is very reminiscent of the underlying rule(s) in Kipling's "With the Night Mail" & "As easy as ABC" Nothing shall interfere with free communication or transportation ..... Also - companies bigger than governments ... Look up the history of the "East India Company" ( The English one, not the Dutch) - &/or a recent book by ... Wm Dalrymple on the subject.
Hmm - is Zuckerberg an actual fascist, or something else - is he "just" a panopticon-autocrat, for instance, or is there (as yet) no classification, or we haven't looked doen the right rabbit-hole in the past for his label?
That one's easy: Zuckerberg is a billionaire -- the archetype of the subspecies of multibillionaire unique to the 21st century, whose wealth is predicated on disintermediating human relationships. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is of the same type, but more specialized -- he only disintermediates commerce and retail relationships. Zuckerberg, however, relies for his wealth on the ability to monetize the panopticon, which makes him incredibly dangerous to civil society.
Charlie So he's as dangerous as Jean Calvin, as I suspected, yes? Using money rather than relgious blackmail, but the same ethos - control. How do the AI's called "governments" deal with people lik Zuckerberg, then?
Am rather intrigued by the rarely unmentioned
4) unknown/knowns
I like that observation!
However, I define it differently: "Things that we know, but don't realise we know"
Consider that an (almost) all-white, all-male, all Oxford-educated upper caste of First Division civil servants might be sort-of-aware, collectively, that they are not as inclusive as they should be.
They may even be aware that they can and should do better, and start addressing some of the overt behaviours and rules that they can see are barriers to recruitment and the career progress of outsiders.
But there are a number of barriers - some of them very simple but, like privilege, invisible from above - and other barriers which are subtle and complex but consistent (and highly effective!) patterns of responses and behaviours that could be modelled as algorithms and brought to light.
These are things that the system does, but doesn't know that it is doing.
Obviously, every coherent and definable function and functor within a non-sentient non-self-aware system is an 'unknown/known': but we're talking about people here, and discoverable logic.
An interesting speculation:
All societies, organisations and communities have 'unknown/known' embedded logic that maintains their cohesion and (say) protects against in-breeding, manages difficult individuals, mitigates contagion, allows emergency responses...
...And there are also self-destructive patterns of behaviour that haven't yet evolved-out: embedded logic that encodes failure modes, which can be discovered by careful statistical analysis by a hostile outsider's AI algorithmic rules engine.
The formation of hate groups and fact-resistant cliques of cranks is one of these anti-patterns: I do not doubt that there are others - some of them impossible to describe in human language - and I suspect that Cambridge Analytica's successors know a great deal about them.
Plus, of course, there are things we do actually know about - racism, sexism, age discrimination - which are often unseen, but are discoverable and knowable.
Discoverable, that is, for people who want to know.
I am pleased to hear that Amazon is making good use of the AI 'failure' that gave such unwelcome discoveries about the recruitment of women and non-white engineers: other organisations have 'we-don't-to-know/knowns' that they pay Facebook to codify in 'smart' algorithmic recruitment campaigns to find candidates that are 'a good fit for our dynamic culture'.
Those algorithmic campaigns are, of course, absolutely and provably not racist by design, nor by intention; likewise, there is no intention nor discoverable algorithmic logic ensuring no-one over 50 ever sees their job adverts.
Legally they're in the clear, except in jurisdictions with a law against 'indirect discrimination' that measures the discriminatory and prejudicial effect, regardless of the stated intention. And that matters, because the stated intention is often well-documented and legally-watertight, so that the bad mechanism is, in law, unknown and impossible to prove. . .
. . ...And the very simple data practice of statistical analysis is effective against toxic AI, if we're prepared to use it, and if it is observable in large populations and large-ish organisations.
A very smart algorithmic campaign can, of course, attack an 'atomised' population of differing subgroups that are impossible to aggregate for the collation of statistically-significant data.
Actually, no - Utopia was not satire, but a revolutionary philosophical tract - it wasn't mocking anyone, which is the definition of satire. Traditionally, both satire and such tracts have often been written in the form of science fiction or fantasy, to avoid attracting the ire of TPTB and the attention of government employees wearing masks.
"The evolutionary algorithm explores all of the behaviour space of the circuit elements, rather than the limited region of safe and predictable behaviour prescribed by the datasheets, ..."
Actually, no, and that myth is right at the heart of why so many people misunderstand evolution, intelligence, AI and computational complexity. Such methods will find only solutions that are connected to the initial conditions in a way that I describe below. If a better solution exists elsewhere, it will be found only by the application of genuine intelligence or an extremely unlikely fluke.
What both evolution and those algorithms do is to take a (often random) set of initial conditions, and search their neighbours for better ones. They will thus behave like water, flow only downhill, and get stuck in the first sink they come to. That problem is partially alleviated by adding various forms of randomised jumping, but the space of possible solutions is too large for that to enable them to search more than a very small proportion of it.
Those techniques were extensively studied in the 1960s, and those problems were known then; nothing has changed. I was a mere student, but dabbled with them then, and have been watching the modern claims with disgust and despair. No, they are NOT new and, no, they do NOT do what the proponents claim.
This has consequences:
The more that we focus on automation, bureaucracy and 'rules', the less potential for radical progress we have. None of those inventions by AI have been more than minor, nor are any likely to be.
We could perfectly well have AIs with any particular properties we want (e.g. explicability, fail-safe etc.), but we have to engineer those in. And, currently, the political will is not there.
However, the skills to perform the analysis are different to those required to build the artefact, and take time, so currently we have lots of opaque gee-whiz boxes which seem mysterious because we don't yet have off the shelf tools to automate the analysis. In contrast, creation is supported by a massive ecosystem.
This is true in biology as well. Humans don't (until recently) design living things. They walk (or slither or blow) into our lives, and we try to figure them out. The way we do that is not very similar to the way they developed through evolution. (Even though we do it using tools that evolution gave us.)
In the case of machine learning, it HAS to be useful that we know in some detail how the machines were built, at least in the sense of knowing the overall structure of the machine, what algorithmic process was used to optimize its parameters, what environment it evolved in (which is to say, what the training set was), and the objective function. That is to say, although it is true that "the skills to perform the analysis are different to those required to build the artefact", there is a useful relationship between them.
I've been musing on the title of this essay, particularly the contrast "Threat or Menace". What distinction is being highlighted here? To me the words mean very nearly the same thing (with some subtle shades of difference). The essay itself uses the word "threat" or its derivatives several times, but "menace" appears nowhere except the title.
Isn't telling whether a school is Montessori or Waldorf best done by counting how many nuts there are in it?
It's a joke, dude.
The subject of talks in the IT Futures conference this year was the role of AI in the future of Edinburgh University, with talks on everything from AI-assisted captioning of courseware for the deaf/non-native speakers, to the use of simulated or remote-controlled chemistry labs in MOOC content delivery, by way of how the law deals with algorithmic processes. Not so much teaching about AI as deploying AI as part of the business process of an institution which turns out to have close to 15,000 staff and 50,000 students this year (wikipedia is out of date).
I was there to give an opening keynote as an icebreaker/talking point, so decided to go full-bore cautionary in case there was a bias towards pointy-haired administrative optimism -- but it turns out most of the speakers were on the same wavelength already.
I haven't had significant contact with that bunch, or any at all in several decades, but it fails to surprise me. Edinburgh was one of the originators of that area, and has a history of keeping its head in the clouds but its feet on the ground. I am sure that it was an extremely interesting meeting - I must check up and see if the talks are published.
I've been musing on the title of this essay, particularly the contrast "Threat or Menace". What distinction is being highlighted here?<\i>
It's something of a set phrase/cliche.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_or_menace
"Threat or Menace". What distinction is being highlighted here?
Specifically it's a reference to the Spiderman comic books. Supporting character J. Jonah Jameson, a tabloid editor, famously kept running editorials of the form SPIDERMAN: Threat or Menace? (Spiderman is a loony who climbs around the outside of buildings in his pajamas, right? It's not as if he can sue. Besides, stories about these super people sell papers.) One might think such sensation mongering would get old after a while or that people would notice that he's repeating the same line of bull for years on end; out in the real world we have the counter-example of how long people have been happily wallowing in myths about Hillary Clinton.
Nile Very slight correction: ... nor discoverable algorithmic logic ensuring no-one over
5035 ever sees their job advertsEC Disagree ... Of course, More changed sides, later, & turned into a murdering persecuting bastard. Only to have the paradigm removed from under him, leading to his own demise. Called "karma" I believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_or_menace
Aha! Thank you for introducing that meme into my consciousness, where it will undoubtedly reproduce and produce thousands of little incomprehensible meme children, to the consternation of my nephews and nieces.
One talk was a quick history of the AI field. Ed Uni was one of the first three universities in the English-language world to conduct AI research (along with Stanford and I-forget-where-else in the US): it's the leading CS department in the UK, if not Europe, right now.
Ed Uni was one of the first three universities in the English-language world to conduct AI research (along with Stanford and I-forget-where-else in the US) (highlight added).
MIT, I believe.
AI: Threat or Menace?
Or Menacing Threat?
4) unknown/knowns
Explained by a phrase from earlier in American politics: "plausible deniability". Something that you can plausibly claim not to know, so can't be held responsible for consequences deriving from it.
I don't know if it originated in politics or is a transplant from business. A lot of businesses, especially the prominent tech businesses, seem to put a lot of effort and resources into not knowing inconvenient facts.
I don't know if it ["plausible deniability"] originated in politics or is a transplant from business<\i>
Once again, Wikipedia(*) comes to the rescue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability
(*) Which cannot be doubted.
MIT, I believe.
Although CMU (Carnegie-Mellon University in lovely Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) was also a strong contender, with a focus on robotics.
to DMPalmer @30: But Artificial Neural Nets aren't the only ones that can be led astray by biased training data. In WWII, the Russians trained dogs to run and crouch under tanks. Once they could do that perfectly they were taken to the battle front, in a region where the Germans had tanks but the Russians didn't. The dogs were fitted with explosive vests and released. This is some sort of urban legend as well, because even though something like that existed IRL (like the chicken bomb detonator), it was found ineffective rather than not working as intended - you should train your dog for at least several months to achieve the reliable result in a heat of battle - not several weeks.
That's the interesting thing about "unknown/known". What the humans think and know is not what the dog thinks and knows. The dog is effectively is placed into it's own virtual world, in which the food that is needed for it's survival is hidden under the tank ahead of it (probably indicated by some sort of verbal cue by the tamer). It does not know from its experience that the thing that is placed on it's back now is a live bomb that will blow up the tank and itself. But this is a human survival strategy nevertheless. By a corollary, this sort of relationships may even be a survival strategy for the dogs in general - they are here because they are useful to us.
As such, I like to view a human society as a large clump of neural networks constantly working on their survival strategies in complicated world. And he most interesting thing about it is that even though most of this society is immersed into situation where they don't really think what they are doing and only follow their routine, it still works. As if it is not a natural, nor it is an artificial intelligence - it works because people artificially create systems to order each other around and remain in synergy at the same time. They have a protocols of communications, systems of trust and responsibility and methods to create and control so many things at once. The fact that this "mechanism" has such a degree of control with only handful of modes of communication is simply the most astounding thing about the civilization.
I remember reading not-so-famous series by some Japanese author, since I was very impressed by it - quite long time ago. It is about AI as much as it is about concepts of battle, military intelligence and subversion. It is a dilogy and also a 5 episode series of impressive quality - and many artworks associated with it. https://www.amazon.com/Yukikaze-Chohei-Kambayashi/dp/1421532557 https://www.amazon.com/Good-Luck-Yukikaze-Chohei-Kambayashi-ebook/dp/B005CXHYHC Despite the fact that it uses totally obsolete view on organizations and computer or network architecture, despite the very inconclusive end of the series at large, it has some very interesting attempts to explain logic and thoughts various characters, some of which are humans, or machines, or the alien-something that is never really explained or described in detail. Especially the part where they try to recognize between each other who is the enemy of which.
Serendipity strikes:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/assessing-employer-intent-when-ai-hiring-tools-are-biased/
to Paul @15 The question then is, can liberal democracy avoid a legitimation crisis, not of the current leaders, but of the concept itself. When most people view most other people as not merely mistaken, or even deluded, but actually malign, how can anything like democracy survive?
It can't. It simply does not. If liberal democracy is about rule of liberal democrats, it sooner or later turns into their exclusive playground, refusing to hear from anyone but themselves, testing their legitimacy. If it is about ideology - well, too bad, because it will be challenged all the time by those who disagree with it but cannot be cast aside. If you chose both options, of course, you will get both outcomes? and this is what happens all the time, ironically.
Same thing with dictatorships, btw, because any sufficiently advanced democracy isn't really distinguishable from dictatorship (as in, say, marxist definition of dictatorship of the capital) in the face of a crisis - it only becomes obvious when the system cannot keep up with the changes around it. I think transition from Weimar Republic to Thousand-year Reich should have demonstrated as much. But oh well, it did not, for so many people. https://www.dw.com/en/vladimir-putin-condemns-eu-stance-on-nazi-soviet-wwii-pact/a-51636197
Greg Tingey @17: Exactly the same idea that both the Nazis & the "old" CP ( Like Stalin or Mao ) used ... We saw how well ( or not ) that worked. It worked until it stopped working. Some of these worked better than others. Lots of fascist regimes in sheep clothes existed and still exist to this day, hidden in the shadow of bigger powers. As it turns out, when we talk about systems more complex than a clock or several lines of code, it becomes a question of ideology and personal preferences rather than question of science and experience.
Chinese "answer" is a perfect example of short-term solution which may or may not be modified in the future and thus may or may not run aground, amok or in various trappings nobody really knows yet. We can only wander what could the next problem be, but sure nobody is going to be left behind. May I remind you that the dictators of 20th century are never popping out of nowhere - they are consequences of destruction caused by much grander tragedies like disappearing of an empire or a civil war. People always prefer known fears to the unknown instability of anarchy. People always remember when the great powers and their great promises resulted in disappointment, their idealistic view of democracy was tainted by the crimes this "democracy" committed against them.
We are talking about the 1950s and early 1960s, here, and my understanding is that CMU's robotics work is MUCH later.
https://www.ri.cmu.edu/about/ri-history/
It's not hard to imagine "Zuckerberg sells blackmail information to Putin, society falls" as the way history will eventually be written.
Re: AI hiring tools - multiple-choice (scaled) self-admin test
Don't understand why such corps would bother with using a CV-reading AI when all you need is a detailed job description and requirements presented/filledout as a bunch of multiple choice rating scales. Each candidate would also be assigned some unique ID. Sort through all of your candidates' application data and only then contact them to request further non-job related info such as age, gender, ethnicity, etc. A check on job description bias could be done at this point -- specifically, identify which questions ('requirements') skewed the candidate selection.*
The human interview could be the final step in the hiring process although considering the accelerating rate of employee turnover in the larger corps (the only outfits that could afford this tech) ... meh, why bother: individual employees are interchangeable cogs in the great corporate machine.
”Those techniques were extensively studied in the 1960s, and those problems were known then; nothing has changed”
Minksy’s critiques from the 60s did not really address back/propagation in multi-layer networks. If they are what you are thinking of.
But it is odd that we are calling GAN “A.I.” These are all highly specialised networks trained for very specific tasks. They are each extremely efficient pattern-marchers for a given type of pattern. They are not in any way General purpose A.I.
But it is odd that we are calling GAN “A.I.” These are all highly specialised networks trained for very specific tasks. They are each extremely efficient pattern-marchers for a given type of pattern. They are not in any way General purpose A.I.
You may not have noticed this but there's currently an industry bubble/gold rush in project, and "AI" is the new "Cyber". (Shudder.)
Back in the 80s it was Expert Systems. In the 90s it was hypertext and search; in the 00s it was social networks.
You may not have noticed this but there's currently an industry bubble/gold rush in project, and "AI" is the new "Cyber". (Shudder.)
Industry and Academic. I think it was about two years ago that I reached the point of averting my gaze whenever it fell on the phrase "Machine Learning".
You may not have noticed this but there's currently an industry bubble/gold rush in project, and "AI" is the new "Cyber". (Shudder.)
Does it have nanotubes and use blockchain?
Charlie, the ideas in your talk are calling to mind an SF story from 1997: "Billy's Bunter" by Walter Cuirle. (Published in the U.S. in "Analog", and probably elsewhere.)
Running off of memory, but in the story, a school-age boy carries an AI device from his Dad that he calls a Bunter. It's to listen to Billy's surroundings and give suggestions that help him socialize, since he's had problems and been bullied for it. It's supposed to only know what he knows, but drinks it all in and makes the connections faster. At one point, struggling with a question in class, the device whispers a clue that suddenly inspires a new answer in him, and he raises his hand with confidence.
...And gets in trouble for his answer. You see, he lives in a future U.S. that isn't quite Handmaids Tale, but half-religious with hi-tech, and some freedom of belief but strong social pressure. The culture-wars split in US society ended with a split in different kinds of schooling you could choose among. But even in a "Traditional" school (vs the encouraged religious schools), there is strong social pressure to conform to authority (even bullies), with an implied immoral, scary world outside the country. Originality, and certainty creativity, not encouraged. (The analogy of "satellite dishes in Iran" was, I believe, specifically mentioned in the story. As an aside, the story even predicts the accursed "Smart" TVs with the father grumbling about bootup & ads just to get to a decent video to play for his son.)
Anyway, in that story, the handheld AI device in Billy's hand was shown as a positive thing, a solution to help Billy create and learn. It ends, not with a revolution, but with the founding of one of the third legal type of school, a "free" school (any curriculum you want, but none of the accreditation) where all the students including Billy have a Bunter AI to help them. Free in their own little world.
But they're still stuck in that culture. Anyway, that story made an impression on me, since it wasn't a full-on "1984" or "Handmade" world, but showed a slow, plausible creeping in that direction. So many elements of that story have been coming closer since I read it. And if there was any downside to, say, having Bunter AI technology in the hands of the right-wing rulers, I don't remember it mentioned.
That's not actually incompatible with the point I was making. Perhaps I should have said "the evolutionary algorithm sets out to explore..." (as in, the starting point is random) "...while the exploration is limited by inherent deficiencies of the algorithm such as the tendency to get stuck in local minima, it does not have any constraints relating to sticking to the region of safe, predictable behaviour characterised in the datasheet". The evolutionary algorithm can - and does - "measure" uncharacterised performance parameters of individual elements on the chip and use the results to influence its larger-scale behaviour. But the representation that we have of the evolved circuit is still just an ordinary circuit diagram (expressed as an FPGA program), which is no longer adequate when you're doing such weird tricks; it misrepresents some of the information and misses a whole lot more out entirely. So these circuits are artificially hard to understand because the circuit diagram does not actually make sense (and similarly, you can't rely on putting the same program into a different FPGA and still having it work the same).
What I'm saying is that that kind of difficulty is not actually the problem here. That problem is solvable, even if it is a huge pain in the arse, by making a horrendously tedious bunch of measurements on the FPGA to acquire the missing data. The problem we have here still exists even when the basic elements of the machine are very well characterised indeed, and is not (currently) solvable because we don't have the basic toolkit to understand huge numbers of interactions (and what we do have tends to just recursively shift the opacity somewhere else without actually getting rid of it).
Your post #14 seems to suggest that we may fundamentally never be able to develop a general toolkit, or at least not unless we come up with a fundamentally different approach. On the other hand "fundamentally impossible in the general case" covers a lot of ground and doesn't mean we can't get results for more specific cases (eg. 10 PRINT "FUCK THE TORIES": END halts but 10 PRINT "FUCK THE TORIES": GOTO 10 does not). So I don't despair of the possibility of keeping a handle on things by developing tools that do work for a useful number of cases and not developing systems that exceed the capabilities of the tools to check them. I just despair of the will to do it, given the current popularity of the approach of going live with some half-arsed piece of crap and hoping people don't notice it is crap or can't complain effectively if they do.
Sorry, I was unclear. I meant I didn't know where the concept of plausible deniability originated.
Multiple independent originators, all of pre-school age (though it takes them a while to get the hang of it).
why bother: individual employees are interchangeable cogs in the great corporate machine.
I've seen evidence that at least some of them work on a "hire, then let them transfer internally", since they know that they are bad at hiring. Sadly that also encourages the development of undesirable ecological niches. Most obviously the "handmaids" and "racially pure" ideological ones, but also intellectual dead zones.
It is funny in a way watching very smart people{tm} struggle with scaling problems. All the problems that they'd like to fix by "go there and look at it, enforce my preferred solution" stop working when you have even 1000 employees. For some reason I'm reminded of wild outposts like Greenpeace New Zealand and The Greens NSW both of which were founded fairly independently of the rest of the organisation and have/had their own ways of doing things. When the borg arrive to encourage consistency some people leave rather than comply.
That sort of internal diversity can be incredibly valuable, but there can be real ethical issues with allowing them to not use best in class solutions. But again, when you have delegated authority how do you get the delegates to enforce the same rules in the same way if they believe the rules are bad rules? Especially when you want charismatic leaders even though they're hugely more likely to be arseholes.
Since everything was "cyber" once upon a time, I suppose we'll se "ai" become a prefix, as in aispace instead of cyberspace.
That said, how would you pronounce aispace. A.I. Space, or aiiieeeeespace?
There's a couple of other "fun" problems with training set data.
The first is deliberate poisoning of data. If an adversary can taint the training data then it's possible they can mis-train your AI to their benefit.
The second is inadvertent poisoning of data. We see this in the Cyber Security space a lot; tools get brought in and you train them on your data and they'll be able to detect anomalies. But what if the anomaly is already present (an attacker already has a foothold and is exfiltrating data)? This gets learned as normal behaviour and your new system now has a blind spot.
Curating training data is gonna be a whole new speciality; my prediction for the 5% space :-)
In space, nobody can hear you aiiieeeee.
(You're not going to claim you weren't playing for that, are you?)
If you want see this language in action, "Existence", by David Brin, is full of it; "aintelligence", "aissistant", "aivatar" and so
(and Our Gracious Host gets a quote reference in it :-))
“internal diversity can be incredibly valuable, but there can be real ethical issues with allowing them to not use best in class solutions.” One reason that diversity is valuable is because the solution the “borg” settled on isn’t necessarily best-in-class.
best in class solutions<\i>
Got an adjective, an adjectival prepositional phrase and a noun there in just four words. I've been in analogous situations where involved people had wildly different conceptions of what any of those meant.
Best in class is a corn monoculture.
Optimized for local conditions, inputs, and required outputs might be a vineyard or a vegetable garden.
The problem is that, without putting some referents and scale markers on defining "best," you're likely to get whatever standard operating procedures defines as best. And since bosses tend to simplify so that they can get their heads around the problem, that massively constrains the possibility space.
Actually thinking about it, this is a huge problem with AI: simplifying the system so that the human in charge can understand it well enough to make useful decisions. This is a classic problem with bureaucracies and supply chains. If we leave humans in charge, then no matter how brilliant the AIs are, most of their possibilities are going to be pitched because no one can understand how they work well enough to evaluate them.
Putting the AI in charge means that you understand the model it's using well enough to trust that it has your best interests at heart. Again, this means throwing out any possibility that doesn't make sense...
I guess the only way around this is to bring in AIs as consultants to management. Oh dear.
There is actually very little automated CV reading going on, having worked on a few such attempts the sad truth is that the things written on a CV have very little correlation to someone’s suitability for a job, other then the basics of education or prior work experience. And you hardly need a complex AI for that. The content of CV’s is mostly useless trash
Which is the flaw in a lot of what Charlie is asserting, you need data to do anything. The main reason Facebook works is not the clever AI but the fact that Zuck has managed to get the user base to provide him with a ton of high quality data, which when combined with external data sources made it easy to target ads to them
So if you want to see where AI is going to be big in the future you need to look at where massive amounts of high quality data is being collected now. Note the word “high quality” it currently doesn’t apply to things like surveillance cameras . But it does to things like Alexa
@76 - “Does it have nanotubes and use blockchain?” Hell, my company has it with nanochains and blocktubes. Does the whole Dymaxion CyberNeuroExpert thing really well. Provides ongoing best-in-class optimaxualisation of resource matrix acceptivity parameters for whole-problem visualization and transitivual solutionising.
The first version of the training data story I heard was a network which appeared to have learnt the difference between NATO and Warsaw Pact planes. Until someone realised that the training data (and initial successful test data) came from a book that presented pairs of planes, NATO on the left, Warsaw Pact equivalent on the right. And all the left hand photos had been chosen flying left to right, all the right hand photos flying right to left. Other versions have tanks in woodland vs tanks on plains, or even colour vs black and white photos.
Another urban legend has the UK Home Office back in the 70s or 80s trying to use a rules based expert system to make immigration decisions. They allegedly gave up when they couldn't make it match past human decisions without an explicitly race based rule, which the human decisions weren't supposed to have used as a factor.
Back to tanks, allegedly one breakthrough in designing fire and forget over the horizon anti-tank missiles was realising that you don't have to recognise tanks in completely 3D arbitrary orientations - if the tracks aren't flat on the ground, it isn't a threat. (Again, algorithmic, not ML or neural network - for Warsaw Pact tanks crossing from East Germany.)
"Best in class" is horribly vulnerable ( Like orders of magnitude more vulnerable) to an OCP. Than even normal people, scrabbling fo a solution to said OCP. Because people are so used to thinking (excuse me) "inside the box" of the class. IMHO, this is one of the main reasons ( aprt from running out of money) that the Communist systems collapsed completely. Thinking outside the class got you the Gulag. And, now communism is gone, it looks as though the USA is making the exact same mistake, unless they can get rid of Trump & the "R's" next year .... ... Heteromeles on this same subject: .... Leading to the inevitable effect in so-called "education" of "Teaching to the Test", rather than teaching to the "Real_World"TM
timrowledge 😍 The semi-random bullshit generator turned up trumps, there, didn't it?
More generally, I wonder if part of the problem is the reverse of the Japanese quality-control paradigm. Your "limits" will probably be set at 3 or 4 SD's in a normal bell-curve. What happens when a result appears that's 5 SD's out? And, it WILL happen at some point, & you don't want to ignore it - because there is your Black Swan, so to speak. See also the early Pterry: "the Dark Side of the Sun"
So for the foreseeable AI future people should learn to ask themselves the question: 'Do we trust this (depending on the AI level) cockroach/mole-rat/pride of lions/pet to make the right decision for us?'
Is anyone working on AC (Artificial Common sense)?
Unfortunately even if they can be voted out of office, they're not going to quietly go away (and the structure of the systems means that in Congress the best you can hope for is a comfortable majority for those who appear to have an ideology beyond "we should be in charge because we should be in change).
I see what you mean, but it's still somewhat mistaken. From an engineering viewpoint, there are several levels of 'possible', such as:
(1) Sign a moderate cheque, and it can be done within a reasonable timescale. (2) We are pretty sure it can be done, but the bill might be horrendous and the timescale excessive. (3) It could be done in abstract theory, but almost certainly not within the lifetime and resources of the human species. (4) It can't be done, even in abstract theory.
Exhaustive searching of the possibilities of something of the scale of a modern CPU chip or software application is either (3) or (4), depending on the question you ask. So the smart thing is not to go there.
"Your post #14 seems to suggest that we may fundamentally never be able to develop a general toolkit, or at least not unless we come up with a fundamentally different approach."
Never. But, as you say, that doesn't mean we can't come up with something usable. The solution is as I described in the last paragraph of #50, which is possible in sense (1) above:
We could perfectly well have AIs with any particular properties we want (e.g. explicability, fail-safe etc.), but we have to engineer those in. And, currently, the political will is not there.
This is horrendously common with 'technological' problems - they are usually soluble, often fairly easily, considered as a classic engineering problem (including biology etc.) - but the chosen political and social contraints mean that they are insoluble.
nanochains and blocktubes
Nanochains are a real thing, of course: polymers such as DNA, RNA, proteins, morpholino oligomers, etc. Once a subject of corporate buzz, but now past their sell-by date, alas.
My brain refuses to provide me with a visual for blocktubes this morning, though.
My brain refuses to provide me with a visual for blocktubes this morning, though.
https://www.google.com/search?q=kidney+stone&hl=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiAjMbr1LfmAhUqgK0KHSVTD0kQ_AUoAXoECBAQAw&biw=2024&bih=1378&dpr=2
https://www.google.com/search?q=kidney+stone&hl=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiAjMbr1LfmAhU
Indeed, it is easier if you think of block as a verb, rather than a noun. (Didn't occur to me. I just got up and there's still an excess of blood in my caffeine-stream). But these images are not very attractive for inserting "blockchain" into the corporate bullshit memestream.
From the opposite bank of the jargon memestream, there is this report from journalist Molly Ivins, speaking of a Texas politician:
Even for someone who lived 20 years in Texas, this takes some decoding. Ivins helpfully adds, "bob war is what you make fences with".
Is there an equivalent of Poe's law for corporate bullshit? If not, there should be one.
Re: ' ... my company has it with nanochains and blocktubes. Does the whole Dymaxion CyberNeuroExpert thing ...'
Gee, sounds familiar. Hmmm ... I think your outfit presented to us last year. (Just pile on some more of that zero-content technobabble whydontcha.)
A question to the folks here that actually work in this area:
How do you test for errors? Don't recall any genpub (non-techie) news stories mentioning this detail. The few times I've sat in on dept-targeted sales pitches, the stock 'answer' was: it's a trade secret (until you sign on the dotted line usually several years' worth of some font-4 irrevocable contract that includes an NDA that binds your past and future employees' great-great-great-in-laws, etc. - and of course after your last payment check clears).
Thinking about the whole "Threat or Menace" thing, I'd guess that the greatest threat/menace is that some psychopathic, right-wing authoritarian leader of the Altemeyer type* gets it into his head that it's possible to use AI, probably in conjunction with quantum computing to break security codes, to beat a conventional military using cyberwar, excuse me, AIwar. There are two problematic outcomes, and the rather worse one is that the AI attack fails, prompting the target into nuclear retaliation.
The more unpredictable one is if AIwar wins. I think it's possible that this is the way we get serious action on climate change, simply because, the biggest users of petroleum (conventional militaries) are shown to be ineffective against the new threat, so there's leverage to drastically downsize the Big Iron Boys. Also, a number of cities undergo drastic population drops after AIs borked their infrastructure controls and caused their power plants to blow themselves up. This will probably lead to some drastic retooling, which might conceivably be more carbon neutral.
Alas, I suspect that the internet would also be a casualty of an AI war, since cutting the cables is about the only way to stop this from happening again. This would lead to an era of paranoid nationalism, which wouldn't be good for cooperation on climate change. On the other hand, we more-or-less managed the Montreal protocol on CFCs in 1987, while we've so far utterly muffed controlling greenhouse gases in a completely networked world. I don't think the internet is necessarily vital for controlling greenhouse gases, based on this (probably incomplete and faulty) logic.
"My brain refuses to provide me with a visual for blocktubes this morning, though."
Blocktubes are the high-bandwidth buses used for inter-processor communication in computation modules using a virtual super-network of clusters of emulated BBC Micros running on a self-extending fractal anthill architecture. They allow the processors in one sub-cluster to exchange data at high speed with those of another, like the interconnections between transputers. So basically think of a big pipe full of ants.
I reckon that what that would show is that while conventional computer-dependent militaries are ineffective against the new threat, conventional militaries that aren't computer-dependent don't even notice it exists. And one thing about pre-computer military hardware is that you can build shitloads of it very fast. So say the US manages to knock out all the computers in China, including the ones that work the nukes. You then get a very pissed off China building WW2 style kit (petroleum-powered, of course) for all it's worth and able to handle the casualty rates involved in using it, vs. a US struggling to get its head round the new situation and doing its usual freakout over the fact that when you go to war some of your own side are going to get killed. Wherever the actual fighting takes place, the result ends up much like Vietnam except bigger and worse. I don't think you end up with "AI wins" at all, except in the limited and very temporary sense of "I just hit him and he hasn't hit me back yet".
My apologies for being harsh, but I think you missed the threat.
Cyberwar's dangerous because much of our infrastructure is now wired to the web. So, for example, you could use a cyberstrike to take out a city by borking the valves and meters that control the water supply and insure that it's safe. Ditto with sewer, electricity, just-in-time food deliveries, traffic signals, etc.
If major cities get borked without bombs hitting them, the military has another job: disaster relief. Do this enough times, and the military is tied down keeping most of their country's population from dying, while they try to get all the infrastructure running without it being connected to the internet again.
If you want to add even more misery, set up your AI to dox everyone that you can, erase records, amplify misinformation and discord, and so forth. If no one gets paid, everyone's angry and alienated, and no one can prove who owns what property, it's an ungodly mess. You can do the same thing with a nuke, but a cyberstrike doesn't kill anyone directly, except for maybe people in hospitals whose power gets shut off and whose generators get hacked.
Hopefully you get the picture? This is AI used as a weapon of mass destruction, entirely because we're stupid enough to be moving to an Internet of Things without adequate security. The only solution to stopping it from happening is to break the internet, and I don't think anyone's going to do that as a precautionary measure.
There are a million ways to mess up modern cities, cyber attacks being one of them. Poisoning the water supply and chemical attacks also work prett well
However the best one is still multiple thermonuclear air bursts
Someone may start with something cutsy like a cyber attack but it is not likely to end there. There really isn’t much point in leading with something half ass when the other guy is likely to just escalate to the real deal in response
My guess is most major state actors (like China) would correctly see a cyber attack as just a step along the path to thermonuclear war and would MAD away from it
Lesser states and NGO’s might be more likely to pursue such, though even a lesser state is probably going to end up a glowing slag pile
The problem with cyberwar is attribution. For example, I don't think an American attack on Beijing would come from whitehouse.com and have "God Bless America" in it. It would probably look like it originated from a server in India. Or something.
Now, who does China shoot at if a cyberstrike comes from India? The US? We can play combinatorial games all day here, but there's no subtext, I chose these simply as examples. I don't think that computer security is fast enough to rapidly (for nuclear war levels of rapidity) determine where a cyberattack came from. That makes them, ironically, rather nasty. If someone uses a cyberattack to shut down the municipal water supplies of a bunch of US cities (for example), what does the US do? Nuke Russia or China? What if it was a private actor, say Geoff Bozo, out to make a point that democracy was dead and aristo-capitalism was the way to run the world? Do you nuke him? Russia? China?
It's a mess. That's what makes it dangerous, possibly to the point of comparing favorably with conventional war in terms of damage caused.
The real problem will be when some disaffected grad student at Edi You can rent a cloud computer long enough to fire off an infrastructure-leveling cyberattack anonymously. Wonder if we'll get to this level?
That's exactly what I, as "nation1" would do to attack "nation2"; make my attack use servers and domains that id themselves as www.nation3.gov.ac or whatever...
You can do the same thing by burying an hbomb or sailing it into port on a container ship. They tend to figure it out eventually though. It’s pretty hard to keep secrets like that long term
a virtual super-network of clusters of emulated BBC Micros running on a self-extending fractal anthill architecture. My favorite google hit on "fractal anthill" was this segment of an erowid trip report (probably not safe for work so no link but a search will find it) on 4-HO-MiPT (from the account a strong psychedelic): Looking down at the beach under my feet I can see that every grain of sand is meticulously arranged in natural looking patterns, like the inside of a fractal anthill. Impossible paths the size of hairs look meticulously maintained, and lead arterially to other larger and larger paths that snake across the beach like the sandworms of Dune. Sounds like a good drug for computer architects preparing to pitch to venture capitalists. :-)
big pipe full of ants. :-) The One(s) With The Names once warned me about [threats from?] ants related to this segment from "A Thousand Plateaus", Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari (near the beginning; I have yet to finish it): A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed. Real ants never really bother me; at worst I have to gently break/redirect a pheromone trail or three. (Not sure I made that clear to her/them.) But a pipe full of ants, that might be worrying.. Is there a role for jumping spiders in blocktube architectures? :-)
The real problem will be when some disaffected grad student at Edi You can rent a cloud computer long enough to fire off an infrastructure-leveling cyberattack anonymously. Wonder if we'll get to this level? Or splurge and rent some distributed services, e.g. (Not vouching for this; haven't evaluated it or the previous article.) My Journey into the Dark Web: At Your Service (January 9, 2019, Emil Hozan) Or both. (Zerodays are not cheap for a grad student who hasn't found them themselves, though.)
Hacking AI employment systems is already a thing: a recent suggestion ("What, you didn't know about....' suggesting it's been around for a year at least) that all job applications should include on the last page a copy of the advertisement itself in white 4-pt type, so any AI reading it would tick all its boxes.
Threat or Menace: "More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Woody Allen
I'd use a bunch of prawned servers and botnets within nation2's own borders. Seed it by going there and throwing a suitably-programmed mobile phone in a rubbish bin within range of an open wireless network, bugger off home while it breeds and trigger it off when the need arises.
I'd also expect nation2 to have, or rapidly acquire, a pretty good idea who nation1 was by means that have nothing to do with computer nerds performing a trace on the attack. It might not "stand up in court" or be revealable to anyone without the appropriate clearance, but they'd have an answer a lot quicker than they said they did.
One reason that diversity is valuable is because the solution the “borg” settled on isn’t necessarily best-in-class.
Well no, but there are situations where it's pretty clear to outsiders and the majority of insiders, but there are hotspots of diversity. I suggest that best in class solutions like "rape is bad" and "lynching is frowned upon" are things that, while fiercely contested, should probably be enforced by upper management regardless. As a general rule, even competence-based arguments of the form "you should not exist" shouldn't be allowed. Even for things that are illegal, I prefer that the behaviour be the target rather than the person performing it. Likewise I'm not entirely convinced that we should have diversity of tax eligibility. We have it, but I think it's a problem to be eliminated.
There are many examples of the contrary, though, from traditional diversity (all our managers are white men) to the ubiquity of MS-Windows.
Oh, I'd break the internet repeatedly at random intervals just to teach people not to be such fucking idiots as to do all those thus-disruptable things in the first place, because it's been getting on my wick for years that people don't see the problem with it.
The thing is that while you may indeed be able to do such an attack, how badly and for how long it fucks the target nation up depends greatly on how government in that nation operates, how the people of that culture react, how big a proportion of the total population their military is, and the like. The attacker of course hopes it will be utterly crippling, but should also be aware that they may well just find they've kicked a wasps' nest.
Heteromeles @ 106 Or,maybe just DO NOT USE "internet of things" devices in anything remotely critical. Like your home "smart"meter" for instance. I mean, as Pigeon also points out, we've known about this for some time, yet people & orgs are STILL DOING IT ... W.T.F?
... Oh yes Pipe full of ants, etc ... ... + .. OUT OF CHEESE ERROR .. + ...
Pigeon: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/12/13/no-apples-new-mac-pro-isnt-overpriced/
Unfortunately non-computerized weapons are basically ineffective, until you get down to the level of assault rifles.
Consider that during the 1992 Gulf war, roughly 90% of the destruction of Iraqi forces by allied bombers was inflicted by 10% of the weapons -- the GPS and laser-guided bombs, not the old-school WW2-era Iron bombs that the USAF and RAF dropped in huge numbers. It turns out that a single 500kg bomb that lands exactly on its target, or within a metre of it (the level of accuracy the RAF now takes for granted) is more effective than a hundred similar-size bombs that are only accurate to within a 50 metre radius. (Which is amazingly precise, compared to WW2 bombing campaigns, where the CEP of an RAF night bomber in 1941 was measured in multiple miles.)
Again: you can't kill an enemy if you can't see them, and a lot of the modern electronics is all about sensors and networking, to detect enemies and notify appropriate forces of exactly where to point the howitzers or MLRS to flatten them.
And you can't kill an enemy if you can't engage them, because your supply chain won't reach that far or you've run out of truck tires because your logistics are crap because your quartermasters are relying on bits of paper rather than the just-in-time fulfillment networks that were invented, in the first place, to allow the US military to conduct extended operations at trans-oceanic range.
Industrial age warfare is intimately dependent on logistics which in turn doesn't work properly without communications, which is where the computers come in.
Now, I'll concede that you can do 98% of the job with late 1960s LSI logic based 8-bit or 16-bit minicomputers and so on; and that if GPS goes away you can still take out bridges using laser-guided bombs, and use acoustic couplers to send data over field telephone wires. But if you try to regress to pre-Vietnam War era tech, you're going to lose, and lose hard.
What you are talking about has already started - look at what is being done to Iran. It isn't being reported in western media, but it has been under repeated, serious cyber-attack. And we are almost sure that Stuxnet was a USA/Israel attack that took 'cyber-warfare' from the low-key probes and disruption of 'the enemy' that is SOP in international relations to a higher level of warfare than was used in the Cold War. And, yes, Iran has responded by cutting the Internet, at least once.
Indeed; there are people who still don't believe me about the "Gulf Wars" when In say that:- 1) A Paveway was accurate to the extent that you could decide to put it through the 4th window from the West end of the building on the 3rd floor, with a 99% certainty of getting that window. 2) At least one F-15E scored an air to air kill on a helicopter in flight using a Paveway, and the footage was on the news that evening.
A Paveway<\i>
JDAM has a laser seeker option that gives it moving target capabilities too. And the latest Paveway, P-IV, has GPS/INS added to provide essential equivalence to LJDAM. My guess is that LJDAM will eventually win out.
Milporn video of LJDAM striking moving truck targets:
https://forum.warthunder.com/index.php?/topic/444228-what-is-the-name-of-that-bomb/
Yes, but only when one is talking about conventional battlegrounds in wars between 'nation states' and similar - if you can change the type of warfare, things are somewhat different. And a great deal of warfare always has been and is not fundamentally of that form; a lot of it is primarily conflict between worldviews.
Let's exclude the various methods for disabling all computers and electronic communications, as the consequences of those have been well-discussed in SF.
For example, if you can turn it into (effectively) civil warfare using guerrilla tactics by well-embedded and disaffected members of the society you are attacking. Our rulers in the UK (mainly Bliar) have already started creating automated weaponry to use against violent (and other) dissidents, but it doesn't work very well even against the few serious ones that we have.
And then one gets onto longer-term warfare, often by converting the new generation or distorting the way that governments are appointed or constrained - which includes the struggles against slavery, for female emancipation, for socialism and (our current ones) for monetarism etc. I know that many people wouldn't call that warfare, but the late unlamented Joseph McCarthy and the leaders of most countries would disagree, as can be seen by their actions. And there, advanced technology is of only marginal help, though 'they' are working on it - as you said in your speech.
One COULD argue that the way Labour was targetted was a proof that technology works in such cases, under some circumstances, but it's stretching a point. There was nothing automated (or even really modern) about was done.
A Paveway with laser seeker from an airframe with a WSO does have a capability to track a moving target; a JDAM with only GPS doesn't.
A Paveway with laser seeker from an airframe with a WSO does have a capability to track a moving target; a JDAM with only GPS doesn't.<\i>
Er, yes. But a JDAM with a laser seeker does.
http://www.deagel.com/Defensive-Weapons/GBU-54-Laser-JDAM_a002233001.aspx
http://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/defense/weapons-weapons/images/laser_jadam_product_card.pdf
Yes, but only when one is talking about conventional battlegrounds in wars between 'nation states' and similar
That's what Pigeon was talking about, implicitly -- a conflict between the USA and China. My point stands (but does not in any way invalidate your subsequent line of argument: it's an apples/oranges situation).
FWIW, the dangers posed by "Internet of Things" devices are trivial compared to the dangers of the brainworms that Twitter, facebook, Instagram, etc are designed to implant. IMHO.
Consider that during the 1992 Gulf war, roughly 90% of the destruction of Iraqi forces by allied bombers was inflicted by 10% of the weapons -- the GPS and laser-guided bombs, not the old-school WW2-era Iron bombs that the USAF and RAF dropped in huge numbers. Such is the nature of combined arms, they seem to be not very effective, but we must consider that other 90% were necessary to solve the problem of much more conventional matter. That is, if somebody knows how the enemy is going to attack their forces exactly, they can get prepared for that with maximum efficiency, which was demonstrated multiple times in singular cases, and sometimes even at large scale. So if he sees just several radar marks that does not disclose exact type of ammunition, target, radar signature and at best can be recognized as "fast movers", he is forced to take chances and guesses if they are even present clear and immediate danger. Which is the larger part of warfare than shooting itself.
If you know with good confidence the the enemy is attacking in same low-profile stealthy run with gliding guided bombs, you don't need to ask about method of prevention, it is all in the game theory. Another words, warfare that consists purely of stealth, singular deployed airspace penetrators with precision weapons, super-trained super-soldiers (and other idealistic "future wars" concepts of "liberal" generation) does not work because they are vulnerable to counter-intelligence and information attacks of similar quality - and they are also much cheaper. Of course, supreme force of supreme capabilities and supreme numbers will always win against smaller one, but even then the chances are that there will be a lot of struggle to keep everything under the wraps.
Modern application of force in Middle East conflicts show that only extremely costly support operations can lead to such extreme sense of security that US have had in the region, otherwise normal army would have exchanged a tiny bit of vulnerability for huge drop of price of war (I suppose, the change is almost inversely proportional at this point, so 50% reduction in expenses means 100% casualty increase). The US could easily win these wars if a) it had any serious intention to do so instead of exercising its military powers and b) if it used less obscure methods that involve neutralizing actual problems and not fighting the symptoms.
Though there's a question, if we increase the portion of our intelligence in warfare to it's logical limits, will the classical combined ops will still be viable enough? What if you could invent an AI that would crack internal communication protocols so effective that IFF will fail and prompt forces to fire on their own? That is one of such possibilities in the future. Pretty much if you remember how the civil wars get started under the foreign influence by actors like 100 years ago, but oh well, where were we again with that?
Today, perhaps, but tomorrow?
the dangers posed by "Internet of Things" devices are trivial compared to the dangers of the brainworms that Twitter, facebook, Instagram, etc are designed to implant.
Disagree, and would like to note that IoT devices are roughly a decade to a decade and a half newer than Facebook, etc.
What makes FB so toxic is the userbase of roughly 2.5 billion shaved apes. We are nowhere near to 2.5 billion unmaintained/buggy IoT devices yet, but we'll get there in the next few years and it ain't going to be pretty. In particular, a lot of the exploits on IoT kit are going to look like FB/Twitter/social media hacks -- client bots running on rooted internet-connected lightbulbs look like social media attacks but are really IoT hacks, after all.
Here's the thing: Clausewitz was half-right about war being a continuation of politics by other means. The problem with this statement in a modern context is that when we're dealing with power issues, there's actually a continuum of politics that starts with something like consensus at one end and goes to tactical nuclear warfare at the other.
And it's probably multidimensional, not a scale, either. For example, strategic nuclear warfare has primarily been about maintaining a credible threat for deterrence purposes, not actual explosion of nukes. Also in the middle are all the "bright-side" nonviolent conflicts (bright in the sense that often the leaders see no value in keeping anything secret), the "dark-side" nonviolent conflicts (bribery, blackmail, extortion, doxxing, propaganda, all the social media stuff we hate, electioneering, etc.), as well as various forms of guerrilla and economic warfare.
Currently, petroleum-powered conventional warfare is what the US uses to maintain its dominant status. Other powers do similarly. There are serious problems with this, but the biggest is that conventional warfare really is one of the major drivers of climate change. It's not just that the big weapons systems use petroleum, it's that much of military strategy is about controlling systems that extract and move petroleum. And the militaries know this.
Cyberwar to date generally in the messy middle of messy with people's heads and politics, and is part of a system known as hybrid warfare that's being practiced by all the major powers. This is probably only going to get worse. One thing to note is that in the US, we only hear about Russia's hybrid warfare attacks on us. However, we don't hear about what the NSA is doing with their enormous budget. My assumption is that we're all causing trouble for each other, which kinda sucks.
Anyway...
The problem going forward, especially with the civilian side of the internet of things, where security lapses are a normal part of the discourse (read Bruce Schneier), is that cyberwar can start causing infrastructural damage by disrupting or destroying control, logistics, and financial systems. STUXNET was just the start of this.
In a weird way, this is good. Warfare is about disrupting the enemy's will and ability to fight. If this can be done without burning any petroleum, this is a good thing, especially if it also renders conventional, petroleum-burning warfare ineffective. We'll likely get rapid action to curb greenhouse gases once they're irrelevant for war.
Unfortunately on the bad side, this won't be a theoretical war, it will be an actual war, which means that, likely, cities will be destroyed in the conflict and there will be a considerable death toll, not through direct killing from enemy munitions, but through famine, epidemic disease (lack of clean water and sanitation) and the resulting civil unrest. Dealing with the mess at home will tie down military forces as surely as a siege would, especially since the militaries are more likely to be resistant to cyberwar than civilian systems are.*
On the good side, the fortunes of many of the billionaires (including Putin and the Saudis) are tied to petroleum, as well as to social media, so disrupting their systems might conceivably radically change politics.
On the bad side, we'll have little control over how such systems will change, and weak states with limited ability to fight back through democratic processes are the normal hunting grounds for would-be dictators. To the extent that cyberwar can affect the structure of successor political systems, it will do so. However, I'd point out that the US and USSR have been pretty ineffective at using non-cyber warfare and propaganda for durable nation building, so I'm not sure how effective the cyber version would be.
And so it goes.
*Note again, for civilian IoT, I'm not talking about internet-enabled doorbell cameras, but rather the logistics and public health infrastructure that gives us clean water, working sewers, food, medicines, and other necessities of life. Where these systems fail, people will die.
What makes FB so toxic is the userbase of roughly 2.5 billion shaved apes.
Absolutely. And IoT devices are inherently far less dangerous than shaved apes.
Are you sure? I mean most of them aren't (yet) for us, but central heating, lighting, cooker, microwave (treated separately), fridge/freezer, washing machine, real 'pooter, fake 'pooter (aka cell phone), door bell makes 9, so if we say that a couple will have at least one real pooter between them and a fake pooter each, that gives us 5 times as many things per front door as there are people... and I've not considered stuff like transport; I own a car, and have access to 7 works pool vehicles.
Charlie - grants uses of AI.... where I was working, they built a program that is now stood up for the whole of the US NIH: the system reads grant proposals, and comes back with recommendations as to which Institute or Center (there are 27 in the NIH) the proposal should be proposed to. What little I know of it involved it looking for phrases, etc, that matched successful grant proposals for a given Institute.
So, it guides the grant seeker.
Do you have any idea how many times, over the years, that I wished I knew what the compiler, o/s, or application was doing this or failing on this for?
And telling me I can read the code - do you really think that I had time at work to figure out what part of the hundreds of thousands of lines of code I needed to read? Sometimes I could, if it was obvious, and others, not so much.
Tensorflow and PyTorch (the two most widely used frameworks for training NN's) use the CUDA libraries for GPU support, which means that GPU acceleration only works on Nvidia GPU's. So from a practical point of view the AMD Radeon is (nearly) useless despite often being faster from a FLOPs point of view.
There are some not-commonly-used counter-examples, like PlaidML.
Minor nitpick, but annoying to me because it means my next computer won't be a Mac.
English already DOES have a gender-neutral third-person singular: "they"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/singular-nonbinary-they
In They Promised Me The Gun Wasn't Loaded (James Alan Gardner), the superhero Zircon uses "ze" and "zir", which I kind of enjoyed.
India has a nationwide database of all its nationals yet is now demanding some folk (Muslims) to 'prove' their Indian citizenship otherwise it's into an internment camp you go. Not the first time gov't red tape has been weaponized but having super-duper computer systems aka AIs handy means this can be done remotely, instantaneously and without any messy/expensive physical property damage. The harm done via targeted red-tape can be as devastating as a nuke.
Oh that's lovely! Neopronouns like ze/zir have been around a LOT longer than a lot of people think.
I also quite liked it about Ann Leckie's books that everyone is "she" regardless of gender or genitalia.
An amusing list of examples of learning machines that satisfied their "goals" in unintended ways:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml
That's an really fun list, thank you. This immortality scheme made me laugh: Qbert - cliff: An evolutionary algorithm learns to bait an opponent into following it off a cliff, which gives it enough points for an extra life, which it does forever in an infinite loop. I didn't see any that involved changing the Rules(/reward/utility function). That's also a valid approach, if one can accomplish it. Especially if the observers don't notice.
“I'd also expect nation2 to have, or rapidly acquire, a pretty good idea who nation1 was by means that have nothing to do with computer nerds performing a trace on the attack. It might not "stand up in court" or be revealable to anyone without the appropriate clearance, but they'd have an answer a lot quicker than they said they did.” But how long, if ever, until they have something solid enough to make it politically possible to launch ICBMs?
Probably depends on the target. After all, actually invading countries on very thin evidence is demonstrably politically possible.
Well, that depends on their definition of "politically possible" and what their preferred solutions are when the possibility does not match the desire. But I'd take a guess that it would be before they restored the physical possibility.
Just to use the US as an example, the President has sole authority to launch a nuclear strike, on the assumption that nuclear war happens too fast to get the legislative branch involved. The problem with launching a nuke is that it escalates rapidly. The target is likely to massively retaliate so as to not lose their missiles in the tubes, so one ICBM is likely to start a war.
We've been lucky that world leaders tend to prefer the Mexican standoff aspect part of nuclear war, with a side order of "invade us and die" in nuclear hell-fire.
I don't think cyberwar will ever touch nukes, aside from messing up GPS systems if the missileers are stupid enough to rely on satellite navigation as opposed to inertial navigation (my bet is that they are not, because it's too easy to mess up GPS, but I suppose they could be stupid enough).
Anyway, how bad would a cyberstrike have to be to force a nuclear retaliation? My guess is that if it's that bad, nuclear retaliation will be extremely difficult. However, this depends on having someone sane and smart at the switch, and oddly enough, there's been a political trend to install useful idiots at these switches. Hopefully that won't backfire on the installers. But you know, it might.
"...your logistics are crap because your quartermasters are relying on bits of paper rather than the just-in-time fulfillment networks that were invented, in the first place, to allow the US military to conduct extended operations at trans-oceanic range."
Well, exactly. If all that lot isn't working any more, the US military's ability to conduct extended operations at trans-oceanic range is fucked. So is everything it does that relies on horrendously expensive ultra-shiny kit with a gigantic maintenance crew and a minimal and coddled complement of actual combat personnel. Having gone further and more enthusiastically down that route than anyone else, they have the hardest task when circumstances force them to go all the way back again. Not to mention non-military factors like much of the industrial capability which they used to tool up for WW2 having been dismantled in favour of using someone else's on the other side of the world.
Even with all systems functional, they have never "picked on someone their own size" in the electronic era. It's one thing to attack a much smaller opponent and run around the place firing off loads of expensive missiles far fewer of which actually hit anything than you claim they do when dick-waving about how much more stuff you've got than some backward (because you've kept it like that) country with a tenth of your population that only has what weapons you've allowed them to have in the course of your long-term interference in its governance. It's a bit different going up against a large and well-equipped opponent with plenty of their own missiles and you have to start worrying about running out.
Embarrassing brain fart to have forgotten the author because I'm sure it's Clarke or Asimov or someone of that stature, but you must have read it - short story where the Americans (although they're not called that) seek victory further and further into the realm of expensive wunderwaffen, and while they are marvellously effective, all the time they spend doing engineering their more-conventionally-armed opponents spend taking over their territory and eating their production capacity until their high-tech methods are no longer able to achieve anything.
(The article seems to be saying "Apple are selling this computer, Gordon Bennett look at the price. Ah! but there's a reason for that! - it's got shit loads of really expensive bits in it. So really, it's only natural that it costs shit loads of money! Can't really complain about that now, can you?" But I wasn't anyway, so other than the general sort of "big expensive computers" theme I don't see the relevance.)
Embarrassing brain fart to have forgotten the author because I'm sure it's Clarke or Asimov or someone of that stature, but you must have read it
Clarke. Superiority. Included in his Expedition to Earth collection, which is one of the ones I am not going to throw out in the current cull.
J Homes
Trying again after my first post disappeared.
Embarrassing brain fart to have forgotten the author because I'm sure it's Clarke or Asimov or someone of that stature, but you must have read it
Clarke. Superiority. Included in his Expedition to Earth collection.
J Homes
Superiority was written by Arthur C. Clarke all the way back in 1951 and was 'at one point required reading for an industrial design course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology' per Wikipedia. In some ways little has changed since that long ago pre-Dilbert era...
Anyone who wants to re-read it may do so here.
Regrettably, that is not true, and that article shows a lamentable ignorance of the English language. And that quote contains a mistake, anyway - 'themself' should be 'theirselves'.
What they have missed is that English has not just singular and plural, but generic usage, which has slightly different conventions. 'Anyone' is generic, not singular. 'They' to refer to a specific person is a neologism.
One of the principle features of cyberwarfare is that it makes false flag attacks almost trivial, and making them convincing even to someone suspicious and competent is no harder than mounting the attack in the first place.
Pigeon is right, in theory, that a victim is likely to have a good idea of who the attacker is, but ONLY if they analyse it rationally, and that is regrettably rare. Just because an attack comes from (even official) servers in a country isn't even serious evidence that country was involved.
Oh that's lovely! Neopronouns like ze/zir have been around a LOT longer than a lot of people think.
Yes. Although as gender-neutral pronouns they don't entirely succeed, at least for me. ze/zir has a distinctly feminine feel to an old coot who's been hearing she/her and he/him/his all his life.
But perhaps ambiguous femininity is the effect Zircon is going for!
This reminds me of a seminar I heard recently. The subject, ostensibly, was the use of wavelet transformations for analyzing paintings. Some European museum set up a project to automate the detection of forgeries of Old Masters. They had a painter produce something like a dozen (sanctioned) forgeries, then gave the competitors (mostly teams of academic mathematicians) scans of the forgeries and real originals. The results were all published somewhere.
The seminar I heard was by the leader of one of the winning teams. They found statistical differences that could reliably detect the forgeries. Then, embarrassingly, after they published, they found that many of the most striking anomalies were the result of the scans of the forgeries being of higher quality than the scans of the originals. (You see, the museum had to scan the forgeries for the project, whereas they had archived scans for the originals).
This, BTW, didn't really have anything to do with machine learning. Just good old statistical analysis.
I'm pretty sure Clarke wrote Superiority as a comment on the Nazi search for the ultimate wonder weapon -- the timing is about right, certainly, and the Nazis were absolutely bugfuck about superweapons by late 1944 (when it was obvious that nothing else could save them).
I mean, even during a total war where everyone wanted a superweapon (see also: the atom bomb, the B-36 program, Project Habakkuk, and I have no idea what the Soviets were up to but I'd be astonished if Stalin wasn't devoting some minimal resources to secret superweapons projects) the Nazis were the stand-out overachievers at Mad Science Weaponry (I think it turned out that by the end of the war the Reich Post Office alone had about 40-60 air-to-air guided missile programs on the go).
I'd be astonished if Stalin wasn't devoting some minimal resources to secret superweapons projects...
Well, they were certainly receiving and digesting information from Klaus Fuchs, which proved critical in the design of the first Soviet atomic weapons. Richard Rhodes describes Soviet atomic weapons programs in some detail in Dark Sun: the making of the hydrogen bomb. (Yes, even the fission weapons, despite the title.)
Here, try this other actual dictionary on for size: https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/
Or don't. Regardless, singular they exists, has been in use and increasing popularity for years now, and people who built a language translation engine should probably know about these sorts of things even if you personally don't.
That's interesting! To me it does not feel feminine at all, it feels quite completely outside of male/female to me actually.
'Each man' is ALSO generic. I am not, repeat NOT, denying that it has been used since time immemorial in such contexts. I was taught the difference at school when I did Chaucer's Prologue for O-level (which also contains such a use), and have observed it many, many times in literary contexts since.
If you look at the actual OED, the relevant definition is: "With an antecedent referring to an individual generically or indefinitely ...". The use for a specific person of unconventional gender is a separate definition and the first reference is 2009, and there is a footnote to the first meaning stating that the second one is a 21st century practice.
Fred Pohl's "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" story was definitely about the increasing complexity of weapons but it was based on the US post-war experience rather than the Nazis and their superweapons programs. It was written only a few years after "Superiority".
I'm pretty sure Clarke wrote Superiority as a comment on the Nazi search for the ultimate wonder weapon -- the timing is about right, certainly, and the Nazis were absolutely bugfuck about superweapons by late 1944 (when it was obvious that nothing else could save them).
That's my take on it too.
People forget how many mad science projects they had going, and how little most of them did. The V-1 and V-2, yes, certainly. The V-3 supercannon never got fielded. And there were others like the vortex cannon, designed to destroy Allied aircraft by shooting tornadoes because the engineers were completely deranged, I guess; it sort of worked, in the sense that the house-sized cannon could break wooden target sheds within its effective range of about 150 meters. Other projects were less practical than this...
Why pointy-haired bosses decided the Post Office needed even one missile program I won't try to guess.
Actually, it was more about marketting taking over from engineering - which we have also lived through. The prospect of AIs taking over marketing policy, designing user interfaces, writing the documentation, and handling 'customer' support, is enough to make one throw up. But it's coming ....
You might find these two interesting: they have decidedly different approaches to keeping their worlds' defaults gender neutral: Forward and Kill Six Billion Demons.
Why pointy-haired bosses decided the Post Office needed even one missile program I won't try to guess.
The Nazi bureaucracy was all about empire-building: you know that the largest SS Panzer division the Reich fielded was owned by the Luftwaffe, because Fat Herman had to have the biggest and the best?
It's not just Nazi Germany that fell for this disease; the United States has it, too. The Army of the Navy has its own Air Force, after all (the USMC air arm: they fly Harriers and F-35s).
And for truly baroque bureaucratic efflorescence it's hard to beat the United States Intelligence Community -- a coordinating group of seventeen intelligence organizations who cooperate and theoretically work together. To quote: "The Washington Post reported in 2010 that there were 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations in the United States that were working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, and that the intelligence community as a whole includes 854,000 people holding top-secret clearances." If that's the number with top secret clearance, I'm going to stick my neck out and guess that once you count the lower-clearance individuals working for said organizations (e.g. police and sheriffs departments) you end up with more bodies working in that sector than in the entire uniformed armed services.
"The problem with launching a nuke is that it escalates rapidly." :
It can be much worse than that. Launch a single missile nuke at North Korea, how does China decides that it is not a decapitation strike aimed at Bejing ?
For that matter, Russian decision loop is believed to be less than 15 minutes (because their radar coverage is not what it was), do you think they will have time enough to decide that this nuke aimed at N Korea is not also for Moscow ?
Remember also that everything is MIRVed these days. And supersonic airfoil have apparently made serious progress meaning the separation of targets can be ider and wider.
Given this knowledge, if any balistic nuke is launched anywhere from sea or big five powers, everyone else shoots back a full salvo, because noone can be sure that they are not the real target, and the decision loop is in minutes.
Then the natural consequence is that the first to shoot must go "all-in ".
Para 3 - There's at least one 617 Squadron history that claims they destroyed the V-3 battery using Tallboy and/or Grand Slam before it ever fired a round. It notes also that most of the "guest" and enslaved workers were entombed by the raid.
From Wiki: "The site was finally put out of commission on 6 July 1944, when bombers of RAF Bomber Command's 617 Squadron (the famous "Dambusters") attacked using 5,400-kilogram (11,900 lb) "Tallboy" deep-penetration bombs." See also this
That's a much more detailed history of the site than I'd previously read, but there's nothing in it that contradicts my previous readings on the subject.
Surely one of the inspirations could have been the Sherman tank versus Tiger tank debate, also the sad story of the new German submarines that were rushed into prouduction a year or two too early, so lots of resources were wasted on fixing them. Apparently they were quite good and would have been difficult to deal with only were not available in time due to production being fucked up so much.
Actually, for WW2, we've got multiple examples of examples of homeland (England, Japan, USSR, Germany). Everyone improvised like crazy, but England and Japan went for the cheap and dirty (in Japan's case, broomstick bayonets, slam guns, and kamakaze/banzai everything, in the British case Q-structures, radar, commandos, and various other gizmos that didn't see action).
If I had to guess, what made the Nazi end-game so bizarre wasn't just a notion that technical superiority had won in the past so it would win in the future (cf: Allied radar). Another factor that probably added to the madness was the widespread use of methamphetamine among the Nazis of all levels. I could be wrong, of course, but it seems at least as plausible an explanation as "something about the right-wing German character loves gadgets."
... The Sherman tank vs. Tiger tank debate kind of misses the point: by 1945, even if the Reich hadn't collapsed, the USSR was building up-gunned T34-85s in huge numbers, and the UK had finally worked past its history of bad tank design and come up with the Centurion, which was just entering service in September 1945 (and which, even today, is still in service in some niche roles, e.g. as a turretless APC with the Israeli Army). The Tigers were over-complex both to maintain and to build; the USSR meanwhile had a much simpler but nearly as good design in huge scale production (1200 tanks per month), and the UK had a next-generation design coming on-stream that was a good decade ahead of the Tiger.
Hitler's response? In January 1945, he green-lit production of the Panzer VIII Maus -- a tank so preposterous that ... let's just say, nobody sane ever fielded anything like it.
To quote from the Anime "Girl und Panzer" (in which girls' schools indulge in the subject of Tankery, involving mock battles with actual historical armour) "They've got a mobile wall!?" (a Maus).
I think you badly underestimate the British wartime technology program.
It wasn't just the Chain Home radar system that did it, but the invention of integrated radar-directed air defense on a national scale; also development of the jet engine: a nuclear weapons program that got rolled into the Manhattan project (google "Tube Alloys"): production of strategic bombers on a scale matched only by the USAAF: and a bunch of other stuff. The UK went onto a war footing in September 1939 and didn't come off it until September 1945, and managed to outproduce Germany in terms of tanks, guns, and pretty much everything else.
The methamphetamine abuse was widespread, too: I'm pretty sure a bunch of the British cabinet (and military) were on similar drugs too. (Famously, Anthony Eden -- PM during the Suez Crisis and Churchill's Secretary of State for War during WW2 -- was out of his head on meth during the Suez thing.)
Charlie The Centurions were live field tested twice - 5 years & 11 years after their introduction. In Korea they were used as heavy tanks against which nothing the DPRK or PRC had anything effective ( WIth a side-order, apparenty of a few Churchills for climbing steep hills (!) And in the disgraceful business of Suez, but where they showed that they were still better-than-a-match for the IS-3/T-10 tanks fielded by Egypt - I remember seeing one go past on a transporter & suddenly realising that "ThHat's not one of ours!"
Not to mention the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
In "The Collected Stories...", Clarke states that the story was inspired by the development of the V2. He further says that the 2 main characters were based on von Braun and Dornberger.
"As Amazon found with their AI recruitment tool - their entire structure was biased against women but not just in the ways they had identified but even more so in ways they hadn't themselves identified."
I'd love to get a link. Would you please send it to bdecicco2001 who is at yahoo dot the com?
Thanks!
While OGH is taking the tack that AI is a potential serious problem and that many of the commenters are dittoing that viewpoint, I would take the opposite view. Humans and their organizations have been biased and unaccountable for a long time. (Kafka even wrote a story about this.) The problem of human bias is that it is hard to reprogram, unlike a DNN that can be rebuilt with better data with time scale orders of magnitude faster than any individual or organization. Furthermore, it doesn't try to resist being changed.
It has become de rigeur to criticize self-driving cars for making mistakes humans normally don't make, but the evidence shows that such vehicles are rapidly becoming safer (if not already so) for most driving conditions that human drivers. How often do you see human drivers running red lights as just one example of human frailty despite passing driving tests and the worst offenders being kept off the roads with license suspensions?
DNNs are easily fooled with adversarial inputs that wouldn't fool a human. Yet humans have been fooling people for ever, and our defenses are just not that good. We even have a president and newly elected PM to show you can fool more than half the voters at least some of the time. Everyone must over their careers seen incompetents hired. Fooling the system or gaming it in the myriad ways humans have learned?
If any social organization with rules and procedures from governments on down are potential AIs, humans as social animals are going to be kept prisoners of such constructs whether humans remain in the loop or are replaced by algorithms. For most of us, there is a conceit that humans are at least able to change adverse decisions. That is true in some cases, but not for the vast majority. As for the changed decisions, they may not even be better, e.g. the recent acquittal of war crimes by military personnel in the US. I for one believe a GOFAI using symbolic logic would do a better job at reaching a good decision in the current impeachment and removal from office of the current POTUS than the Senate.
The complaint that NNs are opaque while true today, may not be true tomorrow, as explainability is a hot topic. I expect to see Susan Calvin's appearing in teh future, albeit using advanced computing tools rather than psychology to determine why decisions were taken. Human decsion-making is rarely explainable, as the decline in expert systems proved. Kahneman's experiments emphasize the various problems humans have in making rational decisions, and these are really hard to determine, and unlike computers, environmental changes will influence those same decisions.
Kevin Kelly has argued that technology generally has a small net benefit when good and bad outcomes are compared. I think we will see the same with so-called AIs (currently just machine learning).
AI development seems more like the 9% of the foreseeable future. Technology may not even be the unforeseeable 1%, but rather non-linear social responses. After all, it was not that long ago you talked about the beige political future, yet look what has happened since then, and on a global scale.
"... The Sherman tank vs. Tiger tank debate kind of misses the point: by 1945..."
The US had deployed the first Pershings by spring of 1945 (the successor to the Sherman), and upgunned Shermans were already in service (in the movie (in the movie 'Fury' Brad Pitt's Sherman was an upgunned model which could have killed that Tiger from the front).
To clarify, what I'm thinking of is the Post-Dunkirk stuff that the UK came up with to arm paramilitaries in Britain in case Operation Sealion had actually occurred. Once that threat went away, I absolutely agree with you about all the technical innovations that the Allies collectively cranked out.
What I'm looking at are the weapons of 1940: the silenced 22 commando rifles, the three-in-one cosh/stiletto/garrotes, the Q-installations to distract incoming planes. That kind of thing has parallels with what the Japanese were building in preparation for the US Operation Downfall in 1945, although the defense strategy was rather different. For all I know, the USSR had come up with similar stuff to deal with the Nazi Invasion. Certainly the Chinese fielded Big Saber brigades in fighting the Japanese.
This is on a different level from vortex guns and the Maus, and I'd argue that mass produced improvised weaponry is the default when facing invasion. Nazi Germany seems to be an outlier in this regard, and it's interesting precisely because of that.
Para 3 - Even leaving aside that you could not "vote for Bozo" unless you live in "Uxbridge and South Ruislip", the Con Party did not achieve 50%+1 of the votes polled.
Also, memory fails on author and title, but there is one short story which posits opinion polling advancing to the state where polling a single individual is as effective as polling an entire nation.
Hands off my ebook reader! No (affordable) smartphone has a 6-inch e-ink screen, offers weeks of service from one battery charge and is free of spyware by virtue of having no communication interfaces besides micro-USB.
By mid-1944 and into 1945, still not all Shermans were Easy 8s, the British Firefly equivalent, or even "Jumbos". Witness "The Bridge at Remagen", where you correctly see Shermans with the original 75mm gun being used in their designed fire support role. (OK, it's a film, but based on a battle that actually happened).
Re: '...short story which posits opinion polling advancing to the state where polling a single individual is as effective as polling an entire nation.'
Are you thinking of Isaac Asimov's 'Franchise'? Not sure about its political 'effectiveness' although it apparently inspired some statisticians to reduce their data sets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)
And folks look at me when I rant about the lit'ry establishment, and the media, and 90% of people-in-the-street knowing NOTHING about SF&F.
Since I got into fandom in the mid-sixties (yes, really), we've had New Wave, etc, and sf&f is like AI: if it now does it, then it's not Real [AI|Litrachur]. In the meantime, Real Litrachur has made itself a smaller and smaller market, because NO ONE wants to read their crap.
I was quite pleased a year or two ago, when I heard that some SF&F authors have starter referring to that as "lit fic", a genre of its own.
Accountancy - yep.
Actually, let me talk a little about magick and religion and philosophy: I've read that the earliest markings we have were small items - like miniature urns, which were pressed into the outside of a larger vase, one for each actual urn loaded on a ship, and the urn was then fired and sealed. Effectively, double-entry bookkeeping.
Now consider "inner meaning" and outer meaning/seeming. Or Plato - what's on the inside of the urn is the real thing... except that it represents an actual ding-an-sich (the urn with oil or whatever), and what's on the outside of the urn is what we see....
Are you thinking of Isaac Asimov's 'Franchise'?
Not one of Uncle Isaac's best, IMHO.
Cheers - regardless of any "merit" it may or may not have, that's the story I meant.
One small note about schools in the US: there are, effectively, two kinds of "homeschool" - the "Christian" ones, and the others. I had a late friend who was very heavily involved in the latter. There are, in fact, distance learning schools for kids that are accredited, as opposed to the bs "Christian" ones.
sigh Every Fucking Website in the world does NOT END IN .com!!!
whitehouse.com an anti-Trump (at the moment) website.
You're talking about whitehouse.gov. .gov domains were once US federal gov't ONLY.
You wrote:
Consider that during the 1992 Gulf war, roughly 90% of the destruction of Iraqi forces by allied bombers was inflicted by 10% of the weapons -- the GPS and laser-guided bombs, not the old-school WW2-era Iron bombs that the USAF and RAF dropped in huge numbersSorry, I disagree. The same way all the "smart" munitions were used in the invasion of Iraq in '03. You seem to be forgetting what the media refuse to make note of: when you drop that much into a CITY, the amount of "collateral damage", that is, innocent civilians getting killed and maimed, is HUGE.
Re: 'Human decsion-making is rarely explainable'
Maybe for now. Also think that the definition of 'human decision-making' changes because the consequences of decisions keep changing. Decision-making is not just about the methodology, it's also about the answer/result.
No, I'm making a joke and a point, because I know perfectly well what whitehouse.com is. Misattribution is part of the point of cyberwar, no?
My dad and his buddies as kids watched Sherman M4 Tanks come off the assembly line at the Fisher Body Tank Arsenal in Grand Blanc, Michigan during WWII. They would spy from a perch among the bushes on the other side of the fence as the tanks were test driven through a course of ditches and berms … while his big brother Gerald (uncle) served in the US Army over there. Grand Blanc produced 19,034 tanks, tank destroyers and prime movers from April 1942 to October 1945.
They allegedly gave up when they couldn't make it match past human decisions without an explicitly race based rule, which the human decisions weren't supposed to have used as a factor.
Why was it so important to make it match past decisions? Couldn't they make the case that the rule-based system makes better decisions? I am not saying they were better, just that it would be at least a defensible claim.
Is anyone working on AC (Artificial Common sense)?
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
It has been going on since 1984, and still no success
Expanding on Charlies's idea of corporate AI, the belief in the invisible hand of the market is a belief in a gigantic AI-cluster. Which recommendations do apply?
The problem with pulling the trigger on a cyber attack is shit escalated fast. I doubt the Serbian who popped Arch Duke Ferdinand thought that was gojng to start WWI
If a nation state is going seriously mess with another nation state they better do so through something very low intensity or go straight for the knockout, anything in the middle is the worst choice of all
With regards to the US and China I would be really really surprised if the US doesn’t have a first strike nuclear decapatation plan that has a good chance if success. The Chinese nuclear arsenal is pretty sad compared to Russia and there are many many ways tk deliver nukes other then flashy icbm launches, if all you need to do is land five hundred or so very fast
Given the choice between taking them off the board quickly versus a conventional an war with china? I’m not saying they wouldn’t get their hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.
That's the beastie, cheers.
I find that particularly amusing because the similarity between the words in Latin has led me to refer privately to mice as walls in English since I was a kid. It also makes me wonder if the anime authors/translators had also noticed this, especially since they do seem to be quite fond of using mangled chunks of Western languages (including Latin) for stylistic effect.
Paul Brickhill's "The Dam Busters" includes a reference to bombing the V3 that matches your description. He also feels the need to begin the story of that raid by telling the reader what the V3 actually was, which leads me to suspect that even that most well-known of nutty Nazi projects did not command the instant recognition from the 50s public that the V1 and V2 had acquired by exploding on them. Indeed it wouldn't surprise me all that much if most Brits who did know what it was prior to the Iraqi supergun doings and the background references that generated had probably first heard of it in connection with 617.
Now that I'm reminded of it I do remember reading that Clarke wrote "Superiority" inspired by the V weapons. But I still suspect (there being no contradiction involved) that it also stands as an element of warning to others not to be tempted down the same road. After all, the US superweapon project had actually worked, the temptation was apparent, and the "Sphere of Annihilation" is an awful lot like a nuke (especially in space).
As if the misogynistic bro culture of SV wasn't bad enough without biased AI.
With regard to the block tube/nanochain products, I must point out that the description was not in fact generated by some random process. I am deeply insulted that any of you could think that. It was in truth the product of careful work with our Bisynchronous Universal Low-Latency Sequential/Hierarchical Information Transformer Textual Extraction/Report application suite. Available for your use as a serverless FaaS facility containerized for optimal financial performance.
To me it grates. Partly for the same reason that I don't usually like made up alien language names and the like - they are weird, and they are loft hatches, so there's this horrible thing that lurks in sentences to trip you up and doesn't flow like normal words do. But partly also because they give the impression of the author repeatedly jumping up and interjecting, irrelevantly to the actual narrative, "look at me, how right on I'm being, writing all gender neutral an' that!" - not just once but every time they use a bloody pronoun, which gets a bit wearing after a page or two.
That second reason is a consequence of deliberately using a very conspicuous means of achieving gender-neutrality when the English language is so particularly well suited to doing it thoroughly inconspicuously. Singular "they" is only a little bit of what's available. It's entirely possible to write in such a manner that the question of what pronoun to use never even arises, and moreover to do it so smoothly that the reader never notices you're doing it at all; it's not even particularly difficult. When such subtlely is so readily accessible, conspicuously going to the opposite extreme and doing so in such an ugly manner pretty much inescapably conveys the impression that the ugliness is being used deliberately to ram home a pet point about use of language, whether that actually is the intention or not.
(I'd also argue that if you are trying to make a point about internalised prejudices, it's far more effective to leave them unchallenged until right at the end of the story and then compel the reader to go back and check the whole thing over word by word to discover that no, there really wasn't any evidence at all one way or the other and the conclusion they'd thought they were so sure of is in fact entirely the result of those prejudices and not something in the book at all.)
Alex Tolley Actually, returns from our election showed that the tories actually gained very few votes ... Labour simply lost them ( usually ) And, of course "Remain" got considerably more votes than "Leave" - the exact opposite of the supposed result. Perverse ....
paws It's a mid-period Asimov short, where the election is named after the single person who answers the multipart questionnaire that determines the election. Can't remember the name, though. Ah ... SFR has it, I see.
Unholyguy I doubt the Serbian who popped Arch Duke Ferdinand thought that was gojng to start WWI Erm, no. Before he died in prison, Gavril Princip was asked about all the carnage he'd started. His reply was that: "The Germans wouild have found some other handy excuse, anyway" ( Or words to that effect )
timrowldege @ 202 Extradoubleplusgood.
Para 1 - That could be the case, but I normally only watch Anime in English dub, and with the camera angle, this line does match the visuals.
Para 2 - I may have been thinking of The Dam Busters, but I do tend to read multiple authors and volumes on a specific subject when they're available, so tend to not say $volume unless I am 100% that I have an actual quote from that source.
For example, in the case of the V-3 raid, aside from TDB (qv), there is at least one other squadron history, and a biography of Leonard Cheshire that I've read.
Before he died in prison, Gavril Princip was asked about all the carnage he'd started. His reply was that: "The Germans wouild have found some other handy excuse, anyway"
In which he was correct, at least about Wilhelm II wanting another chance at re-running 1870-71 (against France). Whether the UK would have been sucked in, under different circumstances (if Germany observed Belgian neutrality) is another matter. Ditto whether Turkey would have become involved, if not for some oddly specific preconditions that via a hop, skip, and a jump resulted in the western allies being unable to reinforce Russia (result: contributed to the collapse of Tsarist government, long-term disastrous consequences, in particular freed up German troops to participate in Operation Michael).
And if it had held off for another few years because the Archduke wasn't assassinated, there's a very good chance that Emperor Franz Josef would have died and been succeeded by Franz Ferdinand, with imponderable consequences for the politics of the Central Powers.
A much funnier alternate history scenario to consider is probably: let us suppose that the Black Hand miss, war does not break out in 1914, and then Kaiser Wilhelm II -- who had a tendency to piss off the neighbours in an almost Trumpian fashion -- is assassinated by a screwball German or Austrian citizen in 1916 (let's call him something unmemorable like, oh, Adolf H: he's fallen in with a bad lot, radical nihilist theosophists or something, and they give him a pistol and a mission).
What happens in Europe now, with Kaiser Wilhelm III (age 34) at the helm of Germany -- still a Prussian militarist, but less narcissistic and unstable than his dad -- and Emperor Franz Ferdinand (age 52: more liberal and internationalist than his predecessor) on the throne of an Austria-Hungary that's still meddling in Bosnia and Serbia?
Charlie @ 206 Brings us back to the other great missed mission. the chapter in B Tuchman's masterly hiostory "August 1914" headed: "Goeben, being an enemy then flying" Where, if the RN had caught Goeben u Breslau Turkey would have stayed neutral.
I’m not sure about exactly what happens in the what if, but this is part of the background world building for the classic novel series that dieselpunk has needed ever since Porco Rosso.
If that had resulted in any reduction in the major wars, the consequences for the British Empire and the rate and type of scientific development would have been considerable. Indeed, the former might well still be dragging on, losing pieces as it did, though I doubt that it would have made much difference in Ireland, except in detail.
And, as you imply, what would have happened in Russia without WW I is anyone's guess. Or Vicky's Factor VIII, but that's been covered many times before.
I will note that until roughly 1930 there was a perceived risk of a naval war breaking out in the Atlantic between the UK and the USA (with an added land war along the Canadian border).
A first world war started in 1927 over US Customs intercepting a British-flagged rum-running ship, and escalating into a global war with Germany on the UK's side and France allied with the US is ... not totally inconceivable, but totally surreal to our eyes (being a re-run of 1789-1815, rather than 1866-1871).
Yes, very much so, to the first paragraph. That approach is often (usually?) counter-productive. I read Cherryh's Gate of Ivriel (I think), and almost every page grated because of her use of 'thee' in the nominative! I find such distortions make something almost unreadable, and I have difficulty not reacting against the author's political message in response.
The second paragraph isn't quite right. You have to prefer the passive voice (and use similar usages), which reduces the directness. It definitely interferes with writing action prose.
And, yes, indeed, to the third paragraph.
Indeed. I had forgotten about that! Given that it was both in the government's and people's perception, it's not at all implausible.
But, even without such things, no WW I would have not almost eliminated the aristocracy, and no WW II would not have finished bankrupting Britain. I can't see that the empire would have been disbanded over that timescale as a matter of policy, though it would almost certainly have started broken up.
Naval war primarily meaning all-big-gun battleships. I forget whether the limitation treaties started before or after WWI. The interesting thing then would be whether 1927 is late enough in the development of aircraft and carriers, that the air-power-beats-battleships lesson from Singapore and later in our timeline would apply at some point.
Other themes that want treatment: Austro-Hungarian Navy, what side is Russia on, what side is Japan on (and what’s happening in China), are we talking Zeppelin strategic bombers or what, etc, etc.
It all depends how it falls out. I can't see a UK/USA war in the late 1920s as anything other than a disaster for the British Empire -- likely to lose Ontario (and possibly Quebec), massive drain on resources, the USA was catching up/overtaking the UK in industrial output by then so able to build more battleships faster, and the potential for making mischief in the Empire (e.g. by shipping guns to Indian malcontents, or raising hell around the Pacific -- think Singapore, a short hop away from the Philippines) was ever-present. Meanwhile, there's no plausible outcome whereby the British Empire actually conquers the United States: it's just too big, too populous, and too ornery -- the best they could hope for would be a conditional victory or armistice, which would just leave a pissed-off America eager for round two a decade down the line.
Meanwhile, the British failure to decisively defeat a naval rival would have a galvanizing effect on basically every other maritime power on the planet. (From 1805 onwards, British naval supremacy was pretty much unquestioned, until it gradually transferred over to US naval hegemony from 1945 to 1956.)
Lest we forget, everyone saw the utility of aviation (starting with airships, then fixed-wing and floatplanes) for fleet observation right from the start.
The USN first experimented with launching aircraft from a ship in 1910, the British commissioned their first flat-topped carrier in 1918 -- and the Japanese launched the first ship-based seaplane raid on enemy warships in September 1914!
Utility is one thing, but in our timeline no-one sunk any capital ships by air attack at sea until Japanese torpedo bombers did for HMSs Prince of Wales and Repulse in 1941. One would imagine in this 1927 scenario something like that occurring earlier, and in or around the Atlantic.
The empire angle is interesting, but mostly because it has a whole forest of what ifs of its own...
Oh, agreed. I was thinking as much of the politico-social aspects, where the two world wars led Britain into a form of capitalist socialism (*), Labour being as much a party of government as the Conservatives, and the consequent changes in governance and power bases. I have not a clue what would have happened if the aristocracy had not been largely killed off and the bankruptcy had come earlier (i.e. in a war with the USA), though the old order would definitely not have survived. But I don't think that we would have seen anything similar to Attlee's reforms.
(*) Sadly, no more.
they give the impression of the author repeatedly jumping up and interjecting, irrelevantly to the actual narrative, "look at me, how right on I'm being, writing all gender neutral an' that!" - not just once but every time they use a bloody pronoun, which gets a bit wearing after a page or two.
For me, Gardner's use of ze/zir in They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded didn't have these problems. Kimmy/Zircon is a minor character in this book, so zir particular pronouns are just not that prominent in the book. It was not "every time they use a bloody pronoun". Most of the pronouns in the book are the ones Jane Austen used.
Also, it didn't have the feel of Gardner engaging in virtue signaling (not to me, at least). Rather, it was about delineating the character Zircon and zir friends. I never had the feeling of the author breaking the wall to lecture me about gender neutrality. Rather I had the feeling that Zircon was a sort of slightly overbearing but still likable person who would ask zir friends to do this, and they were kind enough and loved zir enough to go along with it.
As I said earlier, I enjoyed it. You, Pigeon, apparently, did not. Así es. (Now, there's a really annoying authorial yet widespread practice: peppering ones writing with unnecessary foreign language phrases.)
Keynes was at Versailles at the end of WWI. No WWI, but a war starting in 1927 suggest a radically different economic situation in 1929 through to the early 30s.
Would an art-deco 20s war kill off enough aristos to force a change of guard? Can we find some other way for them to die horribly?
I think that without a significant Far East presence, there’s a whole “are we the baddies” dynamic to consider, given the USA of the time is definitely the more liberal democracy v the UK and Commonwealth of the time. I’d expect Australia to follow Britain, but with a much larger than usual popular sympathy for the USA. We basically flipped over after WWII as a direct outcome to the exigencies, etc. Not 100% clear whether that might not happen during a war as described.
The Washington Treaty (also relevant to Charlie's comments) was signed in 1922.
... then Kaiser Wilhelm II -- who had a tendency to piss off the neighbours in an almost Trumpian fashion -- is assassinated by a screwball German or Austrian citizen in 1916 ...
Things would have to go worse for Germany if he wasn't. As you say, he was a proto-Trump and didn't get along with anyone any better than The Donald does. I've repeatedly suggested the essay here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-happens-when-a-bad-tempered-distractible-doofus-runs-an-empire
Note the UK's ongoing constitutional crises from 1882 onwards (Irish Home Rule), roughly 1900 onwards (womens' suffrage), the Labour movement and social security, the constitutional crisis of 1911-ish (which neutered the House of Lords), and so on. While policy wrt. holding down the Empire remained more or less constant, domestic policy was all over the map, and party representation was as mind-buggeringly complicated as it is today (that is: it's not a simple two party duopoly any more, there's a strong risk of one or both of Labour or the Tories imploding catastrophically within the next 5-10 years, a member state seceding from the union, and so on).
Meanwhile, relatively recent research suggests that when high inheritance taxes came in in the UK for the first time, the nobs simply hid their wealth behind trusts and shell companies -- the richer they were, the more efficiently they hid it -- and rather than 80% of their wealth going to the state over a 50 year period, it was more like 30% (but 80% of the visible assets).
And finally, the aristocracy traditionally planned for their families to have "an heir and a spare" -- and it was usually the spare who got packed off to the western front, unless the heir had already bred. The carnage of WW1 left a lot of holes in family trees, but it was more brutal than any other war fought by the UK after 1649: an Outside Context problem for an entire ruling class.
It is unclear that replacing the aristocracy by the plutocracy and demagoguery has improved anything for the hoi polloi. The aristocracy of Britain in 1900 was more civilised than it is often given credit for.
given the USA of the time is definitely the more liberal democracy v the UK and Commonwealth of the time
It's debatable, and both native Americans and coloured people might disagree.
W.r.t. the last paragraph, yes. But, it wasn't just the fact that WW I often killed the heir and spare, but it often killed the title holder. What it did was destroy the landed gentry as a major power base.
Damian @213:
John Biggins's A Sailor of Austria is a good treatment of the Habsburg Navy in the OTL WWI. It's an excellent book, full of the horror and absurdity of war.
Biggins wrote four books in that series, received to glowing reviews but declining sales. The third book in particular (the first that I read) was on remainder tables at constantly falling prices for most of a year. The failure of the series was a real shame, IMO.
Charlie @222:
Not quite the last question the Irish had to think up (as per 1066 And All That), but it (at least eventually) got what's now the Republic out of the Empire. The English Question of 2016-2020(ish) will probably lead to a Republic of Ireland that includes NI.
Elderly Cynic @223:
The hoi polloi's condition didn't really improve until post-1945. See Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London for just how bad things were for the moved and shaken. If you didn't have money, TPTB didn't give a rat's arse about you. The more things change....
...the British wartime technology program.
An interesting read on this subject is Chance & Design: Reminiscences of Science in Peace and War, the autobiography of neuroscientist Alan Hodgkin.
When the war broke out, Hodgkin was just beginning the squid giant axon work that would later make him famous. He broke that work off and left his post at Cambridge to join the war effort. It was a great blow at the time, because KC Cole at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory had begun making progress recording from giant axon, and it seemed he was throwing away his chance to be the first to make great discoveries.
Because of his expertise with electronics, he was put to work on radar. He designed an airborne radar system that could be carried on a fighter plane and used for battle at night. (This system is described in loving technical detail in the autobiography. It was mostly ingenious electromechanical engineering.)
KC Cole, for some reason, made no progress during the war years, so when Hodgkin returned to Cambridge in 1945 the problem of how nervous system electricity works was still wide open. He was soon rejoined by his former student Andrew Huxley (who had also been gone off to the war), and they took up the giant axon work again. They developed voltage clamp (the papers show the circuit diagrams of their voltage clamp amps, which were based on tubes/valves). The work they then did resulted in several beautiful papers that elucidated the chemical basis of neural electricity. These papers are still read by neuroscience students today, and are a joy to those of us who like to believe that scientific papers don't HAVE to be badly written.
That was my main point. The change improved nothing until Attlee's reforms.
But that was not universally true for the dependents (including employees etc.) of the old aristocracy in (say) 1900, almost all of which were rural. See Kipling for what the better ones were like, and there were more like that in the country than is now admitted.
Simplifying, what the change from the aristocracy and landed gentry to the plutocracy did was to replace the landholding of such resident gentry and yeoman farmers by non-resident landowners, who cared little for either the land or the people who lived there except how much money they could get from it. I saw the effects of the post-1945 punitive inheritance taxes on such people, and it was tragic, especially for the ecology.
EC @ 223 Unusually I am in 150% agreement with that! .... but @ 227 Not quite. Some serious social reforms were instituted during WWI, by L George & others, to stop open exploitation & of course, WOmen's suffrage immediately it was over .... Agree about the latter ... A single aristo, or family are subject to "peer" pressure & social ostracism ... but a faceless AI of a corporation? Much harder to move, as we have been discussing.
That also ignores various European potato famines, and the (Scottish) Highland clearances (1800s CE), and that's just the tip of reasons why the analysis is weak.
In the U.S. it's called The Guns of August, and it's one of my favorite history books.
Eh? What on earth do they have to do with what happened from 1900 onwards? Obviously, I am not claiming everything was sweetness and light by then, but blaming a group for the sins of its ancestors is NOT civilised!
To Greg Tingey (#228): you are right, and I should have said that there were improvements in the period 1900-1944, even if not on Attlee's scale.
As I've said before, what my late wife and I decided we wanted, back in the early/mid-nineties, was an artificial stupid. "I know what to do with this, I know what to do with that, um, hey, boss, I don't know what to do with this - what do you want?"
As opposed to the "smart" everything, that's sure that they know what you want, or, esp if it's from M$, they know better than you.
And Russia will just stand by, I'm sure. And China has none in shipping containers on ships now, Riiight.
No one "wins" a nuclear war. We all die.
ROTFLMAO! Love it.
Sorry, we disagree. On the one hand, "they", based on the amount of German in English, and on the Deutsche Sie and sie, has been my entry in the non-gendered third-person singular sweepstakes since at least the early eighties. (Since I see that Webster has accepted it as that this year, I won, thank you.)
On the other hand, I also liked it because I really dislike stupid neologisms like xe or je.
On the other, other hand, sometimes coming up with the right word, when you're writing, is hard. I was just asking on a mailing list about a word to use when I'm dealing with two interstellar governments. Also have spent hours trying to verbalize how someone from the future (+150 yrs) would talk about connecting to someone through something 150+ years more advanced than idiot, er, "smart" phones and the 'Net. AND I want to do something that doesn't sound stupid, made up, and won't look stupid 10 years from now.
Say, like "clicky" in the old Buck Rogers' strips.
I'm of two minds.
Personally I don't mind they in common use, so long as its meaning is properly understood.
In writing, I've used fae and ona.
Here's the scoop. Fae was my rather obtuse take on a society's homebrewed gender descriptions. They were an offshoot of the radical fae, and my conceit was that some of their kids really wanted traditional gender roles. So the fundamental split in the society was whether you accepted traditional WEIRD gender roles, in which case you were he or she, or you did not, in which case you were fae. Honorifics include Miss, Mister, or Fair. I'd even go so far as to posit that a woman or man could have a fairy partner of any sex, or two (or more) fairies could marry. I don't expect it would ever catch on anywhere outside a story, but I think it's worth recycling when I resurrect that world someday. It was a way to express how a group controlled their identity in profound ways, rather than conform to outside preconceptions. This, incidentally, was a primitive society on an alien world, so marriage wasn't just about love, it was about divvying up the necessary chores for living and raising a family. In such circumstances, there are good arguments both for and against having traditional roles for people to train their lives around, and for divvying up tasks based on talent, so long as partners' talents complemented each other and nothing essential got left undone. This group tried to have it both ways, while actually privileging the latter where possible.
Ona is something I've swiped from toki pona, a conlang you can look up online. Toki pona was designed as a minimalist language, so it has first person (mi), second person (sina), and third person (ona), but no gender or number, so ona can be translated as he, she, it, or they depending on context. It's perfectly suited to what I'm writing, but it gets a bit weird to use. This is another case where I don't expect it to catch on outside a story, but it's fun inside.
Why am I flexible about this stuff when I'm not a gender activist? Well, when you study plants and fungi for any length of time, notions about what constitutes normal gender patterns get a little flexible. After all, plants default to bisexual individuals, and fungi range from asexual/cryptosexual (extremely common) to having over 23,000 mating types (Schizophyllum commune, also extremely common).
Out of the blue my news feed dropped a pretty interesting story from IT world about modern state of AI and machine learning today, namely the issue with modern neural network science. Uh, well, the original article is in Russian anyway, but I googled enough to find similar publications elsewhere about the same problem. It's not all that good. The singularity might have to wait a bit, actually. https://habr.com/ru/post/480348/ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6377/725 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/09/houston-we-have-problem-reproducibility.html https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/ai-researchers-allege-machine-learning-alchemy
Long story short, a lot of the recent science is affected by the same malady that pushes people to get results and discover something while not really caring about actual potential of that science, but rather about being first. I may guess this is not a new problem, but in the age where you can submit results directly as often as you need, the competitive factor is overcoming reason and purpose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish I'm not really into science and wasn't as bold and single-minded about it, but even I understand the crucial point of this moment - if the science runs into stalemate despite widespread public interest, the entire "revolution" is again under the threat of not giving. Which means that billions of investments spearheading into that area will produce nothing but a trash. (A trash like 3lon M4sk would be a good examples, if you have any second guesses)
What is interesting here is that the quality of the representation of neural networks has fallen through the floor, so much so that people are reluctant to explain and demonstrate how their code works, not to talk about what it does and to the point of not including it into their submissions. It goes like "this is a code, it does stuff, give money pls" - and not even concerned about it doing anything useful outside the experiment bounds. Long story short, the author says that only about 17-20% of the works are even having any code at all.
Even more interesting that it is supposed to be Computer Science, but now it operates in the same field as natural sciences like psychology and medicine. When was the last time we really had a revolutionary breakthrough in this area? Anyway, i think we can fairly agree that those "AIs" we have are as much of a black boxes as our own mind and without stern guidelines they will not be "intelligent" at all. If you think about it, it goes even further. Remember all these statements above about these AI systems screwing up towards social-economical biases? Now, how are you going to prove and reproduce that? Who can still guarantee that some of these messages is just not another layer of fake news designed to discourage people from researching real science and instead shoehorn them into doing their bidding? Transparency is the larger issue in the informational society that one might ever realize, and it's going to ever increase especially if so many people think they can grasp it intuitively.
Nothing could be less surprising.
I see; I was thinking in general terms of how I have seen such coinages used, which is pretty much "all or nothing". Sparse usage as a part of the delineation of a specific and minor character, such as you describe, is a distinctly different technique and one I would probably find rather less aversive.
Paul @ 15: The question then is, can liberal democracy avoid a legitimation crisis, not of the current leaders, but of the concept itself. When most people view most other people as not merely mistaken, or even deluded, but actually malign, how can anything like democracy survive?
What do you do when the other side actually is malign? How's the old saying go? You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you.
LAvery @ 52: I've been musing on the title of this essay, particularly the contrast "Threat or Menace". What distinction is being highlighted here? To me the words mean very nearly the same thing (with some subtle shades of difference). The essay itself uses the word "threat" or its derivatives several times, but "menace" appears nowhere except the title.
Wouldn't "threat" be danger some time in the future, while "menace" is danger right here and now?
timrowledge @ 91:
Hell, my company has it with nanochains and blocktubes. Does the whole Dymaxion CyberNeuroExpert thing really well. Provides ongoing best-in-class optimaxualisation of resource matrix acceptivity parameters for whole-problem visualization and transitivual solutionising.
Yeah, but what the hell does that mean if I need a thousand #2 Left-handed Widgets & they got to be delivered by next Thursday?
Wouldn't "threat" be danger some time in the future, while "menace" is danger right here and now?
If you google "What is the difference between a threat and a menace, you'll find at least half a dozen different answers. None of them is convincing. In fact, you'll find pairs in which answer one says, "Threat means A, menace means B", and answer two says, "Threat means B, menace means A".
Clearly the correct interpretations of Charlie's title were given by Allen Thompson (@56) and Scott Sanford (@57).
I'm not sure we do disagree; it looks to me as if we're in fairly close accord. I was not decrying singular "they" - I've been using it naturally myself for as long as I can remember. I'm saying that one thing that makes those neologisms so hideous is the gross unsubtlety and conspicuousness of their use in a language which is already notable for being unusually well provided with natural and mellifluous means of achieving the same end (singular "they" being merely the easiest and simplest of many).
Trying to ensure that words by which characters with future technology refer to establishing communication are proof against sounding stupid and made up is a similar class of problem, in that a frequent cause of failure is the chosen coinage having the effect of overemphasising unimportant factors and stealing the scene from the aspects that do matter. Almost certainly the important point will be that a conversation is taking place between the president and the madame, not that they're doing it using the same kind of comms gear everyone else uses. To insist on saying "the president twotincansandapieceofstringed the madame" may be more technically accurate but it also calls a distractingly excessive amount of attention to the scenery instead of the action. As you say people do occasionally manage to come up with a word that works, but most such words don't really work all that well, and I reckon the ones that do are the product more of luck than of ingenuity.
I'd probably decide to solve the problem by avoiding it :) After all, "call" has worked for every development of the technology since plain yelling, and it seems reasonable that it should go on doing so. Or I might use some existing slang term which is known more widely than it's used, and which either makes no reference to the actual technology or is already grossly inaccurate but no-one cares, like "to get someone on the blower".
The basic advantage of democracy is that it allows a peaceful transition of power. Authoritarian regimes, whether aristocratic, plutocratic, oligarchic, or autocratic, tend to have violent power transitions.
In other words, in a democracy, a president can be impeached without fearing that his spouse, children, and relatives will be put up against the wall in front of a firing squad. With a dictator, said firing squad is a common way to end things. Similarly, faction fights in aristocratic regimes tend to be bloody.
Today's super-rich and would-be president-kings seem to have forgotten this. I'm not sure they want to live in a world where, for the US, it's a rerun of the civil war every time someone gets too weak. They think they do, but most of the people living with that fantasy have only played with guns. They've never been under fire in return.
Otherwise, any system can be corrupted, and authoritarian systems seem to get corrupted even faster than democracies do. Spreading out the power seems to slow corruption, and that's the best argument for a liberal system that I know at this point.
any system can be corrupted
I'm currently reading Lying for Money by Dan Davies, about fraud, and it's interesting how you can get a situation where illegal and fraudulent acts are committed because the system has been changed to incentivize that, and yet the changes are not made with that intent. Ie. you can have a system that encourages criminal behaviour without there being a criminal mastermind. (The example he uses is the PPI scandal.)
Criminality as an emergent property looks likely to continue unless we can, somehow, hold management to the same standards that engineers and doctors are held to in terms of the consequences of their decisions. (Eg. set poorly-paid and -trained sales staff nearly impossible goals for upselling, you are responsible for the inevitable fraud and other chicanery.)
The reason that computer assistants don't already do that isn't (usually) because no one thought of it, or because the programmers are arrogant enough to think that their programs are perfect. It's because they literally can't tell which problems they "know what to do with" and which they don't.
Computers are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect: they don't have the meta-knowledge to understand where they perform well and where they don't, and therefore they don't know when it's appropriate to ask for help.
The so-called AIs are not smart enough to act like your "artificial stupid".
(Of course, you can turn the slider all the way towards caution and have them ask about everything--but then you just get the "dumb" software you've been using for decades. So if that's what you want, you've already got it.)
"given the USA of the time is definitely the more liberal democracy v the UK and Commonwealth of the time"
Definitely not.
Where I lived in the USA wasn't even in the South - it was Indiana. But the Klu Klux Klan ran Indianapolis in the 1920s - their candidate for mayor always won (and appointed the police), their candidates as judges always won, etc. They were the police, the judges, the prosecutors.
It Was Nasty.
Nor is this just a democratic "tyranny of the majority" - Southern States that were majority black somehow managed to never have a black governor, or senator, or judges, or etc.
Well your statement is trivially not true given the US has already won one nuclear war and we didn’t in fact all die
No one wins a nuclear war between the US and Russia that I’ll grant you . But a China that actually only has 300 odd warheads and a really odd philosophy around nuclear deterance, that I’m not so sure anymore. Assuming their not lying of course but it’s be an odd sort of lie that encourages rather then discourages someone else from nuking you.
The unthinkable only stays unthinkable up until someone does it, and I don’t doubt the US us capable of such an act
"Computers are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect: they don't have the meta-knowledge to understand where they perform well and where they don't..."
That's a really well put. I hadn't thought of the connection between Frame Problem type issues and Dunning-Kruger.
It's the "Out of Context" Problem.
My recollection is of some article about German WWII prisoners of war being kept in the south of the USA...ie...actual Nazis...being kept in labor camps.
Apparently, many of them were shocked by how much more poorly African American citizens were treated than actual enemy combatants...
What really scares me are the computer systems used to design integrated circuits. It is known that humans do a far better job of laying out circuits than the automated layout tools. However a device with 20 billion transistors is far too complex for a human to design so the automated tool is the only practical choice. It only makes sense to integrate machine learning into the routing and layout tools. Those tools will be used to design the next generation of processors. Those processors will incorporate machine learning themselves, and will be used to run the next generation of routing and layout tools, which will be used to design the next generation of tools, and so on and so forth. I worry that one day we may look at our shiny new 100 trillion switch processor, and realize that while it does everything we want it to do,faster than anything previous, it's also doing something else unintended. Maybe that something else will be harmless. At least I hope it's harmless.
"It's because they literally can't tell which problems they "know what to do with" and which they don't."
Hmm, not so much. That does apply to things like self-diagnosing hardware, which tends to suck because it can't tell the difference between a report of a fault and a faulty report. But too often the problem is that the program can decide what it does and doesn't know what to do with, but the decision parameters have been set to "be helpful", which is short for "barge on regardless because the user is defined to be too ignorant to make any meaningful choice". A crude example of "be helpful" vs. "ask for help" is Windows vs. Linux installation tools; when Linux installation tools find existing partitions on a hard disk they ask you what to do with them - delete them, resize them or keep them as is, do you want to set up dual boot, and other such useful options, whereas Windows installation tools just assume that "delete" is the only possible valid answer, so they don't bother to ask and just nuke the lot regardless (or at least they did the last time I had any contact with them).
Antiston & whitroth Yup "Our programme &/or fault-reporting systems cover ALL eventualities" ...... so we don't need to put a box marked "other" with a comment-box afterwards. Ran head-first into one of those earlier this year. Took about 5 goes round the loop, before we could get a real, actual HUMAN to pay attyention to the problem. Grrr ....
P.S. Fucking TfL are "good" at this, as well. Ther appears to be no way at all to report faults or omissions on their web site.
Oh, they do that already, they always have done it. Can even turn out useful, especially if you don't mind being naughty.
Ah, no... that's actually the opposite problem; not "be helpful", but "be unhelpful". The function of the shiny automated front end is to act as a display they can point to as incontrovertible evidence of how much effort they're putting into making it easy for people to complain (look at all the options!), while actually being so useless that most people get sick of it before it gets sick of them and give up without ever reaching the human, so they can claim they're not getting very many complaints so they must be doing OK, and also don't need to employ so many people to be the human in the first place.
Working in consulting and large scale business transformation for the past three decades, I've often thought that the biggest challenge with ANY decision system is not "is it right" but "is it reliable" - because mostly right is pragmatically fine, with regular course correction. This works whether the decision is inherently local (what are we eating for dinner tonight) or more global (should our diet include red meat). The answer should always be directional and incremental (as in identify steps to take to get there. Even catastrophic cusp events [from smoker to non-smoker, for example] require incremental action...one step at a time, even though "that first step is a doozy".)
Every transformation project and process that has worked for longer than the initial rollout has relied on a baseline principle that there has to be competing versions of "decision processors" - e.g. a third party consultant, an internal "decision support group", and the board, is a common triumvirate for major decisions. Each group has access to the same (or vastly similar) environmental & business information, and has been provided a set of goals (current direction, or improvement metrics). Each will therefore recommend subtly or hugely different actions.
The immediate value comes in when they agree: that action is probably more right than others.
The real learning pay-off for organizations is when they disagree -- that provides feedback (just as in a GAN) to each of those networks to their individual biases, and redirects them all. But not all in the same direction (that bias might be antithetical to the bedrock principles of a group, and so will simply inform the decision making process of additional countervailing arguments than needs must be addressed in future recommendations), and it provides opportunities to identify potential game-changing state transitions (to exploit a brand new opportunity space)
most of the people living with that fantasy have only played with guns. They've never been under fire in return
Ahem.
Next time around, it won't be played out with guns: it's going to be wall-to-wall slaughterbots (watch the video).
Or at least, mostly harmless.
But a China that actually only has 300 odd warheads and a really odd philosophy around nuclear deterance, that I’m not so sure anymore.
AIUI the Chinese deterrent posture was based around having the capability to rapidly roll out a deterrent, rather than actual possession of a large one, because the CPC didn't trust the PLAN (who would operate any nuclear weapons). Hence about 20 ICBMs, a single SSBN, and a fistful of theatre nukes to deter the USSR from invading by land. (The ICBMs and SSBN kept the operational expertise on tap without triggering an actual arms race that would cost China an outrageous amount of resources desperately needed for development instead. And were sufficient to assure DC and Moscow that while they could wipe out China, they wouldn't be able to guarantee doing so without taking casualties.)
This may now be wrong. China lurched towards ethnonationalist authoritarianism at the same time that it hit its peak workforce:dependent ratio and graduated to being a first rank global industrial powerhouse. If the CPC want a thousand nukes, the only thing stopping them is internal considerations (e.g. how to guarantee the PLAN don't go off the reservation and do something stupid with them). Which is probably a non-issue these days, given the extent of internal surveillance ... and also a lack of any perceived external nuclear threat.
Which might, after all, be the point. I'm thinking of Graydon Saunder's Commonweal books, which use singular "they." You think it's a case of "strip gender markers and let readers see what they assume" - and then you see a character use "he" and how people react and realize in fact it's telling you things about the society.
(I suspect it might be both. It's not a series where there's only one thing going on much.)
However a device with 20 billion transistors is far too complex for a human to design so the automated tool is the only practical choice.
Machine learning isn't your only threat: you need to worry about stealthy dopant-level hardware trojans injected via software corruption of your design tools -- imagine the technique described in Reflections on trusting trust used to inject an entire 486 or Pentium class microprocessor and its own boot ROM into the dopant layers of the Management Engine of a next-generation chipset.
The chipset passes all verification tests, including verification of the IME ... until it receives some trigger condition, at which point the million or so transistors hidden in the dopant layers wake up, take over the IME (gaining ring level -3 control over the entire hardware platform) and go looking for a network connection over which to download new orders.
You can't find this attack by testing. You can't find it by examining the source code of the design tools or the microprocessor itself. You can't even see it under an electron microscope: you won't even know it's there unless you are very carefully examining every network packet emitted by your motherboard every time it wakes up or the clock ticks, and the bad guy behind the infiltration thinks its time to take control over their horde of zombies.
Note that while Intel chipsets use a management engine (running a canned version of Minix, ironically enough), ARM chipsets don't currently ... but often need to load opaque executable blobs to set up their graphics and other subsystems (e.g. baseband processors). And top-end ARM isn't that much simpler than ia64 architecture these days: quite possibly ARM is vulnerable to an equivalent attack.
That. Was. Not. A Nuclear. War. It was an end to a conventional one. You don't have a boxing "match" when one person stands there and gets beat on.
And do you really think, say, 280 of the 300 nukes China may have go off, that they are the only nukes going off, and that they're the size of Hiroshima (20kt), and not 1MT, and not MIRVed? And there aren't 300 cities of 1M+ in the US....
If you think anyone "wins" a nuclear war, you're dangerous, and a fool.
Anyone who uses, or authorizes use of a nuke should be killed, along with their entire chain of command, and everyone in that chain of command's family.
You hope it's harmless. Yeah, well, look up the MELTDOWN and SPECTRE vulnerabilities that were all over the trade media a year or so ago.
And that's assuming that no one's hacked into the company's network, and played with the control programs.
Y'know, I have a language problem: saying "thank you", for example, to someone for telling you what you REALLY didn't want to hear or know.
And, of course, we know just how well facial recognition works - I mean, unless you're black, or wearing a mask....
..they can claim they're not getting very many complaints so they must be doing OK..
Once upon a time, at an unnamed company (Cisco), a new bug reporting tool reached Beta. There was a general call for everyone to kick the tires. I was one of the usual suspects, so I did, and I reported some flaws to them. My reports met prompt pushback, with semi-polite comments about how they were concentrating only on Windows issues. They didn't even have any Linux boxes, with which to verify my reports. They'd get Linux boxes later. So, effectively, please go away. I did.
Fast forward most of a year. Managers were now pretty happy with the lookups and reports from the Windows boxes, and the Linux world (AKA engineering) weren't complaining, so it must work, right ? So they shut down the old tooling and cut over. And the ordure met the rotating device, really big time. The people who actually needed a bug tool, so they could find and fix the bugs, couldn't get their work done. Bug tracking is a bigger issue than it sounds: the source code repository supported branches, and products weren't just being shipped from one master branch, they were being shipped from dozens of branches. Development happened in about a hundred branches, which were forever being merged and forked.
Gaah. Well, the responsible VP got fired, which was small consolation to the frantic peons.
The whole point of a decapatation strike is to make sure your opponent never gets to use their nuclear weapons
Protecting against such was why both the US and the USSR developed such an obscene number of nuclear weapons . They assumed some large percentage of them (around 80%) would be taken out by an enemy first strike and wanted to have enough left over for retaliation
300 odd warheads (not missiles, warheads) simply isn’t enough to protect against such and it is bound to give people ideas. If a US first strike accounted for 80% that leaves 60 warheads for the anti ballistic missile systems. That seems within the realm of winnable.
I’m sorry if that offends your religion but I guarantee the war planners at the Pentagon don’t share your convictions
Which would make the odds of China launching some massive cyberattack against the US pretty remote IMO. They know they are vulnerable is the shit seriously hits the fan
I hate to say it, but the real reason is a lot simpler: they hire people right out of school, and the longest program they've ever written is < 3000 lines, and they could guarantee the input in school, and that's all they needed to do to pass. The amount of error checking and handling they did in school approaches zero as a limit. Most upper management has no idea about any of that, and besides, they know how it Needs To Bee, so they say "do this" and the new employees do it.
They're shocked, shocked I tell you, when people scream bloody murder. Then they, and their management, mostly "it's always stupid users"....
The programmers, of course, are not allowed to ever talk to end users.
Let me add one more thing: to me, I feel as though they're not "activists" as much as terrified of hurting someone, and everyone's being told that things should be considered hurting (note that I'm very heavily including right-wingers, who throw around the word "snowflake", but are utterly unable to handle criticism.)
I'm not a snowflake. If someone were to accidentally address me as "ma'am", I'd be amused. When people insist on me giving a pronoun, my answer is, "anything except late for dinner".
Agreed:- I have one piece of software (ada) with one subprogram that reads:-
Procedure MyProc ( parameter list ) is separate ; -- Myproc is about 2_000 lines; this is clearly far too long, but I've tried everything I know to shorten it, and at least this makes the rest of the package body legible.
Argh. I was lucky - never had to deal with ADA.At any rate, so much of that are folks who have no idea what they're doing.
When I worked at the Scummy Mortgage Co, I shortened a COBOL program from 2200 or so lines to 600. All it did was print a 12 or so high set of 6 numbers on a label for a manilla folder. The senior programmer, who'd been a keypuncher, didn't understand arrays, not how you move a structure....
I was lucky - never had to deal with ADA.At any rate, so much of that are folks who have no idea what they're doing.
Nowadays I do most of my coding in python3, which is truly a joy to use.
Anyone who uses, or authorizes use of a nuke should be killed, along with their entire chain of command, and everyone in that chain of command's family.
Well...
Not that I'm for the use of nuclear weapons, but we've got two situations here.
One, as you pointed out, was the US use of nuclear weapons on Japan in 1945. I think the documentation pretty conclusively shows that this was the correct move on Truman's part, not just to end the war, but to minimize casualties. The casualties caused by not using nukes and running Operation Downfall (the conventional invasion of Japan) would have been an order of magnitude higher on the Japanese side, and probably double the total death toll on the US side for WWII. It's sick, but the nukes saved lives in that one particular instance.
Nowadays, nuclear weapons are for deterrence. Everyone who's sane and intelligent knows that using them on anything other than an incoming asteroid is probably a death sentence for himself and his family. However, we're in one of those interesting Mexican standoff situations, so we do need to mutually assure each other's destruction. The twisted part of this whole equation is that the bluff only works if no one in the chain of command is bluffing. Except perhaps the guy who can set it all in motion.
Next time around, it won't be played out with guns: it's going to be wall-to-wall slaughterbots (watch the video).
You know, it's possible there's a fairly cheap deterrent for these machines, although they're illegal in the US, so I don't know what these actually do.
If you don't want to jam, putting a decent faraday cage around your structure would make it much harder for these machines to work properly inside.
And, since this is an IoT device, I'd love to know what the security on the slaughterbot's operating system is...
Ooooh i used to follow Kill Six Billion Demons, thank you for the reminder!
I'm sorry, but that "pet point" is, in fact, some people's pronoun. Some of them are people I know, who are manifestly human beings and not science fiction novel characters or political point-scoring about the English language. In point of fact, people sometimes write or speak about me taking great pains to avoid using any sort of pronoun rather than using the correct one, so I can tell you that that approach fucking hurts. And my pronouns are the anodyne she/her; anodyne, at least, for cis women.
It is quite often that people in no position to have to care prefer not to be reminded that they are uncaringly hurting others except perhaps in the subtlest of ways. You are not unusual in that regard. It is also not unusual that people dealing with the pointy end of the problem prefer to be more vocal than that.
OK fair enough the specific use is new. As of 2009 :P
Point remains: we DO have one. It's rather famous at this point what with the M-W "word of the year" thing, and not to mention the many thinkpieces stretching back years now.
It's entirely possible to write in such a manner that the question of what pronoun to use never even arises, and moreover to do it so smoothly that the reader never notices you're doing it at all; it's not even particularly difficult.
TBH, I do not believe this statement is true, when you are talking about the thoughts and actions of a person from the point-of-view of another person. (In English, that is. In Japanese, sure.)
Sure, AIUI with Japanese the question not even arising is pretty much built in to the structure of the language, whereas with English it takes a bit of planning to make it happen smoothly, but it's still possible. Thing is that with any technique such as this where part of the definition of "doing it well" is that you don't notice it's being done at all, the instances that you do notice are those where it's being done badly, so your appreciation of how successful it can be is inevitably pessimistic.
I ought to post a link next time I come across a good example, but the idea of an example that is noticeable enough for me to spot it cold but not noticeable enough for you to spot it when I've told you what to look for is an obvious contradiction. :)
with English it takes a bit of planning to make it happen smoothly, but it's still possible (emphasis added).
I am completely convinced that you believe what you are saying. But I am also convinced that you are quite wrong.
I will add, BTW, that I mean I believe you are wrong in that your statement is true only in a sense that makes it vacuous. That is, it is possible to write such that "the question of which pronoun to use doesn't arise" in those cases in which it is possible. But if you have some particular thing you need to say, and you don't get to choose what that is, and you have a reader you want to communicate with, and you don't get to choose who that it is, I don't believe that you can, for every case (or even most cases) of those two things, "write in such a manner that the question of what pronoun to use never even arises, and moreover to do it so smoothly that the reader never notices you're doing it at all".
And since you have just stated that you cannot possibly produce any convincing demonstration of the phenomenon, we are at an impasse.
You know, it is my belief that you don't know anything unless you know how you know it, and can explain that to someone else.
BTW, natural-sounding gender-neutral writing in Japanese or Korean is not actually easy. But pronouns are not the problem.
You know, it is my belief that you don't know anything unless you know how you know it, and can explain that to someone else.
Yes, that's why it's so very easy to explain the feelings of sexual intercourse to someone who's never done it before. There are similar gendered issues around genitalia with things like physical damage and menstruation that are similarly difficult to explain to people who have not (or cannot) experience them.
Not all knowledge can be explained.
If you want a less fundamental example, look at the role of dance in communicating hunting knowledge in non-literate cultures. "This is how an emu or red kangaroo moves in this situation" is easy to pantomime, but difficult to impossible to explain in words. This is one reason why it can be really difficult to train literate wildlife biologists to the standard of non-literate hunting and gathering people--much of the vital knowledge cannot be conveyed through western pedagogical techniques, and issues like billable hours and social norms prevent the traditional learning methods from being deployed in most circumstances.
And I won't even go into the difficulties enlightened Buddhists have in training their students to replicate the achievement.
Not all knowledge can be explained.
I agree. What I said is that you should know how you know what you know, and be able to explain that to someone else. For instance, "I know what sex feels like for a man, or at least for me, because I have had sex." satisfies the requirement I stated.
Understand now?
You know, it is my belief that you don't know anything unless you know how you know it, and can explain that to someone else.
The first part of the statement is bogus. Consider someone with normal vision explaining colors to someone who is unknowingly colorblind. By your definition, the person who has normal color vision does not know what colors look like, because he has no knowledge that the person he's explaining something to has no clue what colors look like, and colors are normal for him. Only once the colorblind person is diagnosed and have the concept of colors painstakingly explained to him can the first person be said to know anything about colors, under your definition. This is completely absurd.
As for the second part, anyone who has been any part of a non-disclosure agreement legally cannot say what the source of their information is. That seems to eliminate a large body of knowledge from your criteria.
Heck, by your definition, the Pueblo Indians, who regard knowledge as more highly controlled and owned than American society at large does (under notions of intellectual property) know very little about anything, precisely because they will no longer share their intellectual property with outsiders having seen it be abused in the past.
And I won't even go into the issue of abuse victims being required to recount their experience in order to qualify for your stance that EXPLAINING the source of their information is HOW they know.
Controlled, private knowledge is still knowledge, and knowing how you know is less relevant than you think, because your statement depends, not on the information in your head, but the information in other peoples' heads.
no reference to the actual technology or is already grossly inaccurate but no-one cares, like "to get someone on the blower".
I always thought a "blower" was an actual technology. Isn't it a term for a speaking tube capped with a whistle at both ends? To talk, you remove the whistle from your end, give a good hard blow, and the whistle at the other end attracts the attention of the person you're calling.
OTOH I always took 'blower' to be a slang term for telephone.
I'm not really sure how that relates to my post. I'm not talking about interacting with real people, I'm talking about writing fiction. If a real person expresses a desire to be referred to using neologous pronouns then sure, I'll use them; I might forget, but I won't avoid using them on purpose. On the other hand, if I'm writing a piece of prose in a gender-neutral style, then I will deliberately avoid using neologisms, in favour of achieving neutrality by some less obtrusive and uncouth device (choice depending on what kind of style I want to achieve).
Nor am I making any comment on the value or correctness of the implied message. As it happens I do agree with the desirability of using gender-neutral language, but that is irrelevant. I'm purely talking about the ugliness of its delivery, both the primary ugliness of the neologisms themselves and the secondary ugliness of the intrusion into the narrative by the implication of a message inherent in their use. (The obtrusive ugliness ensures that the implication of a message does exist, whether or not the author actually intended it to.)
I am objecting to the reduction in beauty conferred upon the artwork by the ugliness of the deliberate choice of a clumsy and awkward new method to do badly something for which there are already plenty of smooth and dexterous methods for doing it well. I have a very similar objection to the unskilled formulaic excretions of far too many of the species so inappropriately referred to as "web designers", strong enough that it is not even overshadowed by the existence in that case of the rather more obvious objection "it doesn't fucking work"; the nature of the objection remains the same despite the political and personal contexts being utterly different.
When I see the term "Blower", I think supercharger, as in "Blower Bentley", or GMC 6-71.
(also gasdive @285) Yes to both :) The original meaning was a whistle-capped speaking tube, which makes it a grossly inaccurate term to use for a telephone, but that didn't stop the later meaning from taking over from the original one almost completely.
"You know, it is my belief that you don't know anything unless you know how you know it, and can explain that to someone else."
I thought I had. I can't demonstrate it, but that's because the fact of our having had this conversation has buggered the conditions for a meaningful demonstration in advance. Never mind.
But in general, there are a lot of things I know but can't explain. Such as things that were briefly important in a non-recurrent context and arise from some corpus of knowledge I'm not interested in. I'll check them out at the kind of level of seeing whether they're built on rock or sand, and record the conclusion along with metadata on confidence level and quality of evidence, but not bother about whether any of the background material records itself or not, which because I'm basically not interested it usually doesn't to any great extent.
I prefer the related adage "the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else", because I do find that helps a lot with clarifying something I don't have adequate records on.
As it happens I do agree with the desirability of using gender-neutral language, but that is irrelevant. I'd prefer that it be the norm, TBH. When I see "ze" in the comment sections here, I read it not so much as gender-neutral as "please note: probably not binary". That's not normal usage but I don't much care.
BTW, natural-sounding gender-neutral writing in Japanese or Korean is not actually easy. But pronouns are not the problem.
I think it's easier in Finnish. We only have two gender-neutral singular third person pronouns, and the language as a whole doesn't have as much difference between men's and women's speech as does Japanese (and probably Korean). I speak some Japanese, but no Korean, so I know more about it.
As for writing English fiction gender-neutrally, I liked the 'Lock-In' and the 'Head-On' by John Scalzi (which are written in first-person perspective gender-neutrally) and those Ann Leckie books with 'she' as the only third person pronoun. Both these examples felt a bit gimmicky, though, the Leckie books more.
In normal life, instead of fiction, for me the pronoun thing is like somebody's name: if they tell me they'd rather be called by these words, so be it, I'd be an annoying person (at least) if I wouldn't do that. For me the gendered pronouns seem a bit strange, even after 35 years of learning languages that use them.
In Finnish, the third person singular pronouns are 'hän' and 'se'. In formal (usually) written language, 'hän' means a person and 'se' means an animal or an object, but in usual spoken language at least in my vicinity, 'se' is the usual pronoun for everything. Pets and farm animals are more often 'hän' than people in my daily life.
"...to inject an entire 486 or Pentium class microprocessor and its own boot ROM..."
I don't think the attack in that link is capable of doing that. Their technique doesn't insert new transistors. What they're doing is selectively buggering up transistors that are already there. This is pretty limited in scope, since it's pretty hard to find transistors that you can get away with buggering up without someone noticing that whatever function they're supposed to be part of isn't working any more.
The first attack gets around that using the unique property of a random number generator that it's not possible to decide whether any individual number it gives is "right" or "wrong", so they can mildly fuck it and thereby weaken keys generated using it but nobody will notice anything different unless they make a point of analysing vast numbers of results. The second one doesn't really fuck anything at all, it leaves it all working quite normally but generates a signal invisible to normal hardware that in conjunction with extra hardware that can detect it leaks crypto secrets one bit at a time. They're both examples of ingeniously selective crippling that has an extremely weak effect that does nothing by itself, but relies on some high-gain computational amplification by some additional external means to become significant.
The first one is potentially more powerful because it does actually change the chip's functionality, but to get away with that it relies upon the chip having a special extra bit that doesn't work like normal bits so it's not obvious it's fucked. I suppose if you were very very clever and had far too much time on your hands you could figure out a way to play with dopant levels that would cause an entire new processor to appear as an emergent property of the aggregate of little fucked bits, but you'd need a staggeringly humungously vast area of silicon devoted to random number generators and things of equivalent weirdness to hide it in.
What you could do by some elaboration of this technique is fix it so that one specific pattern of a suitably large number of bits causes things to go phut and permanently alter the processor's operation. Most easily of course just to stop it working altogether, but with rather more effort to effectively turn it into a different processor entirely (albeit of considerably lower capacity) which you can then run your own code on and the sky's the limit.
"Blower" was also a specialised dedicated telephone circuit(s) used for placing & reciving bets, usually on horse-racing, from about the mid-1930's until the legalisation of off-course betting in the 1960's
If OGH is referring to the technique that I think he is, it injects that logic into the code that describes the complete component, either in the source code itself or during the translation of that into the control logic for building a mask. It doesn't have anything to do with repurposing transistors.
The original example arose because someone claimed that source code viruses could not exist. Someone else said "Yeah?" and wrote one. That was in the 1960s, if I recall. Since then, there has been a fair amount of work on them and, while they are trickier to create, they can do anything an object code one can.
@214: The "Two Georges", by Dreyfuss and Turtledove, is an alternate history in which Britain and America made peace in 1776. I'm sure it's not the only such book.
Adam Smith, writing in 1776, said that the war was wrong from an economic point of view. His point was that if Britain lost, the Americans would still be gloating about it in 2019, and if they won, America would be so poor that it would take 40 years before Britain could collect the taxes they would have collected in 1775.
Hmmm. Let's see for my house. I'm both ahead and behind the curve.
4 TVs (but not connected) a printer, 6 or more streaming things, 10 or so remote sensing things like motion detectors up through door bell cams and security flood light cams, only 1 printer (not an HP with their every printer is a WiFi hotspot), watches, phones, ipads, 5 computer like things, router, WiFi APs, switches (some smarter than others), and so on. I still can't figure out what to do with a smart fridge. A smart oven, yes. A smart fridge nope. Unless it tells me when it can't do it's job of keeping my food cold.
Ah, yes, the language that uses whitespace as a syntax element....
Sorry, but I disagree.
"Doing it well".
Yeah, I can see writing without using pronouns. Isn't that called writing in passive voice, and isn't that discouraged, except for journal articles?
Thanks for the definition. When I hear the word "blower", at least for the last 10-15 years, what I see in my mind is someone holding a usually gas-powered, noisy machine on their backs, and blowing leaves, etc, either into a pile, or into a neighbor's yard.
And, of course, at least half the time, it's done while you're still in bed, waking up.
You can experience something, and that can be one kind of knowledge, very different from the other kind, that can be taught and measured.
For example, unless you've been there, I don't think any of you can truly understand how the death of my late wife affected me, and nothing I say can get that understanding into your head in a way that you really understand it.
On the other hand, teaching someone else is a wonderful way to understand what you know or have learned more deeply.
What forced the Japanese empire to the negotiating table in 1945 wasn't the atom bombs — it was the Soviet offensives in Manchuria, that kicked off on August 9th and steamrollered the Japanese army right off the mainland. (Japan had occupied Korea for decades: the current DMZ marks the point where the Soviet tanks ran out of fuel and had to stop after driving all the way south through China.)
After Midway it was clear that the naval war was lost, and from August 9th onwards it became clear that the land war was going to be lost too.
This left the Japanese government facing an unpalatable choice: whether to surrender to Stalin, or to surrender to the USA. Or to put up a fight to the death and suffer invasion -- which they'd seen at a distance in Okinawa, where roughly 50% of the civilian population died.
The atom bombs were a useful pretext for surrender, but probably not the actual cause. On the other hand, they were a very useful warning to Stalin -- that after the Axis powers went down, going up against the United States was a really bad idea.
Realpolitik sucks, especially when it's carried out using hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths solely to make a point. But it's fairly clear that the final conflict could have been even worse.
Austro-Hungarian Navy
That term has always grated when I hear or read it. Even when it first entered my realm when I saw the Sound of Music as a youth.
No oceans so what navy? Yes I know it was based on the extent of the empire but still.
everyone saw the utility of aviation (starting with airships, then fixed-wing and floatplanes) for fleet observation right from the start. The USN first experimented with launching aircraft from a ship in 1910
We just had to wait for the battleship admirals to generation out. Dec 7, 1941 sped the process up a bit.
Look up USN torpedo performance and why of it at the start of WWII to look at how ossified the USN had become in the 20s/30s.
given the USA of the time is definitely the more liberal democracy v the UK and Commonwealth of the time
It's debatable, and both native Americans and coloured people might disagree.
Agreed. Two full terms of Wilson sans stroke might have led to interesting things if he could establish the direction of things during his last year. He was a hard core racist (polite but hard core).
how to guarantee the PLAN don't go off the reservation and do something stupid with them
Well it helps in this specific area that the PLAN owes its loyalty to the party and not to China. Which is hard for us westerners to wrap our head around at times.
Charlie Erm, no. The USSR's offensive was very presuasive, but not as persuasive as instant sunshine on your own territory.
David L The Austro-Hungarian Navy was a real threat iw WWI. They had some capable Post-Dreadnaught battleships, one of which was deliberately sunk, at the last minute, or even later, by the Italians ( When there was no actual threat ) to make sure that the new state of Yugoslavia didn't get them ....
David L Yes, well, I don't think the USA had any "non-pink" officers in their armed forces by 1918, whereas Britain certainly had had some by then. Look up Walter Tull, for a start.
My reports met prompt pushback, with semi-polite comments about how they were concentrating only on Windows issues.
Was at a conference at Penn State earlier this decade. One of the folks involved in a Mac support group was complaining/yelling at the internal systems folks about how hard it was for students to use Macs to schedule classes, and almost anything else with their being a student there. He was told they didn't support Macs. He told them that 60% of the incoming freshman class was Mac only. This was just after the academic year was over and he hadn't gotten a clear response at that time about what would be done for the next year.
The twisted part of this whole equation is that the bluff only works if no one in the chain of command is bluffing. Except perhaps the guy who can set it all in motion.
And no people we think of as insane get a hold of a few. Especially if "end of the world as we know it" doesn't bother them.
But in general, there are a lot of things I know but can't explain.
There IS the factor of how much back story do you need to go into before you can get to the topic at hand.
The Japanese High Command had been trying for, I believe, 10 days, to arrange a surrender.
Nope. Fantasy. Some were trying but the PTB were determined to fight on.
Realpolitik sucks, especially when it's carried out using hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths solely to make a point. But it's fairly clear that the final conflict could have been even worse.
I wonder if Stalin might have gone further west at some point prior to 1950 without seeing the bomb effects on Japan.
What forced the Japanese empire to the negotiating table in 1945 wasn't the atom bombs — it was the Soviet offensives in Manchuria, that kicked off on August 9th and steamrollered the Japanese army right off the mainland. (Japan had occupied Korea for decades: the current DMZ marks the point where the Soviet tanks ran out of fuel and had to stop after driving all the way south through China.)
Richard Frank's Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire is based on the unsealed archives of the former Japanese empire. We know what happened. Long story short: Yes, it was the nukes. No, it wasn't Stalin. Yes, it is documented, and yes, it is worth the read.
Longer story: the problem the Japanese government faced was mid-level officers who strongly believed in the bullshido ideology of the regime (e.g. no surrender). Any cabinet member who talked about surrendering risked assassination. This happened right up until the Emperor surrendered, at which point a bunch of officers tried to stage a coup and overthrow him. Fortunately, imperial loyalists were ready for it, the coup went nowhere, and the surrender stood.
The reason? It's not simple. The nukes weren't the major cause of death on Japanese soil. That would be the firebombing campaign (killed about 4x more Japanese than the nukes) and the bombing campaign to cut all interisland bridges and major railroads, and the naval campaign to mine all the harbors. The Japanese were facing starvation and invasion, and they did not surrender.
The imperial plan for defending the homeland against invasion was simply to cause as much bloodshed as possible on both sides. They reasoned that Americans were "soft," in that we weren't fond of mass murder, nor of mass casualties from kamikaze actions and banzai civilian charges. They believed that a horrendously bloody invasion would force the parties to the negotiation table, and the result of negotiations would be that the Emperor would keep his throne. It might have worked, too. Polling in the US suggested strengthening opposition to an extremely bloody invasion of Japan. Comparison afterwards of the Allied invasion Plan ("Downfall") and the Japanese defense plan revealed effectively no surprises. Both sides had exactly the same model of where the invasions would have started and how they progressed, and both sides predicted horrendous casualties that, had they happened, would have about doubled US WW2 casualties, with millions more Japanese civilians dead in the carnage.
The nukes changed the equation. First off, the Japanese had done nuclear research of their own, so they knew within a day of Hiroshima what had been done to them. That told them that the US had a technological advantage they hadn't counted on. Nagasaki told them it wasn't an accident, and extensive dropping of leaflets told the Imperial government and the Japanese public which cities were going to be eliminated next, and in what order. And there was apparently nothing they could do to stop it. (The leaflets turned out later to have been a bluff, but it worked)
At that point, the Japanese strategy for defending the homeland collapsed, as the Americans could apparently cause all the casualties they wanted without invading, and they could kill the emperor if they desired (IIRC he was the last on the list of nuke targets, although I might be misremembering). That's when the Emperor surrendered.
This all came out of their records.
What the Soviet invasion did was to save the Japanese Imperial family. The US took over Japan in the chaos following the surrender, and there was some serious push to depose the Emperor and create a democracy. However, there were also a lot of Japanese communists active in the streets, for pretty obvious reasons. Gen. Douglas Macarthur was in charge of Japan, and to counter the budding communist insurgency, he rehabilitated the Imperial family as figureheads of a peaceful government and buried the war crimes they had undoubtedly been party to.
It wasn't a matter of old folks being old, the planes of the 20s could not carry enough boom far enough to decisively defeat a fleet of post-dreadnought battleships. Yes, they could do a lot of increasing amounts of damage as the years went by and engines delivered more performance, but it wasn't until the eve of WW2 that airframes with enough payload started to get fielded.
If you look up the evolution of war plan orange, you can watch the changing threat environment dictate changes to overall strategy.
Let me correct that. The actually rulers at that point were hinting at an armistice where the army and current command structure would be intact and everyone would just stop fighting. The US wasn't interested as the leaders left at that point would be the ones who started the mess in the first place.
Austria-Hungary included a large chunk of the Adriatic coast from Trieste in the north to the border with Montenegro in the south, so that ocean with Italy just the other side.
I know. I know. But when you're looking at maps from WWII onward the term seems odd.
Thanks for posting that. I was in the middle of figuring out what sources would be required to address it. For those looking for an easier-to-digest source, I would recommend either the nuke section of the AskHistorians FAQ or the nuclearsecrecy blog.
The leaflets turned out later to have been a bluff, but it worked
Someone on this blog a few years back (5 or more?) posted a link to US reports that told the Pacific command that starting in September/October 3 bombs a month could be delivered.
I wish I had saved that link.
From what I've read the guys in the field (well open water) with the power were mostly battleship guys. Dec 7 allowed their air power thinking peers to mostly take charge.
This covers it, and I've seen the same figures elsewhere several times.
(From the site Rabidchaos linked above.)
Passive is one way of doing it, and as EC says its prominence can become problematical, but it's not the only technique available. There are forms of sentences where it would be unnatural or ambiguous to use a pronoun, so the pronounless form is what you naturally expect, and by planning ahead a bit you can arrange things to fall so that using those forms of sentences is itself also something you'd naturally expect.
Those gas powered leaf blower things are a prime demonstration of the Sisyphean futility of fighting entropy. As fast as their users order the leaves the wind comes along and randomises them again. Ten steps forward and nine steps back, if that, and anyway what is the bloody point of even trying in the first place? I think about the only people who do manage to put them to a useful purpose are those who use them for starting home made gas turbines.
"inject an entire 486 or Pentium class microprocessor and its own boot ROM into the dopant layers of the Management Engine of a next-generation chipset." You don't need anything like that much complexity; remember, the first ARMs we built used 25,000 transistors and would be entirely capable of doing the job. That would be such a small area of a modern big cpu that it could hide under the dot over the 'i' in the intel logo etched into a spare corner.
Not the Thompson attack, the hardware attack in the first link in OGH's post. The Thompson attack is just his proposed vector for getting the hardware attack in there. The hardware attack allows you to make changes to the circuitry on the chip which are invisible to the usual imaging techniques. Charlie wants to make those hidden changes add up to a whole concealed Pentium sitting in there alongside the fully-functioning real processor, undetectable by electron microscopy but able to wake up and start acting as a sort of hypervisor under the attacker's control. I reckon the limitations of the hardware attack aren't going to let you do that, but it probably is feasible to hide a set of flaws such that you can trigger an HCF by getting the processor to load a specific bit pattern, and if you were very lucky you might be able to leave the fucked state with a little bit of processing ability, probably sub-microcontroller level but still with full access to the current memory contents etc.
Some polities' armed forces are royal. Some polities' armed forces are Imperial. But we're Austria-Hungary, and ours are Imperial and Royal. Take that, suckers.
Conventional bombing would have done for the Japanese cities and towns regardless of the nukes being available. Air defences over Japan were pitiful and getting worse as they ran out of fuel for interceptor aircraft and their anti-aircraft guns were poorly used and not effective especially against bombers flying at 30,000 feet. An interesting factlet, Boeing's Seattle plant built and delivered 300 B-29 Superfortresses in September 1945, that's after the Japanese surrendered.
I remember reading an SF story where the nukes didn't work so the US and Allies just kept bombing Japan with conventional iron bombs and never invaded. They were still doing it in 1955, relying on bake sales and collections from patriotic groups to pay for the missions. There wasn't anything left to bomb really but it had become a tradition of sorts.
The Japanese Navy had been training to attack capital ships using aircraft since the early 1930s using dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers launched from aircraft carriers so it wasn't on the "eve of WWII" that such aircraft became available.
The real problem was range -- the primary concept of using aircraft against fleet-strength battlegroups in the US was to employ land-based long-range heavy bombers against them hence the Midway island land-grab that sparked the Pearl Harbor raid. The Japanese opted for lots of short-range two-man bombers and torpedo-bombers carried on aircraft carriers and that turned out to be the better choice. During the Battle of Midway in June 1942 the US actually flew B-17 "Flying Fortress" bombers from Midway island against the Japanese carrier fleet, dropping bombs on them from 20,000 feet up and scored exactly zero hits, not surprisingly.
No, OGH was right.
The Japanese warlords, who actually ruled the country with Hirohito as a puppet, knew that Stalin would smash Japan utterly, and had been trying to negotiate a surrender to the USA for over a month. But they were insisting on being (effectively) left in power, with some of their fleet, and everybody knew they would start another war in a decade or so (now with atomic bombs). Failing that, they were prepared to fight to the last man - no, it wasn't just a negotiating tactic. The status of the Emperor was an irrelevance.
Quite rightly, the USA was demanding unconditional surrender, to humiliate the warlords, and what the atomic bombs did was to shake up the warlords enough to enable Hirohito to seize control, bypass them, and surrender. It really DID save all those lives, both compared to a conventional invasion and compared to a negotiated surrender.
Someone on this blog a few years back (5 or more?) posted a link to US reports that told the Pacific command that starting in September/October 3 bombs a month could be delivered.<\i>
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/45.pdf
A conventional war that continued for 14 years (1941-1955)?!?
That is more fantasy than SF. The US would never get involved in a conventional war that lasted that long. They'd make peace somehow, don't you think? /snark
The basis of the story was, IIRC that the atomic bombs didn't work. An invasion was attempted but it was very bloody on both sides and the Allies eventually stopped advancing and just bombed everything that looked like civilisation from the air -- cities, towns, ports, railways, reservoirs, roads, houses, fields etc. while maintaining a naval blockade to prevent supplies being shipped in from outside.
By 1955 in-story the bombing is desultory since there's nothing identifiable left to bomb hence the bake-sale funding of private bombing missions, often paid for in revenge for the loss of a family member to the Japanese a decade earlier. An odd little story.
The Japanese attempts at a negotiated surrender were via the Russians which was rather pointless, it turned out. Stalin had agreed at the Yalta conference to enter the war against Japan three months after victory in Europe. He put Marshal Vasilevski, the greatest general in history in charge of the preparations to attack the million-strong Manchuko army in Manchuria and that attack was launched on August 8th, exactly three months after VE-day as promised, two days after the Hiroshima bomb was dropped and a day before Nagasaki was bombed.
This attack concentrated the minds of the War cabinet somewhat. Their chances of a negotiated surrender mediated by the Russians had gone out the window, they were losing their last large military force outside Japan proper and they faced being attacked from all sides. They were already losing cities to conventional bombing which continued after August 9th but the firestorming of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and elsewhere previously hadn't dented their resolve to carry on fighting.
There's an anime movie by Makoto Shinkai, "The Place Promised To Us In Our Early Days" which is set in a Japan which was occupied by the Americans and Russians and split as Germany was after the war with the Russians holding the North, having invaded via Sakhalin island through Hokkaido and northern Honshu.
No. There may have been such negotiations, but my sources indicated that Japan had approached the USA via Sweden, and been told "We will accept only unconditional surrender." As I said, for very good reasons. This page refers to it, but my sources were by people who were involved (though not principles).
https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Japanese-government-offer-to-surrender-before-an-atomic-bomb-was-dropped-on-them-in-WWII?share=1#
"It wasn't a matter of old folks being old, the planes of the 20s could not carry enough boom far enough to decisively defeat a fleet of post-dreadnought battleships. Yes, they could do a lot of increasing amounts of damage as the years went by and engines delivered more performance, but it wasn't until the eve of WW2 that airframes with enough payload started to get fielded."
I read a great book on the interwar US Navy, which demolished a bunch of myths. The short story is that they, like all of the Great Power navies, were really interested in aircraft, and were pushing hard to use them.
However, a ship-launched aircraft could as best drop the equivalent of one shell from a cruiser's guns (far smaller than a battleship's main battery). And that could be done if and only if the weather was good, and good for a couple of hours (otherwise the aircraft would be lost).
"Those gas powered leaf blower things are a prime demonstration of the Sisyphean futility of fighting entropy. As fast as their users order the leaves the wind comes along and randomises them again. "
The first rule of leaf collection is obey the wind (the second is to collect them while they are dry).
I agree that if one uses them in a very foolish manner, they don't work. What you do is to move them in the direction of the wind. My technique on a windy day was to use the plume of air down low, so that the leaves were lifted, and would then travel down wind. On a good day I could them to travel up to 20' with each pass.
This is experience gained from dealing with a one-acre lot in Michigan, which had well over a dozen maple trees, and a 150' tall cottonwood next door (up wind).
"300 odd warheads (not missiles, warheads) simply isn’t enough to protect against such and it is bound to give people ideas. If a US first strike accounted for 80% that leaves 60 warheads for the anti ballistic missile systems. That seems within the realm of winnable. "
Anti ballistic missile system?
How about 10-20 cargo ships each carrying several nuclear-armed cruise missiles?
Cruise missiles don’t require abm systems they can be shot down with conventional fighters or ships. Naval fleet doctrine is still set up to deal with attacks of hundreds of bomber launches cruise missiles that was one of the Soviets big tricks
You’d probably be better off just sailing the ships all the way to port and detonating them there. Except for whatever countermeasures the US has in place to detect such, not exactly something they haven’t been working on for at least 20 years
The reality is China’s nuclear deterrent is kind of amazingly crappy for a nation with such aspirations. I’m sure it won’t stay that way but that’s the case today. They really don’t want to get in a shooting war with the US especially not the current set of wackjobs who if given the chance would probably would go for all genocide not just decapatation
Firstly: China has the debt bomb — they could crater the US dollar more or less at will (at risk of heavy damage to their own economy).
Secondly: How many USAF and ANG fighter bases operate QRA around the clock on US soil, and how many fighters can they scramble within 60 minutes around the coastline? Here's a hint: the equivalent figure for the UK is four fighters on 24x7 QRA for the entire country, with another four available within an hour, and we're set up to expect regular visits to our airspace by Tu-95s and Tu-160s. I suspect the US air defenses, which got beefed up a bit after 9/11, are mainly focused on intercepting hijacked airliners -- a mass attack by cruise missiles would swamp them, and although a bunch of missiles would be shot down, better than 50% would make it to their targets (especially if it's a volley attack without prior warning and they field upwards of 50 -- preferably upwards of 100 -- weapons, exceeding the AIM load-out of the available QRA fighters).
A lot of Cold War deterrence calculations are based on hypothetical worst-case scenarios, whereas for an attacker with nukes ... "you need to get lucky every time: we only need to get lucky once".
Heteromeles @ 245: The basic advantage of democracy is that it allows a peaceful transition of power. Authoritarian regimes, whether aristocratic, plutocratic, oligarchic, or autocratic, tend to have violent power transitions.
In other words, in a democracy, a president can be impeached without fearing that his spouse, children, and relatives will be put up against the wall in front of a firing squad. With a dictator, said firing squad is a common way to end things. Similarly, faction fights in aristocratic regimes tend to be bloody.
Today's super-rich and would-be president-kings seem to have forgotten this. I'm not sure they want to live in a world where, for the US, it's a rerun of the civil war every time someone gets too weak. They think they do, but most of the people living with that fantasy have only played with guns. They've never been under fire in return.
Otherwise, any system can be corrupted, and authoritarian systems seem to get corrupted even faster than democracies do. Spreading out the power seems to slow corruption, and that's the best argument for a liberal system that I know at this point.
That still leaves my question unanswered.
What do you do in a democracy when the wannabe Authoritarian's weasel their way into power and refuse to give up their hold on it?
How do you vote them out of office when they rig the election so that only their supporters are allowed to vote and only those votes toward them retaining power are counted? And even if somehow in spite of all that they lose the election, they refuse to recognize the validity of the outcome?
@340:
It is not a democracy if they can rig the election in the first place.
paws4thot @ 286: OTOH I always took 'blower' to be a slang term for telephone.
Perhaps it's a term originating in one technology adapted to describe a different technology with similar function?
It’s not worse case scenarios it’s generally a scenario that massively favors the attacker. Which is again why both the US and USSR maintained such ridiculous weapons surpluses
If the US was premeditating a first strike in China, say after a cyber attack, then you wouldn’t be scrambling normal air defense you would be waiting with everything you have to soak up whatever retaliation China managed to get off after you annihilate then with stealth cruise missiles or space based icbm’s or whatever crazy toys all those trillions of dollars of defense spending has bought since the 80’s
Air power can be redeployed pretty fast so you would not have to worry about giving the enemy too much of a heads up
The container ships packed full of cruise missiles is likely a fantasy, what you need to worry about are land based icbms that survive the first strike plus the very few sub launched slbms. And anything unexpected you didn’t plan on
A lot would also depend on the relative positions of the various fleet elements as well, they redeploy slower however the carrier based air assets can be rebased if needed
This is all assuming a cyber attack doesn’t gut the entire military for all time of course. If that happens, it’s game over since even the relatively weak chinese nuclear arsenal could finish the job. In fact they’d have to, or else risk the US going for them once they recover from the cyberattack
My meta point is serious nation vs nation attacks in a military environment that heavily favors the attacker escalate very quickly because there is a huge military advantage that goes to whomever escalated them first. eventually they very likely end in nuclear war. Which is why no one does them . Nation vs Nation stuff is likely to stay low intensity, political and economic for this reason
whitroth @ 299: Sorry, but I disagree.
1. The Japanese High Command had been trying for, I believe, 10 days, to arrange a surrender..
The Japanese High Command had been seeking an armistice; a "cease fire" that would leave them in charge and their military intact. Moreover, their proposed armistice would have been ONLY with the United States and Great Britain, leaving them free to continue their genocide in China, Korea and south-east Asia ... and to resume their war against the Allies at some later more advantageous date.
2. They did not have to hit a city, rather than a target like a naval base.
Hiroshima was an industrial and military target. Hiroshima was a supply and logistics base for the Japanese military; a communications center; a key port for shipping, and an assembly area for troops. Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's Second General Army, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan, located in Hiroshima Castle. The headquarters of the 59th Army, the 5th Division and the 224th Division, along with five batteries of 7-cm and 8-cm (2.8 and 3.1 inch) anti-aircraft guns of the 3rd Anti-Aircraft Division, including units from the 121st and 122nd Anti-Aircraft Regiments and the 22nd and 45th Separate Anti-Aircraft Battalions for a total of 40,000 Japanese military personnel stationed in the city. It was also a center war industry, manufacturing parts for planes and boats, for bombs, rifles, and handguns.
Nagasaki was one of the largest seaports in southern Japan, and had wide-ranging industrial activity producing ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The four largest companies in the city were Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, which employed about 90% of the city's labor force, and accounted for 90% of the city's industry.
Don't blame the United States because Japan put their military establishments & war industries within their population centers.
3. Read fucking Hiroshima, by Hershey.
Got it on the bookshelf right next to my copy of Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking"
The other thing to keep in mind is after all the conventional air campaigns, the idea of avoiding civilian casualties was any kind of goal had pretty much left the military zeitgeist
One suggestion that got at least as far as being made was not to nuke anything on land at all, just set one off offshore somewhere with a good audience and say "this is what you'll get if you don't surrender". It didn't get anywhere because nearly everyone thought it would just be a waste of a nuke, and I see no reason to disagree.
The distinction between "civilian" and "military" targets in Japan had pretty much gone out the window anyway because so much of their manufacturing was based on people making parts at home. Instead of having the European separation between factories that were difficult to hit and residential districts that it was naughty to hit, they combined the two functions into one great big unmissable and highly flammable target. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were simply two out of five such targets that the nuke guys had to beg the conventional guys to hold off setting fire to for a bit so they could see what a nuke did on its own to an intact target.
It is not a democracy if they can rig the election in the first place. It is a Democracy until they do this, e.g. by gaining total control over all parts of the government including the courts, then changing the laws. To get to that point, they have to hack the voters first, if the election apparatus is sufficiently secure. Relentless lies and influence operations, a supine or friendly press, etc. Recent UK GE an example, to be followed by voter suppression and redistricting. (Has any of these happened yet? If not, they will. A minoritarian government needs these to maintain control.) Brexit showed that the techniques worked on UK voters. These were heavily done in the US at the state level (2010 was a turning point), starting with a strategy of gaining control over state governments, then computer-assisted gerrymandering of district boundaries for the advantage of the ruling party (almost always Republicans, a few exceptions), along with voter suppression laws to differentially suppress the votes the opposition party (almost always Republicans; don't know of any exceptions actually).
Comsec/opsec fail. NYTimes piece, but the tweet has a short video.
"The reality is China's nuclear deterrent is kind of amazingly crappy for a nation with such aspirations."
They're nukes. You don't actually need thousands and thousands of them to ruin someone's day. And if you're after swamping someone's defences then it's kind of a waste to put one in every missile when you expect most of them to get shot down; better to put the actual nukes in say one missile in ten and just lumps of concrete that weigh the same in the other nine, and spend the money you save on nukes on building a lot more missiles.
By doing the hard work of democracy.
I mean, seriously. If you think Democrats are pure little snowflakes who can't deal with corruption or authoritarianism, you really haven't dealt with democratic politics. I'm not being snarky when I say that the advantage to democracy is that it keeps political fights mostly nonviolent.
Go read Blueprint for Revolution by Srdja Popovic if you want to see how a bunch of activists broke a dictatorship and instituted a democracy. Just because we haven't done it yet in the US doesn't mean either that it can't be done (it can) nor does it mean that the knowledge base doesn't exist, both here and elsewhere in the world (it does).
Pretty much. It got worse, because not only did the integrate military factories into civilian neighborhoods, so that workers were close to plants, and both were housed in highly flammable wood buildings, they also outsources some of the parts manufacturing to peoples' homes around the plants. The US noticed this when they did photo reconnaissance after fire bomb raids, and found the remnants of burned factory equipment in places that, before the raid, had been peoples' homes.
I don't think this was a system deliberately designed to provoke atrocities for PR value. From what little I know, this seemed to have been "Texas Style" urban planning, wherein they saw less value in segregating people and their work, and rather more value in having people live and work in close proximity (Texas is notorious in the US for allowing highly divergent land uses, like, oh, chemical factories and low income neighborhoods, to exist as neighbors).
Anyway, this was why the fire bomb raids by the US caused more casualties than did the nukes. There was literally no way that they could bomb industry and not hit civilian homes, and once they realized this, they stopped trying to differentiate.
In the same vein, it's not unusual for a Japanese model kit to contain several small packets of jewelers' screws, small runners of amber and/or red lighting parts, rubber tyres, polyurethane bushes..., all of them individually hand-packaged by people such as sanitation workers doing a second job...
Well in order to swamp with thousands of fake nukes you’d also need thousands of fake icbm’s which the Chinese also don’t seem to have
Their attitude toward deterrence is very odd and I think harkens back to a time before they were trying to do the regional power thing and only needed to make sure India wasn’t going to get frisky
Pretty much any industrialised country pre-WWII had lots of workers and their families living close to large employers like ports, shipyards, factories, rail establishments etc. Remember at that time the working day was ten hours, typically so adding a couple of hours commuting on a bicycle to work wasn't going to happen, instead the dockyard gates were half a mile from the front door.
The East End of London got blitzed by the Germans, not because it was a densely populated area but because it surrounded the Port of London and supplied it with its manual labour force. I lived at one time in a residential area in Southampton -- the pub across the road had been built on a bombsite after the Germans missed the Supermarine Spitfire factory down at the docks one day in the early 40s. Etc. Etc.
Separating factories and other industrial facilities dependent on a lot of manual labour from their workforce was pretty much impossible in those times.
In that sense, yes, but there was still clear demarcation: this is a factory, where war stuff gets made; this is a house, where people live. You can draw lines round them on a map and unambiguously classify areas as containing one or the other. At least the concept of trying to hit the factory and not the houses made sense, even if the practicalities were such that hitting the town at all and not the woods five miles away was more luck than anything.
The Japanese system did not have that clear demarcation. They put machine tools in people's houses and people made war stuff at home without needing to go to the factory. The "military" and "civilian" targets were the same buildings, so hitting one and not the other was flat out impossible, and once the US realised what the setup was they stopped worrying about it.
"I don't think this was a system deliberately designed to provoke atrocities for PR value."
No, nor do I. I think they just had the bad luck that some important things on their standard list of good ideas turned out to be very bad ideas in circumstances that had never happened before, made worse by failing to anticipate what kind of circumstances were likely and not installing useful anti-aircraft defences.
I think the dispersed manufacturing thing was something they did a bit of in normal times anyway, and massively expanded it in wartime because that was a very effective way of getting the necessary boost in production with the minimum of hassle. It's also more resilient as long as your enemy still thinks hitting the factory is what it's all about.
(the Chinese) attitude toward deterrence is very odd
I think it may be more that they were as worried about the USSR as they were about the USA.
Certainly a lot of their air defenses were set against an attack from the north, and some of the civil defense procedures assumed soviet-launched short/medium-ranged missiles.
This is based on conversations with a retired PLAAF colonel, so applies more to 20th century policies/priorities. (And of course nothing classified etc.)
At least the concept of trying to hit the factory and not the houses made sense, even if the practicalities were such that hitting the town at all and not the woods five miles away was more luck than anything.
Consider Cherwell's paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehousing#Production_and_contents_of_the_dehousing_paper
Given the known limits of the RAF in locating targets in Germany and providing the planned resources were made available to the RAF, destroying about thirty percent of the housing stock of Germany's fifty-eight largest towns was the most effective use of the aircraft of RAF Bomber Command, because it would break the spirit of the Germans. After a heated debate by the government's military and scientific advisers, the Cabinet chose the strategic bombing campaign over the other options available to them.
The RAF was trying, as a matter of policy, to hit people's houses. In 1942.
It's the reason Niven & Pournelle wrote Bomber Harris into "Inferno".
The machine tools and fabrication units weren't exactly in the home i.e. not in the kitchen or bedroom, they were in a shed in the garden or in an annex. It's still a common thing in Japan to this day for light engineering combined with small (20-50 square metre) dedicated engineering shops and the like interspersed with housing developments and shops.
The key part of that paper was "Given the known limits of the RAF in locating targets in Germany and providing the planned resources were made available to the RAF,"
95% of RAF Bomber Command couldn't land their bombload within a mile of a specific target, especially at night. Either they bombed something more than a mile across or it wasn't worth bombing anything, pretty much. That would mean leaving the Germans alone mostly, with perhaps occasional pinpoint bombing of factories by experts like the Pathfinders and the specialists flying low-level Mosquitos and the like on risky daylight missions.
The attitude was that this was a total war and letting the German population which supported their leadership escape unscathed because they weren't in uniform wasn't going to fly. The RAF were getting lots of bombers (the planned resources) and given the limitations of high-level bombing especially at night (the known limits) then German cities were going to get bombed.
better to put the actual nukes in say one missile in ten and just lumps of concrete that weigh the same in the other nine, and spend the money you save on nukes on building a lot more missiles.
You got the economics exactly back-asswards: nukes -- assuming you've got an enrichment cascade running, or a reprocessing plant for a reactor breeding 239Pu -- are cheaper than ICBMs, and quite possibly cheaper than cruise missiles. There's a lump of exotic machined metal, some rather unusual high-speed electronic detonators, a few other strange ingredients (tritium -- see also "reactor breeding 239Pu"; some kind of aerogel in current-gen US warheads, presumably as a spacer/radiation channel), but the rest is boring 1950s explosives technology.
If you're the USA you manufacture fancy variable yield ultra-lightweight weapons using incredibly high purity pits and you design them to need remanufacturing every 2-3 years. Then you need to have an assembly line running back-to-back with a dis-assembly line tearing down the time-expired warheads and recycling/reprocessing the ingredients, and this whole plant is basically running 365 days a year just to keep your existing fleet of warheads in running order, which is where a chunk of the cost comes in. And another chunk of the cost is securing the stockpile (there's an entire federal agency, the NNSA, just for shipping nuclear weapons around the continental United States in booby-trapped armoured articulated lorries with escorts of heavily-armed Men In Black, and contingency plans for what to do if one is caught in a multi-vehicle pile-up caused by random happenstance). And so on, and so on.
The US government is so paranoid about losing just one gadget, or having just 1% of their fleet of gadgets fail to go "bang" on command, that they gold-plated the entire supply chain and run it according to some half-assed 1950s US military equivalent of ISO9000.
But this isn't necessarily the only (or even the right) way to do it.
Their attitude toward deterrence is very odd and I think harkens back to a time before they were trying to do the regional power thing and only needed to make sure India wasn’t going to get frisky
Think of Japan.
Japan invaded and brutally occupied a big chunk of China from 1931-45; the Rape of Nanking was the world-headline stand-out for brutality back then, but not the only or even worst atrocity the Japanese Army committed.
And Japan is about this -><- close to deploying mature IRBMs with thermonuclear warheads capable of hitting Beijing and other population centres. It's not a matter of whether or not they could, but a matter of how long it would take -- probably single-digit months at most, because they've got the plutonium stockpile, suitable solid-fuel smallsat launchers, everything but the warhead design and the maneuvering bus (which could well be hacked out of existing satellite interstage designs). Japan, right now, has an ion drive deep space mission bringing back an asteroid sample for the second time: I think it's pretty clear that they could have the bomb (for first-rank values of "the bomb") if they ever wanted it, and in diplomacy, people tend to go by capabilities rather than intentions (intentions can turn on a dime, as we've seen since 2016).
American zoning laws are weird, to the eyes of anyone who lives in a thousand year-old city, or an environment that relies on walking rather than automobiles for personal transport. Even here in the UK, where new factories tend to be built on the outskirts of cities (outside orbital ring roads for access), older warehouses and light industrial units are typically scattered throughout residential areas, so that you get things like auto repair shops, artisanal breweries, and food wholesale warehouses within the same block as apartment buildings, restaurants, and pubs.
(One of the things that makes central Edinburgh so pleasant to live in is that it's mostly commercial and retail at ground level and apartments above the shops, so that everything you need is within walking distance or a short bus ride away. And it's something that got lost when they built the outlying residential suburbs with zoning in mind, so that there are vast people warehouses in what are effectively amenity deserts: the designers assumed everybody would drive, but many of these suburbs are so dirt-poor that the residents can barely afford bus fare.)
You got the economics exactly back-asswards: nukes -- assuming you've got an enrichment cascade running, or a reprocessing plant for a reactor breeding 239Pu -- are cheaper than ICBMs, and quite possibly cheaper than cruise missiles.
Some further thoughts on this: Per gram, fissionable materials are very expensive. But a bomb doesn't need all that many grams, at least not as many as some of us would like. And the reason why nukes are eye-wateringly expensive is because the refining process to create that fissionable material consumes vast amounts of money before the first gram is purified, on budgets that make chip fabs look reasonable. Once the production line is running the marginal cost of another kilo of instant sunshine mix is...still not cheap, but nothing that will worry any power that can afford a nuclear weapons program in the first place.
Space capable rockets, even in the 21st century, are not cheap. Contrary to Robert Heinlein's hopes, you can't just buy a bootleg rocket at the county fair...
to Heteromeles @314: Richard Frank's Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire is based on the unsealed archives of the former Japanese empire. We know what happened. Long story short: Yes, it was the nukes. No, it wasn't Stalin. Yes, it is documented, and yes, it is worth the read. This is a major problem with US historiography - when it comes to important things, facts and logic can take a vacation. Because if they do not agree with America, it is their problem, not America's. Pretty sure that could be the same case with USSR, but OTOH it is long in the past now.
Rabidchaos posted good links @319, they at least cover more or less balanced position.
So to correct the rest of the obvious problems here: They reasoned that Americans were "soft," in that we weren't fond of mass murder, nor of mass casualties from kamikaze actions and banzai civilian charges. Which was possibly quite underlined by firebombing campaign that is designed to put as much as possible effort into killing as much as possible civilian population and destruction of their infrastructure. Besides, this was a point for future market expansion - people without cities and production power would be forced to buy foreign goods for generations to come. Ahem: obviously because they were bloodthirsty fundamentalists who did not care about their own population and were ready to sacrifice as many of them as possible to stay in power. Whatever bad US did on Japanese soil, they at least destroyed this cohort thoroughly.
That told them that the US had a technological advantage they hadn't counted on. I thought, that the intelligence should have told them that, because by the time they would have lost all of their ships to the constantly modernized US forces AND they probably knew already that their codes are cracked. If a truck hits you on the road it doesn't really matter that much if it has one or two trailers.
What the Soviet invasion did was to save the Japanese Imperial family. The US took over Japan in the chaos following the surrender, and there was some serious push to depose the Emperor and create a democracy. This lopsided formulation seem to suggest that USSR willingly helped US to suppress possibility of something like communist coup in Japan? I doubt that. The push of USSR was to regain access to certain strategic areas in the region and negotiate it with US - not more and not less, because Stalin knew perfectly well that they can't get a hold on any territory with a significant Japanese population. What they were trying to avoid is Hirohito to surrender everything to US, because Empire still held ground in many other regions beside mainland - especially the ones in China. Same as with Germany, for one - the war progressed until capitulation because both US and USSR were looking for complete capitulation, however many casualties it would take - they learned the lessons of WWI.
to JBS @344:
Separate Anti-Aircraft Battalions for a total of 40,000 Japanese military personnel stationed in the city. It was also a center war industry, manufacturing parts for planes and boats, for bombs, rifles, and handguns. Unfortunately the heavy industries facilities seem to be mostly undamaged because the bomb was slammed into the valley where the city was. And IDK about the stationed troops but something tells me that only the HQ would be killed immediately. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/18/story-of-cities-hiroshima-japan-nuclear-destruction#img-4
Nagasaki was one of the largest seaports in southern Japan, and had wide-ranging industrial activity producing ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.
Which would have done them more honor and excuses if they would actually hit that port and not the population center beside it. https://blogs.forbes.com/jimclash/files/2018/08/IMG_8035.jpg
Most people on this planet agree that it was a terrible war crime and useless loss of life for the equivalent of PR stunt that would hail the ascension of US to the top of food chain with their absolute power of destruction.
Reading up on the history of the atom bombings, it's apparent that the second raid was a near-clusterfuck: due to a balky fuel pump the bomber has a shorter-than-nominal range, and the primary target (Kokura) was obscured by smoke and cloud. Nagasaki was a secondary target, also blanketed by cloud, so they tried to bomb using radar alone (and made visual contact at the last moment). They missed the aim point, and had to make an emergency landing at an unprepared base in Okinawa -- one of their engines actually crapped out from fuel starvation on final approach. (More here.)
Frankly, if not for the political pressure to conduct a second raid so soon after the first, it would have been more sensible to abort the mission and try again a day later -- even if you consider the circumstances made it necessary to the war.
Which would have done them more honor and excuses if they would actually hit that port and not the population center beside it.
You may be thinking of a different event than the Nagasaki bombing. From the mouth of the river to the hypocenter is only three kilometers (and about 2,400 meters northwest of the original target point); as already observed, bomb accuracy then was not what it is now. Bockscar was dropping on visual, through a break in cloud cover, so pinpoint accuracy was not expected. The Fat Man device came down in the industrial Urakami Valley, leaving the more densely populated city center sheltered by hills.
to Charlie Stross @363: I think it's pretty clear that they could have the bomb (for first-rank values of "the bomb") if they ever wanted it, and in diplomacy, people tend to go by capabilities rather than intentions (intentions can turn on a dime, as we've seen since 2016). I would like to suggest that it is indeed not the case, at least in traditional sense of the word. The engineering is an art to some degree, and most of modern big engineering venues are more the works of tradition rather than pure research effort - if you want to create something new you only just have to use what is already available. So, if you want to create a bomb in Japan, you can do so... if you have access to all the related materials, and all the specialists you really need. Or, say, the rocket science. If you don't have specialists, or experience, or can't buy licensed technology, you are square out of luck. Imagine modern ventures like SpaceX - they all grew out of people moving around and assets changing hands around new business model to the point that there's corporation that could have potentially made itself international independent entity. Well, too bad it was weighted down and did not fly (you can't really call all those years of gaslighting and 3D renders as leverage for actual working transportation).
And the major problem is that everybody, literally every single competent person out there is on lookout for unaccounted fissionable materials, so the Iran situation was a pretty explosive one just because somebody suggested there could be a nuclear device in the middle - without proof of such. If some middle eastern country (wink wink) would actually expose they have an unaccounted nuclear devices, much less hidden from public for decades and actually not that safe from uncontrolled usage, the only viable solution of it would be to put their hands into the air, squint really hard and hope they won't get obliterated in the time it takes to secure the payload.
Couple of years ago somebody suggested that country like Ukraine needs a nuclear arsenal as "deterrent" - well, this country has access to the fission material, it used to have nuclear arsenal, and probably even has some people who know how a nuclear device looks like. Actually, I think I've only seen one or two photos of actual nuclear device components. Naturally, it was met as any other ridiculous statement of mad fascist government, unfortunately it has it's own implications. With destruction of recent nuclear agreement there are increasing amount of attempt to move the missiles even closer to their targets, preferably right on top of them so to not use any rockets at all. That is, there were suggestions to move the american bombs directly into the former USSR borders, however fxxking stupid it sounds from military perspective, but policy is policy.
Another words, even though current abolition of INF is aimed at China, it may actually have other consequences in Europe. Not right now, maybe not even at all, but one wrong move and what seems to be a mighty and venerable bunch of freedom fighters will be thoroughly destroyed, because one thing is to have some options for negotiation and future reconciliation, and the other one completely when you have mad, nuclear-toting rascals directly at your border. And I'm not really saying about the dirty bombs only - the US involvement in the region wouldn't be ignored too.
to Charlie Stross @368: They missed the aim point, and had to make an emergency landing at an unprepared base in Okinawa -- one of their engines actually crapped out from fuel starvation on final approach. (More here.)
Oh, ok, I think I have completely forgotten these details since last time I was reading about that. It is even obvious on the map of destruction that the blast wave trapped in the valley exited through the harbor gap and wrecked some of the port structure.
Still, I wanted mention that even though it comes up again and again that people are defending US actions in later stages of war, it is very much open to everyone that these actions were not dictated by military necessity, but rather from opportunism - to destroy the independent industry capacity and the will of the people in anticipation of post-war occupation and politics in the world. Just a cherry on top of the whole destruction - and, uh, it's the very profitable one at that.
letting the German population which supported their leadership escape unscathed because they weren't in uniform wasn't going to fly
And there was if anything an even stronger anti-Japanese attitude in the US. I very strongly doubt that Japanese housing would have escaped bombs even if all production facilities were segregated as Pigeon suggested.
Fat Man was armed in the air on the way to Kokura (it was a city supporting a major military arsenal and weapons construction complexes). There wasn't a procedure to disarm it, I understand, it was going to be dropped somewhere after it was armed. Disposing of it into the sea with the fuzes not set wasn't acceptable as it might be recovered by the Japanese. Flying back to an American base with an armed nuclear weapon on-board wasn't going to happen either.
The Nagasaki bombing did some damage to the port area -- I've been up the mountain on the west side of the river above the Mitsubishi shipbuilding facilities and seen scorched rock walls and damaged trees lining the road.
The bad news about nukes is that they are very effective at the centre of their explosion but those effects (heat, mainly accompanied by blast) decay away quite rapidly. A widespread firestorm from chemical-energy weapons is a lot more destructive even if it doesn't match the kiloton numbers in terms of explosive energy.
A widespread firestorm from chemical-energy weapons is a lot more destructive even if it doesn't match the kiloton numbers in terms of explosive energy.
And for a real firestorm, nothing quite comes close to a multi-kilometre-diameter asteroid impactor in the opposite hemisphere. You don't get a mushroom cloud from something like the Chicxulub impactor: you get a "rooster tail" of debris all the way out to geosynchronous orbit (it's speculated that some of the rubble from the Chicxulub event may have landed on Titan). Then most of it rains down as gravel and dust -- gigatons of it -- in the opposite hemisphere on the other side of the world. At which point it gives up most of its gravitational potential energy in the form of heat, and the sky across an elipse a couple of thousand kilometres long heats up and glows radiatively with a black body temperature in the thousands of degrees, baking everything on the surface and bringing the surface waters to a rolling boil.
Now that, my friends, is how you conduct a first strike (on somebody else's planet).
...although to really do it properly you collide two full-size planets, moving in opposite directions with the target planet half way in between.
"So, if you want to create a bomb in Japan, you can do so... if you have access to all the related materials, and all the specialists you really need."
You say that like you think they don't? They have the nuclear materials, which is the hard bit. They have nuclear physicists. You can simulate your design by computer these days well enough to have confidence it'll go off without ever having to bend metal. You can spend as much time as you like making sure the design's right, then when it comes to making the real thing that's a matter of precision engineering and metallurgy, which the Japanese are really good at.
Naah, for my money it's hard to top Greg Bear's description in "The Forge of God". (Alien death robots take two small moons of Saturn, convert them into lumps of neutronium and anti-neutronium about the size of a grapefruit, and fire them into the Earth slow enough that they spiral in, converging as their orbits decay -- the Earth's core approximates to a hard vacuum, as far as lumps of neutronium are concerned -- then mutually annihilate. Meanwhile, more alien death robots have seeded the undersea subduction fault lines in the Earth's oceans with gigaton-range direct-fusion bombs to rupture the plate tectonics just before the shockwave from the emerging core reaches the surface and blasts the lithosphere right into orbit around the Earth's centre of mass. Description of the end of the world narrated by informed onlookers at the surface, waiting to die ...)
I have a (probably) false hope that some elements of the Secret Service or possibly the US military have a quiet plan to take 45 'off the board' if he goes full bunker and decides to destroy the world.
They don't have sufficiently pure Pu-239 in stock and they've shut down the Monju breeder reactor in preparation for decommissioning so they don't have a breeder that can make pure Pu-239 despite expensive attempts to keep Monju operational even after a couple of engineering disasters there (dropping the refuelling machine into the core is not a good move...)
What they do have are functional spent fuel reprocessing lines which could, if the claims about laser enrichment are true, produce sufficiently pure Pu-239 for a few bombs from existing stocks of spent fuel. It would take a bit more than a year to do so and a lot of people would be in the loop and in today's world of whistleblowers and social media it's likely the information about the project would leak out.
Remember though nukes are not made to be used, they're made as counters to perceived threats. Being able to nuke Beijing doesn't mean they HAVE to nuke Beijing, it's just something that the folks in Beijing have to take into account when they sit around the table with a nuclear power.
What the Japanese do have is a more outward-looking defence capability, no longer limited to their shoreline since it's clear modern threats can appear from over the horizon at short notice hence their new aircraft-carrier-launched strike fighters, the extended-range deepwater Soryu-class subs, the P-1 marine patrol bomber and such.
Definitely one of my favorite science-fictional bits.
And I for one am glad it's only fiction!
Why not?
Infrastructure.
Back in the 90s, someone gave me the plans for a nuclear warhead in poster format as a gag gift. I had it up in my office for many years, which amused the physicists who passed through my office (long story). The thing wouldn't work (for one thing, the firing circuit was the sort of fractal short-circuit that only an engineer taking the piss could come up with), but it made two points abundantly clear: 1. Designing a nuclear warhead is easy. Multiple people, including IIRC high school students, have done it. Yes, making one that can be launched by an ICBM is hard, but designing one that could fit in a cargo container takes not much skill. 2. Getting the materials to make a bomb is almost impossible, which is where the humor of the poster came in (Examples: For heavy water, take ordinarily tap water and distill it over and over and over and over and over again. For U-235, buy a lot of uranium yellow paint and distill out the U-235. Sourcing and milling the plutonium will be hard, and we're not going to tell you much about making the high explosives for the lens, except you'll need some weird exotic atmosphere for the reactions.)
And that second one is the point: nukes take big infrastructure, and if you're looking for people assembling bombs, look for the infrastructure they need to do it.
Sadly. post 9/11, I'd probably get locked up on terrorism charges for having the poster on a wall, and I have no idea where it is now. Probably I threw it out during a move. Oh well.
Here's an obscene counter-factual/alt-history.
Let's assume that the peaceniks above are right, and that the US could have got Japan to surrender without nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What would have happened next?
*Korea was the recipient of Downfall rather than Japan, as the Americans rapidly and badly retooled the Japanese invasion plans to take care of the communist advance down the Korean peninsula. During WW2, Korean communists were the only group to fight against the Japanese Imperial forces in anything like a vaguely organized fashion, so absent the US bulling in from the south, the Korean peninsula would almost certainly have become entirely communist. Similarly, we can see how Downfall played, out, so saying something similar would have happened in Japan is straightforward.
Given how fast the Korean war blew up after WW2, a divided Japan would have been the locus for a war between the US and USSR in the 1950s.
Given that nukes existed, and given that the secrets to their construction were leaked shortly after WW2, it's likely that the USSR would get nukes about as fast as it did in our world: 1949, give or take.
Because no one had seen nukes used in anger, the war on the Japanese peninsula would have turned nuclear. So in addition to the mess of Operation Downfall (5 million Japanese dead was the estimate), they'd have a nuclear war the next decade. Sayonara to Japan as an industrial power.
Per Graff's Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die*, there were all sorts of interesting plans to make US cities proof against nuclear war in the 1950s, including burying them. In Alt-World, after Japan is comprehensively destroyed in a Pyrrhic Japanese Atom War (and quite honestly, it doesn't matter who won Atom War I), we can assume that cities on the US West Coast and elsewhere would get very serious indeed about hardening themselves against nuclear assaults: those who could went underground, with more cities doing it as the range of missiles extended.
*Note that FEMA's predecessors tried to save US civilians from nuclear war. They also tried to save all three branches of the US government from nuclear war. When everything except some plans to save the Presidency were obviously failing miserably, they retooled to save the President. When those plans were shown by 9/11 to be unworkable, they retooled again to come up with a long line of successors--and to make Post Disaster US an authoritarian dictatorship with an appointed president perhaps someday responsible for reconstituting the Legislative and Judicial Branches.
There's no reason to assume that a limited 1950s nuclear war would have stalled the petroleum economy, so climate change would have roared along in Alt World, possibly a bit more slowly than in this world, as rampant consumerism doesn't necessarily play well with the more limited space of underground cities, and rampant warmongering might have taken the place of rampant consumerism entirely (there are rampant parallels, with missiles being the ultimate consumer goods). Still, I suspect that Alt World would have serious climate change problems by, oh, about now.
However, underground cities are better able to deal with certain climate extremes (like Black Flag Weather) than are the current car-centric sprawls we have now. So, ironically, a world scarred by nuclear war might actually be better able to deal with self-inflicted climate change than ours is. Of course, they'd be no better at getting off petroleum or not having horrible wars, but that's irruptive civilization for you.
.. the sky across an elipse a couple of thousand kilometres long heats up and glows radiatively with a black body temperature in the thousands of degrees, baking everything on the surface and bringing the surface waters to a rolling boil.
But luckily, not everywhere. Chicxulub left the Mississippi drainage area growing nothing but ferns (because spores survive better than seeds). But the area was repopulated later from refugia in eg Alaska.
The brief high temperature preferentially killed animals that were out in the open. A lifestyle involving dens, or holes in trees, saved many species - but of course, that's the little guys, and mid-size guys. Big critters, well, oops. Birds were little.
rocketpjs Looks as though that might not be necessary ... given reporting today from a (breifly) Trump-appointee ( Scaramucci ) stating that the evidence is such, that even a solid Retuglilizrd support for DT won't be enough ....
DonL I remember reading that no animal over 70kg survived & very few above about 30-40 kg
And for a real firestorm, nothing quite comes close to a multi-kilometre-diameter asteroid impactor in the opposite hemisphere. <\i>
Also R-bombing, which IIRC was a thing in A Fire Upon The Deep.<\i>
Currently about R-bombing, there's this, https://www.quantumvibe.com/strip?page=2033, where a large object is accelerated to 0.9c by means that appear to violate conservation of energy, but oh well.
However, there's always the possibility of giving a Kuiper Belt object a nudge to send it on a well-aimed orbit into the inner solar system. It would take a while to get to Earth, but one assumes the perps are far-sighted.
Pigeon @376: You say that like you think they don't? They have the nuclear materials, which is the hard bit. They have nuclear physicists. You can simulate your design by computer these days well enough to have confidence it'll go off without ever having to bend metal.
I would not deny any of it, it would seem that Japanese have all the components that are needed to make atomic bombs, yet they do not have atomic bomb. US has all the materials to build Space Shuttle and yet no Space Shuttles are working. China has all the technology to fly to the Moon, yet moon is as far away as it's ever been. Basically that means that if they even hell-bent on that and pour a lot of money in it, it's not going to be another decade until they roll out first working prototype. Not enough experience and practice, and there's a great chance that even though the bomb is assembled and tested in separate parts within designed parameters, the final result very likely may as well fizzle out. Always a chance, because the real engineering only works in practice. To work in practice you need people who know what they are doing and have an experience in that.
You can spend as much time as you like making sure the design's right, then when it comes to making the real thing that's a matter of precision engineering and metallurgy, which the Japanese are really good at.
I am an engineer, this is my job, so believe me, nothing ever works completely straight even in plain old electric engineering. This is one of the mistakes that venture capital makes regularly - investors think that our knowledge of the Universe is so complete and mighty we can pour several billions into project, churn some data through some supercomputers and deliver the complete results right away. Remember that big thing called ITER? Sure it is the spearheading project, but we are stuck with this project with DECADES of experience and have no idea how good it will work. Now, since nuclear weapons are classified, anybody who thinks they are good at everything that makes the bomb go boom, will be spearheading into the classified area with unexpected results.
Another words, if there's some "super-secret" facility that would super-secretly produce materials needed for nuclear device, it is only possible if it's been around long enough (decades) and/or it is covered by some powerful allies. They need specialists that need not only know how to make certain details with certain data, but also HOW EXACTLY to implement it and WHAT EXACTLY is the method and what to do if the sample is FUBAR, if the industrial machine that delivers the product isn't to the same specification as the laboratory one, etc. As a person who recently survived (sort of) through first engineering audit, hell of a job, I say that!
Also this proverbial example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK
Here's the good reading for those who are interested in this topic: https://web.archive.org/web/20111206183617/http://wrttn.in/04af1a
.. there were all sorts of interesting plans to make US cities proof against nuclear war in the 1950s ..
The design of the interstate highway system had a lot of military input - for example, there were straight sections of highway, specifically to be emergency landing strips.
More importantly, there was an effort to decentralize America. A side effect of that effort was the growth of suburbia, and the poor service to inner city slums.
That bit gets a bit complicated. And yes, I do work on land use issues.
Yes, I agree that the interstate system has some serious military uses. That's been true of every nationwide road and rail system ever built. As for decentralizing cities to cope with nukes, that was only true until hydrogen bombs got big enough and plentiful enough that sprawl was an inadequate defense. Sprawl has rather more to do with things like farmland being cheap, land value going up when its converted from agriculture to high density residential, houses needing less water than crops, and cities getting a lot of property tax revenue from new developments. This is why inner city redevelopment and densification all are much, much harder to do, because it has none of the advantages of sprawling onto undeveloped land.
More seriously, Raven Rock is worth reading to see all the ways (military) planners tried and failed to come up with ways to save people from nuclear war. In the end, even their plan to assure continuity of government may well be unworkable, since it depends on some set of unknown dudes* a) surviving nuclear war, then, b) opening the sealed envelopes that tell them what their new jobs will be (aka "You are Now President!"), and c) enough of the survivors following them that they can assemble a functional government.
The parallels with planning for any disaster are painfully obvious.
*Most of the people in the line of succession are reportedly current or former politicians. Unfortunately, Raven Rock was written under the Obama administration, so it's unclear what, if anything, the US is prepared to do if the current White House Denizen gets nuked.
Your Honda/Toyota/whatever if assembled in Japan likely has things like a wiring harness assembled in someone's basement. To this day families get supplies of wires with connectors, tie up widges, a layout board, and other assorted things and created harnesses for the nearby plant. 10 to 30 per week per household.
It's also more resilient as long as your enemy still thinks hitting the factory is what it's all about.
Given they started the war against the west with the plan that we would agree to pull back and ask for an armistice, air defenses in the homeland didn't fit into the plan. Now not everyone was on board with this plan, (see Yamamoto), but it was the plan.
Which has been going on longer than you give credit; ask Scots historians about "Wade roads", and/or British archaeologists about "Roman Roads", and clear your evening...
Frankly, if not for the political pressure to conduct a second raid so soon after the first, it would have been more sensible to abort the mission and try again a day later
From what I've read about the construction of those first bombs their shelf life once assembled was very short. Measured in weeks or even days. They were the product of a science lab, not an assembly line.
I saw a talk by the author of a book written about the US nuclear deterent from 46 to 50. It took a while to gather up all the lab notes and turn them into something even a skill worker could build. These notes were not exactly "step 1, step 2, etc..." Once the war ended most of the folks at Los Alamos beat feet in a hurry to get home.
Still, I wanted mention that even though it comes up again and again that people are defending US actions in later stages of war, it is very much open to everyone that these actions were not dictated by military necessity, but rather from opportunism - to destroy the independent industry capacity and the will of the people in anticipation of post-war occupation and politics in the world. Just a cherry on top of the whole destruction - and, uh, it's the very profitable one at that.
Nope. Neither the documentation in the US nor the documentation in Imperial Japanese archives supports this view. On the US side, this really was about ending the war with minimum loss of life on all sides.
Since the US helped rebuild Japanese industrial capacity rather rapidly after the war, with the result that the current Japanese GDP is over three times the size of the Russia GDP (which in turn is only a half billion larger than the GDP of South Korea, which the US also helped rebuild), I'd say the results speak for themselves.
Neither the documentation in the US nor the documentation in Imperial Japanese archives supports this view. The only problem with that is the fact that US very thoroughly occupied Japan immediately after the war was over and in fact still do so in present. Loyalty of this nation, as was mentioned before, has been bought by allowing current imperial family (if I formulate it correct) to stay in power post-war.
Since the US helped rebuild Japanese industrial capacity rather rapidly after the war, with the result that the current Japanese GDP is over three times the size of the Russia GDP (which in turn is only a half billion larger than the GDP of South Korea, which the US also helped rebuild), I'd say the results speak for themselves. Doesn't have to be self-contradictory - the US is known follow the certain idea of market expansion/regulation known as "digging holes and filling them up again". Destruction of local industry by lethal force is the easiest and most direct way of market competition and US applies it everywhere it can, especially when it comes to Nazi Alliance activity. https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/destroying-serbia-order-save-it
Japanese industrial and economical capacity as well as their GDP is very well connected to US willingness to support (and the dept they accumulated) it and many people still consider it a fair exchange. Possibly. Possibly not, in the wake of situation of economic stalemate Japan is stuck in ever since the 90s. The question is still, is the large and healthy economy really useful for anything if it is so dependent on the foreign power?
ask Scots historians about "Wade roads"
Or listen to this verse of "God Save the King":
Lord, grant that General Wade, May by thy mighty aid, Victory bring. May he sedition hush, and like a torrent rush, Rebellious Scots to crush, God save the King.
“ The only problem with that is the fact that US very thoroughly occupied Japan immediately after the war was over and in fact still do so in present. Loyalty of this nation, as was mentioned before, has been bought by allowing current imperial family (if I formulate it correct) to stay in power post-war.”
Where is your competing evidence then ?
Also the idea that you are criticizing others for an ideological skew to their view of history is pretty laughable. Very much pot calling the kettle black. You are about as politically brainwashed as anyone I have ever met
True, with the note that you can still find some of Wade's military roads in the Scottish Highlands, witness "an gearastan", the Gaelic name for "Fort Willian", which translates directly as "the garrison".
Thanks for that last link. I’ve seen such on a much smaller scale. If humanity still has a mechanized civilization in a hundred years, “industrial archeology” will be a recognized and respected profession.
Yeah, because of course Russia or its predecessors never occupied anybody, even after the horrors of WW2.
Hate to say it, but sr’s comments here were very predictable, almost algorithmically predictable. Not that it means much, it just isn’t worth spending a lot of time arguing.
The roads Wade created into the Highlands were primarily to carry artillery -- there had been military roads since Roman times with way-forts in places like Carpow in Perthshire which endured for hundreds of years but they were for light wagons, horses and mules as well as men on foot.
Part of that is because a lot of them are correct, God help us all :-( In the posting you referred to, the only paragraph that isn't is the last, though it was true up to about half a century ago!
Even in the 1990s, some 'strategic' Japanese exports were contrained (and, to a great extent, controlled) by the USA. We did a supercomputer procurement then, and I was surprised that the conditions imposed by a Japanese vendor on a UK sale were those imposed by the USA, which had to authorise any changes. The same is true for exports from the UK, but that's another story :-(
Export conditions were because the US was the source of certain components such as high-end processors and the like and the export restrictions on those parts to Japan for integration into systems precluded the sale of such items onwards without similar restrictions being imposed.
1938 to 1945 is less than a decade, and we're way beyond 1938 in even public knowledge these days.
We have similar things going on with aircraft sales. Boeing and Airbus have technologies that come from each other. And ditto their suppliers. So aircraft sales in almost any direction to any country get national interests all in a tither all the time.
And no need for rooms full of ladies running fancy mechanical calculators to do 1000s of long division calculations for days or weeks at a time.
ITAR I presume?
to Damian @401: Hate to say it, but sr’s comments here were very predictable, almost algorithmically predictable. Doesn't really matter what comments there are if your response is always strawman arguments, i.e mostly plain denial of things I wasn't even talking about.
to Elderly Cynic @403: In the posting you referred to, the only paragraph that isn't is the last, though it was true up to about half a century ago! Well I was referring to a certain very large US base that is located on Japanese territory. Though as was noted several times here before, nowadays it is rather difficult to make difference between exclusive US interests and the globalist ones. Well, certainly not from my viewpoint.
to John Hughes @405: 1938 to 1945 is less than a decade, and we're way beyond 1938 in even public knowledge these days. That is indeed a very disappointing tendency among newer generation who think modern science is so ahead in the progress they can build space rocket in the garage if they desire so, or maybe even in a free time instead of watching funny cats videos. They can't. They can't even remember that the current generation was thinking almost exactly the same thoughts for about 20 years already. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=3698
Supercomputers have applications in nuclear weapons development as well as signal processing for radars, encryption and the like so the sales of sufficiently powerful processors and high-speed networking components have been limited in the past. The days of 387 co-processors being on the banned list are long gone though.
Don't know how trustworthy it is, but I ran across a story about Amazon's Alexa telling someone they should stab themselves in the heart for the good of the planet.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/10585452/mum-amazon-echo-speaker-kill-herself/
Re: 'Even in the 1990s, some 'strategic' Japanese exports were contrained (and, to a great extent, controlled) by the USA.'
I see two reasons for Japan just not bothering with the US:
1- With the US's share of Japan's imports and exports in continuing decline, the general distrust of/disrespect for DT, Japan signing the TPP11 (the US walked out) last year, kinda hard to sell voters in Japan on US-imposed trade rules.
2- Prime Minister Abe is to-date the longest serving PM: he's a nationalist, revisionist, and his economic views sound kinda similar to DT's. Basically we have a perfect set-up for a prisoner's dilemma deal apart from the little detail that DT's screwed over pretty much every business 'partner' he's ever had. (No idea whether Abe is a backstabber. Based on a couple of Japanese inspired sagas that I'm only passingly familiar with, backstabbers are acceptable leaders provided 'ruses' are considered aspects of their strategy.)
Oh, really? As far as I know, ALL of the components were Japanese designed and manufactured - and, given what I know about the company and system, that is what exactly I would expect. Even back then, Japan's technology led the USA's in such areas.
Furthermore, as the vendor explained it to us, it had been imposed as a constraint on Japanese companies as part of allowing international contracts between them and USA ones.
The days of 387 co-processors being on the banned list are long gone though.
I remember when the Sony PlayStation 4 was on the ITAR banned list, though: an ordinary cheap PC today kicks sand in the face of a 1990-vintage supercomputer in most if not all dimensions of performance.
ITAR persists because it's kind of hard for US Congress to repeal/sunset old laws, especially in the security field -- the precautionary principle means there's no benefit from doing so if the law's no longer necessary and a huge penalty if you get it wrong and it was still useful -- but also because it handicaps competitors for American corporations. As Systime (in Leeds) learned the hard way when DEC went after them in the early 80s.
Rocketpjs @ 378: I have a (probably) false hope that some elements of the Secret Service or possibly the US military have a quiet plan to take 45 'off the board' if he goes full bunker and decides to destroy the world.
If I understand how it works, there's NOT a big red button on his desk that he can push to launch the nukes. He's got a military aid with a briefcase full of codes (I'm guessing for various contingencies ... wouldn't want to nuke the Russians if there's an incoming missile from North Korea) and to launch Trump has to select the appropriate set of codes out of the briefcase. So I think there are a bunch of circuit breakers that might trip if he just went completely off the rails and decided to nuke California's 8th Congressional District.
But that does raise an interesting question. For all the fear that Trump might try to "wag the dog" with nukes if he really believed he was going down, WHO would he target? Who is he going to nuke if he can't nuke California (and I'm pretty sure SOMEONE would step in to stop him doing that)?
The intellectual property rights to some parts of of a given supercomputer were not necessarily wholly-owned by Fujitsu -- they tended to use SPARC-based designs IIRC and that architecture was derived from Sun Microsystems, a US-based company. Earlier than that, bit-slice systems were common for vector-calculation machines and again the silicon and their designs were typically American-derived and under ITAR control.
That's my understanding of how the nuclear "football" works too: he can initiate one of a handful of pre-planned responses, but that's it -- to actually do something unanticipated ("I want to nuke Malta! Why isn't there a plan to let me take out the Knights Templar?!?") requires a whole bunch of committee meetings and setup at a lower level, that would take days or weeks to prepare.
Other nuclear powers have different systems. The UK, for example -- the submarine on deterrent patrol has a letter from the PM in a sealed safe that takes both the captain and the XO's agreement to unlock (following certain conditions being met/signals received or not received). These orders govern what to do after the UK is confirmed to have received a nuclear first strike. Meanwhile, the PM can't actually order a nuclear first strike without an act of parliament (or, allegedly, the cooperation of the Duke of Cornwall, thanks to an obscure loophole) -- the Nuclear Explosions Act actually makes doing so a criminal offense on a par with treason or murder.
paws4thot @ 392: Which has been going on longer than you give credit; ask Scots historians about "Wade roads", and/or British archaeologists about "Roman Roads", and clear your evening...
The origins of the Interstate Highway System have a lot more in common with the reasons the Roman's built roads throughout their empire than they have with serving as emergency runways for an Air Force that didn't yet exist when the planning started back in the 1930s. They are primarily LOGISTICAL, rather than strategic or tactical.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/convoy.cfm
Eisenhower understood the benefit of good roads long before he saw the German Autobahn.
Not to change the subject too much, but I think it would work better if the government owned the rails just like they own the highways and that Railroad Companies should pay taxes to use the rails the same way Truckers (actually anyone who has a motor vehicle) pay taxes to use the roads
I’ve seen ITAR requirements mindlessly flowed down until there’s a “No Foreign/Keep filed when not in use” stamp on the source control document for a MIL-SPEC washer. (For those who don’t know, MIL-SPECs are freely available for download at dla.mil.)
David L @ 393:
From what I've read about the construction of those first bombs their shelf life once assembled was very short. Measured in weeks or even days. They were the product of a science lab, not an assembly line.
I saw a talk by the author of a book written about the US nuclear deterent from 46 to 50. It took a while to gather up all the lab notes and turn them into something even a skill worker could build. These notes were not exactly "step 1, step 2, etc..." Once the war ended most of the folks at Los Alamos beat feet in a hurry to get home.
I don't think that was really a factor in the Nagasaki bombing. If they'd known the aircraft was going to have trouble on the way to the target, they most certainly would have postponed the mission until the problems could be corrected. Same thing for if they'd known the primary target was going to be obscured by weather. Delaying the mission for a couple of days wouldn't have been a problem. The main factor was the device that could not be easily disarmed once armed, along with the scarcity of usable devices at the time and the fact that for whatever reasons the device couldn't be jettisoned. Once the mission was launched & the device was armed, it HAD to be used somewhere.
As the saying goes ... Once the pin is removed, Mr. Hand Grenade is NOT your friend!
More specifically, see the history of the 1919 Motor Transport Corps trans-continental convoy, which was observed by one Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower. "The actual average for the 3,250 mi (5,230 km) covered in 573.5 hours was 5.65 mph (9.09 km/h) over the 56 travel days for an average of 10.24 hours per travel day." Which tells you something about the state of the US road system in 1919! It's noted that "practically all roadways were unpaved from Illinois through Nevada."
So, no surprise that the US interstate highway system got its biggest impetus during the presidency of one Dwight D. Eisenhower (who had also been the supreme allied commander in charge of the western allied force invading the Third Reich in 1944-45).
their shelf life once assembled was very short
And here is a picture of a man about to assemble the Nagasaki bomb. That thing in his hand is the plutonium core.
I'll play devil's advocate on the timing of the nuclear bombings.
The problem the Allies faced is that late summer is typhoon/storm season in that part of the Pacific. They would have had to wait for months to get reliably clear weather. Nagasaki especially was considered marginal from the get-go, but on the other hand, I'm pretty sure they had no expectation of better weather showing up any time soon after that.
"Fortunately" for Japan, the islands didn't get stuck in a situation where the only area clear of clouds was over Tokyo, because I suppose the Allies might have even gone for that if it was the only target available.
You realize that you're giving me odd story ideas. Let's see, WWII ended with national collapses*, and in the end, the US balkanized. East Coast, West Coast, South, Texas (trust me on this), and, oh, yes, the "Real US", capital in Kansas, and it has a navy....
My father got out of the US Army Air Corps in '46, I think, and he told me that there'd been mutinies, or near-mutinies, over me wanting out at last, and rumors of fighting the USSR....
60% were "Mac only"?
So, they were buying into the advertising, and getting overpriced commodity hardware? Meanwhile, I'll wager the administration was also not supporting Linux, or anything but M$.
"Earlier this decade" puts it in the cross-hairs for the Windows Vista era, which was an abomination: meanwhile, the Intel Macs were at a peak. OSX was relatively solid -- the dev team lost their edge later -- and the unibody macbook construction was way better than most PC laptops of the day and they hadn't borked their keyboard mechanisms: also, the retina displays had just come in. There was a window of a few years when Mac laptops were clearly better, even if more expensive, than the Wintel equivalent -- rugged unibody construction and reasonably fast OS vs. old-style laptops with plastic/laminated bodies and Vista.
Meanwhile, university IT departments, like every other IT department, lag behind user demand by at least two iterations.
As I said, ideas for stories. The Unpleasant Colonies start a revolt against the Terran Confederation, and the Confederation pulls out one of its emergency plans, and sends out the hyperlight signal, and the first thing that happens is that all the colonial life support systems start to shut down, and will refuse to respond until they surrender.
None of the colonies, of course, have fab capability....
Back then, yes, it would have been unlikely.
As I noted in my last post, there were mutinies and near-mutinies in the US Army around '46 - the troops wanted to go home. I have zero doubts that that was the case in a lot of other nations.
The GOP, on the other hand, loves funnelling tax dollars through the military budget to them and their friends.
I have a lot simpler and quieter answer: I pull out my electric mulching mower, after most of the leaves are down, and mow. 85%, at least, of the leaves are shredded, and stay where they are, putting nutrients bacK into the soil, instead of taking it away when the locality collects the leaves.
https://www.beliefnet.com/inspiration/2004/04/did-god-create-lawns.aspx
You wrote:
The container ships packed full of cruise missiles is likely a fantasyReally? I read, a couple years ago, that hedge funds were paying to keep tanker ships full of oil out in the ocean, to keep the price up, and we're talking in the last 10-12 years.
You don't think there's one in a hundred ships coming from China that don't have containers, and people on the ships who would use the containers?
And in that case... there are no defenses. Fire 'em from just offhore, and they're at their targets in less time than an ICBM.
Trust me, there are huge fights over zoning.
If you haven't read it, may I recommend a book from the sixties, written by the city planner Robert Moses' mortal enemy, Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Mixed-usage zoning/housing is a Great Thing. Single-use zoning sucks dead Republican roaches.
Yeah, I don't think we know what the football does any more.
The last time it was used (and I think I got this out of Raven Rock, Bush II admitted later that he sat down with the football holder, both of them read through the material, and they realized that they had no option for dealing with a major terrorist attack on New York, aside from scramming to the Nightfall 747 and going into full-on evasion mode in case more planes were inbound. Cheney was in the White House bunker coordinating the defense while Bush scrambled to safety, per protocol (with the door open, since it turned out the designers had no clue how to set up proper communications into their bunker, so that if the door was closed, the decision maker was cut off and left with inadequate staff).
Anyway, we're now 18 years on from that. It's probable that there's a bigger, better bunker under the White House (they built something down there), and FEMA under Obama rewrote the rules for how a nuclear war would be conducted, based on what Bush and Cheney went through. My understanding under Obama was that the President, VP, and SecDef would, in event of emergency, man their posts and coordinate the response until they died, at which point the C-Team backups would be notified that they were now in charge. There's a B-Team per the Constitution, but since most of them are in DC most of the time, the guess is that during an actual emergency, they'd be dead too. The C and D teams in line of Presidential succession are located far away from Washington, and we have no idea who they are. That's part of the problem, in that if Washington is slagged with all the recognized people in the chain of command dead (President, VP, Speaker, Senator Majority Leader, Secretaries in order), then it's an open question whether anyone will follow whoever's next on the secret list.
So anyway, if I was guessing, I suspect the nuclear football now has protocols for various terrorist attackss, probably a protocol for someone releasing a pandemic at a major airport, and I don't know what else.
Whether the current denizen of the White House has done anything to change the system??? That's one of those questions I really hope I don't find the answer to. The US would become even more dysfunctional under Notional President DT2 or Notional President Giuliani, either option with the Bill of Rights suspended and no functional legislative or judicial branch. I suspect the emergency that brought that about would also include a side dose of civil war, along with public health break downs and break downs in the food distribution network. The death toll would be rather high. Biblical, even.
Yeah, but building the gigantic Bergenholms to allow you to do that is a bear.
Though I will admit it's a hell of a lot easier than going to the parallel universe where c is the minimum speed, and doing it one one or two of the planets there.
But you forgot the really hard part. I think it was around '80 that Mother Jones, or someone like that, published the story of the high school guy who, using unclassified plans, had designed a nuke. The one show-stopper was having to get the radioactive slurry in a bucket, then spinning it around in your living room for half an hour....
You missed a major issue: with the nuke war, and some underground cities, suburban sprawl would never have happened, with the result that you wouldn't have 76% of the US driving to work alone in a car every day.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/10/03/americans-commuting-choices-5-major-takeaways-from-2016-census-data/
Therefore, fossil fuel usage would have declined. For that matter, with all the radiation, no one would worry about building more nuke plants faster....
But that does raise an interesting question. For all the fear that Trump might try to "wag the dog" with nukes if he really believed he was going down, WHO would he target?<\i>
Russia, perhaps using one of the less-than-major attack options.
US nukes Russia, Russia in response nukes the US. Indirect, but effective. Somewhat like suicide by cop.
Even if the tax income means you effectively have infinite money? :-)
I tried to follow that link. After I told noScript to allow it, it was still the case that all I saw was a blank page, with nothing.
CentOS 6, firefox 60.9.0esr
SR wrote:
This is one of the mistakes that venture capital makes regularly - investors think that our knowledge of the Universe is so complete and mighty we can pour several billions into project, churn some data through some supercomputers and deliver the complete results right away.And if anyone disagrees with this, you're living in a fantasy land. I swear, most upper management thinks that you "make" something by waving your arms, pointing at things with a mouse, and poof a miracle occurs.
Single-use zoning sucks dead Republican roaches.
Now you're letting your politics color the facts. D's can be just at stubborn about zoning when it impacts THEIR BACK YARD. Want to come by my neighborhood and discuss the issue. If lucky you might get away with just a few feathers stuck to the tar. My area is 3 to 1 D over R.
Whether the current denizen of the White House has done anything to change the system??? That's one of those questions I really hope I don't find the answer to.
I would find it hard to believe he would/could consider or allow others to consider a situation where HE'S NOT IN CHARGE.
Unfortunately, we live in the near-'burbs, or we'd be throwing the biggest party ever.
Russia
Nope. Ukraine.
Then he could claim forever that they "did it in 2016", HAD the server (now melted) and so on.
I was not talking about Fujitsu, and my points stand.
Yeah it’s kinda like a ballistic missile sub only a million times shittier
Not to mention you have to figure out some way to actually launch them, presumably launch all the missiles simultaneously and keep them from being detected by various radiation sniffing apparatus which doubtlessly exist and doubtlessly are watching container ships since everyone is scared the terrorists are going to sneak a nuke in that way
And if they get detected they are firstly going to get sunk and put a fair amount of your nuclear deterrent in the bottom of the ocean secondly going to trigger a major diplomatic incident
And oh by the way are going to be utterly useless if you have a problem with some other regional power like say the Russians or the Indians or the Taiwanese
Seems an utterly strange thing to do with the few warheads you have. Not saying it’s totally crazy but if China cared about such things they’d probably just build more boomers
Part of the emergency continuity plans is a fair amount of pre signed executive orders that are sitting in the various emergency command centers (Raven Rock, Mt Weather, likely some unknown sites )
They also make a pretty strong effort to never have the entire line of succession in DC at the same time
Still a lot of possibilities for confusion though
There is actually a TV show called “designated survivor” that explores what happens when DC gets nuked
it's unclear what, if anything, the US is prepared to do if the current White House Denizen gets nuked.<\i>
I don't know what the current arrangements are, but in classical times (pre-1991, roughly) there was a set of pre-delegations in place whereby various CINCs could use their tactical nukes at discretion to respond to attacks in progress. At the strategic level -- and I think this is still true -- the Airborne Emergency Action Officer on Looking Glass could order his on-board battle staff to execute a SIOP attack if the National Command Authority wasn't available anymore.
Those were days when the question of "Who did it" had at most two answers and the AEAO and his folks basically had to figure how much retaliation to inflict on the perp. The range of possibilities is much broader these days and I can well imagine that the Looking Glass crew might be left scratching their heads and wondering what to do and to whom.
Actually, per the book Raven Rock, they're no longer using Raven Rock or Mt. Weather, because a) they're too well known, and b) they're not strong enough to survive a predictable attack. There is evidence of at least one new site, but you're going to have to buy the book to find out where it is. There was also a spate of bunker building under DC in the Bush and Obama years. Who knows how far down that goes?
And yes, I know about Designated Survivor. That's the official plan (I listed it as Plan B in my post above). Raven Rock made it pretty clear that there was a secret plan under Bush II and Obama, simply because most of the highest level officials in those administrations demonstrated that they'd rather die defending the country than do what the protocol demanded, which was to run for secure cover, then wait to assume the job of president should everyone above them die. It turned out that the emergency planners hadn't spent much time talking with the people they were planning for, and didn't take their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the country into account. Much as I dislike the Bush II people, for literally trillions of reasons, I will grant that they were willing to die at their posts.
The Obama-era plan apparently assumed that all the first-line people would die trying to organize the initial response/counter attack. The people who would pick up the pieces afterwards were secretly briefed and identified to FEMA. The idea is that this secret government would take over afterwards. In this regard, the whole paranoia about FEMA instituting an authoritarian "New World Order" is extremely well-founded. My feelings about it are a) FEMA and its predecessors have generally proven to be crap at disaster preparedness, so I'm not sure all this contingency planning will be any more useful than any other bit of 60 year-old toilet paper, and b) Congress and the courts failed even more abysmally at planning to secure themselves from nuclear war*, so FEMA may be trying to work with the best of a really bad set of options, and trying to secure some sort of executive authority after everything else falls apart.
As for what the current regime would do in an emergency, again, I have no clue, except that I don't think there's a good bunker under Mar A Lago. I have no doubt that there are people in the current administration who are willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of the country. Unfortunately, I have no idea which of the current crew fits that bill, and whether they're in positions to do anything if the proverbial balloon goes up.
*Apparently in the football are some contingency documents hand-written by JFK around 1961. It says something that their planning effort still revolves in part around decades' old secret, handwritten documents.
**Some of the bunker building of the last two decades might conceivably been an effort towards securing the Legislative and Judicial branches. Previous plans for protecting Congress and the Supremes involved evacuating hundreds of critical personnel by car or bus out of DC with threats inbound and due in minutes. The chances of this happening were somewhere between fat and slim. One congressman at least got four fast motorcycles and made sure everyone in his family could ride. His survival plan amounted to getting home, getting on a bike and weaving through gridlock, to outrun the blast.
If you would tell us the manufacturer of the supercomputer (I recall both Hitachi and NEC made products in that field a while back) and maybe hint at the architecture involved then maybe we could find out if ITAR applied to their products due to technology transfer. Until then your point (the Americans fdorced the Japanese to put arbitrary restrictions on their technology sales) is, well, pointless.
Re: ' ... highest level officials in those administrations'
Okay, so we have a bunch of senior execs surviving.
Do any of them know the nuts & bolts of whatever department they head? (I'm guessing they're probably more knowledgeable about the financials than the actual services.)
Would they even know any of the middle managers apart from occasionally seeing names on some org chart? I'm guessing that 99% of the delivery of federal department services is performed by minions and that it's very unlikely that any of the C-team worked their way up the corp/gov't services ladder.
Or do you want all gov't departments FEMAnized?
No, I was simplifying. The Obama White House reportedly handed out, in addition to their normal ID tags, a set of special tags that went to some of the employees. Those people had roles to play in the post disaster continuity of government. Those without the special ID cards did not. Apparently there was an awkward moment when one staffer told his boss that he had the special ID card, only to find out that she had not been issued one and had no idea that they even existed. She was upset for some reason.
There's this perennially interesting problem with a bunch of disaster planners tasked with coming up with a plan for continuity of government in the case of existential disaster. They come up with their plan, the POTUS okays it, it goes into effect, and then.....?
The one time it was tested was on 9/11. Bush was sidelined in his Nightfall jet, out of communication and without options to respond in the one tool he had available, the nuclear football. Cheney got into the White House bunker, but had to leave the blast door open to find out what was going on (remember, this was when a hijacked plane was thought to be in bound to the White House). Rumsfeld ran into the fire at the Pentagon after that plane hit, and helped pull people out and manned a stretcher until his underlings found him and forced him to go back to his office and coordinate the response. Notice that there are three different failure modes here.
After that, Cheney got to test out the various bunkers, upgrades were made, new plans were laid...and to my knowledge, they haven't been tested since, at least by a real emergency. If the misfiring possibilities weren't so horrifying, there's a pitch-black comedy waiting for someone to write it, about everything that goes wrong after DC blows up.*
*I have to peripherally deal with emergency response in what I do as an environmentalist, and trust me, the planning at the civilian level really isn't any better. You'd think with a prepper subculture, Americans would actually have a grip on how to deal with emergencies. Sadly IMHO, preppers are more interested in zombie outbreaks than they in earthquakes, wildfire, climate change, crop failures, or creeping authoritarianism.
@425 "So, they were buying into the advertising, and getting overpriced commodity hardware? " I don't know about them but pretty much all my colleagues - and we are variously high-experience software engineers, cpu designers, engineering VPs, CTO, intelligence officiers of various sorts - gravitate to Macs because they annoy a fair bit less than the alternatives. That's worth a good bit of money when it's your working sanity at stake. I use linux too but the desktops suck.
I have the book Raven Rock, though I only got about 3/4ths through . That guy needed an editor pretty bad
I believe Mt Weather, Raven Rock and NORAD are all still used, while it’s true several of them were mothballed it seems that is no longer true and some have received significant upgrades relatively recently
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/mt-weather-governments-backup-emergency-operations-center-activated-for-power-outage-in-april/1972472/
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/raven-rock-the-u-s-governments.html
That's the plot of an episode from The West Wing.
"I use linux too but the desktops suck."
I use Linux but desktops suck, so it's not a problem.
The high school nuke designer story I best remember is that it was a deliberate experiment to see how possible it was. Some spook type department got hold of six or so high school students, possibly by having a competition where the winner got to be groomed through university for a job doing it or something like that. They gave them a library containing only nuke stuff that was already in public libraries and told them to design a nuke, I think either one each or in pairs rather than all together. Then they checked out the results to see how much of a pig's ear they'd made of it. One or two of them had failed, but most of them would have worked, at least as far as the spooks were willing to admit and/or conceal details that weren't right because the reason for the lack of rightness was classified and pointing out the error would enable people to work out how it was really done.
(The details of that lot may be up the creek, but the general outline is correct.)
The first one I heard was something in the Reader's Digest (spit) about some guy who designed it in his bedroom and took it to the spooks to be marked and they freaked out. That was late 70s, which seems to be about when most of the urban legend variations started to show up, whereas the experiment story is dated a couple of decades earlier.
The memory of the experiment story is associated with a memory of reading a PDF of scanned typescript downloaded from one of the websites that collects unclassified and declassified stuff from Los Alamos and Livermore etc. If the association is correct then I'd guess the experiment story is where the urban legend variants originally sprang from.
There's a spurious comma on the end of the URL and the server does not deliver a proper 404 or suchlike sensible response. This ought to work:
http://www.quantumvibe.com/strip?page=2033
Heteromeles Rumsfeld ran into the fire at the Pentagon after that plane hit, and helped pull people out and manned a stretcher until his underlings .... did he, now? Actually, sorry, but you've got to admire that spirit.
There's an amateur enthusiast, I think he works or worked as a truck driver, who has spent decades trying to reverse-engineer the Little Boy uranium bomb design from publicly-available documents, books written by the bomb makers and such. He discovered/collated a lot of details about the simplest design of nuclear weapon bomb that could have been showstoppers for anyone trying to replicate it without that knowledge. I can't dig up information about him right now though.
Flip side of underground cities: less fossil fuel use by commuters, but agriculture is still top-side and vulnerable. (Underground hydroponics/vertical farming won't work without a really efficient lighting technology: we can do it today with LED/lasers, but in the 1950s/1960s waste heat would be a huge problem, and so would electricity consumption.)
So your cities are safe (FSVO "safe"), and might even be plausibly protected in the ICBM age by ABM systems, but the agricultural districts that supply them are vulnerable -- specifically to attack by Cobalt bombs (originally hypothesized in 1950 by Szillard). With a ~5.3 year half-life could plausibly fuck up agriculture for decades (not to mention the rest of the biosphere). Yes, there are remediation processes: but nothing that could generally decontaminate an entire nation's croplands within a year or two. (A working cobalt bomb really could be a doomsday weapon insofar as if you survive the war you are forced to grow and eat highly radioactive food for years afterwards.)
Previous plans for protecting Congress and the Supremes involved evacuating hundreds of critical personnel by car or bus out of DC with threats inbound and due in minutes.
We'll know they're serious about evacuation plans if and when Elon Musk announces he's building a hyperloop in the vicinity. Short of helipads on the roof capable of taking V-22 Ospreys, that's the one technology that might be able to bypass DC's traffic and carry enough legislators to refuge.
Would totally suck to be riding the last hyperloop capsule in the tunnel just as the mach wave from the bomb reaches it, though ...
Osprey, like every other VTO aircraft even hypothesized other than some strike fighter designs, is not capable of M1.0; the blast wave from most nukes is!
It doesn't have to be capable of going supersonic -- it just has to get its passengers a few kilometers away given several minutes (to hours, in the case of cruise missiles) advance warning of inbound warheads. Remember the inverse square law? The blast effect from a nuke diminishes rapidly as you get away from the hypocentre.
(Note that the F-35B is not only STOVL but capable of supercruise. I'm guessing it could probably go full VTOL at a pinch, with no munitions and a reduced fuel load: but that's kinda pointless.)
I never expected to survive a first strike; my point still stands that you have to get far enough gone for the pilots to retain control.
(Oh and it wasn't just the F-35B I was thinking of as STOVL capable but yeah it's a fairly useless trick)
John Coster-Mullen.
https://www.amazon.com/Atom-Bombs-Secret-Inside-Little/dp/B0006S2AJ0/ref=sr_1_1?Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=10&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=9&qid=1577194382&refinements=p_27%3ACoster-Mullen&s=books&sr=1-1&unfiltered=1
He used to sell copies himself on Amazon, but apparently it is no longer available.
Enjoy
Frank.
Re: ' ... a prepper subculture, '
From what I've seen on mostly parody shows/sites the prepper strategy is to stockpile existing finished goods thereby avoiding having to learn how to grow or make supplies afterwards. The implicit expectation/sales pitch seems to be that once the doomsday war is over everything, i.e., agriculture, manufacturing, services, etc., will resume as per normal. They never saw 'Threads'.
...read "The AMTRAK Wars" (Which is even set in the Yousay...)
Thinking about it, if I wanted to evacuate the Congress and Supreme Court quickly, if there was enough warning, I'd have an aircraft carrier based at Naval Station Norfolk, and put it out to sea to loiter in a semi-random fashion off the south Maryland coast. With enough warning, make that a carrier strike group. You'll need the extra bunks.
To get important people out of DC rapidly, I'd consider stuffing them into available fast copters, flying them the 100-odd miles out to the carrier, dumping the copters over the side (as in the Vietnam evacuation) and getting the ship under steam and away from the coast as fast as possible.
The advantage is that the carrier has communications, some supplies, and is mobile. Also, I don't think anyone's aiming to nuke Chincoteague or Cape Charles, so a ship off the coast is a good 50 miles from the nearest explosion (Norfolk). And if they're targeting ships with nukes in real time things have gotten truly ridiculous. This contrasts with Mt. Weather and Raven Rock, which can't move any faster than plate tectonics allows them to go. Even if they're open for business, probably they wouldn't withstand a direct hit even if they buttoned up in time. That's why the US developed the whole Nightwatch E-4 system, to make the Presidency hard to target, not impenetrable to impact.
Note that putting people on an aircraft carrier will only get a few hundred people out, and most will be reluctant at best to leave their families to die. But given that or dying in DC gridlock, at least a few will run to safety.
Now that I've thought about it, I'm sure that this is written up as SPRING SHOWERS or HOGWALLOW or something. If the USAF has Nighwatch, and the Navy has something like I just described, I wonder what the Army's plan to save its civilian bosses is? Raven Rock? (Mt. Weather is FEMA turf)
Well, yes, the prepper scenarios tend to be on the batshit side.* It gets annoying, because when, for instance, I buy earthquake supplies (food that has an extended shelf life), I also tend to get things like self-published books about how the world's going to hell and we need to buy more stuff to prepare for it.
Now I know a bit about self-publishing books about how the world's going to hell, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I want one free with a case of canned chicken. I mean, it's a nice thought and all, but seriously. Is this the Rapture of the Consumers that we're preparing for?
*I'll admit a certain whimsical fondness for the people who are building ex-urban castles for when society returns to the dark ages, complete with giving their teenagers crossbows to practice with. Hopefully they didn't take out a mortgage to pay for their fantasy, but whatever. My partner thinks my occasional thoughts about building an earthship are every bit as silly, probably correctly.
You don't want a CVN for that job, you want a Marine Corps amphibious assault ship. IIRC the US Navy has about twice as many amphibious assault ships as nuclear fleet carriers. They're specialized carriers -- they have flight decks and can fly F-35Bs, and are bigger than almost any other navy's largest carriers -- but they're really optimized for helicopters (lots and lots of helicopters compared to a regular aircraft carrier) and can also handle boats, hovercraft, and amphibious vehicles via a well deck. They also come with berths for up to 2000 marines (or other passengers) which is exactly what you want if you're evacuating DC.
There is also a rumor that there is an underground tunnel all the way from the Capital to Mt Weather. That would be one hell of a tunnel
It’s not entirely unrealistic to have snuck in a hidden subway line when the DC metro got built though, at least get people to the outskirts of DC. There is a persistent rumor the Soviet’s built a “Metro2” as an extension to the Moscow Metro
With regards to preppers the most hard core do in fact live in rural areas and grow their own food. A significant chunk of the off-grid community is waiting for the bombs to drop
Funnily enough the essential reading materials for preppers are mostly Mormon manuals. The LDS has a requirement that each church member have one years supply of food on hand, while most don’t entirely follow it, the LDS Church is still pretty serious there
https://thesurvivalmom.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/LDS-Preparedness-Manual.pdf
The other essential manuals for surviving the big one is the Foxfire Series (which is honestly a fascinating read)
https://www.amazon.com/Foxfire-Book-Collection-Books-Brand/dp/B01HUQY2TQ/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=foxfire+series&qid=1577209584&sprefix=foxfire+ser&sr=8-2
It would never have occurred to me to nominate an LHA for the role,but it makes sense.
There is a persistent rumor the Soviet’s built a “Metro2” as an extension to the Moscow Metro
Not just the Soviets; virtually everybody who builds a buried metro system for their capital -- at least, one that requires deep tunneling rather than cut-and-cover -- includes buried infrastructure including bunkers. There are books about it: "London's Secret Tubes" (ISBN 9781854143112) for example, discusses the history of secret tube extensions built between 1930 and 1960 and filled with everything from the Cabinet War Room to bomb shelters, factories, telephone switches, and other critical infrastructure that had to survive strategic bombing. I can't find it right now but I'm pretty sure I have a book comparing secret subway systems of the world -- the Tokyo one is particularly spectacular, as is Moscow's, and I think bits of the DC subway run deep enough they'd have been suitable.
These installations were obsolescent by the late 1950s (nothing we can build can survive a megaton-yield ground burst unless we tunnel under a mountain) but they were cheap, because subway operations indirectly subsidized the construction costs. So they got built everywhere it was practical.
Yes, ideally an LHA would be better. The problem is basing and supply. I don't know what all is based at Norfolk on a given day, but I do know that four carrier strike groups call it their home port, as do six CVs (per Wikipedia). The only LHA currently in service (LHA-6, USS America) is based in San Diego.
Now obviously where a ship is based and where the ship actually is at any given time are two different things. However, if politics start pointing towards a nuclear war, pulling ships out of Norfolk (at the mouth of the Chesapeake, 194 road miles from DC, rather less by air) to take refugees from DC (further up the Chesapeake) would seem to make a lot of sense. The only reason to put the ships off Maryland rather than near port is that Norfolk will probably be on the receiving end of something, I don't think the Maryland shore will, and due to the geometry, flying due east to Maryland waters appears to be closer than flying southeast to the Norfolk.
the prepper strategy
Most prepper strategy seems about as well thought out as that of space cadets who talk about living on the moon or such.
It’s not entirely unrealistic to have snuck in a hidden subway line when the DC metro got built though, at least get people to the outskirts of DC. There is a persistent rumor the Soviet’s built a “Metro2” as an extension to the Moscow Metro
Really. You think that many people would never talk in the DC metro area? At least in the old CCCP they would import the workers, hold them in barracks, then ship them back to a coal mine near the Arctic Circle.
Getting back towards the original intent of the post, I'd like to flag a couple of recent articles about threats:
How To Track President Trump. As an experiment, the NY Times got their hands on 12 million phone records, showing only where the phones were over given times. It turned out one of the phones they had tracks on was in the possession of a secret service agent in Trump's entourage. Even though they didn't have names for any of the accounts they had tracking information for, simple correlation (where the phones spent significant amounts of time) let them suss out who owned them fairly quickly. They also suggested that at least some phone owners were engaged in problematic activities, such as apparent affairs. This article points to the problems of getting such databases hacked, then correlated with other hacked databases.
Yahoo news reports that Pentagon warns employees not to use commercially available DNA kits. They're worried about everything from hacked biometrics to tailored biological weapons to blackmail and such.
Note that linking DNA data to phone data gives an AI system all sorts of devious ways of causing mischief, from highly tailored blackmail of a CIA worker (they don't take their phones into Langley, but they do leave them in their cars in the Langley parking lot) to bioweapons targeted at particular people in particular areas (likely to backfire, but someone might be stupid enough to try it), to more insidiously, racist appeals to people in critical areas (hack together DNA evidence for racial origin, place of work, and online activity for evidence of poltical views).
Anyway, mass correlation of hacked databases will produce a colossal number of false positives and wasted effort, but AI allows these kinds of operations to be automated. That might turn out to be a bit of a problem.
Thanks for the LDS link. And for the reminder to get my Foxfire set out of storage.
The problem with Foxfire and most back-to-the land books is that a climate changed future won't be like the past. Heck, a nuclear war or something catastrophic that halts anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions would be really good really soon, if the goal is to try to make the future like the past.
The problem is that we're going to be stuck with a different (hotter and wetter and/or drier) climate that's less predictable. We'll also be stuck with fewer intact aquifers and less wilderness to fall back on.
As a for instance, without mountaintop removal coal mining, the Appalachians would have been a really good redoubt for climate change. With mountain top removal screwing up too many aquifers and watersheds, it's likely to be a wasteland.
Similarly, rich idiots draining desert aquifers in the western US and elsewhere means that deserts that were once crossable, following trails that led from spring to spring, are going to become largely impassable, because the springs are now dry. The only way across is to wait for the rare heavy rain and then travel fast, following the rains and avoiding the flash floods. Tricky business, that.
And so it goes. I joke about prepping to eat things like rats, kudzu and careless weed (Amaranthus palmeri). At least kudzu and careless weed seem to be thriving under climate change. Not what you might want to be eating, but that's survival for you. Not quite as fun as Foxfire, sadly.
Sorry, you're picturing something very different than I am. I'm thinking not far offshore, just outside the national limits. They're required to be in certain positions on the deck of the ship (I trust you've seen pics, iwth them 4 and 6 containers high on the deck.) The moles get the orders, they have the ship rotated, and at the right time, they blou out the locks on the outward-facing side of the container, and launch. We're talking < 15 min to target, in some cases 5 or 10 min, and there may be more than one per ship.
Who cares - some may be nukes, some conventional, aimed at specific targets. A nation-state can afford this, a hell of a lot cheaper than ICBMs, boomers, and B-52-equivalents.
Sorry, but I don't think FEMA would be in charge of restoring a government. I'd think both State and the Pentagon would be dealing with it all. FEMA's more for "ordinary" civilians.
Sorry, I don't believe all that about Rummy.
Besides, the folks in the Pentagon knew what to do... since they had just had a simulated such attack on 29 or 30 Oct of 2000. The coverage of that was on the Military District of Washington's .mil website for several years.
Linux desktops suck? Really?
I must have been missing that for the last 20 years or so.
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/18/archives/persistent-amateur-expert-on-nuclear-weapons-charles-r-hansen-man.html
Thank you. Of course, Doc Smith and the Lensman did it first.... I think it was in Second Stage Lensman (publ 1941).
Sure - but my point was that the insane commuting of the US doesn't become reality, as it did in the fifties.
Hmmm... if you're more worrying about eating this year, and you'll worry about cancer, etc, later, I wonder if you put thin sheeting over your crops, tented, so that radioactive dust doesn't fall on it (when it's not raining, at least), would work as a kludge.
You did say "the most hard core" preppers. Most, I would expect, are more the "we'll wait it out, then the stores will be full before we run out of supplies... or we'll take what we need/want, we gots GUNS!!!
Foxfire: yeah. Just as the old folks were starting to die, the ones with all the skills learned over the centuries, the hippies came in, and started preserving them for posterity.
Damn good thing.
Totally off-subject.
Hey, Charlie, it's been too long since I read your future sf stories, but I'm really appreciating the work.
Right now, I'm working on what will be the final piece that will tie together the shorts and the two novellas into a full-blown novel, and trying to think of how to describe, in words and phrases that don't seem too-right-now, and won't look stupid five years from now, and not do an infodump, of, oh, 800 or 1000 years from now's version of the Web/smartphone/no kludges.
Ghu!
Oooo and he likes pidgies too!!
Sorry, but I don't think FEMA would be in charge of restoring a government. I'd think both State and the Pentagon would be dealing with it all. FEMA's more for "ordinary" civilians.
...
FEMA is the home of what's properly called "Continuity of Operations." See, for example, https://www.fema.gov/pdf/about/org/ncp/coop_brochure.pdf
Here's why State and Defense are not appropriate for the job. --"The Department of Defense provides the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security." (https://www.defense.gov/our-story/) (I liked the old version better, but that's what's on their website) --State "leads America’s foreign policy through diplomacy, advocacy, and assistance by advancing the interests of the American people, their safety and economic prosperity." (https://www.state.gov/about/about-the-u-s-department-of-state/)
Neither of these has the mission to insure continuity of civilian government during a catastrophe. That's FEMA's job, believe it or not.
Linux desktops suck? Really?
Of course. Every OS Sucks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85p7JZXNy8
800-1000 years from now? Your metaphor for their tech is "magic". That is: describe it by your protagonists' relationship to it in terms of their intentions, rather than their actions. Smartphones today are already wildly mind-blowing science fiction in 1970s terms: if you took a time machine back to 1979 and described what an iPhone could do you might as well call it a "magic mirror" that runs on an imprisoned djinn who answers to "Siri".
My guess for 8C-1K years hence is that the tech will be ambient, sensitive to emotion and intent, and largely invisible ... or it'll be design classics: a steel pocket knife never goes out of fashion, for example (although the cultural context of carrying a knife may change -- we still talk about "pen knives" even though we no longer use them for sharpening quills).
As for advertising, that's an epiphenomenon of a capitalist economic system that has only really been around for about two centuries: it relies on attention scarcity and information constriction. So I'm guessing it's going to be non-existent or very different by then.
If you want to link to an existing body of literature to attract an audience now, there's also Orion's Arm. Since they're kind of open source, there's no reason not to repurpose bits and bobs of the 10,000 years-from-now galaxy they created.
I think any container ship that sailed with visible missiles would get identified by satellites and boarded almost immediately. You’d need to hide them and then unhide them
You’d also be emitting a fair amount of radiation the entire voyage. I don’t know how good radiation sensors are and how far down the shipping lanes are patrolled and by what exactly but probably neither would whoever was trying to run this plan which equates to a big risk. The longer you hang off the enemy coast the more likely you are to be detected
Cruise missiles are generally subsonic . While they would be able to plaster whatever city they were parked off the coast quickly, hitting some other city is more problematic. To do a good job nuking the US you would need to park a bunch of these guys off both coasts and you still wouldn’t hit anything far inland where all the military command and control and land based icbm’s are
It’s not a good first strike weapon if it can’t kill the enemies ability to retaliate
Thus means it’s only good as a deterrent
to quote the good doctor “what good is a deterrent if you don’t tell anyone about it?”
If you tell your enemy your container ships exist, the enemy will easily kill them. If you don’t tell the enemy it exists it doesn’t function as a deterrent
“You'd think with a prepper subculture, Americans would actually have a grip on how to deal with emergencies.”
Remember Brin’s “The Postman” ? When it came to distaster recovery, the preppers were the bad guys. The guys who took a precarious nation and pushed it over the edge into the abyss.
Surviving disasters is about co-operation and working together. Google “Christchurch” and “Student Volunteer Army” for a different cultural approach than individual preppers. ( I have a lot of time for the SVA, great mob of kids when the chips were down after the earthquakes )
Charlie @ 489 a steel pocket knife never goes out of fashion Except that the knife blade is a lot less used than the scissors on mine ... & the real reason I carry one is that I can get into any known drinks container with it .... Disagree re. "advertising" ... maybe in the sense of gratuitous billbords or equivalent all over the place ... but shop-fronts & stalls always advertised & there are plenty of examples of 18thC advertising available, if you look in the right places Like these for instance
icehawk Yes, in reality ( never mind the Brin novel ) the US-preppers seem all about dominating the other survivors, if any, with their guns & aggressive muscle. In other words, they are fascist scum. Funny, that.
I think any container ship that sailed with visible missiles would get identified by satellites and boarded almost immediately. You’d need to hide them and then unhide them.<\i>
Like by putting them in a standard shipping container? That's been thought of:
http://roe.ru/eng/catalog/naval-systems/shipborne-weapons/klab-k/
There might be some subtle signs to give away the missile launchers, but there might not. And the defender would have to have advance knowledge of those signs.
You’d also be emitting a fair amount of radiation the entire voyage.<\i>
No, nukes aren't all that radioactive. Remote detection schemes usually involve active interrogation, which typically needs bulky accelerators, power supplies and detectors. See the "Detecting SNM at a Distance" section in https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/R40154.pdf
Re: ' ... plenty of examples of 18thC advertising available'
According to the timeline below, advertising goes back to ancient Egypt. I think of it as for-profit graffiti (or interval).
https://mashable.com/2011/12/26/history-advertising/
A very interesting technical development A magnet-free electric motor in fact - for fairly high power useage, too ...
“Linux desktops suck? Really?
Of course. Every OS Sucks:” Exactly. Obviously it’s one of those things that is very much a personal taste issue but equally obviously my taste is better than anyone else’s. The least-sucky OS for many years was RISC OS and I still think it has many aspects that make it a great UI. It’s fallen behind badly in a lot of aspects but what can one expect without serious support? Windows has never been anything but awful and seems to get worse with every release. Mac OS was originally pretty but not very useful and grew up to be fairly pretty and tolerably useful. Unix has always had lots of usefulness surrounded by colossal amounts of carefully arranged obfuscation; X is basically a way to damage programmers’ minds. Almost all the desktop setups for Linux are bad copies of the poorest parts of Windows. Ubuntu’s GUI is just plain awful. Happily for me I live in the world of Smalltalk where we have almost complete control of our UI and can almost ignore the host nonsense.
Please note that the whole point of the cargo ships with nukes idea is not a sneak attack, but to persuade US leadership that even after a barrage of nukes against China, that there'll be a few to several dozen missiles surviving and usable.
Please note DeGaulle's apocryphal comment about the French Force de Frappe:
"We can rip the arm of the bear off, and it can kill us. If it comes down to the bear's life, it will kill us and we will rip its arm off. But until then, the bear doesn't want to lose an arm.'
[note - this is a paraphrase from memory]
Intentions... thank you, very much. I've gone through about two or three ways to view it (it was hard enough dealing with 150 years from now), and yct could well be what I was looking for.
Advertising? Within 150 yrs from now, it'll be looked at as malware, with sophisticated anti-malware blockers.
And, one hopes, laws REQUIRING opt-in for anything other than view-on-web page.
Thanks, I'll look at that.
Of course, I do not have the god-like intelligences ruling... let's put it this way, if you were a god, would you want to deal with the moot and trivial annoyances of trying to rule?
That's on par with the difference between movie mad scientists and real mad scientists: movie mad scientists all want to, dare I say it, Rule The World.
Real mad scientists aren't stupid. Here, you want to rule the world, conquer the Middle East, and when you've done that, get back to me.
Ok, I see: you're not actually reading what I wrote, you're just skimming, and seeing what you expect to read.
I'm not sure there's any point in discussing this further, since you're IGNORING what I'm saying, and putting your words in my mouth.
Just to make it clear, I deny I said ANYTHING that you suggest I said in your post. I SAID that they're HIDDEN IN EXISTING SHIPPING CONTAINERS, that were placed on the ships in government-secret-required locations, and that they fire explosive bolts, which blows out the sea-facing side of the shipping container, not that they're ship-mounted and visible for the entire time since they were installed.
sigh
A WinDoze desktop comes from Redmond. A Mac desktop comes from Cupertino.
Linux, like all unices, has X, which is a windowing server, it is NOT the desktop. If you don't like the windowing manager, which is NOT part of X itself, then chose another. I hate gnome, which is what ubuntu uses, and what RH prefers, so I use KDE. If it's available, I may go back to using IceWM when I install CentOS 7 to replace my 6, which will go EOL next year. Or I could use xfce, or mate, or any of the others, some of which look like Mac, or I could even use fvwm2, which certainly does not stand for the "feeble virtual window manager", and doesn't look at all like WinBlows....
Interesting; if totally lacking in any form of performance data.
I'm not clear what point they're making. Switched reluctance motors are as old as the hills, and the article even points that out. So are highly polyphase drives, it's just that nobody bothers because nearly all the time three phases does all you want well enough: which makes it odd that the article claims a six-phase drive as a new development; what is it that really is new about it?
What is unusual is the use of aluminium windings, but they dismiss that in about three lines. Aluminium is fine for power transmission, where you're not constrained for space and you can just double the thickness and stop worrying, but in something like a motor it means the I2R losses are roughly doubled and there's nothing you can do about it. And the article says nothing at all about the effect of that factor.
@502 - yes, yes, I am actually fairly familiar with all that as I’ve been using them for 40 years or so. Which has not made me think kindly of any of them. Like I said, thank Ghu for Smalltalk.
You put your finger on exactly what is stupid about most prepper movements. Survival is absolute about s community cooperating and they all want to be lone wolves. A cooperating community (whether benign or malignant) would likely just roll over them, all the prepper guns and supplies not withstanding
... they're HIDDEN IN EXISTING SHIPPING CONTAINERS, that were placed on the ships in government-secret-required locations, and that they fire explosive bolts, which blows out the sea-facing side of the shipping container ...
I think you're confusing speculations and technothriller plots for normal operations.
Let's take one example of this: government required positioning. If someone were mandating specific containers in particular spots, this would be known to pretty much everyone in short order, at which point your secrecy is no better than if one actually hung missile launchers over the side. (Yes, it could be done once, which is the usual technothriller plot. Not as SOP.) Not to mention talk about what the missile crews were doing.
Yes, of course there would be missile specialists. You think just anyone could fire these things? (Sadly, that part is probably true.) If the ship doesn't have people on site making a fuss during loading, the missile pods are going to be loaded under something else because the weight works out better that way, or in the right place but backwards with the explosive hatch facing inwards, or where they happen to fit because other things got loaded first.
Why, yes, I have worked in shipping...
Preppers follow an unspoken ideology that asserts hierarchy, with them at the top. They assume it's a dog-eat-dog world and anyone who isn't closely related to them is a hostile threat.
It's an ideology that makes perfect sense to the descendants of white planters, living in fear of a slave uprising: and you'll note that preppers are overwhelmingly white Americans.
(The Mormon prepper thing is somewhat different: a holdover of being a tribal group fleeing religious persecution by their neighbours, only just falling out of living memory. But that's a whole 'nother furball of weird right there.)
I think the modern Preppers go along with the Neo-Fuedalists who all assume that they’ll be the aristocrats rather than the serfs. As a kid looking through my father’s copy of “The Survivalist Handbook” in the early 80s it was clear that their philosophy was “I got mine, and screw you all.” His reading of “The Preppy Handbook” had more influence on him, thankfully those phases only lasted a few years.
As for the Mormons, they may have fled persecution, but were more than happy to commit their own once they were settled out west.
they may have fled persecution, but were more than happy to commit their own once they were settled out west.
That's usually the case with tribal religious exile groups, yes. (See also: Israeli politics going back, oh, about 60 years before the State of Israel was founded.)
Of course still another side of the whole prepper thing was the various back to the land communes, especially in the western US. Many of them were doomsday related , but took more of a community approach then individuals
I think Charlie is over indexing that this is all slavery related. I think doomsday cults are a relatively common human phenomenon and preppers are what you get when you cross a doomsday cult with America’s obsession with individualism and frontier mythology
I'm currently using XFCE. I've tweaked it heavily and it has a taskbar all the way across the bottom, like Windows or (old?) KDE, plus a hidden taskbar on the side which holds all my most-used apps.
The big point of using a Linux OS is the customizability of your desktop, which is near-infinite if you know what you're doing, and without writing any code.
The bad thing about Linux is that it doesn't come with any of the Windoze-virus desktop productivity programs.
Which "productivity" programs are you talking about? My thought, for most people, is that a mail tool (thunderbird will do, though I've had issues), and LibreOffice, which puts out perfectly good .doc, .docx, etc.
I will admit that it can't always read perfectly some .xlsx files were someone'e done something odd, but it surely reads most of them...
Of course, I'm sure that the government would directly order it. There's no possibility that, say, they tell their Party members, who also work in upper management, to give orders (you're not a Party member? Do you really want to question me?) where they should be loaded. For that matter, they could load them facing each way, across, or facting forward or backward on an end stack, nor would any "passengers" or crew have sealed special orders to give orders to the captain....
Charlie Furrball of Wierd - must remember that one ... along with a reference to something in English law about "What it actually does" as opposed to "What our very clever legal structures say. Was actually in reference to the
grotty scheming crooksvigorous entrepreneus of "Uber" - usually called: "The Duck test". Well, uber have just come unstuck in Frnkfurt ... where it was referred to as an "Ententest" - lovely!also @ 509/10 Actually the entire religious history of the USA seems to be based on persecuting "Other" religious groupings, even though, or maybe because of (?) no "established" religion of any sort.
Actually the entire religious history of the USA seems to be based on persecuting "Other" religious groupings,
Yep, pretty much from the beginning. The Puritans came because of persecution, then did their own against those who came after. And so on...
I use Open Office and Thunderbird myself, and Linux is well-supplied with programs which speak fluent Microsoft Office. But suppose you need to be Peachtree Accounting compatible? Or use any of the very specialized programs written for Windows in one industry or another? They're either not there are all, or the Linux programs are to their Windows counterparts (at best) as Gimp is to Photoshop.
Of course, if you really want to kill Microsoft get Samsung or LG to put a well-customized XFCE desktop with a package manager on their flatscreen TVs, then give them 4 gigs of memory and an 32 gig SD card (or better)
Anyone else ever heard of Golden Software Grapher? A perfect demonstration of why "Microsoft Excel" in one of the great oxymorons of our time (and claiming you can't pluralise a noun is another one).
Of course, I was just talking about regular and home users. Major packages - accounting software like Peachtree or Quikbooks, etc, ain't there.
And I suspect some of the flatscreen tv's already run some version of Linux. Heh... the Expen$ive 44" poster printer we had where I worked ran it - I could tell by the fsck on boot....
religious history
of the USAseems to be based on persecuting "Other" religious groupingsRvdH Yes, that too .....
There are a number of TV models that have slots for the Raspberry Pi compute module; sorry can’t be bothered to look up exactly which one(s).
Agreed.
So far as I can tell, doomsday preppers have something in common with many martial arts groups, survivalists, apocalyptic cults, gun nuts*, and similar: they're all organized around fear. Often, it's a low probability fear, and much of the organization is about finding a community who shares one's terrors, with the goal of adopting various group-identifying behaviors, jargon, and so forth to both adopt group identity and manage the fear.
The critical compare-and-contrast is with groups that actually are in harms' way. While there is overlap, the people who are actually dealing with real threats have different sets of issues, tend to be very serious about adopting behaviors to maximize their own chances of survival, and deal with different mental issues (especially PTSD and survivors' guilt) as a response.
As a comparison, let's look at the prepper who's afraid of immigrants who, zombie-like, will invade his land, take over, steal him blind and fridge his wife and daughter. Compare that with an immigrant from Central America who's dealing with crop failures and increasingly dangerous gangs who want to either induct or kill her pre-teen son, so she hops the top of a freight train ("the beast") to go north into Mexico, looking for a safer life, ideally in the US. That whole drama plays out a few miles from me everyday, where people who are genuinely afraid for their lives deal with our pointlessly cruel immigration service, while armed civilian preppers patrol the desert and threaten illegal border crossers, reportedly destroy water caches left to keep immigrants from dying in the desert, and so forth. One group is a prepper, the other is an immigrant. They're both afraid for their lives, but the threats they face are rather different, and so are their responses. I may well be wrong, but I don't think a majority of preppers would do all that well if transported to Central America and put in the place of the people who are choosing to come north for asylum. That's why I want to point to the element of unreality in prepping, rather than elements of fear and repression that are quite common.
"reportedly destroy water caches left to keep immigrants from dying in the desert"
This suggests that it might be an interesting experiment to wait until they get out of their truck to do this and then sneak up on it from the other side and put nails in the tyres, or goop in the fuel tank or whatever, to see how well they cope themselves without mechanisation.
They make me think of people who have spent too much time reading things like "Day of the Triffids" and imagining themselves as one of the bands of armed arseholes who are roaming the country after the catastrophe. Like the games we all played as kids pretending to be characters out of our favourite shows and series etc. (or people like them) before our mums gave us our tea (produced by industrial agriculture) and we went to bed (made in a factory and used in a house). The Outlaw experience, in the Just William sense.
groups that actually are in harms' way
Up here it's common to get the combo, because as soon as you go into a rural or semi-rural area you're also going into an area that will burn. If you don't prepare for the latter you will be left with a smoking ruin and the neighbours will probably laugh at you, if you survive. There is considerable social pressure to be part of the fire prep group, for obvious reasons.
I have one friend who is a "civilisation will fall" climate catastrophe type, but who also has a refuge that is somewhat fire resistant. It's not what I would have built, or him either for that matter, he inherited it from his father who built it as a holiday home. But it has been modified for survivability even when there is civil unrest. Sadly it is also in a bad place for farming, but it does have a surprising number of fruit trees (and as a consequence quite a lot of readily available meat).
Greg @493, Charlie@489,
Advertising is older than that. It was around in the ancient world. Here's a gratuitous dick pic pointing the way to a Pompeii brothel:
https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/history-advertising-no-142-pompeii-penis/1357977
What was missing was mass media and joint stock companies to advertise on a large scale. It's interesting to speculate on the ephemera like handbills or jingles which wouldn't have survived, and wouldn't have been considered noteworthy by ancient historians.
Yep, in my semi-flammable suburban home, I've got many of the same issues. Unfortunately, I don't get a lot of animals coming in (too far from the wildlands) so I don't have many opportunities for meat.
The good news is that being more independent is actually not a stupid way to prep for climate change. If you can ride out uncertainties in utility, food, and medical supplies with comparative ease, you're better off than if you're living paycheck to paycheck and utterly at the mercy of whatever's available right now.
I've seen an amusing picture of a screen mounted on the back of an aircraft seat, displaying not whatever it's supposed to but instead a Linux boot log that hasn't made it past fsck. Tux in the top right corner and all.
Major software... of course with some really major software it's the Windows version rather than the Linux that is missing or an afterthought. The kind of stuff that for much of its existence hasn't had to consider Windows because nothing powerful enough to handle the package used it.
Desktops an' shit... no desktop here. I use fluxbox as WM; I get to move and resize windows and stuff, and I get a menu to launch stuff from ("xterm" being the most used entry), but no gigantic pile of bloat just to let me do those things that also does fuck only knows what else as well that I can't even imagine (at least I presume it does; all that code must be for something, surely...?) and fights me all the way to Evesham when I try and change bits of system gubbins like the network configuration and such.
Office type stuff I prefer the smaller non-"suite" applications like abiword etc. These days they manage fine opening the occasional Microsoft-format document sent to me by someone who doesn't know any better, and again it means I don't have a huge wobbly bloated thing to do loads of stuff I don't want anyway (although it does annoy me that everything does lug around the bloat of spelling checker functionality and dictionaries in its package dependencies). Email is mutt; HTML email is evil and is only used as a malware vector anyway, so the inherent inability to parse it is more and more of an advantage the stronger that correlation gets.
I've heard it argued that "the" major change in advertising came about once newspapers and the ability to read them had become widespread, and was a shift from informing people of sources of familiar kinds of things that they are naturally likely to want ("to get your leg over follow the dick"), to informing people that something-or-other is something they should want (and here's a source). And from there we naturally progressed to the state where "But Muuuum I want one like Johnny's got" is considered an appropriate base philosophy for life as an adult.
You don't even have to be from Texas. Oklahoma works fine. (My father was an Okie, and could put the accent back on, even after 30 years away.) The most interesting use for bob war I saw was at an arts-and-crap show in Texas, where someone had nice ceramic teapots with wire wrapped around the body of the pot - or used as the handle. Several strands, in both cases. (Grab that one the wrong way, and you'd wake up really, really fast.)
In a container, which is loaded on a truck or train...and has a timing device set to blow up at some time days after it's offloaded, by which time it's hundred or thousands of miles away from the port.
Not necessary running red lights in the sense of "going through without stopping". Many stop first and wait until traffic is clear, because they don't want to wait even a few more seconds for the light to change. (In one case, it was a vehicle from the company I'd worked for. Couldn't get its number, or I'd have reported it.)
I've been sent online survey where I'd run into a question where none of the available answers fit, and they had no "other" or "none of the above" option. So I just quit and deleted the email.
Some school districts in the US require students to get and submit homework via computer, and parents are supposed to schedule meetings that way also. Which ignores things like people with no computers, or with little or no internet access, or without smartphones. Assumptions should be checked against reality.
"Southernisms" reminds me of a Redd Fox performance where he explained that black people talked funny because they learned english from southern whites.
Two thoughts. One is that if you're going to the trouble of smuggled nuke in a cargo container, go to the trouble of putting some good GPS antennas camouflaged into the countainer, and set it to trigger, not at a particular time, but at a particular location. Remember also that it's likely to fizzle if it takes too long to get to its location. A state sponsored traitor can do anything this way: nuclear attack, chemical attack (unit sprays sarin as the truck goes through built-up areas, perhaps), biological attack (spray the virus of your choice in built-up areas), etc (although I'm not sure what "etc." would be--GPS jammers? Stingrays? faux-billionaire political candidates that are shipped shrink-wrapped from a factory?)
The other thought is that there's a really useful place for a Q-ship formatted as a cargo ship: places like the Sunda Strait, the South China Sea, or even the Red Sea. Have a clandestine crew from, say, the PLA Navy that could do anything from anti-piracy (off the Somali Coast) to trade interdiction (in Indonesian or Philippine waters) or similar. Having something that looks like a giant slow boat with a bunch of cargo containers start launching all sorts of boxed munitions would really make for a bad day for someone, worse somewhere like the Singapore strait or off the coast of Los Angeles.
Of course, if you really wanted to cause trouble with cargo ships, stage a nonviolent strike wherein a large number of cargo ships simply don't arrive until certain conditions are met. In our just-in-time world, this would rapidly cause chaos.
"although I'm not sure what "etc." would be - GPS jammers? Stingrays? faux-billionaire political candidates that are shipped shrink-wrapped from a factory?"
Rat and mouse eggs. With glue on, so they stick to things high up where people don't notice them, then after the truck is long gone they hatch and the rats and mice fall to the ground and start infesting things etc. The mice can plug themselves into people's computers and upload viruses and the rats can eat the data cables so nobody can download fixes except via the hooky wireless points you put in a different truck.
I find the questions are engineered to force you to return a favourable response when what you really want to communicate is that whatever it's about is a piece of shit. They all relate to aspects of the whatever which are either irrelevant, or are basically more or less at least OK enough that I certainly don't want them to get the idea they're deficient and start "improving" them (ie. fucking them up). They carefully avoid having any questions that have any useful connection with the unsatisfactory bits. Sometimes there's an "anything else" text box but since you can't process that automatically to make pretty presentations I very much doubt they do anything with it except pick a few of the most complimentary submissions to put on the "look how brilliant we are" section of their website. As far as the data which I actually expect to use is concerned, the only way I can avoid returning a result which is generally positive is to mark stuff negatively no matter what I really think of it, which is pointless in terms of communicating the real problems and risks inciting them to fuck up stuff that is better left untouched.
There have also been too many instances of trogging through the whole thing and then getting some stupid error when I finally submit it that I no longer believe it's worked even if it hasn't reported an error. Experience with stupid website errors in general suggests that dropping form submission errors on the floor is an increasingly popular practice, and false success reports on something that actually failed are not unknown.
So basically I ignore them all entirely these days...
I've been sent online survey where I'd run into a question where none of the available answers fit
My local council has learned no to do that, because it just leads to council meetings where people ask for explanations. These days I have a pet councillor but for a while I would just turn up in person and when there was an opportunity or just a pause I would ask about it. The gap between the expectations of the elected people 'a voter has gone to the effort of attending our meeting because of this problem' and the employees 'computers are hard' is interesting to watch.
That only works one or twice, then they decide you're a habitual nit-picker with too much time on your hands. Or worse, someone who should be persuaded to stand for election since you obviously care and have the time available...
OTOH, my detailed submission on bicycle infrastructure in response to their survey was completely ignored until I turned up at a meeting to demand answers. Then (one of?) the councillor(s) who had instigated the survey and cared about the responses started asking really pointed questions starting from the premise "if we don't accept the answers we actually get we have wasted all the time and money that went into asking people to tell us what they think".
I am currently waiting to see what my new council (I moved) does about my volunteer efforts. When I pruned an overgrown path and left the prunings in an obvious place they cleaned them up after a couple of days but then a week later sent a crew in to do it properly. I was impressed.
But I have just improved some bicycle infrastructure and I am very curious to see whether they return it to its previous state or decide that they will remediate* similar infrastructure to bring it in line with the Australian and NSW standards.
screen mounted on the back of an aircraft seat, displaying not whatever it's supposed to but instead a Linux boot log
One flight as we were taxiing out to the runway the flight safety video was playing but without sound. Near the end the flight attendants noticed and thus began a very hurried flight safety LIVE demo. There are RULES about this must be done and parking the plane at the end of the runway while the demo went on would have gotten someone in hot water.
... they tell their Party members, who also work in upper management, to give orders ...
If middle management, much less upper management, starts giving orders about where to load particular items the crew is going to be paying a lot of attention to those things and gossiping about them. That's fine for a one-time event, particularly one that doesn't have to stay secret for more than a week or two.
Note that there are general rules, such as "reefer containers need to be stacked such that the vents aren't blocked." That's not the same thing.
Although now that I think of it, it would be handy to build a hypothetical missile-sneaking launcher as a reefer, both for the power connection and some hope the box won't be buried on all six sides. Writers take note.
Actually, even in the 1950s and 1960s, there were some people predicting (and I mean doing so in engineering terms, not SF) and even working on enabling technologies for things like smartphones. I agree that it was probably true for people not in the advanced IT area.
Make that the 1930s, though, and your point stands as written, even for the specialists!
It's a really bad idea to put your smuggled nuke in a shipping container if there's any chance of it being offloaded at a port, as the 2010 Genoa incident demonstrated. (Which happened a decade ago: you bet they're much more on the ball for such threats today.)
Actual nuclear weapons are probably harder to detect than random piles of radioactive scrap metal, but nevertheless, you don't want to risk detection.
Possibly the best place for your container ship to lurk: the Ghost Fleet off Singapore (sorry about the DM link: seems to be the original article) is huge during recessions and I gather it persists even when times are good. And the other spot would be the zero-zero location off the west coast of Africa where badly-configured GPS systems all decide they live. As most ships these days broadcast their location via a satellite transponder, that particular patch of ocean is chock full of spurious ghost ships (and aircraft, and trucks!), so anything sitting there is going to be ignored by default.
The pre-flight safety dance happens in a very specific manner, and every stage of the dance is choreographed that way because of an incident in which lives were lost.
(I confess to ignoring it most of the time on my regular shuttle -- EDI-AMS via KLM -- but my excuse is that unless they change the airliner model on that sector, I've sat through it 50-100 times before and could probably recite it from memory if my memory was anything other than spectacularly shit.)
I find the seatback entertainment screens an interesting phenomenon, demonstrating how entertainment technology is outrunning civil aviation design/certification cycles.
In the old days: projection TV screen for in-flight movies. Then a tube TV overhead in each cabin section. Purpose: to distract the canned primates and keep them from moving around/being a nuisance/panicking in-flight.
That worked until the late 90s/early 00s when decent flat screens began to become available. Suddenly in the mid to late 00s, every seat headrest sprouted a screen ... at around the time that every traveller also sprouted a power-guzzling laptop or netbook, and had a phone (utterly forbidden in flight).
The seatback screens were typically Windows CE machines sitting on an ethernet backbone. ARM hardware, because airliners are power-constrained (at least when it comes to powering 150-500 extra computers), and a file server to stream movies to the seats. (Advantages: you're streaming from a video library with pause/rewind, rather than a bank of videocassettes as used to be the case. Saves a stunning amount of weight on something the size of a 747 or even an A330.)
But then people began to bring their own tablets, which are generally much better for entertainment (because -- who knew? -- a centrally curated, censored-for-public-display-in-front-of-kids, library of Hollywood pablum doesn't really satisfy most customers).
So the next step was to add seatback mains power (only about 50 watts per seat and most people don't even know it's there), and lately seatback USB power at 0.5A, because rollout of USB seatback power was designed before fast-charge became a thing.
And now we also have satellite internet in flight (for a fee, of course), and you can actually get work done in an airliner seat (if you've got the elbow room), and while they don't let you stream movies over the shared-between-200-pax satellite data link, that's obviously the next step (look at Starlink's bandwidth claims).
I see a final stage coming in about a decade: the mains and USB-A sockets will go away, replaced by a single USB-C socket, supplying up to 60 watts of juice and a bunch of data connections (notably, ethernet-over-USB to the airliner's file server loaded with movies, but also ethernet to the satellite router, to take the load off the in-cabin wifi mesh). And the headrest screens will go away, replaced by a mounting frame you can slot or clip your own device to, or rent a dumb screen from the cabin crew if you don't have a device to watch.
(Taking out the seatback displays will probably save about 100-300kg per airliner, so that's a win.)
Upshot: a time traveler from the 1960s would wonder what the odd plastic extrusions on the back of the headrests were for, and where the projection screen has gone. And then they'd notice everyone else was glued to the flickering glow of a magic mirror ...
Many front-rank navies have or used to have a merchant marine, right?
If I was an Evil Dictator™ working up to one of these schemes, I'd of course be running a nation with a navy, and probably conscription.
Given a 10 year lead time, I'd set up a training pipeline: take the best/most effective sailors, give them training in non-military aspects of seamanship by rotating them onto fleet auxiliaries, oilers, supply ships, and so on, and also put them through political indoctrination (and monitoring, to reject the intractable/cynical ones).
Then, when their term of enlistment is up, select the most suitable and quietly offer them a deal: come to work for EvilCo's employment agency, as a merchant sailor, and in addition go on the "inactive reserve" navy list, and draw pay from both -- in return for an unspecified future commitment to put in a month a year full-time national service. Then turn them loose to work as civilian ship crews (with the added bonus play, plus a really aggressive approach to employers who forget to pay their crew, strand them overseas, etc).
(Expect some losses along the way -- folks retire, get married, settle down -- but even after a decade many of them will still be active, and it doesn't take many hands to operate a modern container ship as long as they're experienced hands.)
When the time comes, my small privately-owned freight company is going to find it remarkably easy to recruit experienced merchant seamen who also have military training and know how to keep their yaps shut. Bonuses all round, then: for the glory of the fatherland!
Many front-rank navies have or used to have a merchant marine, right?
Hell yes, this.
It used to be that certain governments (he said, eyeing the five sided asylum near Washington) ran actual cargo ships, until that got dumped onto private enterprise. I hardly have to bring up the trend of privatizing government functions here, nor the failure modes of that. Once upon a time some vessels were even designed for Q-ship conversion, should the need arise. Or so I understand - there's obvious advantages in people thinking such things are out there somewhere, unobserved, no matter how many may actually exist.
That's yet another way this caper can be run.
As an ongoing mission it's better to be an intelligence gathering ship. Do it too often and everyone will be making jokes about Russian fishing trawlers...
Some of us already do make jokes about Russian "fishing boats", and about letters of marque.
I've seen an amusing picture of a screen mounted on the back of an aircraft seat, displaying not whatever it's supposed to but instead a Linux boot log
https://www.flickr.com/photos/13168692@N00/8587049931
First, thanks for that article. I'd avoided Wired for years, since they stopped giving access to the online version as part of the written version. It's nice to be reminded that they actually occasionally had a good article.
Unfortunately, that good article noted twice that the radiation detectors at ports would be really bad at finding nuclear weapons, most of which actually aren't as radioactive as the chunk of cobalt that caused such a headache in Genoa.
Be that as it may, weaponizing shipping containers is either about loosing some sort of WMD hell (presumably using pathogens), a terrorist incident, or disrupting global trade for some good reason.
Actually, if you wanted to unleash a pandemic, becoming an uber driver and spiking your car with your pathogen on the drive to the major airport would be a lot simpler than outfitting a cargo container to release the virus across the world. And unless the goal was to disrupt global container trade, having containers randomly explode isn't all that useful. I see from the article that everyone's worried about the multi-billion dollar cleanup from a dirty bomb in a city, but again, that's terrorism, not warfare. If it's a hot war, the dirty bomb would add misery, not slow down the war.
The hard part of a container nuke is that you've got a nuke in a box. How long will it last without maintenance, what do you do with it, and what do you do if it's discovered? Ideally from a warfare perspective, you want something that will sit undetected in an enemy's port that you can set off on command, destroying the port without warning. That would require a weapon that can sit around for years and still be dangerous on command, that can't be accidentally detonated, and won't be accidentally discovered. The last is a real problem, because if one of your cached bombs is discovered, the gig is very definitely up, and you're faced with some bad choices about detonating and starting a shooting war, or not detonating, letting the technology fall into enemy hands, and dealing with the (hopefully purely diplomatic) fallout. Sending a missile screaming in with 20 minutes notice seems a bit more controllable.
As for Q-ships, I did a bit of Wikipedia reading. Apparently they weren't all that useful in WW1 or WW2, at least compared with things like minefields. I could see a container ship set up for Q, not to transport nuclear missiles, but possibly for cruise missiles and definitely for armaments that launch laterally. This is probably my ignorance speaking, but I could see a ship that used a bunch of repurposed containers on the bottom level to hold armaments (missiles, chain guns, whatever) and a bracing infrastructure to hold several layers of normal containers above it. The vessel would be partly reloaded at each port (everything above the disguised weapons decks would be real containers), so that it wasn't too conspicuous.
The uses for such a system are pretty minimal. I suppose, if there were world war style unrestricted submarine warfare or rampant lethal piracy, Q-ships would be handy, or if you wanted to make shipping lanes impassable by shooting at everything that passed you, road rage style, then a Q-ship might be good. But there are better traditional solutions for all of that, from convoying (yes, I'm sure container ships could convoy pretty well, given how big they are...), to anti-ship missiles and purpose-built, fast corvettes and frigates for anti-piracy work.
And there's also the problem of building a Q ship without anyone noticing. That would kind of limit Q ships to countries that normally make container ships. That would be....let's see...China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia (per Wikipedia's list of biggest shipbuilders in 2016). Oh my.
It's kind of a cool idea looking for a realistic use. But it's a fun idea to play with.
Thinking about it a bit more, if I wanted to use container ships to disrupt trade with an enemy, I'd simply flag them for my country and make sure the captain and crew were loyal citizens (this is actually hard, and making sure they don't stand out might be even harder).
Anyway, assuming these issues get solved, I could cause real economic damage simply by ordering loyal ships to stop their cruises to enemy ports and to instead sail for the nearest loyal port. Imagine all the Chinese container ships steaming from China to the US turning around and heading back to China. Hard on Chinese companies, but even harder on the US. And beyond assuring the loyalty of the crew, there would be no need to alter the ship at all to use this tactic.
That's the most realistic idea I've come up with so far.
If you wanted to go even more Honor Harrington than usual, I suppose you could rig a Q/Container ship to be the mothership for a shark swarm of small unmanned fast boats. I'm not sure how you get the swarm into or out of the water from a container vessel, or how you maintain cover. Unmanned minisubs launched from torpedo tubes and retrieved through a moon pool? Still, for (anti-)piracy or harbor protection, a container ship hull might not be the stupidest solution available. If Japan had to rearm in a hurry, I could see them going for something like this.
Unfortunately, I feel like I'm reinventing the USS Akron as a ship. It's still a cool idea in search of a realistic mission.
The last is a real problem, because if one of your cached bombs is discovered, the gig is very definitely up, and you're faced with some bad choices about detonating and starting a shooting war, or not detonating, letting the technology fall into enemy hands, and dealing with the (hopefully purely diplomatic) fallout.
Any country discovering your bombs on their territory will consider it an act of war — it's going to be very difficult to walk that back. So the moment you start deploying these, you have committed to a nuclear war1, just one at some indeterminate future date.
We've already seen Charlie's take on this.
1I do presume you're doing this to another nuclear state, granted. But if your target wasn't another nuclear state, I can't imagine the actual ones not getting extremely unhappy at it too, because why would they think you've not done it to them too.
Doubleplus good Doctor Strangelove reference, but a very dubious misunderstanding of decay half-life (and indeed of isotopes: also "Cobalt Thorium G" is not a thing that exists outside of a movie script).
I do presume you're doing this to another nuclear state, granted. But if your target wasn't another nuclear state, I can't imagine the actual ones not getting extremely unhappy at it too, because why would they think you've not done it to them too.
And for added lulz, how do you satisfactorily prove to a frightened, angry, nuclear-armed state that you haven't planted nuclear landmines in their big cities?
As a tactic it begins to make the Russian Poseidon Torpedo look reasonable (and Poseidon/Status-6 is very not reasonable indeed when you stop to think about it).
As a young Second Lieutenant on my Platoon Commander’s course, we spent a week on exercise on Salisbury Plain, merrily digging and getting as suitably muddy and frozen as a January course at the School of Infantry would suggest (Mario from Gibraltar had never even seen snow before, two days in and he was wearing everything he’d carried). Every 12 hours for a day or two, as we did a frequency change, we would wait for the inevitable as the Soviet trawler fleet would change frequencies to follow us, and we’d have to listen as Russian chatter filled our ears. Gits.
So, Soviet “fishing trawlers” were certainly an active part of their ELINT setup (when I worked on radars in Edinburgh, their presence in Granton or Leith harbours affected our ability to transmit).
I’d also take a good look at oil industry. Those rig legs are nicely submersible, and by definition planted in an area of high economic value... In the 1970s/80s, the SBS apparently lost a lot of their dive-trained SF operators to the rock-star wages being offered by the oil companies, there’s a history of suitably trained types working offshore.
Finally, cargo airlines or private jets. Mix your WMD among hundreds of aircraft flying in and out of small airports with limited security infrastructure, with the ability to deploy and recall for maintenance...
The pre-flight safety dance happens in a very specific manner, and every stage of the dance is choreographed that way because of an incident in which lives were lost.
Trust me I know. I'm the almost commuter flyer remember? Airlines track delays. SOMEONE is always responsible. Pilots many times will take the hit as they can say safety or whatever. Others get dinged as not being up to standards.
I do pull out the seat card to make sure I remember how to open the doors/windows. (Current 737-800 windows pull then push / doors left on the handle then right. A3xx doors up then to the right / windows I don't remember.)
As to power and seat back screens. It is a total pain for the airlines. They hate it because it adds weight and maintenance headaches. But it is a competitive thing.
AA and Delta are currently in a PR battle. AA says we give free WITHIN the airplane WiFI and access to all of our movies, TV, music etc..., and there are a LOT, for you to watch on your device. Delta says they are committed to displays on the backs of screen. I think United is mostly watching to see which works out better. Seat back screens tend to be ancient tech by most standards and the headphone jacks tend to be broken a LOT. Seat power is also problematic. Many of the sockets have been used so much that main power and usb plugs fall out due to the plane vibrations. And as my wife has noted, not everyone is comfortable reaching down around the legs of strangers to plug cables into holes they can't see and aren't sure of the orientation. And if the power is in the seat back it is even more prone to being too loose and the cable/adapter falling out.
Add in concerns about USB malware injection and none of this is great.
And so far user experience, seat backs mostly seem like a table from 2007 while the app method in BYOD is clunky to say the least. But the BYOD gives you a better display experience most times and you get to use your Bluetooth Airbuds, Beats over the ear, or whatever.
I think the AA way of BYOD will like win out due to seat back screens just costing too much in total cost to deliver a mediocre experience. But I'm lousy at picking stocks so watch our for my predictions.
FYI I have a portable Lithion battery that is almost identical in size to my cell phone. Which is great to have when power on the plane just isn't there or not working.
And in full disclosure my wife works for a major US airline.
I've occasionally wondered about how some Red Dawn scenario would play out in real life.
Could some country load six to ten battalions of troops (including APCs, etc) onto cargo ships, then set sail under phony cargo manifests to somewhere like New Orleans? Unload the troops when they get to port, and suddenly they're occupying a major US city. What does the US government do? Start bombing the crazy country? Expect to see repercussions on millions of registered US voters. Bomb New Orleans? Aside from Tulsa, OK, when was the last time a city in a US state was attacked from the air? You'd have to go back to 1865 for the last ground-based enemy attack on US soil.
This would, of course, require a security cock-up on the US side that would make Pearl Harbour and 9/11 look like nothing in comparison. It would also require a national death-wish that would make Paraguay's leaders in the War of the Triple Alliance look like wise statesmen.
This is already happening on some carriers. I know a bunch of folk skipping American ATM coz while they don't have screens, they don't have the power needed to keep the BYOD folk running for the flight time yet ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The problem with prepping is not the "unreality" so much as the poor threat analysis. I think it was Heinlein who observed that based on the population movements and wars of the 20th Century that it was about 50 percent likely that the place you live will suffer a terrible displacement (of some kind) once in your lifetime.
So the idea of "prepping" is not necessarily a bad one. The problem is that preppers are concerned with a "race war" or "social collapse" or "peak oil" not with Global Warming, natural disasters, or the possibility that a hostile army will come through their neighborhood. If you're going to prep you need to take a very careful look at history and statistics and see what that territory really looks like, not allow your attempt to survive that fifty-percent-chance be damaged by your own fears.
Real prepping doesn't start with gathering food or guns. It starts with statistical analysis.
I know a bunch of folk skipping American ATM coz while they don't have screens, they don't have the power needed to keep the BYOD folk running for the flight time
Actually American (AA) does have power at each seat on the plane where the screens have been removed. But at times it doesn't work. Or your power lump will keep sliding out. Or the USB plug was fubared by an earlier passenger. Or ... But usually your seat mate will share.
But there can be issues. See my other comment.
Something to think about prepping for, infrastructure failure, with the added fun that if properties of the stupendously wealthy aren't directly threatened, repair will be delayed by the "Tax is theft!" folks. Flood control structures in a major river basin stand out, lots of working class, few country clubs and guaranteed back burner for repair.
Charlie There's a subtext in that DM article, which I don't think it's writers meant us to see ... BIG RECESSION COMING Now then ... who will be hit hardest & will it hit before or after the next US Pres-election? As for Britain will we either be one of the worst-off ( because of Brexit) or the least-affected (ditto) & I can't tell which.
Problem with that marine drone swarm Range. Oh & length of time remaining operable. Yes, I know ... "mothership" & all that, but you are going to have maintence & resupply issues, same as everybody else.
Martin @ 559 Why didn't someone simply aim a VERY high-power narrow microwave beam at said "trawlers" to fry their electronics?
whitroth @ 427: I have a lot simpler and quieter answer: I pull out my electric mulching mower, after most of the leaves are down, and mow. 85%, at least, of the leaves are shredded, and stay where they are, putting nutrients *bacK* into the soil, instead of taking it away when the locality collects the leaves.
https://www.beliefnet.com/inspiration/2004/04/did-god-create-lawns.aspx
My "lawn", such as it is, is whatever "God" (or Dog or whatever) decided to put there. It's mostly green, but I don't think it's grass. Grass doesn't have little round leaves does it? Lots of little pink, blue and yellow flowers in the spring and early summer. Doesn't require a lot of cutting, maybe twice a month if it's a rainy summer. When it does I've got a bagging lawn-mower & all the cuttings go into a compost bin (cube about 3 ft on a side w/quarter-inch hardware cloth sides & back).
It's actually three cubes side by side. This year's cuttings are all in one cube, with the residue of the prior years in the other two. At some point I'll run all of last year's compost through my chipper/shredder and move it to the cube on the left to join with the last 40 years of compost, then chip/shred the current year's crop and move it to the center cube so I can start afresh in the cube on the right with whatever clippings I accumulate in 2020. By the time I harvest the compost it's like that expensive "organic topsoil" they sell in bags at Garden Centers.
I also use the chipper/shredder to chop up whatever tree limbs & brushy residue that's too small to bother with cutting into lengths for firewood. Larger limbs, anything bigger than about 2-1/2 inches in diameter, I cut to fit my wood stove. The chippings go into the compost as well.
The lawn mower is only a couple years old because I couldn't find a replacement frame to rebuild the 15 year old cheap Lowe's or Home Depot model on. The chipper/shredder is a close to 38 year-old Troy-Bilt Super Tomahawk & I can still get parts for it. Which is good, 'cause they don't build them like that any more. I've only had to rebuild it twice, both times for failed bearings, but the manufacturer used a standard size bearing that's still manufactured today.
whitroth @ 428:
Really? I read, a couple years ago, that hedge funds were paying to keep tanker ships full of oil out in the ocean, to keep the price up, and we're talking in the last 10-12 years.
You don't think there's one in a hundred ships coming from China that don't have containers, and people on the ships who would use the containers?
And in that case... there are no defenses. Fire 'em from just offhore, and they're at their targets in less time than an ICBM.
Have you ever looked at the way container ships are loaded? There's no need to pack cruise missiles in a container when you can just have the containers with the nukes inside unloaded at some port and pay a trucking company to deliver them to the target cities. It's the most reliable way to deliver the weapons on target I can think of.
All you'd need to do is figure a way to fiddle the exit scans. Considering the many ways drugs get smuggled into the U.S. that shouldn't be too hard.
whitroth @ 429: Trust me, there are huge fights over zoning.
If you haven't read it, may I recommend a book from the sixties, written by the city planner Robert Moses' mortal enemy, Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Mixed-usage zoning/housing is a Great Thing. Single-use zoning sucks dead Republican roaches.
https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/
SFReader @ 448: Or do you want all gov't departments FEMAnized?
Bit late to worry about that under THIS "administration". It's already been done.
Charlie Stross @ 458: Flip side of underground cities: less fossil fuel use by commuters, but agriculture is still top-side and vulnerable. (Underground hydroponics/vertical farming won't work without a really efficient lighting technology: we can do it today with LED/lasers, but in the 1950s/1960s waste heat would be a huge problem, and so would electricity consumption.)
So your cities are safe (FSVO "safe"), and might even be plausibly protected in the ICBM age by ABM systems, but the agricultural districts that supply them are vulnerable -- specifically to attack by Cobalt bombs (originally hypothesized in 1950 by Szillard). With a ~5.3 year half-life could plausibly fuck up agriculture for decades (not to mention the rest of the biosphere). Yes, there are remediation processes: but nothing that could generally decontaminate an entire nation's croplands within a year or two. (A working cobalt bomb really could be a doomsday weapon insofar as if you survive the war you are forced to grow and eat highly radioactive food for years afterwards.)
That sort of reminds me of the passage from the Bible where Joseph (he of Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat fame) becomes an adviser to the Pharoh of Egypt by interpreting his dream and warning him that Egypt will have seven FAT years followed by seven years of famine allowing them to store up enough food to get through the lean times.
I'm guessing that underground cities might have been accompanied by putting different emphasis into the Federal Government's existing farm support programs; buying up surplus agricultural products to keep prices up and turned them into a hedge against such an attack. It would have replaced paying farmers NOT to plant with paying them to plant extra that could be stockpiled against future need. Eventually I can see unused stockpiles being used to bolster various Food for Peace diplomatic programs as they're reaching the end of their "shelf life".
How many decades of food would the U.S. need to have stockpiled to survive until they could go back to surface farming? I'm also thinking the need for "hydroponics/vertical farming" might spur intensive development of really efficient lighting technology. What would DARPA be doing?
And wouldn't the real threat that the fallout would spread beyond the U.S. and make their own farms radioactive be a bit of a deterrent?
Any country discovering your bombs on their territory will consider it an act of war
IIRC, this plot has already been used:
The Rithian Terror Damon Knight 1953
paws4thot @ 460: Osprey, like every other VTO aircraft even hypothesized other than some strike fighter designs, is not capable of M1.0; the blast wave from most nukes is!
You don't have to outrun the mach wave. Enola Gay & Bockscar didn't. You just have to be far enough away that your aircraft is sturdy enough to to survive the buffeting when the wave overtakes you.
Also "Project Nightmare" by Heinlein, where the key to defeating this is a good corps of psionic operatives to suppress the fission.
"Why didn't someone simply aim a VERY high-power narrow microwave beam at said "trawlers" to fry their electronics?"
Easier said than done... the transmitting ship would have to be "next door" in marine terms and they'd know immediately what had happened, or if they didn't the repair technicians back home would.
Politically, it's just easier to know they're doing it and pretend you don't than it is to try and blow their shit up every time they take the piss or else it'd just be one diplomatic incident after another...
Real prepping doesn't start with gathering food or guns. It starts with statistical analysis.
I think we agree on most points, and are now arguing about who won the agreement.
Statistics analysis, though, doesn't work for rare but devastating events. That's the whole point of black swan theory. The two problems with statistical analysis are a) that it relies on past events, so new threats (like AI) or changes in baseline (like climate change) are difficult to analyze. The hundred year flood statistic for infrastructure standards is an example of how a statistical standard (the three deviations from mean) becomes utterly insufficient when the baseline moves and the engineers do not.
In any case, statistics will tell you to not prepare for disasters, since almost all of the time you won't have to deal with them. Most of the time this works, but the consequences of this strategy failing can be monumental.
However, you're absolutely right that many preppers are guilty of crappy threat assessment. That's why I focused on what they feared, as opposed to being fearful of threats. But you're equally right in that regard.
I always always ALWAYS fly with a booster battery that's good for the entire duration of the flight plus 50%, and also a mains charger for use in the lounge that can top up the battery and my mobile device(s). And with two devices I can get at in flight in case one of them crashes hard and bricks itself.
(This isn't necessarily heavy: I'm talking about a 6"-size iPhone in an Apple extended battery case as primary, plus an iPad mini as secondary -- in economy the mini is about as big as I can go: the phone is more convenient -- plus headphones, a really skinny mains plug and cable, and a spare battery that can drive the cable or suck from the wall-wart. The iPad plus spare battery and charger adds about 500-600 grams to what I normally carry walking around town, and this has saved my ass from extreme boredom several times over the past year, when I've been on trains that got stuck with 4-8 hour delays, and a flight that ended up getting me to my destination 12 hours late. The mains plug helped, but at a pinch I could have done the trips on battery power alone -- I've had train carriages and airliner rows with no working power sockets -- and I always arrived with roughly 30-70% charge remaining on the phone.)
Greg: the DM article was published in 2009.
Fruit trees make meat available? Please explain.
Unless you mean friggin' rrrrabbitsssss
I think the Daily Mail Ghost Fleet article was from 2009, so, erm, the recession did happen. Ghost Fleet in 2019 is an entirely different story.
Frankly, I think the shipping-container-of-instant-sunshine is obsolescent in first-strike terms these days.
I already posted the Slaughterbots video, but in case you didn't have 8 minutes to watch it, here's the wikipedia summary: The dramatization, seven minutes in length, is set in a Black Mirror-style near future. Small, palm-sized autonomous drones using facial recognition and shaped explosives can be programmed to seek out and eliminate known individuals or classes of individuals (such as individuals wearing an enemy military uniform). A tech executive pitches that nuclear weapons are now "obsolete": a $25 million order of "unstoppable" drones can kill half a city. As the video unfolds, the technology get re-purposed by unknown parties to assassinate political opponents, from sitting congressmen to student activists identified via their Facebook profiles. In one scene, the swarming drones coordinate with each other to gain entrance to a building: a larger drone blasts a hole in a wall to give access to smaller ones.
Note that the slaughterbots -- which weigh about 100 grams each and have a range of maybe 500-1000 metres -- can be delivered in cassette-like containers and batched up into multi-ton payloads that can be tipped out of the back of a transport aircraft or launched from a container on a truck. But because they're small (and not radioactive!) they can be infiltrated piecemeal disguised as shipments of consumer electronics -- e.g. toy drones for the retail market. How many millions of legit, real drones are sold in the USA every year at this end of the decade? The only distinguishing characteristic of a slaughterbot is the ~3 gram shaped charge, which could be shipped separately and integrated on enemy territory by the delivery crew, and the firmware (which is opaque to customs inspectors).
Alas, I fear that they're not going to be used in warfare: more likely to be used in "police actions" by authoritarian governments against their own citizens. Indeed, I reckon my chances of being killed by a slaughterbot are already higher than my chances of being killed by a nuclear weapon, and rising steadily.
Advertising...
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/dec/23/advertising-breaks-your-spirit-the-french-cities-trying-to-ban-public-adverts
Moz is Australian. I think they're talking about 'roos (which share many characteristics with rabbits, but are an order of magnitude bigger).
"but the manufacturer used a standard size bearing that's still manufactured today."
They usually do; even if it doesn't have a number on it it usually turns out to be a standard size when you measure it. Like bolt sizes or resistors, the easiest way of doing things is just to design around the standard sizes to begin with.
Thing with lawns though is who the fuck decided that if there is grass in front of your house you have to regularly mutilate it? It's not like its natural growth pattern leads to it producing poisonous stingers or anything if you don't keep stopping it. All it produces is beneficial stuff like bird food and cover for wee beasties to live in, and it's surely better to allow that than keep on wasting energy trying to prevent it.
One thing that got missed is that you can't just grab a US President, throw him in the back seat of a supersonic jet on 60 seconds notice on the south lawn of the White House, hit the afterburners, and outrun a nuclear blast.
Some of the problems:
--The F-35B could take off from the back lawn of the White House, but it's a single seater. V-22s are kinda slow for the mission (and I live near Miramar, so I have thunderchickens flying over my place quite frequently. Even got to go inside one at the air show). Anyway, unless there's a VTOL supersonic multi-seater among the Pentagon's crown jewels, or someone's figured out how to make a supersonic, two-seater sea plane that take off from the Potomac, there's no vehicle that can fly this mission. --Also, I don't think it's very good for an older gentleman to pull high gees without a flight suit, and I don't think there will be time for him to suit up before he gets dumped in the back seat and takes off with full afterburner. A woman president could presumably do this while wearing heels (/sarcasm), but the point is that scraping Presidential forcemeat off the back seat of the plane that was supposed to evacuate him safely probably isn't kosher. So to speak.
Well, the real heavy-duty software is on mainframes (too many people think they've gone the way of an 8088....) I suspect some of the big players, like Quicken, or Peachtree, or Adobe, are afraid that it will be too easy to make illegal copies of their sortware (hah, hah, hah).
200% agreement: HTML email is malware spreader, which is why, though I use t-bird, I have it set to display as plain text.
Great fun - I was amused, a couple years ago, at the US IRS allegedly sending Important Email from Brazil (according to the link).
Charlie Stross @ 468: You don't want a CVN for that job, you want a Marine Corps amphibious assault ship. IIRC the US Navy has about twice as many amphibious assault ships as nuclear fleet carriers. They're specialized carriers -- they have flight decks and can fly F-35Bs, and are bigger than almost any other navy's largest carriers -- but they're really optimized for helicopters (lots and lots of helicopters compared to a regular aircraft carrier) and can also handle boats, hovercraft, and amphibious vehicles via a well deck. They also come with berths for up to 2000 marines (or other passengers) which is exactly what you want if you're evacuating DC.
Neither the CVN nor the Landing Ship Dock ideas seem so good to me. Kind of a "putting all your eggs in one one basket" problem.
I'd suggest a fleet of Boeing 777, Boeing 787 or Airbus 300 airliners (even the old 737s) dispersed to multiple airfields in the Washington, DC area - BWI, Reagan, Dulles ... Join Base Andrews, Davison AAF, Quantico MCAF (Patuxent River NAS & Langley AFB might even be close enough to be reachable if you DID build one of Musk's HyperLoops to connect them) - ready to take a significant portion of Congress and critical government workers PLUS family members and blast them out in small packets all over the country.
Spread Congress & critical government workers far and wide around the country and enough should survive to reconstitute a reasonable working democratic government in the aftermath. You wouldn't want them in large concentrations. They are already concentrated in DC & that's the problem you're trying to solve with evacuation.
Think of how messages get routed in packets on the internet so that enough pieces parts get through to reconstruct the message at the destination. Reconvene the government by smartphone after they've been scattered all over the country where no enemy can get to all of them.
It still wouldn't make nuclear war winnable, but it might make survival of the U.S. Government assured enough that the idea of attacking & decapitating the U.S. is demonstrably NOT a workable proposition and that might be a deterrent to starting such a war in the first place.
You do not want them on a timer. Suppose that something happens, and your rulers decide not to end the world?
Q ships... Not sure if I've heard of them before. Not that I didn't know about them. I think the first time I ever saw one was in a movie. They were going after pirates. The pirate ship came close... and then, blow the trumpets! Out oars, Legionnaires on deck, and, oh, yes, the part I've long visualisd when some idiot driver turns in front of me, pull the lever to bring up the bronze ramming prow from under the van, er, from under the water!
Now you're starting to sound like the rest of the environmentalists. It's forced conformity, it is! Well, actually, a mowed lawn in front is forced conformity, 1950s style, governed by everything from HOA rules to people whining about property values.
Fortunately in California you can avoid the mess by planting a drought tolerant landscaping. You can also get points by putting in a wildflower meadow. If anyone whines about the latter, tell them you're feeding the local pollinators so that they'll have good crops in their backyard gardens the next year. This generally works.
Entertainment on airplanes.... A few years ago, we were flying (cross-country?), and there was a player above every other seat.
Let's see: sunlight half-wiping the screen, which was maybe 16cm, and watching what might have been Thor on it. Yeah... but then, I can't imagine watching a movie, made for a big screen, on a mobile.
JamesPadraicR @ 509: As for the Mormons, they may have fled persecution, but were more than happy to commit their own once they were settled out west.
Which makes them different from the Puritans who settled New England, the Roman Catholics who settled Maryland or even the Anglicans of Jamestown in what way?
On Salisbury Plain?
Oh, well, you're probably too young to have been in the exercise with tanks on the Plain, around this popular band that was making a movie....
Unholyguy @ 511: I think Charlie is over indexing that this is all slavery related. I think doomsday cults are a relatively common human phenomenon and preppers are what you get when you cross a doomsday cult with America’s obsession with individualism and frontier mythology
I don't know. Pretty much every problem we have in the U.S. today is in some way related to how we dealt with (or failed to deal with) the "question" of slavery. From colonial days on down its effects ripple throughout our society.
Another off-topic or two: first, one thing that I hit a wall in writing, every time, coming up with far-future name for people, and cities, and planets that don't look or feel fake. It sometimes takes me days.
Unrelated: how's the call for ScotRef II coming? I saw Nicola called for it.
If you're worried about drones, might I recommend Ye Olde Tyme and manly art of skeet-shooting? Actually, someone seriously recommended this as anti-drone training, coupled with putting shotgunners on base patrols. Also, the USAF was testing an anti-drone shotgun load a couple of years back. It looks too complicated, and think the KISS crowd are right to focus on base guards learning how to hunt ducks as good anti-drone defense training. Also, the anti-drone shells being tested are on the market, but they're US$39/shell, while a box of 25 shotgun T shells (good for geese and swan to around 25 yards) is under $20. And yes, a shotgun is a better weapon against drones than a 9 mm pistol or an AR-15.
As for the rest, I'd suggest it's time to up the ante on dazzle camouflage. Computer vision dazzle is a thing, after all, and making targets unrecognizable to drone vision is one of those delightful Red Queen races that will keep researchers on both sides funded for years, if not decades. And heck, given the reports that software can't recognize dark faces due to problems with their training sets, I think we've actually got a socially acceptable use for black-face makeup...
Various - I can't do a soft kill on an EW vessel with a One Hundred KiloWatt 0.8 degree primary beam radar. I don't much like anyone else's chances either!
A certain DW has already produced "space going" aircraft carriers and submarines; you think these things haven't been thought of!?
David L - You're not the only one who's use of passenger aircraft is as near to "commuting" as the security theatre cargo cultists allow.
Heteromiles - #586 : Do keep up please; We already said "actual or hypothesised SST VSTOL" Check for "plenum chamber burning Harrier" for an indication of age of concept.
Fruit trees would t attract kangaroos so much, as they tend to suppress grass, which roos eat. Fruit trees do attract lots of names I’ve birds and Australian possums. No one eats either of those, nor could possibly want to, but I think Moz was making a joke about desperate times, riffing on a theme in Frank’s comment. Also, Moz is actually from New Zealand, where Australian possums are an introduced feral pest so there is a whole other undercurrent.
I'd actually first come across the comment from South America, that the Amazonian natives liked having fruit trees around, because they brought in peccaries and other animals that could be hunted. In my part of the world, deer and rabbits going after apple trees would probably be about as much as you could expect. Since I've got three rabbits in my yard most years, I don't think this will work for more than a meal for me, even if I was a good enough shot to bag them.
This actually does point to a thing most preppers miss, one that has profound consequences: they assume they can run to the woods, and the woods will be in great shape so that they can hunt and forage the the frontiersmen did.
That might indeed happen, if the disaster they're outrunning is a human pandemic. If the problem is climate change, then no, the woods won't be full of game.
The California Indians, among many others, tended the wild. What little bounty they had (it supported thousands of them, it won't support millions of us) was the result of quite a lot of land management that favored not just plant and fungal foods for humans, but also plant and fungal foods for animals that humans hunted. They also made sure that there were homes for animals too.
We've got to do the same, if we want to keep wildlife populations up so that preppers can survive. This goes from everything to planting flowers to support pollinators to support fruit and vegetable production, to having plants that feed small caterpillars that are fed to baby birds, to providing cover for deer and other game species, so they have a place to sleep. This last is a sticky point, because land managers always favor destroying chaparral to make grasslands "for deer browse." Deer have enough food locally. They're disappearing because they have no safe brush to sleep in or give birth in.
Anyway, a big part of real prepping for the end of civilization isn't just stockpiling supplies and weapons, it's maintaining the local parks and wildlands so that, when you abandon your home, you not only know the woods you're heading into, they actually have the plants and animals you need to survive.
I don't think most preppers have thought this far ahead. I certainly don't do enough in that regard.
P J Evans @ 531: In a container, which is loaded on a truck or train...and has a timing device set to blow up at some time days after it's offloaded, by which time it's hundred or thousands of miles away from the port.
You wouldn't really want to set it off with a timer. You wouldn't be using your own ships to deliver the container (plausible deniability), so you'd redirect the "cargo" to some third country with kind of lax import/export controls and transship it on to the U.S. from there. You don't want to draw undue attention to your container (or containers), so you're going to ship them with fairly low priority. There's no telling how long they're going to sit in that third country port's storage yard until they get loaded onto a ship.
What are you going to do if the container doesn't arrive in Pearl Harbor by the 7th?
What you want is a timer that wakes up periodically to activate a passive communicator to listen for command & control instructions and then shut down again. You don't launch your attack until you know all the containers have arrived in place & have received their instructions. And maybe it turns out you don't launch your attack even then because something about the situation has changed.
I'm thinking here about the obsolete H-bomb in the Boston sewer system from The Merchant Princes series.
Plus if you didn't need to use the device or if the device needed maintenance, you could just have a trucking company pick up the container and take it back to a U.S. Port of Embarkation to load it on a ship for return to some point where you retrieve it.
For "nukes in a shipping container" none of the common carriers would need to be in on the scheme. You'd only need an agent in the Port of Entry to fiddle the incoming inspection & scan for nuclear material for your containers.
He wouldn't even have to know that's what he was fiddling. In fact, you probably wouldn't want him to know what he was really turning a blind eye to, because even the most corrupt person is unlikely to agree to set his own country up for a sneak nuclear attack. Let him think he's being paid off by drug smugglers.
Since slaughterbots got brought up, here's an anti-piracy system that might work pretty well against them: whipping, high pressure water hoses. We all know how much fun it is when a high pressure hose goes out of control and starts whipping randomly and spraying, and shippers have weaponized this as a way to defend against pirates boarding large ships, using many hoses dangling over the sides of the vessels and flailing and spraying full force. As an area-denial tool against a swarm of small drones, this one ain't bad. Plus it has the added advantage of the water shorting any drones that aren't fully water-proofed, or that get cracked when hit with a randomly flailing hose.
Yes yes, I'm sure everybody is concerned about being in a room where they deploy the hose-whips to counter the incoming slaughterbots. But heck, if you live through it, you'll have a story to tell...
More seriously, there's a range of off-the-shelf stuff that could really make a difference against slaughterbots. This includes everything from jammers to lasers, discoballs (laser on discoball would be a hellacious visual environment for systems operating on camera. Even worse if it's a dark environment and the lasers are shooting IR, so they don't affect human eyes), and strobe lights, to shotguns, to water cannon and hose-whips, to something as simple as mist-netting, possibly upgraded with more heavy-duty line (the point being that mist-netting is so hard to detect that it's used to catch birds and bats, so it will be hard for the drone to defeat). The challenge is setting up a layered defense that doesn't also incapacitate the humans caught inside the activated defense system.
This reminds me that most of the ideological background to prepping fails the categorical imperative. It doesn’t matter much which formulation, but “what if everyone did it?” is a pretty suitable one. That’s totally leaving aside the idea that wilderness is more a sort of curated biological museum with some of the management (in the USA at least, and I guess parts of Europe and Africa too) directed at supporting recreational hunting. The conflation of recreational hunting with a genuine survival strategy is probably the hardest knot to unravel in the heads of the people who have it. It doesn’t take much imagination to consider that even just 10 million people with AR-15s tramping through Yellowstone is not a recipe for sustainability.
Minor light bulb moment, though far from original: It occurs to me that macroeconomics, in the sense that we have it today, is really the application of the categorical imperative to microeconomics.
Charlie Stross @ 582: Frankly, I think the shipping-container-of-instant-sunshine is obsolescent in first-strike terms these days.
I already posted the Slaughterbots video, but in case you didn't have 8 minutes to watch it, ...
Yeah, I watched it. It was hard. Pushed my PTSD to the max, but I persevered through to the end. IEDs give me the willies, particularly VBIEDs (Vehicle-Borne IEDs)
But it wasn't really a new idea to me. I've been dealing with the idea of the consumer drone as weapons delivery system since 2003. There used to be a website "HexaCopters dot com" that had a blurb about "Imagine a swarm of these things descending on your location with a couple pounds of explosives strapped to them!! ...Might technology, once again, level the playing field for "rebels" fighting against much better-funded oppressive regimes? I'm guessing at least 5,000 radio / GPS controlled hexacopters could be purchased for the price of just one "conventional" attack helicopter. What could 5,000 hexacopters do to "pester an enemy?"".
Haven't been able to find the site recently (until I thought to consult the Wayback Machine), but I remember finding it in 2003 while I was still at the airport after 9/11. That was before I even encountered roadside IEDs in Iraq. Not sure when the site was taken down, but I was still checking it occasionally for several years after I retired from the Army in 2007.
Mostly my ideas about how to deliver a nuke-in-a-shipping-container were addressing what I saw as flaws in other posts, particularly the idea of having a ship loiter offshore somewhere and launch cruise missiles. If you're going to use shipping containers as a weapons delivery system, the most effective way to do it is to have the container actually delivered to the target whatever kind of weapon you've put inside it.
I wonder how many Slaughterbots could be loaded into a standard shipping container. I think hiding the chemical traces of the explosives in a container full of Slaughterbots would require more effort than you'd have to make to hide a nuke inside a shipping container, but the delivery logistics and command & control elements would be pretty much the same. Instead of detonating a device, you'd need some way to remotely open the container.
On the "Plus" side, you wouldn't need to smuggle the container on to a military base. Just park it to somewhere near the perimeter and when you unleash your attack have them go for anyone wearing a uniform, although you'd want more than 500-1000 meters range for the individual units - 5 to 10 km would probably suffice to blanket most U.S. military garrisons from the outside. I make it fewer than 450 ACTIVE military installations in the Continental United States including state operated National Guard facilities. You probably wouldn't need a container for even half of them to completely destroy U.S. military capabilities, although you'd probably want to blanket most of the U.S overseas bases as well.
And then there's the question of who the attacker actually is. This is a scenario where a false flag operation could be extremely effective. If the FBI and/or CIA get their forensic accountants on the paper trail, just swarm them as well, although I believe most of the government offices in DC & environs would be swarmed in the intiial attack.
Pigeon @ 585: Thing with lawns though is who the fuck decided that if there is grass in front of your house you have to regularly mutilate it? It's not like its natural growth pattern leads to it producing poisonous stingers or anything if you don't keep stopping it. All it produces is beneficial stuff like bird food and cover for wee beasties to live in, and it's surely better to allow that than keep on wasting energy trying to prevent it.
Thing is see, I'm basically a redneck, and if I don't cut it back at least once in a blue moon, how am I gonna' find my old pickup truck?
Heteromeles @ 586: One thing that got missed is that you can't just grab a US President, throw him in the back seat of a supersonic jet on 60 seconds notice on the south lawn of the White House, hit the afterburners, and outrun a nuclear blast.
Nah. That just demonstrates how stupid it is to procrastinate until the warheads are already inbound before you decide to "get outta' Dodge!"
Charlie Slaughterbot Helmet & face-mask? Keep VERY careful control of entry/exit to your home property? And, as stated further down - "layered" defences of various sorts. Also, this will only work ONCE ... after that everyone else will be doing it to you, too. Maybe not such a good idea ...
Heteromeles A yes, the Convair Sea Dart Wonderful idea. I liked the Martin Seamaster myself
& @ 596 Ah yes "blackface" ... some "morris" dancing types ( Border mostly ) will be pleased to hear that ...
Whitroth @ 589 MY version was an H.U.D. dipsly contolling the power-laser turret on the roof of the Land-Rover [ Based on an old series III I saw, which had been used by a TV company, with an actual circular hole in the roof, for a TV camera & operator, tank-style ]
& @ 593 Beatles, um, err .. oh yes ... "Help!" Seen it, definitely played for the laughs
Hmmm. It looks like some quadcopters at least have the range (3-5 miles). One problem is keeping their systems ready to go for months to years before they get used. Keeping batteries charged in all kinds of weather is a bit of a chore, especially when there's no option to recharge.
Actually, since I was just driving around the perimeter of MCAS Miramar today (aka shopping), the real problem is finding a place within drone distance of the base where you could leave a container unattended for months, without someone asking pointedly why you didn't lease the site where your container is sitting, or having it removed from their property, or indeed calling the cops about something that looks like a massive drug transshipment waiting for pickup. Making it legal for the container to loiter generates a paper trail, which generates problems of its own. Thinking about most military bases I've been on or near, it's kind of hard to find one where there's land sitting around it that isn't owned by someone. Finding someone who won't be curious about just why you want to park your anonymous container within drone distance of a military base generates its own problems. I think the bottom line is that good old property rights might be an unexpected but effective defense against these kinds of things on military bases. Transshipping at ports might be a different issue, though.
Personally, I'm more worried about some future Critter-In-Chief flying a wing of V-22s or similar over a city and dumping swarms of slaughterbots out the back to deal with some problem or other.
I wonder how many Slaughterbots could be loaded into a standard shipping container. I think hiding the chemical traces of the explosives in a container full of Slaughterbots would require more effort than you'd have to make to hide a nuke inside a shipping container, but the delivery logistics and command & control
This is known in the biz as "a solved problem".
Tally up what a container of top end dildos (lithium batteries, fully blue-toothed with radio control, under the nice silicone actually lots of stuff) then add in the mass and...
Flying Penis Monsters. [If you don't understand this reference, look it up]
Look...
No, really. That's how you ship those munitions in the 21st century.
I defintely won the agreement! :-)
I think it's probably a matter of preparing for a very generic disaster, then doing special preparation that's based on your location/needs; earthquakes in California, tornadoes in Kansas and the like. I hope to be a climate refugee, but I want to do that before it becomes fashionable!
I don't think most preppers have thought this far ahead.
It always seemed to me that they were thinking in terms of stock piling enough stuff to last until the supermarkets opened back up.
That's only for the mass produced murder bots (two tiers above the stuff ISIL was running in Syria recently).
For the real top end you want to do this:
Look for the top selling toy for this year, per weight / battery ratio and complexity.
Ship X containers. Within X hide Y top spec murder bots. Koreans (S) / Japanese use this as standard procedure.
Disney is an arm of the American MIC. Fact.
Before you snort, you should prolly look into Korean Naughty Murder Bots and how they avoid UN embargoes to get the joke.
David L - You're not the only one who's use of passenger aircraft is as near to "commuting" as the security theatre cargo cultists allow.
Your point? Mine was my wife and I are in a plane more than 99.99% of the 1st world population. We pay for airline club access as it is cheaper than buying food and drink at the other airport shops. (Plus you can use the toilet without your luggage in the stall.)
Ah, forgot the age gap here.
Look - for an old vet: you know the unholy shite that the Iraq gunsmiths produce, constantly, right? Ancient 1911 bolt actions with M16 rails screwed onto them and so on. Top tally goes to the Mauser with the M16 barrel and sights that point in opposite directions.
Get the drift?
Quality is produced in X. Usage is in Y. Z is the cluster-fuck of cludge that makes Driftal Zone so funnn to deal with.
Murder Bots are the same.
You don't need the wings, the fans, the gubbins, you can scratch that up with a 3D printer or Greg's local Airfix club. You need the central bullet of tech. Which, ironically, is dildo sized. The rest is "local flavor".
Note: Korea is referencing Samsung shipping autonomous weapons to places it shouldn't. Oohh, Africa, that place next to India...
And the above is all fiction. Not really. Disney has no connection to any arms trading globally at all, there's certainly not a C2 level rep now sweating heavily because he's been caught shipping contraband murder bot stuff to Asia at all.
Armed, I can fuck planets
Oh.
Humans are really shit at this War Game Stuff.
K T W K
look it up: Hollywood actor, Lizards, creepy Xmas vids. Oh honey.
I reguarly repack my travel kit. But for me it is also for around town. I have gotten my basic power kit down to a very small bag that fits in the bottle carrier of my big or little backpack. I now switch backpacks based on if I'm commuting or actually traveling somewhere. Been rethinking what I carry now that I'm no longer on parent watch.
My battery is just the size that I can hold it and my phone at the same time with a very short cable between them. Or it can fit in my front jeans pocket.
My goal on a plane is to get off with 80% or more charge in the phone.
“ I don't know. Pretty much every problem we have in the U.S. today is in some way related to how we dealt with (or failed to deal with) the "question" of slavery. From colonial days on down its effects ripple throughout our society.”
Yeah I don’t believe that even remotely. That’s just one of the common hippy-memes right now because they like things to be simple. Yes if you try hard enough you can play Kevin Bacon and connect and “relate” anything to anything, but you can do that with anything as any alleged root cause so it’s pretty much a null
Global warming for instance has jack shit it do with slavery
You can also look at all the problems we share with countries that never really practiced slavery (resurgent nationalism as another example) and many of those other countries are having just as hard a time dealing
There are plenty of problems in US society that can be legitamitly claim slavery as a main causal factor but nowwhere near everything. In reality, the causes for our problem are complicated and if there is anything they all ripple from it’s “people are stupid and make bad decisions for bad reasons”
Global warming for instance has jack shit it do with slavery
Wait. You're serious.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oh-wait-youre-serious-let-me-laugh-even-harder
Here's a fucking tip your brain might be able to parse:
You EXPLOIT humans until they die and you think this is good =
You EXPLOIT ecosystems until they die and you think this is good =
They're fucking two Janus Coins dude.
Where did you get your morality from, Vietnam?
CD I don’t care about anything you have to say . Ever. Kindly fuck off
It's called "Human Resources" for a reason you soulless ghoul.
You don't have to care, you just have to know that it's true.
:D
No, but really.
Exploitation of Human / Ecology is like kindergarten level of understanding of how Capitalism works. Did you miss the year 12 intro into "colonies" and "extractive economies"? How did pyramids work? (Spoilers: not slavery). How did Empire work (spoilers: slavery).
I mean, it's cool you're over 50 and still learning.
Unholyguy. Last time someone gave someone my "personal information" (demi leader of some NI party) he lost his seat. Lost a lot more than that, but hey... I think the mantra is: "The Banshee (Sidhe) take your dreams and soul".
You want to play with me? Don't.
But learn something at least. At the minimum, extractive Capital = ecological destruction. So does extractive Full State Communism.
But LOL.
Americans. You got 10 years before it crumbles.
Be Seeing You
AI-human brain interface
Just started watching this video and thinking that the world with direct AI-human-brain interface is probably closer than jetpacks. A bunch of different examples/approaches are already being worked on in various labs but now that there's proof of concept, I'm guessing the research funder with the deepest pockets could decide to get involved.
Okay -- AI is a separate thing (so far) - but imagine if these two technologies merged resulting in the AI actually directing (not just transmitting) signals to a human brain so that that human would perform a specific action. One of the scientists interviewed mentioned that after a while they noticed that the test-subject's brain underwent a change - sorta a new 'sense' was being developed/mapped. (From an SF/F perspective, this sounds like a form of 'possession' except by an AI vs. 'spirit/demon'.)
Here's the video:
World Science Festival (2016): 'Mind Melds and Brain Beams: The Dawn of Brain-to-Brain Communication'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SObhSqYglvQ
Who needs online marketing when you can tap into a brain. direct?
Not how it works.
You can do some really bitch basic shit like direct load into cortex (visual / audio) via various intermediaries. Heck, if you're willing to run blackops stuff, you can insert audio / visual in a target and so on and so forth.
Proven.
You can get real invasive and essentially fry cortex function through wavelength interference. You can get even worse and tie a MIND into another MIND through >threading< and then torture one until the other one goes mad.
And... a lot of other [redacted].
I'll put this quite clearly: computers are fast but linear.
Biology is slow but fractal.
The fact you're imagining that the future is silicon and not biological is due to a massive PR drive by our friends in America.
Destroying biology (3-4 billion years) to make yourself feel good / Gods using silicon is a fucking dead end biologically speaking.
Crack Heads. That's what it equates to.
Fuuuuck it.
Ever had a flash in your visual cortex of a face / Mind you've never met?
IF false, then... bleh. No wonder you think silicon is gonna be better than fungi.
If true, then - welcome to Shoah, that's another Mind dead / closed off. They tried to kill off only the ones who didn't meld/mesh/agree with them, but then someone summoned
Oh, and Pinky and the Brain altered the Wikipedia so the Ancient Greek for her is no loner on her page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis
In ancient Greek religion, Nemesis, also called Rhamnousia or Rhamnusia ("the goddess of Rhamnous"), is the goddess who enacts retribution against those who succumb to hubris (arrogance before the gods). Another name is Adrasteia (or Adrestia), meaning "the inescapable".
What is this bullshit?
Removed her real name.
Put in some German Romanticism circa 19th C instead.
SOULLESS FUCKS ARE SCARED.
~
There are billions of you, and we watch you all die.
Νέμεσις
And fuck your Wikipedia Shitty Little Games.
Cut your liver out mate.
Started looking at it, and it starts out interestingly, but I've started having issues with "the Singularity", and I've already got FTL (in more ways than just writing, once I finish my Famous Secret Theory...).
I'm going in different direstions. Thanks, though, for the link.
Btw, in '89, my late wife and I tried getting a dealers' table at one con. Decided that we didn't want to do that, one of us tied down all the time during the day, not fun. But we called ourselves Orion's Arm Trading Co.
Hi. Your story of Νέμεσις and Narcissus makes more sense, and yeah the wikipedia edits of older religions/deities have been annoying in the last year+.
New moon. :-)
I won't speak about Kevin Spacey, don't know enough context/truth there, but MLK did express my attitude (sometimes achieved): “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” ("Strength to Love", Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963)
And heck, given the reports that software can't recognize dark faces due to problems with their training sets, I think we've actually got a socially acceptable use for black-face makeup...
Hmm, I think Vantablack would be somewhat unhealthy applied directly to skin, but something black enough could probably fool many face feature detectors. Also, look quite cool in many places, though I think it wouldn't be cool in the Sun, for example.
Bill Arnold @ 624 PLEASE, please ... DO NOT feed the Troll?
As for Q-ships, I did a bit of Wikipedia reading. Apparently they weren't all that useful in WW1 or WW2...
That's correct. They were never very good at delivering explosives to the enemy. What they did do was to deliver uncertainty and fear, since there are a lot of cargo ships on the oceans and it was hard to be sure the one you were looking at wasn't a trap.
Obviously this only works if everyone knows there are traps out there somewhere. As Dr. Strangelove said, "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!"
Off Topic, but I have asked google and places. And I have an idea for a story, which may be impossible.
But, and my physics is kinda weak.
So.
Assuming that we could construct a very light framework that did not leak, and it contained a vacuum, what size would it need to be to achieve escape velocity? And is that even theoretically possible? I'd imagine that accelaration would be maximised at lift off and fall pretty rapidly, but the initial boost? Could that take us to orbit?
I'd imagine that payload would be an obvious issue.
Sorry, off topic, etc, but this is probably the best fora on the planet for asking questions like that.
Love the site and Mr Stross.
Could some country load six to ten battalions of troops (including APCs, etc) onto cargo ships...
Once again Tom Clancy novels come up; in Red Storm Rising that's how the Soviets take Iceland. It works, since the USSR had a much larger military than Iceland[citation needed], and for much of the book NATO is busy in Europe.
If you enjoy such things the book is worth reading; it was written when Tom Clancy wanted to tell fun stories and before he made money by licensing his name to extruded fiction product.
reports that software can't recognize dark faces due to problems with their training sets
Also Mikko at #625 - Well, the solution is right there in the stated problem. You need better (larger numbers and of more ethnic sub-groups) data sets. You may also need better photo-sensors, but this is really outside my area of expertise although (real names redacted) I can recognise members of other ethnic groups so do feel qualified to state that it can be done now the problem is identified.
Assuming that we could construct a very light framework that did not leak, and it contained a vacuum, what size would it need to be to achieve escape velocity?
I'm pretty sure you're describing a really good balloon. We have pretty decent balloons now and some have gotten above 100,000 feet (yes, really). But I don't think there's any way to get one into orbit on its own, much less free of Earth's gravity.
Since you did ask about the physics, ascent speed is basically a question of terminal velocity, in this case upwards since the balloon's weight is less than its buoyancy. As you guessed this should be greatest near the ground where it is displacing the most air; inconveniently Earth's escape velocity of 11.186 km/s is much greater than any reasonable speed of travel through air.
Is this about what you had in mind?
I was thinking of black pigments so dark that they look like holes in the world, for example Vantablack. Coating your face with that could make it hard to recognize even a familiar face - you could probably see only the eyes.
Of course the same effect can be had with masks, so the Vantablackface was kind of a joke idea. It's also not very healthy.
Extending on Scott's #631...
Or, putting it another way, Vup is proportional to atmospheric density, which actually reduces with increasing height, so just as you start approaching orbital heights your rate of climb slows to an effective 0.
Of course, if we can keep the framework from leaking, your static height will be constant (bar variations in atmospheric pressure) but I don't think we can achieve an orbital altitude.
Ah, got you now!
What I was originally thinking was about "a makeup", in which case the product was probably transparent to non-visible wavelengths. As Wikipedia describes it, you want a detector that works on If subjecthasnoface then ALARMALARM_ALARM ; end if ;
If you wanted to take out a country with Slaughterbots then you'd target infrastructure not people. People will just put on hats with veils.
Put a small solar panel on each one. Have them travel the country a few miles at a time, looking for power lines, transformers, aircraft, fuel storage tanks.
Fly over (not land, just be flying over, so no customs or inspections) at 30 000 ft and drop thousands over the enemy. You could drop hundreds of thousands over a night and have them all activate at once.
"have fruit trees and therefore meat" explained:
Yep, I'm from Aotearoa and living in Australia. In the bush here the common meat animals are macropods, yes, but they're annoying to hunt, impossible to trap, and very mobile. If you kill one while the others watch they will travel 20+ kilometres and not come back for months. So you need many large herds of them if you're going to hunt them regularly.
Fruit eating tree bears, aka possums, on the other paw, breed like bastards and are stupid as fuck. You can drag one out of a tree by the tail and club it to death while its mates watch and say "couldn't happen to us"... until it does.
The way Australia has been managed, in evolutionary terms, is that small patches are burnt and some of the wildlife that flee are killed. Then the green shoots and later grassland feed macropods which can be judiciously hunted. Over a few hundred generations this settled into a fairly stable cycle where everyone knew their place, and there was a place for everyone. Specifically, and importantly, everyone knew that the climate tends variable so you DO NOT breed to fill the available niches when it's wet, because sure as death there will be a dry spell and the excess people will die.
It's worth noting that the above arrangement survived a sea level rise of more than 50 metres. The recent immigrants don't seem likely to survive the 5-10 metres due in the next couple of generations. So don't you newcomers be lecturing your betters on how "primitive, ignorant people" could live better through modern technology. Give it at least a millennia to settle in before you rush to judgement.
Aotearoa, on the other hand, popped out of the ocean recently* and was settled yesterday. We have NFI what it's going to do next but raining molten rock seems as likely as subsiding gently into the sea. Mount Taupo pissed off up north a while ago* and hasn't come back, and "we don't think that will happen again" {cough} ... well, at least not to *that mountain :) Viz, I wouldn't count on Aotearoa being continuously inhabitable for the next millennia.
Making it legal for the container to loiter generates a paper trail, which generates problems of its own.
Not really; national financial systems are porous, after all.
Let's say you're the President of Crazystan, planning to attack the USA with slaughterbots. Obvs you don't want a return delivery of instant sunshine for the 200 containers (each holding 50,000 murders) you're positioning for X-day. So you want your regional rival Patsystan to take the blame for the attack.
What you do: you have your intel agency dump heroin/cocaine/ipads below cost price on the black market in Patsystan, thereby giving the local crimelords a money laundering problem. You also provide the ganglords in Patsystan with a decent return rate for US dollars in return for investing in a shell company in the US. This company is a broker for storage locker space. It rents storage units/lock-ups in the USA, near to the targets, and you park your slaughterbot fleet in them.
When X-day comes and the clouds darken with death on the quadrotor drone, it's obvious that they're flying out of storage lock-ups around the nation. And it's equally obvious that the lockers were leased through a shell company heavily capitalized by shady front companies in Patsystan. Case closed, right?
(Add a couple of Gleiwitz incidents dotted around the country to add plausibility, of course: you don't want to risk the FBI being too stupid to follow your breadcrumb trail to the right place, after all, and they're going to be pretty stupid and panicky after you've murdered 25% of their colleagues because -- of course -- Quantico was on your hit list too.)
Also, if you wanted to run a denial of service attack on major ports note that a lot of them are accessed via narrow channels. And modern dredges are optimised for moving silt because that's what fills up those channels. A complete bastard might be inclined to fill some shipping containers with concrete and ballast a large container ship with a layer of those and normal cargo on top. If you blew that up in the wrong part of a channel you'd scatter big heavy things all over the place that would need to be hauled up one at a time, after the bits of container ship were removed. Doing it dockside would be less annoying but still screw up a significant chunk of the port, because they typically have few berths and fast turnover.
One side effect of doing this even twice would be to snarl up the whole system as ships were rigorously checked well before they got near the actual port.
Lots of different people are working on small heavy weapon systems because those can be used by infantry and are both flexible and cheap. Rather than buying and transporting big heavy machinery you use things the size and price of small cars that are radio controlled and have a keypad/controller on a wire as well. Maximum flexibility, minimum risk to your expensive staff.
And the Turks have just announced that they have a quadcopter firing .50 cal machine gun rounds in a controlled manner. I'm sure they wouldn't sell those to anyone nice...
Sadly neither are yet available at Walmart, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWTod2Lu1I
Global warming for instance has jack shit it do with slavery
Okay, let's try this:
Slaves were introduced to the American colonies in the 17th century as a cheap source of labour, yes? Agriculture -- specifically plantations -- ran on muscle power because the only alternatives were waterwheels or windmills, which weren't really portable into fields. So it was humans or animals, and humans who are treated like animals.
Then, a century or so later, the industrial revolution kicked off. We get mechanisation as a substitute for human labour, and steam (then oil/gas burning) as a replacement for muscle power that is transportable into fields. Upshot: slavery is increasingly non-viable economically, so those who profit from it try to defend the institution they see as supporting their aristocratic status initially by political means, and then by military force. Which comes easily to them because slavery is inherently violent.
(The gradual shift of the USA from an agrarian/planter economy to being an industrial economy is the ratchet that made institutional slavery increasingly non-viable. But it's also the driver for climate change, because burning shit, yes?)
Other stuff: why the USA doesn't have a single-payer healthcare system? Slavery left you with a caste system, the state -- the only entity big enough to operate a single-payer scheme -- is nominally colour-blind, and white voters (notably poor rural whites) are upset that "those people" might get kidney transplants on the state's dime, i.e. "their" tax dollars. (Which is spurious nonsense -- who the hell signs up for kidney failure just to get a freebie? -- but shaved apes aren't rational about loss of social status.)
And so on and so forth, right down to the American construction of justice, policing, and punishment, to social planning that red-lines and contains low-caste communities, to piss-poor public transport connections and low bridges in New York to keep buses from black neighbourhoods out of Manhattan, for example.
It's everywhere.
Also, if you wanted to run a denial of service attack on major ports note that a lot of them are accessed via narrow channels. And modern dredges are optimised for moving silt because that's what fills up those channels. A complete bastard might be inclined to fill some shipping containers with concrete and ballast a large container ship with a layer of those and normal cargo on top.
For little or no loss of immediate inconvenience, they might skip the fancy stuff and simply pack a single intermodal container with explosives and load it onto someone else's expendable vessel. Triggering could be a problem if it gets buried too deep for good GPS reception but there are plenty of options for radio if the bad guys can have someone within a few kilometers when the ship is due in.
Checking cargo is hard enough on the docks. Examining deeply stacked containers while out at sea just isn't practical.
It wouldn't hurt to have a plausibly patsy.
Yup. SOP by all great powers, though exactly what they use to do that depends on their wealth as much as anything. As OGH implies, trawlers are the cheap solution. At least we could be fairly confident that trawlers would not actually start hostilities.
And, at least until fairly recently, The British merchant marine's ships and officers were de facto part of the Royal Navy reserve.
It's more than a diplomatic incident - it's an act of war - and, if we do that, why shouldn't 'they' do it to us?
Despite the blithering in the press, the people who actually do the 'escorting' know perfectly well that it's just like dogs sniffing each others arses. Every now and again, the armchair warriors get uptight about British pilots/sailors waving to their counterparts, while waving their nation's willies at each other. "Those are our ENEMIES - that's fraternisation!"
I have eaten possum - it's not much worse than supermarket chicken - what's your objection to it?
If used, slaughterbots would probably be programmed to take out anyone with a covered face and without an IFF tag. They are also working on DNA sniffers - yes, good ol' SF predicts the dystopian future yet again :-(
I can't see them being use on the UK in the near future, except on demonstrations, but the step beyond that is to take out the people who are claimed to fuel disaffection. However, if I were OGH, I would be far more worried by the spooks hacking my car to crash it at speed. MUCH easier to cover up.
"Related to" is not the same as "caused by". Consider another problem - the religious cults and bigotry that suppurate throughout the USA. There are definite associations with the racial discrimination, which is (to great extent) a relic of slavery.
I am not sure that it is a particularly meaningful line to take, though, as the relations vary from being close and important to distant and essentially irrelevant.
If used, slaughterbots would probably be programmed to take out anyone with a covered face and without an IFF tag.
It's hard to imagine slaughterbots being cheaper than decoys. (Department store mannequins are surprisingly expensive, BTW.) Consider scarecrows, approximately life-sized sculptures, happy-face balloons, painted melons... If the slaughterbot AIs can't do good 3D imaging they'll target televisions and advertising posters.
Targeting humans is hard enough. Targeting anything that might be a human disguised as not-a-human opens up the universe of common false positives immensely.
Defensive tactics would vary a lot depending on how smart they were.
If used, slaughterbots would probably be programmed to take out anyone with a covered face and without an IFF tag.
Or to enforce face covering among persons over 1.5 metres tall who don't have beards, if deployed by Da'esh or their equivalent. The possibilities are endless.
(My car is old, and I'm giving up driving, so that's not really a proximate threat to me.)
Well, while they might be a feral pest in NZ, they are still a protected native species in Oz (well there are two species prevalent in the eastern states at least). Heck, moving one from its range (which might include part of your house) is highly regulated in most states, killing one is completely illegal, whether you eat it or not.
Plus, annoying as they might be at times, they are cute. It is much more like eating cats or dogs here than perhaps elsewhere. Kangaroos and emus, sure. Possums not so much, and wallabies, quokkas, quolls, bilbies or flying foxes not at all.
Cost of slaughterbots?
A few weeks ago I was in a toy shop (Konrad, in Dortmund -- FSVO "toy shop" that would probably keep 90% of you lot amused but bore the pants of anyone aged under 12), and they were selling basic tiny quadrotors with camera capability for €20-30. Better ones with actual cameras and image stabilization were around the €70-200 mark, before you get into the real high-end stuff.
Note that this is retail price: subtract 22% VAT, then cut by 50% for the retail mark-up. So we're talking €10 or so for the basic mechanism.
The brains could easily be related to a cheap Android phone like the HOMTOM HT-16 Pro. Quad core 1.3GHz processor, 2Gb RAM, 16Gb FLASH, the usual cameras: retail is currently £66, delivered to the UK. There are cheaper models for the Indian and Chinese market, where bottom end for an Android smartphone is now around €35-50. Note that you can omit the screen and the big battery, thereby reducing the BOM for building your bomb-with-rotors. And this is retail price.
The explosive charge can be approximated to an electrically-detonated .22 calibre cartridge, shaped charge rather than bullet. So probably about 10-50 cents to manufacture in bulk.
Upshot: I figure you're being ripped off if you end up paying more than $50 per slaughterbot at wholesale (minimum order: 100 units). Most likely MilSpec dispensers, chargers, target designation kit, and penaids will come as a package and the actual slaughterbot part of the system will be treated more like disposable ammunition. Most of the maintenance cost will be in recycling batteries/charging circuitry and updating the software. But this is a temporary stage -- a 2017-2027 weapon system. By 2050 things will be a lot scarier (in ways I'm not sure I can anticipate).
Note the guy who built a business card that runs Linux for $3 in parts. Potentially the BOM for slaughterbots is going to go the same way, which case things are going to be really freaky, and not in a good direction.
Cost of slaughterbots?
Far too little, yes.
Decoys could be improvised for so little that the primary cost would be in expended time not cash spent. I'm having a hard time imagining a large market for them, since thousands of decoys exploiting the same weakness in the target identification algorithm would be less useful than dozens of uniquely constructed decoys. (Particularly once there's a patch to recognize the decoy model.) There is one niche market that might be worth exploiting: celebrity look-alikes.
Imagine a political rally with mannequins in suits (possibly with horrible yellow toupees) providing cover for the loathed politician of the moment. They might have lifelike quirks like heaters for IR spoofing or motors to make their heads turn. This would probably be just as disturbing as it sounds to humans.
“It’s everywhere”
Sure i am not disputing any of that
However the Patriarchy is equally everywhere
Christianity is equally everywhere
Global capitalism is equally everywhere
Class warfare is equally everywhere
The military / industrial complex is equally everywhere
The fundamental attribution bias is equally everywhere
And many others
And you can Kevin Bacon any of them into being the big bad fundamental root of all Evil if you try hard. But the reality is there is no big bad, just a bunch of medium sized ones that are hideously interrelated and intertwined.
The only fundamental evil is how people think. Which is really poorly
And if you ever meet anyone who is trying to tell you a “root of all evil” story, there is always an agenda
I don't think a shaped charge that size could be detonated...an actual bullet with a little barrel would be much cheaper and have a stand off range < theres sensitivity issues with explosives,>
The best way to arm your slaughterbot might be to glue ball-bearings to a good-sized firecracker, (M-80-sized at the very smallest, through something a little bigger would be best.) An android board would be good, but a Raspberry Pi clone would also work and be very cheap.
The useful thing to do with a gun-type slaughterbot might be to design it to fire straight down. It just lands on the head of whoever it wants to kill...
Again, you didn't watch the video, did you?
The proposed gadgets are the size of a smartphone. Fits in the palm of your hand, weighs around 100 grams max. An RPi is way too heavy and power-hungry (although a PiZero is getting close). RPi isn't optimized for weight, though.
Extra-nasty twist: arm the slaughterbots with laser diodes as well, so that once they lock onto the head of a target they can blind their victim as they close in for the kill.
Counterargument time. Three things to realize. --I had a storage locker close to MCAS Miramar, so I know exactly what the slaughterbots would be dealing with. --My nephew got (and wrecked) a drone for Christmas two years ago, and I've got drone flyers in my neighborhood. --I do pay attention to the local paper.
There are a couple of problems with local storage. One is that all the big rolling steel doors in front of every unit are fairly heavy. That could be taken care of with a shaped charge, of course, although positioning the door buster in the right spot would be kind of fun, especially if you wanted some dufous to regularly enter the unit to maintain the bots. However, those doors do make Wifi pretty spotty inside the complex. But you'd want the outside garage units, which are in high demand, because the local contractors and small businesses park their supplies there and are at the units every day. That's the second problem, trying to set up your slaughterbots without someone noticing what you're doing. Finding a time when no one's around gets interesting, and since the doors are wired, the company knows when your unit is open. Third problem is that the storage place staff are pretty careless. They once came close to booting me out, because someone forgot to run the credit card I had on file with them. That simple carelessness is pretty bad, because they auction off the contents of your unit if you don't pay. It would be really embarrassing if they opened up your slaughterbot box to a bunch of bidders.
Now MCAS Miramar is an extremely urban base, and it still bisects San Diego with open space (so the jets can try not to crash on people's houses). If you wanted to take out, oh, Fort McCoy in Central Wisconsin, there aren't any towns nearby, and you'd have to work with a farmer to park a shipping container next to his cranberry bog. Camp Pendleton is pretty similar to McCoy, in that it's a huge open space, and a shipping container within range of something more important than the PX would stand out rather badly. Naval Station North Island on Coronado (one home of the SEALs) has the opposite problem: it's overbuilt and high end, with more retired admirals per square mile in Coronado than anywhere else in the country. No storage lockers there, and no place to park a shipping container. Ditto Pt. Loma. You could probably find some storage near the shipyard, but that's about it. San Diego's a military town, so if I'm having trouble finding a place to hide slaughterbots here, I suspect we can generalize to other locations. Most of the bases in the west are like Pendleton, Edwards, or Area 51, off in the back end of beyond, with large spaces around them to keep prying eyes away and give a place for munitions to expend themselves somewhat harmlessly. While this makes them great for saving endangered species, the space means a lot of drones would drop with dead batteries before they found something to kill.
As for the toy drones, my nephew wrecked his within a couple hours of opening the package, and that was after a couple of recharges. You need to pay for range and durability. Normally, the people flying recreational drones around here get some basic performance out of it (it goes up! It goes sideways! It shows pictures! Wait, where did it go?), but they're always fussing with battery life. The professional drone crew I tripped over while they were filming a commercial lot had three people on it: the pilot, the guy watching the video camera, and the human spotter, and that seems to be the way these things work at the moment. In the future the technology may well get better, but if you're going to store your little slaughterbots in a storage locker, they're going to get nibbled on by silverfish and covered in dust, unless they're regularly maintained. Keeping them in flying condition without anyone seeing is going to be difficult. Reprogramming them is going to be even more tricky, because the data are going to leave a long track across the internet. Reprogramming the ones that are stuck in a shipping container in the back end of nowhere is going to be fun, because the signal's going to stand out from a low data background.
Speaking of traces, running with drug cartels is problematic on its own. I mean, I can't think of a better get-out-of-jail card than a narco leaking the plot to the DEA/FBI/CBP/SDPD/whoever. That will guarantee a reduced sentence, especially if the narcos start cooperating in the name of national security and getting the bomb-making monkey off their back. Turn over one pod of bots, and the NSA goes to work, finds the internet communications used to test or update the slaughterbot software, and they find them all. Heck, the FBI's been so hard up for non-white terrorists in the US that they've taken to framing idiots on gun charges by selling them the guns after they radicalize them. Stopping a plot like this will make someone's career. Heck, even with someone as problematic as the Border Patrol, they can use uncovering a plot like this to get out from under any problems themselves.
At present, I'd suggest that the best use of slaughterbots is political assassination, because they're effectively maneuverable bullets that can be fired from a mile or more away. Use them on politicians during outdoor political rallies, and the whole thing becomes a mess, whether or not the assassination works. For one thing, the defenders can't deploy the obvious counters (GPS jammers and internet jammers) because you need both the press coverage and for audience phones to work. For another, the best defense against the drones are choked shotguns firing bird shot. So you station a bunch of shotgunners around the target, the drones come in, and they gunners start shooting. Whether they get all the drones or not, all that shot ends up somewhere, and some of it may end up injuring or killing people in the crowd. Whether the resulting rage is aimed more at the shotgunners or the people flying the slaughterbots is up in the air, but it will make big rallies hard to do, and that may be useful in itself.
The flip side to that is that anyone who orders a slaughterbot attack may well end up on the receiving end of their own slaughterbot attack, with the slaughterbot in this case being a cruise missile or something similar.
I have a feeling that pouring the money into electing someone like BoJo, El Cheeto Grande, any number of other problematic politicians might be a more sound investment for disrupting local or national politics. But you're right, in the future things could be different.
why the USA doesn't have a single-payer healthcare system?
Not saying some of your arguments don't have merit but.
Much of the European nation health care setups started in the 20s or 30s. Maybe earlier.
In the US, at that time, we were very much a confederation of states. Go see the earlier (year or more ago) discussions on how the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers split up much of the country before the 50s. And the west coast was on the other side of a huge swatch of mountains. And during that time the economy was booming and no one cared then we were in the depression and no one had any money. At all.
So about the time transportation across this land got started WWII showed up. And for various reasons the US wound up with heath care based on where you worked. (Price controls and union demands during the war created laws about taxation of benefits that ...)
Now that medicine has evolved into more than "get sick and die" we have all kinds of entrenched interests who don't want it to change. Specifically big unions (now smaller) (and there are others) who in no way shape for form want to give up their fantastic plans (yes better than the NHS in ways) for a leveling of care across the country.
And big pharma has a play here, even with all that European ownership. Plus hedge funds who have created out of network doctor monopolies to soak everyone.
It IS a mess. But simple answers as to how we got here and can switch tend to be just that simplistic (and in so many ways not wrong) answers.
And I think we (US) will be single payer in 20 years or less but it will be traumatic to get there.
Storage units causing a problem? Try RVs and fifth wheel trailers. Common as cassette tape used to be on Merkin roads. Nobody pays much attention to them, especially when parked in a storage lot. Blow the bloody doors - or better yet, the roof - off to release the flying monkeys. Can be moved easily - fifth wheels by the pickups that flood the US - with little chance of trouble. 2nd hand ones may be cheaper than containers and probably easier to find a space to leave them near interesting targets.
Thinking about it, one SF gizmo we haven't seen is the cyber shotgun for drone defense.
The problem is that skeet and trap shooting are kind of high end hobbies, so the population of teenage shooters (and duck hunters) going into the military is rather low. Ideally you want to train your MPs to do anti-drone shooting, but either you draw your soldiers from the population of shooters and hunters (e.g. a decreasing pool of people who might object to spending their careers tramping around as security guards at military bases) or you figure out a way to develop the skill in grunts who are happy to be security guards at military bases). How to do the latter rapidly?
One way might be to develop a AI shotgun. The AI does the complex calculation of figuring out when to fire to shotgun so that the shot intersects the path of the targetd drone and electronically firing the gun. The grunt's job is to get the shotgun tracking the incoming drones as best they can. When the grunt's gets the gun aimed, the gun fires itself. This would require less training for the grunt, and depending on the cost of the smartgun, the savings in training costs might make this cost-effective. Of course, the gun has to be rugged, and it also has to have a dumb trigger mode so that the grunt can use the shotgun in traditional anti-personnel, anti-vermin, and door-busting missions. Still, if we're going to posit cheap AI making robot assassins a reality, we can posit AI making targeting robot assassins a reality too.
Also, if a gun makes bird hunting easier, then the hunting community might be interested in adopting a civilian version of it. Hunters are a dying breed in the US, and anything that makes their passion more accessible might be something they'd support.
Also, a 0.22 magnum rimfire cartridge is quite powerful enough, and a single-use barrel can be quite small and light. Yes, you can optimise that, but the technology was (is?) used for zipguns and easy to make (the only 'special' component being the cartridge), as is bolting on a laser pointer.
Indeed. One less lethal but equally depressing possibility that I have just thought of is if our gummint outsources things like safety campaigns.
Just imagine going for a quiet walk in the country/hills/whatever and having a drone following you saying "You shouldn't be walking on your own at your age; you need to buy a Merkintech Personal Alarm System; just click on your mobile phone notification and one will be sent to you (*)."
Or walking or cycling along a road with one saying "The Highway Code says you should be wearing hi-viz clothing; followed by similar blithering ..."
It's been described in SF before, of course, but it's looking horribly like a near-future reality.
(*) And your account debited, of course.
Indeed, an RV might be a solution. I suppose Breaking Bad has receded far enough into history that an RV parked near a military base, and only visited secretively by interesting individuals (for law enforcement values of interesting) would draw no comment at all. More seriously, many of the RV lots around here are, you guessed it, storage locker locations (although that happens to not be true near Miramar IIRC).
Anyway, the devil's in the details for any of this. The general problem to solve for any buried munition, smart or otherwise, is that it has to be indetectable for long periods of time, then work perfectly when called on. That's harder to do that in looks. Since you can't avoid leaving traces of your activity, you've got to adopt the equivalent of the CIA's "Moscow Rules" to make the data as uninteresting and unrelated as possible. Trusting criminal groups or other governments to do the dirty work is problematic, since that makes the plot more complex.
Personally, if I was going to launch a cyberattack on MCAS Miramar, I'd focus on the infrastructure buried under Miramar Road. There are power lines, water lines, and who knows what else all buried under the road in close proximity. Find a way to disrupt those and things get interestingly messy, very fast. A slaughterbot won't do it, but hacking a controller under a manhole lid might.
Indeed so. The terminal ellipsis was intended to imply "continuation of diplomacy by other means" :)
The interesting thing about drones is that, right now, they're remote controlled by teams of controllers, not by individuals. The killer warfare drones are remote piloted, but any attack they perform is often vetted by a committee before the pilot gets told to pull the trigger. Commercial drones are often flown by three-person crews: someone taking data or watching the camera/video, someone piloting the drone, and someone acting as a physical spotter to keep eyes on the gadget in case things go haywire.
In this regard, it's sort of like the old Japanese Bunraku puppetry theater, where the performance of one human actor is replaced by a whole team of puppeteers, plus an onstage narrator.
Now there are advantages to both unifying a performance and making it a crew job. A solo performer, be it a human pilot or actor, can respond in a sophisticated way. However, the system for putting the person in place to perform (e.g. a jet fighter, or an assassin insertion, or a theater set) can be expensive, and the range of actions a human can do is limited. A puppet or a robot or drone often requires a crew to fly and is more limited in its actions. However, the range of actions they can take, and the environment they can work is, is different than a human. So there are roles for both.
Presumably AI can take the place of some or all of the human controllers. However, unless we believe in the AI singularity, I'm not sure whether AI can get to the point where it stops being limited by something or other. That's the problem with things like slaughterbots or any other OMG we're all going to diieeee intelligent technology.
And yes, someone will bring up AI bombs.
"Note the guy who built a business card that runs Linux for $3 in parts."
Thank you for that. The references to things which I didn't know about which are cheaper, smaller and more powerful than a Raspberry Pi Zero may make it possible for me to reduce the number of connections between a fixed and a moving part from ten wires or so plus a ribbon cable to just one single wire.
Oh, things like that already exist in profusion and indeed as backyard constructions. The difference is that they use a couple of motors to swing them about instead of a soldier. As well as the obvious advantages like motors being cheaper and not liable to falling asleep on watch etc. etc., it makes the task of the aiming computer a lot easier if the gun only moves when it tells it to rather than having to predict and keep up with an aiming point being sort of scribbled over the general area of the target by an external system that provides no information on what it's going to do next.
There are advantages to doing both.
Think autofocus+image stabilised camera. The camera wouldn't be much use if it just photographed everything. The human points it in the general direction. The camera identifies targets and boxes them in the viewfinder. The human confirms and presses the trigger, the camera does the final aiming and triggers when everything is lined up.
Although if it is coming close enough to hassle you vocally then there's a good chance that it's also coming close enough that you actually can scramble its electronics with a portable device made from a cooker magnetron; actually releasing the smoke might not happen, but it is probably within reach to confuse it enough that it falls to the ground where you can jump up and down on it, so you get both destruction and catharsis without the disadvantages of the shotgun method.
Much of the European nation health care setups started in the 20s or 30s. Maybe earlier.
Wrong (ish). The UK got it's NHS in 1948; other European states were basically rubble in mid-1945 and in most cases rebuilt from scratch, including political arrangements (a problem with the Nazi occupation was, they tended to tear up the rule books completely).
I'll grant you that social security/pension systems go back earlier -- Germany post-1871 led the way in that respect, under that well-known socialist Prince Otto von Bismarck (he wanted healthy soldiers) -- but the same transport/medicine development issues you point to in the USA also applied to Europe, which (if you squint) also has state/region based healthcare (it's just that the states have their own armies and flags and so on as well as health ministries).
"The camera wouldn't be much use if it just photographed everything."
Oh, it would; after all that's just what you do do when you're watching for an attack but you don't yet know where it might come from (or even if there's going to be one at all) - just keep looking at everything to see when any bit of it becomes different.
Question: there's a phenomenon here in the UK, where advertising hoardings are illegal alongside motorways, where you sometimes see an old articulated lorry trailer parked up in a field alongside the m-way with an advertisement plastered on its side. Is this -- container-sized trailers converted into advertising hoardings -- a thing in the USA? Because if so, that's totally the way to go (to get at isolated bases alongside roads).
Sounds like something you could develop from the XM-25, except the program was cancelled because the guns cost $35,000 apiece and the ammo was $55 per round!
Defense is so often much more expensive than offense.
I don't understand the need to store stuff next to the target. That assumes that you've got stuff past customs.
So you're in the country and running a front company. If you're in the country there's no reason you couldn't run a front company that rents out autonomous camper vans. Empty autonomous camper vans would be a common sight in airport parking lots, trundling down highways and pottering around all sorts of out of the way locations. You'd also expect there to be some big service yards with hundreds of them together.
It would be trivial to send a thousand of them out to hundreds of targets. Each camper full of slaughterbots.
a thing in the USA?
Totally.
It is an ongoing battle. Activist who think the world should be free of signs get state and/or local laws passed limited signs as much as possible. But huge billboards are not always under the same regulation. So at times you see a HUGE billboard for a competitor next to the parking lot for a firm.
As to side of trucks/lorries, That started happening around here and in other places where signs were legally made almost illegal. So the activists went back and got yelled and passed more laws which required that the vehicles be legally drive able (some were really a tow away from a wreaking yard but only if you inflated the tires). So now your side of truck sign has to be licensed and registered with the DMV. [eyeroll]
Other states cities have similar fights.
I understand how signage can get out of hand but some people seem think you should find a business by walking down the street (with no sidewalks and a 45mph speed limit) and knock on each door asking what they do. [bigger eyeroll]
That business already exists and is growing, due to increasing fights between hotels, AirBnB, and housing advocates looking trying to deal with skyrocketing prices in vacation areas. These companies will put a high end RV in an RV resort for you to stay in for a weekend, and they're causing angst of their own, because they're taking up sites that locals used to use to camp.
Anyway, the same problem applies: a company that looks prosperous but has no social media footprint or customer base stands out like a sore thumb. Where are they getting their money, and what are they doing, if they're not catering to customers?
For all the trouble you all are making, I've got a very simple solution: --Assemble the slaughterbots in country to the maximum extent possible. The components are widely available, and much of the nasty stuff can be homebrewed or hacked. --Put them in a specially modified, old, semi trailer when they're ready to go. You want old because it muddies the trail and it might be available for cash. Also, it's got to break down on cue. --Through elaborate cutouts, hire a driver to deliver the semi to a target, such that the trailer full of bots is near the right target at the right time.
--When the trailer hits its mark, it breaks down by jamming on the brakes, the side of the trailer opens up (or it simply pops its back door), and the bots go on their spree. The driver has no clue what's going on, because he's a hireling who's simply moving the cargo from A to B. --Your job is then to get the heck out of town and to pray that all the cutouts you employed worked to save your behind.
Instead of attacking a bunch of medium value targets, such as military bases, you go after a few high value targets, like the Pentagon or NSA parking lots at 5 pm, when the shift is changing and people are heading home and exposed. I picked on these two because both parking lots are right next to freeways, so you don't have to send the drone miles to find someone, as at a military base. I'm sure there are equivalents in London, Moscow, or Beijing.
Cheap.
Every read about the Zumwalt class destroyer gun ammo? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#Advanced_Gun_System
As the Navy scaled the program back in terms of ships and thus ammo needed the tooling / startup costs of the factory overwhelmed the shell costs. These smart bullets got up to over $800K before things were cancelled. Now there were really neat 155mm things but still.
but the same transport/medicine development issues you point to in the USA also applied to Europe, which (if you squint) also has state/region based healthcare (it's just that the states have their own armies and flags and so on as well as health ministries).
Which is why it was able to happen in Europe but harder to do in the US.
Again, powerful voting blocks after WWII had great health care plans that would have been cut back if a national plan had been implemented.
And also we didn't get the shit beat out of us and everything held dear so weren't in a mood to change as much as Europe was.
Think autofocus+image stabilised camera. The camera wouldn't be much use if it just photographed everything. The human points it in the general direction. The camera identifies targets and boxes them in the viewfinder. The human confirms and presses the trigger, the camera does the final aiming and triggers when everything is lined up.
Yes, this is what I was thinking about. In its simplest form, you've basically got an elaborate shotgun sight that turns green when it's on target, at which point the soldier pulls the trigger.
If the drone is moving too fast,* then the gun has to have an electronic trigger where the AI shoots when the gun is properly aligned. You could put the human in the decision loop by having them depress the trigger while aiming at the drone, thereby telling the AI to take the shot when the gun is in position. It looks like "digital triggers" already exist, so adding this to a shotgun may not be that expensive, at least until the military contractors build it.
*As for fast, people use shotguns to hit ducks (60 mph flying) and pigeons (75 mph), so it might be possible for a human to hit an drone when the AI signals to pull the trigger. The problem is that hunters rarely shoot at birds that are in very close proximity, so I don't know whether people can shoot fast enough to make a difference.
they are still a protected native species in Oz
I don't see anyone protecting this one...
More seriously, there are a whole lot of technical violations you commit while eating roadkill and in my experience the only people who give a shit are hungry or bored. I've had a carload of local aboriginals pull over and remind me that it's an offence for me to possess whatever animal I had, so I asked them to help me eat the evidence. That seemed to be the desired outcome :) I've never had cops take an interest, I suspect because I'm white and look rich (rich = owns a bicycle and camping gear in this context).
The wee possum I had in my roof at one stage was mostly interested in getting out because there was no food or water up there. I left it long enough for it to be pretty unhappy, then opened the (indoor) ceiling hatch and put a ladder up. When I poked my head up there was the possum. So I scarpered, and shortly afterwards the beastie went down the ladder and out the front door. It huddled in the corner for a few hours then overnight it vanished.
"I understand how signage can get out of hand but some people seem think you should find a business by walking down the street (with no sidewalks and a 45mph speed limit) and knock on each door asking what they do. [bigger eyeroll]"
Maybe the signs are used differently in the US, then; that point doesn't apply here. Our signs mostly advertise things that everybody knows about anyway, like types of beer or insurance companies. Even the dodgy ones on the side of a trailer in a field for the farmer to make an extra buck from aren't usually for anything of local specificity. Things of that order of size that do advertise a local business are either things on its actual premises, or else the business hasn't existed for about a hundred years and the sign has spent most of that time mouldering before being repainted in modern times for its historical interest.
The best way to find a local business (as opposed to a local branch of a non-local business with many branches) is indeed to walk down the street and, well, not knock on the door blind, but look at the name over it and at what's in the window first (of course, we do have pavements, though) combined with word of mouth, which is particularly important for back-alley businesses. It used to be possible to look them up in the Yellow Pages but we don't get that any more.
When you have a town of 25000 or 500000 and are looking for the electric motor shop that you visit, oh, once per life, you really need a sign. Or are in the next town over and want to stop in to the grocery or hardware store. And so on. Not everyone lives in a walk-able village which has everything they need. Not that that would be a bad thing at times.
Oh, yeah, zoning in much of the US segregates business areas from living areas. H and I are in agreement as to how this isn't a good thing much of the time.
So far as defenses against slaughterbots go, a few more ideas:
Inside buildings, you install: --Lots of mirrors, especially ones that reflect at the wavelengths drone cameras see in case they're using IR or something weird. --Lots of pictures of people's faces on walls, because why not get the slaughterbot to slaughter a photograph? --Busts and statues of high value targets, ideally with life colors. The North Korean leader might love this idea. So my the current American leader. Again, blowing up a statue isn't as bad as hitting a living target. --Hanging lots of abstract metal art (mobiles and such) that tend to reflect and distort any photon-based systems used by drones for proximity awareness. --Lots of heavy drapes to hide behind (thermal and visual barrier)
This will give you an idea of what the inside of a high-value target will look like in the 2020s and 2030s. Shall we call it VersaillesPunk? It could become a visual code for "billionaire residence" in technothrillers.
Other less visible defenses might include:
--In-the-building GPS distorters/silencers (I can see this as an excellent anti-stalker defense in any case) --Phone mimics that, when activated, broadcast the signal coming off of peoples' devices in multiple places in the building. If the drone's targeting a phone rather than a person, this will cause it to blow up a cheap antenna, not an expensive person. --Microphones tuned to detect distinctive sounds like explosions, gunshots, and drones. I can hear even a small drone from at least two blocks away, as that mosquito whine is distinctive. Having a microphone grid spread across a site that listens for problems like drone incursions and rapidly triangulates on the location is a useful defense organizer that's already been implemented in at least one city (for locating gunshots).
--Hosewhips that deploy from the ceiling when a slaughterbot system is in the building, using the sprinkler lines for pressurized water (what a mess) --Interior guards who are issued short-barreled pump shotguns when slaughterbots are expected. Use of small shot with maximum dispersal and rapid reloads seems to be the order of the day. Ideally, it will turn out that the shot size that will destroy a slaughterbot is small enough to merely injure a human, so guards can open fire without worrying who is downrange.
Yup, I know about that. The main difference is the Zumwalt's AGS was intended to shoot magic bullets that could kill an enemy warship well over the horizon, at 100-200km range; for that, $800K is a reasonable price (the comparison is with a cruise missile). The XM-25, in contrast, was an infantry squad support weapon: a brigade might have a couple of hundred of the things, each with 20-50 rounds issued, and burn through them fairly fast. Which adds up rapidly. (In contrast, how often does a USN
battlecruiser"destroyer" get to unload a can of whoop-ass on an enemy warship?)("Battlecruiser" because the Zumwalt is larger than most cruisers; it's about the same displacement as the Royal Navy's first all-big-gun HMS Dreadnought, the biggest, baddest battleship of the pre-WW1 era. Calling it a destroyer is a bit of a joke, even though its hull design is technically in that line of descent, bearing in mind that originally "destroyer" meant "torpedo boat destroyer" and maxed out at 500-600 tons rather than 16,000 tons.)
Addressing the question more directly.
I suspect a strange trailer (with or without tractor) (what I think you mean translated to USAsian) would draw attention in most places. Especially if the goal was not to wipe out a few cattle. Even then the local farmer might give it the stink eye and call the local badges. You'd need to find a parcel of land where the owner wasn't around on a regular basis.
Parking a rig near where it would do some damage might be possible if carefully chosen. You'd want to find a maybe recently closed business with a few other things in the parking lot.
In my town there is a non-ferrous metal stockist. You weave your way through a bunch of industrial and warehousing buildings that sort of agglomerated on a 3D Tetris principle in Victorian times, most of which either are abandoned or look like it, until you are somewhere in its deepest recesses. Then you go up a rickety fire escape kind of stairway. At the top is a door, a plain flat rectangular slab of wood with manky green paint. It is only when you get to this point that you can see any kind of sign and the last time I went there it was of the piece of paper inside a plastic bag variety. How the fuck anyone is supposed to know it's there is a mystery, but even so I've had to wait behind other customers more often than not.
We used to have loads of little places like that, though to be fair most of them did have a sign that you could see from nearly as far away as you could see the actual doorway. With the town having lots of crappy Victorian grot, both industrial and residential, all crammed in wherever there was space, there were all sorts of shed-sized spaces that would at least give you a door and a roof that cost bugger all to rent. Unfortunately most of them have now been squeezed out by habitat destruction, with the Victorian grot being demolished and replaced by modern grot that accommodates a few large users with lots of money and shops all over the place already. And with much bigger signs than the previous occupants, although still only on their actual premises.
The medieval town centre was just the same but at much higher density (so you had to turn sideways to get in places), and was pretty well full already by Victorian times so the little businesses had more to do with horses than iron. It is also there that the habitat destruction began, and didn't really spread to the Victorian areas until they'd run out of stuff in the city centre to smash up. Charlie's comments way up there somewhere about living in a thousand year old city are not all that generally applicable, because Charlie's thousand year old city is historic and impressive enough that people began to get their act together to stop other people smashing it up for money something like a hundred years or more before most places. I don't think Edinburgh had a mayor who was so put out at not having been able to join in all the knocking shit down the army did in WW1 that when the war was over he decided to replicate the destruction at home (complete with a big sign saying that's what the site was) by driving a tank through the town centre, nor fifty years of like-minded successors enjoying freedom of action before anyone even began to rein them in. (And looking at some of the plans it's a bloody good thing this country was skint after WW2.)
Not quite. Ships Taken Up From Trade remained part of the Merchant Marine; take the case of the MV Atlantic Conveyor
https://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2012/04/the-atlantic-conveyor-falklands30/
The crew didn’t become RNR or RFA; although ISTR that the ship’s Master (Captain Ian North) had started out doing convoy work in WW2. The Merchant Marine had its share of hard men - many have heard of HMS Jervis Bay; fewer have heard of the SS Beaverford.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Beaverford#HX_84
I'm used to finding those places via the yellow pages or trade magazines in the old days, or via the internet now. Occasionally word of mouth, but inevitably they have some sort of website. Some of the websites are backed up by "corner of the garage" shops, others by commercial premises of some sort, ranging from storage unit size up to surprisingly large warehouses.
I bought some rainwater tank top filters from a place like that, the website was amateur hour and I was not expecting to visit a giant warehouse full of everything you need to collect and use rainwater that had obviously been there a long time. But without the "looks like a MySpace page" one-page website I wouldn't have known to look for it.
Edinburgh just lost a machine tool store, one of THOSE places round a corner and then round another corner and in through a roller shutter door into a funny-shaped space with a counter, a display board with everything Britool ever made on it up to the year 1966 and boxes of assorted "stuff" at reasonable prices. I got a set of outside jaws for our lathe's Burnerd chuck from them, like rocking-horse droppings and impossible to source unless you got them with the original chuck, and only 15 quid. Bargain!
Some online investigation reveals the company's registered directors were family members, one of whom was born in 1940 so that's probably why it shut up shop. I was along that street today, I couldn't positively identify which door the store used to be behind.
Well where I live the population has gone from 250K/500K city/county to 500K/1000K in the last 20+ years. So signs help us find the "new" stuff.
I don't think a shaped charge that size could be detonated...an actual bullet with a little barrel would be much cheaper and have a stand off range True that a zip gun is easiest to improvise, but small shaped charges/EFPs do exist, and could drill through e.g. helmets. These devices can be hard to find via search. (There are a few vendors, e.g. Alford Technologies sells larger devices) There are some patents related to bullet-sized shape charges/explosively formed penetrators. Some Russian. Here's a recent American application (not vouching for buildability): SMALL CALIBER SHAPED CHARGE ORDNANCE (2017 application) Since it's blindingly obvious, for the record multiple-use devices would (also) be deployed, that might not be lethal.
While poking, found this, which is oddly topical. Book-of-Revelation interpretation meets killbots. How Technology May Fulfill Bible Prophecy (2009) It mentions a 2001 (US) Popular Mechanics article about using small drones to deliver shaped demolition charges to destroy key infrastructure, and then Some military strategists envision swarms of robot flies fluttering onto battlefields. Scout flies, equipped with miniature cameras, would do the work of reconnaissance teams by eavesdropping on tactical communications and sending back real-time videos of enemy positions. Sniper flies would seek out field commanders, recognizing them by the iris patterns of their eyes....Then, they would become the 21st century incarnation of the tribesman's poison dart as they hurled themselves into the carotid arteries of their targets. ... While such stratagems obviously appeal to the highest levels of US military intelligence, theologians will be troubled by glaring similarities between MAV technology and fundamentalists predictions of an end-time spiral by mankind into a cataclysmic war where locust-sized weapons are "given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power" (Rev. 9:3).
Related, mainly for the pun, K.W. Jeter's Noir (1999) had "Noh-flies", that destroyed any flying machinery.
Greg @ 626 No. I replied enough to indicate that I had parsed some of her material. That's ... being friendly (and more).
You weave your way through a bunch of industrial and warehousing buildings that sort of agglomerated on a 3D Tetris principle in Victorian times, most of which either are abandoned or look like it, until you are somewhere in its deepest recesses The current approach is to use the internet to obtain an address then use GPS navigation to try to find it. I found a hidden accordion shop in (US) New Jersey that way recently. It was the only such shop within several hundred kilometers. There was no obvious sign outside, no display window.
The US had cross-country transportation as early as 1869: it's called railroads. Highways came much later, because cars and trucks with pneumatic tires can't handle dirt roads as well as horse-drawn wagons.
In my area the ones that got regulated (first) were small trailers with signs, which would get dropped off at the side of the street. They annoyed enough people that regulations were put in so that they couldn't be left overnight. The van-type signs actually have to be moved, also, or they'll get ticketed for parking offenses, but that applies to all vehicles.
Scott Sanford @ 627:
That's correct. They were never very good at delivering explosives to the enemy. What they did do was to deliver uncertainty and fear, since there are a lot of cargo ships on the oceans and it was hard to be sure the one you were looking at wasn't a trap.
Obviously this only works if everyone knows there are traps out there somewhere. As Dr. Strangelove said, "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!"
Actually, it was kind of the opposite. They were reasonably effective until the Germans started suspecting every British ship they stopped might be a trap.
They were effective against WW1 U-Boats while the Germans were still stopping ships and allowing the crews to get off into life boats before torpedoing the ships. One of the reasons the Germans switched to unrestricted submarine warfare, abandoning Cruiser Rules was they were losing too many U-Boats and other commerce raiders to Q-ships.
Q ships turned out to be not very effective against U-Boats that shoot first & don't bother sticking around to ask questions later
Scott Sanford @ 631:
I'm pretty sure you're describing a really good balloon. We have pretty decent balloons now and some have gotten above 100,000 feet (yes, really). But I don't think there's any way to get one into orbit on its own, much less free of Earth's gravity.
Since you did ask about the physics, ascent speed is basically a question of terminal velocity, in this case upwards since the balloon's weight is less than its buoyancy. As you guessed this should be greatest near the ground where it is displacing the most air; inconveniently Earth's escape velocity of 11.186 km/s is much greater than any reasonable speed of travel through air.
Is this about what you had in mind?
During the early days of "space exploration" some scientists used balloons to carry rockets up to high altitude for launch, allowing the rockets to achieve much higher altitudes with less fuel than they otherwise might have achieved. I don't think this was ever used to loft a satellite into orbit, mainly because you want a fixed launch point so you'll know where the orbit is going to be.
gasdive @ 635: If you wanted to take out a country with Slaughterbots then you'd target infrastructure not people. People will just put on hats with veils.
Put a small solar panel on each one. Have them travel the country a few miles at a time, looking for power lines, transformers, aircraft, fuel storage tanks.
Fly over (not land, just be flying over, so no customs or inspections) at 30 000 ft and drop thousands over the enemy. You could drop hundreds of thousands over a night and have them all activate at once.
... unless your purpose was to take over the country and loot it. In that case you'd want the infrastructure reasonably intact and you'd want to target the people who might resist your takeover.
The NRA notwithstanding the U.S. would be pretty helpless under a coordinated attack by several hundred thousand Slaughterbots against any person in uniform or within the defined perimeter of known U.S. military establishment or anyone seen with a gun.
Here there is a problem created by BT packing in the Yellow Pages on the grounds that the internet has replaced it without actually checking whether that was true. Unfortunately the only "local businesses" that are easily found using the internet are only "local" in the sense of one of their branches being within driving distance, so they have a great big website that the search engines are all over and the pages that mention their local branches are what you find. Minor websites such as you describe just get buried - that is if they exist at all; listings on local business directory websites are more likely than not to have to leave "website address" blank for any given business. But that too is something you don't discover unless you can manage to get the local business directory site to cough up anything in the first place, which usually doesn't happen because they are some of the most perennially dysfunctional pieces of shite on the internet and badly out of date to boot.
So doing an internet search is slow, painful, biased against useful results, and misses an indeterminate but large number of possibilities altogether. Whereas with the Yellow Pages you could quickly leaf through the relevant categories and pick out a list of useful possibilities in a few minutes, and if you didn't find anything you could be confident that it was because there really wasn't anything rather than because you just couldn't find it.
listings on local business directory websites are more likely than not to have to leave "website address" blank for any given business.
Here it seems that instead they pay some scumbag $50 (or more likely $500) to put up a "BobScrapDealer.l0callbiznesz.com.au" website that is one page and could reasonably be mistaken for a yellow pages small ad as drawn by a 5 year old with crayons... but on the internet!
But many, many more businesses have discovered that if they have n online shop and will ship anywhere, they get enough business to cover the cost of the website. The smarter ones replace 90% of the phone orders with a complete product listing or some kind of smart finder like this: https://www.edconsteel.com.au/steel-finder
You have no idea how much better that is that having to ring, or worse visit, some knuckle-dragging moron to find out that they don't provide advice or even descriptions, you have to know what you want. Sure, half the time you find a really helpful and knowledgeable bloke who's really happy to advise on whatever random project you've got. But the other half it's someone who will give you slightly less than you ordered of something that looks a bit like what you asked for. Buying pop rivets I ended up going back with my own vernier caliper because they wouldn't let me use their one, purely so I could argue that the 17mm rivets listed on the invoice were not the 15mm ones supplied, let alone the 19mm ones I would have preferred. They had to haul the old geezer out of the back room to read the caliper, because apparently no digital display = blank incomprehension. Old geezer was actually helpful, and explained that just because it says "in stock" on the website doesn't mean it's actually on site, or even exists, it just means that the standard allows for such a thing. So I either need special order 23mm rivets (min qty ~10kg) or I can stick with 17mm.
timrowledge @ 658: Storage units causing a problem? Try RVs and fifth wheel trailers. Common as cassette tape used to be on Merkin roads. Nobody pays much attention to them, especially when parked in a storage lot. Blow the bloody doors - or better yet, the roof - off to release the flying monkeys. Can be moved easily - fifth wheels by the pickups that flood the US - with little chance of trouble. 2nd hand ones may be cheaper than containers and probably easier to find a space to leave them near interesting targets.
gasdive @ 673: I don't understand the need to store stuff next to the target. That assumes that you've got stuff past customs.
So you're in the country and running a front company. If you're in the country there's no reason you couldn't run a front company that rents out autonomous camper vans. Empty autonomous camper vans would be a common sight in airport parking lots, trundling down highways and pottering around all sorts of out of the way locations. You'd also expect there to be some big service yards with hundreds of them together.
It would be trivial to send a thousand of them out to hundreds of targets. Each camper full of slaughterbots.
This whole discussion started with nuclear tipped cruise missiles hidden in container ships loitering off the coast of the U.S.
I suggested the loitering would be a problem and it would be better just to deliver the container to the target using the existing system for containerized cargo ... until Charlie pointed out how obsolete the whole sneak attack with instant sunshine idea is. Still, I've pretty much stuck with shipping containers as my basic delivery unit because they're something I'm familiar with.
There are bound to be hundreds of different ways to hide your Slaughterbot dispensers until X-Day that I haven't thought of.
The other part about how near the Slaughterbot dispenser needs to be to the target is a function of the Slaughterbot's range. You don't have to store the container at the target, you just have to figure a way to make sure the container with the Slaughterbot dispenser is within range of the target when X-Day kicks off. Again, there's likely more than one way of doing that.
You could probably do it with a fake Big-Box Store semi-trailer delivered to a nearby store the night before X-Day, since "just-in-time" logistics are a thing. Trucking companies deliver sealed trailers to big-box stores during the night all the time. It's unremarkable to have a sealed semi-trailer sitting near the loading dock for a day or so before anyone in the store knows anything about it.
Well, I don't know which would be easier to conquer. No one in uniform, but everyone who was on leave, or asleep, or at sea or indoors or in mufti would be OK. Vs, all the army, navy and airforce personnel ok, but no electricity, no fuel, no aircraft, no radio, no phones, no TV, no food, no internet, no water, no sewage, no banking, plus 250 million heavily armed civilians all in the same boat.
Of course, there's no reason you couldn't do both.
Charlie Stross @ 671: Question: there's a phenomenon here in the UK, where advertising hoardings are illegal alongside motorways, where you sometimes see an old articulated lorry trailer parked up in a field alongside the m-way with an advertisement plastered on its side. Is this -- container-sized trailers converted into advertising hoardings -- a thing in the USA? Because if so, that's totally the way to go (to get at isolated bases alongside roads).
In the U.S. they're called Billboards in the U.S. There's a problem outlawing them in the U.S. because the First Amendment protects commercial "speech". The most that can be done about them on most Interstate Highways in the U.S. is restrict how close they can be to the right of way. They can be "regulated" in areas where they might be a safety hazard. But that's mostly on surface streets within a city's limits. The city can't outlaw advertising signage, but it can regulate the size and location of such signs. I think David L has described the kind of fights that provokes.
So there's no need for anyone to park semi-trailers along the interstates in most places to get around billboard restrictions. The one place I do remember seeing something like this is a farm off the Blue Ridge Parkway where some fundamentalist asshat is fucking up the scenery.
OTOH, most semi-trailers in the U.S. have some kind of advertising on the sides. They're just not parked on the side of the road, they're serving a dual purpose transporting cargo while advertising that cargo to consumers. The latest thing I've seen is a truck with digital billboard advertising on its side. Saw one of those today, although I think the one I saw was a regular delivery truck with the billboard function added.
I've a better idea for drones, the same as the answer to "but the world will turn into gray goo!!!": microwaves. I really ought to get a (literal) burner drone, and find a tossed out high power microwave oven. Take it apart, put a horn on it, and see how it works. A lot more controllable than a high-pressure hose.
Right, everyone doing it. One other thing: what I've read that the real reason that the US went to the M-16 in 'Nam was that most recruits couldn't hit the side of a barn, so they gave them a fire hose.
Then, of course, they had to modify it, because too may of the grunts ran out of ammo in minutes.
The US had cross-country transportation as early as 1869: it's called railroads. Highways came much later, because cars and trucks with pneumatic tires can't handle dirt roads as well as horse-drawn wagons.
I was talking about the regional nature of the US prior to wide spread auto travel across the rivers and mountains.
You're talking about what a minuscule portion of the population could do on a regular basis.
It wasn't until after WWII that other than a trivial number of people regularly crossed our big rivers on anything other than a special occasion.
And as someone here pointed out a year or so ago, the Mississippi only had about 20 railroad bridges into the last century. Geography was just not our friend there.
JBS: you were in Iraq.
I'm so sorry. My late ex and I were in the streets in FL in '03, protesting - and let me assure you that you might have some idea of how UNBELIEVABLY PISSED OFF that 30 years later, I was out there again, for the same motherfucking reason.
There was no fucking reason for you to be there. Dick the shit Cheney should be hung, and everything he owns go to the VA.
Oh, there is the issue of things like ticks and fleas. On the other hand, to "cut it less", most people cut the grass as low as the mower allows. I go for highest, or next to highest.
I think mine looks more inviting to sit on.
Well, given the title of this blog post, I'm assuming "intelligent" drones. So messing up their comms channel won't work, there isn't one. You'd have to fry their internals. That means your microwave basically works like a shotgun that has to be plugged into a working power grid.
If they target transformers and substations, then the first thing that goes is the grid. That also takes down much of the internet and phone system within 72 hours. So when they switch tactics to target people in uniform, who will be put in the field enmass dealing with the emergency, there's no warning that they need to take anti antipersonel drone measures.
They still launch rockets via balloon. Do a web search on rocket launch from balloon
I don't really understand what you're saying about unions - they really want a national healthcare system, so they can bring other issues to the bargaining table
Note that I just saw an article about this from some rabid socialists....
Not hardly. I see 53' trailers parked on streets for a week, in less-used streets.
I'm not sure the whole slaughterbot thing actually works with larger nations, as follows:
ENEMY: "Madame President, if you don't surrender, we will release another 100,000 slaughterbots upon another random American city."
PRESIDENT: "Who am I surrendering to?"
ENEMY: "Berzerkistan!"
PRESIDENT: (Covers mouthpiece of phone with hand.) "Ralph, send the President of Berzerkistan a six-pack of Instant Sunshine."
Obviously slaughterbots work if you want to blackmail something smaller than a nation with nukes, (as long as they're not under someone else's nuclear umbrella.) Other than that the most they can manage is an actual war/set-piece battle or minor blackmail (for large values of "minor.")
Probably the best way to use them is to take out something like a hospital, then sell the other hospitals "slaughterbot insurance."
The talk of hoardings/billboards reminds me that I was tickled to see the Antique Fruit sign[1] again when driving to the Spokane Worldcon. No doubt the sign is covered under different rules because it's mounted on a rooftop rather than being free-standing.
[1] A memorable sign for a business selling both fruit and antiques, in Washington state north of Yakima. Block letters two meters tall are easy to read at a distance.
"Instant Sunshine" stopped working that way just after WWII.
The drone attacks would be really poor news because they're small and fast-moving, so you're not going to get good video footage. Plus the attack is not going to be major, there's not going to a complete wasteland full of corpses and rubble anywhere.
So even if it was the US that was attacked, and even if they decided to go full rogue state, they would have a huge credibility problem. This isn't "someone with an arab name destroyed a landmark, therefore we're destroying Iraq. And Afghanistan", it's more like "someone did less damage than Timothy McVeigh so we nuked Cambodia". There'd be a bit of reputational damage, and a certain amount of paying for the cleanup, and the cleanup being done by US citizens, I suspect.
If Pakistan nuked India for that reason, or Israel nuked Iran, there would be quite literal hell to pay for as long as the offending country lasted. I suspect they would be invaded and democracy would be imposed, and if the US tried to protect their ally China and Russia would lead a Coalition of the Willing to disagree. The chances of a full-on nuclear war would be quite high unless the offender surrendered quickly.
Probably the best way to use them is to take out something like a hospital, then sell the other hospitals "slaughterbot insurance."
On the contrary, the best way to use them is to combine the two threads into one public-service device: program paint-spraying drones with AI recognition of well known annoying corporate logos and slogans, then set them free to redecorate any advertising found in the metropolitan area.
It would be technically illegal but public support for expensive government overreaction would be minimal. grin
Moz @ 637 IIRC Mt/Island Rangitoto is merely "dormant" - yes?
SLaughterbots Again ... an "succesful" attack by those will work ONCE THEN everybody will scramble for counters & hazing their sensors & RETALIATION. Oh & ... The flip side to that is that anyone who orders a slaughterbot attack may well end up on the receiving end of their own slaughterbot attack, with the slaughterbot in this case being a cruise missile or something similar. [ Heteromeles, thanks ] Again - "they can do it back to us" .... something the USA keeps forgetting, in their overweening arrogance. They STILL have not learnt the lesson of the CSS Alabama - becaue they were too arrogant & stupid to sign a treaty
David L- & Charlie ( @ 669 ) FIRST form of any National Health/Employment Insurance was started by that well-known dangeous left-wing socialist Count Otto von Bismarck, back in 1883 ... um, err ...
EC @ 661 Already been going on for years TfL/UndergounD batter your ears with fake "safety" messages at MUCH TOO HIGH A VOLUME all the fucking time. I continue to predict that, one day, there will be a REAL emergency & no-one will take a blind bit of notice, because "It's only another fucking announcement" Oh & the platform staff, certianly in the actually-underground-stations are going deaf - I can hear it in their flat intonation & rising volumes
I'm not sure the whole slaughterbot thing actually works with larger nations, as follows:
It all depends what your exist strategy is. It's basically a mass terror attack, on a scale that starts at 9/11 and ramps up, but it's not a substitute for a brace of mechanized brigades or a nuclear arsenal.
On the other hand, consider the USA is split between the Pink Party and the Orange Party. Putinland wants to get leverage, and Kimland is a convenient rabid-looking dictatorship. So Putinland organizes a slaughterbot attack on Congress, Senate, US Supreme Court(!!!), and White House that kills 10-50% of the Pink Party reps and associated justices (and, optionally, bits of the executive branch), while laying a breadcrumb-trail pointing to Kimland.
Upshot: Orange Party becomes entrenched, waves the bloody shirt, and nukes the everloving fuck out of Kimland (who Putinland didn't much like anyway). Meanwhile, now that Slaughterbots are out there, Putinland can bribe or blackmail anyone they damn well like in the Orange Party and if they don't play along, well, they'd better hope the maid service doesn't accidentally let in a small buzzing killer by accident while they're out of their home. Inconvenient, that.
Oh and the platform staff, certianly in the actually-underground-stations are going deaf - I can hear it in their flat intonation & rising volumes
I have an Apple Watch. One of the interesting app gizmos on it is a decibel meter. It's astounding to discover just how loud it gets inside a pub on a Saturday night, or alongside a main road that's also a bus route, or inside a railway station.
I also have a shiny new pair of AirPods Pro, which do really good noise cancellation (with a "transparency" mode you can activate by tapping that lets ambient sound through if you want to hear cars approaching while you're crossing a road).
Not quite. Firstly, moving from 7.62 to 5.56 meant you could carry twice as much ammunition for the same weight (operational analysis in the 1940s revealed that 0.303 / .30-06 / 7.92 was overpowered for the vast majority of infantry engagements). The whole sorry saga of a single NATO calibre is another story.
Secondly, 7.62 is a pig to teach well. Because the recoil is... noticeable, it encourages gunshyness and flinching. Training this out of firers takes time and effort. By contrast, firing 5.56 doesn’t hurt at all, and allows novices and rusty firers to concentrate on the aiming bit, not worrying about whether it’s going to hurt. When our battalion converted from the old rifle to the new, I soon went from being a very good shot (comparatively) to being just a good shot; lots of people caught up with me. This was a good thing...
The current approach is to use the internet to obtain an address then use GPS navigation to try to find it.<\i>
This approach is also handy in the many parts of the world where the concept of "street address" as understood in, e.g., the US is not in use. Fortunately, most GPS devices understand geographic (WGS-84) coordinates as an input, so if you can find the place you want to go in Google Maps/Earth or other, you can get the coordinates from there and use those.
WGS-84<\i>
Also, this. It's an interesting concept, but I don't know how much use it's getting.
https://what3words.com/about-us/
With all this talk about slaughterbots / drone warfare, I'm surprised nobody has brought up Linda Nagata's excellent The Last Good Man. It's about a military contracting company in a plausible near-future setting, where the use of drones is ubiquitous.
"de facto" = "passes the duck test". I know that they weren't called that, didn't change uniform, yada, yada, yada, but the gummint had the right to requisition the ships and officers for naval support work.
Indeed. It's loud enough to trigger the noise cancelling feature on my hearing aids - and, considering that I have 80 dB loss in several of the relevant frequencies, that's saying something.
Greg Tingey has completely missed the point, though. Yes, you are hassled if you go into certain public places, but I am talking about being hassled when you are 'out in the open' and away from other people, often BECAUSE you want some peace and quiet.
On the other hand, to "cut it less", most people cut the grass as low as the mower allows. I go for highest, or next to highest.
JBS and I live in a city where there is an 8" rule. Per the inspectors it is only enforced when someone complains. And it only applies to grass. So plant something that doesn't "look like grass" or just spread out pine straw and what grows is mostly ok.
The city inspectors really don't want to deal with it. At all. They would much rather deal with keeping someone house from burning down or similar.
unions - they really want a national healthcare system
I think you'll find this varies wildly based on the specific union. Some airline unions and other powerful ones don't want it. But I don't disagree that some do.
Barn sides used to be used for advertising. I suspect that personally owned structures in the US are covered by "free speech".
Likely varies by area.
whitroth @ 703: Right, everyone doing it. One other thing: what I've read that the real reason that the US went to the M-16 in 'Nam was that most recruits couldn't hit the side of a barn, so they gave them a fire hose.
Then, of course, they had to modify it, because too may of the grunts ran out of ammo in minutes.
The Army was already looking for a replacement rifle because the M-14 was too difficult for the average draftee to learn marksmanship. It kicks like a mule. Plus they were looking to lighten the Infantryman's load so they could load him down with more ammo.
Their studies of what happened on the battlefields of WW2 and Korea convinced the Army brass that most combat occurs close in, 100 meters or less (yes the U.S. Army was already metric by the early 60s). Vietnam just happened to come along as the Army was finalizing the switch over to the M-16 and both proved the concept and highlighted some mis-assumptions the Army had made about the M-16 (**).
The M-16 makes it easier to teach Rifle Marksmanship because it doesn't kick hardly at all when fired. I still remember the demonstration the Drill Sargents put on to introduce us to the M-16 in Basic Training. One of the Drill Sargents put the butt of the rifle up to his chin and fired a full 20 round magazine in one burst to show us recruits that the M-16 didn't kick.
When we got to the training stage for full-auto fire, we were expected to be able to produce a 3 round burst using just the trigger for control. Woe betide you if the Drill Sargents caught you with an empty magazine when the last of 6 targets had gone down. You'd better have two rounds LEFT in your magazine to fire semi-auto at the end (to prove you had indeed controlled your fire in 3 round bursts).
The modification for 3 round burst instead of full auto didn't come along for a decade or more AFTER Vietnam.
There are occasions when it might seem desirable to dump the magazine on full auto, but they're not that many, and most of them leave you in a situation where you still need bullets in your weapon while you're sitting there with an empty magazine trying to remember "What do I do next?"
(**) There were problems with the early M-16s in Vietnam, but they weren't problems peculiar to the wartime environment in Vietnam.
During the acceptance trials, the Army used rounds loaded with high-grade commercial smokeless powder and decided the Teflon coating on the bolt & bolt carrier eliminated the need to lubricate the bolt. But the general issue of ammunition ain't loaded with "high-grade commercial smokeless powder". It's ball powder that leaves behind a corrosive residue that will foul the UN-lubricated bolt & bolt carrier really quickly.
And after a few thousand rounds, the original buffer springs lost their OOMPH & wouldn't always provide enough force to completely chamber a round. Both problems were solved with the M-16A1. The Army started issuing cleaning kits containing a cleaner that would remove the ball powder residue & a lubricant for the bolt & bolt carrier.
And (in addition to better buffer springs) they added the "forward assist", that little doohickey that sticks out the right side of the upper receiver.
If the round doesn't feed completely, you bang the forward assist a couple of times with the butt of you hand and try to fire again (Immediate Action). If it still won't fire, there's a procedure for clearing the weapon - remove the magazine, pull the charging handle (locking the bolt to the rear & hopefully remembering not to leave the charging handle floating), visually inspect the chamber & remove any round you find in there, reinsert the magazine, hit the bolt release to chamber a round & hit the forward assist to make sure the bolt has locked the round in place.
We practiced and practiced until we had them engraved in muscle memory. I went through Basic with an original M-16 that did not have the forward assist (actually manufactured by the Mattel Toy Corporation - I still remember the multi-point star logo [**]). You were expected to practice the motion anyway. Plus some of my Basic Training Company DID have M-16A1s with the forward assist so we traded off weapons to practice the drills.
Forty-five years later I believe I could still perform Immediate Action/Remedial Action in my sleep ... other than having to open my eyes to "visually inspect the chamber".
[**] The initial order from the U.S. Army for the M16 was so large Colt couldn't fill it in a timely manner from their own manufacturing facilities, so they subcontracted production. Mattel, along with IBM, General Motors & other manufacturers was one of those subcontractors.
Assuming that we could construct a very light framework that did not leak, and it contained a vacuum ..
That was a premise of "The Diamond Age", by Neil Stephenson, 1995.
Specifically, he posited mass production of a closed-cell diamond foam, with vacuum in the cells. So his protagonists travelled the world in, effectively, diamond zeppelins.
I've never seen an analysis of how practical the foam would be. The zeppelins, on the other hand, wouldn't be much more practical than the ones we have already, namely, not very.
whitroth @ 705: JBS: you were in Iraq.
I'm so sorry. My late ex and I were in the streets in FL in '03, protesting - and let me assure you that you might have some idea of how UNBELIEVABLY PISSED OFF that 30 years later, I was out there again, for the same motherfucking reason.
There was no fucking reason for you to be there. Dick the shit Cheney should be hung, and everything he owns go to the VA.
I protested the Vietnam War in 1970 - 1971. I joined the NC Army National Guard in 1975.
I was in DC again for the pre-Iraq war protests (18 Jan 2003 IIRC) - I was on active duty at RDU airport at the time. We worked a cycle of 4 days on, 4 days off, 4 nights on, 4 days off, rinse & repeat ... The DC protest came during one of my 4 days off, so I went ... in civilian clothes of course.
Then they announced in July 2003 that the 30th Brigade would be one of the three brigade strength units mobilized for phase II of the Iraq war and just like that I was promoted (and transferred) to Platoon Sergent for the Chemical Platoon. Found out later that I would have been transferred anyway if I hadn't accepted the promotion. And my prior unit was mobilized for Phase III. I had a chance to stop by and talk to them as the brigade was being transferred back stateside at the end of our tour. So even if I hadn't been transferred into the Brigade in 2003, I'd have ended up in Iraq late in 2004 rather than early.
I thought the Iraq War was a stupid idea from the get-go, but I'd made my commitment to the National Guard years before & I'd enjoyed all the benefits that came from that, so when they went, I went ... whether I thought it was a good idea or not.
I agree about Cheney, but for another reason.
While we were in Iraq, Cheney & company came to the realization medical care for all the Iraq War veterans they were creating was going to cost $TRILLIONS$ (which might affect their tax cut plans) so they arbitrarily cut benefits down to 2 years after you left the service or 2 years after you got home from Iraq, whichever came first, even for those who like me who had already earned VA medical care as part of our retirement benefits.
I got my 20 year letter qualifying me to receive retired pay & benefits in 1995, almost a decade BEFORE I was sent to Iraq.
.. they'd better hope the maid service doesn't accidentally let in a small buzzing killer by accident while they're out of their home. Inconvenient, that.
Not particularly. Sneaking poison into a home would be easier, and I notice that assassins usually poison people outside their homes, where the sneaking opportunities are better. Unless you're thinking of flying in a window, which the maid had foolishly left open. The burglar alarm companies would soon offer detection tools.
The main upshot of bot-fear would be that every bodyguard detail would contain a person who dressed in heavy kevlar, and walked in front.
whitroth @ 708: They still launch rockets via balloon. Do a web search on rocket launch from balloon
No need. I know they do it, but have they launched anything into orbit from a balloon?
They could do it I think, but it seems like launching to orbit from a balloon there would be a bit of a problem getting the satellite into the orbit they want it to go into.
whitroth @ 709: I don't really understand what you're saying about unions - they *really* want a national healthcare system, so they can bring other issues to the bargaining table
Note that I just saw an article about this from some rabid socialists....
I've seen reports (produced from government studies) that most NON-healthcare (i.e. NOT medical service providers & insurance companies) companies favor a single-payer national health insurance or health care system too, because the cost of providing insurance to employees gives American companies a competitive disadvantage ... costs the companies in other countries don't have to bear.
The opposition comes from medical & healthcare companies who stand to see their profits affected and a bunch of rich old radical right-wingnut, christo-fascist fundamentalists who oppose health care for the masses because it would be open to people who don't kowtow to their particular narrow minded vision of what it means to be a "Christian". Every damn one of 'em would gladly wield the hammer and nails if Jesus ever actually did come again because he's Jewish and he was from the middle-east and would look more like the refugees they despise than like the Nordic Aryan Ideal.
Scott Sanford @ 712: The talk of hoardings/billboards reminds me that I was tickled to see the Antique Fruit sign[1] again when driving to the Spokane Worldcon. No doubt the sign is covered under different rules because it's mounted on a rooftop rather than being free-standing.
[1] A memorable sign for a business selling both fruit and antiques, in Washington state north of Yakima. Block letters two meters tall are easy to read at a distance.
See Rock City! There are still a few of these old barns around.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.149081,-87.9535367,3a,90y,132.33h,93.98t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sNgmCkxSWbpPeJkkzTw4WSQ!2e0!7i3328!8i1664
When was the last time you saw a set of Burma Shave signs on the side of the road? There were still a few around when we went on family trips in the early 60s (when I was still young enough that I didn't have to stay home to go to work while they went on vacation).
Re: 'It all depends what your exist strategy is.'
Destroying infrastructure is stupidly expensive if your goal was to increase your total usable/marketable* asset base/wealth. There's also long-term cost-effectiveness of your soldiers, esp. medical and retirement/spouse & family survivor benefits plans. (If you're a cynic, you'll recruit only single 18-20 risk-seeking males.)
Or, there's 'The Mouse that Roared' model except it's getting harder to find a world power that would welcome foreigners as new countrymen. Mind you some Southerners might welcome an opportunity to get fresh low-paid workers [slaves].
”IIRC Mt/Island Rangitoto is merely "dormant" - yes?”
Rangitoto was very active from 1000 to 600 years ago when it’s big eruption occurred.
Rangitoto is the biggest of 53 mini-volcanos in and around Auckland city, which have been erupting for the last 200,000 years. Most are only about 150m high or smaller.
Another way to think of it is that Auckland city is all one big volcano that erupts at different vents over time, with Rangitoto the latest.
You know how bubbles in champagne go up in lines, each bubble following the other? Think of a volcano as being the visible top of a stream of bubbles of hot magma, boiling up from very deep in the earth. Auckland the top of such, a place where small eruptions cause new little volcanos every few thousand years.
Taupo, OTOH, is a mega-volcano. Really big volcanos are not mountains, they blow up their mountains and are flat or lakes. It was the worlds most recent mega-eruption 20,000 years ago. Likely in the next 200,000 years sometime it may again devastate the entire North Island. Lake Taupo, OTOH, is a meg
I'm not a physicist, but IIRC, Galileo had this little demonstration that two objects of different weight, when let go at the same time, hit the ground at the same time.
The point to me (the non-physicist) is that no matter how little your object weighs, as long as it has any mass at all, it's going to be pulled towards the Earth by gravity. Now, if it's less dense than air, it's probably going to rise until it gets stuck in a medium of equivalent density, but it's not going to escape the Earth's gravity unless gravity somehow doesn't affect it.
What you want for your gravity-defying balloon is something like cavorite
Good thing to get angry about! IIRC, the original push towards privatized health care came back around the same time as Darwinian "red in touch and claw" capitalism became the banner around which red blooded American corporations rallied to fight against the growing monster of communism--in the 1920s.
Ever since then, the problem has been an ideology that "capitalism is the best answer," and so better answers that required less ideological purity were suppressed in the US. One of those better answers happens to be single payer health care.
I'm actually quite serious about this. There are many places where the capitalism is better than communism meme has caused misery, but the avoidance of single-payer health care has probably caused more death than any other.
If you want to get really angry, you can look at the close interlink between addiction and capitalism that goes back centuries. It may be called capturing market share, but there's a long, dark history of capitalist organizations, be they called corporations, cartels, or whatever, marketing addictive drugs and recreational chemicals against government efforts to stop the trade and heal the damaged. It really shouldn't be a surprise that we have so much trouble now dealing with problems with addiction to opioids, meth, alcohol, and vaping in a purely capitalist context now. The best solution involves, yes, public health care, but that's anti-capitalist. So we've got a problem.
If it has enough velocity when released, it could achieve escape velocity.
I seem to recall a discussion a couple of decades ago that showed it was not possible for any such balloon (even if it had an infinitely-strong and no-mass material) could do so.
Not quite. As it rises it has an upwards acceleration because the upwards force from buoyancy is greater than the downwards force from gravity. Both are decreasing — buoyancy because the atmosphere is getting less dense, gravity because the object is getting farther away. (To be complete we should also include drag, which gets complicated as it varies by non-linear functions of speed and air density.) If the object can achieve escape velocity before there is no more buoyancy it could escape.
No idea if this is possible even for an object of arbitrarily small mass — I haven't done that kind of maths in decades. My gut feel is that it isn't, but you really need someone to run the numbers before being certain.
The classic (non-American) example was the opium wars of the 19th century, in which the British empire -- at the urging of the British East India Company -- literally went to war with China to force them to accept imports of Opium in exchange for tea.
(Jokes about which drug is more addictive are in bad taste.)
Obligatory reading about "The East India Company Horror-story is that the Dutch East Indoa Co the VOC was, if anything, even worse .....
On the subject of slaughterbots and other militarily aggressive uses for drones:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30162/u-s-military-is-buying-these-small-interceptor-drones-to-knock-down-other-drones
It's taken me since yesterday to finally remember: in the US, find where to buy something? Forever, every purchasing dept in every business had a subscription (annual) to Thomas' Register, about 12 thick volumes per year of all of the providers for whatever. IIRC, you could buy a partial subscription, to a subset.
Now? https://www.thomasnet.com/
There are grasses that don't grow much over 4 inches tall, and are best mowed at as high a height as you can manage. (I'm thinking of buffalo grass, Buchloe dactyloides, which is a plains grass and likes full sun.)
I remember "Burma-Shave" signs from the mid-60s. And I've been past a barn with a Mail Pouch Tobacco sign on it that I think is a lot more recent than that (though I remember seeing signs on the sides of barns from the 60s). Windmills would have ads on their 'tails', too.
Top hit on Google.
Buffalograss is a soft, gray-green or blue-green, perennial turf grass which grows 3-12 inches ... and ...Buffalograss does best in clay loam, where it can survive on as little as one and a half inches of rainfall per month.
but ...Stampede are lawn selections. Stampede does not get taller than 4 inches.
so maybe.
But the range seems to stop around the Mississippi River. Which is well over 600 miles from here plus a middling sized mountain range.
But you've put a bug into my brain. We also have a lot of tree cover which may prevent this and similar grasses. We also have rules about dirt/mud runoff to keep silt out of the Neuse River so you have to be careful when removing vegetation. I agree with this part of then rules.
On a side note on HOA style lawn care, a friend who lived in an Austin TX HOA neighborhood in the 80s/90s got in a hassle during a drought for not keeping his lawn GREEN. So he got some sports field paint and painted it green. After some back and forth with him telling the HOA to pound sand they amended to bylaws over the winter to be a bit more specific about what was meant by "green".
That was a thing in SoCal in the depths of the Great Recession: Foreclosure Business Boom: Lawn Painting (Cindy Perman, 30 July 2009) One of the few businesses booming in this recession is lawn painting, which has gotten a huge boost from all the foreclosures — and dead lawns that result when homes are abandoned. These companies will come in, clean up any litter on the lawn, mow it and trim it — then paint it green. “It gives a house curb appeal, so when prospective buyers drive up, they know they won’t have to spend X number of dollars fixing up the lawn,” said TJ Davis, a retired fire captain in southern California, who founded the lawn-painting service Green Genie last fall. “Plus, the neighbors love it,” he added.
Thanks. I'd forgotten about the acceleration due to buoyancy.
There's a whole article in Wikipedia on "atmospheric escape".
I skimmed it, but the basic point seems to be that, without the input of energy of some sort, a vacuum balloon will be extremely unlikely to reach escape velocity simply by being of extremely low density. If it could escape that way, then hydrogen could escape Earth's gravity simply by being hydrogen. Instead, it looks like hydrogen needs an energy input in the upper atmosphere to reach escape velocity.
Also #746 and #747 - Which reminded me of when a new sports centre and "leisure pool" were being build here. On Friday the building was surrounded by bare earth; on Monday (40 hours later) by 2 inch tall luminous green vegetation, which we took to be AstroTurf seed!
Buoyancy can't drive you to higher than the local speed of sound, even if the mass is zero.
Bouyancy derives from more molecules hitting the bottom (or hitting harder) than the top. Local speed of sound is the average velocity of the local molecules. If you're moving up faster than that, then there's nothing hitting the bottom. (there may be some due to recirculation, but they're only recirculating because there's more hitting the top than the bottom)
You'd have to boyantly reach GEO. That's not going to happen as the atmosphere stopped long before that.
Sure, but that's not bouyancy.
It's 02:20 local, I'm in a bath robe and i'm still pretty sure I said that with the added professional advice to not ask people in bath robes to do quantum physics for you!
Why bother building your own drone swarm when you can simply hack someone elses?
They STILL have not learnt the lesson of the CSS Alabama ...
You mean, "If you need a warship, get the British to build it?"
It worked in the 19th century...
When was the last time you saw a set of Burma Shave signs on the side of the road? There were still a few around when we went on family trips in the early 60s ...
That sounds right; apparently new real Burma Shave signs where only put up until 1963, although there are a few recreations still to be seen.
This may be cryptic to Europeans; generations ago in the US, Burma Shave advertised with sequential roadside signs bearing short poems, a few words per sign and usually ending with the product name:
If you / Don't know / Whose signs / These are / You can't have / Driven very far Hardly a driver / Is now alive / Who passed / On hills / At 75 / Burma-Shave Does your husband / Misbehave / Grunt and grumble / Rant and rave / Shoot the brute some / Burma-Shave
Less commercially, I remember the Uncle Sam billboard south of Seattle, privately owned by a local paleo-conservative crank fond of venting his opinions on everybody using the highway. He was apparently just as opinionated in person.
SS Not quite After the Napoleonic bother, (almost) everybody decided that "Private Ships of War" were not a good idea & eventually signed up to a treaty agreeing not to let their people doin it & efectively banning "Letters of Marque & Reprise" - 1856 Declaration of Paris ... but the US didn't sign. This came back to bite them, because the US South wanted ships & was prepared to pay IN GOLD for them. And the shipyard acceded, once they realised that the buyers were "American" & were therefore not bound by the treaty ... oops.
Meanwhile ... Prediction that the Orange shitgibbon could lose by as many as 5 million votesd in 2020 & STILL become POTUS. Shudder
Dozedilitry is a SPAMMER who is only commenting to insert a link to some bunch of arseholes flogging jammers.
In Milligan's The Bedsitting Room the UK sent it's bomb to the USSR through the post. Unfortunately they didn't put enough postage on it and so it got returned.
They didn't read the info on how to post markup so their link got filtered out, but: banned and flagged as spam anyway.
(I'm not generally awake/looking at the blog before 11am local time these days but got woken up early by the postie today.)
In Milligan's The Bedsitting Room the UK sent it's bomb to the USSR through the post. Unfortunately they didn't put enough postage on it and so it got returned.
See, that's last century's stupid conspiracy cockup, like blowing yourself up because you forgot to reset to Summer Time, which sounds so stupid it could only happen once but no. In the 21st century people will conspire to build fake news websites smearing their opponents, then mass email their documentation to those political opponents.
I might address fighting accusations by appearing on television and confessing everything, but reality is different in the Trump leagues.
My lawn is largely composed of (a particular) clover and vetch, which make a perfectly good cover and don't grow above an inch or so. There are plenty of other such plants, some of which (like those) will take hard wear.
SS Your "Baltimore Sun" link won't open on this side of the pond - something to do with US papers not meeting GDPR requirements - I've seen this on other outlets, too ...
Your "Baltimore Sun" link won't open ...
Do you have better luck with the Independent, New York Times or Wikipedia? For those who follow no links, in 1999 two car bombs carrying three moronic terrorists blew up an hour early because someone didn't synchronize to Israel Summer Time correctly.
Bill Arnold @ 747: That was a thing in SoCal in the depths of the Great Recession:
Foreclosure Business Boom: Lawn Painting (Cindy Perman, 30 July 2009)
One of the few businesses booming in this recession is lawn painting, which has gotten a huge boost from all the foreclosures — and dead lawns that result when homes are abandoned.
These companies will come in, clean up any litter on the lawn, mow it and trim it — then paint it green.
“It gives a house curb appeal, so when prospective buyers drive up, they know they won’t have to spend X number of dollars fixing up the lawn,” said TJ Davis, a retired fire captain in southern California, who founded the lawn-painting service Green Genie last fall. “Plus, the neighbors love it,” he added.
Yeah, but you got to paint it again in three months. My ...uh ..."lawn" ... for want of a better word is as green as nature wants it to be and the little plants with the round leaves (that are not clover, I looked) seem to naturally restrict the height of plant growth. I only have "grass" in a few places, mainly wind-drift from the neighbors.
I think there are a couple of neighbors who subscribe to a lawn painting service, particularly the guy who built the McMansion a couple of doors down on the other side of the street, but the lawn that was left there is TINY. If it's $0.25 a square foot to paint it, I think he must get change back from a nickel.
My lawn is largely composed of (a particular) clover and vetch, which make a perfectly good cover and don't grow above an inch or so. There are plenty of other such plants, some of which (like those) will take hard wear.
As I've moved about the US (Paducah, Pittsburgh, Connecticut, and now North Carolina/Texas) I've discovered that ground cover/grass is very location specific in terms of water/soil/temp/rain/etc... What does well in one area is a jungle or burnt dirt in another.
Add to that that unless I truck in black dirt, most of my yard could be made into bricks with a bit of a fire. Not high quality but brick never less. Also toss in the "English" ivy and another variety that I get to beat back periodically. (Sometimes the period seems to cycle in days instead of months.)
Oh, yeah the needles from my last four 80 foot and taller pines don't help in growing ANYTHING but more pines. Just got a quote for $3500 to take them out. $2000 for the easy three, $1500 for the biggest one which is very close to the substation feed loop for the area. Sigh.
Now I wish I knew what the deer are eating. My security cams have caught 1 to 4 deer at a time visiting my back yard eating various things. Their scents made for a wild time for the first day or two of my daughter's dogs coming over while they were out of town.
“the needles from my last four 80 foot and taller pines don't help in growing ANYTHING but more pines” Sounds like it’s successfully suppressing the growth of anything the town or HOA could object to with close to zero maintenance effort. Why not leave it as is?
That's not right.
I am reminded, of course, of a post on usenet, back in the early nineties. I used to dip into various newsgroups (not the ones I normally hung out in), and in alt.usenet.recovery was one, once, "it's the middle of the night, my beautiful girlfriend is lying in bed nude waiting for me to come back, but after a trip to the bathroom, on my way back to bed, I thought I'd log on and see if someone had posted...."
“the needles from my last four 80 foot and taller pines don't help in growing ANYTHING but more pines”
That sounds about right. I just had a pine taken out for $2K, because it was in the right place to catch embers out of the wind and fall on my house when fully engulfed. I had them save the stump, bought some phoenix oyster mushroom plug spawn from Fungi Perfecti, and used it to inoculate the stump. I can see the mycelia growing under the wax, so it'll be fun if I get a crop of mushrooms off the stump next winter. Sadly, most of their plug spawn is for fungi that grow on trees I don't have, but it's a fun solution to dealing with downed wood if you're into that sort of thing.
More to the point, if you're in a fire area, rake the pine needles (also, teach granny the joys of egg sucking. I'm sure you know how good pine needles are as tinder). Also consider the joys of planting acid-loving plants, like azaleas or blueberries, under the pines. The deer will thank you for the treat.
Heck, since it's already almost New Year's Eve, what shall we name the new decade? It looks like we're exiting the Terrible Teens. Are we going into the Howling Twenties?
More to the point, if you're in a fire area, rake the pine needles
Not really. More hurricanes to deal with here. And even when they get here as a depression they are still a freaking big storm with plenty of wind and rain to bring down individual pine.
Now townhome HOAs are learning that maybe pine straw around the outside are maybe NOT the best "natural" ground cover to use. They turned a single unit fire into a 4 or 5 unit fire recently.
Sounds like it’s successfully suppressing the growth of anything the town or HOA could object to with close to zero maintenance effort. Why not leave it as is?
First off they only impact about 10% of my yard. But it is the 10% next to the sidewalk. I had the rest taken down much more cheaply when the house next door was razed for a McM.
Second they are on a slope and keep most anything but really crappy weeds from growing. So I get to periodically pull up pine seedlings (a few years ago 8 barrels worth) or rake it down to red dirt. Which when it rains is a slide (people not the ground) and it stains anything you track it into.
I don't have an issue with the city yelling at me to cut my lawn. But I would like something that would grow under pines and not require much mowing.
I think we maybe talked past each other, but if you're in longleaf pine country, the pines do love them some fire.
Re: ' ... something that would grow under pines and not require much mowing.'
Have you tried pachysandra? It does very well in acidic soil and is easy to maintain as solid ground cover or as a short hedge.
Haven't tried much of anything so far. Stripped most of my yard clean a few years back when the trees were taken out. If I stay I'll look into it.
Not so much. We both have issues with people who think all trees are sacred. Some trees just don't belong in some places or are no longer useful. And need to come down.
Some people got upset with me about taking down 2 beautiful dogwoods. Both had 12" trunks. But only the outer 2" was solid. The rest was dust or air.
That's what happens to many trees as they age, and does NOT mean they need to be removed. Oaks (the British ones) have hundreds of years' of life ahead of them after they become hollow. See Oliver Rackham about that.
When they are splitting and have limbs that can maim or kill, especially around kids, they need to come down.
Visit a town that has had 50 mph winds for 12 hours. Or 100+mph winds for 4 hours. Then tell me which trees need to be left standing when they start getting into that shape.
My neighbor just took down a tree that I knew was going to have to come down at some point. It got messed up in an ice storm 15 years ago before they lived there. I knew the tree was going to drop bigger and bigger limbs. Lucky for them when the 8" x 20' one came down next to their front door the kids were not in the yard playing. I watched it come down (just happened to be in my front yard facing it) and it would have killed anyone on the ground.
As I said in my comment to H, not all things apply to all parts of the world.
Building houses surrounded by 30'-50' tall pines was stupid. 70 years later when they are in the 100' range they are just dangerous. And the pines have made the oaks and maples and such grow in odd ways that makes them problematic when the pines come down or are removed.
Lawn painting was around long before that. I heard of it in connection with Bermuda-grass turf - it's winter-dormant and thus brown. Also used a lot for golf courses. So...painting it green was a thing.
There's an area a few miles from me where the street trees are all pines. Messy. Occasionally one falls over - onto the street, with luck - and they're now, at ground level, mostly the as big as the space between sidewalk and curb, so those are starting to lift and break. But, like many cities, the rules require that you replace the tree with the same kind - even if time has demonstrated that to be a problem.
"Visit a town that has had 50 mph winds for 12 hours. Or 100+mph winds for 4 hours. Then tell me which trees need to be left standing when they start getting into that shape."
But that's easy. You've got the answer already!
I've read Rackham and I agree with him. Some of my favorite oaks are heart-rotted and old. I also agree that some oaks do better for having hollow centers to take the weight off.
But I also agree with David L. Some of the eastern red oaks aren't very sturdy, and when they get heart-rotted, they have the bad habit of breaking during storms, sort of like sycamores (plane trees in the UK) do. Since these tend to be planted around houses, if those are heart-rotted, then yes, it's better that they come down.
As Rackham points out, it's very often the older, heart-rotted trees that last through that, because they are more flexible. It is often the younger, 'solid' trees that crash down or drop branches.
However, it is also very species-dependent, and I know very little about large dogwoods - my point was that heart-rotting is not in and of itself a good reason to remove a tree.
Moveable type might be pretty awful as blogging platforms go, but wordpress exceeds in on all measures by a considerable margin. Comments on WP just vanish with no explanation as to whether they've been discarded, held for moderation, will be published after a delay, or the account has been blocked by the blog author. H's latest blog post has just gained four comments from me complaining about that (even going to the extent of posting using Microsoft Edge with no protection) before suddenly they all appeared.
The reason blog postings on my Wordpress blog don't show up is that they were held for moderation, since you hadn't commented before. For some random reason, I didn't see your posts. Once you've been accepted once on that account, you should be able to post without limit.
When I had one on WP, it was set up to require approval on comments. (I did get one once that required some editing before I'd let it through.)
Heart-rot is a good reason to take a closer look at a tree. We had to take down an old walnut tree (orchard tree: English on black walnut rootstock) because it was both heart-rotten and had termites.
I set mine to moderate when some racist dude decided to follow me from this blog to my own blog. He got purged, and decided to hold comments until I could actually read them.
I'm not constantly watching for new posts from new people. That's not WordPress' fault, I just get to doing other thing.
In this case my first comment got through but subsequent ones were subject to a ~5 minute delay.
Amusing and somewhat relevant article about the impossibility of trustable hardware, by a guy who DIY'd an "open hardware" laptop and various people misunderstood what that meant. No, it's still a collection of things that can't be inspected shipped to you by people you can't trust, even if the PCB layout was done by a nice man in the USA.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5706
HN also linked to an article on the trusted processor inside your AMD CPU, talking about how to run your own code inside it...
That chap is very much worth reading for his stuff about the electronics industry in Shenzhen and how it works putting some new thing into production there. Also about the Chinese approach to patents and copyright and stuff.
Blogging platforms... Wordpress in general does seem to suffer from over-aggressive anti-spam doobries; I associate it also with security like a string vest, and sites that don't work because so many of them seem to be based on templates written by the same idiot. Dysfunctional crap like giant oversized menus that fill the entire screen just to present a few links, which appear over the top of and completely obscure the actual content because they are hard-coded to do so in the CSS, or sheer mindless stupidity whose only possible effect can ever be to fuck things up (like <body style="display: none;">, which is a real and frequent example), is all too common these days anyway, but Wordpress doesn't help matters by handing people ready-made configurations that are claimed to all work fine but in fact contain nuggets of this kind of idiotic code lurking in them here and there like rabbit turds in a bag of Maltesers.
Other platforms, though, seem to be if anything even worse than Wordpress at losing posts. I've basically long given up on trying to comment on any blog ever because the expected response to submitting the form is that either it just sails off into the wide blue yonder and nothing else happens at all, or the server returns a message purporting to claim successful submission and just doesn't tell you it's been submitted to /dev/null. Charlie's blog being on Movable Type was a pleasant surprise, in that it does respond as it's supposed to and I haven't had to hack it at all (except to stop it changing the time in winter).
Blogging platforms... Wordpress in general does seem to suffer from over-aggressive anti-spam doobries;
What you're seeing is a failure of the blog operator, not Wordpress. Signup with wordpress.com, Godaddy, or any of the next 100 or so Wordpress blogging hosting firms, give them your credit card for a few $$, answer 5 to 20 questions,
and BAM!!! You now have a blog.
It will come with a default set of plugins and settings. Almost certainly with restrictive SPAM settings to protect the ignorant and/or stupid from themselves and also to protect the reputation of the hosting firm.
So if you're serious you drill down and adjust another 100 or so settings. And make some serious decisions about SPAM and comment moderation. If you don't most comments will get held and if you are not willing to look at the held list they will appear to vanish. After adding in a decent theme and some useful plugins you can have 1000 more options to set and/or ignore.
I deal with a wordpress blog of similar traffic to this one. A highly customizable theme plus 20+ plugins for more tuning. We use some fairly specialized and tuned SPAM filtering plugins which allow us to track and decide on all not purely crap comments and decide what to do with them. And even with that we get to see a lot of "spell casters", you have money in our African bank, click here for health/wealth/fame, or whatever.
It is all about who is running the blog and if they have time to deal with it. But unless you are posting from an IP know for pure crap (and thus get instantly dumped) your comment will not be lost. Just ignored due to the time constraints of the blog admin(s). (The default SPAM plugin for most sites dump held comments after a few days. Ugh.)
I can feel for H. It can be a full time job digging real comments out of the SPAM filters. Especially if you have them at the default settings.
And just so you know, for most of us with non trivial blogs your first 1 or 2 comments will ALWAYS be moderated as most SPAMers operate on a hit and run basis.
Now if you move up to some places like a major newspaper they exist in an entirely different universe.
Since we're way past 300, let me ask if the collective intelligence here would care to comment on this....
I've started what will be the third novella, which will actually make up the rest of this novel. When the shorter stories sell, I figure I'll sell the novel... and then I'll have a universe I like to play in for a long time.
But... it's 11k years from now. There have been a number of long (thousand-year, or maybe two of them...) wars. There are now two major human polities: the Society and the Alliance. In the story, my people from 150 years from now (long story) have settled in the Alliance, on a world that's famous for its universities.
Which means I have to work out how their society works.
I've taken it from they all came on ships, where everyone better cooperate, and you don't need money on board. The worlds they've built - vastly beyond 3D printing whatever you want (including food), so there's no reason for most heavy labor or bs work. The upshot is that they have a basic income (consider it their share from the state-owned production machines that are the distant decendants of 3d printers). Everyone can live at what we might call comfortable working class level.
You want more? You do something, and if people come to/want it (media, show, something unusual, etc), you get additional creds (think China's social credit), which you can use to do more, or rest on your laurels. You can apply to the government to start a business (or whatever), and the sys (AI mediated, but with people involved) agrees, and you're given resources, or not. (Think business/small business loan, but it's not a loan.)
Some of the worlds of the Alliance issue cash/scrip, but this is mostly for couch change, not for something big. It's all a matter of available/required resources.
That's a first draft. Do you folks see any big showstoppers?
mark
Can we have it now please?
It sounds pretty good to me, though the devil is in the details. Obviously a society with cheap space travel and automation will be able to give everyone a good set of basic stuff.
Dystopia time. I mean it all sounds good, but the devil is in the details...
Charlie's blog being on Movable Type was a pleasant surprise, in that it does respond as it's supposed to...
I remembered recently that Movable Type avatar graphics used to work, which was nice. That led me to discover that the Movable Type website is strongly oriented around selling people copies of Movable Type software, whereas support for users is not their priority. Or even something they're willing to put up with, apparently. Disappointing.
Heteromeles Are "your" sycamores different from "ours"? Bacause we have both sycamores (ugh) & planes & other maples. The true-breeding hybrid "London Plane" can get truly enormous - no-one is quite sure as to what the maximum size can be, yet. ( Species only appeared about 1650 ) Oops - species description Ah yes, Frank - what's your blog name again? ( Yes I've forgotten )
May I just say thanks to everyone that discussed my vacuum idea, You guys rock!
It's mostly his name :) https://heteromeles.com./
That's a first draft. Do you folks see any big showstoppers?
A handful, at the world-building level.
Thousand year wars: unlikely -- humans are really shit at building institutions that outlive a human lifespan, and a thousand years is way out there. A thousand year war presupposed cultural durability on both (or more) sides, along with a very low level of actual conflict; maybe vigilant/armed peace punctuated by periodic flare-ups, or some sort of ritualized aggression that doesn't leave permanent marks?
For long duration wars the most obvious -- to me -- one would be the Hundred Years' War between England and France, but that was largely down to Edward III reigning for fifty years (a miracle in the middle ages) and being a bloody-minded SOB. There were also several outbreaks of peace during the war, lasting up to 25 years.
Then there was the whole 17th-19th century dust-up between Britain and France (of which the American War of Independence and the War of 1812 were side-shows, as the Vietnam War was to the US/USSR Cold War).
There's a really high level view that suggests France and England were at war from roughly 1066 to 1903, but that's highly problematic insofar as the political institutions which began the war were utterly different from those that buried the hatchet. (Oh, and the first and second world wars were merely Phase 2 and Phase 3 of a big-ass struggle between Prussia and France which kicked off in 1870 and ran on-and-off until 1945, with roots back to the 18th century, but hey.)
Anyway: thousand year wars? RED FLAG, needs more research (unless you're going to make it a slower-than-light universe and the war's interstellar, in which case: carry on, and maybe add a few more digits.)
The planetary civilization as outlined ... it may well have a problem with heat pollution. Not carbon emissions (I hope!), and not greenhouse effect, but raw waste heat from computation, and/or waste heat from transport and manufacturing processes. What are the limits on energy consumption given ubiquitous magic-wand manufacturing and the sort of energy economics implied by interstellar (or even interplanetary) travel?
While it sounds like academia/study/research is a primary focus for a lot of people, that's not going to be remotely workable for everyone; today's high level of university/tertiary education in the USA and other western countries is artificially inflated by the monetization of student debt and the commercialization of universities. In the background you've sketched in a HUGE attention economy as people compete for social status/visibility in whatever way they can, because primate brains do that shit (because natural selection for reproductive fitness through displays of whatever the hell we can). There will be people creating viral memes deliberately, people driving fast fashion, people engaging in weird extreme sports, and so on, unless you actively repress such activities or impose artificial scarcity. You can maybe divert the crazier cultural efflorescences into a virtual/augmented reality where unlimited growth/recomplication isn't expensive in anything other than data storage and cpu cycles, but the question of how they deal with malignant narcissists is going to be illuminating. And how they deal with the political succession problem, much less with genetically-engineered-in inequality (which breaks one of the key foundations of the Enlightenment world-view, that all human lives are of equivalent value)?
the Movable Type website is strongly oriented around selling people copies of Movable Type software, whereas support for users is not their priority
Yep: they discontinued the open source license a handful of years ago, which is why my blog is increasingly buggy (I do not particularly want to be on the hook for an extra $1000/year in license fees, so I'm running on the last open source release).
At some point I'm going to have to plan a big-ass migration: archive the existing blog and discussions as a static site (it runs to about 300Mb), then move to a new platform. I suspect I'll also give up the physical colo box I'm renting at the same time -- cloud/VMs have come on a long way since 1996 -- and/or switch to a paid WordPress site (although I don't trust the software: it seems to get hit by every exploit going, partly due to being written in PHP by a crew of gerbils).
Also just by being widely-used - there are a lot of WordPress sites around there to attack.
There's very little that will grow in deep conifer shade and needle litter, but you could try periwinkle or toadflax. No mowing, but you need to stop them invading the neighbourhood :-)
Actually, I don't think that thousand year wars are particularly unlikely - IFF you accept thousand year societies (which I think is your real point). Almost all long-running wars have been when two empires or nations were competing head-to-head and neither could suppress the other. So I think that he should concentrate on working out how to build stable, thousand year competing societies - and, no, I don't see how to do that.
Given your qualifications about it really being an attention-seeking society, which I strongly agree with, I don't see the dominance of universities as being a problem, though I fully agree that they would be nothing like what we know. I see two prerequisites for that, though, which I have thought of in a world I have tried to build (and am NOT going to write about):
1) Ideas have to be highly valuable, which probably means that advanced automation can turn even more of them into 'products' (including software) more generally than can be done today. And I don't mean just ideas as universities know them today, but cooking recipes and more. Designing 'IP laws' that wouldn't conflict with (2) below would be tricky.
2) There has to be a ferociously powerful mechanism stopping centralisation of anything that doesn't critically need to be centralised, and limiting what does. That is critical, and I can't see how to do it over that sort of timescale except by copious applications on handwavium.
This would end up with the majority of people competing on a local scale, including in ways like cooking, gardening, carpentry, storytelling etc., as well as agents polishing those for 'export'. Things like comestic pottery and entertainment would almost all be hand-made, usually locally. The leaders would attact attention from much wider areas (yes, El Bulli). The Moon Moth springs to mind :-)
[Movable Type] discontinued the open source license a handful of years ago, which is why my blog is increasingly buggy...
I hope it is obvious to everyone that none of these bugs are your fault.
I'm not looking forward to the Grand Migration, which even from years away sounds inconvenient and difficult. There's probably not going to be a great new blog platform coming along soon either, since any corporation in the market only has to be not obviously worse than the competitors' hot mess of a website.
I don't see the dominance of universities as being a problem ...
I suggest that this be rephrased as something like "universities are where the action is in the opinion of the primary characters." That's fine as described, with the story set on a world famous for institutions of higher learning; if your story was set in Oxford readers would expect to hear about colleges now and then.
Such a setting implies at least one of fast travel between worlds or a very static culture and science. Nobody is going to want to go to their universities if that involves centuries of travel.
Charlie Trick question: "When was Britain last at war with Fance?" Ans: 1940-42 ... oops ( True, though )
Shade-loving plants .... Try Epimediums Lungwort - Pulmonaria Officinalis Leafing up only Mid Feb-Mid May? Allium ursinium
It's not just shade - neither ramsons nor mosses like dry conditions, and under conifers is very dry. Cyclamen coum will form a near-carpet in such conditions (with leaves in spring and autumn), but surprisingly little else will.
Under conifers CAN BE very dry - alternatively, like some parts of Scotland or NW England, it can be pretty wet, too! In the case under discussion, what's the annual rainfall, & how is it distributed, seasonally?
Moz Trying to log in to "heteromeles.com" I get all sorts of safety/privacy warnings from my anti-virus & "not safe" ... which surely is incorrect?
Let's clarify: dry shade is an annoying environment for gardening in general. Conifers do not always cause dry shade. Douglas-firs, spruces, and redwoods, among many others, are trees of the temperate rain forest, and they've got a whole set of understory species that love them.
One simple solution is to cut down some of the trees and form a savanna. The trick here is to create light gradients, where you have high shade under the canopy tree, little shade in a nearby gap, and all sorts of intermediate zones in between. Then you go from having one annoying environment (dry shade) to a plethora of light environments that you can fill. On a suburban lot, pruning or cutting one tree may be sufficient for this.
There's very little that will grow in deep conifer shade and needle litter, but you could try periwinkle
I am down to only 4 pines in a strip near the side walk now. I took down 12 of them (plus other crap) in 2012 and 5 others about 15 years ago. Now I'm clear in the back. I have a patch of periwinkle I've been fighting for a couple of years. I wouldn't mind it if it wouldn't expand by 100 sf in a few days at times. And want to grow up the side of my house, UNDER the siding, and then send out invites to the ants to climb up and enjoy the climate controlled walls.
I've "cleared" my 400' area a few times but always seem to miss enough root stems for it to surge back when I'm not looking.
My biggest question is whether or not to sell my house (well really my lot) to a developer who will bulldoze my house. Or do something myself. 10 different options from 4 stakeholders. THEN I'll decide on long term ground cover.
Almost all long-running wars have been when two empires or nations were competing head-to-head and neither could suppress the other.
The eastern edge of the Roman empire moved back and forth almost yearly for a few hundred years and they and the Persians pushed each other back and forth.
Yes, I was over-simplifying, but he comes from a relatively hot, dry part of the world!
Yes, conifer species vary considerably in the density of their canopy, but that is actually much more dependent on whether they are natural or planted. And how dry it is depends a great deal on the precipitation/evaporation difference - in Scotland, the former varies from 65 cm to 120 sm and more, and the latter is close to nil. Scots pines form a very light canopy in nature, but a much heavier one when planted close together in richer soil, and nothing but moss grows underneath. I have also walked through (both kinds of) redwood forest, and there was nothing growing where they were dense.
I'm not looking forward to the Grand Migration, which even from years away sounds inconvenient and difficult.
Totally. I just went through this with the large Wordpress site I mentioned. Just go get from an older version to a more current one. When you have 400K comments it can just be hard to do anything as the backup and possible roll back times and processes get to be a PITA.
There's probably not going to be a great new blog platform coming along soon either, since any corporation in the market only has to be not obviously worse than the competitors' hot mess of a website.
Actually Wordpress is in the middle of a total conceptual re-write. While mostly keeping compatibility with the older code. But soon the "current" version will obsolete huge swaths of WP add ons. Mostly for the good but expect a lot of semi-orphaned web sites to get hacked starting in a few to 10 years as people just don't want to convert.
I tend to agree with Charlie. Individual human dynasties generally seem to last three generations, although there's a long tail. Imperial traditions can last a very long time, so long as people use the tradition to justify their rule. That's how you get China and Ancient Egypt claiming (or being claimed) to last thousands of years. The simplistic but effective way to think about it is the whole ship of Theseus/Grandfather's axe parable (if you replace all the parts, is it still the same boat/axe?). Long-term empires are all Grandfather's axes, successive dynasties claiming to be the true successors of previous systems. In the case of China, they claim that it's the same axe now as it was in the beginning, even though it started out with a bronze head.
So if you want to have a civilization that lasts a long time, the simplest way to do it is that it claims to have lasted continuously for a very long time, and the historians know better. That's if it's run by humans. If it's run by AI, then you've got the Orion's Arm Sephirocracy/AIocracy setup, which depends on multiple Singularities (I think they get up to five in their world-building, over 10,000 years).
Another issue is that it looks like you're trying to have both unlimited resources, freely shared resources, and heavily (AI) regulated resources. Picking one of these might make things simpler. A better way to do it is to have these models competing: unlimited resources (Star Trek style) only work if there's unlimited expansionism of the European colonial empire variety (talk to Africa or aborigines from the Americas or Australia about being on the receiving end of this kind of empire).
Shared resources is the university ideal, although it's achieved through massive and nasty competition, with most workers (grad students, postdocs, now adjunct professors) perishing along the way, and most publications being no more meaningful than the mouthfuls of mud termites use to build their mounds, impressive only in the collective. The prevalence of murder mysteries set around campuses like Oxford might give a hint here of the tensions involved.
Rigorous resource control is what cultures in extreme environments do, and it can bring out both the best in humans and the worst. It makes sense for asteroid mines, long-term space travel, and, erm, most planets.
Oh yeah, planets. We have a stupidly distorted view of Earth, because we're in a really unusual place in the Milankovitch cycles right now, and Earth is a really unusual planet in general, with a nearly circular orbit and a big-ass Moon. And normally Earth's not this predictable. More normally, Earth's like Australia or California (big droughts, big storms, and so forth) where an average year can be calculated, but no year ever acts like the average. In southern California, most of the rain arrives in a few huge storms, so whether an area experiences drought or not depends on whether the storms hit us or not (a storm just missed me and went hit Ventura and central Baja, for example. That may make the difference between this being a normal rain year and a drought).
Civilization, in the sense of having big agriculture and huge supply chains, is built around things being predictable. Most planets that humans can settle on are going to be less predictable than Earth ever was, due to simple things like orbital eccentricity.* That doesn't mean that civilization on such planet is impossible, but it's different. You've got to start with something like an Andean model, where resources are warehoused whenever they're surplus, and resources and people are shipped around through large networks to make sure everyone has enough. This isn't a just-in-time surplus resource system, it's a system where logistics rules and the guys who own the warehouses and maintain the roads call the shots. And it's worth pointing out that the Inkans at least were voracious conquerors too, so it's unclear how much of their resource surpluses came about due to conquest, rather than superior logistics. Most times, in highly variable climates, civilization as we know it isn't the solution the locals choose, even if they live there for a very long time (cf: California, Australia, Chile, and South Africa).
A thousand year interstellar war is perfectly possible so long as FTL isn't possible (see Orion's Arm, Haldeman's Forever War) and so long as there's a reason to fight STL on an interstellar scale. Oh yeah, and so long as the same beings who started the trip (the ones who wanted to fight) are there to fight when the ship gets to its intended battle. Alternatively you can have Saberhagen's Berserkers (the Orion's Arm autowars) or Brin's Lungfish scenario, where interstellar AIs destroy things because they're programmed to do so, to make the galaxy safe for their makers or something.
The general problem with infinite space wars is that space is very, very big, running away is very, very easy, and defending planets against attacks coming in at very high speed is very, very hard. In other words, to engage in a fight takes huge resources (the starship) and is likely destructive on a beyond-nuclear-war scale (Chicxulub strike equivalents from fractional C missiles, for example).
Running away from this mess makes sense. Those who follow this strategy colonize stuff floating in interstellar space (the OA haloists) and minimizing their emissions (OA hiders and backgrounders).
Keeping a planet safe when interstellar war is possible requires something more like MAD-style nuclear diplomacy, with a strong side of trying to project how crazy you are while ideally trying to make sure all your opponents (and yourself) are as sane as possible. Doing this in an STL situation gets...interesting.
Notice how I keep referencing Orion's Arm? I think they made a lot of mistakes in their details, but they came up with the kind of fictional universe you describe, mostly because it's so huge that someone tried every option somewhere. Something like their Version War give ideas for how you can have a long-running interstellar war.
The problem about ground-cover for problem conditions is that you need a thug of a plant - and such plants behave like, er, thugs!
Around here (and I suspect other places) people want things to exist without change "forever". The problem is that trees grow. But many people only live in a house for 5 to 20 years. So for most they buy the trees and don't touch them as trees are sacred after all. What should be happening in the suburbs that are full of trees is the ones that outgrow the yard or get fragile be periodically removed. And new ones planted. Say every 5 to 10 years. But this is outside of most folks planning horizon. So you get neighborhoods like mine with some yards barren as new home owners take them all down or as long term owners give up and do the same. And other hold on to their sacred trees. So you have bald lots next to wooded forests next to a new house with ornamental things stuck around which will look hideous in 10 years ....
Dynasties are personalising societies, as is the 'three generation' rule. Even the USA has lasted longer than that in essentially its current form. One can reasonably argue that England has had a stable society for nearly a millennium, with only a few glitches. And that Russia has had the same for over three centuries (*). Yes, the details have changed, and the societies have evolved, but they're still recognisably what they were. In both cases, we gained and lost an empire in the interim, but that has had remarkably little effect.
(*) Stalin and Putin were/are effectively Tsars, after all.
Robert van der Heide @ 768:
Sounds like it’s successfully suppressing the growth of anything the town or HOA could object to with close to zero maintenance effort. Why not leave it as is?
There are still a few tall, solitary pines scattered about throughout my neighborhood. House down the street has three of them. It used to have four, but one night during a thunderstorm one of them snapped off about 30 feet up and came straight down like a spear thrust into the roof. It was a healthy tree with no previous indication of disease or rot. Pine trees just do that shit. It's not really a problem out in the woods, but if they're solitary trees right next to your house ...
It cost more than $2000 to repair the damage. Of course, the lady living there didn't have to pay it because she was renting and that kind of thing will allow you break your lease and move out, but I'm sure it broke some of her stuff, along with all the hassle she had finding another place to live. Don't know if the owner's liability insurance had to pay for any of her loss, but he had to deal with lost rental income in addition to the cost of repairing the house.
Soon after that the homeowner in the house across the street from there had the two healthy 80+ foot pines in her front yard completely removed.
Heteromeles @ 771: Heck, since it's already almost New Year's Eve, what shall we name the new decade? It looks like we're exiting the Terrible Teens. Are we going into the Howling Twenties?
You've still got another year to figure it out before the new decade begins. When you count from one to ten, "nine" is not the last number in the sequence.
Heteromeles @ 774: I think we maybe talked past each other, but if you're in longleaf pine country, the pines do love them some fire.
Longleaf pine is mostly long gone from this area. All that's left around here is Loblolly Pine.
P J Evans @ 780: Lawn painting was around long before that. I heard of it in connection with Bermuda-grass turf - it's winter-dormant and thus brown. Also used a lot for golf courses. So...painting it green was a thing.
I know, but every time I hear about painting lawns green, I'm reminded of this hoary old joke:
https://sledpress.wordpress.com/2016/03/19/catch-that-and-paint-it-green-or-a-populist-parable/
Greg Tingey @ 810: Under conifers CAN BE very dry - alternatively, like some parts of Scotland or NW England, it can be pretty wet, too!
In the case under discussion, what's the annual rainfall, & how is it distributed, seasonally?
David L and I both live in Raleigh, North Carolina. I live here, wedged in between the Mordecai & Oakwood Historic Districts and St. Agustine's College. David moves around a lot (plus living part time down in Texas), so I'm not sure what part of town he's currently residing in. IIRC, the last time he told me where he was, he was house-sitting "inside the Beltline" somewhere in Southeast Raleigh.
Raleigh has a sub-tropical climate with an average annual rainfall of 46.5 inches per year pretty much scattered throughout the year, although the peak comes in July & August during the summer.
This has the climate chart I was looking for but for some reason couldn't see when I was looking at Raleigh's Wikipedia entry while composing this. It's for the airport out between Raleigh and Durham.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raleigh,_North_Carolina#Climate
Ok, let me cover the responses in two posts.
First, I just threw out the background of 11,000 years. I was not concerned, and so was not specific.
Not that I've written this up - I think this post will be a start, actually, of my history - but: when I said Thousand Years War, y'all are picturing, say, England vs. France. What I was thinking of was this:
The Terran Confederation expanded beyond Terra. Terraforming is EXPENSIVE$$$$$$$$$$, and even so takes time. About 850 years from now, one colony, settled by a strict religious group, has had major issues (haven't decided what yet, but it's critical to the colony's existence), so they put together enough to invade a relatively near system with a colony with heavy industrialization, to take equipment to solve their problems.
This spreads, and eventually breaks the Confederation. Perhaps a better name would be the Times of Troubles - think Japan or Russia - that have raids, and occasional wars, that last for the better part of 1000 years.
Set this against a chunk of galaxy about 3000 or 3500 ly across, and Terra isn't exactly at the center of that spread, astrographically speaking. It's also spotty - I mean, how many earth-like planets have we found yet in 100 ly around us? So they're scattered. The drives we have from 150 years from now - it's taken my people 16 mos to go about 2800 ly. You folks are thinking jets; you need to think sailing ships.
In the interim between the two "Thousand Year Wars", there are alliances, etc, that then get raided, or otherwise fall apart.
Meanwhile, what's going on on Terra, and the nearer colonies: Terra got one huge hit (small asteroid) during the first war; otherwise, things are upward, technically, in a spiral (slower, faster, rinse, repeat), and gets less interested in the further colonies.
Things start to stabilize over the human chunk of the galaxy (I've not even begun to think about the aliens... but some of them really are uninterested in earth-like worlds, so, no wars there) about 9k years. The heavily religious colonies, most in one general sector, get the Revelation (and no, it's not what you think it is, you'll have to wait for the novel to find out what it really is), and unify into the "Society of Humanity", with a good bit of war, over about 150, 200 years. They spend hundreds of years dealing with their own issues, then they want to expand.... The much more secular worlds are either scattered, or in another sector. Eventually, after a number of alliances, they form the Alliance, another confederation (with federations within it), mostly to defend themselves against the Society's incursions.
Does that make more sense than the impression I gave by referring to the Thousand Years' War?
PAGING "sleepingroutine" Any comments on Poland's response to Putin's mendacious rewrite of history ??
Second post on my future.
I didn't mean to say it's an all-university world. Instead, you should think Boston, or Philadelphia, or Cambridge, or Oxford.
(As much as I like Philly (36 higher degree granting institutions in the metro area, as of 1980), Boston might be the best analogy. Is that more reasonable?
I also think that you're thinking too much of the just invented social media. This is a LOOONG time from now, and would be considered on par with distributing your attention-seeking on clay tablets, and hoping that public readers will read them to the illiterate majority, with no commentary of their own.... [g]
I've mentioned, I think, the mesh that they used on my folks from 150 years from now, with connection to the brain, and computer-assist, and AI-based moderation/guidance. These folks have their sys, which, as I mentioned the other day, is at least 800 years more advanced.
So, no, it's not an attention-seeking based society. A lot of folks are happy to do what they want, study, garden, art, or other kinds of things that replace our current "job to earn a living to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table". A fair number of young people try the attention-seeking route, but when your path to doing it involves AI or older people as mentors, or pointing out flaws, or running a sim to show you why it's going to go thud, then tend to find something else to do.
And there are the folks who go into politics, and those who join the Alliance Navy, which, if they're not facing off against the Society, still has to deal with the occasional raiders, and the Alliance worlds, like the Society, are scattered over many hundreds of light years.
Y'know, explaining myself to y'all sure helps firming this up in my own head.
I should avoid commenting now, because this is beginning to sound a little like the setting for "Ghost Engine" (except GE is set 600,000 years out after humanity has speciated -- oh, and there's no big alliance, although there are plenty of holy wars).
Glad to help!
As far as a university goes, which university function are you thinking about? --Retaining old knowledge and passing it on. --Retaining esoteric skills that are occasionally extremely useful but generally not (an example is crop epidemiology, which we've largely abandoned in the last few decades, and I think we're really going to regret that fairly soon) --Being the incubator for innovation that generally fails but rarely changes the world (we're over-invested in that right now in the US) --Propagating societal norms (every conservative university right now) --Exposing students to radically different people, places, cultures, etc., as the essential form of a liberal education.
That's what universities do in varying proportions now. If you're talking about an institution that's going to have a history of more than 1000 years, what is it doing?
One more cmt: during the "wars", a good number of colonies failed. Sometimes there were a lot of refugees, other times, maybe a handful.
The preferred tactic for taking over a planet involves throwing rocks at them, leaving you with a) them smashed, and b) metals in the crater for exploiting. If you're in the middle of terraforming, and that happens, most of the process can be rolled back by the native life....
Sorry, whose Ghost Engine?
so I'm not sure what part of town he's currently residing in. IIRC, the last time he told me where he was, he was house-sitting "inside the Beltline" somewhere in Southeast Raleigh.
North Hills. 29 years. I have at times house/dog sat for my daughter near you. But we have made my back yard so the dogs can stay with us. Since my back yard is about 8 times the size of my daughter's we are like a doggy Disneyland to them. The deer/racoon/fox scents just add to the excitement.
GE is set 600,000 years out after humanity has speciated Oooh! Do we get Rishathra .... ?
H @ 829 "Crop Epidemiology" - last time I looked, Rothamstead were still going & surviving, in spite of the best efforts of "It's not-making-an-immediate-profit-RIGH-NOW" tories to kill it .... If you're talking about an institution that's going to have a history of more than 1000 years, what is it doing? Ask Oxford? Or Bologna or Paris .... [ 1096 ( or 1167, maybe ) / 1150 / 1088 ] - or - King's School Canterbury, founded 597 (!)
Inca logistics included systematic agronomy research: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/moray “Studies have shown that many of the terraces contain soil that must have been imported from other parts of the region. The temperature at the top of the pits varies from that at the bottom by as much as 15ºC, creating a series of micro-climates that — not coincidentally — match many of the varied conditions across the Incan empire, leading to the conclusion that the rings were used as a test bed to see what crops could grow where.”
“Most planets that humans can settle on are going to be less predictable than Earth ever was,” Including Earth, going forwards.
You forgot sports teams.
And yes, I forgot the sports teams. Stupid me.
Anyway, the whole category of world-building is what fascinates me about SF. That may be why I liked Orion's Arm so much: all universe, stories peripheral.
Probably I should write a blog post about what we've learned in the last decade, specifically dealing with climate change and politics, that generally doesn't get reflected in SF. For example, we've got a great example of terraforming right here: California, which supports over 100 times more people than it could without the massive infrastructure of dams, aqueducts, and so forth that allow us to live in this really unpredictable place. The whole western US is like this, really, and it's a good reason why anyone who thinks about terraforming really should read Cadillac Desert.
Personally, I don't think that turning Mars into Earth 2 (or the alien equivalent) is something that can be done in a few centuries. Earth terraformed itself in about four billion years, just due to chemistry. There's no reason to think we can do it faster. Getting anything resembling a stable oxygen atmosphere turns out to be really hard.
A key question few like to ask is, "what happens when terraforming fails?" California's experiment in terraforming will fail sometime, as will every other dam we've built in our dam nation. That's the most likely outcome of any terraforming exercise, so how long do your habitable planets remain habitable, on average?
Anyway, that's not the key to worldbuilding in SF. The key to worldbuilding, much as it pains me to say it, is the role of the world in the story. Most of the time, SF is window-dressing, and the story could take place anywhere. Why spend much time on it if your story rarely focuses on it? Harold Page's rule about getting people to admire your artistic belfry by putting a sniper in it gets at this essential idea, that it's only worth investing in the bits of the world that matter to the story. The hard part is figuring out the bits. Do seasons matter on your alien world with high orbital eccentricity? If so, you need to know more climatology than you think you do...
An even more common problem is that space gets treated as the Otherworld, where the rules are different. This pops up in Old Man's War where somehow all of humanity's technological progress bypassed Earth, in the movie Interplanetary (where spaceships literally work differently off Earth than on), and in many, perhaps most other stories. It's that ancient adventure trope/monomyth of the hero leaving the normal world and heading off into magic (science) land to have an adventure. If you're building an SF Otherworld, then you're writing some variation of a monomyth or fairy story, and the details of your fantasy space don't particularly matter. Sadly.
I'd suggest that hard SF is where the details do matter, and they change the plot as well as the window dressing
If we were capable of building a city on Mars, building a city in Antarctica or Greenland would be trivial and probably a done thing. Do those cities exist in your story? If not, why not?
If we could colonize an asteroid and live by mining it, building a colony on a landfill and mining it would be much easier, and human waste and garbage would be dealt with very differently. That implies that everyone in your world has a very different relationship with waste than we do now (for instance, problems with a composting toilet may be considered polite dinner conversation, while conspicuous consumption is not done). Is that in your story?
If we had ship shields that could stop debris damage at some fraction of C, every sensitive installation, plus the lairs of the super-rich, would all be so equipped and invulnerable even to nukes. How does that affect your story? It certainly changes how wars would be fought.
And so on. A culture capable of colonizing makes for a really weird, everyday life. And that can be very, very hard to write if you don't think about it. This may sound odd, but how many things do you take for granted that are the result of past colonialism? Sugar, chocolate, coffee, racism, rich white male Europeans? Colonies warp their metropoles, just as they warp them. Writers need to figure out if and how this matters in what they're writing. And then they need to do something about it.
Maybe I'll blog about it sometime.
You forgot sports teams.
"College sports" teams are, IIRC, an almost exclusively American thing. You get sports faculties in UK universities, and athletes who end up going all the way to the Olympics, but there's nothing that's really equivalent to the US university teams that get national-scale airplay, much less being a major distorting influence on academic funding.
Thinking about this a little more, there are already "guaranteed income" proposals going around, and IIRC this ties into something called Modern Monetary Theory. There's also a lot of "We can use Von Neuman machines to build lots of stuff in the asteroids without hurting the environment stuff" out there, which you should research. (Maybe OGH could aim you at some of the materials he used to research Singularity Sky.)
But do the research, so you don't make egregious errors about this stuff.
But it does have some interesting consequences; people protesting a war because they can't get a new TV this year, or some such.
which university function are you thinking about?
--Exposing students to radically different people, places, cultures, etc., as the essential form of a liberal education.
Oh come now. "Universities are the fount of knowledge, and students come to drink."
There is coming-of-age, meeting-the-opposite-sex, learning-of-mores, and finding-one's-tribe events that get facilitated. AKA growing up.
Plus, of course, encountering the cool new music/dance/drugs/sports that define one's generation. For example, skiing trips used to be thing, before winter started to fail us.
Yes, that's allegedly what happens.
My experience (a long time at grad school getting two graduate degrees and teaching the whole time) was that college, at least in the 1990s, was more like one of those chicken pox parties, where you expose the naive students (who haven't developed their intellectual antibodies yet) to a wide variety of infectious memes, to see what they catch. Many of them fail to catch anything, rather more develop the intellectual antibodies that make them impervious to later education, thereby fitting them for a wide range of managerial jobs. Some have such a bad reaction that they leave and never return. A few really get infected by the ideas and make their life's work in cultivating them (that would be me), and a very few become such enthusiastically superlative vectors that they get hired to teach. Learning is infectious, after all.
Less cynically, Altemeyer's The Authoritarians seemed to say that the biggest force driving down right wing authoritarian impulses was living in the dorms, rubbing elbows with a bunch of people who were very different than the students are. The particular education the students received had rather less of an impact. This is the exact opposite of the "finding-one's-tribe" story, that people become less tribal through dorm life in a liberal institution.
Since Altemeyer is popular both on the hard right and the hard left, I strongly suspect that the concerted attacks on liberal institutions are deliberately designed to make people more tribal and more authoritarian in outlook, as a deliberate ploy to boost the power base of right-wing authoritarian leaders.
It's sounds like you've rediscovered Polynesian expansion. It might be worth looking into how things went down.
The waka/starship goes places and found colonies. There isn't really money as we use it, but there is mana and tapu.
https://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?idiom=&phrase=&proverb=&loan=&histLoanWords=&keywords=Mana
2. (noun) prestige, authority, control, power, influence, status, spiritual power, charisma - mana is a supernatural force in a person, place or object. Mana goes hand in hand with tapu, one affecting the other.
These are recorded in moko (tattoos) and whakapapa (genealogy).
There's endless war, but there's also peace and conservation via tapu. Sometimes a permanent state, which does things like creating marine reserves "wāhi tapu".
Sometimes temporary.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/405392/what-the-rahui-in-place-after-whakaari-erupted-mean-and-why-they-are-important
There's also stories of the effect of contact with aliens, and technology transfer.
https://youtu.be/5kwIkF6LFDc
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongi_Hika
There are places of learning for all this, the marae, which might form a model for your universities.
Obviously a complex culture isn't possible to summarise in a blog post, nor is this Pākehā in any way qualified to comment, so apologies to any actual Polynesian readers.
Yes and no. Full disclosure: I've done a deep dive into the history of Oceania, and the story I'm currently working on had to be comprehensively reworked to not be wholesale regurgitation of everything I loved about the islands*.
The best two references I've found, hands down, are Pat Kirch's On The Road of the Winds and A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief
Yes, the Polynesian expansion can be worked into a colonization story. But...
The setting is why the expansion worked. The Polynesian Islands are remote, and that gives them a bunch of advantages. --They don't have malaria (the curse of Melanesia, which otherwise would have far outshone them) --They are relatively similar (reef, beach, basalt volcanoes, except for Aotearoa), so once people figured out how to live on them, it was simply a matter of finding the islands and colonizing them, until they ran out of islands. --The islands, when initially colonized, each had a lot of seabirds and often flightless birds, as well as untouched reef ecosystems. This was good, because the islands themselves had little to nothing that humans could eat, so they had to be terraformed into gardens. As Kirch puts it, the Anthropocene started about 3,000 years ago in Polynesia. The rest of the world is only now catching up. --The act of wiping out the seabirds and the forests had a huge impact on Polynesian culture, but it's not the one you think.
A. On the one hand, the Polynesians had to wipe out a lot of fairly useless forest and scrub on many islands in order to plant the gardens they needed to survive.
B. On the other hand, wiping out the seabird colonies radically decreased the nutrient inflow to the islands via bird guano.
C. Thus, when the plants regrew in the places they hadn't been cut down, they regrew smaller, and even when they didn't, they got cut down younger because people needed timber. It takes years to grow large trees. (Very few islands produced big boats into modern times, and one of them in Fiji was known as a "famine island" that was crap for gardening, but supported good forest. The locals built boats in return for food.) D. This in turn played a huge role in the colonization pattern, because colonization depended on huge boats, and huge boats required huge trees.
E. Thus, the pattern of colonization was a huge burst of colonization around 1,000 years ago (ish) when most of the Polynesian Triangle was colonized (all the way to Hawai'i, Rapa Nui, and Aotearoa, as well as likely to South America, where they got sweet potatoes but did not colonize). After about a generation, maybe two, the voyages stopped. Partly it was because the people who'd known other islands had all died, but also, they had no large trees left to build big boats, the islands were less capable of growing the giants that had enabled the initial colonization rush, and anyway, it would take centuries for the next generation of giant trees to grow. F. A lot of what made each Polynesian culture unique really developed after the colonization rush. A lot of the endemic warfare problems also developed when the land filled and there was nowhere else to go. Interestingly (probably because the islands are similar and the crops are similar) the same patterns of conflict tended to show up repeatedly, often with similar outcomes.
--Centuries after the great voyages, civilization developed on Hawai'i. It wasn't a result of voyaging, and it didn't relate to voyaging. Instead, it was a result of increasing populations that both forced and enabled chiefs to rework social structures to privilege themselves, enserf others, and in so doing, to deal with persistent problems that the old clan-based social structures could only solve effectively at lower population densities.
The Polynesian model works best for SF in a couple of situations. One is that the colonies are all roughly similar, whatever that means. If every planet is radically different, this model doesn't work. It works for things like colonizing asteroids, red dwarf planets, ice moons, etc. It especially works when the fundamental notion is that colonies are effectively big mining camps, where the primary goal of a colony isn't to survive and grow into the indefinite future, it's to build more starships first, to guarantee that, if the colony fails, at least some of the people can travel somewhere else to set up another colony. Once this is done, people can try improving the place, even if they turn out to be isolated in the long term.
That's the Polynesian lesson in a nutshell. While I think that the Polynesians are the best model we have for colonizing space in real life and in some SF universes, I think it should be obvious that they're not necessarily the ideal model for all stories about interstellar cultural formation. If nothing else, starships would seem to demand the development of a local civilization as a necessary preliminary, not in the aftermath of the ships leaving and interstellar transit becoming impossible.
*I've finally gotten clued in about cultural appropriation. Much as I love the Polynesian Renaissance, it's not my story to tell or swipe.
Greg, I get the same reasonable website in multiple browsers. But I have spammed enough so I'm not going to post a new comment from each browser. Suffice to say that the two browsers I tried both worked fine, for Wordpress values of worked.
https://heteromeles.com./
The dot after the com is possibly important, it's DNS-speak for "this domain, don't try using it as a prefix on other things. Viz, if "foo.com" fails they might try "foo.com.scum.net" etc to see if they can resolve it... and strangly scum.com often do resolve a lot of things. But some CDNs break on that although if they're that shit you probably don't want to be using them.
I agree completely. Thanks for the tips on references. It's hard to figure out history when you've grown up in Australia. I've got as far as realising that what I was taught in school was atrocious propaganda, and that mass media is the same (for instance I'm hearing nothing about the current purge of Polynesian background residents that's happening in Australia right now). Beyond that it's a bit shrouded in mystery.
As for cultural appropriation, I have no idea.... Greek legend has been a source for literature up to the present day. Are we stealing the Greek's birthright by naming children "Jason" (which is my given name). Moana (the Disney princess film) certainly looks like cultural appropriation when a gigantic US based conglomerate lifts legend for profit. Yet it was written by Taika Waititi, who's from the east coast of New Zealand. Then to muddy the waters further, Disney releases versions in a variety of Polynesian languages which is hailed as a huge step in preserving te reo and tikanga. https://teaomaori.news/moana-reo-maori-launches
I think fiction based on legend is OK, but I don't know what Polynesian people think. Yet I wouldn't dream of having moko without mana, yet my middle son does, and all the islanders he meets are delighted.
So I remain confused...
Well, there are two things going on with Oceanic culture.
One is that Polynesian fantasies have the reputation of "not selling." Despite the success of Moana, I haven't seen a swell of island fiction. Maybe it's there and I'm not looking, but that's the rep I learned.
Disney artists, to their credit, reportedly went to Samoa and Fiji, had long talks with community elders, and worked with them to figure out what was appropriate for Moana (notice that Maui's the only well-known mythological figure in there, and Te Fiti was created for the movie?). While yes, Disney is profiting off the Polynesian Renaissance, they are also celebrating it in a powerful way.
As for the Greeks, their official religion is Greek Orthodox Christianity. For a couple of years I knew a guy online who was a Greek pagan who worshiped the Olympian gods. He was a fascinating person to talk to, but he did face substantial discrimination in his own country for his religious choices. Ancient Greek culture has been appropriated since Roman times (cf: Ancient Grome), so even though it gets misappropriated in various ways, it's been part of the popular culture since before that notion existed. That's a lot different than hiking on Hawai'i and finding an active fishing shrine in Waipio Valley, or finding offerings up on Mauna Kea. Some Hawaiians still worship their traditional gods.
Since I haven't asked their permission to use their beliefs to my profit. Much as I enjoy visiting Hawai'i, visiting doesn't make me Polynesian, and doing a bastardization of their stories to sell and profit from is one of those things ignorant white folk (like me!) would think of doing. Having a case of island fever is not the same as living on the islands, let alone being part of the culture and dealing with all the Mainlander American BS they've had to deal with.
I finally decided that the appropriate thing to do in writing was twofold: --One is play with island ecology, which I happen to love, but change it so much that it's obviously my work, and not me stealing from islanders. If it ever sees daylight, you'll see a world that looks little like Hawai'i or any place on Earth most people would recognize. --Rework various other western people's conlangs, invented mythology, and alternative cultures to fit the situation.
If I get it done, we'll see how many people like it.
That sounds like a well thought out response. I wish there was more like it.
If we're talking about our writing projects, here's what I've been working on lately. The protagonist is "Bunny," a somewhat foofy Orcish noblewoman with terrible PTSD who shows up in a human-run town just after the war has ended:
Whatever it was that had picked Bunny up and sucked her through the hole gently lowered her to floor level, and she felt something cracking beneath her feet as she was again stood upright. An eldritch shiver of energy flowed away from her, pouring down her body like the feet of a thousand tiny insects and she realized that she could move her head and neck once again. The room she was in was not very large, perhaps four paces across, and the same width as the conference room she’d been in a couple moments before. To her left she could see some very nice oak filing cabinets, and to her right were a number of solid bookcases of the same wood, all filled with bound volumes. In front of her was a desk, covered with old parchments and fraying papers. On top of the desk was an amethyst crystal almost as wide as her calf, which stood upright on a wooden stand. Oddly, instead of six sides, this piece of amethyst had five, so it had obviously been carefully worked.
The crystal pulsated with an inner light which sometimes faded to the point of almost complete darkness, then increased to the point of illuminating the room with a nacerous purple glow. The fact that the crystal’s energy was actually visible almost certainly meant that it was vastly overpowered, the kind of energy-source Elven wizards spent centuries creating, usually with an eye towards the battles which might end an age, which meant Bunny was only a few feet away from enough power to explode an army… or an entire nation.
In front of the desk was a chair, and Bunny’s first impression was that the person in the chair was a mean old Elven lady with a horse’s head, playing a lute made of black wood. Bunny ran her eyes quickly over the thing in the chair, then felt like they were being pushed away from from the frightening figure by the sheer hideousness of the thing, then she forced herself to look again, a little longer this time. From the proportions, the body was that of a dead Elf, and the head was clearly artificial, with “horse hairs” made of some very thin, silky material. The ‘mean old Elven lady’ wore a severely-styled, high-collared, long-sleeved blouse of black sack-cloth. Tiny black buttons held the high band of the collar together at the front of the neck, pushing distorted corpse-flesh upward into a disturbing parody of someone’s double-chin. The collar itself, which folded over and lay against the shoulders and collar-bones was made of some kind of translucent lace. More tiny black buttons, perhaps a couple-dozen of them, no more than half-an-inch apart, held the front of the blouse together. The mean old Elven lady’s skirt was also of a severe cut, made of faded, age-tattered purple silks sewn together with white thread. She wore black lace stockings made from some kind of thin, closely woven twine and complex, tight leather shoes with far too many buttons.
The Elven lady’s dead fingers, one hand on the frets of the lute, one hand playing the strings, were bony and covered with tightly constricted and mummified skin, implying that the corpse had been dead for many decades. The square cuffs of the blouse were tight, with several straining buttons holding the cuffs very tightly against the dead and dried wrists. The lace which puffed out from the cuffs was also of the same strange, translucent material.
Every once in awhile the dead fingers moved, twitching a noise – not a noise Bunny heard with her ears, but a noise all the same - from the strings of the lute. Bunny didn’t so much tear her eyes away as allow them to be repelled, and kept them away this time. The thing was clearly an anchor-fetish, a humanoid figure meant to house a demon. From the horse’s head, Bunny guessed it currently held a nightmare.
A nightmare with enough power to explode an army, Bunny thought with a kind of frigid, brittle calm. I’m already dead, I just don’t know it yet.
Are you talking about Charlie's Movable Type installation, or Movable Type in general? After all Charlie and Greg both have custom avatars, and I'd always assumed the reason nobody else did was that nobody else could be arsed.
"which is why my blog is increasingly buggy"
Increasingly buggy, or just an increase in the percentage of the bugs that have been noticed by now?
As I mentioned up there I was pleasantly surprised to find that your blog was on a platform that didn't continually act the arse, and it is no less functional now than it was when I first found it.
Have you noticed any bugs that are not on the old Debian bug list? (I wish they didn't consider dropping the package to have "resolved" all the bugs so that list doesn't reveal which ones actually were not resolved when they gave up on it.) http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?archive=both;src=movabletype-opensource
"Ask Oxford? Or Bologna or Paris .... [ 1096 ( or 1167, maybe ) / 1150 / 1088 ] - or - King's School Canterbury, founded 597 (!)"
Or Rome :)
After all, measuring AUC the Eastern branch lasted the best part of 2500 years before it finally petered out, while the Western branch mutated into a theocracy and is still going...
"sycamores (ugh)"
What have you got against sycamores? I think they're great. They grow nice and fast so you can plant them yourself and not have to wait until after you're dead before you can see them making a proper difference.
There was one in my neighbours' garden which they cut down a few years ago and made the place look all bare and horrid. But fortunately it had managed to drop a viable seed in my garden before it went, and the replacement is getting on for 4 metres tall already and ought to be quite usefully substantial in a couple more years. This is much better than either planting something that grows at the speed of continental drift and I never get to see it as anything more than a bush, or trying to transplant an existing large specimen from somewhere else.
"Under conifers CAN BE very dry - alternatively, like some parts of Scotland or NW England, it can be pretty wet, too!"
And Wales :)
Yes, the idea of pine needles as tinder does sound weird to me, at least excepting the case where you keep them in a warm dry atmosphere attached to a (flammable) support structure that holds them all out where the air can get at them properly for a couple of weeks so everything dessicates nicely, and then hang candles or dodgy electric lights on the whole thing. In their natural state I'm used to them being a kind of damp soggy mat which starts turning into peaty muck a couple of centimetres down, and is much more suited to putting fires out than starting them.
"living in the dorms"
That word confuses me. I'm used to a "dorm" (dormitory) meaning what it means in a boarding school: a big room full of beds where lots of people sleep at the same time, all go to bed at the same time, all get up at the same time, all have a bath at the same time in the big room full of baths down the corridor, etc. Like an old fashioned prison except that you sleep in beds instead of in the pile of shit on the floor.
University accommodation on the other hand I think of as a building that provides a separate room with a lock on the door for each individual student to live in. Sleeping two to a room is something only a handful of students who got a bum deal when the rooms were allocated have to put up with, and three or more just doesn't happen. Similarly the bathrooms, although still shared, are one-person-one-bath-one-room-one-locked-door setups and not everyone all in together.
Is that usual for the UK?
I've slept at a fair number of university residences in the last decade. (Our annual physics conference is always held at a university, with accommodations in the local residence.) Some had individual rooms, but most were dual rooms with a shared (lockable) bathroom for sets of 2-3 bedrooms. Queens and Waterloo had bigger toilet/shower rooms shared by a whole floor.
I dimly remember Saskatchewan having something similar, but I always lived off-campus so never had to suffer through it myself.
Yeah, I like damp green coasts.
Anyway, about sycamores... The local street trees out here are a combination of the local western sycamore (Platanus racemosa) and plan trees (I think London plane), mostly because the dudes at the nurseries can't be arsed enough to tell the difference between the leaves of the plants they're batching for the contractors.
Anyway, they're nice street trees, but they have this bad habit of shedding branches when it's windy. And yes, they do get quite big.
So yes, I'm fond of sycamores, but parking under them during storms is not a great idea.
As for dry pine needles, they are a real nuisance. San Diego of course has dry summers, so the needles get dry even if the yard is watered regularly. The real problem is when the infamous Santa Ana winds blow for a few days. You can emulate the effect by turning a hair dryer on high and blowing it on your face. It's not pleasant when it goes on for hours or days. Everybody who has any sense is sniffing that wind for the smell of wild woodsmoke that means that somewhere upwind there's a fire. For many who have grown up sniffing the Santa Anas, woodsmoke is not a good smell.
I suspect that the Australians reading this just twitched hard, so I do apologize for bringing it up. Wish there was something I could do for anyone dealing with fire in Oz right now.
No worries. I'd actually like to smell wood smoke. I can't smell it at all now after nearly 6 months of constant smoke.
I visited Australia in the 1980s and worked my way down from Cairns to Sydney before heading east. It's a shame to think of all those woods burning.
I for one look forward to the decadal outbreak of pedantry over the issue of when a decade ends and the next begins. Of course, as the zeroth child in my family I'm the eldest and thus prone to pedantry myself, and being born in the last year of a decade, just before men walked on the moon I am also old enough to appreciate the fun of hair-splitting (while I still have hair)
Yes, individual rooms are pretty much universal. A room typically contains a bed, a desk and chair, some cupboards, and a washbasin. More serious washing facilities and toilets are located on the same corridor at a ratio of one to every few rooms.
Shared rooms are the same thing only with 2 beds and 2 desks in the room. Pain in the arse unless you have the exceptional luck to get on very well with whoever gets the other bed.
I have seen one building with something probably similar to what you describe. Most of it was the standard layout of individual bedrooms plus occasional bathrooms opening off a corridor, but one or two of the doors off the corridor led not to a room but to a tiny sort of recursive sub-corridor, with two separate bedrooms, and a separate bath and toilet just for those bedrooms' occupants. These were called "shared rooms" and it was sort of true in that the nameplate over the door had two occupants' names on it instead of one, but they still provided those occupants each with their own private accommodation to no less an extent than the "normal" rooms got. I don't know what they were supposed to actually do apart from show that architects can do recursion too.
Ah, our sycamores are Acer pseudoplatanus, which seems to be quite different but with similar looking leaves. They have distinctive "whirligig" seeds with wings on that make them spin round and round entertainingly as they fall instead of just falling straight down plump.
Sycamores tend to self-monoculture & they are sticky underneath ... FAR better to have lots of variety "Pines" ... yes, well ... certainly Coast Redwood have nativised themselves in Wales, & if you can get them to strike as cuttings (difficult) Dawn Redwood does v nicely, too - provided it's either near a water course or has higher rainfalll than SE England.
The fires are enormous and terrifying. Some areas (including SEQ) had rain over Xmas, but it clearly hasn't helped that much. The politics has been exasperating, as you might imagine, given the general election in 2019 was supposedly won on swing votes in coal seats.
I dunno, we voted for more climate change faster and we got it. Kind of hard to argue that going into an election in the middle of a major drought with catastrophic fire warnings that people didn't at least have the opportunity to think about that.
I liked the Guardian article asking basically "is Angus Taylor (minister for heating) right that Australia is doing more than its share" and concluding (indirectly) that yes, yes we are doing more than our share. Our coal exports alone contribute ~3% of total human emissions. We're the only country trying to use the way we scammed the Kyoto round to let us scam the current round of emissions cuts. We're one of the major players in fucking up international attempts to reduce emissions.
The last shared rooms at my university went away in late 1977 or early 1978 and only lasted that long because a building project ran over. That's fairly standard across the UK.
These days new build accomodation by the universities themselves tend to be single en-suite rooms, there are a number of private businesses who put up blocks of flats for rent to small groups (3-6) of students but each occupant has their own room.
Individual human dynasties generally seem to last three generations, although there's a long tail. Imperial traditions can last a very long time, so long as people use the tradition to justify their rule. That's how you get China and Ancient Egypt claiming (or being claimed) to last thousands of years.
I can't help thinking of the Roman Catholic Church. It has been around for more than 1500 years and while it has seen its share of upheaval, it has been remarkably stable and robust. Much of this is probably due to its lack of dynasty: Everyone in the Church are required to be celibate, so they can not have any children, officially at least.
This means that the people who rise to power will be skilled politicians, rather than depending on the blind luck of child birth. And there is a well defined succession that involves all the powerful people in the Church having a say.
Could such an organization be used to rule an actual country? And would it be robust enough to face the challenges involved with rule over a millennia or more?
You might find possible answers to some of these questions in "A Canticle for Leibowitz".
zumbs Everyone in the Church are required to be celibate, so they can not have any children, officially at least. Only after about 1100 .... & they appear to be about to relax/repea that, soon..... [ Incidentally the wiki article on this subject is wall-to-wall bollocks ]
Yeah, well, to me, the current guaranteed income proposals aren't new. But then, starting in the mid-nineties, I kept trying to start a conversation in various places, like usenet, then here, online, to talk about what I've referred to for all this time as "post-Adamic society", when we no longer need to earn our living by the sweat of our brow.
With automation serious impacting employment, it's going to happen, because there just ain't enough makework bs jobs to keep most people working. I'm reasonably sure that a lot of the homelessness is just that.
Example: the ultrawealthy's rhetoric of the "war on coal". Yeah, about that: in the 1960's. +/- 10 years, there were about 780,000 coal miners in the US; now there are 78,000. ALL of that due to things like mountaintop removal, open pit mines, and geez, look at pics of the GIGANTIC trucks they use.
All this is going to hit this century. There will be changes, whether the wealthy want them or not... and I would not be surprised to see some of them going down, hard (as in, think heads in a bushel barrel).
Couple things - that's one of the really, really good things of public (US def) education... and why the right hates, hates, HATES it (both better off, and funnymentalist self-proclaimed "Christians").
The other... about college. An old friend (Brother Guy) used to teach at various Catholic colleges around the US for half the year, and one of the courses he taught was "science for non-science majors". About a dozen years ago, on a techie mailing list, he went down the food chain of the majors who took that course. The next to the bottom, those that didn't get it, but didn't let that worry them, were the business majors. The bottom of the food chain, those that didn't get it, and didn't know that they didn't get it, were the communications majors - the folks who go into HR, and PR, and journalism (which explains a lot).
And there are a large percentage of the population - half? who don't want higher ed, they want to do stuff, and a lot of it has nothing to do with higher ed (unless you think your auto mechanic needs a B.Sc). Automation, and the way that they build things now "buy a new one, don't fix the old", is taking away jobs.
Then it sounds like you're reasonably up to date and won't make any errors that are larger than the range of opinions in the field.
(I called the issue out because recently another author's issue of laziness turned a great book into a merely OK book due to lack of study on subject where it's not difficult to learn enough details to look well-educated and I'd hate to have that happen to you.)
The Oxford vs Cambridge boat race?
(And other cmtrs): thanks for reminding me of the Polynesian expansion. I do need to look at that.
That being said, it's not hugely important. The stories in my universe are set 11,000 years from now, long after the first(?) big diaspora of humans into the stars.
Reading these posts, however, gave me some thoughts: 1. Most people, unless forced by economics (we're relocating the auto plant half a continent away, for cheaper, non-union labor, feel free to relocate yourself on your dime, and leave everyone and everything you know behind), or social reasons (everybody in my small town hates me, and I hate them), don't relocate.
So, I see colonies being settled, and people stay. The colonies would take a long time, and need a reason, to settle another planet in another solar system, and terraform, while Terra, we've got too many people. When you have not just a new continent, but 100 new worlds, I don't see huge numbers on more settlements. Terraforming co$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$t$$$$$$$$, and takes a *long time, even with Von Neumann machines.
Anyway, I'm dealing with the universe as it is far in the future, not in between. Who knows, maybe in my mid-eighties, I'll be writing about that, but not now.
Fictionally, see "Anathem" as well as "Canticle".
my lady and me to NZ? Sorry, I need to make sure we have enough to live on in my retirement.
You can do it with points and miles if you are willing to play the game. It requires some effort but at the end of the day you can likely do it for 10% of the "full" price. Or less.
While my wife works for a major US airline and that gives us certain flight benefits, we pay for almost all hotel stays with credit card points. And collect miles to pay for tickets for others.
We do NOT carry credit card debt.
But you have to invest some time. And commit to a clean credit report.
Graduate students reading Land Management or the Oxford equivalent get the Boat Race suspicious looks. Undergrads need the exam results first, sporting prowess may help applications but is not sufficient.
"Points and time". I've been flown somewhere once in my life for work, and I've just retired after 39 years of a professional career. I fly maybe once or twice a year (partly depending on where Worldcon is). How is it that I should get either points or miles? I stay in a hotel at cons, and that's 4-5/yr, and most cons are in different chains.
I don't have any credit card debt, either. I also don't spend enough to make huge points on the one card that would do it (the other's from a credit union).
By the way: I'm published. The story, Red Makes Friends, is in Grantville Gazette #87, and is "highly recommended" by Eric, and all but one comment was very good (the other one was some idiot who thinks "socialism" is theft, so I'm not sure why he's online....)
Polynesian expansion. I do need to look at that.
The trick is to not accidentally make the racist trope version obvious in your story. I've seen that a few times, where I spend a while saying "no, surely not? ... No, just, just, don't do that" then I throw the book away because I just can't take it. Possibly more common in Australia where's there far too much fiction based on the "degenerate savages civilised by noble hero". If you have an empty universe and at worst lost colonies you can avoid that side of it to some degree - your discoverers are generally finding equals rather than animals.
The good news is that in a fictional setting blasting about the place for fun is completely reasonable, while in real life air travel is a crime against humanity (really against the planet, but we're not play Alpha Centauri here so Planet isn't recognised as a player in the game... possibly there's a causal relationship there)
Only after about 1100 .... & they appear to be about to relax/repea that, soon..... [ Incidentally the wiki article on this subject is wall-to-wall bollocks ]
Can you suggest a good source for that?
The wiki article just states that some say that without a citation and no indication of why they say that, so I am getting a bit curious.
Heteromeles... sigh you need to do something about your security cert - firefox doesn't like it, and I had to tell it to make an exception.
For me Opera and Firefox both show the certificate as valid and in date. So does Chrome, but since Opera uses the Chrome engine that's expected.
Meanwhile... people in Australia still seem to think the answer to the current outrageous bushfires is more firefighting. There's lots of enthusiasm for aerial bombers, but no recognition of just how much of that we would need. When you're looking at hundreds of kilometres of fire fronts just the volume of water required starts to become an issue, even before you consider the expense of converting enough large aircraft (all of them?) into a water-bomber then paving enough of Australia to allow them to operate 24/7 for the six-ish months of the fire season. Also not mentioned is the need for nuclear reactors to power the desalination plants if we're not to convert most of Australia into a salt marsh. Or the limited number of renewably fuelled heavy aircraft if we want to avoid making the problem worse.
It does make the cost of avoiding climate change in the first place seem pretty trivial, though. Or even a rush program to mitigate it now.
Well, I think the 1100CE is ballcocks; Working from the Synod of Whitby in 664CE seems more sensible (original sources to include Celtic scholars such as Peter Berresford Ellis (aka Peter Tremayne and Peter MacAlan)).
I also don't spend enough to make huge points on the one card that would do it
Power bill? Water Bill? Rent? Groceries? Insurance (home/auto), etc...
Thinking of buying a new computer or TV or whatever. Get a new card ahead of time with a bonus you can meet with the extra purchase.
Property taxes? For a variety of reasons it didn't make sense for me to open a new personal Visa/MC in the last month or so but if I had I'd have been able to make a tax payment of $3500 on it. Transaction costs would have been about $100. Bonus points would have been worth $1000 or so.
Opera and Firefox both show the certificate as valid and in date.
I just went their in Firefox on a Mac and all was ok.
nuts nuts nuts
THERE
Actually Polynesian expansion seems to have occurred in two major pulses, stopping around Samoa around 1000 BCE and then getting all the way to Hawaii somewhere around 1000AD, with a relatively long pause between them (1000-2000 years) between them
There is a lot of debate on how long the first pulse lasted but it was likely more then 1-2 generations
No one knows why the long pause happened, the running out of trees theory is one of many theories
Similarity about reaching South America to acquire sweet potatoes that’s very controversial
Yeah, I'm less certain about the problems with the sweat potato story than the authors who wrote the paper questioning it seem to be, IIRC. It's like Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki theory--you can raft to Polynesia on an Andean-style raft, provided you have a powered boat tow you across the Humboldt current and into a part of the ocean where your floating object can actually head west rather than north. The researchers who think the sweet potato floated into Polynesia seem to have ignored ocean currents. That's something I've seen in more than one botanist recently...*
And yes, I'm simplifying the pause story. I'm willing to bet that some of it was simply learning how to deal with really long voyages, some of it was climate change, and some of it was having the crops appropriate to settling islands. And some of it was tree growing.
The thing to realize is that things like sea level changes and temperature changes really do matter in the Pacific. One weird example is that many of the atolls in Micronesia were under water until 2000-3000 years ago for various reasons, so that sets a ceiling on how old cultures on those atolls are.
As for the rest of it, crop and domestic animal coevolution is one of those things we don't think about, but our ancestors (like the Celts or Romans) really didn't have the same foods we have. Even with things like wheat that we know they had, the wheat they grew was different than the wheat we grow, and those differences mean a lot. In Polynesia, a lot of the agriculture was clonal, taking cuttings off plants and transporting them in soil. Developing the proper clones that could really handle the islands took a lot of time, and that may have had something to do with the pause as well.
There's also a fair amount of cultural change between the Lapita and the Polynesians. Certainly there are many similarities, but they are far from identical.
*I just dealt with someone who swears that a plant lineage had to have moved from Australia to California somehow in prehistory, based on one line of genetic evidence. They didn't want to deal with the "how is that going to work, if golden plovers aren't involved?" part of the story. Fortunately, I had some ideas that might help them come up with an alternative reading on the genetic evidence. We'll see how it pans out.
Yeah, California just took the first big step towards approving an unending War on Fire, following the model of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. It provides jobs for underemployed areas (so both unions and rednecks support it), it funnels billions of dollars in contracts to contractors (often ex-fire chiefs), with minimal oversight and minimal goals to fulfill the contracts.
The only thing not to like is the damage caused and the fact that the stuff they want to do to prep for the fires (massive clearances and such) have a very low likelihood of actually stopping any extreme fires.
Something to watch out for, I'm afraid. Look carefully at whether what they're proposing to do will do anything other than provide welfare for bulldozer owners.
Landclearing for fires isn't a problem in Australia, NSW and QLD both removed most effective restrictions 3-5 years ago when nihilist parties were elected. Rates skyrocketed and are now dropping somewhat IIRC.
What I am expecting is a wave of salvage logging where they rip up any remaining ground cover and disturb the soil in the name of removing any unburnt wood from the disaster zones. With obvious effects on recovery, even if somehow the loggers leave some of the living trees.
P J Evans "Anathem" is unreadable ... I was foolish enough to believe the recommendations & bought a copy ... The "Aren't-I-a-clever-arsehole-by-renaming-EVERYTHING-common" trope got so far up my nose, that I gave up before p 100. Shame, I suppose, because I liked Snow Crash / Diamond Age / Cryptonomicon.
zumbo Start here Another wiki article that (partially) contradicts the first ... down near the bottom, the bit about clerical celibacy.
California & AUS - both "doubling down" & making it worse, huh? How long do you give that before it becomes obvious that it isn't working? ( Unlike the "War on Drugs" where there are (fake) "moral" considerations are involved so logic really doen't enter into it .... ) When the reverse occurs it will, of course go too far the other way ... never mind. And, of course, if you've bulldozed all the ground-cover & it then rains & all the soil washes away?
Oh yes, flying. Up until, um, err .. 1998 I had never, ever flown. Since then, usually once a year to Germany - destination SHOULD be by train, ( Done it that way twice ) - but flying is cheaper, except the year I didn't go there but went to Berlin, instead. This year, I hope to be able to do it by train again, with one change in Amsterdam, if BOZO doesn't fuck it up.
Are you talking about Charlie's Movable Type installation, or Movable Type in general? After all Charlie and Greg both have custom avatars, and I'd always assumed the reason nobody else did was that nobody else could be arsed.
I see avatars for Greg and Charlie (it's obvious why Charlie has privileges and Greg could have just asked him); I don't see an avatar for you. If you look up posts from five years ago you'll see I had a user avatar back then; happening to do that was what got me thinking about this.
Do you see an avatar for your posts? I don't. (Although I'm now imagining a Mister Pigeon image...) Showing avatars to some users but not others would be puzzling behavior.
I for one look forward to the decadal outbreak of pedantry over the issue of when a decade ends and the next begins.
As usual there is an appropriate xkcd addressing the question. Too, Randall Munroe gives us the useful advice, "If you're going to be pedantic, you should at least be right."
Avatar ... has a long story The picture is of my hand holding a beer glass - not taken by me, obviously ... I think you should be able to work the rest out?
"Do you see an avatar for your posts? I don't. (Although I'm now imagining a Mister Pigeon image...)"
Hahaaa, love it :D
No, I'm one of the people who can't be arsed. I've never even looked for the facility to set one up.
I remember Charlie did some kind of maintenance a while back which went wrong and buggered up the avatars of those people who did have them, so maybe that's where yours went. I remember Greg asking on here about his own disappearing, but I think he fixed it himself without needing to ask Charlie to use his privileges.
As is apparent, I did set mine up, but I'm damned if I can remember how.
According to Gavin Maxwell it is possible to pass the three-year Estate Management undergraduate course at Oxford by doing sod all for most of the three years and stealing the questions for the intermediate exams, then cramming diligently for the six weeks immediately preceding the finals and passing them honestly, "with distinction". It sounds as if the course was pretty much designed to occupy the time of surplus sons of gentry that their parents didn't know what to do with.
Land Management at Cambridge isn't available from scratch for undergraduates, they've got to get through their first year reading something else first. There's a definite hint of "we don't want to intermit this person or send them down" about it. I think the department also offers short non-degree courses that allow "I went to Cambridge" bragging rights.
My wife is deeply amused that she's allowed to put MA (Cantab) after her name, which is her version of "I went to Cambridge" bragging.
Why yes, she did matriculate into the University — just not as a student — which meant that after the requisite number of years as an officer of the University, she was entitled to apply for the MA.
(For those, the majority, who are unaware, the Cambridge MA is not the Masters degree you might think. It's the reward for being of a sufficient rank (so BA or officer of the university) for a sufficient period without bringing the place into disrepute, and then paying a nominal handling fee. In other words, it's a bit of paper you can buy for a fiver.)
Speaking of climate change, as we sometimes do, Panama just celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its sovereign control of the Canal (31 December 1999). One of the themes that came up in speeches was the effect of climate change on the availability of water, which has recently been falling off. This isn't good not only for the Canal itself, but also because about half the country's population gets its drinking water from the same sources, Lakes Gatun and Alajuela. Various measures to address the situation are under study.
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-panama-years-canal-climate-threat.html
Avatars
These can be interesting at times. If a blog has controversial topics at times you have someone who leaves a comment under a pseudonym but their portrait is next to the comment. Because they forgot they uploaded their portrait years ago on their kids baseball blog. Now the blog admins get furious emails asking for the picture to be removed before their neighbors see what was said about their local doctor, church, mayor, whatever.
Of course the admins can't take down the picture. We can only kill the comment or maybe bogus the email address.
Avatars If you look at a Google-backed blog & I've used it ... you will see a picture of the still-lost-lamented & dead "Ratatosk" the Birman Tom cat .... If you look at a lot of others, notably "London Reconnections" ... you will see a picture of Gresley A-4 pacific 60010 Dominion of Canada photographed in 1962 ( By me ) ... "DoC" is one of the 6 remaining 6 A-4's.
Yes, salvage logging is a huge problem in California. If you're fighting it, there are two issues that help.
One is that charred wood still retains carbon on the landscape. For some reason, some greenhouse gas emission models assume that logs vaporize into their component molecules once burned, so that any logs lefts are effectively CO2 already and can be removed. Asking pointed questions when they start yammering about how this is "GHG neutral" can help bring these silly models to the surface.
Another is that, in California, there's a shortage of nesting cavities in dead trees for things like owls and woodpeckers. Yes, I'm aware that Australia works differently (I just finished rereading a book on eucalypt ecology, so I've got a bit of it in memory). However, if they start talking about "dangerous snags," this can be countered with heartbreaking tales of woe involving cavity-nesting rare/cute birds and the like.
Um, er... I pay my bills via snail mail, and check.
Note that there are a fair number of dealers at cons who are happy to accept a check, so that they don't need to pay the card co's for that amount.
Hey, based on what I'm writing - after the posts here, I've finally written my first draft of the next 11,000 years - I don't suppose there's any possibility that the pause was due to any or all of the following: 1. The population dropped, and took a looong time to come back up. 2. They were happy on their islands, food, etc, was good, and you want me to get on that raft/canoe and paddle off into nowhere and never come back? Why?
A really, really streamlined futuristic Pacific! Cool.
Population drop would be awkward, since usually one of the colonizing boats had somewhere around 40-60 people. Dropping below that and creating a successful colony seem close to mutually exclusive.
Most of the islanders strongly believe in birth rank order and ordered their society thus, with the eldest surviving child of the eldest lineage going back to the founding of the island being #1, and the youngest child of the youngest lineage being #last. This got jumbled and people at the bottom often stopped caring, but that's their theory. There were two results. One is that that whole "eldest surviving" thing was the pretext for any number of conflicts, and the jealous young brother plotting a coup is a standard trope in island lore. Apparently another standard trope was that the younger lineage holders who got the crappier section of the islands as fiefs often were the ones that built boats and went off looking for places where they could be eldest and get better land.
That dissatisfaction=bye bye thing happened fairly rapidly, so I don't think that happiness with existing circumstances is a good explanation, although I certainly could be wrong. Inability to find a better place to live and/or to colonize them seem to be better stories, at least superficially. When the Polynesians were forced to stay, they tended to get into agricultural intensification (better gardens) and invading other territories when that didn't work (generally, the people on the more precarious dry side of the island invaded the people who lived on the better-resourced wet side of the island).
I am going to take the same attitude to decades as I did to millennia, which is that any period of exactly 1000 years, give or take the appropriate number of leap seconds, is a millennium.
So we can if we wish have a decade starting on 23 September 2017 at 13:04 UTC, which runs up to but not including 13:04 UTC on 23 September 2027.
Hope This Helps.
J Homes
Another is that, in California, there's a shortage of nesting cavities in dead trees for things like owls and woodpeckers.
You remind me, possibly again, of visiting my grandfather in Ojai and hearing the rapid chiming sound of woodpeckers getting absolutely nothing out of the city's aluminum streetlight poles. It's been many years; I hope the birds have learned by now there are no bugs on the shiny metal trees.
Since this is an artificial intelligence thread on a science fiction author's blog, it seems appropriate to remind anyone who missed it of Issac Asimov's centennial.
I hadn't known it was coming, having no reason to look up or remember the date 2 January 1920.
Um, er... I pay my bills via snail mail, and check.
I guess between my wife and I and living in 2 cities we use 5 or so checks a year. I just ordered one via my bank's bill pay for a special situation. I pay all my bills online.
But in general we've moved on. Ditto postage. I have 3 stamps in my back back. Have have them for 2 or more years now. They are for "if I need one". So far, nope.
I heard something a while back that I try and apply to my life. With mixed success.
"Don't let habits become decisions"
As I said, mixed success.
But habits I have broken include snail mail, paper checks, debit cards (except to extract cash from a bank), etc...
woodpeckers getting absolutely nothing out of the city's aluminum streetlight poles. ... I hope the birds have learned by now there are no bugs on the shiny metal trees.
Doubt it. I just put up a some rubber snakes on the side of my house to scare them away. They moved to the other side of my house so a few more faux snakes and they might stop. My crappy Masonite siding has no bugs. But a large number of spackled over holes.
Years ago a house my dad build and was trying to sell had dark stained rough cut fir siding on the exterior. A woodpecker kept going at it and we couldn't get it to stop. He finally shot it. But not before it stripped off an area 8' tall and 4' to 6' wide. He didn't want to but there was over $30K on the line. In 1971.
Science Fiction Writing
So, CS has said (and it makes sense to me) that most writers don't really get anything published until they are writing after 30 or 40 years of living. Otherwise they typically don't have the life experiences needed. Makes sense to me. So many successful writers are well past 40.
I personally have become convinced that most people don't like the world around them to change unless their world is absolute misery. And even then many will fight change. And it seems to me that for most of us shaved apes that this tendency against change grows stronger with age. But this might just be do to people getting richer and/or more aware of their mortality as they grow old and less inclined to allow change into their lives.
So if you're writing SF, and living "in the past", how do you write for the audience of people younger than you? If you are still using paper checks, postal mail, or email instead of texting, still have a land line telephone, and so on, how do you write and/or relate to the younger audience who things these things and many others are quaint or even crazy?
And yes whitroth I starting down this specific path based on our comments to each other but I'm seriously not trying to pick on you. I'm asking about this to the wider audience here of writers. Published or not. Lack of openness to change is an ongoing thought train with me lately. H's comments in many ways got me going down this train a few years ago. That and observing the lives of my children currently aged 28 and 30.
You want answers? Have I got answers....
I'm not convinced that most folks don't want change. Certainly, I really want change, and not the direction it's taken in the last 40 years.
I'm also a tad annoyed that you mention what I consider to be trivial things (email, instead of text? Maybe because I can speak, and write, in whole sentences and paragraphs? Maybe because the virtual keyboard on a stupidphone is a lousy kludge... and I'm waiting for the reports of a endemic wave of carpal tunnel from texting.)
Land line? In '04, I was living in Florida, on the Space Coast. A hurricane came through - they very rarely come by that area, which a) was why the Cape exists, and b) why it was chosen, out of all of FL's coastline - the power went out Sunday or Monday. That killed our 'Net connection. By the next day, the cell towers were overwhelmed. Land line, on copper, and phone co power, went down Tuesday, I think, came up for about an hour Thursday (so I could make a call, cell towers still overwhelmed), and came up Friday and stayed up Power didn't come back until Sunday or Monday.
'Net, cell, landline: no single point of failure.
Now, beyond all that, I know that things will change. Trying to deny it is a right-wing trait. SF, esp, is "what might happen if this or that or all of them go on?"
Some folks like positive outcomes, at least for their characters, some find they've no choice but less bad. In either case, change of circumstances is the driver... and no younger person who reads sf or fantasy doesn't want change.
For a really large view... based on the post or two that I did above, I spent Wed eve, and a good part of yesterday working out a history for the next 11,000 years, which is when my central novella jumps to, from 150 years from now,,, and most of all but the last 2k years of that is irrelevant to my stories, but it gives them real solidity. If you're interested, I'm now working on an abbreviated version of that history, and it'll be up on my writing website in a day or two: https://mrw.5-cent.us
Since I'm now "out", there's a joke that goes with the domain (which I own): my "professional" computer professional website, under it, is 24.5-cent.us... as in, yes, Duck Dodgers, in the Twenty-Fourthththth and a Halfthth Century!
I'm also a tad annoyed that you mention what I consider to be trivial things (email, instead of text? Maybe because I can speak, and write, in whole sentences and paragraphs? Maybe because the virtual keyboard on a stupidphone is a lousy kludge... and I'm waiting for the reports of a endemic wave of carpal tunnel from texting.)
I wasn't discussing if these this trend is right, wrong, or neutral.
People under 40 are leaving them behind. By the time you get to 20 and younger they almost refuse to use them. They may be headed down the wrong path but that wasn't my question. They ARE headed down that path.
...and may swear at you if you give them a reply like, say, "...and in English please?"
I'd suggest the best thing to do is ignore it or else risk coming off like the teacher who tries to be one of the lads and gets the piss taken for it behind his back.
It's the very nature of things that when you're young everything you're reading is written by people a lot older than you and a lot of it was written before you were born. So you just get used to it without thinking about it. It never really bothered me that families in books often had servants and that sort of thing. I was more bugged by books of science fiction that failed to anticipate the invention of the transistor, even though I knew it was unreasonable.
My point was that they will ask a complex technical question in "txt spk" and then wonder why, if they get a reply at all, it is a request for further details in clearer language.
Sure, no disagreement with that at all. I was talking about the book authorship age gap thing.
ask a complex technical question in "txt spk" and then wonder why, if they get a reply at all, it is a request for further details in clearer language.
I see this a lot on reddit, where forums like SolarDIY get regular "I has panelz lol make litz go? Howe?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/SolarDIY/comments/e4e5wg/what_can_i_dowith_this_boy/
Plus homework where the question as repeated doesn't make much sense
https://www.reddit.com/r/SolarDIY/comments/dz6qyb/solar_panel/
I R l33t g33k => 'tis 33$! 4 me 😏
I've got an easy one. So easy that, if civilization doesn't crash first, I'm going to write it:
Break the Internet. Then write about how this affects millennials.
The basic premise is fairly straightforward: after everybody trashes everybody else's elections and savages their authoritarian and plutocratic regimes, the escalation to WebWar I leaves cities broken all over the globe, and desperate to repair. Because of this desperation, they cut themselves off from the internet to regain control of their water, utilities, food distribution, and other resources logistics and infrastructure.
Yes, this sucks hard, but coupled with climate change, it fuels a massive rise in the building of warehouses, slow logistics, and an increasing emphasis on resilience to crises and emergencies rather than on maximizing growth (note for the class, minimizing chase of total loss is a different mathematical function than maximizing growth, although both utilize the kind of math non-engineers can understand).
Now this is a familiar landscape to anyone born before, say, 1980. It's increasingly alien to those born after 1990 in the WEIRD world. So if you're an older writer, this gives you a major advantage in writing a coming-of-age story in a post-internet solarpunk world. Or something like that. The point is that the technology hasn't gone away, but the connectivity and online addiction has.
I'd also say that this is a more straightforward prediction of future trends than the assumption that everything will keep growing indefinitely.
Ok, Charlie, and others: I spent a good bit of yesterday working on my writer website, including a page with a timeline for the background of the far future stories I've been talking about, including more on the Thousand Years' War. If y'all have any interest, feel free to have a look: https://mrw.5-cent.us and it's the link to 11,000 years in the navbar.
No need to worry about malware on my site: these pages proudly built in vi, and are straight html.
Once the orbital sat constellations get ubiquitous and cheap, “cutting yourself off from the internet” is not a thing a city is going to be able to do even if they want to
Hell they can’t even really do it now , at least not for rich people
ROTFLMAO!
So, you're saying crashing the entire jit* idiocy of MBAs, and a change to tax laws that effectively penalize have stocks of supplies.
Note that the change in tax laws in the US that made that "reasonable" also seriously affected artists (as a very long time, on-and-off member of ASFA, I'm well aware of this).
@911: "I personally have become convinced that most people don't like the world around them to change unless their world is absolute misery..."
If you are talking about macro change then I would tend to agree. The thing about age though, is complicated. The young adapt to new things readily because they aren't new to them-compared to anything else. Nothing is "new" or "old" when you have no experience to relate it to, they just are. That doesn't make them more adaptable, because once they get used to their "new" technology, they become as resistant to change as anyone else (ask my 13 year old how much he likes new responsibilities). I teach college freshment--they hate email because they aren't used to it. For them, email is new.
Middle aged people (the elderly are a different kettle) have a useful knowledge set: they have seen things change in the past. They don't like change any more than anyone else does, but at least they have ridden this rodeo. And we resist change for an additional reason--we have seen change hyped, and then fail to deliver (or really change anything). All change imposes costs, but only some change provides sufficient benefits to justify the costs (at least from an individual user's perspective--there's usually some vested interest behind hyped changes). Changes that last tend to deliver some benefit that ensures their survival--good luck guessing which one's those are when the changes are first introduced. Often the benefits take years to become clarified.
And I think that's the hook that SF used to reel in new users: look at this incredible, radical change! Oh, it didn't turn out how the protag's thought (or were told) it would, and look, there are distinct similarities to changes we've seen in the past, and hey, they have to fight for the change they actually want. Many young people, who are naturally cynical with respect to anything an authority figure tells them, can relate to that message. It's pretty universal, and eternal.
Topical for the thread is this cartoon, wherein a presenter claims "Our company can assist with your re-elections, senators, by using artificial intelligence to create actual ignorance."
Yup.
For example, tell me what good texting is, and what are its advantages over either email or a phone call.
I know of one: as one of my daughters puts it (she's the programmer and the writer), sometimes, if signal is really bad, it's easier to get a text through than a voice call.
That's the only advantage I know of.
tell me what good texting is
It's asynchronous. If you ring me while I'm riding my bike I will ignore you and that's the end of that. But if you text me I can read your message when I get where I'm going and respond. Since my cellphone provider doesn't allow me to disable voicemail I have a message that says "text me, I never listen to voicemail".
Against that I can talk, walk and use both eyes to look out for traffic. If I try to text I have to stand still, read, "type" and can then start walking again.
If I phone you to say "Which table are you at in the bar?" you can then reply whilst I still make walking pace towards the bar. If I was driving my phone would be off, and I'd not get a text and sooner than a voicemail.
Sorry, I thought the question was "what is SMS good for" not "if your phone can only do one thing which should it be?"
The obvious answer is that I would buy one of each sort of device and carry both, the way I used to have a pager as well as a cellphone.
Think about it a bit more deeply, because there is a serious implication. It's not just that such people are losing the ability to read and write, it's that they are abandoning the capability of ANY non-trivial written communication.
This isn't a simple change of habit with age, but an aspect of the way our societies are breaking down. As with 'money', our technical facilities are becoming more abstruse, centralised, and controlled by a tiny minority - AND the abilities to handle them are being concentrated in fewer and fewer people.
One of the oldest SF stories about this is still one of the best: The Machine Stops.