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Starship bloopers

(I need to blog more often, so here's one of hopefully a series of shorter, more frequent, opinions ...)

NOTICE (as of comment 322): the discussion is about the book, not the Verhoeven movie, which I have not seen. Stop with the movie discussion or I will start to delete comments. I run this blog for my amusement and I have zero interest in movies/TV adaptations of this novel.

Anent the "Heinlein was a fascist" accusations that are a hardy perennial on the internet, especially in discussions of Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie, which I have not seen because it's a movie): I'd like to offer a nuanced opinion.

In the 1930s, Heinlein was a soft socialist—he was considered sufficiently left wing and "unreliable" that he was not recalled for active duty in the US Navy during the second world war. After he married Virginia Gerstenfeld, his third and last wife, his views gradually shifted to the right—however he tended towards the libertarian right rather than the religious/paleoconservative right. (These distinctions do not mean in 2021 what they might have meant in 1971; today's libertarian/neo-nazi nexus has mostly emerged in the 21st century, and Heinlein was a vehement opponent of Nazism.) So the surface picture is your stereotype of a socially liberal centrist/soft leftist who moved to the right as he grew older.

But to muddy the waters, Heinlein was always happy to pick up a bonkers ideological shibboleth and run with it in his fiction. He was sufficiently flexible to write from the first person viewpoint of unreliable/misguided narrators, to juxtapose their beliefs against a background that highlighted their weaknesses, and even to end the story with the narrator—but not the reader—unaware of this.

In Starship Troopers Heinlein was again playing unreliable narrator games. On the surface, ST appears to be a war novel loosely based on WW2 ("bugs" are Nazis; "skinnies" are either Italian or Japanese Axis forces), but each element of the subtext relates to the ideological awakening of his protagonist, everyman Johnny Rico (note: not many white American SF writers would have picked a Filipino hero for a novel in the 1950s). And the moral impetus is a discussion of how to exist in a universe populated by existential threats with which peaceful coexistence is impossible. The political framework Heinlein dreamed up for his human population—voting rights as a quid pro quo for military (or civilian public) service—isn't that far from the early Roman Republic, although in Rico's eyes it's presented as something new, a post-war settlement. Heinlein, as opposed to his protagonist, is demonstrating it as a solution to how to run a polity in a state of total war without losing democratic accountability. (Even his presentation of corporal and capital punishment is consistent with the early Roman Republic as a model.) The totalizing nature of the war in ST isn't at odds with the Roman interpretation: Carthago delenda est, anyone?

It seems to me that using the Roman Republic as a model is exactly the sort of cheat that Heinlein would employ. But then Starship Troopers became the type specimen for an entire subgenre of SF, namely Military-SF. It's not that MilSF wasn't written prior to Starship Troopers: merely that ST was compellingly written by the standards of SF circa 1959. And it was published against the creeping onset of the US involvement in the Vietnam War, and the early days of the New Wave in SF, so it was wildly influential beyond its author's expectations.

The annoying right wing Heinlein Mil-SF stans that came along in later decades—mostly from the 1970s onwards—embraced Starship Troopers as an idealized fascist utopia with the permanent war of All against All that is fundamental to fascist thought. In doing so they missed the point completely. It's no accident that fascist movements from Mussolini onwards appropriated Roman iconography (such as the Fasces ): insecure imperialists often claim legitimacy by claiming they're restoring an imagined golden age of empire. Indeed, this was the common design language of the British Empire's architecture, and just about every other European imperialist program of the past millennium. By picking the Roman Republic as a model for a beleagured polity, Heinlein plugged into the underlying mythos of western imperialism. But by doing so he inadvertently obscured the moral lesson he was trying to deliver.

... And then Verhoeven came along and produced a movie that riffs off the wank fantasies of the Mil-SF stans and their barely-concealed fascist misinterpretation: famously, he claimed to have never read the book. I pass no judgement on whether Starship Troopers the move is good or bad: as I said, I haven't seen it. But movies have a cultural reach far greater than any book can hope to achieve, so that's the image of Starship Troopers that became indelibly embedded in the zeitgeist.

PS: I just want to leave you wondering: what would Starship Troopers have looked like if it had been directed by Fritz Lang, with Leni Reifenstahl in charge of the cameras?

PPS: I don't agree with Heinlein's moral framework, although I think I can see what he was getting at.

1643 Comments

1:

I enjoyed deconstructing the book the other day with my PolSci academic son in law. But mainly for the suits!

2:

Heinlein was a vehement opponent of Nazism

True. Since RAH was born in 1907, he saw the Nazi end-game: extermination of pretty much everybody the state disliked.

We are all getting a lesson in what happens when something falls out of the cultural memory. Nazis were socialists! Vaccines are bad! No need for financial regulations!

If RAH had been born in 1977, rather than 1907, would he have swallowed the Big Lie about DJT actually winning in 2020? I hope not. But we can't know.

3:

If RAH had been born in 1977, rather than 1907, would he have swallowed the Big Lie about DJT actually winning in 2020? I hope not. But we can't know.

I'm pretty sure we can know. Just comb Baen's author list for mil-sf authors aged 44, +/- a couple of years, possibly with a service background in Iraq/Afghanistan, but ideally Navy.

Heinlein turned 44 in 1951, only two years after publishing "Sixth Column" (although to be fair John W. Campbell should cop the blame for much of the racism in that turd-ball).

It's a depressing thought, isn't it?

4:

I would consider Forever War by Joe Haldeman to be an interesting retort to Starship Troopers, being definitely more...in your face with the points it is communicating. Along with other ones to go with like the potential development of human society & race.

5:

I reread it a couple of years ago and this time the ending came across as almost like 1984, with Rico finally loving the army and even his father joining his unit. That said, in 1984's Expanded Universe Heinlein says that he stopped working on Stranger in a Strange Land to write Starship Troopers in response to the campaign for a nuclear test ban, to glorify the military.

“That book glorifies the military!” Now we are getting somewhere. It does indeed. Specifically the P.B.I., the Poor Bloody Infantry, the mudfoot who places his frail body between his loved home and the war’s desolation—but is rarely appreciated. “It’s Tommy this and Tommy that and chuck him out, the brute!—but it’s ‘thin red line of heroes’ when the guns begin to shoot.” My own service usually doesn’t have too bad a time of it. Save for very special situations such as the rivers in Nam, a Navy man can get killed but he is unlikely to be wounded … and if he is killed, it is with hot food in his belly, clean clothes on his body, a recent hot bath, and sack time in a comfortable bunk not more than 24 hours earlier. The Air Force leads a comparable life. But think of Korea, of Guadalcanal, of Belleau Wood, of Viet Nam. The H-bomb did not abolish the infantryman; it made him essential … and he has the toughest job of all and should be honored. Glorify the military? Would I have picked it for my profession and stayed on the rolls the past 56 years were I not proud of it?

He then goes on to argue for a franchise limited in some way, if not by public service

Democracies usually collapse not too long after the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses … for a while. Either read history or watch the daily papers; it is now happening here.
which supports your Roman Republic theory.
Let’s stipulate for discussion that some stabilizing qualification is needed (in addition to the body being warm) for a voter to vote responsibly with proper consideration for the future of his children and grandchildren—and yours. The Founding Fathers never intended to extend the franchise to everyone; their debates and the early laws show it. A man had to be a stable figure in the community through owning land or employing others or engaged in a journeyman trade or something.

And proposes selling votes, having to solve a quadratic equation to vote (with eugenic twists) then end up suggesting that we it allow women to vote and hold public office.

6:

Yes. While I strongly disagree with his approach to enforcing civic responsibility, he has a very good point that one such is needed. Smaller and more stable societies can sustain it mainly by social pressure (though rarely did above a few thousand people), but we have seen (in many countries, including the UK and USA) what happens when that breaks down.

7:

To a great extent, that is the difference between WW II and Vietnam.

8:

I have one contrary opinion, namely that the Bugs were not Nazis but Commies, and the Skinnies were their fellow-traveler dupes.

Other than that, great. Now do Farnham's Freehold.

9:

Democracies usually collapse not too long after the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses … for a while. Either read history or watch the daily papers; it is now happening here.

And this, in my opinion, is where Heinlein went wrong! Because it's glaringly obvious that the real threat to democracy in the USA today emerged after the plutocrats discovered they could directly buy bread and circuses (or, rather, tax cuts and reactionary social policies to distract the ordinary voters). Indeed, a similar internal threat brought down the USSR; it wasn't the workers revolting and demanding bread and circuses, it was the power hierarchy ossifying and focusing on its own narrow interests.

But I'm at risk of wandering off-topic ...

10:

That is true, especially if you account for that Haldeman would later edit his book too post-war as he clearly thought more on his wartime experiences in retrospect. Though Haldeman has been quoted to respect Heinlein's work, so I think it can be safely understood what the book was trying to get at, and took his own take of "how society could be based on how wartime experiences affected my outlook of grand scale conflict". Especially since Haldeman further humanises the non-humans and how the society took efforts to make them evil, much like the political sentiment at the time of the evil commies etc. among the other political topics brewing in his head that translated into the writing such as LGBT+ and how an older generation adjusts to generational change.

11:

In fact that line about bread and circuses is a perennial conservative slur against the plebs, who even in Roman times didn't vote themselves that.

12:

Looking at online debates among serving US and UK military, there’s a mix of responses to the “middle aged, seen a war zone have an opinion”. The bulk of it is reassuringly skeptical of war as a means of achieving… any desired diplomatic end state. IIRC Ender’s Game, Old Man’s War, The Forever War, and Starship Troopers have all appeared on military reading lists (U.K. forces don’t have as much enthusiasm for reading lists, not least due to cynicism / anti-intellectualism). That’s not to say that there aren’t some rather sad puppies in uniform, just that it would be lazy to assume they’re in the ascendant.

The irony is that a commonly-used US term for their deployments 2001-2021 among the skeptical is… “The Forever War”

Going back to the Riefenstahl “Starship Troopers”? Much the same plot and iconography, but without women in combat roles, zero humour, no knowing winks. And maybe a few more torchlight ceremonies.

And as for other Military SF/F authors, it’s worth noting that Robert Mason (who wrote the excellent “Chickenhawk” about his experiences as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam) also wrote “Weapon” and “Solo” in the 1980s/90s (when in his mid-40s), about an AI combat robot… Murderbot in Nicaragua, if you like. By your criteria, it should be interesting to see the 2030-onwards crop of ex-military SF/F authors, responding as middle-aged types to a youth spent at war.

13:

Other than that, great. Now do Farnham's Freehold.

I am not touching that bait! It is stinky and writhing with maggots—

Okay, hold your noses.

"Farnham's Freehold" was published in 1964, which means it was written some time prior to 1963 -- it takes time to edit and schedule production of a magazine serial, never mind a book-shaped novel.

Now, Heinlein was born in 1907 and raised in Kansas City (Missouri, not quite Kansas). To put his background in perspective, when he was 15, the Tulsa race massacre happened about 200 miles from his home.

I mention this not because I think he had anything to do with the massacre, but to point out that he grew up as a white man in the era of Jim Crow, sunset towns, and lynching. He almost certainly didn't have black neighbours or really know any African-Americans, until he joined the Navy -- and possibly not even then.

And when he got out of the Navy he settled in California, which was a mostly white state (insofar as the whites didn't want to put up with the Chinese, Japanese, or Mexican communities, never mind the native Americans or the AAs from back east).

So: Heinlein wasn't necessarily a racist, but he grew up in a (by modern standards) racist hell-hole and he for sure had a lot of unexamined beliefs and prejudices that tainted his writing.

Fast-forward to the late 1950s/early 1960s. The civil rights movement was in motion, but it would not have impinged on Heinlein personally except insofar as he traveled through parts of the USA where it was a thing.

So he decided to sit down and write a novel about racism in the USA with only limited understanding, a whole bunch of under-examined prejudices, and oblivious to what today we'd call his white privilege.

In this context, "Farnham's Freehold" looks like it's meant to say "it's not much fun to be treated like a slave by other ethnicities, huh?" to a typical white SF reader of the day. Only Heinlein set off on a blindfolded wild ride on a pogo stick through a minefield, and detonated a whole bunch of racist landmines that not only undermined the message but left him wide open to accusations of racism that are impossible to ignore or excuse.

(My opinion: he should have left the MS on the shelf for a few years, then re-written it, at a minimum. Or preferably drowned it in the bath tub. I'm not sure it could have been salvaged: as a 50-something white male from Missouri, he was the wrong guy to write that book in the first place. Should have given the job to Samuel Delaney or Octavia Butler. Hell, pick any gay or other ethnic minority author: at least they'd have more experience of being othered and hated by racists or 'phobes with an exterminationist agenda.)

14:

I'm always cynically amused by those who take past empires built through conquest as a model for the present and/or an iconographic objective. The obvious problem with the Roman Empire is that it was built on conquest, and a particularly nasty form of it; it's where we get the very concept of a "second-class citizen." All too often, particular conquests were in service of providing more land holdings for the upper classes, and/or pacifying those who wanted to be Important by providing some (but not prime!) land for them. Slavery. Cultural imperialism, with required assimilation. Conversely, looking backward, so many of the advocates for those empires would have been its victims... but have managed to convince themselves otherwise. (Mr Rees-Mogg, I'd like you to meet Mr Lion.)

It's not that the Roman Empire had no positive effects, and perhaps even on balance might have been "a good thing" (if only because some version of it is the only thing we know). It's that blind worship of it ends up somewhere close to "the object of power is power" with very, very few detours or exceptions. Over Here, we can see that now with the worship of Confederate icons; people really don't like acknowledging that great-great-grandfather founded his "heroic struggle" on treason (as a visiting professor proclaimed about George Washington in a US History class, many years ago, before introducing himself as an Oxford don).

Empires don't have baggage that they're dragging. Oh, just ignore that fully-loaded lorry behind Mr Cicero, ok?

15:

Indeed, the plutocrats buying up the state is far more common and there are warnings from history there, like Sparta for example. A more interesting Heinlein book on government is Tunnel in the Sky, which warns you to look out for the PPE types taking over. The 'Heinlein makes you a fascist' trope is a bit naïve - depending which Heinlein book you pick up and take too literally you could end up an Imperial Monarchist (Glory Road), a globalist bureaucrat (Star Beast) an MMT+UBI with Universal Healthcare supporter (Beyond this Horizon), a libertarian cabal with an AI leader (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) or a media friendly actor in a constitutional monarchy (Double Star).

16:

depending which Heinlein book you pick up and take too literally you could end up an Imperial Monarchist (Glory Road)

Eh?

Glory Road isn't about imperial monarchism; if anything, Star's role is to handle arbitration and dispute resolution along the same lines as a CEO in a contemporary multinational, per Andy Groves' algorithm for running Intel. (TLDR is: no exec can fully grasp everything that's going on below them. So what you do is: you wait until there's a dispute that keeps getting kicked up a level until it lands on your desk. Then you let both (or all) sides make their cases to you. You pick whoever seems most sensible, and roll with it -- or you send them all back to rethink their cases before they come back to you. Oh, and you try to be a suitable figurehead for that nebulous thing, corporate culture.) In Glory Road, the Emperor/Empress isn't hereditary, although how they're selected is unclear.

The real point of "Glory Road" is that it's an attack on the narrative problem of myths and fairy tales, namely what happens after "... and they all lived happily ever after"? Because the quest-story ends halfway through the book, leaving our hero to grapple with the essential meaninglessness of being a trophy consort after he defeated the Big Bad, saved the empress, got the girl, and became rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

(There's also the usual Heinleinian hobby-horse riding into the ground, this time about sex and power exchanges, but that's probably just Heinlein turning sixty and grouchy about sex.)

17:

When the topic of the Roman Republic comes up, I think it's always useful to remember that if you were going to vote, you had to be at Mars Field at the crack of dawn, yet the rich got to vote early, the Middle class next, and then the poor. So not only did you have to take the day off if you were poor (i.e. no money for food or work), you'll be in the queue for hours, literally hours.

I sometimes think that's where the GOP got some of it's voter suppression ideas from.

As a side note this is where bribery came in. If you were a wealthy Roman you had about 8 hours to convince the plebs to vote for you (either by money, food, or drink). I often thought that was the missing part of ST. It has the strict regime of the Roman Republic, but none of it's flaws. And we all know the flaws would be there. In terms of a long term solution, it wouldn't last, because sooner or later, a general is going to suggest maybe the problem isn't the bugs, or the skinny's but a different division. Where would be the Rubicon in that scenario I wonder? Lunar orbit?

18:

Alec Nevala-Lee in Astounding (the group biography of Heinlein, Campbell, Asimov and Hubbard) suggests that the 'typical white SF reader' Heinlein was addressing Farnham's Freehold was Campbell, who was an out an out racist and pro-slavery. He also says that Glory Road was mocking Campbell's narrow view of fantasy. I may be misremembering Glory Road a bit, but I thought Star was the remote Emperor who indeed settled disputes as a last resort, but didn't try to deal with minutiae.

19:

I believe Verhoeven never read the book! I read ST when I was a teenager, and the thing that really captured my imagination was the mobile body armor and the troopers ability to fly-jump around the battlefield. There was no mobile body armor in that movie. I saw the movie at the theater when it came out and was very disappointed.

20:

Your memory of Star from "Glory Road" matches mine.

(Parenthetically: I did my obligatory Heinlein homage novel -- "Saturn's Children" riffs extensively off "Friday" -- so feel no obligation to go back for seconds. But if I did, I'd probably do "Glory Road". It needed an edit to get rid of the axe-grinding over sex/power exchanges, but aside from that, it's a delight.)

Viewing JWC as the target audience for "Farnham's Freehold" makes perfect sense, and indeed, it'd need to be as heavy-handed as it was to sucker him into reading it to the end. Otherwise he'd just bail. (I think that's the most charitable explanation I've yet heard for what is otherwise a terrible book.)

21:

The difference between Starship Troopers as book and movie is that, if you're somewhere between 15 and 30 the book is likely to make you think, whereas the movie... isn't. I certainly don't agree with all of Heinlein's surface-level conclusions, but he wrote it in a way that made twenty-five-year-old me consider a particular principle and say, "Hmmm. That's interesting," then think about it for awhile, and this quality is why the book is a classic. Rereadings later in life show no sign of any visits by the Suck Fairy.

The less said about the movie the better. I thought that it dishonored the source-material worse than any movie I've ever seen, to the point, Charlie, that if you ever have someone purchase an option on your work I'd strongly suggest a "no Verhoeven" clause! (In fact, I'd suggest a "no Verhoeven" clause as an appendage to all option contracts by any author anywhere!)

As for Farnham's Freehold, I'd agree that it was a disaster, and it's very sad that Heinlein didn't think to run it by any black acquaintances!

The really sad thing about/for Heinlein is that nobody these days thinks about an author's background or education, or when they were born, or about what the author was actually attempting to accomplish with a particular, and that goes very strongly for Heinlein's followers in the line of MilSF - it's fairly clear that most of them don't actually get or think about Starship Troopers beyond the "Hooray for the troops, let's talk about fighting" level.

And the bit about "who gets to vote" becomes very interesting if you expand it a little to say... teachers or social workers. ~Shrugs~ Just sayin'...

22:

And the bit about "who gets to vote" becomes very interesting if you expand it a little to say... teachers or social workers. ~Shrugs~ Just sayin'...

It would, but I got the impression from the book that the government services used a lot of civilian contractors so I imagine many jobs would be contracted out. If you volunteered they had to find something for you to do, but why give a volunteer a great job if part of the reason for requiring a term of service is testing commitment?

23:

Fully agree with Charlie, but one point must be emphasized: "The political framework Heinlein dreamed up for his human population—voting rights as a quid pro quo for military (or civilian public) service"

As you note, Heinlein made it clear early in the book that military service was only one way to gain the right to vote. He listed several other forms of public service that were acceptable alternatives. But as a novelist, he made the right call (knowing his audience) and rather than writing a rip-roaring yarn about shuffling papers in a soulless bureaucracy, he chose a war story.

Last time we discussed this (back in 2018), several folks disagreed. To avoid repeating that discussion, I suggest that before you post a rebuttal, you please go back to the primary source (i.e., what Heinlein actually wrote, not what people say he wrote). I don't have time right now to skim the first 50-some pages of my copy to find his specific description of national service, but those who disagree should feel free to do the work and find me a quote from Starship Troopers that says "only military service qualifies you to vote".

I completely get why people like to call Heinlein a fascist, but they're wrong. My reading of Heinlein biographies and some of his papers suggests he was frequently a nasty man who treated people who disagreed with him quite badly, but Charlie nailed it: he was a right-wing libertarian, not a fascist.

24:

You know, I was silly enough to by a Kindle version of Starship Troopers. My dad's version apparently perished under cat vomit some years ago.

Anyway, the weird thing is that in the Starship Troopers universe, federal service is what's required to get a voting franchise, not military service. If you want to be able to vote, you have to serve a time doing stuff for the government. Volunteering to get shot at is not only optional but discouraged, at least by the people taking them in.

Here's a quote (Kindle p.33): "But if you came in here in a wheel chair and blind in both eyes and were silly enough to insist on enrolling, they would find something silly enough to match. Counting the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch, maybe. The only way you can fail is by having the psychiatrists decide that you are not able to understand the oath.”

So there may be a couple of points here.

One is that what the genre knockoffs that follows this model influences what we think is in the original, even if it's not exactly there. This is true for LOTR, HPL, REH, and others.

The other thing is that I'm not sure how much of this is Heinlein doing a libertarian philosophical screed a la Ayn Rand, and how much of it is him being a market savvy SF author. We tend to think libertarian means "screed writer, no? Does that (and his later writing) color our view of what he was up to here?

Just to be obnoxious, I'll pose the alternative: he's a writer trying to make a living. In this book, he took the common stuff most people think they know about Rome (e.g. World History classes from high school), mating it with a "what if I could take out the ugly parts" creativity spurth, the normal impulse for anyone committing SFF, feeling around for a story that's appropriate for the times (fighting kommie kritters with nukes is Kewl).. And after doing all this he rolled a natural 20 in the sense that people are still aping the book decades later, even though his estate doesn't get licensing fees for the knockoffs. Was this is core philosophy, or was he trying a Rand and trying to make bigger points?

25:

It's been years, decades even, since I read the book but, probably unpopular opinion, I quite liked it.

Perhaps it's not having had dreams of, or having played at, being a soldier, sailor or similar but my memory of the book is thinking "this world/galaxy is horrible but this political system is worse" although I enjoyed some of the ideas in whatever their moral indoctrination classes were called. I didn't have the language back then (I last read it sometime in my teens), but today I still occasionally look back and think of them when I see people reframing (or refusing to reframe) history. The furore around Winston Churchill where Britain's generally older and more right-wing figures stridently object to any acknowledgement of things he patently did wrong while more progressive members of the historian profession are saying "he was undoubtedly a great wartime leader, and should be lauded for that, and also for doing that while dealing with his mental health difficulties but..." Reframing the Crusades as purely about population pressure "but you have to dig deeply to prove it" remains with me as clearly as another author and "the rule of five" and the picture of the child born with six fingers.

I thought the message, the parody message came through quite clearly. I think it does in the movie too. The core film might hype up the right wing mil-SF fanbois. But the adverts, just like in Robocop, really ridicule the whole of the society. But like a lot of humour, if you're the butt of the joke, it's easy to miss it.

26:

IIRC he wrote the book because there was a "no nuclear weapons" campaign which worried him. Beyond that I'd agree with your "he's a writer trying to make a living" interpretation. But he also definitely had Opinions and he took great pride in the idea that his work could make people think.

27:

I don't know if I'd agree that Heinlein was a right-wing libertarian, at least not as we understand the term today. He obviously believed that adulthood came with responsibilities as well as privileges, which is something modern right-wing Libertarians don't seem to understand.

28:

"It's glaringly obvious that the real threat to democracy in the USA today emerged after the plutocrats discovered they could directly buy bread and circuses" and this was also so in Rome. Heinlein did some decent historical research, but he was not a critical historian. In his view of how republics fall, Heinlein followed the prevailing belief of historians of the 20th century, up to his time. (This was also the source of one of the worst problems with with Farnham's Freehold.)

Heinlein thought well of The Forever War - he said so, face-to-face, to Joe Haldeman.

BTW, Roman universal conscription is where (via Machiavelli and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the one born in 1655) we got the "well-regulated militia."

29:

"He almost certainly didn't have black neighbours or really know any African-Americans, until he joined the Navy -- and possibly not even then."

Not even then. He was an officer, and blacks would have been a very, very small majority of Navy sailors, in specialized servant job (mess attendant). They'd have serve his food, but there would be at least a double social gap between white officers and black mess attendants.

30:

Please note, you're confusing the Roman Republic with the Empire. They had different pressures (the Republic had to survive, it wasn't the monster that it became as an Empire).

31:

I should reread Glory Road. But Star as "arbitrator" reminds me of the Worldcon costume my late ex and I did in Denver in '08. She was the "Supreme Artiter", and I was her "Chief Executor", emphasis on the "execute".

Her line on leaving the state: "An arbitration? Are the missile pods loaded?"

32:

Yup. I make it a point to say I don't write military sf - actually, I just did a post on it yesterday https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=354486706016089&id=102609341203828

I'm not interested in milSF fanboys (or, as I refer to it, military pr0n). [snark]As some folks I've seen post, these are guys who can't run a mile, Meal Team 6, and run around in the woods... and are sure they're ready for urban warfare....

I'll also note that every so often, the thread in the US gets loud enough to get an op-ed, that we should have a national service requirement, to be done (usually) between high school and college), and options include the Peace Corps, VISTA, etc. That would be a Good Thing, I think.

33:

"A writer trying to make a living."

And let's not forget that, in addition to JWC, he's also writing for a market that was assumed to be 80% or 90% white males between 12 and 26.

34:

Charlie @ 9 The ultra-rich buying up bread-&-circuses & subverting the previously-stable Democracy. BoZo has REALLY LEARNT this one & is following IQ45's lead, but is, so far getting away with vast amounts. I mean, Dido Harding in charge of the NHS ( See previous thread ) etc. It took how long to bring about implosion of the CCCP? Fall of Kruschev to 1990? ( about 26 years ) Or from the appointment of Andropov in 1982 ( So 8 years ) ? Where are we on that trajectory? Assuming, of course, we don't get the "distraction" of a War with the PRC .....

Kevin Marks OTOH There is a very well-known subset of fascism, that is currently very powerful in the USA. R.A.H. trashed that, utterly, in one of his earliest works - usuall called "Revolt in 2100" ( Christofascism )

whitroth .. the Republic had to survive, it wasn't the monster that it became as an Empire NO many times - NO Carthage, Syracuse, Corinth, the conquest of Gaul, for that matter.

35:

I happen to agree about Rome.

It was an expansionist Republic from pretty much the get-go, although getting sacked by Gauls would rather put people on edge.

That said, I indulged in a little alt-history along the lines of "If Rome was so evil, what would have happened if Rome never rose?" A badly timed eruption of the Phlegraean Fields would have sterilized that part of the Peninsula rather nicely, for instance...

So anyway, I started reading a bit on Hellenistic history (Alexander to Actium, to be precise). My quick impression was "holy crap, what did I step in? And how do I get this off my legs?" Rome was pretty bad, but much of what was going on in the Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean was arguably worse, with a bunch of super-rich of varying skill levels (or lack thereof) indulging their fantasies of divine rule and killing each other in the most expensive ways they could devise and sacking the landscape repeatedly in the process. Rome was somewhat better in comparison. That said, I can certainly see where the popularity of messiahs in that region comes from. Anything to get to a better world would be immensely popular, whether it's itinerant Buddhists preaching in the big cities or homespun mystics.

Actually, if you can figure out how to file the serial numbers off a story of the super-rich destroying each other, only to be subjugated in turn by a scrappy and innovative democracy, you could make a fantasy for the 21st Century...Just sayin'

36:

Just to be obnoxious, I'll pose the alternative: he's a writer trying to make a living.

This is absolutely true of Heinlein all along. He started writing short fiction for the pulps because his Navy pension was too small to live off on its own; there may also have been alimony payments to Leslyn MacDonald (who he divorced in 1947: the bio details are unclear but MacDonald died in 1981).

I don't think the financial pressure really eased on him until the runaway success of "Stranger in a Strange Land".

37:

Troutwaxer noted: "I don't know if I'd agree that Heinlein was a right-wing libertarian, at least not as we understand the term today. He obviously believed that adulthood came with responsibilities as well as privileges, which is something modern right-wing Libertarians don't seem to understand."

I should've said mid- to late-stage Heinlein. My memory is that he did maintain a belief in adult responsibilities to the end of his career, but that those responsibilities shifted from the state to the individual's chosen family group (e.g., particularly "Time Enough for Love" and "Friday", and probably "Number of the Beast"). That may not be strict Aynal-retentive Rand libertarianism, but it's heading closer to that direction than any other simple label I can come up with. You're right to split hairs on this point if we want to dig deeper, but for a superficial discussion, "right wing libertarian" fits better than fascist.

38:

"A rip-roaring yarn about shuffling papers in a soulless bureaucracy." wasn't that The Star Beast? And one the major characters of that story was African, most likely Black, though I don't think that was stated in the text. (Not likely that would make it into a 1950s juvenile.)

There is, I think, in Heinlein, a Swiftian, or perhaps Twainian, level of satire. (Does anyone recall if he mentioned Swift? He did mention Twain.) And his naïve readers miss that.

39:

he wrote the book because there was a "no nuclear weapons" campaign which worried him.

Now that's an interesting piece of timing!

"Starship Troopers" dropped in 1959, the year of Sputnik. At that time the CIA was screaming at Eisenhower about a Missile Gap existing, with estimates that the USSR had as many as 700 ICBMs poised and ready to obliterate the USA at 30 minutes' notice.

As it later turned out -- see also the U-2 program and Project Oxcart, not to mention the spy satellite program -- the USSR had only about a dozen ICBMs back then, which took 6 hours to fuel up on the launch pad. They were mostly R-7s, the ancestor of today's Soyuz launcher, and made a piss-poor ICBM (but a much better satellite launcher).

But back then, the US media were partial to the CIA interpretation, which was selectively leaked through media channels to drum up an atmosphere of near hysteria. The 1950s were really something else, and like most of his generation Heinlein had been borderline-traumatized by living through WW2, even if he hadn't been on the front lines.

40:

Greg: It took how long to bring about implosion of the CCCP? Fall of Kruschev to 1990? ( about 26 years ) Or from the appointment of Andropov in 1982 ( So 8 years ) ? Where are we on that trajectory?

Going by Thatcher -> Present, I think we're probably overdue. If you subtract the New Labour interregnum, then we've had 29 barely-interrupted years of Thatcher and her doctrinaire fanboys since 1979. So we're already overdue.

41:

Remember the horrifyingly bad pun (or dad joke) at the end of Star Beast? And how Heinlein in 1954(!) smuggled a John Thomas into a book published by Scribners' kidlit imprint?

42:

Actually, multiple historians have pointed out that the US has been this polarized before. The late 19th century had lots of bread-and-circus style rallies, where the point was to provide a lot of food and more beer, get everyone riled up and parading in an us versus them style, and to not talk politics during the election because the last thing you want is for the mobs following your banner to think about what they were demonstrating for. This was the norm in US politics, and yet somehow, we got through that. Sort of. For a little while.

I think the bigger global picture, the part that's relevant for the UKians in the audience, is to not make the mistake of thinking history is destiny, or that history is even very good at rhyming. If there isn't a Mandate of Heaven, rebuilding Rome won't be useful either. And if you can believe in Black Swan Theory, historical cycles, and climate change, then you're almost as good at compartmentalizing contradictory ideas as any authoritarian follower. One of these is not like the others.

43:

I don't know if I'd agree that Heinlein was a right-wing libertarian, at least not as we understand the term today.

Like "Republican", the term "libertarian" seems to have drifted over the last generation.

After all, most contemporary Republicans would find Reagan too left-wing for their tastes, let alone a Commie like Eisenhower. :-/

44:

The history of Starship Troopers is laid out in Expanded Universe (which admittedly he wrote 20 years laters so may be embellished a with hindsight, but Astounding agrees). He was worried by the Test Ban proposal and wrote a reds under the bed polemic:

Last Saturday in this city appeared a full-page ad intended to scare us into demanding that the President stop our testing of nuclear weapons. This manifesto was a curious mixture of truth, half-truth, distortion, exaggeration, untruth, and Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense.

The instigators were seventy-odd local people and sixty-odd national names styling themselves “The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.” It may well be that none of the persons whose names are used as the “National” committee are Communists and we have no reason to suppose that any of the local people are Communists—possibly all of them are loyal and merely misguided. But this manifesto is the rankest sort of Communist propaganda.

And so on. Eisenhower ignored the lobbying. Heinlein continues (in 1984).
Presently I resumed writing—not Stranger but Starship Troopers. The “Patrick Henry” ad shocked 'em; Starship Troopers outraged 'em. I still can't see how that book got a Hugo. It continues to get lots of nasty “fan” mail and not much favorable fan mail … but it sells and sells and sells and sells, in eleven languages. It doesn't slow down—four new contracts just this year. And yet I almost never hear of it save when someone wants to chew me out over it. I don't understand it.

Then he explains the franchise thing:

  • “Veteran” does not mean in English dictionaries or in this novel solely a person who has served in military forces. I concede that in commonest usage today it means a war veteran … but no one hesitates to speak of a veteran fireman or veteran school teacher. In Starship Troopers it is stated flatly and more than once that nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead, 95% of voters are what we call today “former members of federal civil service.” Addendum: The volunteer is not given a choice. He/she can't win a franchise by volunteering for what we call civil service. He volunteers … then for two years plus-or-minus he goes where he is sent and does what he is told to do. If he is young, male, and healthy, he may wind up as cannon fodder. But there are long chances against it.
  • He/she can resign at any time other than during combat—i.e., 100% of the time for 19 out of 20; 99+% of the time for those in the military branches of federal service.
  • There is no conscription. (I am opposed to conscription for any reason at any time, war or peace, and have said so repeatedly in fiction, in nonfiction, from platforms, and in angry sessions in think tanks. I was sworn in first in 1923, and have not been off the hook since that time. My principal pride in my family is that I know of not one in over two centuries who was drafted; they all volunteered. But the draft is involuntary servitude, immoral, and unconstitutional no matter what the Supreme Court says.)
  • Criticism: “The government in Starship Troopers is militaristic.” “Militaristic” is the adjective for the noun “militarism,” a word of several definitions but not one of them can be correctly applied to the government described in this novel. No military or civil servant can vote or hold office until after he is discharged and is again a civilian. The military tend to be despised by most civilians and this is made explicit. A career military man is most unlikely ever to vote or hold office; he is more likely to be dead—and if he does live through it, he'll vote for the first time at 40 or older.
  • 45:

    Roman universal conscription is where (via Machiavelli and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the one born in 1655) we got the "well-regulated militia."

    At least Roman Senators didn't fetishize the Right to Bear Swords and argue that they could carry them into the Forum.

    46:

    "Actually, if you can figure out how to file the serial numbers off a story of the super-rich destroying each other, only to be subjugated in turn by a scrappy and innovative democracy, you could make a fantasy for the 21st Century...Just sayin'"

    You rang? Not the next book I get published, which is in a different universe, but the one after that is the creation of the Terran Confederation, and the trillionaires' internecine wars finally push us over the line.

    Bonus points: most of the PoV characters are women.

    47:

    As I've said a number of times before, I haven't read any Heinlein between Moon and Friday. In between was that water on the brain, that was surgically removed in the late seventies....

    And, please, I've also said for many years, if I want to read right-wing propaganda, I'll take Heinlein any day - he could, in fact, write, as opposed to Rand, who would never have gotten out of the slush pile without friend$$$$$. Her "writing" is dreadful, on par with Eye of Argon.

    48:

    Charlie! Sputnik was 4 Oct 1957.

    49:

    Reading your post, what came to mind was, of course, the CCC, and the Federal Writers' Project, and other programs of the New Deal. All would qualify as federal service.

    As did Woody Guthrie composing songs for the government....

    50:

    The difference between Starship Troopers as book and movie is that, if you're somewhere between 15 and 30 the book is likely to make you think, whereas the movie... isn't.

    Given that the script and acting in the movie was done so that 12 year olds could follow it in detail, well, ... And most all 12 year olds. Even the one who are barely getting by in school.

    I leave it on every now and then if it pops up on a TV channel as an amusing diversion while writing emails or such. But past that ...

    It's a movie made from a comic book.

    51:

    Oh, dear. Now my SO is calling me cruel, and asking why I would do that, when it struck me to write a fanfic parody of Anthem, or Atlas Shrugged, in the style of Eye of Argon....

    52:

    The difference between Starship Troopers as book and movie is that, if you're somewhere between 15 and 30 the book is likely to make you think, whereas the movie... isn't.

    My father (1925-2001) was considered to not be a racist in the later 60s onward. It cost him much of his social standing in our little back water of Americana.[1] Anyone with his views today would be considered a racist. Not much of one but still. At some point you have to allow for the environment where people existed. Not some utopia they never knew.

    And I still have words and phrases and jingles in my head that I'll never be able to remove that I picked up and used in the 60s/70s.

    [1] I'm still learning things about my family and the community I grew up in 50 years after the fact that surprise me.

    53:

    My keyboarding went nuts. Total user error. That quote for for another comment I was making. But my reply was to your comment.

    55:

    I'm on the opposite end of the experiental spectrum here - I've seen (and really like) the movie but not read the book.

    Only wanted to say that wrt the OP Paul Verhoeven explicitly did base some of the camera work on Leni R

    "...I was looking for the prototype of blond, white and arrogant, and Casper Van Dien was so close to the images I remembered from Leni Riefenstahl’s films. I borrowed from Triumph of the Will in the parody propaganda reel that opens the film, too. I was using Riefenstahl to point out, or so I thought, that these heroes and heroines were straight out of Nazi propaganda. No one saw it at the time. I don’t know whether or not the actors realised – we never discussed it. I thought Neil Patrick Harris arriving on the set in an SS uniform might clear it up..."

    from this article https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl

    I think it's a totally fair point that the only thing the movie really shares with the book, from what I understand, is the title.

    I vaguely remember him also saying somewhere that the point of the movie was that fascism turns everyone in to fascists, which seems on the money and is a pretty accurate description of what happens in the movie.

    56:

    This was the norm in US politics, and yet somehow, we got through that. Sort of. For a little while.

    I think the "smoke filled back rooms" had a lot to do with it. They resulted in some really bad things. But overall they keep the boat somewhat steady. Just not steady in a way that many liked when the 60s finally blew up.

    57:

    After all, most contemporary Republicans would find Reagan too left-wing for their tastes

    He negotiated with, compromised with, and was friends with Tip O'Neill. Any single one of those would get him laughed out of the party today.

    58:

    I have the opposite: I have only watched the movie, but have not read the book. I guess I am too young for that? (35) I don't know if I read any Heinlein, but I certainly have read Mil-SF

    On first viewing, it is a blatant, bad, cheesy, strange, military fan-p0rn movie. However, on second and third viewing, when the brain knows what is going on and can think, I can only frame it as "Propaganda - The Movie!". That needs some explanation: The movie is basically an in-universe propaganda movie, as a citizen would see on their whatever-device. -> The propaganda ad-breaks, the framing of the characters, etc. That interpretation doesn't quite work in a few scenes, e.g., the one where the the officer sends his corporal to die for no good reason. It doesn't get better in repeat viewings, it's still bad. But it has things in it that are either intentional and badly executed or brilliant accidents.

    I was not inspired to think of anything this movie portrayed as worthy to implement in the real world, but I was told I have at least two brain cells, so that does not surprise me. People getting all "Rar-Rar Hurra, space facism rocks!" over this movie I cannot emphasize with.

    For a Riefenstahl version, I can buy it being essentially unchanged story-wise. Details would change: All human soldiers being portrayed as heroic all the time. Minor defeats are causes by human weakness, not because the enemy is too strong. (no major human defeats.) All human deaths are portrayed as evil acts by monsters and the fallen are raised as martyrs of the cause. A straight up propaganda movie, essentially.

    59:

    I haven't read RH in 50 or so years. His books that is. I read his Byte magazine articles and his blog at times. (What a confusing mess of navigation.)

    But I like him. And many times didn't agree with him. His politics, computer thoughts, whatever.

    But I always felt that he had thought through his positions and was right as a result. Unlike so many people.

    And at times would admit to changing his mind and that he had qualms about his conclusions.

    60:

    Those are just two sides of the same coin - the problem comes when an electorate turns into a flock of sheeple, and start following demagogues and (worse) rabble-rousers. For representative democracy to work, the electorate MUST be sufficiently well-informed, thoughtful and (above all) involved to be at least resistant to those.

    The other aspect is to avoid 'them and us' in governmental organisations, which is demonstrably not working in the UK at present.

    I agree with him that universal public service is an important part of a solution, but I do not at all agree with his take on it.

    61:

    There, I agree with you. I have read precisely one Rand (Atlas Shrugged), which I was pointed at as a way of understanding their mindset, and it was hard to tell whether it was more scrofulous as philosophy or literature.

    62:

    fwiw, my take on Starship Troopers the movie: perfectly credible first-person shooter of a movie, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the book, and redeemed from a literary perspective only by the scene with the brain-eating bug-eyed monster.

    YMMV.

    63: 11 - As the Romans didn't have a universal franchise, the plebs couldn't vote, for that or anything else. 19 - Similar feelings about the book, and mild disappointment about the film. 23 Para 3 - You're correct about the actual (lack of) statement but I think it's fairly clear that Rico believed that you had to do military service to gain the franchise, and to become eligible for some civil service careers.
    64:

    my take on Starship Troopers the movie: perfectly credible first-person shooter of a movie, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the book

    Take interesting book. Mil-SF.

    Turn into comic book. With liberal interpretation / deletion of details.

    Make a movie from comic book. Don't worry about any details.

    65:

    I believe you're thinking of Jerry Pournelle, not Heinlein.

    66:

    You rang? Not the next book I get published, which is in a different universe, but the one after that is the creation of the Terran Confederation, and the trillionaires' internecine wars finally push us over the line.

    Oh cool! Maybe you'll be able to make Progr-SF a thing, sort of like the inverse of MilSF and for a bigger audience.

    67:

    Side note on using "comic book" to mean "overly simplistic" or just plain "stupid". If you believe that, you haven't read any comic books (in which I include graphic novels) since, say, 1970. A lot of the newer stuff is every bit as good as purely textual fiction and some is better; Neil Gaiman's and (much of) Alan Moore's work comes to mind, but there are many others. And I'm probably doing an injustice to pre-1970 comics, but I'm speaking to the comics I've actually read.

    68:

    pirateFinn @ 4: I would consider Forever War by Joe Haldeman to be an interesting retort to Starship Troopers, being definitely more...in your face with the points it is communicating. Along with other ones to go with like the potential development of human society & race.

    Perhaps in a way. But Haldeman was writing about the Vietnam War, while Heinlein was writing about WW2 and the Korean War. Different wars, different experiences.

    69:

    If you've never seen the movie, don't bother. It is a grotesque travesty of Heinlein's writing.

    And aside from the politics it gets wrong, it's poorly acted, the writing is SHIT even for screen writing, the special effects are appalling in their representation of the military (not even up to the cheesy level of Star Trek) and the "soldiers" are not tactically proficient, they're JUST PLAIN STUPID.

    It is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has ever served, including draftees who hated serving in the military.

    travesty noun

    trav·​es·​ty | \ ˈtra-və-stē\
    plural travesties

    Definition of travesty
    1 : a debased, distorted, or grossly inferior imitation
    a travesty of justice

    2 : a burlesque translation or literary or artistic imitation usually grotesquely incongruous in style, treatment, or subject matter

    70:

    On this book, I tend to think that if most teenage boys, the readers it was aimed at, come away thinking powered armour is cool as is blowing lots of people up and only letting vets have the vote, then maybe Heinlein wasn't as great a writer as some people like to think he was. As in, if he meant there to be multiple layers and maybe take the mickey out of such attitudes, he didn't do a good enough job writing it. Or maybe teenage boys at that time were deeper thinkers than in the late 20th century, but I doubt it. Or maybe the editors wouldn't have accepted such a book. Maybe he should have written it aimed at adults instead.

    71:

    I never read it. I might now that I have study-avoidance procrastination reading opportunities, it's possible it could have a place in that list. I generally prefer to use my time to discover, try to understand and build on good ideas, though, and not spend it trying to understand why I disagree with bad ones. It might have been timing, when I was a teenager in the 80s there was a lot of good writing available, I never really had to fossick in the midden of 50s post-war-US genre stuff (though I definitely read Asimov, Dick and some others). Pre-war crime fiction was what really drew me in, I guess. At the moment it's still that I want to support good ideas so I'm more likely to spend money on this, for instance than giving some of it to Heinlein's heirs. Same reason I avoid buying Murdoch papers or following links to Murdoch sites. It's a form of voting.

    I'm interested in the depiction of public service that emerges in this thread. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash already portrays it as a joke*, more or less, and it's roughly equidistant in time with Starship Troopers and the present. I wonder when and how it moved, in big-L Libertarian thinking, from Heinlein's viewpoint to the "small government" mindset, because those are clearly very different positions and potentially explain some of the other differences. There's a definite trajectory, but the shape is not clear in my head. Fascism has always been a bit paradoxical on the role of the state, at least from the representation we get of it in the current "right".

    I did see the movie, and enjoyed it as a very dark comedy. Floss nails it above, it's all about the banality of evil in the tradition of Arrendt. It's a mirror to The Hollywood and/or FPS culture of the 90s (which is only worse since, from gamergate to incels to alt-right) and how close it already was. But it's also how just going along with the official story makes us all into cheerful, righteous monsters. If Heinlein had a different point that's being missed, I don't think Vorhoeven really cared. And sure maybe that's rough if the book is important to you, but that's not really relevant. Sometimes the message is presented via a sort of reductio ad absurdum, and unfortunately this often doesn't work, because people can have a surprising threshold for absurdity sometimes that undermines the best intentions. And so I think is the case here: the overtly stooopid, gamer-style militarism is there so get under the radar of the gamer-types, the teenage boys of the 1990s (much like the take on Farnham above), who then are supposed to grasp how ridiculous it has become by the end. The reason it's just not Verhoeven's best work, IMHO, is that this massively overestimates the audience. But at least it is (sort of) an attempt at engagement, and it beats the snooty indifference I find myself withdrawing to.

    • I'm not taking an position on what Stephenson actually represents there, but my impression is it's a form of genre-savvy parody so if he's not actually presenting the libertarian viewpoint at least he's parodying it.
    72:

    Starship Troopers was not one of Heinlein's juveniles. In fact Scribner's, (who published Heinlein's juveniles) turned it down.

    73:

    Frank is right @24, Heinlein was a writer trying to make a living.

    • Heinlein was a Trickster[1].

    Look at Lost Legacy and Beyond This Horizon. That is Heinlein, the rest is him writing stories to tweak people's Victorian morals and utterly screw with their heads. He created genre categories so that he would be remembered and read long after he was dead.

    Look at best selling authors over the past century, most are forgotten soon after they died. He wanted to keep his books alive, so he played the long game and won.

    Very few people can even begin to understand the bizarre world that he was born into, grew up in, and had to survive, while still making a living as a writer.

    BTW, What I love about people calling him a "Libertarian" is:

    • The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is his ultimate prank.

    It is the most anti-Libertarian tome ever written. He wrote it in such a way that the book would be embraced by Libertarians, pushed as their religious text, bought and read by anyone calling themselves Libertarian.

    Take a hundred Libertarians and have them emigrate to Luna. Within a week, most of them will be dead because the Loonies would not put up with their crap. At the end of five years, there would be no Libertarians, only Loonies.

    The beautiful thing is, no matter what I say, no one will believe that he tricked them, and his books will still be read, his name living on.

    [1] The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen

    74:

    Charlie @ 40 EXCEPT the madwoman of Grantham ,whtever her many failings, would never, ever have gone for thie current Brexshit nonsense - hell - she was one of the.principal architects of the Single Market.

    David L At some point you have to allow for the environment where people existed. Not some utopia they never knew. Yeah Will the nutjobs campaigning against "slavery " & persecuting people 200-years-dead, PLEASE get their heads out of their arses, & campaign against slavery that is happening RIGHT NOW? Or is that too dangerous, because demonstrating outside W1B 1JL just MIGHT get you arrested?

    (separate) Tip O'Neill? A "Democrat"? Something even more dangerous?

    allynh "Double Star" One of his best - also about responsibility & absolutely not "libertarian"

    75:

    I think there are three ideological (?) themes Heinlein combined in Starship Troopers.

    First of all, it's a homage to the citizen soldiers of World War 2, particularly the Airborne Infantry of D-Day and "A Bridge Too Far". It took a vast number of citizens answering Democracy's Call to defeat the Fascists & the Nazis.1

    https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-us-military-numbers

    Secondly it deals with the ambiguous "ending" of the Korean Conflict - along with the Cold War & China falling to Mao's communists. Vietnam was just on the horizon, but hadn't really moved into the mainstream of public awareness at the time.

    By the time Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers, the Soviets and Chinese Communists looked to be as much a threat to the rest of the world's freedom as the Nazis & Fascists had been prior to World War 2 WITH the additional threat of nuclear weapons.

    The third thing is Heinlein's involvement in Sinclair Lewis's EPIC (End Poverty In California) movement and civic involvement. For Heinlein, every Right demands the acceptance of an equal responsibility.

    If you have the right to vote you also have the obligation to educate yourself about the issues of the day and vote responsibly, i.e.
    FOR progressive taxation,
    FOR fair wages and union representation,
    FOR good schools that teach SCIENCE unconstrained by religious bigotry,
    FOR fair housing policies,
    FOR conservation - the earth is not ours, we are merely stewards, holding it in trust for future generations,
    FOR public works (TVA, CCC, WPA, ...) providing jobs for those who can find no other work2, but NOT for bread & circuses and
    FOR Free Enterprise but NOT for dog-eat-dog, anything goes, Laissez-faire capitalist Fascist Oligarchy.

    And that's what the Libertarian (Loony-Toonarian?) right wing-nuts get wrong. They demand "rights" without responsibility.

    1 Not the United States alone, but that's the part I know the most about. Y'all will know the contributions your own countries made to that fight.

    2 It was, after all, during the Great Depression of the 1930s that many of Heinlein's political views first took shape.

    76:

    I think that, in addition to being caused by Heinlein's reaction to the anti-nuclear newspaper ad, Starship Troopers was written under the influence of the dialectic that opposed Heinlein to Alice Dalgliesh, the editor of Scribner's and Sons Children's Book Division.

    She made him hopping mad, from 1947 to 1959, as he pumped out yearly juvenile novels for Scribner's and Sons.

    77:

    Troutwaxer @ 72: "Starship Troopers was not one of Heinlein's juveniles. In fact Scribner's, (who published Heinlein's juveniles) turned it down."

    Yes, the entire publishing board at Scribner's turned it down. But originally Heinlein had meant it to be his latest juvenile. Since it couldn't be salvaged he found another publisher and quit making juveniles.

    78:

    yohansenbabe @ 19: I believe Verhoeven never read the book! I read ST when I was a teenager, and the thing that really captured my imagination was the mobile body armor and the troopers ability to fly-jump around the battlefield. There was no mobile body armor in that movie. I saw the movie at the theater when it came out and was very disappointed.

    I'm pretty sure I read Starship Troopers when I was in the seventh grade (first year of Junior High School here - 1962). I pretty much devoured all of the Sci-Fi available from the school library. I particularly remember that first edition cover.

    Growing up here in North Carolina, that was also the age I was attending Boy Scout Camporees sponsored by the Army down at Fort Bragg. So I very early associated the Mobile Infantry with paratroopers.

    I wasn't disappointed by the movie, I was FURIOUS about how grotesquely it misrepresented Heinlein's work ... still am.

    79:

    Yes, but when he went to Putnam's he did some revision to make the book more adult. It would be interesting to see exactly what those revisions were.

    80:

    Robert Prior @ 22:

    And the bit about "who gets to vote" becomes very interesting if you expand it a little to say... teachers or social workers. ~Shrugs~ Just sayin'...

    It would, but I got the impression from the book that the government services used a lot of civilian contractors so I imagine many jobs would be contracted out. If you volunteered they had to find something for you to do, but why give a volunteer a great job if part of the reason for requiring a term of service is testing commitment?

    I got the impression that government services used a lot of veterans. Those jobs were held by and for those who had proven their commitment to society was greater than their commitment to self interest. That's really the whole of the concept of government in the book. Even the contractors would have been veterans.

    The thing about "If you volunteered they had to find something for you to do" is really about the nascent Civil Rights movement when Heinlein was writing the book. The future government in Starship Troopers does not discriminate. There's no Jim Crow. Even if you're deaf, dumb & blind you can volunteer and they will find some place for you to serve that will test you and allow you to demonstrate that you put the good of society above self.

    The only reason someone can be refused the opportunity to serve and earn citizenship is if it's determined they are incapable of understanding and fulfilling the oath.

    Which just caused an epiphany ... Could Donald Trump serve? Not WOULD, but COULD?

    Does he have the requisite mental capability to understand and fulfill an oath of service? (No question that if he did "volunteer", he'd desert at the first opportunity, but could he even meet the single requirement for eligibility in the first place?)

    81:

    Greg Tingey @ 34: whitroth

    "italics"

    .. the Republic had to survive, it wasn't the monster that it became as an Empire

    NO many times - NO
    Carthage, Syracuse, Corinth, the conquest of Gaul, for that matter.

    The Roman Republic lasted 482 years, 509 BC (244 Ab urbe condita) to 27 BC (726 Auc). How different is the government of the British Isles today from that of 1539? ... or 1539 from 1057?

    And how does the modern U.K. relate to the British Isles in 455 (482 years after the end of the Roman Republic)? Has anything from that time made its way into modern governance?

    The Roman Republic of 27 BC was not the same as the Roman Republic of 509 BC

    82:

    I wasn't disappointed by the movie, I was FURIOUS about how grotesquely it misrepresented Heinlein's work

    I sympathise. I really enjoyed the Netflix adaptation of Altered Carbon, but I was quite upset about the way it simplified the politics (turning a complex political rebellion against oligarchs into a semi-mystical crusade against immortality). I believe Morgan himself was fine with it, and it was still pretty amazing to see on a bunch of levels, but it took something away (and along with a certain other twist away from the books, removes a lot of the future storyline of the novel's sequels). But hey, the way that stories are developed for the movies is complex and things that resemble the books they are based on more than superficially are actually pretty rare. For Verhoeven, I'm pretty sure ST was just a vehicle... certainly the studio didn't care about following Heinlein that closely. For this stuff it's usually simpler (and closer to the truth) to treat them as entirely different texts, it's just that the movie "borrows from" or "is inspired by" the novel. It's still rough, I get it. But this appears to be how things mostly work.

    83:

    Charlie Stross @ 39:

    he wrote the book because there was a "no nuclear weapons" campaign which worried him.

    Now that's an interesting piece of timing!

    Heinlein himself said he was inspired to write Starship Troopers because of the Eisenhower Administration's decision to suspend nuclear testing and Soviet nuclear tests that followed soon thereafter, along with an April 1958 advertisement by National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy calling for unilateral suspension of Nuclear Testing by the U.S.

    Heinlein was clearly no fan of unilateral disarmament

    The interesting thing to me is that the Eisenhower Administration at that time was already in negotiations with the Soviet Union that led to a joint testing moratorium ("I won't if you don't") 1958-1961 and eventually to the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water) signed by the Soviet Union, United Kingdom & United States signed in Moscow on 5 August before being opened to other signatures (currently 123 signatories to date).

    Neither the Committee's advertisement, nor Heinlein's book seems to have factored into those negotiations.

    84:

    From Starship Troopers:

    """"Mr. Salomon! How did the present political organization evolve out of the Disorders? And what is its moral justification?”

    Sally stumbled through the first part. However, nobody can describe accurately how the Federation came about; it just grew. With national governments in collapse at the end of the XXth century, something had to fill the vacuum, and in many cases it was returned veterans. They had lost a war, most of them had no jobs, many were sore as could be over the terms of the Treaty of New Delhi, especially the P.O.W. foul-up—and they knew how to fight. But it wasn’t revolution; it was more like what happened in Russia in 1917—the system collapsed; somebody else moved in.

    The first known case, in Aberdeen, Scotland, was typical. Some veterans got together as vigilantes to stop rioting and looting, hanged a few people (including two veterans) and decided not to let anyone but veterans on their committee. Just arbitrary at first—they trusted each other a bit, they didn’t trust anyone else. What started as an emergency measure became constitutional practice…in a generation or two.

    Probably those Scottish veterans, since they were finding it necessary to hang some veterans, decided that, if they had to do this, they weren’t going to let any “bleedin’, profiteering, black-market, double-time-for-overtime, army-dodging, unprintable” civilians have any say about it. They’d do what they were told, see?—while us apes straightened things out! That’s my guess, because I might feel the same way…and historians agree that antagonism between civilians and returned soldiers was more intense than we can imagine today.""""

    This parallels almost exactly the rise of fascism after the First World War. An ostensible Upton Sinclair socialist with military connections is more likely than not to know that. I don't think he was a fascist but he was sure expressing sympathy for some fascistic things.

    85:

    Damian @ 82:

    I wasn't disappointed by the movie, I was FURIOUS about how grotesquely it misrepresented Heinlein's work

    I sympathise. I really enjoyed the Netflix adaptation of Altered Carbon, but I was quite upset about the way it simplified the politics (turning a complex political rebellion against oligarchs into a semi-mystical crusade against immortality). I believe Morgan himself was fine with it, and it was still pretty amazing to see on a bunch of levels, but it took something away (and along with a certain other twist away from the books, removes a lot of the future storyline of the novel's sequels). But hey, the way that stories are developed for the movies is complex and things that resemble the books they are based on more than superficially are actually pretty rare. For Verhoeven, I'm pretty sure ST was just a vehicle... certainly the studio didn't care about following Heinlein that closely. For this stuff it's usually simpler (and closer to the truth) to treat them as entirely different texts, it's just that the movie "borrows from" or "is inspired by" the novel. It's still rough, I get it. But this appears to be how things mostly work.

    Netflix didn't just gratuitously trash Morgan's work in making Altered Carbon the way Verhoeven did. They at least made an attempt to respect the work while bringing it to the screen.

    Verhoeven had no such respect for the source novel he utterly perverted.

    86:

    I believe you're thinking of Jerry Pournelle, not Heinlein.

    Totally.

    Oops.

    Actually while reading this post I sort of merged them together in my brain.

    87:

    Tip O'Neill? A "Democrat"? Something even more dangerous?

    Served as the 47th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1987. Basically during most of Ronnie's term.

    So they talked and worked together. Which is anathema today.

    If course this is a strange situation for many here considering how the UK PM relates to the HoC.

    88:

    Side note on using "comic book" to mean "overly simplistic" or just plain "stupid". If you believe that, you haven't read any comic books (in which I include graphic novels) since, say, 1970.

    Yep. Well except for what's in the news papers over here. Given these conditions I stand by my statements.

    89:

    On Heinlein's ideas on race circa 1960, this unsent letter to Francis Marion "F.M." Busby might be helpful https://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/04/weekend-reading-robert-a-heinlein-letter-for-fm-busby-on-freedom-and-race-relations.html It was published in one of the Virginia Editions.

    90:

    I liked Starship Troopers (at a much younger age). And, probably unpopular, liked the movie -> it felt like a natural 'movie' extension of the novel. (Fascist military government made quite a bit more obvious, to the point of parody.)

    My opinion is that libertarianism, like much of US politics, is distorted by racism.

    There's a fraction of liberatarian's who are engineers, or otherwise system people, and simply attracted to the notion that making the portion of society with a monopoly on force less powerful will increase stability and freedom by providing fewer points of failure. I found that argument somewhat attractive, decades ago. (Eventually decided that optimizing for human freedom nowadays wasn't dominated by minimizing government intervention but by modifications to systems parameters that are politically infeasible.)

    But, discussion of libertarianism is pretty useless without discussion of the other 80%, who are simply racists looking for ideological cover. Having read / questioned people on libertarian blogs and looking at ideological inconsistencies, 80% is about right.

    91:

    I notice in passing that he says slavery in British North America began in 1619! But he is aware that he does not know many black people.

    I think it is to Heinlein's credit that people with such different philosophical and political views can find things in his fiction which speak to them.

    92:

    I got the impression that government services used a lot of veterans. Those jobs were held by and for those who had proven their commitment to society was greater than their commitment to self interest. That's really the whole of the concept of government in the book. Even the contractors would have been veterans.

    Yes, but my point (possibly poorly expressed) was that those jobs can't be what what counts as government service for qualifying for citizenship if they require citizenship to hold them.

    Also, Rico's father ends up as an NCO in the mobile infantry — so a successful middle-aged businessman with (presumably) decent organizational skills ends up being assigned as a combat soldier. Sure, there's a war on — but it seemed like there was always a war on somewhere. So while Heinlein said that veteran meant 'veteran civil servant' and 'young and healthy might end up in the military' and only 5% of veterans served in the military, we don't see those non-military civil servants or meet veteran bureaucrats who spent two years as a file clerk and can now teach the civics course…

    Of the three young people in the book, two are military (infantry and navy) and one ends up on a research base which is apparently worth being destroyed in the war (which implies military research, not counting spruce budworms).

    There's also the passage in Rico's OCS where he is a bit appalled at how earlier militaries had a long logistics tail, and proud of how in the MI everyone fights and they use civilians for things that were done by soldiers in earlier times — which begs the question why those things aren't done by the 95% of volunteers who aren't military…

    Honestly, I have trouble reconciling the world as portrayed in the book with Heinlein's statement about what he meant.

    93:

    Troutwaxer @ 21: The difference between Starship Troopers as book and movie is that, if you're somewhere between 15 and 30 the book is likely to make you think, whereas the movie... isn't.

    It certainly made me think when I read it, somewhere between 15 and 20 (I don't recall exactly). And the conclusion I came to was ... Heinlein's "Service for Citizenship" scheme wouldn't work.

    Heinlein envisaged a state where citizens and non-citizens were equal in every way, except that non-citizens were excluded from politics. But there is a fundamental thing that happens when you disenfranchise a group; they automatically become second class citizens in every other respect too. The people with the franchise vote in their own self interest, and so politicians play to that in order to get elected. Whenever there is a decision to be made between giving something to the franchise and giving it to the rest, well its the voters who get it because they are the ones the politicians have to keep happy.

    This trend would be worsened in Heinlein's state because the people with the vote have earned it. So they will naturally assume they have also earned the right to lord it over the plebs. Pretty soon you have laws that require a non-citizen to wear a badge announcing their status, and step off a pavement to let a citizen pass, and not buy a house in parts of town allocated to voters ...

    The bit about "if you volunteer they will find something for you to do" is ripe for abuse too. There was a piece I read about the USSR conscription (never been able to find it since). Basically the mandatory 3 year stint in the military was absolute hell; first years got beaten up and had all their stuff stolen by the second years, second years got beaten up and had all their stuff stolen by third years, and everyone got beaten up and had their stuff stolen by career NCOs. Officers were a separate caste and completely corrupt. BUT if you were the son of an apparatchik then your father could wangle your 3 years of "service" as being training for the apparat instead of military service. Allocations to this were like gold dust, and were a major currency within the USSR civil service.

    There is little doubt in my mind that in Heinlein's "service for citizenship" state things would go the same way. If you were a non-voter then your son or daughter could volunteer, and would be handed one of the shit jobs, probably down a mine in Siberia or as front-line infantry. But the children of a voter would be able to wangle a much cushier job as an assistant teacher or something.

    94:

    That's a good point. On the other hand, the Soviets didn't have to let their military services become hell-pits.

    I suppose you could handle the other issues constitutionally, but I'm guessing it wouldn't last more than 3-500 years.

    95:

    On the other hand, the Soviets didn't have to let their military services become hell-pits.

    At some point the USSR political leaders decided that individuals were cogs and expendable. Which in times of war made military service, ah, not nice. Which likely just became the norm. And based on the way Stalin treated the officer corp prior to WWII they had to feel a bit "dog eat dog" themselves.

    96:

    unreliable/misguided narrators, to juxtapose their beliefs against a background that highlighted their weaknesses, and even to end the story with the narrator—but not the reader—unaware of this.

    This pretty much describes the Verhoeven film, which criticises military SF as a whole not specifically Heinlein.

    I think it's his best film. Propaganda, consciously in the style of Beverly Hills 90210, where the humans aren't even self-aware enough to ask 'Are we the baddies?'. If he went wrong it was in assuming that everyone would notice the parody. To be fair, one of the humans wears an actual Nazi uniform so it's not like he didn't try and make it obvious.

    97:

    Personally, I got that the movie was parody. I just thought the book deserved better treatment. I don't agree with what seems, at least on the surface, to be the book's thesis, but it's a respectable read and it encourages thought about how citizenship should work, so I would definitely count it as a win!

    If Verhoeven wanted to make fun of MilSF there are lots of other authors he could have picked, some of whom are far more deserving than RAH, who for all his faults was at least trying.

    98:

    On the other hand, the Soviets didn't have to let their military services become hell-pits.

    Well no, they didn't have to. But on the other hand this is what always seems to happen when the people on the receiving end have no voice in the government. The people in charge decide that, since they are doing all this difficult and skilful work of serving the public, its only right that the benefits should flow to them and theirs. They don't get to see all the bad stuff behind the scenes, so it doesn't trouble them.

    99: 69 - Well, when I first read ST, I actually was what is now called a "tweenage boy". I do remember thinking that "power armour is kewel". But I also remember thinking "veterans' franchise is an interesting idea, but is it actually a good idea?" 75 - Well, this is more about me than about ST, but I pretty much agree with your statements. 80 - Could Trumpbaby serve? A good question, exactly on your test of being precluded from taking the oath by want of understanding. 84 - Not entirely. RH 'may' have outsmarted himself here, by making the veterans' service movement start in Scotland. There is a strong commitment to actual public service "for the good of all" here.
    100:

    On whether Trump could serve in ST:

    He could have taken the oath. All oaths are presumptively valid unless you have been ruled mentally incompetent. Trump is legally competent to do stuff in the US, and there is no doubt he would be in ST too.

    He would certainly never have found his way into the Mobile Infantry. I wrote in @94 about the tendency for such systems become corrupt, with the offspring of the rich and powerful being given the cushy jobs while the plebs do the suffering and dying. Fred Trump would undoubtedly have greased his son into some easy form of "service" that would further his career rather than joining the "losers" in the MI.

    101:

    The best riff ever on MilSF is Norman Spinrad's "The Iron Dream" - Hitler emigrates to the US after dabbling in radical politics and become a MilSF author. Every nazi fantasy in MilSF is laid out.

    Question: which SF author would have made the "best" fuhrer in some alternate timeline?

    102:

    There's a worked example in US politics of favoured sons in military service working out in real time -- George P. Bush. His uncle GW Bush was dragged endlessly in the press for getting a cushy Air National Guard slot in Texas in the late 60s when less favoured individuals were being drafted and sent to Vietnam. The Bush family consiglieres noted this and when George P. Bush was selected as the next Bush to occupy the Oval Office they made sure George P. had solid military experience in a war zone on his resume (Iraq as, I think, a military lawyer) before he resigned his commission and took up a hereditary political appointment in Texas to start his climb up the greasy pole.

    103:

    There's a bit in Starship Troopers where they go on shore leave in Seattle, and the cops are wearing veteran ribbons, and when they get into a fight with some locals described as:

    There were some young fellows there, too, about our age—the right age to serve a term, only they weren't—long-haired and sloppy and kind of dirty-looking. Well, say about the way I looked, I suppose, before I joined up.

    The police back the troops “It's a mighty serious thing, a civilian assaulting a member of the Armed Forces…” so yes, there is clearly privilege.

    104:

    The interesting contrast is that British Favoured Sons tended to go to “a decent Regiment”. The Duke of Windsor served WW1 in the Coldstream Guards, but to his frustration wasn’t allowed anywhere near fighting; his younger brother was, however (the future King George VI was a turret captain on a battleship at Jutland).

    That carried on; Elizabeth in the ATS, Charles allowed command of a minesweeper, William a SAR helicopter pilot; while Andrew (for his many sins) served in the Falklands War, and Harry in Afghanistan. Just watch what happens to Charlotte - fifteen years from now, and a fast jet pilot in the RAF, perhaps?

    As for Heinlein’s obsession with tooth-to-tail, the US forces typically run that at a greater level to other Armed Forces; but it’s unavoidable. Someone has to count blankets and repair helicopters, and for all the unrepentant “everyone a soldier first” propaganda, there’s a massive difference between “being a basic rifleman/woman in a team of eight” (achievable and desirable), and being part of an effective infantry unit of several hundred (actually rather difficult; infantry is a specialist technical skill in its own right). Most soldiers don’t appreciate that fact, so it’s not a surprise that a sailor like Heinlein didn’t…

    105:

    Troutwaxer @ 21: The difference between Starship Troopers as book and movie is that, if you're somewhere between 15 and 30 the book is likely to make you think, whereas the movie... isn't. I think I read the book not long after the film came out, so I was in my late teens for both. If anything, I think the film did a better job of making it obvious that it was a criticism of the whole idea. When I read the book I got the impression that Heinlein intended the whole setup to be taken seriously. Given how many people seem to have taken Heinlein at his word and used it as permission to go full-on libertarian, I can't fault Verhoeven for deciding that he had to sink to putting-the-characters-in-nazi-uniforms levels of unsubtle, in order to get the point across.

    Although I was annoyed at the lack of powered armour in the film.

    106:

    The interesting contrast is that British Favoured Sons tended to go to “a decent Regiment”.

    There's a bit in the movie "Kingsman" where the source of the money that pays for the Neat Toys of the Kingsmen organisation came from -- it was the inheritances of the 19-year old Favoured Sons who as ensigns and first lieutenants led the Poor Bloody Infantry over the top at the Somme and the other meat-grinders of WW1. Eton and Harrow have rather extensive memorials to students and teachers who lost their lives fighting for King and Country.

    No-one in the US military was ever going to assign a Bush offspring to a posting anywhere near the pointy end in Iraq or elsewhere, their own promotion and future political prospects would be toast if anything happened to him and they knew it. I figured there would be similar knock-for-knock deals in the Federal Service system with people in the higher echelons of politics making sure their nephews and grand-daughters got the cushy jobs while people like Juan Rico got what was left.

    107:

    Counterpoint - The sequence where a member of Rico's unit in Basic goes AWOL, and rapes and kills a girl.

    After he is recaptured, he is hanged in front of the unit, who also do a period of mourning for the dead girl. The Armed Forces take their responsibilities seriously too.

    108:

    Although I was annoyed at the lack of powered armour in the film.

    There was actually a six-episode anime series made in Japan of Starship Troopers which, of course, did have powered armour. Not only that they had the different kinds of armour suit, command, scout and heavy weapons. The story was messed around a little, Juan Rico was a bit of a dick and it didn't push the Federal Service message. No Doogie Howser SS though which is a bonus.

    109:

    And it led to the demise of several aristocratic lines. For all its faults, most of the 19th and 20th century aristocracy took duty to the country seriously, whereas one cannot say the same about the current plutocracy. Despite its risible politics, Weber's Manticore system got that aspect about right.

    110:

    Re the last, yes. It also applies to simple hillwalking - as one of the few people who regularly spent a week out (and I don't mean bothies) in the Highlands, I found ARRSE the most reliable source of equipment information (*). The authors of most MilSF and similar stories who describe long treks under less than ideal conditions have obviously no experience of what it's like.

    (*) In Russian railway terms, I may have been soft class to their hard class, but it was a similar trip.

    111:

    When I was a regular in GEnie in the 1980s James D. MacDonald, was the moderator for the Science Fiction Round Table. MacDonald had been in the US Navy for 15 years and he pointed out the impossible violence used for training members of the Mobile Infantry and for future society in general in Starship troopers.

    Heinlein was an advocate of corporal punishment for training animals and humans. He had a field day in that novel. He didn't realize that violence breeds more violence and that he was describing a school for useless brutes instead of modern soldiers.

    112:

    Troutwaxer@95 / Paul@99:

    Perhaps the Soviet's "didn't have to" let their military services "become" hell-pits. Perhaps... but there were centuries of such a tradition in Russia, and there wasn't exactly a model of humane treatment of the cannon fodder PBI in the 1920s and 1930s. Then, too, there was the really great example of their own "civil war" at the dawn of the Soviet era.

    Martin@105:

    The real "American Way of War" is "establish initial stasis and win through logistical superiority." That's how the First War of American Secession was won — yes, Cornwallis blew it "on the ground," but he was put in position to fail by the lack of a tail in the British army, sort of a real-world zugzwang; the reality is that he didn't have better operational/strategic options, and that set up his operational/tactical missteps. It's less apparent with naval forces, but (for example) the contrast in the targets of submarine warfare between the USN and IJN from 1942 to 1945 is consistent, too. Had Heinlein's knowledge of military history not been skewed by the Mahanite monomania of Annapolis, perhaps he might have seen this. Even when fighting "overmatched" opponents like the Iraqi forces (twice!), that's been the American approach, and usually it works... except when the opponent is all teeth, virtually no tail, and devoted to asymmetric strikes without regard to either "holding territory" or a "front line." Like Vietnam and Afghanistan.

    At least in theory, this will be even more important in "space battles" when life support is at issue, too; The Forever War has at least two sequences in which logistical failures lead to the field problems.

    113:

    I find endlessly perplexing how so many people do not see how hilarious of a satire starship troopers is.

    I mean, yes, the connection to the book is tenuous at best, but Verhoeven by his own words was interested in making an antifascist satire about the military like he had just done with Robocop about the American society in general, and the book license was simply something the studios had there at that moment.

    But anybody that knows the work of Verhoeven in general could not think for a second that he was in any way praising fascism, violence or anything like that.

    In fact, form an interview that I read, he was mostly inspired instead by a book titled "friendly fascism", by Bertram Gross.

    Even the "badness" of the movie was mostly a conscious choice, like the choice of recruiting all soap opera young actors, to give out the feeling of watching a propaganda piece.

    Maybe i don't feel the outrage at the "butchery" of the Heinlein book because I never particularly liked him and his works even as a kid that read any SF I could get my hands on and was pretty insensitive to politics. For some reasons, his works always strongly triggered my BS alarms, like more blatantly partisan authors did not

    114:

    It took a vast number of citizens answering Democracy's Call to defeat the Fascists & the Nazis.

    True, except that the breakdown of the US Army in 1941-45 was 39% volunteers, 61% draftees.

    Apparently this ratio was more or less reversed in Vietnam, with volunteers being the majority. However, before WWII most Americans agreed that the Axis was a threat to the USA. Not so much Vietnam, hence the growing disenchantment with the war, and the resumption of the use of Skedaddle Ridge and other options for draft dodgers.

    115:

    I don't think Starship Troopers is the book which suggests that going full-on Libertarian is a good idea. That would be any Lazarus Long book and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

    I've often made the joke that there are two kinds of Libertarians - those who don't know Ayn Rand was writing fiction, and those who don't know Heinlein is writing fiction - so let me address the second sort of Libertarian here: Neither Lazarus Long nor Manny Rodriguez lives in the kind of moral vacuum inhabited by the modern Libertarian. Lazarus Long is someone for whom taking responsibility is a very natural thing. He definitely wants his freedom, but he also has a gut-level response to fixing the things he sees as broken - his "Libertarian" impulses are offset by the fact that he has a good heart. For all his arrogance, he instinctively wants to be a good neighbor. He's got - old-fashioned idea here - character.

    Manny is also uninterested in being oppressed/talked down to by the brutes from Earth, but he also exists in a society with any number of very necessary rules - the hard vacuum is just outside, and farming on the Moon can't be easy. He's a member in good standing of what we'd describe today as a polyamorous, multi-generational marriage, which means that he's got a ton of obligations to both the older members of his marriage and also his/their children, and like any marriage there is a certain amount of negotiation and acceptance of responsibility and he's also part of a large group effort rebelling against Earth, which is something that requires discipline and the ability to take orders. (Also notice that Manny is obviously Hispanic - in a book written in 1966!)

    Neither Lazarus nor Manny is a racist internet troll/militia member who lives in mom's basement, and I suspect that Heinlein, if he were still alive today would not have a high opinion of the average Libertarian.

    116:

    The internet troll libertarians would be out the airlock as soon as they tried their PUA crap on women in Luna City.

    117:

    For some reasons, his works always strongly triggered my BS alarms, like more blatantly partisan authors did not

    Just out of curiosity, what is your cultural background and how old are you? I ask because I'd not expect anyone who comes from outside the U.S. and is under 45 or so to view Heinlein kindly.

    118:

    I think after 1950 - "Destination Moon", RAH found himself marooned in a dystopian future that he had not imagined, rather than the Shiny, Happy Technological futures he wrote about. He saw the USA as an Impotent Superpower, lacking the Ideological Guts to resolve the situation. Personally, I had read RAH as a pre-teen and young teen, and stopped because there was nothing new. When Stranger in a Strange Land became popular, I read it and rejected it as empty political Porn. I read nothing new after that. I was forced to re-evaluate RAH when his bio was published a few years ago. Now, I reject most of his writings as turgid mush, written to earn a few cents a word. I do credit him for "Destination Moon", without which there would be no USA manned space program.

    119:

    I find endlessly perplexing how so many people do not see how hilarious of a satire starship troopers is.

    So I was around twelve when I read Starship Troopers. I've always been more interested in material culture than social culture, so I wasn't tossing off Heinlein's technology and focusing on his social message or lack thereof, I was trying to figure out how that powered armor thing would work. That's most of what I remembered out of Starship Troopers anyway, and I can see I was far from alone. Being politically aware is a late development for me.

    Where Verhoeven fucked up--and he did fuck up IMHO--was in not reading the book and seeing how strongly the powered armor meme resonated. As with most fucked-up SF (looking at you, Star Trek and Star Wars), there's a point at which "why are you bothering to call this stupid crap SF?" kicks in and throws would-be nerds like me out of the movies.

    My guess is that Verhoeven could have made his anti-fascist movie with the powered armor and had a hit on his hands. Instead, he's scorned, and I think very rightly, for being arrogant, sloppy, and doing a gut-and-replace on the book, instead of minimally honoring the text by including the stuff people remembered. I mean, you'd think the guy who did Robocop could do powered armor. No?

    120:

    I am an Anglo, not a US person, and under 45 and I am a fan of Heinlein's fiction up to the 1950s / thinner than my thumb. He saved my father growing up in a series of small towns with abusive parents, and he was unquestionably the most influential US SF author of the middle of the 20th century. He was also an evangelical mystic, he had a queer sense of duty, and his ideas on race in 1965 were not as enlightened as he remembered them in public- and I choose to forget those things and focus on the good. "de mortuis nil nisi bonum."

    121:

    Kindly do not ignore the role of that sociopath Stalin.

    122:

    It works perfectly well as a film if you imagine it's based on the Sarah Brightman/Hot Gossip song, and not the book.

    123:

    Yep. Jim was having the Navy pay for his BA in English (he's an old friend, who I knew from the SCA in the late seventies/early eighties).

    He and his recently-late lady, Debra (damn it, she was a friend from the same period) have written a number of books.

    124:

    snort chuckle ROTFLMAO!!!

    Mods, we may have a chatbot.

    125:

    The lack of powered armor is definitely part of it for me. The second sin of Verhoevin's movie is it's lack of any quality of thoughtfulness. As satire goes it's pretty adolescent - hey Beavis, this MilSF is all fascist and stuff!

    Look Butthead, that guy is wearing a Nazi uniform! (Followed by coarse laughter.)

    Verhoeven's strategy for "satirizing" one of science-fiction's great trope-codifiers is to downplay the cool parts and expand the ugliness, sometimes all out of proportion to what Heinlein wrote - the knife-throwing scene is a good example of this - which is a shame, because part of what makes Starship Troopers so cool is that the good stuff and the ugly stuff go hand-in-hand, with any halfway intelligent reader seeing a lot of moral ambiguity to the text and asking themselves whether they'd want to live in such a society. The idea that it would have been impossible to portray this in a two-hour movie is... (expletive deleted.)

    126:

    RANT So, if he wanted to do a satire of milpr0n, wRITE YOUR OWN STORY, don't take someone else's and trash it.

    How about if we do the film from the old underground comic, The New Adventures of Jesus, where he goes to the movies (sir, could you please turn down your halo?), and Jesus in the movie is played, apparently, by Schwarzenneger, and at the end, rather than be crucified, he swings the cross as a weapon, and all the animals in the arena come out, and they defeat the Romans?

    Think everyone will enjoy that, and understand the satire?

    127:

    "Turgid mush"?

    Have Spacesuit, Will Travel? Double Star? Time for the Stars?

    I have real issues with your opinion.

    128:

    Thank you for the attitude, says this "draft dodger".

    Actually, I fought it, and #insert AlicesRestaurantMy_version, they agreed they wanted me like a hole in the head.

    And are you counting the guys who joined the National Guard in that "draft dodgers"?

    129:

    Quite. Modern "[Ll]ibertarians"* are all about MAH RIGHTS, and there are zero duties or responsibilities involved, and apparently all of them were born like Venus, fully-formed, with no debts to their parents or society.

    • There were left-wing libertarians, at least up to the beginning of the fifties. I have a booklet my father picked up by them, published by a union shop... a Wobbly union shop, which would cause modern libertarians to run screaming for their assault rifles.
    130:

    That makes sense. I think you've got to be U.S. born and of a certain age to really feel Heinlein in your gut. I'm in my mid-fifties and had a couple relatives who ran farms in Iowa and Kansas respectively, so most of what Heinlein wrote seems very natural to me. If what Heinlein learned from this background is bullshit it's genuine, "everyone knows this" kind of bullshit. (And yes, in some places it is definitely wrong.)

    The "thinner than my thumb" rule is usually pretty good for Heinlein - his later work was really uneven. On the subject of race he did very well* for someone who was born in Missouri in 1907, though he fails pretty significantly according to any modern assessment. He did as badly as Farnham's Freehold and as well as Citizen of the Galaxy.

    • If this is hard to believe, remember that Ferguson, where Michael Brown was killed, is in in Missouri - imagine what the place was like in 1907! (Shudders.)
    131:

    "So, if he wanted to do a satire of milpr0n, wRITE YOUR OWN STORY, don't take someone else's and trash it."

    Yes. This. Absolutely.

    Ref. also #82 "the way that stories are developed for the movies is complex". "Are" != "have to be": an infuriatingly common thought pattern is to assume uncritically that just because at the moment X is usually done in a certain way, that is necessarily the best possible way to do X, or sometimes even the only possible way to do X - and never mind that X may have often been done in a different way at a different time and left a whole slew of examples demonstrating that the former method(s) produced a superior result.

    "I need to change it like this to make the point" is not an excuse. Nor is "I have to change it like this because of the different medium". Chances are such statements aren't even true, and are just disguised ways of saying "I'm not skilled enough to make the point without changing it" or "I'm not actually trying to tell the story anyway, I'm just concerned with making a spectacle". And even if they are genuinely true, they still aren't excuses.

    If you have changed the story then change the flaming title. It's a different story so give it a different name: don't deceive the audience into expecting one story and then giving them a different one.

    (Which, of course, they do not do, because the whole point is to batten on the pre-existing popularity of the real story in order to deceive the audience into paying again for their shit fake version.)

    132:

    Troutwaxer noted: "That makes sense. I think you've got to be U.S. born and of a certain age to really feel Heinlein in your gut."

    Not necessarily. I'm Canadian born and still living here, and pushing 60. I first encountered Heinlein as a tween (Tunnel in the Sky, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, the Rolling Stones) and was completely smitten. He wrote the kinds of character I wanted to be and the kind of women I wanted to date (though at that age, I wasn't yet quite sure why one might want to date). I always enjoyed his writing because, as he makes semi-explicit in Starship Troopers, it's OK to have your own opinion (witness the disagreements among the characters in Number of the Beast)-- as long as you've thought it through and have a few facts on your side. And say what you will about his prose, it's still easier to read than most authors.

    That being said, when I returned to Heinlein as an adult, I didn't agree with as much of what he was saying as I'd done a decade or two earlier. Some of the logical flaws were clearer, whereas others I still had to spend some time thinking about before I could be reasonably confident I was right and he was wrong. I'll always be grateful to him for that -- for challenging me to think more clearly than I might otherwise have done.

    133:

    "the way that stories are developed for the movies is complex"

    Insert story of The Postman here:

    http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/postmanmovie.html

    134:

    "I mean, you'd think the guy who did Robocop could do powered armor. No?"

    Maybe he was thinking "I've just done Robocop, I can't do powered armour again or it'll just be Robocop 2: The Spawn"?

    Hard for me to comment much on the main point because I haven't read the book. Not really a Heinlein fan. I read Stranger in a Strange Land mainly because I had discovered it was the origin of this word "grok" that I'd seen crop up occasionally as part of other writers' versions of the slang of the future, and partly also because I had vaguely heard of it as some grade of "hippy bible", and I wanted to find out what this shit was really all about (much as I read Wuthering Heights so I could understand what Kate Bush was going on about). It was... OK, really; can't put it any more strongly than that. And it went on too long and got boring by about half way through and some bits were definitely shit, but it was good enough for me to read the whole thing without wondering why I was bothering or wishing afterwards that I hadn't.

    It did give me enough of a signal that Heinlein was likely to be tolerable that I looked at some of his other stuff, but it turned out that nothing grabbed me enough to read any more than a few pages, just enough to get the feel of it and decide I wasn't interested. And Starship Troopers itself I never even looked at because I reckoned that with a title like that it was bound to be silly. But it did strike me during this phase that Heinlein was not a usefully predictable author: not the kind of author where you can read one book and like it and thereafter be reasonably confident that their other books will also be worth buying. Heinlein seemed to veer all over the shop and to have produced a lot of stuff which was all different enough that an impression of any one book was no guide to what any other book might be like.

    I've since seen much the same opinion reported elsewhere, and it is one that has been expressed numerous times by commenters on previous threads. So I do have to wonder: is it really valid to postulate that "Heinlein was a fascist" on the basis of this book at all? Surely he is an author who it is unusually unwise to associate with a particular ideology just because one book seems to support it.

    135:

    Boldly done!

    Upthread somebody linked a letter from Heinlein to F.M. Busby wherein Heinlein explicates his thinking and experience in his own voice, and from the part of it I read (it's long) I think you're mostly correct.

    136:

    Weighing in late about What Heinlein Got Wrong in SST:

    I read the book in 197[34], as an early teen, and while I was captivated by the technological picture I was strongly taken in by the categorical opposition to conscription. Registration for the draft was abolished when I was 15, and I went to the only mass protest I've ever attended in 1980 when the Carter Administration was talking about reinstating it. Not because I was afraid of being drafted (being already old enough then to expect I'd never come up) but because of the ideological appeal of the all-volunteer military.

    Well, we have run that experiment for getting close to 50 years now, and it is clear that it was a huge mistake.

    The idea that denying the Army limitless cannon fodder would prevent hopeless foreign military adventures? See the last 18 years to refute that.

    The idea that an "everybody fights, the paper-pushing and commissary jobs get hired done" organization is superior to "draftees do everything that needs doing?" Again, look what happens to the hired staff when there's no safe place for them to do the cooking and cleaning.

    The AVF Army is an amazing organization that can (or could, 20 years ago) literally go to the other side of the world and knock over the government of a pretty powerful country in a few weeks. I mean, after they spent 6 months hauling in all the stuff needed for the task. But then what? When you've only got a million guys, you can't have half of them be Arabic-speaking MPs, which is what the US needed if it really intended to replicate the post-WWII outcomes in Germany and Japan. Ignoring altogether the fact that Germany and Japan in 1945 had pre-existing national identities around which to build new States, which Iraq and Afghanistan lacked.

    So, in addition to what's already been pointed out upthread about how in SST's world, non-veterans will inevitably be 2nd-class citizens in more ways than lacking the vote, the fundamental conceit of the story just doesn't work in the actual world.

    137:

    Canada is close enough to the U.S. that the ideas Heinlein was born with probably slip across the border fairly easily. While I'd assume you didn't think exactly like a USian, you probably either came close or were familiar with U.S. ideas/culture from the media.

    138:

    I have been dreaming for years for Verhoeven's take on The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. ST is one of the very few examples when I prefer a film over a book.

    139:

    Sorry. Movies are NOT a book re-done onto film/video.

    They are: We have an idea to turn a really staggeringly big pile of money into a hugely staggeringly bigger pile. (Please see footnotes on page 359 for risks.)

    And amazingly getting together that big pile of money usually means a lot of people get to have a say in the final product.

    Lucas, Spielberg, etc... are exceptions.

    140:

    Er, yeah, that's just what I'm complaining about.

    141:

    Ah, yes, hiring contractors to take care of the back-office work, to free up troops for combat.

    Did you see the stories, a dozen or 15 years ago, where the troops were expected to last all day on one quart? of water, because "the contractor couldn't was having trouble getting insurance to send people to a war zone"?

    142:

    For some reason Americans of a certain age idolize conscription. Lets look what US conscript armies since 1890 have actually done. There is the army that Woodrow Wilson rounded up to fight on the Western Front. There is the army that finally entered WW II. Then they formalized some things to make sure that rich white people's sons stayed out or got easy duty while poor men's sons went straight from high school to Basic Training. Then there is Korea and the American intervention in 30 years of conflict in Southeast Asia. For much of that period they had a volunteer Marine Corps and Navy to "throw a little country against the wall" every administration or so.

    I don't see anything good about that system, other than that as more people have experience of being in a military, the more will be realistically cynical about it. My understanding is that eg. French conscription in the middle of the 20th century was just as inequitable (if you had the right class background, you could spend your whole service in one training course after another and never get put on a boat to Indochina or Algeria).

    143:

    I think that's what was so refreshing about the Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and, hell, even the Disney Marvel Movies: they realized that fan service and taking care with the props pays huge dividends, allowing them to fiddle around with plot and character to fit them onto the screen.

    Note that none of the above says I particularly appreciated the LOTR plot. But the movies entertained me, because it was obvious the crew gave a shit about the finished product. Compare this with the 1970s Bakshi version of LOTR (or Jackson's Hobbit mess) to see the difference.

    The problem with Verhoeven's SS Troopers is that it didn't care about the people who loved the book (most of whom needed believable armor and bugs), and he didn't respect his personal vision enough to make a decent satire a la Dr. Strangelove (assuming he could which is not a given).

    And I'll admit I've seen a few minutes on TV. I never saw it in the theaters, because my thought process on seeing the ads was literally "Wow, no powered armor? It probably sucks." And apparently I was right.

    I go through a similar process every time I see someone adapt A Wizard of Earthsea with an anglo Ged. Especially if he's blond.

    And please note that blatant fan service doesn't mean I automatically go. Star Wars, Star Trek, Twilight, and Hairy Potter all convinced me otherwise. But blatant lack of care is my normal cue to save money and stay home reading obscure science books. Last time I broke that rule was John Carter.

    Final Note: SS Troopers cost $105 million to make, and brought in $121 million. That's actually not much better than John Carter did, and is about on par with what the investors would have made if they'd invested in something like a Napa Vineyard.

    144:

    Paras 1 and 2 - Are you referring to "Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, based on an idea by JRR Tolkien"? No I don't think it's a whole lot worse than Bakshi's version, mostly because it's more spectacular and more complete.

    I haven't even tried to watch "PJ's The Hobbit, BoaIbJRRT" though.

    145:

    Pixodaros @ 90: On Heinlein's ideas on race circa 1960, this unsent letter to Francis Marion "F.M." Busby might be helpful https://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/04/weekend-reading-robert-a-heinlein-letter-for-fm-busby-on-freedom-and-race-relations.html It was published in one of the Virginia Editions.

    "All I’m trying to say is that if I have any prejudice against Negroes, I am not aware of it. "

    Puts it pretty succinctly

    Heinlein was a product of his time and his society. He had no overt prejudice (that he was aware of), but he no more recognized his privileged place in society than a fish recognizes that it is swimming in water.

    And he could get uppity is he thought someone was accusing him of being "all wet". By the 60s Heinlein was well on his way to being the grumpy old curmudgeon some of writings published after his lifetime reveal.

    146:

    skulgun @ 84: rom Starship Troopers:

    >>> """"Mr. Salomon! How did the present political organization evolve out of the Disorders? And what is its moral justification?”
    Sally stumbled through the first part. However, nobody can describe accurately how the Federation came about; it just grew. With national governments in collapse at the end of the XXth century, something had to fill the vacuum, and in many cases it was returned veterans. They had lost a war, most of them had no jobs, many were sore as could be over the terms of the Treaty of New Delhi1, especially the P.O.W. foul-up—and they knew how to fight. But it wasn’t revolution; it was more like what happened in Russia in 1917—the system collapsed; somebody else moved in.

    Again, Heinlein is writing about "contemporaneous" events - the Great Depression and its aftermath; how the Second World War ended with Stalinism firmly in control of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe behind an "Iron Curtain" and China "falling" to communism along with the ambiguous end to the Korean Conflict that gave every evidence of being a powder keg just waiting for a spark to touch it off (with the UN coalition that had fought that war somewhat in disarray).

    The "P.O.W. foul-up" is a specific reference to questions regarding the fate of POWs under the Korean Armistice

    The first known case, in Aberdeen, Scotland, was typical. Some veterans got together as vigilantes to stop rioting and looting, hanged a few people (including two veterans) and decided not to let anyone but veterans on their committee. Just arbitrary at first—they trusted each other a bit, they didn’t trust anyone else. What started as an emergency measure became constitutional practice…in a generation or two.

    Those veterans were in Aberdeen because the UK-US/NATO alliance from the Second World War was still a thing that hadn't yet fallen apart over the Vietnam War. The UK still had an Army in Asia in 1960 and they sent divisions to the UN contingent during the Korean Conflict.

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

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia%E2%80%93Malaysia_confrontation

    This parallels almost exactly the rise of fascism after the First World War. An ostensible Upton Sinclair socialist with military connections is more likely than not to know that. I don't think he was a fascist but he was sure expressing sympathy for some fascistic things.

    No it doesn't, and no he's not.

    Fascism rose up in countries that did have (for the most part) functional governments and their path to power, along with the reasons for it was different in each case - Germany (on the losing side of WWI), Italy (on the winning side in WWI), Japan (also on the winning side in WWI) and Spain (Neutral during both World Wars before & after the fascists came to power). In none of these cases did fascism fill a void where government had collapsed and no longer existed.

    See also: Post-war Gangsterism & Juvenile Delinquency ... other themes he takes on in Starship Troopers.

    In the late 50s there was considerable concern in the U.S. (and I think also in the U.K.) that society was somehow out of control in ways it should not have been after beating the fascists in WW2. Heinlein's Starship Troopers society reflects those concerns.

    Remember also that Heinlein is firmly of the opinion there can be no rights without an attached co-equal responsibility.

    1 AKA - "Never fight a land war in Asia", which I believe originally refers to the 19th Century British colonial experience in Afghanistan.

    147:
    When you've only got a million guys, you can't have half of them be Arabic-speaking MPs, which is what the US needed if it really intended to replicate the post-WWII outcomes in Germany and Japan.

    What in Ghu's name makes you think that the US wanted to have a functioning, democratic Iraq or Afghanistan after their invasions?

    IMO, Afghanistan was the real payback for 9/11 - "OBL was actually resident in Afghanistan, so let's smash them against the wall. Can't go after Saudi Arabia. They're our friend and ally! Which leads us the main course: Iraq. Let's kill things and break shit!"

    148:

    Robert Prior @93:

    I got the impression that government services used a lot of veterans. Those jobs were held by and for those who had proven their commitment to society was greater than their commitment to self interest. That's really the whole of the concept of government in the book. Even the contractors would have been veterans.

    Yes, but my point (possibly poorly expressed) was that those jobs can't be what what counts as government service for qualifying for citizenship if they require citizenship to hold them.

    Yeah, that's my point about "Federal Service" as well.

    Also, Rico's father ends up as an NCO in the mobile infantry — so a successful middle-aged businessman with (presumably) decent organizational skills ends up being assigned as a combat soldier. Sure, there's a war on — but it seemed like there was always a war on somewhere. So while Heinlein said that veteran meant 'veteran civil servant' and 'young and healthy might end up in the military' and only 5% of veterans served in the military, we don't see those non-military civil servants or meet veteran bureaucrats who spent two years as a file clerk and can now teach the civics course…

    Two things:
    1. Johnnie's father ended up in the mobile infantry because he specifically volunteered for it. He wasn't just assigned by happenstance, he actively campaigned to be a part of it. It harks back to number of OLDER men who volunteered to become paratroopers. William C. Lee, "Father of the U.S. Airborne" was 47 years old when he organized the 101st Airborne Division in 1942. He was 46 when he commanded the jump school at Ft. Benning, GA. If he hadn't had a heart attack in early 1944, he'd have jumped with the division on D-Day. He would have been 49 then and he would NOT have been the oldest paratrooper to take part in the Normandy Invasion.
    2. Heinlein's later claim that only 5% of the Starship Troopers "veterans" served in the military is revisionist retconning in response to criticism accusing him of writing a homage to fascist militarism. It's not. It's a book about the responsibilities of citizenship.

    There's a line somewhere near the end of the book where Johnnie surmises that "Lieutenant Rasczak" had "voted" with every drop he made even though he never lived long enough to exercise his franchise. I think Heinlein was really stung by the accusations of being a fascist apologist.

    Of the three young people in the book, two are military (infantry and navy) and one ends up on a research base which is apparently worth being destroyed in the war (which implies military research, not counting spruce budworms).

    There's also the passage in Rico's OCS where he is a bit appalled at how earlier militaries had a long logistics tail, and proud of how in the MI everyone fights and they use civilians for things that were done by soldiers in earlier times — which begs the question why those things aren't done by the 95% of volunteers who aren't military…

    Because
    1. those 95% of volunteers are a revisionist retcon
    2. the portion of volunteers who are NOT in the military are para-military pioneers, building new worlds for humanity to inhabit à la the CCC & WPA, but with "lions, tigers & bears, oh my" and other largely unknown dangerous circumstances. They're not available to do those "jobs" civilians (veterans) are hired to do because they're off somewhere in the universe doing dangerous, difficult work. Or they're like Carl - "starside R&D" out on Pluto.

    Honestly, I have trouble reconciling the world as portrayed in the book with Heinlein's statement about what he meant.

    That's because his later statement doesn't reflect his original idea, it's equivocating in response to criticism (unwarranted criticism I think, but it still affected him deeply).

    149:

    I'm going to put on a helmet and some armor before making this comment, but the fundamental strategic error of the post 9/11 world was not making an extensive effort to prune back the Saudis, particularly those who practiced Wahabism, with special attention to Saudi/Wahabi missionaries in countries not Saudi Arabia. The secondary strategic error was not beginning our serious efforts to go green immediately after 9/11 - gets the U.S. out of the gulf-states and they can take care of themselves. Or not.

    150:

    Paul @ 94: Troutwaxer @ 21:

    The difference between Starship Troopers as book and movie is that, if you're somewhere between 15 and 30 the book is likely to make you think, whereas the movie... isn't.

    It certainly made me think when I read it, somewhere between 15 and 20 (I don't recall exactly). And the conclusion I came to was ... Heinlein's "Service for Citizenship" scheme wouldn't work.

    That's a criticism I can accept. There's lots of shit in Heinlein's writing that I think, upon reflection, probably wouldn't work.

    The ones that get my back up though, are those that accuse him of writing a fascist apologia in Starship Troopers. The postulated society may be impractical and unworkable, but it's not fascism.

    151:

    I was in the middle of reading a Tim Powers book when everybody started attacking Starship Troopers, so I pulled out the book and started reading it again.

    The first chapter always causes me to tear up, it is so full of love.

    I'll go ahead and finish the book before I finish the Tim Powers.

    I have books to read, books to write. I'll wait to harvest the comments section after it closes. There is often something useful that I can harvest.

    Thanks...

    152:

    Nojay @ 107:

    The interesting contrast is that British Favoured Sons tended to go to “a decent Regiment”.

    There's a bit in the movie "Kingsman" where the source of the money that pays for the Neat Toys of the Kingsmen organisation came from -- it was the inheritances of the 19-year old Favoured Sons who as ensigns and first lieutenants led the Poor Bloody Infantry over the top at the Somme and the other meat-grinders of WW1. Eton and Harrow have rather extensive memorials to students and teachers who lost their lives fighting for King and Country.

    No-one in the US military was ever going to assign a Bush offspring to a posting anywhere near the pointy end in Iraq or elsewhere, their own promotion and future political prospects would be toast if anything happened to him and they knew it. I figured there would be similar knock-for-knock deals in the Federal Service system with people in the higher echelons of politics making sure their nephews and grand-daughters got the cushy jobs while people like Juan Rico got what was left.

    There used to be a tradition of service among the scions of the American political class.

    FDR's sons served in the military during WW2 and after.
    Elliot flew reconnaisance missions over North Africa & Europe;
    FDR jr served on a Destroyer convoying from "Iceland to Minsk", supported the Sicilian invasion and ended up as Captain of a Destroyer Escort that earned 5 battle stars for WW2 against Japan;
    James was a Marine Raider who earned the Navy Cross for his participation in the Makin Island Raid, and a Silver Star from the Army during the later invasion of Makin by the 27th Infantry Division;
    John - the youngest - was a conscientious objector who nevertheless served on board the USS Wasp & earned a Bronze Star for herowism under fire.

    Eisenhower's son John served in the Army during WW2 & Korea, receiving a Bronze Star and earning the CIB & Glider Wings. He served in the Army & Army Reserve from 1944 to 1974.

    Beau Biden (the other Biden son the GQP never want to mention) served in the Delaware Army National Guard, temporarily leaving his position as the elected Attorney General of Delaware to deploy to Iraq with his Guard Unit in 2008-2009

    But since the U.S. military is has been an "all volunteer" force since 1973, I don't think future generations of Bushes or Trumps need worry whether their parents political clout will be sufficient for them to get those "cushy jobs", 'cause they won't need to find a "safe" position.

    There's nothing wrong with being a REMF, particularly in a military that has no draft. It still means you volunteered to place your body between country and war's desolation.

    153:

    JReynolds @ 115:

    It took a vast number of citizens answering Democracy's Call to defeat the Fascists & the Nazis.

    True, except that the breakdown of the US Army in 1941-45 was 39% volunteers, 61% draftees.

    Apparently this ratio was more or less reversed in Vietnam, with volunteers being the majority. However, before WWII most Americans agreed that the Axis was a threat to the USA. Not so much Vietnam, hence the growing disenchantment with the war, and the resumption of the use of Skedaddle Ridge and other options for draft dodgers.

    The Vietnam War - and the response to it by Americans of draft age - plays no role whatsoever in the thinking behind Starship Troopers. It was a war that hadn't happened yet.

    154:

    I'm going to put on a helmet and some armor before making this comment, but the fundamental strategic error of the post 9/11 world was not making an extensive effort to prune back the Saudis, particularly those who practiced Wahabism, with special attention to Saudi/Wahabi missionaries in countries not Saudi Arabia. The secondary strategic error was not beginning our serious efforts to go green immediately after 9/11 - gets the U.S. out of the gulf-states and they can take care of themselves. Or not.

    Problem is that solar-powered tanks and aircraft carriers aren't things. Oh, and the Bush family's been in the oil business since George I made his stake in it, so they were probably more interesting in tying up Middle Eastern Oil (Iraq, Saudi, Kuwaiti) in an American net and putting the kibosh on Iran than on anything else. If you think of oil as a central pillar of 20th Century military power, this actually makes sense, bloody-handed and greedy though it is. For some reason, most of the countries in the region hate being treated that way, although (Sarcasm) I can't understand why(/sarcasm).

    That said, I'm more a fan of the Sufis than the Wahhabis, left leaning softie that I am. Love me some Mullah Nasruddin.

    Finally, I'd point out that OBL did have the germ of a legitimate complaint against the west and oil companies. His family got rich servicing them, along with servicing Saudi oil fields, and he was trained by the CIA at one point when it looked like he could be useful to American interests in Afghanistan. That kind of treatment could make a man bitter, not that this was an excuse to become a monster.

    155:

    Troutwaxer @ 116: (Also notice that Manny is obviously Hispanic - in a book written in 1966!)

    Also notice that Manny is very obviously a Black Man with a young, attractive very White wife ... which is how the Professor engineers his arrest somewhere in the southern U.S. (Georgia I think, but it might have been Kentucky) which in turn solidifies Lunar opinion in favor of "the revolution".

    156:

    True, except that the breakdown of the US Army in 1941-45 was 39% volunteers, 61% draftees.

    Apparently this ratio was more or less reversed in Vietnam, with volunteers being the majority.

    One of the things that makes this analysis complicated is that WW2 USA was on a total war footing, whereas Vietnam War USA was not. As a result, the US War Dept stopped taking volunteers in Dec. 1942 (See executive order 9279.) Let me repeat that for emphasis: Such was the importance of experienced workers in key industries that the military barred them from enlistment.

    You could make the case that, effectively, most of the US population was serving, whether or not they were in uniform.

    But all of that is tail stuff when there's sexy tooth action for everyone to get excited about! Let's make everyone a tooth; that's how to make an effective military!

    Sorry, got distracted. Something about a hereditary warrior aristocracy where they all go prancing about in fancy suits of armour?

    157:

    hcmeyer @ 119: I think after 1950 - "Destination Moon", RAH found himself marooned in a dystopian future that he had not imagined, rather than the Shiny, Happy Technological futures he wrote about. He saw the USA as an Impotent Superpower, lacking the Ideological Guts to resolve the situation.
    Personally, I had read RAH as a pre-teen and young teen, and stopped because there was nothing new. When Stranger in a Strange Land became popular, I read it and rejected it as empty political Porn. I read nothing new after that.
    I was forced to re-evaluate RAH when his bio was published a few years ago. Now, I reject most of his writings as turgid mush, written to earn a few cents a word. I do credit him for "Destination Moon", without which there would be no USA manned space program.

    I remember reading some years ago that Heinlein's experiences with Hollywood working on "Destination Moon" (and possibly the way "Rocketship X-M" stole its thunder) convinced Heinlein not to sell the the movie rights for Starship Troopers.

    Considering the deliberate, slanderous travesty Verhoeven chose to make of the work, I think Heinlein was well justified.

    158:

    whitroth @ 125: *snort*
    *chuckle*
    ROTFLMAO!!!

    Mods, we may have a chatbot.

    Hadn't thought of that. I thought it was just someone we all know & love trying on another new persona & skipped to the next comment.

    159:

    whitroth @ 129: Thank you for the attitude, says this "draft dodger".

    Actually, I fought it, and #insert AlicesRestaurantMy_version, they agreed they wanted me like a hole in the head.

    And are you counting the guys who joined the National Guard in that "draft dodgers"?

    Some of them were. There were a couple of them still in the Unit when I joined the National Guard in 1975.

    My own story vis a vis the draft was I drew a high supposedly safe number in the first lottery. My roommate drew 001 and went ahead and enlisted the next day to get ANYTHING but infantry. He ended up as a high-speed chicken fucker (comsec operator) at the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, but somehow managed to complete his tour before the Cambodia thing blew up.

    The thing about those high, safe numbers was they were a national average. But if your local draft board for any reason didn't have any people with low numbers to call, they called people with higher numbers.

    I got my letter to dine at Alice's Restaurant (i.e. report for a pre-induction physical exam) in September. It was nothing like the movie. Passed with flying colors. They told me to expect THE LETTER in October.

    But it didn't come in October. It didn't come in November ... or December. I stopped worrying about it, stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop some time around March of the next year.

    160:

    It's been awhile since I last read the book, but are you sure the issue wasn't his participation in a plural marriage? IIRC he talked about it in an interview, then he was arrested. Unfortunately, the book is in storage.

    161:

    whitroth @ 142: Ah, yes, hiring contractors to take care of the back-office work, to free up troops for combat.

    Did you see the stories, a dozen or 15 years ago, where the troops were expected to last all day on one quart? of water, because "the contractor couldn't was having trouble getting insurance to send people to a war zone"?

    No. Probably reported on in one of the issues of Army Times (I was a subscriber) that somehow didn't get delivered (mail was sometimes slow and erratic) while I was over there.

    162:

    I remember a long time ago - quite possibly in Omni? - reading an interview with Verhoeven where he complained about not being able to do the powered suits because of budget issues.. It was pretty clear he wanted to, and that he understood the importance but reality sometimes intrudes.

    Remember, no plan survives contact with the enema. I think that is especially the case for movies.

    I strongly disagree with the idea that one needs to be American to get Heinlein; I'm about as British as it is possible to be and grew up reading RAH stories. So were/are/did many of my friends. I don't think I've ever heard any of them suggesting that ST was anything other than a ripping bit of satire on the whole military flag-shagging attittude. Given that we would generally opine that "Yanks don't get satire", that would be quite a compliment to RAH.

    163:

    Pixodaros @ 143: For some reason Americans of a certain age idolize conscription. Lets look what US conscript armies since 1890 have actually done. There is the army that Woodrow Wilson rounded up to fight on the Western Front. There is the army that finally entered WW II. Then they formalized some things to make sure that rich white people's sons stayed out or got easy duty while poor men's sons went straight from high school to Basic Training. Then there is Korea and the American intervention in 30 years of conflict in Southeast Asia. For much of that period they had a volunteer Marine Corps and Navy to "throw a little country against the wall" every administration or so.

    They were still drafting for the USMC in early 1970, when they didn't get enough enlistees.

    164:

    " his participation in a plural marriage?"

    It was a long time ago that I read it, but IIRC you are correct.

    My own particular beef with Heinlein was his unflagging enthusiasm for the death penalty for just about everything, including things that were neither wilful misconduct nor urgent dangers.

    JHomes

    165:

    Looks like GPT-2 (or very related) output to me. (SotMNs postings have content and discussion (often obfuscated) of oft-very-current events and topics, though there is sometimes text that strongly resembles chaff.)

    166:

    Tim, I hate to break this to you, but Heinlein was dead serious. Yes, there was a somewhat unreliable narrator. There was a certain amount of thoughtful discussion about one's civic duty, much of it rooted in ancient practices - and much of that discussion was wrong, but RAH was very, very serious when he wrote ST.

    167:

    There's a very, very long, complex, fairly pedantic discussion here on "Warriors versus Soldiers." I would strongly recommend it with reference to Starship Troopers. This discussion has heavily influenced my current interpretation of the book, because what's obvious is that Heinlein's MI are soldier's not warriors, and that's what makes the book tolerable.

    https://acoup.blog/2021/01/29/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-i-soldiers-warriors-and/

    168:

    JReynolds @ 148:

    When you've only got a million guys, you can't have half of them be Arabic-speaking MPs, which is what the US needed if it really intended to replicate the post-WWII outcomes in Germany and Japan.

    What in Ghu's name makes you think that the US wanted to have a functioning, democratic Iraq or Afghanistan after their invasions?

    IMO, Afghanistan was the real payback for 9/11 - "OBL was actually resident in Afghanistan, so let's smash them against the wall. Can't go after Saudi Arabia. They're our friend and ally! Which leads us the main course: Iraq. Let's kill things and break shit!"

    Chaney & Bush didn't want the Afghanistan portion of the GWOT at all. On 9/12 Rumsfield was already complaining there were no good targets to bomb in Afghanastan, so we should go after Iraq straight away.

    https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=131579&page=1

    CLARKE: Well, Don Rumsfeld said -- when we talked about bombing the al Qaeda infrastructure in Afghanistan, he said, "There are no good targets in Afghanistan; let's bomb Iraq." And we said, "But Iraq had nothing to do with this," and that didn't seem to make much difference.
    GIBSON: But the administration has made the point that their response immediately was to go into Afghanistan.
    CLARKE: Their response that week -- they debated Iraq versus Afghanistan for a week. And their response that week was, "Let's do Afghanistan first," with the clear implication that there was a second.
    And the reason they had to do Afghanistan first was it was obvious that al Qaeda had attacked us and it was obvious that al Qaeda was in Afghanistan. The American people wouldn't have stood by if we had done nothing on Afghanistan.
    But what they did was slow and small. They put only 11,000 troops into Afghanistan. There are more police here in Manhattan -- more police here in Manhattan than there are U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

    And for Iraq, they didn't have "a million guys". They had 309,814, and they only had that many because the UK provided 45,000, Australia provided 2.000, Poland provided 194 (Special Forces), 70,000 Peshmerga (Autonomous Kurdistan) and 620 members of the Iraqi National Congress (Ahmed Chalabi's guys)

    It was always about Iraq from day one ... with junior along for the ride because "They tried to kill my daddy!"

    But they did believe they were going to create a democratic Iraq - for values of "democratic" out of some NeoCon Libertarian Free-Market smoke & mirrors pipe dream. High on their own supply & suckered by their own propaganda.

    The best, most accurate, most informative reporting on what they thought they were doing and what actually went down is Naomi Klein's BAGHDAD YEAR ZERO Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia

    You can trace the ideas back to Cheney's & Rumsfeld's participation in the Project for the New American Century with Iran as the wheel for new American "benevolent global hegemony" and Iraq as the hub around which that wheel would revolve. Iraq was never the end game. With 9/11 they finally got their new Pearl Harbor.

    It's deja vu all over again just like Watergate: Forget the myths the media has created about the White House. The truth is these are not very bright guys ... follow the money.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QodGxD19_as

    169:

    Troutwaxer @ 161: It's been awhile since I last read the book, but are you sure the issue wasn't his participation in a plural marriage? IIRC he talked about it in an interview, then he was arrested. Unfortunately, the book is in storage.

    Maybe both, but IIRC, it was showing a photograph of his wife ... possibly his newest wife ... to the interviewer that was the tipping point for the incident.

    170:

    IIRC, the US Marine Corps has accepted conscripts at various times in its history, but the marine corps of the Banana Wars and gunboats in China in the 1920s and 1930s was volunteer. My point is that governments have avoided the unpopularity of mass mobilization by having a parallel volunteer military for the small wars (often recruited from those with no other options: whereas on 10 September 2001 the US military did a pretty good job of reflecting the class and race balance of the US population as a whole, because it had so many resources that it could attract people with options).

    171:

    Are you referring to "Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, based on an idea by JRR Tolkien"?

    My nieces gave me the extended edition on DVD because they knew I liked the novels, so I watched them all, including all the 'making of' documentaries included — which were actually more interesting than the films :-)

    Jackson's visual inspiration was apparently the Brothers Hildebrandt artwork rather than Tolkien's own drawings, so what you see is already removed from the original.

    There was an interview with one of the scriptwriters about the modifications she made to the dialogue, and what struck me most was that she said that she thought Tolkien would like her version better than what he wrote! I was expecting something about modifying to suit a different medium, but nope, just 'this is better and I'm certain the original author would agree with me'.

    So yeah, decent enough films if you can ignore the really screwed up combat scenes, but still disappointing.

    172:

    JBS @ 170: Troutwaxer @ 161:

    It's been awhile since I last read the book, but are you sure the issue wasn't his participation in a plural marriage? IIRC he talked about it in an interview, then he was arrested. Unfortunately, the book is in storage.

    Maybe both, but IIRC, it was showing a photograph of his wife ... possibly his newest wife ... to the interviewer that was the tipping point for the incident.

    Or it might have been a photograph of ALL of the wives AND husbands showing the mix of races, sexes & ages. That could yank a whole bunch of chains at the same time.

    173:

    And for Iraq, they didn't have "a million guys". They had 309,814, and they only had that many because the UK provided 45,000, Australia provided 2.000, Poland provided 194 (Special Forces), 70,000 Peshmerga (Autonomous Kurdistan) and 620 members of the Iraqi National Congress (Ahmed Chalabi's guys)

    Canada also contributed troops. Sneakily, not to Iraq but by really upping our contingent in Afghanistan so that the government could say that they weren't supporting the Iraq invasion*, but freeing up American troops for the invasion by taking over their duties in Afghanistan.

    *There was a lot of opposition to that up here. But there was also a LOT of not-so-diplomatic pressure from America to sign on, with quiet threats to attack our exports if we didn't do something.

    174:

    IIRC it was specifically the miscegenation that triggered the legal problem.

    175:

    The Heinlein Concordance says:

    Lexington, Kentucky Place where Manuel Garcia O'Kelly was arrested for bigamy, miscegenation, and "inciting public immorality" after describing and showing pictures of his [multi-racial] family. He found out much later that Stuart LaJoie had "planted" the questions that led to Mannie discussing his family, knowing that such a result would ensue and that Mannie's arrest would arouse outrage — and thus increase support for the Revolution — back home in the Moon.

    https://mycroft.heinleinsociety.org/concordance/books/mhm_hc.htm

    176:

    So I guess we've both got part of the picture.

    177:

    So yeah, decent enough films if you can ignore the really screwed up combat scenes, but still disappointing.

    I watched the first two, but in the second one the story went so far away from the book that I didn't watch the third one. I kind of understand the reasons to change things for the different medium, but I'm grumpy and middle-aged, so Faramir was the last straw for me.

    Nice visuals, but still left me feeling a bit empty.

    The same happened with the Hobbit movies, I watched the first one and didn't go to see the later ones.

    178:

    Here’s a thing. What an author writes is not always what a reader reads. To a significant degree I simply don’t care what AuthorX thinks they were saying; it’s what I think I am reading. Since I don’t necessarily share cultural background, or gender/sexual/age/wealth/taste with AuthorX that is always likely to some degree. And let’s not forget that authors lie for a living. It’s in the name.

    179:

    Rabidchaos @ 157 Such was the importance of experienced workers in key industries that the military barred them from enlistment. You could make the case that, effectively, most of the US population was serving, whether or not they were in uniform. Yeah - having learnt the hard way in '14-18 - we did that as well the 2nd time around. My father was told: "You are drafted - into the Scientific Civil Service" f'rinstance. ( Devising, making, & testing new explosives, mostly. )

    JBS @ 159 ( & Bill Arnold ) But, would we be able to tell the difference, anyway? I mean, they are both entirely content-free ... What is GPT-2? And NO - SomN's postings have minimal to zero content - in fact I'm not sure that "she" isn't a chatbot.

    Oh yes, question: IF that posting was another chatbot, what does one do about it? Barr it? Or wind it up, so that it's electronics go poof! You tell me.

    180: 153 - Disagree. Being a REMF in an "all volunteer service" means actively trying to become and stay rear echelon. 163 - Never read the cited interview. Otherwise I'll agree to being Scottish, or British, but regard calling me "English" as an insult. That said, I'll also agree your para 3 with notes:-

    a) Yes, satire, well part satire anyway. b) It's subtle, but RAH does say that there is no such thing as "safe rear echelon" in interstellar warfare. EG, Rico's mother's death when the Bugs use asteroids to "bomb" South America (can't recall the cited city off hand). c) There are sequences, like the MI raid on the Skinnies' planet, that are pure MilSF, years before the term was invented.

    172 "By rights we shouldn't be here". Yes, because the production and screenwriting teams retconned in scenes that don't exist in the books they used as a basis.
    181:

    The secondary strategic error was not beginning our serious efforts to go green immediately after 9/11 - gets the U.S. out of the gulf-states and they can take care of themselves. Or not.

    I started saying the way to, if not solve, at least change the problem, to oil and middle eastern conflict was for at least the US to put say $.005 tax per gal of gas and increase it by that amount every 2 or 3 months. Eventually this would move the world to something other than oil in many cases for energy and take away the money flowing into the region and being used to make a mess of things. Most everyone I knew/know on the right and left told me to pound sand.

    I started saying this in 78/79.

    Says he who remembers the gas wars as a teen where prices would get down to $.25/gal at times.

    My point was to slowly make gasoline more expensive so that people would gradually migrate to the more efficient cars and or other means of transportation that wasn't based on gas.

    I was thinking in terms of 20+ years. Most people wanted things solved in 1 to 5. So far we're 40+ years into this based on my starting point and basically nothing has changed.

    182:

    Nitpick

    FDR jr served on a Destroyer convoying from "Iceland to Minsk", supported the Sicilian invasion and ended up as Captain of a Destroyer Escort that earned 5 battle stars for WW2 against Japan;

    Minsk is the capital city of Belarus, a landlocked state. Getting a convoy there would be rather tricky.

    I presume you meant the coastal Russian city of Murmansk.

    183:

    True, except that the breakdown of the US Army in 1941-45 was 39% volunteers, 61% draftees.

    Not really a valid number for the point you're trying to make.

    My father was drafted. Not because he didn't want to volunteer but because he knew it would happen as soon as he graduated from high school. And it did. The local draft boards back then basically took the high school graduation roles and sent out the notices. When he showed me a class picture from when he graduated in 43 there were about twice as many girls and boys. He said a lot of the boys had dropped out to sign up.

    Older guys waited to be drafted many times. Especially if they had their first decent job in 10 years. And so many jobs early in the war were in support of the war that the "guys" were told to keep their job until. Until they got drafted and/or until the women were brought in.

    My recollection of a report I read a few decades ago was that the average age of a private was 22 for the US in WWII.

    Very different times. Economically and socially than anything since.

    184:

    I'm Italian, over 45 but under 50. There is to say that at the same time I was reading Heinlein I was also reading other more or less militaristic/conservatives/preachy/with problematic ethics authors like Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Larry Niven, Purnelle etc., and I had no issue with them (at the time ofc), or mixing them with authors like Mack Reynolds, James White, John Brunner or Frederick Pohl etc. But Heinlein rubbed me the wrong way: it made me think at the author "well, I don't think you've figured things out as much as you think you've figured them out".

    185:

    Thanks for taking a serious look at Starship Troopers.

    I think of it as a love letter to the military. So far as I know, it portrays an idealized military where everyone is competent and trustworthy.

    There's one way it's very different from more recent milsf-- it's got very little in the way of tactics. This is something I notice because I'm bad at visualization.

    I don't know whether it was conscious, but Heinlein neatly dodged an issue by making it a future where ethnic prejudice is gone. Otherwise, I think the idea of earning the right to vote by doing dangerous civic duty might well have led to people from some groups being much more likely to die before they got to vote.

    Any theories about why people didn't get the franchise until after they were out of service?

    3: I don't think Heinlein would have liked Trump-- Heinlein cared about truth and practicality, and I don't think he would have wanted to be that much of a follower, but we'll never find out.

    $5: My copy of Expanded Universe isn't handy, but I think Heinlein suggested limiting the franchise to women who were past 40(?) and had children. No votes for men.

    So far as I know, there are no historical examples of democracies failing because the public voted itself too much largesse from the government.

    13: I'm pretty sure Heinlein did know black people. FF is remarkably accurate about microaggressions, and presents them as explicitly about how white people were treating black people, rather than having an allegorical handling of racial prejudice.

    To my mind, FF would have been quite a good anti-racist book except that Heinlein blew it by making the black slaveholders cannibals.

    20: I believe Glory Road has the stupidest thing from Heinlein's fiction-- the idea that it's a Earth weirdness that women can charge for what they have in infinite supply. Heinlein did get better-- in Time Enough for Love, he said that prostitutes were professionals who deserved respect. 23: The service needed to get the vote had to be dangerous, at least potentially. So it could include being a subject for medical experimentation or working in the laboratories on Pluto.

    You could probably get decent novels out of those, but they'd be less fun than Starship Troopers. And there might be some interesting discussion about whether or not to adopt new tech to make those lines of work safer.

    40's: I suspect Heinlein was drifting away from libertarianism. If I recall the The Cat Who Walked Through Walls correctly, there was a dawning realization that there are drawbacks to living on a privately owned space habitat. 73: George Hansen is doing a zoom presentation about UFOs on June 12.

    https://www.millenniumoss.com/flyerfornextmeeting.html

    A general thing: I think Heinlein should have explained why he was mistaken about WW3 happening.

    135: The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn is an examination of Heinlein's ideas and themes through his writings, and the book happened because Heinlein's ideas changed enough through his career that such a book was worth writing.

    I was surprised by some things in it. Heinlein is commonly described as an individualist, but most of his happy endings are about people finding a place in a larger society. A very high proportion of his characters are plausibly of color. There really is a lot about wanting to be a woman.

    165: Good point about Heinlein being altogether too fond of formal and informal death penalties, though another surprising thing from The Pleasant Profession is that while Heinlein was strongly in favor of private ownership of hand weapons, there's very little use of them in the stories.
    186:

    The truth is these are not very bright guys ... follow the money.

    Oh, I think most of them were. They just had a deluded ideology.

    I know way too many people who have very very very high IQs but very warped ideologies. Which puts a crazy spin on most of their actions.

    187:

    I think in the case of the movie the powered armor would have been a distraction, in a way it would not have been in robocop.

    For the political point of view of the movie (and of the book too, if a bit less because you can cram more stuff in a book than you can in a movie), the power armor is an extra: arguably, in the book it was only there to make slightly more plausible the importance of the low trooper in an age of atomic weapons (and with a minor point of being a candy bait for the tech crowd).

    This is useful if you want to defend the plausibility of the system as depicted in the book, and an obstacle if you are trying to make a point of the fascist absurdity that was his target.

    Even then, you could have paid lip service to it, but then you must face how hard it would have been practically. Especially because he had already dealt with full cyborg suits in Robocop, he likely well understood how incredibly hard would have been having an army of them (check the Robocop trivia section on imdb, there are plenty of examples of the real troubles they had with the suit, including the suffering for the actor).

    So, pay a lot of money to have a lot more troubles filming to be a bit more faithful to a book when you are trying to send a different message and this being more faithful making your intended message weaker by making the intended mocked protagonists cooler? I wouldn't have, too! :-p

    188:

    Pixodaros @ 90, referring to an unsent letter written about 1964-5 by Heinlein on race issues.

    Thanks for that link. Its difficult to read today; you just keep having to remind yourself that by the standards of that time and place Heinlein was probably pretty centrist. For me the biggest thing, apart from the language, is his insistence that "the Negro" must pull himself up by his own bootstraps by e.g. learning calculus at a time when calculus was being taught to white kids but not black ones.

    One other thing in it caught my eye, about 2/3 of the way through:

    But I must add: This item is not intended to persuade you, convince you, nor anything; it has been primarily a means of letting me get my own thoughts verbalized and in order on a subject which has been troubling me a great deal.

    That's something I sometimes do myself when I have a big complicated problem to think through, and its a very valuable exercise. In that paragraph Heinlein also says that he intends to send the letter. I suspect that he changed his mind due to a growing realisation that he was on the wrong side of the argument. This piece is certainly in marked contrast with "Mannie", the protagonist of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. TMiaHM was published in 1966, and shows Mannie being arrested for being a black man with a white wife (the actual charge was "bigamy", but it was the racial mix of the Davis clan that had the judge seeing red). At another point Mannie also waxes sarcastic about the idea of dividing Lunar society up into racial categories. The later part of the unsent letter touches on libertarianism and the idea of a society without central authority. So it looks like many of the themes in TMiaHM were already floating around Heinlein's brain at the time, and his shifting ideas about race were a part of that. The first part of TMiaHM was serialised in December 1965, so it looks like Heinlein's attitude to race must have undergone a marked shift over a fairly short time. The latter part of the letter makes reference to the social-government nexus regulating sex; perhaps he considered how this concept might also apply to race.

    "Friday", published in 1982, has Friday presented as complete mix; as her father figure Baldwin says in his final letter to her "You can never afford to be racist: you would be biting your own tail". The book also features a character (one of Friday's co-wives) who denied being racist "while exhibiting that irrational attitude every time she opened her mouth", which is an interesting contrast to Heinlein's "... if I have any prejudice against Negroes, I am not aware of it". And of course the whole point of Friday was the fantastic racism she experienced due to her "Artificial Person" status. Early in the book she talks of "passing" as a "real" human, clearly equating the racism of American society in 1982 and the discrimination that Friday suffered.

    189: 186 - Nothing I'd argue with unless I was in a nitpicky mood and not pressed for time.

    General - John Fitzgeral Kennedy, future president, was a PT Boat commander in the Pacific during WW2.

    190:

    I'm not sure that Starship Troopers was a satire on how the military of 1959, more a model for what it should be. So whilst full citizenship is tied to service, we have no conscription and soldiers can resign at any time (even during wartime). There's no bar on the grounds of race, sex or disability. Women are considered better ship pilots and Naval officers (women) have seniority over Army officers (men). Finally, with the right to refuse a medical discharge a promising naval Lieutenant is not going to be kicked out after catching TB and end up writing SF for a living.

    Farnhams Freehold on the other hand is the only Heinlein book that made me feel unclean. I get what he was trying to do - but it didn't work to put it mildly.

    191:
    The Vietnam War - and the response to it by Americans of draft age - plays no role whatsoever in the thinking behind Starship Troopers.

    You're right - I'm engaging in Topic Drift before post 300.

    192:
    Remember, no plan survives contact with the enema.

    No plan survives contact with the cinema?

    193:

    This is a quote from the Wikipedia article on Korean war POWs that JBS linked to:

    "The discrimination extended to the children of POWs who were restricted in their careers, barred from membership in the Workers' Party of Korea, college admissions and military service.[14] Mr. Koh Eul Won, a former POW who escaped to South Korea in 2001, testified that "in North Korea, one must complete military service to be treated like a human being. However, our children were rejected by the military solely for the reason of being the children of POWs. Therefore, our children had no choice but to work in the coal mines as we had done." Young-Bok Yoo, who escaped in 2000, also writes about the discrimination and surveillance in his Memoirs."

    This,ironically, illustrates what the system in ST is more likely to be like, than the one Heinlein wrote about. This is why Verhoeven made the satire he did. I would like to point out that Verhoeven is Dutch, and born in 1938, living through the Nazi occupation. He is also highly intelligent, having a double masters in maths and physics. That he managed to make an anti Nazi satire of America, in Hollywood is a massive achievement. Critiquing it on the basis of a lack of power armour, or some such, seems to be missing the point. He needed a recognisable IP to get it made, this may be considered disrespectful to Heinlein, but I would consider it a worthy goal. I would say Verhoeven is a very underrated director, with people often missing what he is saying because of the type of film he makes.

    194:

    Troutwaxer noted: "I'm going to put on a helmet and some armor before making this comment, but the fundamental strategic error of the post 9/11 world was not making an extensive effort to prune back the Saudis"

    Yup. The rot that lies at the heart of U.S. democracy is how many recent leaders have benefited personally from running the state as if it were their personal money-generating machine. If the Saudis didn't have oil and ties to U.S. Big Oil, they would have been squashed long ago.

    On the topic of the death penalty, the only thing you can say with certainty is that it ensures the executed person won't sin again. There's no evidence it discourages capital crimes or accomplishes much else that's good. It certainly doesn't reform the dead person. You might make a case that it's more merciful than decades of incarceration, waiting every day to learn whether you'll die next week. I wouldn't. It's punishment porn, pure and simple, and that also explains why the U.S. has not standardized on the guillotine which, to the best of my knowledge, is far more humane than electrocution or lethal injection. I guess those who get off on the notion of killing someone slowly wouldn't like it.

    195:

    @JBS #169:

    But they did believe they were going to create a democratic Iraq - for values of "democratic" out of some NeoCon Libertarian Free-Market smoke & mirrors pipe dream. High on their own supply & suckered by their own propaganda

    Thanks for saving me the trouble of making that response. We (meaning US voters) were most definitely promised that our troops would be greeted as liberators, with flowers and candy strewn in their path as the marched into Baghdad. That this was idiocy was easily predictable and in fact widely predicted, but that was how it was sold.

    Republican cadres already included a large number of highly-placed rubes "high on their own supply" but I think the real goal of the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz group was "install a pliant puppet that will pump all the oil as fast as possible and sell it to us, after having purchased our services to bring the oilfields up to spec with new equipment that they will also buy from us, so that we can tell the Saudis to go fuck themselves next time they try to orchestrate a shortage." That and "provide bases for massive garrisons that we can use to menace the Iranians for the indefinite future." For some of that group, Iraq was almost as much a sideshow as Afghanistan: what they really wanted was to remove Iran as a regional power.

    The AVF wound up as something very much like SST's MI, a supremely effective tool for breaking stuff and killing people. The amazing folly of the neocons was their assumption that breaking stuff and killing people is all that it takes to win a war. That lesson seems still not to have been absorbed by our elites.

    And for Iraq, they didn't have "a million guys".

    I was referring to the total size of the US Army, as a round approximation, not to that fraction of it that was sent to the Gulf.

    196:

    So the argument is that Verhoeven is a misunderstood genius? Let's see, he got $105 million to make Starship Troopers, the general reaction was that "this sucks on a variety of levels," although to be fair it made around 10% ROE so it didn't bomb. That's a huge megaphone for an anti-fascist, and he didn't do a great job getting the message out.*

    Now let's throw in some powered armor. You can argue that it's too costly an effect, except that George Lucas solved that problem back in the 1970s with the stormtroopers, and Verhoeven's armor in the movie is arguably a more complex version of the same effect (lots of plastic suits). So throw that argument out.

    So you take something like a Star Wars stormtrooper, but make the armor a bit more practical (if nothing else, let the actors see where they're going, so they can actually move like human beings). Why use stormtrooper armor? Because you're going to need a lot of miniatures, and why not make a design that's easy to churn out as puppets?

    To this, you add a SF version of a 1950s era jet pack (undoubtedly Heinlein's inspiration). Deck it out with a missile rack, use shiny lights and ILM effects instead of actual jets when it's flying, because the smoke trail always looks fake anyway. So we've got a stormtrooper with a jetpack and atomic missiles. Fairly easy to miniaturize en masse.

    Next we've got to identify the heroes in the middle of the battles. The normal Hollywood BS version is to have them take off their helmets. You can get around this with a clear faceplate, or with big fat military insignia on the armor (aka heraldry). I'd suggest doing both, so that the miniature has the logo decals on it, while the full scale has the actor's face visible. Wanna make those logos fascist? Go right ahead, Warhammer 40K style (also around when the film was made, and arguably they would have been better inspiration than the stormtroopers).

    Finally, you take Heinlein's mobile infantry concept, which is daft. The soldiers jump huge distances with exoskeletons and jetpacks. Normally that spells "TARGET" to any sane soldier (comments from the real veterans?), but let's go with it. What else moves that way? Fleas. So basically when the mobile infantry drops on a city (via puppet effects and animation), the little jet-propelled stormtroopers go jumping around like fleas on a carpet, shooting their guns and lobbing overly powerful explosives. It's straightforward to do this now with CGI, and probably possible in the 1990s with miniatures without breaking the bank. If you want to hand the MI a loss, have the flea horde drop on a flat, open plain, with the enemy dug in, and shoot them out of the air en masse (also as in the book, IIRC).

    So here's my question: you have rocket-powered human fleas wearing stormtrooper armor and lobbing nukes. And you can't make an anti-fascist satire out of this? Well, if you're a misunderstood genius like Verhoeven, apparently you can't. But I suspect it could be done.

    *It's worth mentioning at this juncture that we're all hypersensitized to fascism due to the events of the last few years. IIRC in the 1990s, fascism was considered to be the ideology of losers, with jokes about Illinois NAZIs and skinheads being disposable extras in films. Perhaps now would be a better time to make an anti-fascist satire?

    197:

    To be fair to the Iraqis, they knew that the oil works were the real target for the Americans (not hard to predict, with Bush and Cheney in charge). IIRC, they did as much as they could to destroy all their geologic data on the oil fields and to wreck the oil-pumping infrastructure, to deny the US a win in that regard. And I think they at least partially succeeded.

    On a realpolitik level, one could argue that controlling that much oil was a valid strategic goal. I'm not arguing the morality, I'm literally talking about power politics. That, in itself, is not "high on their own supply." Evil and shortsighted, absolutely. But not deluded in itself.

    IMHO, the Bushies doped/duped themselves in two regards. One was that Bush II apparently genuinely believed it was possible to install a client democracy in Iraq, which shows a woeful lack of understanding on par with the SS Troopers idea of bombing aliens until they ally with us. The other was the small-government ideology that using mercs and contractors would get the job done better and cheaper, which turned out to be wrong on multiple levels too. To be fair on this last point, the US Military Industrial Complex specializes in bloat, so trying to trim that is a legitimate goal. Problem is, the industrial side is at least as bloated as the government side, and cutting oversight doesn't make it more efficient, it just makes it easier to siphon money out. Which, at least in Cheney's and others' views, was also probably a central goal.

    198:

    In the unlikely event that I ever re-read Starship Troopers, my visual for the powered armour is going to look a lot like the splendid stuff from Edge of Tomorrow. Powered armour, Tom Cruise getting repeatedly killed and Emily Blunt. Very silly, very entertaining, slightly off topic.

    199:

    (Veering off topic around comment 200, not 300, because this thread has already chewed over the admittedly lightweight OP ...)

    the fundamental strategic error of the post 9/11 world was not making an extensive effort to prune back the Saudis, particularly those who practiced Wahabism, with special attention to Saudi/Wahabi missionaries in countries not Saudi Arabia.

    Nah, you're way too late -- as is normal for American perspectives on Middle Eastern politics.

    First mistake: letting Britain and France get away with the Sykes-Picot treaty circa 1918-19, which divvied up the rump of the Ottoman Empire and, in particular, carved up the Arab world between two hostile European empires. This was secondary to Britain getting elbow-deep in Persia, because of the oil, which fuelled dreadnoughts, prior to the first world war ... because of the obvious deficiencies in refueling at sea using coal that the Russian Baltic Fleet learned in 1906.

    TLDR: the mistakes go way back.

    Second mistake: a toxic devil's brew of feckless idealism, cold-eyed realpolitic, casual racism, and western orientalism, that culminated in (a) backing the coup against Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 to re-install the Shah, (b) backing assorted coups against Arab monarchies around that era that variously installed Ba'ath regimes or tried to overturn the Ba'ath regimes when they proved to be, uh, pro-Arab rather than pro-western. Ba'ath was seen as a bulwark against communism: well yes, but only because communism was one of four rival ideologies in play at the time: Ba'athist nationalism, communism, monarchism (a spent force) and ... islam, which only grew as a political creed to rival Ba'athism after the communists and monarchists were suppressed).

    Third mistake: missing the significance of a turbulent priest in exile in Paris who squared the circle of fundamentalist Shi'ite islam and democracy, so that when the Shah fell the Ayatollah Khomenei was Rather Popular.

    Fourth mistake: not even recognizing the unholy cold war between Shi'ism and Sunni Islam existed. Which is still dominating regional politics to this day (see also: Yemen, Lebanon). And ...

    Fifth mistake: focussing on the Iranian revolution of 1979 and totally missing the Saudi religious revolution of 1980, mostly because the King stayed in place by embracing theocracy with open arms.

    The latter is the hard bit. A whole bunch of destabilization happened in the late 1970s, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Saudi theocrats.

    The US (and the west in general) viewed the Middle East through the lens of Capitalism v. Communism, with a side-order of securing the oil supplies and a smidgen of using Israel as a proxy to keep the local Ba'ath regimes around the east of the Mediterranean in line.

    But that was simply the wrong paradigm. What was actually going on in the Middle East was an inflammation of the long-running Shi'ite/Salafi cold war. Israel was seen as an insurgent Crusader Kingdom like, oh, imagine Fidel Castro's Cuba if Cuba was as rich as Japan, had nukes, and periodically invaded Florida and Texas.

    Nobody trusted the United States; they saw the USA as, at best, powerful but blinkered idiots who could be pointed at one's enemy for shits and giggles. Then the cold war ended abruptly; the US got involved in propping up the oil oligarchs in Kuwait, the Gulf War campaign saw giant US bases springing up on Saudi soil -- the holy land of Islam, remember -- and we know where that led.

    Hypothetically: if Russia had stayed in Afghanistan, and if April Glaspie hadn't inadvertently green-lit Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, there'd have been no US bases in Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden would have been content to stay in the hills there, plinking at commissars.

    200:

    "well, I don't think you've figured things out as much as you think you've figured them out".

    I'll definitely give you that one.

    I think the background of this discussion, and not only with your posts, is that Heinlein is a very respected figure in science fiction in the U.S., and MilSF isn't the only form of SF for which he wrote the primary document (or one of them,) nor is it the only book wherein he subtly undermined the racist tropes of his day.

    U.S. Science-Fiction fans don't like to see him disrespected; at this point in history Heinlein may be the field's "Fox News Uncle,"* but he's our Fox News Uncle, and you can disagree with him all you want, but if you're not respectful in disagreeing you're going to hear from the man's family, and that's what happened to Paul Verhoeven. This is not an attempt to threaten, BTW, but to make clear the background of U.S. fans defending the man in a fashion which probably seems a little irrational.

    • The family conservative, the guy who get's all his opinions and "facts" from Fox News.
    201:

    Finally, you take Heinlein's mobile infantry concept, which is daft. The soldiers jump huge distances with exoskeletons and jetpacks. Normally that spells "TARGET" to any sane soldier (comments from the real veterans?), but let's go with it.

    Your excuse -- and funky visual effects reference -- is stealth. Give them stealth armour with chameleon camouflage: that's an excuse both for bad-ass angular armour and for colour-changing panels.

    They even apply stealth surfacing to drones these days, and there's R&D under way at making tank camouflage that can change to mimic the background. (At worst: plate your main battle tank with horrifyingly expensive micro-LED displays relaying what a camera on the opposite side of the tank can see. As tanks are multi-million dollar appliances, blowing a few hundred K on active camouflage isn't a terrible idea.) So stealthed powered armour with flight characteristics more like a helicopter gunship than a ballistic path is not totally implausible. (What's really implausible is spam in a can on a battlefield dominated by combat drones, but I digress.)

    202:

    And all you've done is recite the Reader's Digest version of the highlights.

    I think that mass media and then the Internet has also contributed to the mess there. (And in other places.)

    "How you going to keep them down on the farm when they've seen Paree".

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgqVCJpRqWQ

    Way too many people know now that the mess in their immediate location isn't the way the world works.

    203:

    (What's really implausible is spam in a can on a battlefield dominated by combat drones, but I digress.)

    Hard for most to imagine what kind of mobile computers we would be carrying around today back in the 50s. Isaac Asimov got it somewhat in Foundation but still most SF writers couldn't make the leap to imagine where we are now much less where we will be in the future.

    I remember one story where they were making hyper space leaps but having to input the values into the computer after looking up numbers in log table books.

    For many it meant a leap from tubes to semis to ICs to full computers on a chip. Big leap for most.

    Anyway, removing the Spam in the can required imagining computer power that very few writers (if any back then) were able to do.

    204:

    Yeah.

    There's also a couple of complicating factors emerging from the USA being the hegemonic thalassic empire of the age:

    a) the USA has developed a foundational mythology about being plucky rebels against an Empire. But this is a terrible foundation when your job is to run an empire, because it means you're perpetually lying to yourself.

    b) The USA war of independence was to no small extent a war in defense of slavery (it's no coincidence that it got under way just two Atlantic sailing seasons after the Mansfield decision essentially outlawed slavery in England: it was glaringly obvious that it was only a matter of time before abolitionism arrived throughout the British Empire). But this also gets swept under the rug in popular accounts of (a), leading to yet more inconsistencies between the USA's self-opinion and its actions.

    c) The lying reaches a crescendo with Woodrow Wilson. (Do I need to explain?) His toxic hypocrisy ends up dominating US foreign policy for most of a century. (Kicking it into the long grass was about the only good thing I can think of attributing to the neoconservatives.) Led to the sort of outcome best summed up in the immortal phrase from the Vietnam war, "we had to destroy the village in order to save it."

    d) Oil corrupts: absolute oil corrupts absolutely.

    e) Pace (c), there came into existence a promotion ladder in the State Department that existed in embryo from roughly the 1860s onwards and became dominant in the latter half of the 20th century, by which one cannot rise to the top of State unless one has successfully conducted at least one reasonably contained colonial war. (This was also true of the British Empire in the 19th century. And of other empires.) Climbing this ladder was necessary in order to be able to paint onesself as successful on foreign policy, or to use FP as a springboard to the Oval Office. Note that "winning a contained war" is not invariably (or even often!) beneficial to the planet as a whole: other countries use soft power, foreign aid, peacekeeping missions, etc. to achieve the same diplomatic outcomes without the violence. (Example: the EU, which doesn't have the military force projection or diplomatic cohesion to go full imperial.) But it's how the Empire rolls.

    The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of the US State Department is to generate convenient colonial wars in order to exert dominance/control over potential rival hegemons. But that breaks down when it runs into an Outside Context Problem, where a bunch of diplomats who think they're dealing with a nice cohesive Post-Westphalian State based on shared enlightenment values discover to their horror that they've wandered into a wasteland populated by pissed-off nihilistic tribesmen, and meanwhile they're wearing flak jackets with targets painted on them.

    205:

    The story with the log table books was Starman Jones.

    As for advances in computers, there was a Sheckley story where the government sent robots to the battle of Armageddon because they would more effective than humans. So the robots were taken up to heaven and the humans were left behind.

    206:

    Charlie, you're preaching to the choir - I'm well aware of Sykes-Picot* and other horrible misunderstandings of Middle-Eastern history by the U.S. and/or Europe in the decades leading up to 9/11. I simply wasn't discussing them.

    • Possibly the very worst political decision in history, which may well kill more people than WWII as the centuries go by - I'd be very surprised if the Sykes-Picot death toll is under a million at this point, and all the ways that decision could go pear-shaped in the future are highly unpleasant to contemplate.
    207:

    While you're correct, the bigger point was that Verhoeven's opus was released in 1997. So I'm imagining something that would have been affordable with 1990s technology, which is why I suggest stormtroopers with jet packs, something that can be made in large quantities on both a human scale and as practical miniatures for big fight scenes.

    Thinking about it, something like the space marines from Warhamster 40oK would have been even more appropriate, since they were popular at the time (premiered in 1987) and are far more obviously fascist than SST is. That's if you're trying the Verhoeven Gambit.

    Right now, given the insect apocalypse and our concerns about fulminating fascism worldwide, I think a pro-bug, antifa story is far more appropriate than any form of SST.

    208:

    Energy. It's become a hobbyhorse for me and I have a habit of reaching for the "energy" magnifying glass any time I look at anything speculative these days but...

    Assume the ST motor-driven powered armour plus weapons and ammo loadout plus the fleshy meatbag inside weighs, all-up, 500 kilos or so. Something has to power this sucker for ground movement and it has to be able to deliver at least a hundred kW of power. They might get away with a self-contained fuel-driven generator of some type. I'd expect Heinlein was intending they'd use infinite-capacity Shipstones made from Unobtainium, maybe. He'd used them before in other stories.

    Additionally something has to lift this half-tonne of easily-identifable slow-flying target with an acceleration of a couple of gees multiple times. This would be rocket motors of some kind which means fuel and oxidiser and lots of it. We have people here on Earth using small gas turbines to fly around nearly-naked for a few minutes but a suitable oxygen atmosphere can't be guaranteed on all possible battlefields and so carrying their own oxidiser is probably necessary.

    Basically the energy budget of powered armour comes up short unless they use lots and lots of extension leads and maybe spring-loaded boots, IMO.

    209:

    Nojay @ 209: "Basically the energy budget of powered armour comes up short unless they use lots and lots of extension leads and maybe spring-loaded boots, IMO."

    When I reread it just for the powered armor I noticed that he never even hints at the source of power for the motors in the legs.

    On the other hand he states that the powered armor needs "jump juice" to rocket higher than their legs can bring them and that they expend all the jump juice and need refills after a day of combat.

    210:

    Yeah - having learnt the hard way in '14-18 - we did that as well the 2nd time around.

    I heavily suspected that would be the case, but decided to not get into it given my lack of knowledge on the subject. The internet does not need more confidently asserted falsehoods.

    211:

    Hard for most but the ground had been covered quite well by Stanislaw Lem a long time ago. I will have to dig out the book to remember its title, but he has more or less accurately predicted each stage of military tech development as it relates to computers and AI from 1970 to now.

    I have little doubt that his projected end result of autonomous machines making human battlefield survival something that might be measured in fractions of seconds will be reached.

    212:

    But, would we be able to tell the difference, anyway? I mean, they are both entirely content-free ... What is GPT-2? Taking those in order: SOMN's posts have a characteristic structure and relate in some way to either the topic of discussion or current events. In contrast, FRNJweaver's posts are much closer related to a standard letter structure.

    I disagree on SOMN's posts being content free. I rarely find enough signal to justify the noise, but there is signal there. I am unconvinced of that regarding FRNJweaver.

    GPT-2 is an open source AI project. Basically, you train it on a ton of sample text, and then it'll generate text in that style with mixed success.

    213:

    For once we agree on an energy issue!

    Yes, I think powered armor in most situations is daft, as are walking mecha weapons. You need something like the "Mr. Fusion" from Back to the Future to make the mobile infantry combat suits work as advertised.

    There's other daftness, not including the starships. Battlefield micronukes? I don't think it's possible for a human with a jetpack to outrun the smallest useful nuke, AFAIK. While yes, with unlimited energy the human could go fast enough, battle armor's not exactly streamlined enough to go supersonic without generating a lot of heat and turbulence. And figuring out which posture to accelerate--Standing up? Sitting? without the grunt passing out--is another one of those fun and interesting conundrums.

    214:

    Thinking about reasonable mechanized combat armor for mobile infantry, I've got a modest proposal:

    Codename ECHIDNA.

    It's a suit that does what infantry is supposed to be really good at: digging in. Using it, a warfighter can dig a foxhole in under a minute in anything less than reinforced concrete.

    To make it most useful with soldiers, the armor is thickest on the suit's gluteal regions, and the smart turret gun is also mounted on the suit's backside.

    More seriously, combat engineers could used powered suits better than most infantry. Mole suits aren't kewl, but they are cool for nerds.

    215:

    If you want to bless me you can bless my bottom...

    216:

    "No plan survives contact with the cinema?" I am totally stealing that

    217:

    More seriously, combat engineers could used powered suits better than most infantry.

    Currently the research appears to be more focused on logistics people; exoskeletoned stevedores can load and unload vehicles faster and with less damage to their bodies than either forklifts* or unaugmented people. Plus, limiting their use to ships and established bases means they can plug into an extension cord. Most of the material suggested the immediate focus is on ammunition handling.

    • Forklifts win when everything is already palletized and they can drive into the vehicle.
    218:

    Yes, I agree. In cinema, this is of course the famous exoskeleton in Aliens, and I agree that this makes sense.

    What I was thinking is the Israeli strategy of burrowing through walls between adjacent houses as a form of urban assault, rather than going door to door down the street, when fighting in Palestinian settlements. I don't support this, merely point out that there's potentially a role for powered armor in places where they're already using armored bulldozers and blowing holes through walls.

    As for concerns about drone war, I think the ECHIDNA would be an adequate answer to that....

    219:

    (What's really implausible is spam in a can on a battlefield dominated by combat drones, but I digress.)

    Who controls the drones and from where? It'll be a long time before people are comfortable letting computers control weapons with a more complicated decision than missile incoming -> fire. Controlling drones from a climate-controlled office back in home country only works against people who lack any sort of jamming that can reach said drones (ground vehicles and quad copters are a lot easier to reach than Global Hawks). That said, we're seeing a lot more integration of drones of a variety of sizes and mobility types, so spam in a can controlling the surrounding drone swarm is probably going to show up in one form or another.

    220:

    Confusion -- It's been quite some time since I re-read Star Ship Troopers, but ... isn't Johnny Rico Argentinian. I know I'm not the only one who is confused by this -- it's a perennial discussion. I kinda leaned Argentinian due to the history of Germany with Argentina, and then particularly the history of nazis in Argentina during WWII and after.

    I shall commit heresy here: Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will is a brilliant cinematic work, far more so than either Heinlein's novel or Verhoeven's movie. I've seen Riefenstahl's film only once, which was enough. It was a terrifying experience, not least because it was awe-ful, in the old meaning of the word. Olympia was almost as impressive. Both films also were all the more shocking to my system, knowing a woman had made them. Which has left me with a great deal to unpack, which unpacking continues, despite it having been years since I watched them.

    Never felt that way from Heinlein's novel or the movie.

    The real world experience of a real world tyranny always diminishes a fantasy recreation. Which was one of the most effective themes of Díaz's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, in which Sauron looks a piker compared with Trujillo. Then I learned it in real life 2016-2020 -- and that was nothing close -- yet -- to Trujillo or the nazis. We can always get there though, I suppose.

    221:

    Yes, though that omits the main 1984 aspect - specifically, the need to turn Russia into a containable enemy, following the demise of the USSR. China would not do, as it was and is not containable. What utterly baffles me about the USA psyche is their fear, almost panic, when faced with utterly negligible opponents. Remember the (apparently genuine) hysteria that the USA would be conquered by Saddam Hussain unless it invaded Iraq?

    222:

    Paws Yes & Churchill / Attlee / Macmillan / Heath / Callaghan all did military service, too.

    H SS Troopers idea of bombing aliens until they ally with us. Worked on fascist Italy in WW II didn't it?

    Charlie @ 200 Ever read "A Line in the Sand" - about Sykes - Picot?? Sunni / Shia - NOT such a "cold" war & it's been running since Karbala. ( 680 CE / 61 AH )

    @205 (b) Have you ANY IDEA how desperately loudly & wrigglingly almost every US commenter will deny that one, down to selling their grandmother for soap manufacture? Oh one little extra - never mind the "OCP" - winning a "Short Victorious War" - all too often doesn't turn out that way, or not for the idiots starting it, anyway.

    Rabidchaos Thanks about GPT-2 SomN's posts have a structure? Who knew?

    223:

    Olympia is the most amazing film I have every seen, but its showing is often discouraged purely because of who its director was. As far as I know, Triumph des Willens is still effectively banned in the UK, so I have never seen it.

    224:

    First mistake: letting Britain and France get away with the Sykes-Picot treaty circa 1918-19

    I don't think the US could stop Britain and France from doing that. Certainly not the US of the 1910s and 20s. Internationally, it was still a distinctly second string power, capable of throwing raw material and raw bodies at European-scale problems but lacking the institutional expertise and the established industries to be recognized as a superpower in its own right. With the short shrift our education system gives WW1, most Americans tend to back-project the status quo at the end of WW2 onto their understanding of the world post WW1. We weren't yet, and lacked some key ingredients necessary for, the super power we would in time become. As a result, our diplomatic position in negotiating the end of WW1 and the subsequent events was already weak for taking on two super power empires trying to empire.

    Of course, domestic isolationism meant we didn't even try. Were American politicians and diplomats to believe the story they tell about America and choose their actions to live up to that ideal, then tilting at the Sykes-Picot windmill would still set up their successors with a reputation that might have enabled ending Sykes-Picot in a way that minimized bloodshed and benefited the people on the ground, with long term soft power and security benefits for the American Empire.

    Instead, we had pig-headed ignorance at best and bloody-minded opportunism at worst.

    225:

    Juan Rico's family were Filipinos who lived in Argentina. They spoke Tagalog at home. These were some of the little details of the story in which, I think, Heinlein was pointing out that without borders and prejudice people would move around frequently - as they have historically.

    226: 191 - As I read it, they had the opposite issue in ST. Not needing to conscript people for the military, but more volunteers than they knew what to do with. 200 bullet 1 - Agreed, with a note that British Middle Eastern power politics goes back even further ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration ). 204 - The earliest I can come up with ICs is circa Project Apollo. 214 - Well, the Douglas AIR-2 Genie had a range of about 6 miles, which was less than the effective range of its 1.5kT nuclear warhead. Standard tactics for the system involved firing it, and then performing an Immelmann turn (now renamed a Yo-Yo) on full afterburner, to get away, 221 - Rico is Hispanic yes, his mother was killed in Argentina yes, but I don't think it's actually specified where he was born or resident.
    227:

    Remember the (apparently genuine) hysteria that the USA would be conquered by Saddam Hussain unless it invaded Iraq?

    Idiots led by liars.

    228:

    No, it wasn't done on Italy, and that wasn't the reason they ended up joining the allies. Mussolini had suckered them into believing in glorious campaigns of expansion, they discovered they had been had, and had changed their minds.

    229:

    In re Sykes-Picot: anyone know sf about living with the consequences of bad treaties or other arrangements from very long ago?

    230:

    Pixodaros @ 171: IIRC, the US Marine Corps has accepted conscripts at various times in its history, but the marine corps of the Banana Wars and gunboats in China in the 1920s and 1930s was volunteer. My point is that governments have avoided the unpopularity of mass mobilization by having a parallel volunteer military for the small wars (often recruited from those with no other options: whereas on 10 September 2001 the US military did a pretty good job of reflecting the class and race balance of the US population as a whole, because it had so many resources that it could attract people with options).

    Except that it didn't.

    It was heavily skewed toward minorities & "working class" whites "recruited from those with no other options", particularly in the lower ranks. Even with standards waived (height/weight, physical fitness, prior/current drug use) recruiters often had a hard time fulfilling their quotas, especially for combat arms.

    At the time, the total footprint of the U.S. military (including parents, spouses, dependents, significant others & Best Friends Forever of service members) was 1.5% of the U.S. population and included (interestingly enough for the subject of this blog post) a significant number of non-citizens who had joined the military in hopes of gaining green-card/naturalization status.

    231:

    Mikko Parviainen @ 178:

    So yeah, decent enough films if you can ignore the really screwed up combat scenes, but still disappointing.

    I watched the first two, but in the second one the story went so far away from the book that I didn't watch the third one. I kind of understand the reasons to change things for the different medium, but I'm grumpy and middle-aged, so Faramir was the last straw for me.

    Nice visuals, but still left me feeling a bit empty.

    The same happened with the Hobbit movies, I watched the first one and didn't go to see the later ones.

    For all the film's faults, Peter Jackson did not set out to deliberately trash the source novels. Verhoeven did. Fuck him.

    232:

    paws4thot @ 181: #153 - Disagree. Being a REMF in an "all volunteer service" means actively trying to become and stay rear echelon.

    No, it just means you're doing your job where you are assigned to do it. And the place you have been assigned is not at the point of the spear.

    #163 - Never read the cited interview. Otherwise I'll agree to being Scottish, or British, but regard calling me "English" as an insult. That said, I'll also agree your para 3 with notes:-
    a) Yes, satire, well part satire anyway.
    b) It's subtle, but RAH does say that there is no such thing as "safe rear echelon" in interstellar warfare. EG, Rico's mother's death when the Bugs use asteroids to "bomb" South America (can't recall the cited city off hand).
    c) There are sequences, like the MI raid on the Skinnies' planet, that are pure MilSF, years before the term was invented.

    Buenos Aries. Could have been any city not in the Continental U.S. to indicate the "Federation" is a world-wide society that is not an extension of the U.S. government as it existed when Heinlein was writing the book. Both the Philippines and South America were former Spanish colonial possessions. Same reason the beginning of the Federation happens with the veterans in Aberdeen.

    He does kind of skim over how "western civilization" goes from losing an Asiatic War to becoming a world government.

    Economically (although he gives scant attention to it in the book) his society appears to be very much the U.S. of the 1950s writ large. It's the post war boom years shared by everyone. There's no attention given to how you'd actually achieve such a utopia, it's just a golden age there in the background.

    He's not describing how society works, he's pontificating on the way he thinks people should act in a free and just society.

    233:

    "I don't think the US could stop Britain and France from doing that."

    Indeed, they couldn't. All Woodrow Wilson's idealistic plans for how America would shape the post-war world according to the principles of self-determination and democracy and stuff just like the propaganda had been saying - propaganda which had been in significant part directed at the US in the first place, to try and persuade them to come in on the Entente side (or at least not interfere with the blockade of Germany too much) - basically went pffft as soon as the winners got round the table and Britain and France steamrollered everyone else's intentions out of consideration. The two principal Western participants pretty much got it all their own way (albeit with many disagreements between the two as to what that way should be) and nobody else really got a look-in. (Though in the case of his top idea - the League of Nations - it was mainly the US itself that sabotaged it by Congress refusing to ratify it.)

    In any case the US were themselves ambivalent over the Middle East because they wanted the oil (fretting about domestic reserves running out being a significant US concern of the time). In the end the easiest way for them to get what they wanted was to basically go with the flow and pick up the crumbs from Britain's table. (Also, everyone was a bit confused over what were the most important bits to get because at that time nobody really had much idea how much oil there actually was or where it was all buried; some deposits had advertised their presence by leaking out of the ground naturally, so they were known of, but not known about, and what quantities might be found for the looking in places where there weren't any natural leaks was pretty much down to conjecture.)

    A lot of the reason Britain got away with it was because of the locals being glad that at least they weren't the French.

    The Saudis got their start basically because the British found them a more puppetisable option than any of the other camel herders who would be king...

    It was also Britain who started off the mess in Israel by supporting Zionism as a propaganda exercise to get Jewish opinion on their side in the war, and then finding themselves in a position where they actually did have to try and go through with it. (Which they fucked up, badly.) It didn't become a matter of such major importance to the US until after the next war.

    Second Greg's recommendation of "A Line In The Sand", which deals not only with the actual wartime stuff that set up the initial conditions but also covers in detail the sewage farm that ensued once the war was over and Germany was no longer the overwhelming consumer of attention. Also worth looking at is "The First World Oil War" by TC Winegard, which goes into the oil-related motivations and actions in that area which don't usually get talked about that much.

    234:

    ha, starship troopers, that book does bring back some memories. Twas' in 1974, I had brought two books with me on vacation at the seaside, ST and The three stigmatas of Palmer Eldritch. At the time, one of my main concerns was how to avoid being drafted (In peacetime, little risk of being shot at, but I didn't fancy spending one year being ordered about by the stupidest people on Earth) Heinlein's ludicrous militarism and bullshit politics didn't go down well with me, yet the book was somewhat readable and luckily quite short, so I didn't fling it into the sea, though I was tempted to do so at times. Philip K Dick's book was great, still one of my favorites.

    235:

    the beginning of the Federation happens with the veterans in Aberdeen.

    Quick check -- can anyone with the source material check for me if the "Aberdeen" mentioned in the book was specifically Scotland or was it left unspecified? I think Maryland in the US has an Aberdeen, home to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, a weapons testing area (including Naval weapons) and I thought this was the Aberdeen referenced in the story for the longest time.

    236:

    Its commonly believed that the US military over-recruits poor and racialized people, but that was not really true circa the 1990s (and one reason many blacks ended up in the military was that they perceived it as a less racist institution than other employers or because it had attractive benefits like free education). This changed in the late 2000s as it became hard not to see what a disaster the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were and recruiters got desperate. The late 2000s were when they were recruiting people without a high-school degree or with criminal convictions.

    My source was probably David R. Segal and Mady Wechsler Segal, "America’s Military Population," Population Bulletin, Vol. 59, No. 4, December 2004 especially table 1 and figure 7 ... what is your source?

    237:

    "My understanding is that eg. French conscription in the middle of the 20th century was just as inequitable"

    French conscription at the beginning of the century basically said that you had to provide a body to the army for two years - but it didn't have to be your body. You could get someone else to do it for you if you wanted; as long as a recruit turned up to correspond with "your" slot at the right time they weren't too bothered if it wasn't you. And IIRC it wasn't too hard to find a substitute for the asking even if you weren't a nob. There were people who took money to do it (some of them even made a profession of it and went round several times), but there were also quite a lot of people who actually wanted to do it and you stood a decent chance of being able to tap one of them up even if you didn't have any money.

    Not a bad idea really, to let the people who would hate it and be shit anyway replace themselves with people who actually liked the idea. The ones who went round several times no doubt cut into the numbers of supposedly militarily pre-trained civilians to be pulled back in in time of war, but I don't think by all that much, and in any case all the European conscription countries who followed that idea fucked it up and fell way short of obtaining the full possible yield, even Germany.

    When they did decide they needed a better yield they tidied up some of the sloppiness and moved to taking people for three years instead of two, but by that time WW1 was nearly upon them and there wasn't time for the changes to have much effect.

    238:

    Bellinghman @ 183: Nitpick

    FDR jr served on a Destroyer convoying from "Iceland to Minsk", supported the Sicilian invasion and ended up as Captain of a Destroyer Escort that earned 5 battle stars for WW2 against Japan;

    Minsk is the capital city of Belarus, a landlocked state. Getting a convoy there would be rather tricky.

    I presume you meant the coastal Russian city of Murmansk.

    That would be my guess if I'd thought about it. "Iceland to Minsk" is a quote from his brother James ...

    Brother James Roosevelt summarized "Brud's" naval service: "Franklin served on a destroyer that dodged torpedoes from Iceland to Minsk [sic!]. He became executive officer of the destroyer USS Mayrant (DD-402), which was bombed at Palermo in the Sicilian invasion. The famed war correspondent Quentin Reynolds went out of his way to write mother how bravely Franklin performed in that bloody ordeal, in which he was awarded the Silver Star Medal for exposing himself under fire to carry a critically wounded sailor to safety."
    239:

    In re Sykes-Picot: anyone know sf about living with the consequences of bad treaties or other arrangements from very long ago?

    Well, the Arabesk trilogy by Jon Courtenay Grimwood -- which I highly recommend -- deals with a Middle East where the outcome of WW1 was rather different and the Ottoman empire still exists into the 21st century: a warped/hard-boiled variant cyberpunk crime trilogy, starting with Pashazade, it didn't sell into the US market for some years because of immediate post-9/11 sore-headedness (sympathetic arab protagonists?!? Impossible!).

    240:

    That makes me wonder what changes there have been in demographics of who read this work and Heinlein in general, because sure, some of his books are aimed at 12, 14 year olds, but most of the rest of his books have been read avidly by what we would now call young adults. How much they have been read by full blown adults in the 20's and 30's I don't know; other issues arise such as I re-read Stranger in a strange land when I was around 30 and it was pretty rubbish, although some of that was cultural changes.

    241:

    And the zillion (mostly very bad) ones about where Britain did not completely balls it up in the 1770s.

    242:

    David L @ 184:

    True, except that the breakdown of the US Army in 1941-45 was 39% volunteers, 61% draftees.

    Not really a valid number for the point you're trying to make.

    My father was drafted. Not because he didn't want to volunteer but because he knew it would happen as soon as he graduated from high school. And it did. The local draft boards back then basically took the high school graduation roles and sent out the notices. When he showed me a class picture from when he graduated in 43 there were about twice as many girls and boys. He said a lot of the boys had dropped out to sign up.

    My father tried to enlist twice and was turned down twice before being drafted. He would have been 20/21 years old by then; graduated from high school in June 1940.

    243:

    On the matter of the American revolution, a book I got a few years ago (I think previously owned by a prof of American history at Stirling uni)called "A mighty Empire" by Marc Egnal, makes it clear how much the revolution was a matter of a lot of people seeing opportunities for expansion and turning their 13 states into a big strong empire.

    244:
    Eisenhower's son John served in the Army during WW2 & Korea, receiving a Bronze Star and earning the CIB & Glider Wings. He served in the Army & Army Reserve from 1944 to 1974.

    In the run up to the 2008 election John Eisenhower wrote an Opinion arguing against children of presidents serving in combat. In effect he was arguing against his own service.

    Among the tidbits: His father made him promise to never be taken alive in the Korean War. The common worry about presidential children is their being taken as a hostage and the effect on that on the president's mental state. The knowledge or even suspicion that your own child killed himself to protect your president, I imagine, would have a similar corrosive effect on presidential mental health. Somehow Eisenhower disagreed.

    245:

    David L @ 187:

    The truth is these are not very bright guys ... follow the money.

    Oh, I think most of them were. They just had a deluded ideology.

    I know way too many people who have very very very high IQs but very warped ideologies. Which puts a crazy spin on most of their actions.

    Having a high IQ doesn't make you smart. I have a high IQ. When I was younger I had a very very very VERY (MENSA level) high IQ. It has diminished quite a bit since then, mainly due to lack of opportunity to exercise it (You lose what you don't use).

    But no, having a high IQ doesn't make you smart.

    246:

    Toby @ 194: This is a quote from the Wikipedia article on Korean war POWs that JBS linked to:

    "The discrimination extended to the children of POWs who were restricted in their careers, barred from membership in the Workers' Party of Korea, college admissions and military service.[14] Mr. Koh Eul Won, a former POW who escaped to South Korea in 2001, testified that "in North Korea, one must complete military service to be treated like a human being. However, our children were rejected by the military solely for the reason of being the children of POWs. Therefore, our children had no choice but to work in the coal mines as we had done." Young-Bok Yoo, who escaped in 2000, also writes about the discrimination and surveillance in his Memoirs."

    This,ironically, illustrates what the system in ST is more likely to be like, than the one Heinlein wrote about. This is why Verhoeven made the satire he did. I would like to point out that Verhoeven is Dutch, and born in 1938, living through the Nazi occupation. He is also highly intelligent, having a double masters in maths and physics. That he managed to make an anti Nazi satire of America, in Hollywood is a massive achievement. Critiquing it on the basis of a lack of power armour, or some such, seems to be missing the point. He needed a recognisable IP to get it made, this may be considered disrespectful to Heinlein, but I would consider it a worthy goal. I would say Verhoeven is a very underrated director, with people often missing what he is saying because of the type of film he makes.

    If Verhoeven wanted to make an anti-Nazi satire about living through the Nazi occupation of Holland in WW2, he should have written his own goddamn book, instead of trashing Heinlein's. He's a despicable person who committed a despicable act.

    247:

    My father tried to enlist twice and was turned down twice before being drafted. He would have been 20/21 years old by then; graduated from high school in June 1940.

    I suspect much of it was due to draft boards being very very local. Your dad might have already had a job. My father didn't.

    Each board had numbers to meet based on local population totals. And so they were made of up of a collection of local "heads of society" who sifted through the list of availables and sent out notices. I'm sure these boards had a few issues with favoritism.

    248:

    Fascinating that people who appreciate the book is satirical while recognising that some take it literally can’t appreciate exactly the same is true for the film… (how anyone can watch Robocop and not recognise Verhoeven is more complex than the stereotype suggests…)

    249:

    Heteromeles @ 208: While you're correct, the bigger point was that Verhoeven's opus was released in 1997. So I'm imagining something that would have been affordable with 1990s technology, which is why I suggest stormtroopers with jet packs, something that can be made in large quantities on both a human scale and as practical miniatures for big fight scenes.

    The original Star Wars film (aka Episode IV: A New Hope) was released in 1977 ... followed by Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983), so required "SPECIAL EFFECTS" technology already existed in 1997 and was well within the producers' budget.

    Not to mention Ray Harryhausen's prior work.

    250:

    The Bushies were told in 2002 that the Iraqi oilfields were already trashed by 10 years of sanctions and that no way would the production goals be realized. The response was to shoot the messengers.

    The "high on their own supply" part was more directed at the other point I mentioned, that the invaders would be welcomed because they deposed a dictator.

    As for realpolitik, yes a coherent plan to seize the oil by proxy and use it as a lever against the Saudis would have made sense, had it been executed competently. I presume that this was what the 98 (I think that was the number) of Senators expected, when they voted to approve the AUMF.

    That was before the steely-eyed masters of realpolitik sent an Evangelical college youth group to administer the occupation, fired the entire Iraqi army with no plan for disarming them or even feeding them afterwards, and in general screwed the pooch. "High on their own supply" is an extremely charitable characterization of all that.

    251:

    'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'

    252:

    I think you're conflating JBS and timrowledge. Also, see my note at 201.

    253:

    Rabidchaos @ 218:

    More seriously, combat engineers could used powered suits better than most infantry.

    Currently the research appears to be more focused on logistics people; exoskeletoned stevedores can load and unload vehicles faster and with less damage to their bodies than either forklifts* or unaugmented people. Plus, limiting their use to ships and established bases means they can plug into an extension cord. Most of the material suggested the immediate focus is on ammunition handling.

    * Forklifts win when everything is already palletized and they can drive into the vehicle.

    That's what we can do now. But what will we be able to do in the future that no one has thought of yet? Why doesn't anyone in Starship Troopers have a smart phone or a tablet computer?

    Why does no one in Star Wars or Alien have a smart phone or a tablet computer? I do remember a scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where one of the astronauts is eating a meal watching his parents's recorded birthday greetings on some kind of a flat pad display.

    254:

    Heteromeles @ 219: Yes, I agree. In cinema, this is of course the famous exoskeleton in Aliens, and I agree that this makes sense.

    What I was thinking is the Israeli strategy of burrowing through walls between adjacent houses as a form of urban assault, rather than going door to door down the street, when fighting in Palestinian settlements. I don't support this, merely point out that there's potentially a role for powered armor in places where they're already using armored bulldozers and blowing holes through walls.

    Those kind of tactics for fighting room to room & house to house in cities dates from the Second World War. I don't know if it was invented by the Germans, Soviets or the U.S. forces ... probably developed independently by all three.

    You don't need powered armor or bulldozers. C-4 works just fine. Never had to do it in combat, but it was part of my MOS, so I did get to practice it in training.

    255:

    @147 et al: one of the reasons for the crazed, got-to-have-an-enemy attitude of those running the US is, of course, that the ultra-wealthy, since the 1800s, have been TERRIFIED of a revolution that would resemble the French or Russian, and they would not just not be rich and powerful, but in danger of being shot for what they'd been doing.

    Therefore, it's always "be terrified of [fill in the blank], you have almost nothing, but if They take over, you'll lose everything."

    I point to everything from the Haymarket Affair to the Red Scare of 1919 in the US, and on, and on.

    Also, the aftermath of WW I included Wilson's stroke, and so a shortage of even his diplomacy, and Harding....

    256:

    Foxessa @ 221: Confusion -- It's been quite some time since I re-read Star Ship Troopers, but ... isn't Johnny Rico Argentinian. I know I'm not the only one who is confused by this -- it's a perennial discussion. I kinda leaned Argentinian due to the history of Germany with Argentina, and then particularly the history of nazis in Argentina during WWII and after.

    Philippines. At one point Johnny mentions his family speaks Tagalog at home.

    I shall commit heresy here: Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will is a brilliant cinematic work, far more so than either Heinlein's novel or Verhoeven's movie. I've seen Riefenstahl's film only once, which was enough. It was a terrifying experience, not least because it was awe-ful, in the old meaning of the word. Olympia was almost as impressive. Both films also were all the more shocking to my system, knowing a woman had made them. Which has left me with a great deal to unpack, which unpacking continues, despite it having been years since I watched them.

    Riefenstahl was celebrating fascism and more particularly the German variant Nazism. Heinlein was NOT. That's the fundamental flaw in Verhoeven's film; the thing he gets wrong that makes his film EVIL. He's hatefully misrepresenting Heinlein's work.

    Never felt that way from Heinlein's novel or the movie.

    The real world experience of a real world tyranny always diminishes a fantasy recreation. Which was one of the most effective themes of Díaz's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, in which Sauron looks a piker compared with Trujillo. Then I learned it in real life 2016-2020 -- and that was nothing close -- yet -- to Trujillo or the nazis. We can always get there though, I suppose.

    Heinlein wrote Utopian Science Fiction. Many of the ideals he espoused would fall apart confronted with real world evil. In the real world, most people don't equate rights with responsibilities. They're shiftless, irresponsible and selfish. That's what Heinlein was writing against.

    257:

    Hell, yes. But the Saudis are "Our Friends", and the Bush family is alllll about oil, and so was Cheney, who wanted to invade Iraq all along (see "Project for a New American Century").

    258:

    Well, of course some did dodge the draft that way. I'm not saying all or nothing.

    I'm also a little older: I became eligible years before the lottery, so Alice's Restaurant was the way to go (though my father told me they'd be happy to help me get to Canada).

    Years later, I burned my draft card when the draft expired. Then came the lottery. 347, here.

    259:

    The death penalty: in the 1860s, I think it was the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court did a study... and of 60 or so people convicted to be hung, the death penalty had not deterred them from their crime,

    260:

    Sykes-Picot was a French and Brit treaty made prior to the end time of WWI, designed for them to pick off the oil rich lands of the Middle East that were under control of the Turks. So it was part of the secret deal for France and Britain to divide up what was left of the Ottoman hegemony. The US had nothing to do with that.

    Moreover, by the time it was presented as a fait d'accompli at the Conference, Wilson was down with the Influenza. It was expected he would die. He didn't die, but his recovery was very slow, and he was never the same. We're speaking of his brain power.

    At that time WWI began Wilson was a total peacenik/isolationist, reflecting the tone of the US electorate, with exceptions such as Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson got re-elected on "He Kept Us Out Of War!"

    With the sinking of the Lusitania he changed horses and the federal government rolled out a propaganda machine like nothing ever seen before or even imagined to change people's minds, and began the stupendous draft, while allowing out in the open the Feds to start lending money to the Allies, and supply them with everything they needed. Before that, lending anything to the Allies by US banks, and providing supplies from US manufactures was strictly forbidden by the Fed. After the first year, I think, the Fed sub rosa allowed the banking House of Morgan to lend through the Bank of Britain and their own British Morgan banking and financial institutions there. House of Morgan made stupendous more fortunes out of entire war effort. They were already stupendously rich and had been for a century, were established both here and in UK, and even Europe, and were opening into the Far East.

    More importantly this meant AFTER the War, the US became the global money power - lender of resort. It ruled global credit and capitalization. Before WWI, Europe, and particularly Britain were the credit powers, with the credit balance flowing toward England, not the US. After the War that was over, to everyone's surprise, even including Jack Morgan's.

    ~~~~~~

    The Plebs of Rome weren't able to vote. So they couldn't vote for their bread and circuses.

    261:

    Yep. The paradigm, esp. in the US, has been about money, and the ultra-wealthy protecting their plantations (factories, etc). The whole idea of any other reason for conflict elsewhere in the world is beyond them. Religion? That's for Sundays, and no one Important pays attention the rest of the week. Nationalism? That's what we feed the suckers.

    Etc.

    262:

    Troutwaxer @ 226: Juan Rico's family were Filipinos who lived in Argentina. They spoke Tagalog at home. These were some of the little details of the story in which, I think, Heinlein was pointing out that without borders and prejudice people would move around frequently - as they have historically.

    That would explain something I have never quite understood. I knew they were Filipinos, but I thought they lived in the Philippines. I've always wondered a bit about why his mother would be visiting relatives in Buenos Aires.

    But if they were Filipinos living in Argentina Buenos Aires makes more sense to me.

    I don't spend much time thinking about Starship Troopers. Only when I encounter blog posts about it, or when "Libertarians" start quoting it to justify Neo-fascist beliefs

    263:

    JBS @ 254: "Why does no one in Star Wars or Alien have a smart phone or a tablet computer? I do remember a scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where one of the astronauts is eating a meal watching his parents's recorded birthday greetings on some kind of a flat pad display."

    Astronaut Frank Poole was suntanning himself when he watched his parent's distance-delayed birthday message on a wall screen.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpzCGZnpXkE

    Poole was eating when he watched BBC 12's previoius interview of the crew on a thin flat pad display.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDha7nj4s10

    Kubrick got things right in his movie because he was a rare film director who actually read books in addition to having co-wrote the 2001 script with Arthur C. Clarke.

    Hollywood film directors and producers don't read books. They just watch movies or TV. You can't possibly expect any of them to direct or produce anything interesting about the future. They have a near zero amount of scientific culture in their tiny brains.

    That's why I wasn't surprised by the film version of Starship Troopers.

    264:

    stirner @ 235: ha, starship troopers, that book does bring back some memories. Twas' in 1974, I had brought two books with me on vacation at the seaside, ST and The three stigmatas of Palmer Eldritch. At the time, one of my main concerns was how to avoid being drafted (In peacetime, little risk of being shot at, but I didn't fancy spending one year being ordered about by the stupidest people on Earth)
    Heinlein's ludicrous militarism and bullshit politics didn't go down well with me, yet the book was somewhat readable and luckily quite short, so I didn't fling it into the sea, though I was tempted to do so at times.
    Philip K Dick's book was great, still one of my favorites.

    Who was going to draft you? In 1974 it couldn't have been the U.S. because the switch to an "All Volunteer Force" here went into effect 1 July 1973.

    265:

    Nojay @ 236:

    the beginning of the Federation happens with the veterans in Aberdeen.

    Quick check -- can anyone with the source material check for me if the "Aberdeen" mentioned in the book was specifically Scotland or was it left unspecified? I think Maryland in the US has an Aberdeen, home to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, a weapons testing area (including Naval weapons) and I thought this was the Aberdeen referenced in the story for the longest time.

    It says "Aberdeen, Scotland" in the book. [p.229, May 2010 Ace Premium Edition]

    On the next page it says "Probably those Scottish veterans, ..."

    Aberdeen, Maryland was named after Aberdeen, Scotland by Scots immigrants.

    266:

    Those kind of tactics for fighting room to room & house to house in cities dates from the Second World War. I don't know if it was invented by the Germans, Soviets or the U.S. forces ... probably developed independently by all three.

    You don't need powered armor or bulldozers. C-4 works just fine. Never had to do it in combat, but it was part of my MOS, so I did get to practice it in training.

    I think you missed the turn. In Palestinian territories where the buildings are wall to wall, the Israelis are blasting through the walls, so that they can't be sniped upon. Yes, they use C-4, but that gets wasteful.

    As for the rest, allow me to introduce you to an Israeli Teddy Bear. Yes, they do in fact use these things as anti-insurgency systems.

    267:

    "The US had nothing to do with [Sykes-Picot]"

    This is true. But they did get their first chunk of potentially-oily Middle East through being willing to play ball with the British in the post-war implementation phase.

    "With the sinking of the Lusitania he changed horses"

    s/sinking of the Lusitania/Zimmerman telegram/

    268:

    Pixodaros @ 237: Its commonly believed that the US military over-recruits poor and racialized people, but that was not really true circa the 1990s (and one reason many blacks ended up in the military was that they perceived it as a less racist institution than other employers or because it had attractive benefits like free education). This changed in the late 2000s as it became hard not to see what a disaster the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were and recruiters got desperate. The late 2000s were when they were recruiting people without a high-school degree or with criminal convictions.

    My source was probably David R. Segal and Mady Wechsler Segal, "America’s Military Population," Population Bulletin, Vol. 59, No. 4, December 2004 especially table 1 and figure 7 ... what is your source?

    Experience. Being there. Thirty-two years in the U.S. Army & Army National Guard ...

    one of those recruits who joined up to escape a severe recession because of the lack of other options; they offered three hots & a cot and skills training that I might be able to apply to civilian employment1, along with a paycheck to help me support my "family".

    "I finally found a home in the Army."

    The guy who got drafted into the Marines in 1970 was a friend from high school.

    1 Which sort of did happen, just not the way I expected it too.

    269:

    David L @ 248:

    My father tried to enlist twice and was turned down twice before being drafted. He would have been 20/21 years old by then; graduated from high school in June 1940.

    I suspect much of it was due to draft boards being very very local. Your dad might have already had a job. My father didn't.

    Each board had numbers to meet based on local population totals. And so they were made of up of a collection of local "heads of society" who sifted through the list of availables and sent out notices. I'm sure these boards had a few issues with favoritism.

    I know all about the local nature of draft boards & how they fill their quotas. See my comment at 160: regarding my own dealings with the local Durham, NC draft board in 1970.

    He had a job as a clerk at a local Menswear store in Durham, NC. Hardly critical to the defense of the U.S. or to the war industries. In the summer he was a lifeguard at a YMCA camp out at Reedy Creek Park (what is now the western side of Umstead State Park - the entrance off of I-40).

    I think they just weren't ready for the in-rush of volunteers. The draft gave them a mechanism to find the correct round pegs to stick in the square holes in a more or less orderly fashion.

    270:

    Thinking about reasonable mechanized combat armor for mobile infantry, I've got a modest proposal:

    Codename ECHIDNA.

    It's a suit that does what infantry is supposed to be really good at: digging in. Using it, a warfighter can dig a foxhole in under a minute in anything less than reinforced concrete.

    Of course! The Echidna troopers are the obvious users for a Cultivator Number Six entrenching tool, which was considered impractical in WWII.

    Presumably the future version will be atomic powered and able to turn.

    271:

    Johnny99.2 @ 249: Fascinating that people who appreciate the book is satirical while recognising that some take it literally can’t appreciate exactly the same is true for the film… (how anyone can watch Robocop and not recognise Verhoeven is more complex than the stereotype suggests…)

    I don't "appreciate the book is saterical". I believe Heinlein meant every word he put in his protagonists mouth straight from the heart. The values he expounds are the values I learned as a child in church and scouting and in school - honesty, fair play, service to community; there are no rights without responsibilities. The problem with the U.S. today is not those values, but that we don't live up to those values.

    When people say Starship Troopers is fascist, they're saying that I am a fascist. That makes me angry.

    I've never watched Robocop. The only other film by Verhoeven I've seen was Total Recall, which I thought was Ok, better than Conan the Barbarian but not as good as The Terminator.

    Verehoeven's Starship Troopers is not only a bad film, it's a viciously hateful film.

    272:

    zephvark @ 255: "MENSA level just doesn't require a high IQ (your definitions may vary).

    When I was younger, in those days when I was easily impressed with how overwhelmingly intelligent I was, MENSA was held up as the exemplary ne plus ultra for high IQs.

    I am not clear on the idea of the IQ being on a "use it or lose it" basis. It largely seems to be intrinsic. You can forget knowledge but, forgetting how to think seems like a problem you might want to discuss with a physician.

    I'm not that clear on it either. I haven't forgotten how to think, but some of the tools I once had aren't in as great shape as they once were; sat in the drawer too long and got all rusty. Anyway, I know I'm not as smart as I used to be even if there's no noticeable cognitive decline.

    Of course, IQ tests are based on an assortment of knowledge so, they are testing all kinds of various things at the same time. You will be at a disadvantage if you've forgotten that this question implies 3^2 * 4^2 = 5^2 or didn't take algebra.

    I thought that was trig, at least the beginning of it? Or maybe it was geometry.

    273:

    The values he expounds are the values I learned as a child ... honesty, fair play, service to community; there are no rights without responsibilities.

    The glory of empire, the necessity of war, the utility of crushing your enemies, the essential superiority of your sort and the corresponding inferiority of others, the unknowability of those others and thus not just their irrelevance, but their unpredictability. "after we defeat them they will become willing allies". Really?

    Albeit Heinlein is unusual today in supporting very high levels of tax* and the execution of tax evaders. Which in turn supported a generous welfare state, at least for citizens (the underclass took what they were given and liked it... or else).

    • remember that in the 1950's even the USA had 50%+ income tax rates and a much broader tax base than any country has today... although apparently that tide may be turning with the moves towards a "universal" corporate tax rate. We can but hope for the same being applied to incomes.
    274:

    If he went wrong it was in assuming that everyone would notice the parody. To be fair, one of the humans wears an actual Nazi uniform so it's not like he didn't try and make it obvious.

    Verhoeven has a strange knack for failing to get his point across. "Showgirls" was supposed to be an expose of how tawdry is the world of Las Vegas entertainment, but pretty much everyone took it to be high-budget porn. "Robocop" was supposed to be a warning of corporations becoming law in themselves, instead it was seen as a straight-up action movie. And "Starship Troopers" was supposed to be a parody of fascism, and it's not like Verhoeven was subtle about it (Neil Harris' uniform?), yet people hate it because it "butchered Heinlein". Or worse, love it because fascist imagery appeals to them.

    275:

    whitroth @ 260: Well, of course some did dodge the draft that way. I'm not saying all or nothing.

    I'm also a little older: I became eligible years before the lottery, so Alice's Restaurant was the way to go (though my father told me they'd be happy to help me get to Canada).

    I think we are close to the same age. I was eligible for the draft for two years before the lottery came about. But the way the draft boards worked was a little different before & after the lottery was instituted. Before the lottery, draft boards counted voluntary enlistees (including Navy & Air Force) against their quotas. My local board was in a town without extensive economic resources for young men, so they had a lot of volunteers they could count against their quota.

    But the rules changed with the lottery and the quotas had to be filled with all draftees. That's why even with a high number I almost got drafted.

    Years later, I burned my draft card when the draft expired. Then came the lottery. 347, here.

    I still have my draft card around here somewhere. I was still carrying it in my wallet when I went to Iraq in 2004. About the time I retired from the National Guard I decided to stop carrying it because it was getting seriously shopworn and I wanted to preserve it for future generations to admire.

    PS: You do know that by revealing your lottery number, you've also revealed when your birthday is.

    276:

    On the other hand, the Soviets didn't have to let their military services become hell-pits.

    I grew up in the Soviet Union, and my understanding is that infamous dedovshchina was (still is) somewhat of an accident. Before WWII Soviet army had its share of abuses, but at least it went with the rank -- no privates abusing other privates just because they had been in for a year longer. This changed after 1945 as survivors felt they were entitled to special treatment compared to the newbies who never fought, and dumped their boot polishing and other chores onto these newbies. Which of course the newbies enthusiastically dumped onto the next year's conscripts. And ad infinitum.

    But this was still just "doing ded's chores", not active torture. Things got really bad in 1968 or 1969 (I forgot the exact year) when Soviet Politburo suddenly reduced the conscription from 3 years to 2 years in the army, and from 4 years to 3 in the navy. But they did not reduce it retroactively -- everyone already in the military had to complete their 3 or 4 year term. This made current conscripts to actively hate the upcoming ones, with predictable results. And they have been passing the baton ever since.

    Of course the fact that officers and their civilian bosses do not care what one conscript does to another, makes the whole thing possible.

    277:

    Remember the horrifyingly bad pun (or dad joke) at the end of Star Beast? And how Heinlein in 1954(!) smuggled a John Thomas into a book published by Scribners' kidlit imprint?

    I never read "Star Beast". What is the pun, and what is a "John Thomas"? (Google is not helpful with this one.)

    278:

    "John Thomas" is somewhat outdated slang for "penis". The princess kidnapped by aliens (aka Lummox) had been raising John Thomases (she was on her sixth or seventh generation of John Thomas by the time of the story) as a hobby.

    279:

    The kindest thing I could say about the New American Century is that they were a group which believed that the Sykes-Picot worms could put back in the can - something like a century later - and anything else I'd have to say about them would be considerably less-kind.

    280:

    I mean, you'd think the guy who did Robocop could do powered armor. No?

    I had read that production companies considered the power armor, and decided they had no budget for it. No idea whether Verhoeven argued against it or not.

    281:

    Robocop was full of crude satire and had a fun twist at the end. It also starred His Holiness Peter Weller.

    282:

    For further information, see the tale of John Thomas Allcock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e6O1JO_Z-w

    283:

    ""Robocop" was supposed to be a warning of corporations becoming law in themselves, instead it was seen as a straight-up action movie. And "Starship Troopers" was supposed to be a parody of fascism, and it's not like Verhoeven was subtle about it"

    Maybe he should have been subtle? As I said earlier I've not seen ST, but I have seen Robocop, and the warning message is so much less subtle than a brick that the critical faculties shut down in self-defence and just leave you to watch the action. I'm not sure if I've even heard of Showgirls, but I now know exactly what kind of thing it probably is and am similarly unsurprised at its failure to convey the supposed message.

    284:

    Robocop, and the warning message is so much less subtle than a brick that the critical faculties shut down in self-defence

    I dunno, I thought it was a bit over the top at the time. Funny over the top, but still the bluntness of "this corporation likes killing people" was right up there in lights. A big dose of "we want to be the corporate boot stamping on the human face forever", or in USA language "this machine kills peasants".

    Interesting that Orwell turned out to be wrong about the humour inherent in the goose-step, it's still used completely unironically by fascists. Luckily people have stopped laughing.

    285:

    I'm not sure if I've even heard of Showgirls, but I now know exactly what kind of thing it probably is and am similarly unsurprised at its failure to convey the supposed message.

    I've not actually seen it myself but was unaware it was supposed to have a 'message.' As I heard it, the basic concept should have been solid if cynical: Make an engaging 'chick flick' with relatable female characters dealing with emotionally evocative issues - but make them dancers, on the theory that men will happily watch beautiful women prancing around half naked. Yet somehow what was made managed to interest neither demographic.

    286:

    Verhoeven has a strange knack for failing to get his point across. "Showgirls" was supposed to be an expose of how tawdry is the world of Las Vegas entertainment, but pretty much everyone took it to be high-budget porn. "Robocop" was supposed to be a warning of corporations becoming law in themselves, instead it was seen as a straight-up action movie. And "Starship Troopers" was supposed to be a parody of fascism, and it's not like Verhoeven was subtle about it (Neil Harris' uniform?), yet people hate it because it "butchered Heinlein". Or worse, love it because fascist imagery appeals to them.

    Ah, America, where someone can write Barbarians at the Gate as a Wall Street expose, and people on Wall Street take it as an instruction book, not a warning...

    John Belushi did more with "I hate Illinois Nazis" than Verhoeven did with that entire movie, so far as I can tell. Probably not an accident, either.

    287:

    Yeah, that's what I meant - it's too blunt and over the top, so you have no choice but to look past it to see the movie instead of seeing it and the rest of the movie as integral. Kind of like how you can look at gentle snowfall and enjoy the scene of fluffy white dots swirling against stark bare trees, but when it's pelting a blizzard you have to put goggles on and keep scraping it off them just to see where you are.

    The goose step just baffles me. Used by fascists and also used by non-fascists because they were using it first, but both lots are quite unbelievably oblivious to what a bunch of fucking clowns it makes them look. Don't they know any Monty Python?

    I quite like the idea of countering a demonstration by a bunch of goose-stepping fascists by having a bunch of anti-fascists doing a mass performance of the Silly Walk and taking the piss. People are more likely to feel fellowship with the side they are laughing with than the side they are laughing at, and it would help the uncommitted masses to direct their resentment at having a demonstration screw up their day specifically at the instigators of it, rather than simply impartially wishing both sides would just fuck off.

    288:

    the Israeli strategy of burrowing through walls between adjacent houses as a form of urban assault, rather than going door to door down the street

    The Canadian army did that in WWII, according to an exhibit at the Canadian War Museum. I suspect other armies did as well, but don't know for certain.

    289:

    It'll be a long time before people are comfortable letting computers control weapons with a more complicated decision than missile incoming -> fire.

    That ship may well have sailed…

    “The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability,” the experts wrote in the report.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/drone-fully-automated-military-kill-b1856815.html

    Here's the original report. Search for "autonomous" to find the reference.

    https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N21/037/72/PDF/N2103772.pdf?OpenElement

    290:

    So it was part of the secret deal for France and Britain to divide up what was left of the Ottoman hegemony. The US had nothing to do with that.

    Yes. Sort of.

    Wilson was one of those "smartest guy in the room" types who believe he and a few like him could re-draw the worlds maps to solve many of the problems leading up to WWI. And he was inflicted by that "white man's burden" so the locals couldn't be trusted to deal with such issues on their own and needed Wilson and others to fix things for them.

    So while the US didn't exactly deal directly with the middle eastern UK/France deal they/we were totally on board with the concept of the big dogs re-mapping the world.

    There's an interesting history of Ho Chi Minh trying to get Viet Nam as a country out of the treaties at the end of WWI. And being ignored. And ...

    291:

    I think they just weren't ready for the in-rush of volunteers.

    I'll agree with that. It takes a while to order up millions uniforms, underwear, shoes, rifles, bullets, trucks, jeeps, etc... for a few million men. Then a few million more. Then ...

    And toothpaste, razors, combs, kitchens, plates, etc... And if some here say, those were already in the economy, not in the US in 1941. While the Navy build up starting a few years earlier was slowly ending the depression, the results, such as they were, were not very evenly distributed.

    292:

    but make them dancers, on the theory that men will happily watch beautiful women prancing around half naked.

    Ah, drop the half.

    That movie was so bad it was funny. I mean really really really bad.

    293:

    Sorry, realised what you meant after I hit submit :)

    Am also reminded of the Gordon Gecko movie that was trying to satirise yuppies but an awful lot of them thought "it's a great movie, we should all be like that". Satire is hard, and can easily miss one way or the other. Worse, it can miss both ways with different audiences.

    Given the current rush to develop autonomous killing machines (that are deliberately designed for mechanical killing, rather than the various data centres that just run software designed to drive people to suicide)... I wonder if Robocop will be seen as having got the form wrong but the rest basically a documentary. Change the death corp name from Trout-on to Halibut-on and away you go...

    294:

    whitroth @ 130: Modern "[Ll]ibertarians"* are all about MAH RIGHTS, and there are zero duties or responsibilities involved, and apparently all of them were born like Venus, fully-formed, with no debts to their parents or society.

    Funny you should say that. See the discussions between me and Heteromeles in the previous post starting at 341, and especially Heteromeles @ 795.

    Actually all this, plus reading "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" has reminded me of another Heinlein book "Citizen of the Galaxy" published in 1957. Heinlein seems to have swallowed an anthropology text book or two, and a chunk of the book is author exposition explaining how his societies work.

    Briefly, slave-boy Thorby is bought for a knock-down price by Baslim the Cripple, who raises him as an adopted son. Thorby gradually realises that Baslim is actually a spy digging up dirt on the slave trade. After Baslim's death Thorby is adopted by a clan of "Free Traders"; an extended family who ply the spaceways in search of profit.

    Some of the big themes in the book are trade, debt, freedom and status. This is explained by anthropologist Dr Margaret Mader (a thinly disguised version of Margaret Meade) who is doing field work studying the Free Traders. She explains how each ship (i.e. extended family) in the Free Trader society is a patrilocal matriarchy; wives join their husband's family, but the family is actually run by the senior female. The notional head of the family is the Captain (everyone has both ships rank and family relationships). His wife or mother is Chief Officer, and she runs the family side and hence makes all the big strategic decisions.

    Ships trade daughters to avoid inbreeding; when two Free Traders are in the same port their Chief Officers may agree to trade two eligible young women. The young women are given no choice in this. According to Mader, the girls have to be dragged off their home ship, but by the time they arrive at their new home they have dried their tears and are already looking for young men to flirt with. "If a girl catches the right man and pushes him, some day she could be sovereign of an independent state. Until then she is nobody". Mader also comments that if it weren't for the matriarchy this would be slavery, but as it is its the girl's big chance.

    (Turns out you can read Mader's exposition here starting around page 112.)

    Thorby was adopted from outside the Free Trader families because of a debt of honour owed by the Free Traders to Baslim (who it turns out rescued an entire shipload of them from slavery). Mader comments that Baslim had bought Thorby as a slave and made him free, but now the Free Traders have inadvertently made him a slave because he has no choice in his fate; he is under orders from the senior officers who make up his new family, and "Grandmother" is already lining up a wife to ensure it stays permanent.

    There is a lot more to the book, and I recommend it. It was the first Heinlein I ever read, and still one of my favourites.

    (On race: at one point Baslim is meditating on what to do with the growing Thorby after he is dead, and refers to Thorby as "green". Not being familiar with American idiom at that age, I thought that was his skin colour.)

    [[ link fixed - mod ]]

    295: 254 - Why does no one in Alien have a smart phone or a tablet computer?

    Well, I'd say because they're a small spaceship crew in a sub-light universe, so don't really have anyone to phone to. Let's also remember that Mother has voice recognition, which seems to reduce the utility of "smart" phone features, and of tablets.

    256 - Maybe not so much? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_explosive tl;dr version. Gelignite was invented in 1875, then not much development happened until Nobel 808, then C1 in the 1940s. 274 - It's Pythagorean theorum, which is Eucleudian geometry.

    Showgirls - Never seen it, but I do remember "film critics" debating whether it was "satire" or "high grade p0rn", and not watching it as a result.

    296:

    Juan Rico's family were Filipino - the use of Tagolog, of course - but I recall no real information in the book as to where little Johnny grew up. (Could have been KC, maybe he and LL were neighbours??? :-) )

    His Mother was visiting Beunos Aires (to visit an Aunt?) when it was nuked.

    297:

    Pigeon & foxesaa Indeed - the RMS Lusitania sinking dampened Imperial German efforts, but it was the Zimmerman incident that did it - completely.

    298:

    The Last Laugh is a documentary about holocaust humor (that is, humor by Jews, not anti-Semitic humor), and one of the points is that the only humor Nazis haven't appropriated is from The Producers. That's the one where the mockery is just too intense.

    Perhaps what's needed to deal with the goose step is someone with enough skill at physical comedy that no one can see goose-stepping without thinking of the parody.

    300:

    I think this sort of cuts to the main fact that would have been obvious to Verhoeven but isn't to many here, and that is that Heinlein is niche, and outside a certain audience he is really (like really) obscure. So there's a huge extent to which the comparisons some make with LOTR are just nonsense: LOTR has and (even before the movies) long had a huge readership throughout the world, certainly the English-speaking part and also through translation. This just isn't the case for Heinlein. Being Australian, which is to say pretty avidly consuming a huge amount of US cultural output for most of my life, I pretty much hadn't heard of him at all till poking around SF groups in usenet days, and I was late to usenet.

    It definitely isn't at the level of "getting it" either. I'm not much younger than you are (early 50s here) and rural background, the things that the folks who stayed on the farms and in the small towns think that "everyone knows" are the selfsame things that make any articulation with them challenging. And hey Australia's fringe right-wing party has launched its federal campaign in my grandfather's town at least once, so it cuts close to home when you even joke about there being some sort of respectable traditional wisdom in that kind of thing. And I guess that's the same reason I refer to the 50s as a midden, up above, for that matter. And maybe that's the metaphor: there's good stuff in there, but you have to go through a lot of unpleasant stuff to find it; as for the era so for the individual authors, maybe individual works. I know every Bildungsroman will get a loyal fanbase of people who grew up with it as they passed through the same life stages depicted in the novel. But seriously, it's awful enough when it's Harry Potter...

    301:

    Perhaps what's needed to deal with the goose step is someone with enough skill at physical comedy that no one can see goose-stepping without thinking of the parody.

    That would be this then.

    John Cleese is of course the civil servant in the Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks sketch. Nobody before or since has done a silly walk like him.

    302:

    Damian @303:

    I think this sort of cuts to the main fact that would have been obvious to Verhoeven but isn't to many here, and that is that Heinlein is niche, and outside a certain audience he is really (like really) obscure.

    Well, having grown up in Oz, in Melb'n, and about to hit the big 6-0 in a few weeks, Heinlein was quite well-known here by the time that obscenity of a movie came out, and a large number of my friends and acquaintances who were not SFF readers made the point that, "Hey, someone has made a movie by one of your people!".

    Now, growing up in Upper Kumbucka West may have limited your options at the library, but even my cousin-by-marriage who owns most of the Mallee, and doesn't read for pleasure, (being a boarder at Geelong Grammar had some negative effects on him), pointed it out to me.

    So no, saying RAH was unknown outside the SFF ghetto really ignores the reach that his stuff had. (Many, many mundanes in the 60s and 70s knew what "grok" meant.)

    303:

    of 60 or so people convicted to be hung, the death penalty had not deterred them from their crime

    The UK's Home Office did a similar study somewhat earlier; back when the death penalty was applied to pickpockets, a survey of pickpockets about to be hanged proved that not only had they all seen pickpockets being hanged before they were caught, many of them had plied their trade among the crowds gathered for the public executions of pickpockets.

    Shorter: actually witnessing someone being executed for crime (X) does not deter some people from committing crime (X) at the very same time. (Oh, and crime (X) is not a crime of passion.)

    More recently: the UK stopped executing people in 1965. Of post-mortem capital cases referred for examination, roughly 10% of the condemned were believed to be innocent on the basis of modern forensic evidence (DNA matching wasn't a thing back then).

    304:

    This thread seems split between people saying Verhoeven is misunderstood, and people misunderstanding Verhoeven, which is funny. I also think ST, springs from Heinleins misunderstanding of how things work or perhaps it is supposed, as JBS says, to be utopian. That, though, seems a very strange description of ST. Damian mentions Harry Potter. In Heinlein's work he trys to some extent to examine prejudices, his own and others. HP though, I got the impression, was full of unexamined prejudice. I think JKR, is now making that clear. I have not read the books, admittedly, but it seemed immediately clear they were regressive. The old fashioned styling, the names, the private school and most obviously the special group who refer to outsiders by a word (muggles) that has clear parallels to racial slurs and suchlike. Is this a valid interpretation?

    305:

    No, if The Ministry of Silly Walks hasn't made the goose step something people are unwilling to do in public, then it wasn't funny enough.

    306:

    people misunderstanding Verhoeven

    Well, if we're going to allow Heinlein to explain what he really meant by his novel, we should probably allow Verhoeven the same courtesy.

    Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic. So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism. Robocop was just urban politics – this was about American politics. As a European it seemed to me that certain aspects of US society could become fascistic: the refusal to limit the amount of arms; the number of executions in Texas when George W Bush was governor.

    https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl

    Verhoeven added that Heinlein’s philosophy was fascistic; for the director, as well as screenwriter Ed Neumeier, their film was having an open fight with the novel. The idea behind “Troopers,” according to Verhoeven, was to create a story that “seduced the audience” on one level, but then make it clear to the audience what they were admiring was actually evil.

    “Our philosophy was really different [from Heinlein’s book],we wanted to do a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these young boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people are really, in their heart, without knowing it, are on their way to fascism,” Verhoeven said.

    The film was widely rejected in 1997. At the time, critics didn’t see the double narrative and panned the film for advocating the very the neo-Nazi tendencies Verhoeven and Neumeier were actively trying to skewer. Watching the film today, 19 years removed, it is hard to understand how people missed Verhoeven’s obvious satiric perspective, with its heightened artifice, campy performances, propaganda newsreels and clear references to Nazi flags and uniforms.

    https://www.indiewire.com/2016/11/paul-verhoeven-slams-starship-troopers-remake-fascist-update-perfect-trump-presidency-1201747155/

    307:

    "Robocop" was supposed to be a warning of corporations becoming law in themselves, instead it was seen as a straight-up action movie.

    The straight-up action carries a much stronger and more bluntly-delivered message. While the drama parts are gesturing in the direction of "this story is about doing the right thing in spite of a corporation that literally owns your body", the action parts are saying "What society needs is to give the police the power to inflict iron-fisted justice on these drugged-up maniacs." And it's not at all subtle - the criminal antagonists are all crazy Mad Max criminals who blow stuff up for the fun of it. In the fight in the drug lab there's a shot of Robocop literally crushing cocaine vials under his armored boots. There's also the whole Jesus parallel where he dies, gets resurrected, and "walks on water" in the final sequence. It's a straight power fantasy - "Imagine if we had like, a perfect, totally uncorruptible cop, and just turned him loose to shoot all the bad guys. That would be pretty awesome, right?"

    And like, maybe that seemed like a reasonable stance to take in the 80s when crime rates were higher - I wasn't alive then - but nowadays it comes across as "Yay police violence!" with "Boo corporate corruption" in second place.

    308:
    And like, maybe that seemed like a reasonable stance to take in the 80s when crime rates were higher - I wasn't alive then - but nowadays it comes across as "Yay police violence!" with "Boo corporate corruption" in second place.

    No, conflating police with military (and police work with war), and therefore believing that killing the bad guys would be an appropriate answer to criminality was never a reasonable stance.

    309:

    I'm amused that anyone thinks Verhoeven could've made power armour work in 1997 if the man himself thinks he couldn't have done it. Say what you will about the director, Robocop is testament to the fact that he knew his VFX. This video demonstrates just how much work was involved in putting together power-armour VFX in 1987 (which hold up pretty well today) just for one character, and even 10 years later those efforts couldn't have been scaled to convincingly portray a whole battalion of mechanically-enhanced soldiers.

    I'm also surprised anyone thinks the film wasn't timely, in the context of the resurgent white power movement and on the eve of the GWOT (and the corresponding explosion in recruitment efforts). Completely understand why anyone would be upset by an unfaithful adaptation, even though I'm not sure you could have done one in the post-Vietnam climate, and it's fair to say Verhoeven should have just come up with his own property. And by no stretch of the imagination is it a good movie. But it's hard to fault a film that made a trojan-horse effort to undermine pro-military wankfest jingoism (whose subscribers it would have appealed to, regardless of what Heinlein was trying to get across).

    310:

    "Ah, America, where someone can write Barbarians at the Gate as a Wall Street expose, and people on Wall Street take it as an instruction book, not a warning..."

    Out host is fond of saying that irony died with the election of trump and Brexit, my personal opinion as a European is that it died earlier with the post WWII rise of USA.

    To keep with the original theme of post, I must note that Heinlein was also very convinced that the American public was especially vulnerable to con artists.

    311:

    {threadjack} Look, I know but I seriously need some help here. My mother suffers from wet macular degeneration (the incurable sort), and we are playing around with spectacles and magnifiers to help her read.

    Now I have just brought to mind that James White (Sector General series) also had an eye complaint that meant that he used spectacles and a magnifier to read. I am looking for informed information on what his complaint was, and on what sort of magnifier he used. TIA to anyone who has useful information.

    312:

    I've heard Michael Lewis talk about how he intended Liar's Poker as an expose' of Wall Street and was surprised people were taking it as advice.

    313:

    Charlie 13/08/1964 is the date given by wiki - the legislation was a year later, but the "authorities" were against it, & the public wasn't ...

    Rbt Prior but then make it clear to the audience what they were admiring was actually evil. The Third Wave was exactly that. I first heard of it in "The Next Whole Earth Catalog" - truly scary, showing how easily people are seduced.

    MSB But - & this seems to be at the root of many US problems - that attitude seems to be the norm in the US. The contrast with here is stark

    314:

    Several people in my family suffer(ed) from wet macular degeneration. My mom (diagnosed years ago) swears by AREDS 2 vitamins and regularly eating kale and other leafy greens. Her vision isn't deteriorating as fast as others have and some years it hasn't deteriorated at all. For what it's worth.

    315:

    James White (Sector General series) also had an eye complaint that meant that he used spectacles and a magnifier to read.

    James suffered from diabetes rather than macular degeneration per se. He explained it to us once at a convention -- the lenses in his spectacles were enough for his eyesight to reach to the magnifying glass he used to read text. This made him a second-stage lensman, he said.

    A gentle man and a gentleman, muchly missed.

    316:

    Out host is fond of saying that irony died with the election of trump and Brexit, my personal opinion as a European is that it died earlier with the post WWII rise of USA.

    Worth rereading Linebarger's Psychological Warfare, his post WW2 writeup of what he did as a propaganda officer in WW2.

    The problem with valuing irony and cynicism is, per the psyops officer, it makes you easier to manipulate with propaganda, not less. When people don't know who or what to believe intellectually, they tend to revert to feelings, which are more easily manipulated.

    I'd say that irony and cynicism have their US home now in the Republican Party and those to the right of them. Not that democrats are earnest do-gooders with no sense of humor (well, I am, as you've all notice. But I'm weird). But what makes (some?) Republicans so hard to work with is that they assume you're lying and that you're trying to con them, even when you're trying to help them reach their own goals. After enough of this, if you're like me, you finally realize that's how they are with each other, and they assume everybody works that way... Well, not all of them, but all it takes is a few inept practitioners (naming no names) to show the pattern. And that's Linebarger's point. When you assume that everyone's playing games with you and grabbing power is your only tool, you're more vulnerable, not less. This is where the truth can set you free, at least a little.

    P.S. Paul Linebarger wrote under the pen-name Cordwainer Smith, and by upbringing and training, he was an internationalist.

    317:

    I thought Roberto Benigni did a somehow excellent job with humour in a Holocaust Movie with 'Life is Beautiful'. That included his character doing a humorous goose step as he was being marched off to die by a camp guard.

    It still amazes me how he managed to take the most horrific subject matter and build a wonderful movie. It is no surprise he won awards for it.

    318:

    I'm also surprised anyone thinks the film wasn't timely, in the context of the resurgent white power movement and on the eve of the GWOT (and the corresponding explosion in recruitment efforts). Completely understand why anyone would be upset by an unfaithful adaptation, even though I'm not sure you could have done one in the post-Vietnam climate, and it's fair to say Verhoeven should have just come up with his own property. And by no stretch of the imagination is it a good movie. But it's hard to fault a film that made a trojan-horse effort to undermine pro-military wankfest jingoism (whose subscribers it would have appealed to, regardless of what Heinlein was trying to get across).

    Hunh? 1997 had Clinton in power. That's when the film came out. The Global War on Terror started in 2002. To be very blunt, Starship Troopers could have come out in July 2001 and still been anachronistic, because 9/11 caught a lot of people completely by surprise.

    While I agree that it's far easier to do powered armor now, I strongly urge you to look again at Star Wars Stormtrooper armor. Based on how inept the stormtroopers are, we instinctively assume that it's no more than the plastic shell that it looks to be. But it's obviously supposed to be powered armor, with air filter up top and batteries between the shoulderblades. Lucas just didn't use it that way, because his rebel mooks would have died like flies if the Empire actually had mobile infantry and used them in maneuver warfare. Or, if you want, look at the space marines from warhamster. They're even more like the MI.

    Anyway, I think the time for Starship troopers the movie has passed, and I doubt even Old Man's War could get made now (sorry if you're reading this John). This isn't a polemic, just looking around at climate change, decarbonization, real worries about an authoritarian takeover, and even more real worries about cyberwar and autonomous drones. It's a different landscape, and it's probably better to write to that than to the paleofuture of 65 years ago, and we ended up going down a different road.

    319:

    ...Heinlein is niche, and outside a certain audience he is really (like really) obscure.

    No. Just no. Far more like-Tolkien than not-like Tolkien, and certainly in Tolkien's league in terms of sales. As in "Heinlein wrote books sixty years ago which have been continuously in print until the present day." Four best-sellers. Four Hugos, (and a number of Retro-Hugos.) First science-fiction Grand-Master. Introduced multiple words into the English language. Stranger in a Strange Land has so far been printed 132 times in six languages and sold five million copies.* Heinlein's books regularly went through somewhere between 20 and 50 printings, including translations into multiple languages.** For example, Time Enough For Love was translated into five languages and had 41 separate printings.

    If nothing else, read Heinlein's Wikipedia article before posting such inaccurate information. You're so far outside the facts that you're not even wrong!

    For number of printings I used this (and counted printings by hands): http://www.isfdb.org/

    • The Return of the King had 274 printings into ten languages, but I'd say anyone who wrote a book with more than a hundred printings is a major authorial badass!

    ** Even a relative turd like To Sail Beyond The Sunset was printed 13 times and translated into three languages!

    320:

    That is to say, Heinlein differs from Tolkien in that Tolkien's magnum opus was made into a film by someone who had some reverence for the story the writer was trying to tell, while SST was "made into a movie" by someone who had no reverence for the story, and in fact had an entirely different story to tell.

    I have seen RoboCop, Showgirls, and SST, all when they ran in theatres. I can attest that the people who keep pointing at interpretations that make Verhoeven some kind of visionary are the really weird ones. Nobody else gets those interpretations. Practically everyone who has ever watched those movies saw glorification of police brutality, high-production-value soft porn/revenge fantasy, and neo-Nazi propaganda in that order.

    321:

    Yeah... and the stuff you learned in church and the Boy Sprouts growing up... most folks pass off as "and then you grow up", and vote GOP.

    322:

    Correction: in the 50's, the top tax bracket was not 50+%, it was, I kid you not, 90%.

    And what JBS and RAH learned growing up, sigh, is relegated to "Sunday school stuff", and the Trumpistas see that as for suckers... or yeah, good, but I need to take care of this first....

    323:

    Actually, after I hit ennter, I realized I should bring up Mark Twain's Letters From The Earth, published 30 years after he died, as his daughter was horrified by it. Letters from Satan, who's taking a vacation from Heaven on the Earth, and is sending letters to Gabriel and Michael.

    Among his comments are "they try not to fall asleep at Sunday church services, but think they want to spend an eternity with a harp..."

    324:

    Re yr PS: yeah, but the odds on someone reading this blog, coming down to that comment, and then relating my legal name to that are insignificant.

    Esp. when they probably have it from the OPM breach a few years ago.

    325:

    My grandad had that. (When I was of the age where cardboard is a preferred constructional material, I presented him with a 3D cardboard model I'd made of the ophthalmoscope photograph of the condition in Wolff's "Diseases of the Eye"...)

    His reading specs were a pair of ordinary spectacle frames but without ordinary lenses in them; instead there was an extra structure stuck on the front, with two more-or-less cylindrical barrels about half the size of a C cell suspended in the centre of the gaps where ordinary lenses would be, each containing a complex multi-element optic providing extreme magnification along with whatever other correction he also needed. Not the kind of thing you could just pick up in the High Street or even just pick up from a purveyor of watchmakers' supplies; they were a custom fitment from a specialist optician. I think there had also been some element of needing to wait until the progress of the disease had slowed enough that he wouldn't keep needing new fitments at unfeasibly short intervals. He did get new fitments once or twice, but he got several years' use out of each iteration.

    His route to getting these things had at least begun with the NHS, so although it was a bit of a long process at least there wasn't any uncertainty about where to start. And of course this was long before computer-controlled machines for carving custom-shaped lenses to shape to sub-wavelength precision were around; now that they are, I would expect that that route now leads more quickly to a more precisely fitted solution.

    326:

    I should point out that after WWII, Uncle Ho contacted the US, and tried to get us to support him.

    Instead, that asshole Truman invited the French to take it back.

    327:

    I agree. Certainly, Stranger was a HUGE best-seller, and I can remember mainstream outlets, including, IIRC, the NYT, having reviews about it. In the US, at least, I'm not saying he was a household name, but he was a name that would come up if someone not a fan tried to say something about sf.

    328:

    My mother has macular degeneration which has been gradually progressing for years and when we were visiting last week she was showing us a magnifying device that she's just got which is apparently fantastic for all sorts of things. I've just asked Dad to send me the details so I'll pass them on when I get them. It's basically a tablet with a camera on an arm, as well as doing magnification it'll read text to her.

    329:

    I don't think that's a valid interpretation.

    But then, I've been in fandom so long that I remember the slogan "fans are slans". And both from the SCA and fandom, many refer to mundanes.

    Will you really argue that They are not mundane?

    330:

    I remember the radio ads for Job, so yes, I think Heinlein would be considered a household name during the era that bestselling books were advertised in mainstream media.

    331: 317 - Thanks; tried the diet and it's been rejected for reasons of her taste. 318 - Yes, the diabetes is mentioned in his Wikipedia (but nothing associated is). I also thought I remembered something "like" your account but I only got to attend his GoH speech the time he and I were at the same con. 328 - Cheers. It's a fairly recent diagnosis, and we're chasing around trying to find what will help most. 331 - Further to the above, this sounds like it might or might not help, but she's a bit technophobic...
    332:

    Since my Grandmother and Aunt also had/have MD as well as the leafy green stuff I take ICaps tablets, which provide the same stuff to help avoid/slow it developing.

    333:

    Chiming in to note that Roberto Benigni somehow managed to square the circle of making a humorous movie about the Holocaust that was also brilliant. And one of the key scenes included him doing a mocking version of the goose step while being marched off by a camp guard to be shot.

    I enjoyed Robocop as a teenager with little critical insight. When I saw parts of it a couple decades later I was appalled at the casual fascism (which was also rampant in most of the 'cop' movies and tv shows of the 70s through to very recently). Most of them were/are rooted in the apparently deep seated fear many Americans have of their neighbours propensity to commit wanton mayhem at the slightest opportunity. Also racism.

    I must have watched Showgirls at some point for my sins because I remember it. I suspect it was when I was at sea, most boats I worked on had vast libraries of VHS movies, which I would work my way through when I ran out of books. Showgirls was utter dreck, neither high nor low brow, just garbage from beginning to end. Whatever the director was trying to do was utterly lost in a mess of poor writing, worse acting and terrible scenes.

    I remember watching the SST movie as well, prior to any real appreciation of SF in general or Heinlein in particular. Brainless action movie with gratuitous nudity thrown in. Yes, the fascism was evident and maybe satirical, but otherwise it was just a dumb movie.

    Of course, I very rarely find movies that are worth the time to watch them. One of the reasons movies like 'Life is Beautiful' are such treasures.

    334:

    And plenty of people (most?) who read Starship Troopers took it entirely at face value. As our good host points out you can also read into it something rather more complex. Books and films are creative. It’s art. You can interpret the films as you please. But don’t dismiss what others see just because you don’t see it.

    335:

    On the note of Heinlein's literary status per the Stephen King test ("the best kind of literary prize is royalties", or words to that effect), Heinlein scooped a million dollar advance for "The Number of the Beast" circa 1978-ish. And back in the 1980s, a million dollars was serious money.

    336:

    And plenty of people (most?) who read Starship Troopers took it entirely at face value. As our good host points out you can also read into it something rather more complex. Books and films are creative. It’s art. You can interpret the films as you please. But don’t dismiss what others see just because you don’t see it.

    Obviously the street makes its own use of things.

    That said, no creative product is produced in a vacuum. Stories especially respond to the artistic environment in which they're produced.

    Because of that, you have to at least contemplate the idea that, if someone doesn't see something in an artwork and you DO see something in an artwork, that perhaps what you're seeing is your own creation, not what's there...

    A good example of this with Verhoeven is someone writing in the Age of Trump that people in the 1990s were so stupid to not see the obvious fascist posturing in the film, forgetting that the latter day commenters have been steeped in a resurgent right wing culture that was at best underground in the 1990s.

    337:

    Nancy Lebovitz @308: No, if The Ministry of Silly Walks hasn't made the goose step something people are unwilling to do in public, then it wasn't funny enough.

    Then I'm afraid it's not possible. Look at the Greek ceremonial guards in the article below. Or just Google for Greek guard silly walk.

    https://www.forces.net/evergreen/worlds-weirdest-changing-guard-ceremonies

    338:

    That's an interesting bit of "inside baseball." It certainly puts any idea that Heinlein was a "minor" writer safely out of our misery!

    339:

    Well, I remember seeing said Greeks on what (unknown to me) was a Michael Palin travelogue, and starting the "It's not very silly" part of the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch.

    340:

    There is also the indo-pakistany change of border guard.

    Here : https://youtu.be/izO02t7KfCE

    341:

    whitroth @ 324: Yeah... and the stuff you learned in church and the Boy Sprouts growing up... most folks pass off as "and then you grow up", and vote GOP.

    Where do you find "Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Brave, Clean and Reverent" in the GQP? When was the last time you heard of the GQP "doing a good deed every day"? Instead of helping old ladys cross the street they're likely to run them over and steal their social security!

    Where does
    "Jesus loves the little children
    All the children of the world
    Red, Brown, Yellow, Black & White
    They are precious in his sight
    Jesus loves the little children of the World"


             fit into the Republican platform?

    Would Trumpolini ever recite "we hold these truths to be self evident, that ALL men are created equal ...", much less try to live it in word an deed?
    ... and be ashamed of himself if & when he inevitably falls short and strive to atone and do better?

    If the GQP is what "growing up" is about, fuck it. I won't! They can't make me!

    I'll stick with those values I learned in the Boy Scouts & church even if maybe I'm not so obedient or reverent as some would want ... but I'll obey my conscience!

    Even as it turns out that the teachers & preachers & leaders who inculcated those values in me didn't actually live them themselves, there's no excuse for NOT making them real; no excuse for not making this country what it pretended to be.

    You just gotta' walk the walk!

    That's the message I found in Starship Troopers and Heinlein's other writings.

    342:

    whitroth @ 327: Re yr PS: yeah, but the odds on someone reading this blog, coming down to that comment, and *then* relating my legal name to that are insignificant.

    Esp. when they probably have it from the OPM breach a few years ago.

    Yeah, didn't mean anything. Just with all of today's concerns about doxxing and internet stalking it gave me a chuckle. I don't tell people when my birthday is, because if I go out to eat with someone I don't want them telling the wait staff and embarrassing me with the clapping & singing ...

    1. The singing is usually pretty awful and ...
    2. They always bring you some kind of chocolate cake and I can't eat chocolate, it makes me throw up.

    343:

    Thank you for raising this. Its inspiring me to go back to some of my oldest books and revisit them.

    I started on Asimovs Mysteries, went to Rocketship Galileo (which happily I no longer have) and took in eventually everything written by Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke before branching out into Harry Harrison, Van Vogt, Tolkein and Frank Herbert. So, we're thinking early 70s here and all I had ever read prior to those was Swallows and Amazons plus the Narnia septet.

    I must reread those that remain, it won't take long. All the books were pretty thin with LOTR, Farnhams Freehold, Stranger in a Strange Land and the Moon is a Harsh Mistress as exceptions.

    From the 13 year old school kid in the 70's perspective I found Heinlein's stuff a bit of a romp with thought provoking moments. Even at the time some of the no volunteer, no vote stuff didn't feel quite right, but I was in it for the totally different world and assumed that in a different world things would be different, so it didn't jar really.

    In a different world my Dad was a soldier shooting people, 30 years later the world had changed and you couldn't have met a nicer more peaceful man. What would our societies have become 20 years ago if the White House, Buck House or the Kremlin had been targeted by Bin Laden as well as the WTC?

    Anyway, must do some rereading and see what need to be dumped to free up shelf space a bit. The Day After Tomorrow went long ago. Do we say Herbert was a libertarian nutjob because his most successful universe was corrupt feudal?

    344:

    I have read when I was younger pretty much all I could of Cordwainer Smith.

    I loved it but he is clearly a writer of these times, the 50s & 60s, where intellectuals and Hollywood would grant psychiatrist and other psy-professions with quasi magical powers.

    I have since learned that scientific fraud and blatant invention of experiments has marred a significant part of the published research in this field.

    Call me a cynic, but I would need better evidence. Specially for results dating from this period.

    345:

    I should point out that after WWII, Uncle Ho contacted the US, and tried to get us to support him.

    By then he was considered to be if not self declared to be a communist. So no one in the US was going to support him after WWII.

    346:

    And back in the 1980s, a million dollars was serious money.

    Isn't chicken feed even today unless you run in circles that live on the upper east side of NYC or similar in London.

    347:

    Look at the Greek ceremonial guards in the article below. Or just Google for Greek guard silly walk.

    There's a border gate between Pakistan and India.

    And the North Korean Army on parade.

    And a lot more.

    348:

    (Moving this on from being about the movies, noting the directive at the top of the blog) Entirely agree the humans see patterns that aren’t there (Exhibit A: religion). But isn’t that the point of any art? It’s the response it evokes. There is no wrong response. Unless you think the authorial intent dictates a “correct” response?

    My impression is that JBS has a deep emotional response to the book. It hit deeply. I suspect (can’t know) it’s not landed the way the author intended. Certainly not my response. It’s still valid.

    I’m not saying don’t discuss what we feel and why we feel it. If that’s the response then that’s the response. The interesting discussion is what and why. It’s not to be had arguing the response is wrong

    349:

    My memory of reading the book is 3 times about 10 years apart. Early teens, middle 20s, middle 30s. Each time I read it differently.

    In my 20s I was rooming with a Jesuit educated liberal. He had an interesting take on the book. In my 30s, married with young children it also struck me differently.

    Interestingly I don't have all that much memory about the mobile body armor. Except that to me it seemed he would be wearing something the side of a Humvee at a minimum.

    351:

    whitroth @ 329: I should point out that after WWII, Uncle Ho contacted the US, and tried to get us to support him.

    Instead, that asshole Truman invited the French to take it back.

    I don't think "invited" tells the tale.

    American President Roosevelt and General Stilwell privately made it adamantly clear that the French were not to reacquire French Indochina after the war was over. He told Secretary of State Cordell Hull the Indochinese were worse off under the French rule of nearly 100 years than they were at the beginning. Roosevelt asked Chiang Kai-shek if he wanted Indochina, to which Chiang Kai-shek replied: "Under no circumstances!"

    The U.S. didn't have any way short of armed intervention to prevent the French from reasserting their claim. Interestingly enough (i.e. I didn't know this before) it was a force of British & Free French soldiers, along with captured Japanese Troops who reestablished French "control" over Indochina in late 1945.

    The U.S. were afraid to break with the French Government over it because there was a very real threat of French Communists revolting and establishing a Soviet style government in France if the French Government had been weakened by the U.S.

    This was also the period when the Iron Curtain was falling and the WW2 alliance between Britain, France & the U.S. with the Soviet Union was falling apart. There was civil war in Greece with the Soviet Union covertly supplying the Greek National Liberation Front & Greek Peoples National Liberation Navy while Britain and the U.S. not so covertly supplied the National Republican Greek League

    The U.S. didn't become involved in Vietnam until after the French defeat and the partition of Indochina (into Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam - with Vietnam being temporarily pending nationwide "Free" elections. Those in the south of Vietnam objected that there could be no free elections in the north under communist control, and the U.S. backed them.

    Another thing I hadn't known before is that the 1954 Geneva Conference wasn't about Vietnam to begin with. It was about Korea

    "to settle through negotiation the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea, the peaceful settlement of the Korean question, etc."

    But they decided to tack the French Indochina question on.

    "the problem of restoring peace in Indochina will also be discussed at the Conference [on the Korean question] to which representatives of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Chinese People's Republic and other interested states will be invited."

    Ironically they reached an agreement on Indochina, but not on Korea, a problem unresolved to this day.

    352:

    And fair enough. I had it the other way around (better critical than popular reception, loyal but small fanbase) and I guess I'm mistaken in that.

    353:

    This thread has been absolutely fascinating because of peoples responses. My interpretation of Heinlein's intent, is that JBSs response is exactly the response he wanted, but I don't know. But (apologies to our host if this breaks his ruling) it is peoples response to Verhoeven's films that is most interesting. Whilst any response to art can be said to be valid, responses to facts is a different matter. It is blatantly obvious both Robocop and ST are satires, even at the time. I saw Robocop as a teenager, and it was obvious. Someone even provided a quote from Verhoeven, saying ST was a satire. But people can still not except it. This is fascinating, people seem to have some kind of mental block about this. With someone stupid or ignorant, I could understand missing it, but that does not fit people on this blog. Is this something akin to cognitive dissonance? Has the challenge to the underpinnings of the culture caused their brains to shut down? This is partly hyperbole, perhaps, but there really is a question to be answered. To our host, I would say, that it is worth watching ST. You will see what I and others were talking about, and might have some answers on peoples reactions. Or just watch this clip, of in film propaganda films: https://youtu.be/EKHme9MvMx0

    354:

    Heteromeles @ 333: I remember the radio ads for Job, so yes, I think Heinlein would be considered a household name during the era that bestselling books were advertised in mainstream media.

    He was more well known after the CBS interview regarding the Apollo 11 moon landing.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PLTkYJ7C40

    355:

    David L @ 352: "Interestingly I don't have all that much memory about the mobile body armor. Except that to me it seemed he would be wearing something the side of a Humvee at a minimum."

    It's supposed to be much smaller than a Humvee. It looks like a steel gorilla and it's 2000 pounds, according to my Berkley Medallion edition (page 81 to 84) of 1968.

    356:

    The U.S. didn't become involved in Vietnam until after the French defeat and the partition of Indochina

    Actually once the French got in deep we (the US) funded their military there. If not all then a large chunk of it.

    357:

    Just to carry all the things he was throwing about couldn't be carried in such a thing.

    In my imagination.

    358:

    it is peoples response to Verhoeven's films that is most interesting. Whilst any response to art can be said to be valid, responses to facts is a different matter. It is blatantly obvious both Robocop and ST are satires, even at the time. I saw Robocop as a teenager, and it was obvious

    Your comment makes the point that SST was interpreted differently by many depending on the decade when first encountered. If you were born around 1980 your life was lived and experienced very differently than those of use alive when it was first published.

    Especially in global military and geopolitical matters. Which colored the lenses we all see the world through.

    359:

    Michel2Bec @ 343: There is also the indo-pakistany change of border guard.

    Here : https://youtu.be/izO02t7KfCE

    Looks like the love child of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo and a Maori Haka

    360:

    Shorter: actually witnessing someone being executed for crime (X) does not deter some people from committing crime (X) at the very same time.

    I'm reminded of something I saw many years ago... An American police force came up with the idea that they could catch illegal drug users by dressing up some of their number as stereotypical drug dealers, hanging around sleazy parts of town, and then having officers swoop in and collect anyone who tried to buy drugs. (Sounds like a good plan when around the water cooler, right?) They tried it and to first approximation it worked...

    What they didn't anticipate was that questionable street denizens would pester their undercover officers even while uniformed officers had a previous customer handcuffed and getting inserted into a police car. With police officers right there arresting other drug users, people still bugged the 'dealers' in the middle of the process trying to buy drugs.

    Anyone hoping to take the 'War on Drugs' seriously would want an enforcement encounter that looked less like a Monty Python skit.

    361:

    Grant @ 346: Thank you for raising this. Its inspiring me to go back to some of my oldest books and revisit them.

    I started on Asimovs Mysteries, went to Rocketship Galileo (which happily I no longer have) and took in eventually everything written by Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke before branching out into Harry Harrison, Van Vogt, Tolkein and Frank Herbert. So, we're thinking early 70s here and all I had ever read prior to those was Swallows and Amazons plus the Narnia septet.

    Pretty much the same path as the one I took, although Rocketship Galileo was my first, leading me to Paul French's (Asimov) "Lucky Star" books and on to the wider worlds of SciFi. I didn't find Asimov's mysteries until much later after I had immersed myself in the writings of Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Margery Allingham, et al. John Maddox Roberts has written quite a few nice mystery stories set in the late Roman Republic as it makes it's transition to empire.

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

    Fantasy genre came later still via The Black Company & Garrett P.I.

    362:

    Which colored the lenses we all see the world through.

    Quite. By my time, delibarately living close to a nuclear target, as a way to make sure you would be among the first to be painlessly vaporised rather than live through the times that followed, that was definitely a thing. It was almost a general consensus that dying in the first stage of an apocalyptic war would be better than surviving it. "The living will envy the dead" was a cliche, almost, overused enough to turn up in comedy.

    It's almost like we're pre-conditioned to see a climate apocalypse as relatively mild, the slow-boil rather than the instant of flaming oblivion. Actually even putting it mildly, it comes across as worse, to me anyway. Maybe I'm just imagining more of how bad it may be than others who don't see it that way, maybe I'm wrong in that too, dog knows I hope so. But it make's OGH's metaphor for climate change even more retrospectively obvious I guess.

    363:

    For a subtly different take on the importance of eugenics and the glory of empire... Peter Watts is grumpy Canadian..

    An act committed for a political, religious, or ideological purpose, check. Intended to intimidate, check. To compel people to do or refrain, to intentionally cause harm, to cause death or injury check check check. The Vatican’s treatment of Indigenous peoples is a classic example of terrorism as defined by the Canadian government itself. ... A PM who proclaims his Catholic identity without any apparent shame.

    I give you a sarcastic Australian on a similar topic: Come Home (Cardinal Pell) - Tim Minchin

    364:

    JBS And, IIRC - something I learnt much later, was that "we" - the Brits - with experiance in India & Burma & with Indian Indepandance obviously coming, didn't want anything to do with it. Another reason why, when asked to "help" the US in Vietnam, we said "NO!"

    365:

    climate apocalypse ... it comes across as worse, to me anyway

    It's a great future for our children, this climate refugee business. Rather than dying suddenly with no warning we get to spend 30+ years watching the catastrophe unfold, fighting to prevent it as best we can, and seeing those around us shrug and make it worse. The good news is that all going well 50 year olds like me will likely just die of heatstroke in our 80's, it's only if a couple of the "too hard to model" events happen that we're going to be badly affected. But the 20 year olds... sucks to be them. If they're lucky a war will kill off enough of them that the survivors won't be too badly off.

    Still, it's important to focus on what's politically palatable now rather than the horrors that await us in the future.

    366:

    I think in particular Riefenstahl herself is rather more complex figure than comes across in this thread. She was an utterly brilliant cinematographer who pioneered the form and established a lot of the conventions we are familiar with today (even if we don't necessarily realise that we are familiar with many cinematography conventions... until someone breaks them for effect). In interviews and her own writing she claims she wasn't aware of the propaganda value of the stuff she did, but it doesn't really ring true. Of course she knew she was making propaganda, it's just that her own internal motivations were different. That representation of grand-scale spectacle you see in Triumph of the Will has been re-used so many times and so often, for things that definitely include propaganda too, but perhaps mostly do not. I think people see the US and European filmmakers of that era as disconnected from each other, but there's a lot of evidence to say this is untrue: the influences flowed both ways constantly, including behind the pre-war Soviet border (Eisenstein was heavily influenced by early Hollywood). And spectacle was something that everyone was trying to get right at that time.

    Not saying that makes it all okay, of course. But there is enough in the context to make it more interesting to study than to denounce, I suppose.

    367:

    Haven't read all the comments yet but amazed that folks are still on topic post-300 Comment!

    Anyways - I first read Heinlein and Asimov when I was a young teen and vaguely recall reading ST. My impression then and still is that Heinlein wanted to be the provocative SF writer. His characters and situations were mostly pretty short-sighted and cliquish/clannish and didn't much care about or look at any potential long-term ethical considerations or consequences. So I really don't see him/his stories as a spokesman for social responsibility. (He also seemed to be infatuated with engineers - no idea why.)

    I've re-read my Asimov books but not Heinlein - once was enough.

    368:

    Johnny99.2 @ 351: (Moving this on from being about the movies, noting the directive at the top of the blog) Entirely agree the humans see patterns that aren’t there (Exhibit A: religion). But isn’t that the point of any art? It’s the response it evokes. There is no wrong response. Unless you think the authorial intent dictates a “correct” response?

    My impression is that JBS has a deep emotional response to the book. It hit deeply. I suspect (can’t know) it’s not landed the way the author intended. Certainly not my response. It’s still valid.

    I think it may have a lot to do with when and where you first encounter it. I came to it at age 13, some time in 1962 or 1963. John F. Kennedy was President:

    In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.

    In Starship Troopers I found a like call to service.

    And I still believe that is what Heinlein had in mind when he wrote the book. It was both an ode to the service and sacrifice of "the greatest generation" and a lament, a warning of what would happen if we, as a society, lost that commitment to serve democracy.

    369:

    Niala @ 358: David L @ 352:

    "Interestingly I don't have all that much memory about the mobile body armor. Except that to me it seemed he would be wearing something the side of a Humvee at a minimum."

    It's supposed to be much smaller than a Humvee. It looks like a steel gorilla and it's 2000 pounds, according to my Berkley Medallion edition (page 81 to 84) of 1968.

    First edition cover:

    I believe it's Chapter 7 if you don't have the same edition.

    It's a development from the body armor that was already coming into use in the late 50s (our world), although "flak jackets" were already in use during WW2. Somewhere in there is a bit of exposition about the development from body armor to a wearable tank to the "modern" MI's slimmed down 2000 pound steel gorilla" suits.

    370:

    It's almost like we're pre-conditioned to see a climate apocalypse as relatively mild, the slow-boil rather than the instant of flaming oblivion. Actually even putting it mildly, it comes across as worse, to me anyway. Maybe I'm just imagining more of how bad it may be than others who don't see it that way, maybe I'm wrong in that too, dog knows I hope so. But it make's OGH's metaphor for climate change even more retrospectively obvious I guess.

    I'd disagree about that, but respectfully, not sarcastically.

    Up until, oh, 2018 in the US, give or take, most people I had to deal with figured either climate change wouldn't happen (so don't worry about it), or everyone's going to die a la nuclear war (so don't worry about it). The key point wasn't the reality of either scenario, it was that they didn't want to deal with it.

    Now about 40% of the population is dealing with it, at least a little, although another 20 percent or so are convinced it's all propaganda from groups who are trying to seize power, because that's how their side works. But for most of those 40 percent, climate change will be over by 2050, so if we can last that long, things will get better. It's manageable. When those of us who know point out that the only way climate change will be over by 2050 is if a miracle or something kills us all first, that we're fighting right now to keep the changes manageable and over the course of hundreds of years, rather than unmanageable and over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, there are wise looks, pained agreement...and as soon as short-term memory has dropped the moment, we're back at 2050 again.

    I think what colors our lenses isn't the international crises, it's the norms we grew up with: things like global travel, tourism as a good thing, just war as a thing, climate change as a technological problem with technological solutions, and so forth. It's really, really hard to admit that the pleasant lifestyle one grew up in (speaking for myself) is probably the most destructive the world has ever known, and that our greatest legacy won't be the internet, but only our pollution.

    Thoughts along that line lead almost inevitably to the opposite, that we all should die off and leave the world to those more pure than ourselves.

    But the sad part is that the future's most likely even worse: we are that bad, some of our descendants will survive (our in the species sense), and that they won't remember us or carry on our culture, because it will be useless to them.

    Do we become even more monstrous to be among the survivors? That's the Traditional White Way at the moment. Or do we try to get some portion of justice for all those we've trampled already, to give them some space in the future too?

    And that almost inevitably leads to depression, so most people avoid thinking about it too hard, either.

    It's hard.

    371:

    Appropos of post-300, but this is bouncing around the interwebs: a new article in Ecology claiming that staghorn ferns are eusocial plants.

    I haven't read the whole paper (thank you, paywall), but the science seems good. The problem is that the staghorn fern colonies in question are mostly composed of plants that are clones of each other via rhizomes. This leads to the inevitable botany problem of what counts as an individual. Still, some plants (ramets) are non-reproducing and specialized for nutrient and water capture, while others have a different morphology and do almost all the reproducing.

    It's one of those interesting problems, whether the parts of a complex plant count as eusocial individuals in a colony or not. In some ways, that's how plants work, because most are not really individuals the way we are*. Still, the observation and data processing part of the science seem good, the conclusions are controversial, and this gives SFF writers more grist for the mill. Happy Friday!

    *For the majority non-botanists here, the thumbnail. What defines different kingdoms on the tree of life is fundamental stuff, like what counts as an individual, how nutrition is obtained, how reproduction is done, and so forth. I'll ignore colonial animals like corals and go with humans. An individual human has more-or-less defined numbers of organs: one brain, two eyes, one heart, etc. Lose an organ, and you're crippled or dead. Get bisected, you're dead. For plants, organs are leaves, stems, and roots (flowers and fruits are modified leaves and stems). Plants shed their organs all the time, and they seldom have a set number of any. Many plants, if bisected, can grow as two genetically identical individuals, so what counts as an individual plant, especially in a rhizomatous species like staghorn ferns, gets complicated.

    If you want an easy metaphor, plant individuals are more like human corporations than humans. Many corporations hire and fire workers all the time, and may grow new branches or shed underperforming ones. It's not an exact metaphor, but if you don't want to become a plant nerd, it's reasonably close. The one thing to remember is that plants don't have CEOs (e.g brains). As corporations, they're entirely run by workers without any management. For them it works quite well...

    372:

    JBS @ 372: "First edition cover:"

    That's the edition I first read. It was at the Fraser-Hickson library. Years later an idiot crook stole it, probably hoping to make a lot of money from a first edition. Imbecile! First editions are worth something when they're in a pristine state only. Library books are in anything but a pristine state. There are some exceptions like The Bay Song Book or The Book of Songs of the Bay, of course.

    Anyway, while this cover has fond memories for me I swear by the cover of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction of November 1959 (where it was printed as a two-part serial: Starship Soldier) when it comes to the most realistic depiction of MI in combat.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers#/media/File:StarshipSoldier.jpg

    373:

    that almost inevitably leads to depression, so most people avoid thinking about it too hard

    I think that's something we all grapple with, at least those with the sense of it. It's a fatalistic perspective, if only because making a significant difference at this stage is just so remote and unimaginable. Of course that is nuanced, and there are useful things to do. But as you say, the useful things are both hard to focus on well enough to achieve anything and also hard to keep in perspective at the same time. I wonder whether there is a language where "perspective" and "despair" are synonyms, or whether perhaps there's even a word in English that has them both as synonyms.

    374:

    And back in the 1980s, a million dollars was serious money.

    Isn't chicken feed even today unless you run in circles that live on the upper east side of NYC or similar in London.

    Well, it will get you 1/3 to 1/2 a detached house in Toronto.

    (Back in the early 1980s the average house cost about a year's average income. The average income has about doubled, house prices have gone up 20 times. Now a year's income will let you purchase a parking spot.)

    375:

    It is blatantly obvious both Robocop and ST are satires, even at the time. I saw Robocop as a teenager, and it was obvious.

    Curious question: is satire not really part of American popular culture? Or are there subjects that are considered off-limits to satire?

    Wondering because the three films we've discussed (and the book one of them was based on) satirized what seem to be hot-button topics for many people, and huge numbers of people apparently didn't realize they were satires.

    Granted, films (especially in the cinema) carry you along without pauses to think, so it's harder to spot hints — but when something that is so obviously a satire is still treated by critics as being not a satire I wonder is the problem is that the critics mental landscape doesn't include satire, either in that medium or for those subjects.

    376:

    Greg would like that rant…

    Why have we not banned this odious hate group and thrown its silly-hatted officials into jail? Why haven’t we, at the absolute least, told them to pay some fucking taxes?

    377:

    its silly-hatted officials

    It did occur to me that what they're apparently missing is an official walk. Pompously ambling around like lost geriatrics does not count.

    378:

    Since the topic has shifted to Vietnam, I'd like to offer a perspective from one of my former teachers. He was a Vietnam vet. It's been decades, so I don't remember it completely. I'll try to reconstruct it below

    "In hindsight, the Korean War was justified while the Vietnam War was a mistake. However, at the time, in the first few years of the war, they were practically considered the same war. What was the difference we should have seen at that time?

    Is the Korean War only considered just because the Kims declared themselves god-kings, while the Vietnamese government modernized a-la China. How could we have known that at the time?

    My point is, it's very easy to judge history if you just look at events in isolation with 20/20 hindsight. It's not so easy if you try to piece it together in real time"

    379:

    Curious question: is satire not really part of American popular culture? Or are there subjects that are considered off-limits to satire? Wondering because the three films we've discussed (and the book one of them was based on) satirized what seem to be hot-button topics for many people, and huge numbers of people apparently didn't realize they were satires.

    Here's one way to see the problem. We stupid, ignorant, uncultured, fascist, and multiply spat-upon Yanks currently live in a moment where "Yeah, that January 6 thing was a nonviolent protest, you stupid libtards, can't you take a joke?" is regarded as a legitimate legal defense against charges of attempted insurrection.

    It isn't.

    Therefore, and this is rather important, the people claiming that something commonly seen as objectionable was meant as harmless satire have to actually demonstrate their point to a skeptical audience. This is because, to be blunt, that tactic's been weaponized against things we care about in the US, and it's currently not on the list of tactics of polite debate.

    Anyway, Starship Trooper got effectively skewered in Bill the Galactic Hero in 1965, so doing it in 1997 is about thirty years too late.

    380:

    Toby @356:

    This thread has been absolutely fascinating because of peoples responses. My interpretation of Heinlein's intent, is that JBSs response is exactly the response he wanted, but I don't know. But (apologies to our host if this breaks his ruling) it is peoples response to Verhoeven's films that is most interesting. Whilst any response to art can be said to be valid, responses to facts is a different matter. It is blatantly obvious both Robocop and ST are satires, even at the time. I saw Robocop as a teenager, and it was obvious. Someone even provided a quote from Verhoeven, saying ST was a satire.

    Verhoeven has always struck me as the sort of creature that will say something inappropriate^Wdownright offensive, and on noting the negative reaction, tack on, "Only joking."

    He changes his story, repeatedly, until he gets to one that seems to keep everybody quiet.

    But Hollywood will keep throwing him money, because in their terms he makes money. Losing money on the in vs. out scale is often still a winner from their point of view.

    381:

    I am not sure I'd call it a US-specific thing, being as I encounter an unrelenting stream of catastrophic sense-of-humour-failure in my own backyard. And probably even more of the "oh you are offended; I was only joking" bullcrap that just seems to be a massive part of western culture, not just anglophone, these days. But the satirical side that all these people miss itself misses the thing that grows more obvious every day as well. And that is that we (broad, sweeping "we" here) vaguely conscious middle-class, relatively comfortable westerners are drawing up against a pretty convincing wall of evidence that we, despite any efforts to be otherwise, are in fact the monsters of our imagination, the destructive force that is tearing the world apart. Our footsteps burn villages, our breath is a searing wind, our petro-chemical-derived effluent is infiltrating the very guts of all the world's fish and fowl and forming vast rafts of waste in the major oceans. That's without even getting to our emissions, which on their own now mean too many things to take in at once. In some ways satirical material that shows people become monsters is too mild to take seriously these days.

    382:

    Ioan Korea / Vietnam Barbara Tuchman wrote a book called: "The March of Folly" Which included Vietnam - & people could tell. Real experts, like P M A Linebarger/Cordwainer Smith wouldn't touch 'Nam with someone else's & said so, but were not listened to.

    Said book was heavy on: "Why do governments, down the ages, pursue policies which are OBVIOULSY contrary to their own interests?" Which brings us back to "We have had enough of experts" - Slimy Gove on Brexit.

    383:

    Just a quick thank you to Charlie for tolerating my threadjack, and thanks for caring enough to try to help to those who responded.

    384:

    My Dad got back to me this morning:

    "Link below gives details of the model Mum has. If you are registered partially sighted, you escape VAT.

    https://uk.optelec.com/products/comp-10-hd-wrld-optelec-compact-10-hd-speech.html

    She says this is probably way over the top for somebody newly diagnosed and that a bright light and a good magnifier would probably suffice!"

    Mum works with her local sight loss support organisation, there is probably one nearby that could advise you.

    Best wishes, it's not a fun thing to deal with.

    385:

    As we've already crossed the 300-threshold I'm maybe allowed an off-topic remark following from the thread about powered armour above:

    Basically the energy budget of powered armour comes up short unless they use lots and lots of extension leads and maybe spring-loaded boots, IMO.

    This is in a nutshell what kills Iron Man (and by extension the whole Marvel bunch of superhero movies of the last decade) for me.

    386:

    Perhaps you've hit the nail on the head. "Are we the baddies?" and the answer being "yes", may be the answer. https://youtu.be/rWvpvlT9pJU For anyone who hasn't seen it, this is the origin of the meme. Western and Middle class too! Anyway, your comment was very well written, poetic. So thanks for that.

    387:

    Re. the thermodynamics of power armor and related topics:

    I always interpreted the armor as a kind of "personal tank", with the question then becoming just how small you could make a functionally useful tank. But mostly, I just interpreted the suits as typical golden-age magical fun tech.

    That being said, lots of the components of power armor already exist, mutatis mutandis: heads-up displays, GPS, grenade launchers, battlefield communication nets and IFF systems, ceramic body armor, small rocket launchers (e.g., PIAT/ManPAD). In that loose sense, Heinlein got a lot of things right. There are even semi-practical jetpacks being demoed (e.g., https://taskandpurpose.com/news/jetpacks-british-royal-navy/).

    To create a true Heinlein-class personal mobile assault armor, I suspect you're going to need (effectively) direct conversion of matter into energy (which would also make "blaster"/"phaser"-type weapons feasible). I suspect that without that amount of power, you run into the rocket problem (i.e., the amount of energy required to transport your own fuel supply becomes prohibitively high), exacerbated by the weight of carrying a day's worth of munitions.

    What I've seen that makes the most sense is assistive technologies such as exoskeletons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWnXOh4r6Dw), with high energy recovery rates and really smart use of the available energy to apply the minimum energy for the maximum effect. For example, those spring-steel foot replacements (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/blade-runners-do-high-tech-prostheses-give-runners-an-unfair-advantage/) seem potentially interesting, if unproven.

    388:

    that tactic's been weaponized against things we care about in the US, and it's currently not on the list of tactics of polite debate

    Was that the case back in the 80s and 90s, when those films were made?

    389:

    That being said, lots of the components of power armor already exist, mutatis mutandis

    If that's the sort of thing that rocks your boat, your best recent example in fiction would be The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata (first book in a trilogy; author is a past Nebula winner and Hugo nominee). Plays with a lot of the same emergent AI themes I hit on in "Rule 34", but does it as political thriller/Mil-SF, and she's been paying attention to DARPA's wish-list for the past couple of decades. (The politics is relatively inoffensive, as long as you're okay with portrayals of the 21st century USA as a colonial imperial power, and with domestic terrorism up to and including nukes.)

    390:

    Was that the case back in the 80s and 90s, when those films were made?

    Not really: it's very much a thing that emerged with the odious alt-right since 2008.

    391:

    Toby @ 389 "We have met the Enemy & he is us"

    Charlie @ 392 The USA IS a colonial, Imperial power. But, then so is the PRC, who, let's face it are a far worse evil ( Hard to believe for some, I know, but ... ) Is there a name for the US "alt-right" that specifically labels them as the fascist authoritarian scum that they are, without muddying the waters, I wonder? Do we need a new word, or to resuscitate an old one?

    393:

    MSB @ 388: This is in a nutshell what kills Iron Man (and by extension the whole Marvel bunch of superhero movies of the last decade) for me.

    That and the assumption that encasing 90kg of meat in metal makes said meat immune to accelerations in excess of 100 gravities.

    394:

    I just call them Nazis.

    395:

    But, then so is the PRC, who, let's face it are a far worse evil ( Hard to believe for some, I know, but ... ) Is there a name for the US "alt-right" that specifically labels them as the fascist authoritarian scum that they are, without muddying the waters, I wonder? Do we need a new word, or to resuscitate an old one?

    A couple of points: it's worth separating Imperial and Hegemonic. The US is both, but PRC is more-or-less imperial. The difference is whether the subject territories (Hawai'i, Tibet, etc) are absorbed as part of the imperium, or whether they're notionally independent client states. The US, with its system of over 100 (over 200?) military bases in other countries across the world is the largest hegemon the world has so far seen, and the closest to a world government because of that. Like it or hate it, I think the US model will be vied for in the future, so long as states are a thing. Which, with climate change, they probably won't be, but it's worth keeping this in mind.

    I'm quite sure China wants US-level hegemonic status, along with a version of the Mandate of Heaven appropriate for the 21st Century. Indeed, if you want to get into SF again, posit a solarpunked world that's surviving climate change, where the United States Hegemony has replaced the Roman Empire as the "western model," while Chinese Communism has replaced the Mandate of Heaven/Chinese Imperium as the default eastern model (not sure what happens with India or Russia), and these models vie for power in the world and possibly elsewhere.

    As for words, just think about some symbols, like swastika and fasces. Prior to WW2, these were not objectionable. Now they're, erm, verboten, downplayed where they still occur (as in the US House of Representatives). Think about how the left cannot use National Socialism. Now we're stuck with a bunch of evil* authoritarians trashing "right," "Conservative," and "Republican." All of which were good words once upon a time. So that's what they've perverted now. And until some ethical conservatives can reclaim and resuscitate them, at best they'll likely become unusable in politics.

    And quite honestly, that sucks. It would be nice to be able to draw a fylfot without being labeled a Nazi, or to form a national socialist party without being labeled a Nazi. Or to tell the parable of the fasces without being labeled a fascist. Oh well.

    *Evil: variously defined as "the people of the lie," malignant narcissism, and similar. It's a socially contagious mental illness, at least in my book. Fortunately, it does have a good cure rate, especially for mild cases (cf: anti-racism)

    396:

    To create a true Heinlein-class personal mobile assault armor, I suspect you're going to need (effectively) direct conversion of matter into energy (which would also make "blaster"/"phaser"-type weapons feasible).

    Much ink has been spilled on Golden Age SF failing to foresee miniaturized electronics. Rather less has been spilled (but should!) on its utter disregard of energy source, and Heinlein was one of the worst offenders. In "Methuselah's Children" a starship takes off from the Moon, lands on Earth, takes up 100,000(!) refugees, takes off again and leaves the Solar System -- all without refueling of any kind, and apparently without pesky issues like air resistance.

    397:

    He also led the underground in 'Nam against the Japanese... and we were still allies of the USSR.

    398:

    By the time of Dien Bien Phu, the US was paying 80% of the French military budget to fight in Vietnam.

    399:

    Clearly, that was before FDR died in '45. I said that Truman invited the French.

    400:

    One "English" ton. If I was against them, I'd dig a lot of trap holes, and cover them over. There's a limit to how long they can fly, I think....

    401:

    I have behind me as I sit and type my late-seventies Fortran textbook, "Fortran for Humans". The illustrations are wonderful... including the one that illustrates a problem, with a demonstration. Demonstrators marching along the sidewalk carrying signs... and one, clearly the police infiltrator, with freshly-shined shoes. No one else's are.

    This was a joke going back to, well, I heard it by the end of the sixties.

    402:

    Satire is neither common, nor a regular thing. Even when I got onto usenet in late '91, folks would add "satire" tags.

    Now... American "humor" is "laugh at me, I'm stupider than you are". Most of it seems to be delivered with a 2x4 upside the head.

    403:

    RAN That SOB, MacNamara, LBJ's Sec of "Defense", before he died in the nineties, admitted, publicly, that the war had been a "mistake", and that it happened because he and his people didn't have the cojones to tell LBJ, when the latter asked him, that it couldn't be won on any acceptable terms... and then LBJ committed half a million men, leaving him unable to politically back out.

    And it was referred to as MacNamara's war in the late sixties.

    404:

    In "Methuselah's Children" a starship takes off from the Moon, lands on Earth, takes up 100,000(!) refugees, takes off again and leaves the Solar System -- all without refueling of any kind, and apparently without pesky issues like air resistance.

    Bad example: the spaceship in "Methuselah's Children" was explicitly a NAFAL interstellar colony transporter with a very early magic wand space drive -- I forget if it was inertialess or anti-grav, but there was a specific reason why Lazarus Long hijacked it.

    And it was in any case not the point of the story, which was to contrast how even centuries-long life expectancy was dwarfed by interstellar distances, and how normal human historical periods passed in an eyeblink relative to not-as-fast-as-light travel.

    405:

    it happened because he and his people didn't have the cojones to tell LBJ, when the latter asked him, that it couldn't be won on any acceptable terms

    You're not accounting for the Abilene paradox, whereby a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group's and, therefore, does not raise objections."

    It's a common cognitive bias to assume everyone else in a group is (a) reasonable and (b) agrees with the group's consensus. And sometimes the consensus emerges by accident, as when you convene a committee to determine how to win the war in Indochina: the very name of the committee leads everyone on it to assume everyone else thinks the war is winnable, so obviously they're missing something and should shut up about their misgivings.

    406:

    Thanks. Message forwarded to my sister so we can discuss it before talking to Mum.

    407:

    Nope, typical transpondian short measure. An English ton is 2240 lbs, just a few shovel fulls different to a metric tonne.

    408:

    Oh, oh, a parody. Iron Man walks out, and jumps to fly after a baddy... and baddy's henchman pulls the extension cord out of the socket....

    409:

    Paul @ 396 : "That and the assumption that encasing 90kg of meat in metal makes said meat immune to accelerations in excess of 100 gravities. "

    In 203 racing driver Kenny Brack survived 214 gravities when his racing car crashed.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Br%C3%A4ck

    410:

    RE: Powered armor.

    Yes, we need a magic energy source.

    We also need magic shoulder joints, so that the arms can lift heavy weights and transfer them through the exoskeletal should to the carapace around the body.

    We also need good lumbar support connected to those shoulders Actually, full spinal support, but with the ability to turn the helmet without sacrificing neck protection (make like a crab?)

    We also need a really excellent pair of hip joints, to transfer the load from the arms through the shoulders down the back through the legs and into the feet.

    And note this all has to be an exoskeleton, so it fits outside. The experimenters are proving its doable, but those joints have to be elegant to provide any lateral range of motion.

    And unlike Edge of Tomorrow, exposed hydraulic pistons do not good armor make.

    But the real miracle is the feet. If your armor weighs a tonne or so (1000 kg), it rests on feet that cover a few hundred square centimeters, so it's basically in the load range of a SUV tire. Not bad for walking on roads. But for landing on the roof of a building from a height? That takes some miraculous engineering, miraculous because the structural engineer had to figure out where the armor would land years in advance and reinforce it properly. I don't think most roofs are designed to have a large, flying, full-loaded bull land on them (to pick something in the same weight class).

    411:

    Iron Man’s armor would look a lot less cool with great big snowshoes.

    412:

    "utter disregard of energy source"

    It's a very old problem. IMO the most frequent crime against plausibility in Jules Verne's works is that his standard magic energy source is plain old electrochemical cells. One of his stories he has a whole town, and then the surrounding countryside also, finding that all the people are getting unusually lively and bouncy, because the atmosphere over a huge area is having its oxygen concentration greatly increased by some bloke electrolysing huge quantities of water using a battery-powered plant in his shed. Even in Verne's day chemistry was more than far enough advanced to make it obvious that the energy imbalance of such an idea is well beyond silly, and he has plenty of other stories which are nearly as far out the window on exactly the same point.

    413:

    Niala @ 375: JBS @ 372:

    "First edition cover:"

    That's the edition I first read. It was at the Fraser-Hickson library. Years later an idiot crook stole it, probably hoping to make a lot of money from a first edition. Imbecile! First editions are worth something when they're in a pristine state only. Library books are in anything but a pristine state. There are some exceptions like The Bay Song Book or The Book of Songs of the Bay, of course.

    Anyway, while this cover has fond memories for me I swear by the cover of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction of November 1959 (where it was printed as a two-part serial: Starship Soldier) when it comes to the most realistic depiction of MI in combat.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers#/media/File:StarshipSoldier.jpg

    Yeah, that may be an even better representation of what the powered armor suits looked like in action. I'm only familiar with the first edition cover because it was the only edition at the time I found it & the copy in the school library still had its dust jacket intact.

    I had already read Rocketship Galileo and The Star Beast in grammar school, so I was looking for Heinlein first time I got to use the school library in Junior High and that was the first one I found. What actually caught my eye was the parachutes. Never really thought about it as an illustration for the powered armor until now.

    I don't know what pages the exposition about powered armor might have appeared on in that first edition, but it's not page 81-84 in my current paperback copy (purchased a couple of years ago in response to another discussion of Heinlein & Starship Troopers here).

    Whatever edition you may currently have (or consult), it's Chapter 7 (p 124 in mine).

    414:

    Unobtanium is a long-standing Science-Fictional tradition. Or you can just strap bottles of morning dew to your body.

    415:

    "I always interpreted the armor as a kind of "personal tank""

    "Is that thing an armour or a personal tank?" as Haynes said to Kinnison. Of course, the Lensmen had had direct matter to energy conversion since back in the mists of time/Nevia, as well as some unspecified technology for accumulators that gave them nuclear-style energy storage density.

    416:

    Iron Man’s armor would look a lot less cool with great big snowshoes.

    Well true, but we're talking practicality here.

    Just thinking about it the combat armor helmet has to have a good air handling muzzle on the face. And given how many weapons are slung on the rest of it, the helmet is also a good place to rig a couple of SIGINT/Comms/Jammer antennas.

    And as you pointed out, proper jump boots (tm) should have big feet, for shock absorption, spreading out weight, extra jump jet fuel, and the like..

    So add it all up, and the armor begins to have a familiar silhouette: Wile E. Coyote.

    And that seems quite sensible to me. You?

    417:

    Robert Prior @ 377:

    And back in the 1980s, a million dollars was serious money.
    Isn't chicken feed even today unless you run in circles that live on the upper east side of NYC or similar in London.

    Well, it will get you 1/3 to 1/2 a detached house in Toronto.

    (Back in the early 1980s the average house cost about a year's average income. The average income has about doubled, house prices have gone up 20 times. Now a year's income will let you purchase a parking spot.)

    I remember my father telling me (sometime back in the early 60s) that as a rule of thumb you could afford the mortgage on a house that cost twice as much as your annual salary. I think he was basing that on the VA loan he took out to buy the house we lived in during the years I was in public schools (grades 1-12). I believe his interest rate was 4.5%

    Interestingly, the price for my own home was just about that, twice my annual income. And then I found out many years later that the price for my home in 1975 was the same as my dad had paid for a house in 1955. But that's because I got a super-sweet deal. I wasn't even looking to buy, I wanted to find a place I could rent that I wouldn't spend my whole paycheck filling the gas tank just to commute too & from work.

    NOW, if I was interested in selling, I could probably get a quarter-million for the piece of dirt the house sits on. Don't mean nothin', just an interesting factoid.

    418:

    Robert Prior @ 378:

    It is blatantly obvious both Robocop and ST are satires, even at the time. I saw Robocop as a teenager, and it was obvious.

    Curious question: is satire not really part of American popular culture? Or are there subjects that are considered off-limits to satire?

    Good satire is. Gratuitous anti-American bullshit not so much.

    419:

    MSB @ 388: As we've already crossed the 300-threshold I'm maybe allowed an off-topic remark following from the thread about powered armour above:

    Basically the energy budget of powered armour comes up short unless they use lots and lots of extension leads and maybe spring-loaded boots, IMO.

    This is in a nutshell what kills Iron Man (and by extension the whole Marvel bunch of superhero movies of the last decade) for me.

    "Hand Wavium" appears to be the most powerful energy source known to man, but we still haven't figured out how to harness it outside of science fiction novels and Hollywood special effects. Willing suspension of disbelief is the essential ingredient in today's anti-gravity powered vehicles.

    See also: Waldo & Magic, Inc.

    420:

    I have behind me as I sit and type my late-seventies Fortran textbook, "Fortran for Humans"...

    This sets up the joke is that you've been writing Fortran since it was only Threetran. grin

    421:

    whitroth @ 402: Clearly, that was before FDR died in '45. I *said* that Truman invited the French.

    No he didn't. He was in no position, had no political leverage, to stop them. But that was NOT an "invitation".

    422:

    whitroth @ 404: I have behind me as I sit and type my late-seventies Fortran textbook, "Fortran for Humans". The illustrations are wonderful... including the one that illustrates a problem, with a demonstration. Demonstrators marching along the sidewalk carrying signs... and one, clearly the police infiltrator, with freshly-shined shoes. No one else's are.

    This was a joke going back to, well, I heard it by the end of the sixties.

    It goes back farther than that I think. A common commentary in the 1930s & 40s was that the American Communist Party (actually CPUSA?) could not have existed if not for the FBI informants ... they were the only ones whose paid dues kept the group afloat.

    423:

    it's very much a thing that emerged with the odious alt-right since 2008

    In which case, whether or not satire is currently acceptable, that's not the reason so many Americans apparently totally missed it when the films were first released.

    424:

    Speaking of Heinlein, after 3 mass shooting in America in 24 hours, I feel we are living in "The Year of the Jackpot".

    425:

    When I bought my house in the 90s, it was 4-5 times my salary — at the bare limits of affordability, and not what I wanted but rather what I could afford.

    A couple of years after buying it I was salary-frozen for a few years, then got sub-inflation increases for years after, so I ate a lot of rice and beans for a decade.

    426:

    Charlie Stross @ 407:

    In "Methuselah's Children" a starship takes off from the Moon, lands on Earth, takes up 100,000(!) refugees, takes off again and leaves the Solar System -- all without refueling of any kind, and apparently without pesky issues like air resistance.

    Bad example: the spaceship in "Methuselah's Children" was explicitly a NAFAL interstellar colony transporter with a very early magic wand space drive -- I forget if it was inertialess or anti-grav, but there was a specific reason why Lazarus Long hijacked it.

    And it was in any case not the point of the story, which was to contrast how even centuries-long life expectancy was dwarfed by interstellar distances, and how normal human historical periods passed in an eyeblink relative to not-as-fast-as-light travel.

    Inertialeess. They dived down towards the Sun at maximum accelleration (which was almost not enough for them to get away) and then Libby turned his "drive" on canceling the ship's inertia and light pressure/solar wind flings the ship straight away at damn near the speed of light.

    The ship they hijacked didn't "take off" from the moon, the ship was being built in orbit as a generation ship. It was the second one, the first being the "Vanguard" from Orphans of the Sky

    Nor did it land on Earth to pick up "passengers" - they used "shuttles"

    Heinlein fudged the interstellar distances a bit because the whole round trip from the Solar System to the two planets only takes 74 years (experienced as only a few years by the Howard Families due to "time dilation'.

    Plus, I remember the journey from the first planet to the second was near instantaneous. And then the little people of the second planet guide Libby in creating a FTL drive.

    Mostly vast interstellar distances are just papered over with an "I'll explain later ..."

    427:

    Good satire is. Gratuitous anti-American bullshit not so much.

    Robocop was set in Detroit, but I wouldn't call it anti-American. America didn't even exist in Starship Troopers.

    Serious question: what makes you consider either of them anti-American?

    428:

    Robert Prior @ 426:

    it's very much a thing that emerged with the odious alt-right since 2008

    In which case, whether or not satire is currently acceptable, that's not the reason so many Americans apparently totally missed it when the films were first released.

    Calling it satire after the fact doesn't mean that it is, in fact, satire. You can call it gourmet, but it's still a shit sandwich.

    429:

    I first read Starship Troopers as a teen in the late 1980s and, personally, always imagined the powered armour as being a bit Space Marine Terminator suit-ish (Warhammer 40K). Obviously, with the ability to fly involved. Fundamentally, a 'step into' piece of kit as opposed to 'strap it on'. Probably an indication of the stuff I was reading/doing at the time. I was never a comic book guy, for example.

    I'd never really considered that the "How is it powered?" question is an issue. If you're talking about 700 years in the future, an unobtanium power source sort of goes without saying.

    The thing which dates most SF movies, even the good ones (and older SF books, for that matter) is the lack of computing/technological prowess on offer. The leap in tech over the past decade has been so massive that even the most futuristic show from the 1990s/2000s looks hopelessly dated. Problem is, anybody thinking seriously about what might be possible in a few hundred years time wouldn't get anywhere when showrunning.

    As for the disappearance of inertia in superhero films featuring characters who don't have any specific superhero invulnerability, you just have to shrug and ignore it. On the other hand for non-superhero stuff, I have less patience. Peter Jackson's King Kong remake was utterly stupid for the way in which the heroine was chucked around as KK fought some dinosaurs. She would have been a crumpled smear of flesh after all of that action.

    430:

    Robert Prior @ 428: When I bought my house in the 90s, it was 4-5 times my salary — at the bare limits of affordability, and not what I wanted but rather what I could afford.

    A couple of years after buying it I was salary-frozen for a few years, then got sub-inflation increases for years after, so I ate a lot of rice and beans for a decade.

    Well, yeah, when my father gave me that bit of advice even hourly wage workers were still covered by defined benefit retirement plans.

    Times changed. I was lucky to find a house that cost no more than two years of my income.

    Like I said, I lucked into a sweet deal. If I'd paid the market rate for a similar house, it would have been 3-4 times my income.

    If I hadn't recognized how good it was and grabbed hold with both hands (and dug in through adversity to come) I'd probably be living under a bridge somewhere today.

    I think it's still a good rule of thumb, but in this day and age, you're are going to have a hard time finding an "affordable" house according to that rule. Housing prices are going into another bubble and incomes are still stagnating, if not stagnating even more.

    431:

    First edition cover:

    For a while now every time I see book cover art I tend to discount it with a side thought of "mermaid boobies".

    http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/06/in-the-pulp.html

    432:

    Calling it satire after the fact doesn't mean that it is, in fact, satire. You can call it gourmet, but it's still a shit sandwich.

    If you're talking about the ST film, it was obvious to me when I saw it in the theatre that it was a satire, and not particularly subtle.

    I was disappointed that it wasn't true to the source material, but as I'd realized that Hollywood seemed basically incapable of doing more than taking the 'elevator pitch' summary of a book and rewriting it based on that I wasn't particularly surprised.

    Still unclear why you think it is anti-American. Feel free to email me at first.last at gmail.com if you'd rather explain/discuss privately.

    433:

    Think about how the left cannot use National Socialism

    Am I misreading your intent here? National Socialism was never a left ideology; growing out of anticommunist sentiment and antisemitism. It sided with business interests and the paleoconservative monarchist right, and crushed any independent workers organizations power after taking power in 1933. The left doesn't want National Socialism.

    434:

    I think he was talking about the two words strung together.

    NOT the actual German National Socialists.

    BTW the people I know who are avid Trumpers also claim that Hitler was a socialist because of the name of the party. And thus the D's are trying to make us into a Nazi country.

    Hugely big sigh.

    435:

    I think he was talking about the two words strung together.

    Yes, this. If there had never been a Nazi party it would be entirely plausible to form a "National Socialist Conference" or similarly named organization.

    As we should all know, the Nazis were not lefty socialists but the lie has been attracting gullible idiots and other liars for nearly a century now.

    436:

    David L & SS Thiis, of course the source of the US r/white-wing meme: "But the Nazis were socialists, they must be left-wing!" Yeah, straight alongside N Korea being "Democratic" because it's in the name, right. Mostly rich liars peddling authoritarianism of their own, actually.

    437: 420 - Well, my father was a bank manager, and would have considered an affordable mortgage (not house price; the mortgage doesn't include a cash deposit) would be up to 3x the principal earner's annual salary. 432 Para 1 - I didn't have the WH40K issue when I first read ST, not least because all forms of Games Workshop Warhammer were 10 years or so in the future. I imagine Charlie will have similar thoughts on this one. You're comparing an already acknowledged classic in ST with something that didn't even exist. 433 - Wildly off topic, but I totally agree about the housing bubble.
    438:

    Re Hollywood and US audiences and satire.

    I decided that satire probably isn't part of US culture when the Austin Powers series came out. The idea of writing a comedy that sends up the Bond series, which is itself a comedy, err it's a complete fail of understanding. They either thought Bond was a documentary or... I don't know what they were thinking.

    I think I dumped SST into that same category of "Americans are very weird, I don't understand".

    439:

    Mike Myers is Canadian, not USian. Not that this makes the Austin Powers trilogy any funnier.

    440:

    Nah. That was a decade earlier. I don't know if there is anyone still alive who used it in the late 1950s, but I assume not many.

    441:

    To be fair I don't think Austin Powers is simply a send-up of the Bond franchise. It's more a send up of the entire 60s-70s culture. I think it acknowledges the hammy/camp stuff by overstating it somewhat.

    442:

    re. the physical capability of power armor vs. the human body: I have less problem with this for powered armor, which should be designed to take the pressure off the body so that using the armor is survivable. If memory serves, Haldeman spent a fair bit of time in "Forever War" describing how the armor had to be extensively and carefully customized to the wearer so that the troopers didn't tear their own limbs off when they exerted themselves. I have much more of a problem with "bionic" folk like the "Six Million Dollar Man" and the Winter Soldier. There, the biomechanics simply don't work.

    China is complex and difficult to describe in simple binary terms. (I've been working with Chinese researchers for close to 30 years; you learn a few things.") First off, China is a centrally controlled state that nowadays increasingly resembles a fascist dictatorship, despite having a nominally democratic structure (representatives are elected at a village level, who elect officials at a county level, and so on up the chain to Premier). Modern China still has echoes of dynastic/imperial China: a good emperor (Deng) can do great things*, whereas a bad one (Mao) can destroy a generation and their accomplishments.

    • Though it's worth mentioning that Deng was also responsible for some of the worst pollution and environmental degradation outside the former Soviet Union.

    In terms of imperial aspirations, China is keenly aware that their main frenemy is the U.S., and having an equally keen memory of being dominated by foreign powers and not much liking it (e.g., Opium War), they're taking what they see as necessary steps to ensure that acquire enough power to punch in the U.S. weight class. Some of this is self-protection, some of this is imperial dreams. And there's definite hegemony there, whatever you want to say about the fates of Inner Mongolia and Tibet; though China's a major "charitable" donor to developing countries, this is clearly about securing access to strategic materials (e.g., "New Silk Road", "Belt and Road Iniative") and shielding those resources from the U.S.

    443:

    They either thought Bond was a documentary or...

    I was introduced to Bond at uni by someone who thought of it nearly that way. They really thought spies did things like swimming into harbours with duck hats…

    444:

    Mike Myers is Canadian, not USian. Not that this makes the Austin Powers trilogy any funnier.

    William Shatner is Canadian, not American.

    Come to that Robert Sawyer is Canadian, his books are definately Canadian, and yet the TV adaptation of Flashforward was a typical American program…

    445:

    I have much more of a problem with "bionic" folk like the "Six Million Dollar Man" and the Winter Soldier. There, the biomechanics simply don't work.

    In the original novel this is an acknowledged problem — he can't lift a car because it would just rip his fancy arm off his body. Caiden spent a fair number of words exploring the limits of his fancy technology.

    447:

    Disagree. Bill Shatner is American, and so is Salma Hayek, so was Simon Bolivar...

    448:

    Geoff Hart Belt-&-Road is old-fashioned colonialism + Imperial expansion Berlin to Bhagdad Railway, anyone? More that than Cape-to-Cairo, which was a proposal, based on stuff/land already "acquired".

    449:

    I always saw Bond as more "tongue in cheek" than "satirical." If Robocop and Starship Troopers (the movie) are satire... There's a lighter hand at work on the Bond films I've seen.

    450:

    Never said I thought Bond was satirical. But it isn't a realistic, though — which is what my acquaintance thought…

    451:

    paws4thot @ 450: "Disagree. Bill Shatner is American, and so is Salma Hayek, so was Simon Bolivar..."

    Take a look at Shatner's and Bolivar's Wikipedia articles and you'll find out otherwise.

    452:

    I have, and think you've missed the point. "America" is 2 (sometimes 3) continents, and is not a nationality.

    453:

    I think paws' point was that "America" =/= USA.

    America is a double continent that comprises of 35 independent countries. Everybody who comes from any one of these countries (between Canada in the north and Chile in the south) is American.

    AFAIK Shatner's Wikipedia article states that he's from Canada, therefore American. Bolivar's Wikipedia article states that he's from what is today Columbia, therefore American.

    454:

    Exactly, with the additional note that Salma is Mexican, therefore, {drum roll} American.

    455:

    I watched the trailer for Edge of Tomorrow, that someone posted a link to.

    Um, wearing little to no clothes under the metal armor? A visor that falls off when he hits the ground?

    shakes head

    456:

    Nahhh... since I studied it around 1979 or '80, it was probably fortran. Now, if I'd been using it in the sixties, ten years after it was developed, I would have been writing bitran.

    457:

    I think that's back-dating it. There were, I gather, dues-paying actual members, although there was a huge fuss (to understate it) when Stalin ran his purges and show trials.

    I have heard that about the CPUSA in the fifties, the FBI paying the dues.

    458:

    Well, by that note, OGH is a Brit, and everyone who's not a transpondian is Asian. Or perhaps you're all African, since the Suez Canal is an artificial waterway, and Africa's bigger than Europe and closer to most of you than Asia is.

    I know silly name-calling and pointless dunks are there just to reveal a deeply held sense of inferiority on both sides, but do we have to be so childish?

    459:

    Everybody who comes from any one of these countries (between Canada in the north and Chile in the south) is American.

    In Canadian usage, "American" refers to citizens of the USA, not inhabitants of either North or South America. That's also the case in the USA (which we/they often call "America").

    Last time I visited Europe (admittedly decades ago) that was also the case there — I was Canadian, not American.

    460:

    Well, if you want silly…

    There were the man-on-the-street interviews Rick Mercer did for the "Talking to Americans" segment of "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" (Canadian political satire).

    For example, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZE0TuKTpo4

    461:

    :-) and, in the spirit of the video, I'd like to say "Congratulations Canada, on completing a trans-continental railroad."

    462:

    Honest question: is a "deeply held sense of inferiority" the reason that US-citizens misappropriate the name of their whole continent to refer to their own country only? I honestly don't know why they do it.

    Of course I should note that something similar happens on the other side of the pond, whenever "Europe" and "EU" are used as if they were interchangeable, which gives the false impression as if countries that are not members of the EU were not part of the European continent. (Think for instance of Brexit-headlines along the lines of "The UK is leaving Europe".) The misappropriation of the continent-name "Europe" for referring only to a certain group of countries on that continent is of course just as incorrect as the misappropriation of the continent-name "America" for referring only to one country on that continent, even if the incorrect usage happens to be widespread.

    However, to me it looks like the reason for this continuing misappropriation (on both sides of the pond) seems to stem from arrogance (or a sense of superiority) rather than from a sense of inferiority.

    And as far as I know OGH is indeed a Brit, or more precisely a citizen and denizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, usually shortened to "United Kingdom" or "UK". Do you have reason to claim otherwise?

    463:

    I think the use of the terms 'American' and 'America' just evolved from common usage. Any deeper analysis is probably silly.

    On that note, why do we insist on calling a country 'Spain' when its citizens call it 'Espana'. Italy, Italia. Greece/Hellenica (!). Germany/Deutschland. The list is long and I'm sure every single example has reasons.

    So 'Americans' have appropriated a continent for their name. Ecuador has appropriated a Latitude. Aside from irritating pedants, I don't see the issue.

    464:

    Re: '...terms 'American' and 'America' just evolved from common usage'

    A lot more convenient than calling yourself an 'United-States-of-Americ-an'.

    Plus none of the continental neighbors were using any similar sounding names. There's also Yank/Yankee which probably irks the good old Southern boys.

    465:

    germans: ok, so our country is called Deutschland the french: got it. the country of Allemagne germans: ...no? that doesn't even sound like it the english: oh no, we got it, it's Germany germans: not even close the polish: it's Niemcy, right? germans: how are you each getting it wrong in a completely different way danes: Tyskland lithuanians: Vokietija slovakians: Nemecko germans: ... finns: Saksa germans: you know what? sure. whatever japanese: Doitsu? germans: i mean at least you tried

    466:

    Re: '... the exoskeletal should to the carapace around the body.'

    Or something completely opposite like the highly permeable membranes of critters living at the bottom of the ocean. Basically if you can't stop something without eating into your energy/reproductive budget, then don't. Not sure how making the human body (all tissues and organs included) more permeable would affect biochem reactions in the body - slow or speed them up?

    Also - based on previous discussions, I figure you might have some ideas about what naturally occurring materials might have some of these permeable/flow-through properties.

    467:

    Robert Prior @ 430:

    Good satire is. Gratuitous anti-American bullshit not so much.

    Robocop was set in Detroit, but I wouldn't call it anti-American. America didn't even exist in Starship Troopers.

    Serious question: what makes you consider either of them anti-American?

    Just Robocop being set in Detroit could be reason enough, but I won't pass judgement on Robocop as satire because I've never seen the film.

    The two Verhoeven films I have seen do not encourage me to do so. The deliberate over-the-top lying Nazification of Starship Troopers offends me. It is wrong, it is evil, and it is NOT satire. Beyond that, the film is just plain crap. I have seen the film, and that is my judgement.

    The other Verhoeven film I have seen (Total Recall) is almost good enough to be called mediocre. In the vernaculer of film criticism, it's a "1/2 thumbs-up" (with 4 being the highest, and none being the lowest).

    But mainly, Starship Troopers is an "American" Story for all that it's putative milieu is a world federation (an interstellar federation?) and Verhoeven trashed the story with his glorification of Nazism which is NOT in the book.

    Verhoeven is a scumbag and he made a scumbag movie.

    468:

    Re: 'germans: ok, so our country is called Deutschland'

    Just looked up the Wikipedia entry and have a couple of questions - no snark intended.

    Okay - so do 'Germans' actually call themselves 'Germans' or something else that sounds closer to the official name of their country. If yes - what is it? (If not - why not?)

    As per Wikipedia - 'Germania' has been in near constant use as the place name since Julius Caesar --- Germania tribes and such. 'Deutschland' on the other hand is Dutch-derived word meaning 'people'. (Lots of countries self-name themselves and their countries as 'people' in their own/old language. Just wondering: why Dutch?)

    469:

    "I watched the trailer for Edge of Tomorrow, that someone posted a link to.

    Um, wearing little to no clothes under the metal armor? A visor that falls off when he hits the ground?"

    I think that the point was that the armor was extremely new and not tested. Note that the deployment method from the VSTOL aircraft stank.

    470:

    Robert Prior @ 435:

    Calling it satire after the fact doesn't mean that it is, in fact, satire. You can call it gourmet, but it's still a shit sandwich.

    If you're talking about the ST film, it was obvious to me when I saw it in the theatre that it was a satire, and not particularly subtle.

    I also saw it in the theater, and it was obvious to me it was garbage, although "not particularly subtle" is an understatement.

    I was disappointed that it wasn't true to the source material, but as I'd realized that Hollywood seemed basically incapable of doing more than taking the 'elevator pitch' summary of a book and rewriting it based on that I wasn't particularly surprised.

    How could it be "true to the source material" when he never even read the book and had already decided to make a Nazi propaganda film out of it before the screenplay was even written.

    Still unclear why you think it is anti-American. Feel free to email me at first.last at gmail.com if you'd rather explain/discuss privately.

    I've explained why I think it's anti-American. If you don't understand, I don't think I've any more to add.

    471:

    Congratulations to all those whose efforts led to the separation of Mr. B. Netanyahu from the levers of power (direct power, that is). (I'm petty, and loath the unjustified level of arrogance displayed by that one. That, and how he helped elect DJT and worked to make support for Israel a partisan wedge in the US. And his warmongering and attempted normalization (with Yossi Cohen, gone a couple of weeks ago[1]) of both intra and extra national political assassination. (Yeah, he gets some blame for Rabin.) ) Netanyahu uses last speech as prime minister to attack Biden on Iran (Barak Ravid, Dave Lawler, 13 Jun 2021) Bold mine. (Assuming the translation/paraphrasing is accurate.) Bennet is at least constrained a little by his fragile coalition. (It'll be interesting; best wishes to Israel and others in the immediate area.) Netanyahu positioned himself as the only man standing between Iran and an arsenal of nuclear weapons, and claimed Iranians were celebrating his departure. He also compared Biden's Iran policy to the refusal of the U.S. to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. He also said he'd rejected U.S. demands to freeze settlement construction and opposed Biden's plan to reopen the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, which handled relations with the Palestinians before being shut down by Donald Trump. Again, he claimed Bennett lacked the stature or credibility to take similar stands.

    Iran has a reset opportunity re Israel; I hope they use it wisely. (Significantly and quickly reducing proxy-based kinetic violent activities, as a probe of the new government.)

    [1] Worth watching this one closely. Yossi Cohen gives specific details of Mossad actions against Tehran nuke program, his role in UAE deal, his Gaza error, and his prime ministerial hopes (11 June 2021)

    472:

    paws4thot @ 440: #420 - Well, my father was a bank manager, and would have considered an affordable mortgage (not house price; the mortgage doesn't include a cash deposit) would be up to 3x the principal earner's annual salary.

    Yeah. My dad wasn't a bank manager & was likely simplifying a lot in explaining the economics of buying a home to a 10-year old. It's just what I remember from that time. It's the only advice about home buying that I ever got.

    #432 Para 1 - I didn't have the WH40K issue when I first read ST, not least because all forms of Games Workshop Warhammer were 10 years or so in the future. I imagine Charlie will have similar thoughts on this one. You're comparing an already acknowledged classic in ST with something that didn't even exist.

    #433 - Wildly off topic, but I totally agree about the housing bubble.

    It's after 300, so "Wildly off topic" is probably more the rule than the exception. 8^)

    473:

    paws4thot @ 442: Mike Myers is Canadian, not USian. Not that this makes the Austin Powers trilogy any funnier.

    Doesn't make them any less funny either. Sophomoric humor perhaps.

    But I don't understand how anyone could think the Bond films (other than the first Casino Royale [1967] with David Niven, Peter Sellers & Woody Allen) are comedies?

    They have some humorous moments (more in the vein of "look how clever Bond is"), but they're mainly Spy/Action Film genre. In fact, they're the epitome of the Spy/Action Film genre.

    474:

    paws4thot @ 450: Disagree. Bill Shatner is American, and so is Salma Hayek, so was Simon Bolivar...

    Most people don't understand that. Hell, most "Americans" don't understand it.

    475:

    Yeah, they're the Deutschen.

    "Germania" has only a partial overlap with the areas defined by later borders, less with the later population, and far less still with the later political entities. For most of its post-Roman history the place has been an absolute pizza of little polities, until the Prussians managed to finish absorbing the whole lot in the later 19th century. (And they were more like sort of Lithuanian-ish before they started sending their hyphae west.)

    There used to be a place called Almany once upon a time; I think it was somewhere down in the south-west around Alsace or thereabouts. That's why the French still call all of them Almans even if they don't come from that bit and even though there haven't been any actual Almans for many centuries. There are similar explanations for all the other different names it has in different surrounding languages: it was the name of the nearest bit, or the name of their own sub-tribe that went and lived there, or the bit they used to think was most important for some other reason, etc.

    The proper name is kind of an expression of the fact that the main thing all the different bits of the pizza did have in common was the language... or sort of. There used to be all kinds of different versions of it before the current version became standardised and the mutual intelligibility of some pairs of variants got pretty iffy (there still are all kinds of different versions even now, come to that). Dutch is one that still has more or less the same name that found a suitable political niche to develop into something that even ignorant foreigners can understand is a different thing. English is one that kept a different name and then got infested with a great pile of Frenchitude a few centuries after it became independent.

    476:

    "worked to make support for Israel a partisan wedge in the US."

    ...following the lead of a certain Brit who was into that one a hundred years earlier, who would now be remembered as more of a cockend than anything if it hadn't been for the Nazis.

    477:

    Superficially, or to a first approximation from a modern perspective, that map show a split based on whether you happened to the Germans (Allemania), they happened to you (Nemetskjia, roughly), they are you (Deutsch, Tyks, or Tedesci) or none of the above (Germania). But that's eliding a lot of history.

    478:

    I've explained why I think it's anti-American. If you don't understand, I don't think I've any more to add.

    Um, you stated that it's an "American story" despite it being set in a worldwide federation. I still don't understand what makes it "American" as opposed to generically modern western. What clues did I miss when watching it that made it "American"?

    479:

    I think the use of the terms 'American' and 'America' just evolved from common usage. Any deeper analysis is probably silly.

    On that note, why do we insist on calling a country 'Spain' when its citizens call it 'Espana'. Italy, Italia. Greece/Hellenica (!). Germany/Deutschland. The list is long and I'm sure every single example has reasons.

    As someone quipped about orderly languages:

    I love japanese bc it’s so regular and logical. eg,

    kore = this, sore = that, dore = which koko = here, soko = there, doko = where koitsu = this person, soitsu = that person, doitsu = germany

    480:

    paws4thot @ 450: Disagree. Bill Shatner is American, and so is Salma Hayek, so was Simon Bolivar...

    Most people don't understand that. Hell, most "Americans" don't understand it.

    Perhaps it's a satire of Verhoevian subtlety and sophistication, which is why we crude Yanks don't get that it's funny. We're so silly and uninformed, our first thought are that Canadians and Mexicans who live in the US while retaining their nationality might well be seriously annoyed to be called American. Thus, we think it's impolite to do make statements like this and don't see the cleverness inherent in them. Which of course is our problem, not the problem of the satirist who is inherently right.

    481:

    "Germania" has only a partial overlap with the areas defined by later borders

    Ya. Like everyone on the big island in the UK is English, yes? Saying that won't offend anyone, surely, it's near enough to true?

    482:

    The only other film by Verhoeven I've seen was Total Recall, which I thought was Ok, better than Conan the Barbarian but not as good as The Terminator.

    Oh yeah, that's right, I have actually paid to see a Verhoeven film: Total Recall. How shocking. I'd probably be banned for asking whether the people who love Philip K Dick and Loathe Heinlein, similarly love PV's adaptation of "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" the same way they loved his other adaptations and satires.

    So I won't ask that question. Perhaps we should do a comparison of the literary merits of the more Dickian (dickish?) bits of Heinlein's oeuvre, such as "All You Zombies," and his later multiverse works, and the more Heinleinian of Dick's works ("Do Androids Dream", perhaps?) and ignore their respective Hollywood versions?

    483:

    Iran has a reset opportunity re Israel

    Yeah, just like the Nobel Committee had a great opportunity when Obama was elected... to wait a few years and see what effect he had on the global peace environment. Instead they gave him the peace prize straight away then got to watch him reinforce the reputation of that award as being primarily for war criminals.

    IMO Iran should be making overtures, but should not expect any major change, and the Palestinian government/terrorist network {delete as applicable} should continue to hope for a change away from genocide but not get their hopes up.

    484:

    The logistics types already have forklifts and palletised handling systems in the rear area; exoskeletons might be useful, but not critical.

    My opinion is coloured by training at “light role” infantry (i.e. no protected transport - just feet or trucks). It’s not until you try to move across country with a basic load (30kg is the minimum; that’s just weapon, ammunition, water, radios, NBC equipment; add food, shelter, and spare batteries and you approach/exceed 60kg) that you appreciate that you just aren’t… mobile. It’s scary (and painful) to discover that 1km/hr is a realistic speed when heavily loaded, over rough ground.

    Once you start the “operations in built-up areas” stuff, you discover delightful rules of thumb like “it’s 45 minutes and a platoon of thirty soldiers to clear/secure a defended house”. Trying to shift metal ammunition boxes, across those last hundred yards; or trying to shift a casualty backwards to a Company Aid Post; is insanely hard work. This was where the Universal Carrier excelled in WW2 (in the days when the lack of air burst fuzes meant that overhead armour wasn’t critical)

    You can be the most rugged / fit soldiers around, the tyranny of logistics applies. I recommend “Logistics in the Falklands War”; note that when 2 PARA attacked Mount Longdon, their ammunition resupply was carried forward by five snowcats - but also three tractors/trailers and five landrovers, driven by local farmers (including one 17-year-old girl, IIRC). And they still ran very very tight on their resupply.

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

    I think Linda Nagata had an excellent exoskeleton system in fiction…

    485:

    Seconded on the Pashazade, it was excellent.

    Has anyone mentioned P Djeli Clark’s world with a similar scenario (The Master of Djinn, Haunting of Tramcar 015, etc)? Excellent stories, well worth reading :)

    486:

    FWIW I don't think the SST movie is actually good. I'd meant to say so above but didn't because the moment I thought to was also just the moment when Charlie asked us to stop talking about it. I didn't much like Robocop either, and it also occurred to me to consider Total Recall... which I didn't mind so much, it's just a (very) different text to the novel. In general: no I'm not a Verhoeven fan at all. It's just that movies based on novels have typically been so dramatically different to the novels, for most of my experience of them, that any expectations you take to them are certain to be frustrated. This has changed a bit with some filmmakers realising that catering to a novel's existing fandom is money in the bank, though it usually takes a filmmaker who has been a part of fandom to really get it (like Peter Jackson I guess). Even then, for the movie to make money it has to appeal to an audience that has never heard of the novel. And also novelists are often not great screenwriters, so it ends up being a team effort, even when the writers are all alive and involved in the project. Cf the Richard E. Grant character in The Player (1992), or the whole Barton Fink movie.

    OTOH I loved Blade Runner, though I also see it as a quite different text to the novel. Does that help?

    487:

    MSB @ 465: Honest question: is a "deeply held sense of inferiority" the reason that US-citizens misappropriate the name of their whole continent to refer to their own country only? I honestly don't know why they do it.

    It may be an Honest question (although usually when someone claims to be asking an "honest question", it's anything but), but it reveals your "anti-American" bias.

    See also the reply in Arkell v. Pressdram

    My first response is to question what do you know about your own veracity or lack there-of that should lead us to believe it's NOT an honest question?

    But, an "honest question" deserves an honest answer... It's the result of rhetorical laziness on all sides. People say and write "America", instead of spelling out The United States of America as they properly should.

    It started long before I was born, and I've given up trying to get people to understand that the United States is part of America, but there are other parts. I prefer to refer to the country where I live as the U.S. or United States.

    Now you know.

    488:

    No other country in the western hemisphere uses the name America except for the USA. This pedantry isn't even clever.

    489:

    Never said I thought Bond was satirical. But it isn't a realistic, though — which is what my acquaintance thought…

    Legend has it that back in the day Soviet counter-intelligence sent someone to see every new James Bond film, so they could report on what strange new Western gadgets Russia would have to guard against.

    Maybe not the most effective use of their KGB resources - but you know you've seen much more government money wasted on much dumber things.

    490:

    I won't pass judgement on Robocop as satire because I've never seen the film.

    Go ahead, if action movies are your thing. I think one of the reasons Robocop is well regarded is that above and beyond any message or higher artistic statement it may carry, it also works as a straightforward action movie with moments of comedy.

    Lt Hedgecock: What kind of car do you want? Miller: Something with reclining leather seats, that goes really fast, and gets really shitty gas mileage!

    491:

    Robert Prior @ 481:

    I've explained why I think it's anti-American. If you don't understand, I don't think I've any more to add.

    Um, you stated that it's an "American story" despite it being set in a worldwide federation. I still don't understand what makes it "American" as opposed to generically modern western. What clues did I miss when watching it that made it "American"?

    ... and you probably never will understand.

    "What clues did you miss"?
    All of them. Go back and read the early comments I've made about the book & Heinlein the writer on this thread, particularly the first one - which I believe was at #76. See also #148

    Also, read the book and study what was going on at the time. Research some of the concerns that were in the news around the U.S. while he was writing the book.

    Despite the setting in an Interstellar Federation, Heinlein was writing about the U.S. in WW2 and the Cold War. Those were the things he knew and from which he drew his inspiration & examples.

    492:

    Scott Sanford @ 493:

    "I won't pass judgement on Robocop as satire because I've never seen the film.

    Go ahead, if action movies are your thing.

    I don't know if they're my thing or not, but I now know Robocop is a Verhoeven film and that well has been thoroughly poisoned, so I won't be seeing it.

    493:

    No other country in the western hemisphere uses the name America

    Except arguably American Samoa.

    The Americas, which are also collectively called America,[5][6][7]

    I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think you could be closer to correct.

    Looking at that list reminds me that countries often have aspirational names. "Democratic Republics" are often struggling to be either, and the "United Kingdom"... points for effort?

    494:

    ... and you probably never will understand.

    We might finally have a point we can agree on! :-)

    "What clues did you miss"?

    Well, given that I thought we'd established that the film shared almost nothing with the book other than a title and bug-like aliens, I was ignoring those as being totally unrelated to the film, and thought there was something in the film itself.

    495:

    Looking at that list reminds me that countries often have aspirational names. "Democratic Republics" are often struggling to be either

    What about People's Democratic Republics?

    496:

    IME the 'people" part is accurate, but they tend to go sharply downhill from the possessive apostrophe onwards.

    The United States of America is a bit up and down on that front... not very United, strong on the States part, not really "of" and only a little bit of the Americas... like Meatloaf sang "one and a bit out of four ain't bad".

    497:

    "Like everyone on the big island in the UK is English, yes?"

    Calling everyone from Deutschland Prussians would probably be like that, or at least sort of like that. But I don't think people are much bothered about what the Romans did or didn't call them any more.

    498: 496, #499: I like to transpose the middle two letters of "United".
    499:

    But then many USAians will get very angry with you because they fought several wars to keep their country tied. Part of the point is that no-one is allowed to untie. Albeit of late no-one is allowed to become a state either but "United States and Territories And Also Washington DC of America" doesn't have quite the same ring.

    500:

    only a little bit of the Americas.

    Boy did you get that bit backwards. Or are you being sarcastic?

    501:

    I'd point out that the Untied Kingdom is a likely reality, while the United States, while deeply divided, isn't about to lose California.

    I should also point out that American Samoa is a territory of the United States, so they are properly American. Considering their position relative to the International Date Line, we should question whether they are in the western hemisphere or not (they just barely are, by latitude).

    The other thing to point out is that having Hawai'i as a US state is not accidental, and even American Samoa and Guam are basically there as naval bases. Whoever controls Hawai'i has a dominant position on the North Pacific seaways. Since the US west coast depends on oceanic trade, I think the US would fight to keep it. Which sucks for the native Hawaiians, to be honest.

    502:

    Germany/Deutschland

    When visiting relatives and friends in Germany they used "Germany" when speaking English and some version of Deutschland when speaking German. Not sure exactly what since I only speak English. When the conversations switched to German I listened more for tone if at all.

    503:

    Oh, yeah. The name was picked in 1788 when the Constitution was ratified and never changed. Everything involved at the time was on the Atlantic coast of North America.

    Your comment reads as if you think the name as picked around 1962 and left out a bunch of bits.

    504:

    >a little bit of the Americas. Boy did you get that bit backwards.

    Can you explain? To me "the Americas" is two continents, and the USA occupies part(s) of one of them.

    505:

    American Samoa is a territory of the United States, so they are properly American

    That's a bit of judicial activism that AFAIK is still under discussion. They get full US passports but they can't run for president and they still have no representation in "their" government*. It's "some are more equal than others" territory.

    That's what I was alluding to with "can't become a state" (if they wanted to).

    • they have local government, but so does everyone else in the USA.
    506:

    Moz @504: "To me "the Americas" is two continents, and the USA occupies part(s) of one of them."

    I learned very early in school that there were 3 Americas within America: North America, Central America and South America.

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

    507:

    "United States of America" referred at that time (1788) to 13 states located IN "America". Other bits were added later. The name was never changed.

    I assume (mind reading back 230+ years) they thought they were the only "united states". Which was sort of a new setup.

    There there any countries on any of North America at that time? I have no idea.

    The preamble of the Constitution sets the name. It gets referred to as "United States" throughout. But the copies I just looked at don't have "the" capitalized which means "the" isn't a part of the name.

    We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

    Whether or not you agree with the statements in the preamble, well that's another subject.

    How did Australia set its name?

    508:

    Moz The "R's" are desperately screaming UNFAIR! at the v. sensible proposal to make "DC" a state. Something about "No taxation without representation" I think?

    Um, err .. "United states of Mexico" ??

    509: 502 - The "District of Columbia" and "Australian Capitol Territory" are the same legal thing. A political geography move to make the national capital not legally part of any one state or territory. 511 - "United States of Australia"? ;-) Departements Unis de France, Vereinigte Länder von deutschland ...
    510:

    Since we've degenerated into pedantry can I suggest that you might mean "equivalent" rather than "same".

    At least until residents of the ACT get to vote in US presidential elections...

    511:

    You have that completely arsey-versey. Israel has been waging direct war against Iran since well before Netanyahu schemed his way into office, and he hasn't done more that heat up the war. The ball is solidly in Israel's court, to stop its unlawful and unjustified agression, and I don't see an earthly.

    512:

    I think the idea of having to treat any other middle eastern power as an equal (or in fact with any respect whatsoever) constitutes an existential threat to Israeli self-esteem somehow.

    513:

    JBS: Yellow card.

    Reason: see the bold warning I added to the top of the original blog piece. (Also, you're getting unreasonably irate.)

    Stop talking about that goddamn movie or I will start deleting your comments.

    514:

    The ball is solidly in Israel's court, to stop its unlawful and unjustified aggression, and I don't see an earthly. Sure, but it costs Iran very little (domestic politics possibly excepted) to semi-publicly tamp down their (inc proxies that listen to them) efforts for a month or two, and such a move might even boost their credibility, and there is the possibility that Israel will respond positively somehow.

    515:

    The real problem would be what would you call us - USans?

    Right, it was Weans in the book....

    516:

    You wrote: japanese: Doitsu?

    which reminds me of the old joke - before the cars were called Nissan, they were Datsun. And it was a German-Japanese company.

    Germans: How soon can we be ready to put it on the market? Japanese tell them. Germans: Dat soon, eh?

    517:

    Ok, I've been avoiding mentioning it, but I have seen at least part of Robocop on TV. What I remember is that the company that created him is nasty... and the ending cracked me up, because it was clever.

    518:

    Agreed. Now if they can put the SOB in jail....

    And the whole Iran Must Not Get Nukes is insanely STOOOOPID. Jerusalem is holy to all of Islam. Israel is so small that nuking anywhere will make Jerusalem uninhabitable, and the nuker a world-wide pariah state.

    THERE'S NO POINT TO NUKING ISRAEL, and every reason not to. But it's back to the West literally not understanding the impact, and religion is important, except when they need something....

    519:

    Nope, not at all.

    I fyny Cymru!

    520:

    I've only read Haunting, from last year's Hugo readers' packet, and I really want to read more from him. That was brilliant.

    521:

    Moderators: FRNJweaver @ 518

    If this isn't an AI=generated chatbot, I'll buy someone who can prove it a drink.

    SotMN has issues... but is trying to make points. This is not.

    522:

    A highschool English teacher once said somebody's comments weren't germane to the discussion and had to explain that germane meant "related". She went on to claim it was the origin of the word "Germans" because Anglo Saxon settlers in Britain recognized them as "the relatives". Further up in the thread a comment about Germania being the Latin name for a northern part of the Roman Empire makes me wonder if similarity to the word germane is more than a coincidence, since Romans wouldn't likely have been willing to acknowledge kinship with barbarian tribes. Plus the Spanish word hermano for 'brother' sounds close. So what are they really, Germans because they're cousins or because they inhabit Germania?

    523:

    Charlie (mods), that FRNJweaver mass of text at 518 is extremely probabilistically consistent with generation by GPT-2. Just FYI. It's also in no way artful; e.g. no selection of seeds or word continuations to give an appearance of being backed by a mind, no gaming of rngs[/probability], etc. Not gonna try to guess motives. (OK, P guesstimate 45 percent it's a cryptocurrency person, perhaps attracted by twitter, being stupidly, cluelessly obnoxious/offensive.)

    524:

    CHATBOT! FRNJweaver 51 - please nuke with extreme prejudice?

    ( Aside to whitroth ... SotmMN's Issues are: "LOOK AT MEeeee!" & tiresome, but agree it's almost-certainly human. )

    525:

    That explanation is thoroughly mangled, though I can't say who mangled it :-) According to the OED, it comes from the French germaine, which means 'close' in terms of relations (e.g. full sibling or first cousin). If it came from Germania, it was near-universal with that meaning among the Romance languages by the 12th century.

    526:

    Let's ignore the fact that they aren't proxies, but are being supported by Iran, for reasons given below. Iran stayed out of such politics for a long time, until it became clear this was an anti-Shia pogrom, led by the USA, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

    Which? The ones that are trying to defend themselves from being eliminated by Saudi Arabia, the ones that are trying to defend themselves from being eliminated by Da'esh or the ones that are trying to defend themselves from being eliminated by Israel itself?

    The only ones that just MIGHT be able to let up are the ones in Iraq, but their existence is still under threat. If the USA and its allies manage to restore a puppet Sunni government, the Shias are up shit creek and know it.

    527:

    That's pretty much the same conundrum as I was confused over when I was little: are Germans called Germans because they have germs? After all, it would explain why we kept fighting wars against them.

    Apparently the true situation is one of those confusing things where some linguistic analogue of convergent evolution means you end up with two words which look exactly as if they are the same word but nevertheless aren't. There is one word "germanus" which means "familially related" and is traceable back to the usual ultimately Indian origins, with "germane" and "hermano" and "germs" all being part of the same chunk of evolutionary tree. Then there is another word "germanus" which means "someone from east of the Rhine" and was apparently dragged into Latin quite independently, derived from some word the locals were using as descriptive of the same bunch, although nobody seems to be clear what that local word actually was. Thus we have two Latin words which look exactly the same, but are in fact different, and everyone who comes along later gets confused.

    So your teacher was wrong, and so was I :)

    528:

    But it likes me! Can I keep it?

    529:

    Of course you can keep it, but don't let it run about on the Internet unsupervised!

    530:

    p>Pigeon @ 501: #496, #499: I like to transpose the middle two letters of "United".

    You can do that for the British Isles, but for over here, it's not your call to make.

    531:

    Thanks for that! I may tell the OED that they should have mentioned that ....

    532:

    CHATBOT! - again @ 530 ARRGH! or something

    533:

    Robert Prior @ 497:

    ... and you probably never will understand.

    We might finally have a point we can agree on! :-)

    "What clues did you miss"?

    Well, given that I thought we'd established that the film shared almost nothing with the book other than a title and bug-like aliens, I was ignoring those as being totally unrelated to the film, and thought there was something in the film itself.

    Two thing here ...
    1. OGH stated repeatedly his post was about the book and NOT about the film. My objection to the film is based on the book which Verhoevan didn't even bother to read before making mock of it.

    2. Verhoevan's film in and of itself is objectionable. It's a glorification of Nazism that would be anti-American even if the book had never existed. If he meant it to be satire or parody, he failed abysmally. It has no basis in the book.

    How can you presume to satirize or parody a book you haven't even bothered to read?

    But mainly, you should not have ignored arguments based on the book because they are NOT "totally unrelated" to Verhoevan's film because Verhoevan claimed the film was adapted from the book. It WAS NOT. Everything about the film is a lie.

    534:

    Moz @ 507:

    >a little bit of the Americas.
    Boy did you get that bit backwards.

    Can you explain? To me "the Americas" is two continents, and the USA occupies part(s) of one of them.

    It's the "little bit".

    The United States is larger than a "little bit" of America. By comparison, would you consider Russia to be only a "little bit" of the Eurasian land mass? Or China?

    I would consider either one to be a fairly large portion of the continents wherein they reside. Thus so with the United States.

    535:

    Greg Tingey @ 511: Moz
    The "R's" are desperately screaming UNFAIR! at the v. sensible proposal to make "DC" a state.
    Something about "No taxation without representation" I think?

    The GQP opposes it because they believe it would give the Democrats two more Senators. I don't think it's really that good an idea. I think the Federal Government should cede most of DC back to the State of Maryland, as was done with the Virginia part back in 1847

    Um, err ..
    "United states of Mexico" ??

    Officially the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos);

    536:

    Charlie Stross @ 516: JBS: Yellow card.

    Reason: see the bold warning I added to the top of the original blog piece. (Also, you're getting unreasonably irate.)

    Stop talking about that goddamn movie or I will start deleting your comments.

    Message received & understood. Been trying to get away from it, and in fairness, I think you should also look at the comments I was responding to.

    Also trying to get away from it because it does make me angry.

    537:

    As opposed to when they made the Dakotas and Wyoming states, to give themselves six Senators.

    538:

    Speaking of politics, Charlie (and other Scots), any ideas when the "non-binding referendum" is coming?

    539:

    Worth pointing out to the UnYanked here that Wyoming and Vermont each have smaller populations than does Washington DC. That by itself doesn't mean much, because southern California, with its population of over 19 million, would be the #3 state behind Texas and all of California if it was its own state, and only a few ijits up north want to secede from California to go be poor reactionaries on their own.

    That said, the 630,000-odd people in DC don't have a vote in Congress and none in the senate, even though Congress does a less-than-cromulent job running DC. I think it's only fair to limit the capitol district to the central area the Mall and let the state of Columbia run itself.

    540:

    Getting back towards the original idea of the post, I find myself scratching reflexively and wondering what an SST-equivalent would look like now?

    The obvious answer is Old Man's War, but the bigger point is that warfare's changed so radically in the last ten years that "Supertech soldiers shooting it out with BEMs" seems, I don't know, quaint perhaps. The bigger things that have changed are that a good chunk of SFF is woke, so coding BEMs for stereotype phobia jerking is a bit passe (read, smaller audience), and we're getting slapped repeatedly that a core leg of SF, that technology can solve the more complicated problems of life, like climate change/terraforming, extinction, and CRIS*, is stupidly wrong. Some problems can't be solved by science, even when science caused them.

    So if we want to do a riproaring story around, say, interstellar colonial imperialism, how do we go about doing it?

    *CRIS: Cranio-Rectal Insertion Syndrome

    541:

    "So if we want to do a riproaring story around, say, interstellar colonial imperialism, how do we go about doing it?"

    Short answer, we don't. Distances are too vast without some FTL handwavium. Perhaps, just perhaps, if someone is able to someday invent a functioning and controllable wormhole (and thus network of wormholes). Then, maybe, an interstellar colonial empire could theoretically exist, but it would be forever inclined to disintegration as cultures and distances remain vast.

    I like a model where humans etc. spread into the stars but individual colonies have little to do with each other for millenia at a time. When they do interact they aren't always mutually intelligible or even recognizably human any more. And of course many/most do not survive for obvious reasons.

    542:

    I like a model where humans etc. spread into the stars but individual colonies have little to do with each other for millenia at a time

    A lot of Alastair Reynolds is like that

    543:

    whitroth @ 541: As opposed to when they made the Dakotas and Wyoming states, to give themselves six Senators.

    Before my lifetime, but I don't think I've ever accused them of being upright & forsquare in fair dealing; of not trying to rig government to benefit their own power.

    The honorable anti-slavery coalition of the GQP went south (so to speak) in 1877, leaving the prototype wannabee Oligarchs in control.

    544:

    Given the right kind of warp drive, FTL is not necessary. See this interesting video:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA66ah9b0U4

    After showing why and how Alcubierre's actual warp drive cannot exist, the presenter examines a different approach.

    Create a hollow shell with material as dense as that found in a neutron star. Given the high gravity associated with this material, anyone living inside of the shell would experience time slowing down as if they were travelling near light speed (gravity also slows down time). For example, for every hour you spend inside the shell, thousands of year would pass in the outside universe.

    And so a spaceship of this configuration may take thousands of years to reach Alpha Centauri moving at sub-light speeds, the crew would experience only the passing of a few hours.

    This guy gets points for thinking outside the box.

    But this approach has the advantage of actually being able to exist in the real universe, unlike the negative matter and energy required by Alcubierre.

    Furthermore, create similar neutron shells to house the capital of the galactic empire, regional governors, etc.. Time moves just a slowly for the emperor and his court - and thus everyone in the empire feels that are travelling to stars in only a few hours with the empire's central government in temporal synch with the rest of the empire.

    Now if only Home Depot carries neutron star mass panels.

    545:

    Heteromeles @ 544: Getting back towards the original idea of the post, I find myself scratching reflexively and wondering what an SST-equivalent would look like now?

    The obvious answer is Old Man's War, but the bigger point is that warfare's changed so radically in the last ten years that "Supertech soldiers shooting it out with BEMs" seems, I don't know, quaint perhaps. The bigger things that have changed are that a good chunk of SFF is woke, so coding BEMs for stereotype phobia jerking is a bit passe (read, smaller audience), and we're getting slapped repeatedly that a core leg of SF, that technology can solve the more complicated problems of life, like climate change/terraforming, extinction, and CRIS*, is stupidly wrong. Some problems can't be solved by science, even when science caused them.

    So if we want to do a riproaring story around, say, interstellar colonial imperialism, how do we go about doing it?

    *CRIS: Cranio-Rectal Insertion Syndrome

    How do you predict the consequences of an idea no one has thought up yet? All you can do is take the ideas that are around today and project where we might go if they are taken to extremes. Or take historical events and re-frame them in a different projected milieu.

    The farther into the future you place your story the less detail you have to account for. Go far enough ahead and you don't have to explain how your ships are able to traverse the universe in less than a lifetime, any more than authors writing contemporary fiction have to explain the mechanics of driving a car. They just go.

    But I think the PBI will always be the PBI even if you give them new tools. Those tools are the background and the story is still the people who employ those tools. Bullets go right through you and so do whatever it is that blasters blast out. The interesting part of the story is who shot whom & why?

    546:
    Now if only Home Depot carries neutron star mass panels.

    To paraphrase Doc Brown:

    "I'm sure that in 2051, neutronium will available in every corner drugstore, but here in 2021, it's a little hard to come by!"

    547:

    The trick is to buy depleted neutronium, not enriched neutronium.

    548:

    Duffy @ 548: Given the right kind of warp drive, FTL is not necessary. See this interesting video:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA66ah9b0U4

    After showing why and how Alcubierre's actual warp drive cannot exist, the presenter examines a different approach.

    Create a hollow shell with material as dense as that found in a neutron star. Given the high gravity associated with this material, anyone living inside of the shell would experience time slowing down as if they were travelling near light speed (gravity also slows down time). For example, for every hour you spend inside the shell, thousands of year would pass in the outside universe.

    And so a spaceship of this configuration may take thousands of years to reach Alpha Centauri moving at sub-light speeds, the crew would experience only the passing of a few hours.

    But once they got there, how would they communicate back to Earth. They've only experienced a few hours, but Earth has experienced thousands of years. Would there be anyone who could understand their reports?

    This guy gets points for thinking outside the box.

    But this approach has the advantage of actually being able to exist in the real universe, unlike the negative matter and energy required by Alcubierre.

    Furthermore, create similar neutron shells to house the capital of the galactic empire, regional governors, etc.. Time moves just a slowly for the emperor and his court - and thus everyone in the empire feels that are travelling to stars in only a few hours with the empire's central government in temporal synch with the rest of the empire.

    Now if only Home Depot carries neutron star mass panels.

    And again, how would "government in a shell" deal with problems outside the shell. If a thousand years elapses outside for every hour inside, the reaction inside the shell would be too slow to deal with real time.

    549:

    Would there be anyone who could understand their reports?

    Yep, the galactic emperor living inside of his own neutron shell for whom time passes just a slowly as the crew of the neutron shell imperial dreadnaught.

    And again, how would "government in a shell" deal with problems outside the shell. If a thousand years elapses outside for every hour inside, the reaction inside the shell would be too slow to deal with real time.

    Glad you asked. The conquered species of the empire would have to be kept in a permanent state of pre-technology (maybe introduce an oppressive religion that considers science to be a "sin"). So the natives never advance technologically enough to pose a challenge to the empire or its local garrison.

    Cosmic threats (rogue planets maybe) would have to cover long distances at sublight speed and the emperor could probably see them coming.

    550:

    Israel has done some dumb things over the years, but I can't help but think the whole area would be calmer if Iran wasn't an authoritarian, oppressive theocracy committed to the obliteration of the state of Israel and funding most the "thousands"* of missiles fired from Gaza at Israel.

    And its going to get worse after they next Iranian "elections" where many opposition candidates were banned.

    • And it really is thousands
    551:

    The real challenge is to make sure that the architecture inside the neutron sphere is so perfectly balanced at the center of the sphere that it doesn't slide towards the shell and turn everything and everyone inside into chunky salsa.

    Did I mention that these things would have to be huge, like Jupiter sized huge, so that the people living inside can experience the slowing of time without being torn apart by gravitational tidal forces because the sphere will inevitably spin if only slowly.

    552:

    Maybe just ignore the chatbot & it will go away. That's what I'm doing.

    553:

    Grant @ 555: Israel has done some dumb things over the years, but I can't help but think the whole area would be calmer if Iran wasn't an authoritarian, oppressive theocracy committed to the obliteration of the state of Israel and funding most the "thousands"* of missiles fired from Gaza at Israel.

    And its going to get worse after they next Iranian "elections" where many opposition candidates were banned.

    * And it really is thousands

    Given the roles both governments have played in obstructing peace in the middle east, I can't help but think Mercutio got it right ... although I think it might need to be "A plague o' ALL your houses!" to account for the other regional players.

    554:

    Actually, entering and leaving the sphere would be a problem. The tidal forces encountered while passing through the shell would rip you apart.

    So.....

    Leave openings at the "poles" at the top and bottom of the sphere's axis of spin. Holes should be big enough to allow those entering and leaving the sphere to avoid gravitational tidal forces.

    So now it looks like a donut.

    Unfortunately that doesn't inspire fear in the same way as a Klingon battle cruiser or Imperial star destroyer would.

    A donut just isn't badass enough.

    555:

    Re: 'For most of its post-Roman history the place has been an absolute pizza of little polities, until the Prussians managed to finish absorbing the whole lot in the later 19th century.'

    Thanks - interesting and entertaining!

    556:

    It's just a matter of marketing. Call it "The Imperial Death Toroid" or "Toroid Prime," or maybe "Neutronium One." Its primary weapon could be "Gravstar's Hammer."

    557:

    Given that the structure has a gravitational field second only to that of a black hole it's going to be hard to launch weapons. So it would have to rely on energy beams only, and its gravity could bend or otherwise distort the energy beam affecting its aim.

    We need to send the whole concept back to engineering for a complete redo.

    558:

    To rephrase what you said without sacrificing accuracy, we could also say:

    I can't help but think the whole area would be calmer if Israel wasn't an authoritarian, oppressive theocracy committed to the obliteration of the state of Palestine and funding most the "thousands"* of missiles fired from Israel at Palestine.

    • really, thousands. Also bombs, bullets, ground forces, air strikes.
    559:

    The donut cushion on the imperial throne.

    560:

    The problem and/or plot hole I see is this "local garrison" thing you seem to need. Surely on timescales, they are just as much a problem as "subject" populations. Even if small, rigidly hierarchical and heavily armed, they need to be big enough to be self-sustaining, and autonomous enough to use initiative to respond to local issues. Or we are still talking about millennia-long JIT logistics trains, something that doesn't sound very tactically flexible.

    561:

    The Imperial Hemorrhoid Cushion?

    It makes the Alpha Centauri run in 4 light-years.

    562:

    How about if we close one end and they can fire giant beams-of-doom?

    563:

    If the Death Star looked like a donut, the rebel alliance would be too busy laughing at it to drop a torpedo down that heat vent.

    564:

    You would have to garrison from orbit, no boots on the ground.

    Just drop an asteroid on the planet's surface at the slightest sign of trouble.

    By lunch time next Friday (shell time) intelligent life would have re-evolved.

    565:

    A ship made of neutronium is the weapon. Just move it close to the surface and let it suck up the atmosphere, or maybe perturb a fault or two. If you're really unhappy you just bump the surface of the planet with the outside of the ship.

    566: 556: The gravitational field strength of a sphere of mass - whether it's solid or a hollow shell - is greatest at the surface. Inside the shell it falls off until it gets to zero at the centre. With the field being zero, of course the effects of the field are also zero; you don't accelerate, and you don't undergo time dilation.

    You could undergo time dilation inside a thing like that, but you would have to be away from the centre to be in a strong enough field, and you would also be accelerating. You probably don't want that to happen. Especially not if your feet accelerate faster than your head.

    What you need is a source of an intense gravitational field of such tremendous strength that you undergo the desired degree of time dilation while you are still far enough away from it that the gradient of the field at that radius is still negligible. That's a big ol' field. And then you also need to accelerate the source of the field away from you at the same rate that you are accelerating towards it, so as to stay in a region of the desired field strength. So what you end up doing in order to make it work is something like pinching the supermassive black hole out of the middle of some handy galaxy and strapping some rather large engines to it. And this in turn means you can't actually go anywhere with it because the supermassive black hole always gets there first and then your destination no longer exists.

    567:

    That much mass is likely to splat the planet into a thin layer on the surface of the ship. More likely those ships would have to stay out on the fringes of a system just to avoid wrecking the orbits of everything in the area.

    To get useful time dilation you're talking a lot of mass. I'd like to see the numbers but I'm thinking multiple stellar masses if you want a useful amount of internal volume. Sure, it doesn't have to be an office block size, but you'd want more than just a couple of people in space suits wedged inside. Otherwise they'd be very vulnerable to a guillotine placed over the exit.

    568:

    Perhaps a resource war, what if a space capable civilization worked out how to make a living on Oort cloud resources and has been expanding to neighboring systems for centuries, what happens when a species native to one of those systems tries to exploit those same resources? Remember, none of those aliens will have a personal memory of their original home.

    569:

    That was rather my point - the ship is its own weapon. You'd rather want to keep it away from anything you cared about.

    570:

    I thought that things inside a gravity well experienced time dilation regardless of local gravity gradients. The inside of the neutronium sphere still has the same hill to climb back to free space.

    571:

    And in real space war news The USSF just reported designing and launching a satellite in four months. The idea is apparently to rapidly replace satellites that are disabled or destroyed, and/or to rapidly ramp up space forces as needed.

    This is the puzzle of the strange attractor of space travel here: everybody loves to chew on it, but the discussion seldom has any connection with the militarizing that's actually happening. Oh well.

    Rather than going on about neutronium whizz-splatters, perhaps it might be useful to contemplate the different "spheres" that human-built thingies might have to travel in, and how they differ. From bottom to top on Earth: --Hadal pelagic (trenches) --Abyssal pelagic --Mesopelagic (below ca. 1000 m) --Bathypelagic --Epipelagic (the photic zone, top 200 meters where light penetrates) --Surface of the water --Surface of the land --Troposphere --Tropopause --Stratosphere --Stratopause (about as high as weather balloons and most aircraft go) --Mesosphere (where meteorites burn up) --Thermosphere (up to LEO) --Exosphere (past the moon) --Solar Atmosphere (interplanetary space, probably with its own zones based on photon density and composition) --Heliopause --Interstellar Space

    Thing is, a sub like Alvin can only go from the epipelagic zone to somewhere in the abyss, and almost nothing can get a human to hadal zones in the bottoms of trenches. Similarly, it's effectively impossible to get a human into the Mesosphere of the atmosphere. Through it on a rocket, certainly, but not stopping in it, so it's the greatest poorly explored layer of the planet. And only a few humans have made it into the exosphere and none beyond that, although our gizmos have made it out past the heliopause.

    The reason I bring up all these layers is to point out how much technology has to change to get a human to both visit and survive each separate layer. They all have their unique requirements, and it's hard for any vehicle to go into more than one. That's the basis for any action, military or otherwise. So if you want to opine about future tech, it might be useful to think in terms of how to get a human there and back again. And if that's impossible, what (or who) goes there?

    572:

    Boy, diving into a string like this is its own black hole.

    Yeah, I've been gone for a while; hibernating through a pandemic, surviving a heart attack, the usual stuff.

    Paying attention to OGH's wishes, I will NOT be commenting on any movies. I do think RAH was trying to make a philosophical point, and not being particularly subtle about it. His history and predilections didn't seem to run towards subtlety, or frankly, to satire. Now Harry Harrison, sure, but Heinlein always seemed to me to be sincere, even when he was trying to be outré as in Stranger in a Strange Land.

    Even with what seem like antiquated blatantly biased views now, I'll always be grateful to RAH for my gateway drug, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.

    573:

    And another thing, since I couldn't think of his name for the previous post - why is that master of the absurd, Ted Sturgeon, not yet acknowledged as a Grand Master?

    574:

    #556: The gravitational field strength of a sphere of mass - whether it's solid or a hollow shell - is greatest at the surface. Inside the shell it falls off until it gets to zero at the centre. With the field being zero, of course the effects of the field are also zero; you don't accelerate, and you don't undergo time dilation.

    No - inside a spherical uniform hollow shell the gravitational field is zero (see for example Shell theorem on Wikipedia. Of course in the real world you don't get perfect spheres, but it's a good approximation in many cases.

    Then the gravitation of a solid sphere uniform enough (so that it's composed of shells which are themselves uniform in the earlier sense) depends only on how far away you are from the centre. Below the surface the "outer shells" contribute no gravity. This is why gravity gets weaker if you dig a deep hole and measure it at the bottom.

    575:

    Heinlein wrote "Job: A Comedy of Justice" and what he thought were witty digs at those durned philosophers. And he often explores contradictory ideas in different books, which is why he can speak to so many different kinds of people. He strikes me as earnest and opinionated and self-righteous (he did come from Missisouri and graduate from Anapolis Naval Academy between the wars) but he could write satire.

    576:

    Heinlein frequently made it clear that his characters didn't speak for him - none of them are reliable narrators - so I'm not sure I'd go too far down that road in either direction.

    577:

    Interesting exercise, lots of possibilities.

    Also on the list: * depths into the crust itself, never mind below it. * changing terrain of Arctic tundra as permafrosts melt (which seems like a novel setting for warlike activities). Similarly Antarctica, but I think that the technology for that isn't an issue. * the space around each large solar system object and the implications of angles, orbits and so on for logistics, strategy, tactics.

    I'm interested in what kind of technology could hold station indefinitely in the mesosphere (with or without humans inside). It seems like an important space (low enough that you can drop stuff, you don't been to supply delta-v to make it fall).

    578:

    @ 553 Oh FUCK Can't spell, either ....

    Troutwaxer @ 575 The floating Island of Laputa - was also it's own ultimate weapon That was, when ... 1726 (!)

    H Thanks for that Puts it into perspecitve, doesn't it?

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ As for the chatbot - is there no way the mods can block its' source/IP address, or is it morphing from several sources?

    579:

    No, "because Covid 19".

    580:

    I see another problem with that neutronium sphere:

    Okay, so you have built your shiny sphere and it's sitting before you. But before y'all can board it you first have to send in the plumbers to do … well, the plumbing; and of course everything else that has to be finished before the sphere is actually usable as a ship, from interior decoration to installing the computers. How long will that take? Let's say a month. So, when the contractors are done with their work and the whole thing is finished and they return from the inside … your whole civilization has long crumbled to dust and the interior design (and plumbing) specs are all totally wrong for the insectoid civilization that has replaced it. Also, the computer systems that have just booted up are horribly outdated already.

    581:

    No, because (as pointed out above) the gravitational field strength inside a hollow shell is zero. No field, no time dilation. (There might be some GR edge effects if you get close to the shell? But at the centre everything is still going to balance out.)

    Recent papers publishing in the last couple of years suggest that you can build an Alcubierre type field configuration without needing negative energy or matter. You still need /a lot/ of energy - something like the mass energy of Jupiter crammed into a space a few 100m across IIRC - but no negative energy required.

    582:

    @ JBS: Thanks for taking the time to reply.

    … the United States is part of America, but there are other parts.

    That was exactly my point as well.

    I prefer to refer to the country where I live as the U.S. or United States.

    And I try to do the same. So we're actually in full agreement.

    Someone else raised the point that it is slightly awkward to refer to the people living in your country this way, and I agree with . "USians" (or "USian" as an adjective) makes clear who is meant but as a word it's certainly less than elegant.

    583:

    [sorry, accidentally pressed "submit", therefore posting again]

    @ JBS: Thanks for taking the time to reply.

    … the United States is part of America, but there are other parts.

    That was exactly my point as well.

    I prefer to refer to the country where I live as the U.S. or United States.

    And I try to do the same. So we're actually in full agreement.

    Someone else raised the point that it is slightly awkward to refer to the people living in your country this way, and I agree with that. "USians" (or "USian" as an adjective) makes clear who is meant but as a word it's certainly less than elegant, tolerable in writing but awkward in spoken language. Other terms like "Yankee" carry a different meaning or have specific connotations making them unfit as a neutral term. How do you solve this problem? Is there a good alternative?

    584:

    why is that master of the absurd, Ted Sturgeon, not yet acknowledged as a Grand Master?

    If you mean the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master award made by the SFFWA, well Ted Sturgeon is unfortunately dead and the Grand Master title is only awarded to living writers. It's the same with Nobel prizes (although sometimes the awardee dies before the actual award ceremony).

    Ted is well-recognised as having been a very good writer of SF, his shade will have to be satisfied with that.

    585:

    Sure, but it costs Iran very little (domestic politics possibly excepted) to semi-publicly tamp down their (inc proxies that listen to them)

    Eh, no.

    Iran's regional leadership is confined to Shi'ite groups, which they act as quartermasters for; this is pretty uncontroversial. The Sh'ite "proxies" in question don't share land borders with Iran -- what they have in common is a shared religion. Which makes them targets for the Wahhabite fanatics backed by Saudi Arabia, who hold Shi'ism to be heresy and would like to wage a war of extermination.

    The main Sunni/Shi'a conflict zone is Yemen: (Shi'ite, under direct bombardment and blockade by Saudi military forces for five years now). That's not going to stop without someone sitting on the Saudi government hard, and the USA isn't going to do that (because: oil).

    Secondary Shi'ite groups are: in Syria (but the Alawite shia are rather distant from Iran, to say the least -- the Assad regime are primarily Alawite), and Hezbollah, in Lebanon, who are a very useful pinata for right-wing Israeli governments to whack on whenever they want to generate headlines.

    Upshot is, it's not in Iran's power to prevent these "proxies" being involved in active wars because they're all facing off against genocidally-inclined enemies who are likely to take any olive branches as a sign of weakness.

    586:

    Speaking of politics, Charlie (and other Scots), any ideas when the "non-binding referendum" is coming?

    Nope.

    The SNP are fairly clear that they won't schedule it until COVID19 is receding in the rear-view mirror. (This is sensible for a couple of reasons: it gives the Brexit-fondling Tories more time to dig their grave deeper, the demographics are in their favour -- young folks are pro-indy, old folks tilt unionist but are gradually dying off -- and third, they're trying to build a rep for competent leadership in a crisis, which will pay well during the referendum.)

    Likely as not, we won't even get a future date for a referendum before 2023, then 6-12 months of campaigning. And then, in event of a vote for independence, years of negotiating over the divorce settlement.

    Clownshoes Churchill knows he doesnae want it, but his main management strategy seems to be kicking cans down the road. And also reneging on promises. (It's not looking good for the Northern Ireland Protocol right now, or for the Good Friday Agreement which a violation of the NIP would jeopardize, and which underpins the peace process there.)

    587:

    So if we want to do a riproaring story around, say, interstellar colonial imperialism, how do we go about doing it?

    Can I recommend "Invisible Sun", the climax to my "Empire Games" trilogy, which is coming out on September 30th?

    (Yes, the Merchant Princes continuity finally takes the long-delayed off-piste turn into space opera ...)

    588:

    What do Germans call themselves?

    Pigeon has already answered the gist of it, but as a German I'd like to reply, too.

    Someone above gave an impressive list of names for my country in different languages. Why are there so many different names from so many different roots? In addition to the factors already mentioned I think it is also worth pointing out that Germany has a lot of land borders with other countries (9), and the languages spoken in these neighbouring countries come from at least three different language families (germanic, romanic, slavic). And in the neighbours once removed there is at least a fourth (finno-ugric). So I would expect many different terms for this neighbour country.

    We ourselves don't use the name "Germany" or "Germans", and why would we? It's a latin word. Why would we use a foreign language to refer to ourselves instead of our own? Do you know any other countries where the inhabitants use a foreign language name to refer to themselves?

    So, it's "Deutschland", and we as people are "eine Deutsche" (f.), "ein Deutscher" (m.), or "Deutsche" (pl.). Or with the definitive article: "die Deutsche" (f.), "der Deutsche" (m.), "die Deutschen" (pl.). And the adjective is "deutsch".

    Finally a slight correction to SFReader's Wikipedia-findings: The root "deutsch" does not stem from Dutch, but from Althochdeutsch (Old High German), which shares a common ancestor with the Dutch language.

    Oh, and why Nederlander and their language Nederlands are referred to as "Dutch" in English, is another strange tale (per Wikipedia the English used it originally as a catch-all term for all Germanic-speaking people, and then later only for the coastal people they had most contact with).

    589:

    Charlie - for everybody else: who hold Shi'ism to be heresy and would like to wage a war of extermination. And have been doing since 680 CE / 61 AH - "battle" ( Massacre, actually ) of Karbala People really need to know this stuff, I'm afraid. I recently read a book on the "Rightly guided Caliphs" & it's MESSY. Said book is also available as a pdf-download. Recommended, in either format.

    @ 592 Indeed: What's the odds that BoZo the lying clown is even in office by 2023? He's pissing-off the current Speaker - deliberately picked as a "safe pair of hands" after Bercow, oh dear. By then, it will all, hopefully have turned to shit?

    Lastly - and for the mods as well. That chattybot - can it be cast into the outer darkness, or not?

    590:

    A ship made of neutronium is the weapon. Just move it close to the surface and let it suck up the atmosphere

    Given the scale of the things we're talking about, just fly it past within 100AU or so of the target star and watch it disrupt the entire planetary system! May take a few centuries to eject everything but the largest gas giant from orbit, but that's how it's going to play out.

    ("Hollow shell of neutron star matter" about the size of Jupiter, given that lumps of neutronium about 10km in diameter are called pulsars: can we get a sense of perspective here? And this is before I even get to ask what keeps the goddamn thing from collapsing into a black hole!)

    591: 586 - Any term more elegant than "USian" I've seen is something like "Yank(ee)", "Confederate" et al that only refers to some states, and carries distinct connotations of the "(US of) American War of Independence". 591 para the last - Some UKians do use the correct words "Netherlands" etc when referring to the nation. We are aware that North Holland is one region of NL.
    592:

    why is that master of the absurd, Ted Sturgeon, not yet acknowledged as a Grand Master?

    If that's the SFWA grand master award you're asking about ... the recipient has to be alive.

    (Source: have served on that committee the year we awarded it to William Gibson rather than Philip Jose Farmer. I maintain that Gibson is the better and more influential writer, but if we'd known that Farmer wouldn't last another year, it might have gone differently.)

    593:

    As for the chatbot - is there no way the mods can block its' source/IP address, or is it morphing from several sources?

    Account is now banned and all comments un-published. (In general the mods don't do that: I have to intervene directly, and I'm not reading the blog daily.)

    594:

    Both English and Scot(tish) are, eventually, derived from the names the Romans used for particular tribes, and are therefore Latin :-)

    To be fair, I can't think of any other languages that are quite as mongrelised as English (in this context, including Scots).

    595:

    And there's a slight problem with using "United States", are you referring to: The United States of Mexico or: The United States of America ????

    596:

    Greg Tingey noted: "Belt-&-Road is old-fashioned colonialism + Imperial expansion"

    Absolutely not. China hasn't taken over the government of any of the Belt and Road countries, nor has it lopped the arms off slave laborers (in those countries) who can't maintain productivity. But if you want to argue that it's new-fashioned economic hegemony, you're 100% correct and we agree.

    Heteromeles wondered: "Getting back towards the original idea of the post, I find myself scratching reflexively and wondering what an SST-equivalent would look like now? ... the bigger point is that warfare's changed so radically in the last ten years that "Supertech soldiers shooting it out with BEMs" seems, I don't know, quaint perhaps."

    Depends. When you're critiquing an idea or story, you need to step back and ask what the author was aiming for. There will always be a market for humans vs. whatever combat stories; it's an idea with really long legs. And if that's all you want to write about, more power to you. You'll earn a good living doing it. But if you're interested in serious speculation, there probably won't be much use for organic humans in another century or two, so the whole starship trooper notion won't hold water. However, there's a middle ground: Ian Banks or Robert Reed. Re-engineer your humans so that they're effectively unkillable and competitive with AI robots and you can still tell plausible human-focused combat tales. Haven't read Kameron Hurley's recent work (so many books, so little time!), but she's touched on related issues in various books.

    re. Austin Powers: I'm sure the producers earned enough money to buy several small countries, which means they understood their target audience very well indeed. But I quickly gave up, disappointed. The starting point ($1 million ransom) and the mini-me and father/son conflict parts were (respectively) brilliant and pretty funny. The rest was, as others have noted, sophomoric, and not in a good way. A waste of great potential.

    597:

    Also, I forgot:

    Bret Devereaux is making the point in one of his essay series (I think the one about Fremen) that Julius Caesar not only reports to us the names he has for the various tribes in Gallia and Germania, but in many cases also does his best to exterminate these tribes. So it stands to reason that modern Germans have probably very little to do with the Germani or Alemanni (or other namesakes) of Roman times.

    And a fun fact: I learned to appreciate the multitude of names for my country when travelling through Europe during vacations in my youth. When writing postcards to friends and family at home you had to write a different name each time, depending on which country you were sending the postcard from.

    598:

    Paws SLIGHT PROBLEM "N Holland" is also a sub-district of Lincolnshire - my grandmother used to live in it ( Holbeach)

    Charlie @ 594 - phew - thanks.

    Geoff Hart The operative word is - "Yet" Belt-&-Road is actually following a much earlier model - the Dutch ( And also the later British) "East India Company" model.

    599:

    Military power extension happens after the trade routes are put in place. The traders want protection, they want their ports and trading enclaves defended from the locals with pointed stick who threaten them. The government sends a Marine detachment to mollify the traders but the Marines need a Naval supply ship and port facilities and support, the natives need suppressing and their leaders dealt with a la Phillipines and ten years later they have to occupy Honolulu and construct Pearl Harbor to provide that Marine detachment with cover resulting in increasing appropriations to expand the fleet and protect the protectors and militarise Midway threatening Japan and...

    Global hegemony just happens, it's not something countries plan on because it's pointless and expensive and counterproductive in the long run, as the self-proclaimed military dictator of the Free World has discovered to its cost over the past fifty years and more.

    600:

    Both the British Empire and the USA equivalent had, at least at one stage, an active policy of establishing and maintaining a hegemony, and the latter still does. Indeed, the whole of the latter's post-1945 policy in Europe and the Middle East and the latter's post-1945 global ocean policy, have been clearly deliberately hegemonistic.

    601:

    And how is Brexit going so far?

    602:

    Nope, disagree.

    One thing though. If Hamas or Iran had a nuke, do you think Tel Aviv would still be standing?

    603:

    And how is Brexit going so far?

    Well, Dear Leader is tooting his horn about a new Anglo-Aus trade deal that will save us an average of £1.22 per person every year! But only on the cost of meat (clue: I married a vegan).

    Pay no attention to the roughly 20% devaluation of Sterling since that goddamn referendum, the loss of our right of free movement, the shortages of fresh fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets (which everyone denies, who you going to trust, Boris Johnson or your own eyes?), and the roughly £1000/year/person cost of extra red tape imposed by leaving the customs union. Sunlit uplands! Huzzah!

    604:

    Nojay Except the current Han Empire are planning on it happening ( I think )

    Charlie I had not noticed the shortages of fruit/veg - but then - I wouldn't would I?

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Just after I finished sending my previous, I noticed something very unpleasant Serious Plod corruption in SE London ... then I noticed the date There was serious SE London Plod corruption involved in the Steven Lawrence murder affair as well ... MetPlod would rather be thought "institutionally racist" than admit some of their finest were on the take ... ( Not that some of them were not racist, AS WELL, of course, how nice ) Put that together with this pleasant little snippet - "Tell me constable, have you stopped beating your wife, yet?" comes to mind.

    Still nowhere near the league of the - quite literally - uncounted deaths caused by the "police" in the USA, but our standards are supposed to be higher than this.

    605:

    If Hamas or Iran had a nuke, do you think Tel Aviv would still be standing?

    why on earth would they want to nuke tel aviv. israel has nuclear slbms and would be happy to let them fly if tel aviv was nuked.

    if iran wants nukes, they want them so they can't be attacked with impunity, like the norks

    606:

    Sure they would. The point of having a nuke is not to use it. What you do is you wave it around and make other people hide in the corner going "ohnooo he'sgotanuke he'sgotanuke". If you actually set it off they no longer have anything to be scared of and also they are really pissed off, so you quickly end up wishing you hadn't.

    You also need to be big and hairy enough to be able to pull this off. Iran is borderline here, and Hamas just isn't. If Hamas had a nuke their best bet would be to put it on ebay ASAP and convert it into money before someone bigger came along and robbed it.

    607:

    Global hegemony just happens, it's not something countries plan on because it's pointless and expensive and counterproductive in the long run, as the self-proclaimed military dictator of the Free World has discovered to its cost over the past fifty years and more.

    Um, not quite. The guy you need to read about is Alfred Thayer Mahan, a late 19th Century American naval officer who in 1890 published a little book titled THe Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783. He was probably the most influential military thinker of the late 19th early 20th Century, and he certainly led to the WWI naval arms race and the US becoming a global power.

    He was all about naval superiority, something he cottoned onto after watching the War In The Pacific (Chile defeated the Bolivia/Peru alliance, which is why today Bolivia is a landlocked country with a Navy and an attitude).

    The US into the 1890s didn't want to do the overseas colonial empire thing. But we had this little problem called California. Even with the transcontinental railroad, it was marginally easier to ship stuff round Cape Horn from the east coast to the west coast than to go overland. That made the California (with all that gold that helped win the Civil War) vulnerable to whoever had the best Pacific Navy. Things got worse as the Panama Canal became a reality. On the good side, it made it massively easier to get from the East Coast to California. On the bad side, whoever controlled the Canal had a stranglehold on US interstate trade via water.

    So, following Mahan and a bitter debate in Congress, the US became an imperial power, conquering Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominica, Panama, Hawai'i, and the Philippines, and declaring the rest of South America our back yard. Now it wasn't just a march in and grab (cf Spanish-American War), but it did involve sending in the Marines and other armed forces to support American interests when called for. That's what happened in Hawai'i, where a bunch of American sugar barons overthrew the monarchy and got help from the US Navy when they screamed for it.

    The other thing was that Mahan's little book was widely published in Europe, and it heavily influenced the naval tactics of little countries like the British Empire, the German Empire, and the French Empire. And it's still influential.

    Prior to that, countries like Chile, Peru, and Bolivia (among others) fought over the control of Pacific Islands for guano, which supplied the nitrates they needed for fertilizer and gunpowder.

    608:

    (Granted I cocked up confusing spheres and shells (see #575) but it doesn't affect the point.) Acceleration and time dilation are both consequences of mass distorting spacetime; the difference is only that one is trivial to observe even in ordinary modest human-scale fields while the other doesn't get noticed unless you have something well beyond the human scale, either a very strong field or some very sensitive measuring equipment. So if the field doesn't make you accelerate (or get flattened against something trying not to), it really won't make you undergo time dilation. The space inside the device is flat, which makes it survivable, but it also makes it useless for the desired purpose.

    609:

    One thing though. If Hamas or Iran had a nuke, do you think Tel Aviv would still be standing?

    That's an easy one. In a word: yes.

    Iran first: Iran has multiple cities within cruise missile range of Israel's nuclear-armed submarine fleet. Details are not very public (because their existence violates the NPT) but Israel is believed to have 200-400 nuclear weapons and a serious theatre delivery capability. The usual deterrence calculus is thus applicable.

    (This is before we get into stuff like the late grand Ayatollah's fatwah against nuclear weapons -- declaring them to be haram because they're indiscriminate and almost impossible to use against military targets without civilian collateral damage. You may be skeptical: but note that Iran doesn't appear to have bothered with a serious enrichment program leading to HEU -- they just used the threat as a bargaining lever.)

    Hamas is a lot less predictable, but Hamas has a symbiotic/parasitic relationship with the Israeli right: both sides need the other to justify their political dominance. It's vile, but to actually use a nuke would be to cut off the branch they're sitting on -- it's the one thing that would unite Israeli public opinion behind a genocidal attack on the Gaza Strip.

    Nukes are militarily useless, except for chest-beating political gestures and ensuring that even a crazy rival with nukes won't dare attack you with them.

    610:

    Still nowhere near the league of the - quite literally - uncounted deaths caused by the "police" in the USA, but our standards are supposed to be higher than this.

    The British police forces have been corrupted as tools of state political hegemony since at least the pre-WW1 era (when Churchill was using them against "anarchist" cells, by which you should read suffragettes, Jewish union organizers in the East End, and anyone else he disapproved of). Operating in conjunction with organized crime goes back as far as Jonathan Wild, if not considerably earlier (and that was before Police in the modern sense existed).

    611:

    H It wasn't "just" that Mahan formalised it, but throughout human recorded history, whoever controls the seas .. controls, if not the planet, a sizeable portion of it. The only thing that can really bring a thalassocracy down, really, is internal collapse, or exhaustion.

    Charlie Not quite ( With regard to W.S.C. ) he was personally neutral as to female suffrage - it was Asquith who was madly ( literally IMHO ) against it. I also get the impression that he was really glad to get out of the Home Office & become First Lord .....

    Now then, important stuff: the shortages of fresh fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets (which everyone denies, who you going to trust Has anyone else, here, in the UK seen this, at all? As I said, I wouldn't notice, because, apart from onions ( I can't actually grow enough, though I've got more this year & hope for better again in 2022 ) I simply don't buy "veg" in the shops at all - I'm otherwise 100% self-sufficient. Please, peoples, I would like to know?

    612:

    The details in your post make my point for me, thanks. The traders and planters go abroad, rape and pillage the natives and then demand their government defend them from said native peoples or the traders of other nations, the government obliges with, at first, minimal forces followed by more and more substantial establishments and after a few decades Hey Presto! Hegemony!

    Right now the Chinese don't, as far as I know, have military airfields or naval port facilities that they own and control anywhere in the world except mainland China and some offshore islands they claim. This could well change in the future as they build out ports and land and sea-based trading routes around the world and Hey Presto! Hegemony! China may not go that route though and instead of pouring three trillion yuan a year into military hegemony they might just persuade their trade clients to provide security for them for free.

    613:

    Since you ask, you could read my novel, 11,000 Years, just published 27 May, and see how I deal with the Society of Humanity in it....\ https://www.amazon.com/11-000-Years-Mark-Roth-Whitworth-ebook/dp/B095SWJDHB/

    614:

    As opposed to what is beginning to be spoken of in the media as apartheid in Israel - check out how Arab Israelis are treated, then check out how Sephardic Israelis are treated?

    And let's not discuss the Israeli occupation that stands between all the pieces of the Palestinian Territories, and the treatment of Palestinian property from olive groves to houses, that is utterly indistinguishable from the US treatment of the Native Americans.

    615:

    Nahhh... My advanced starships in my new novel are covex cylininders, and the large ones are pretty large, several klicks long, and .5 to 2km wide rings.

    Think of the warp drive ship that NASA designed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IXS_Enterprise, scaled up, seriously.

    616:

    Oh, well, so we won't have to deal with the good (and bad) of an independent Scotland during the Glasgow Worldcon.

    617:

    SHRIEK!!!!!

    This cmt reminds me of a couple of UK friends of my late ex, who were coming to a con in LA, and asked about the possibility of driving out to see the Grand Canyon one afternoon, except in reverse.

    Since you absolutely refuse to see comments I've made over the years, let me do your work for you as to why this is MIND-BOGGLYING STOOOOPID: search distance Tel Aviv Jerusalem.

    The answer is 54 km. Meaning Jerusalem, and around it, would be unreachable for years, and there would be mass deaths, including in the Palestinian Territories.

    What part of Iran getting to say to Israel, "You bomb us, and we'll bomb you; now stop and talk" do you not get?

    618:

    Those are two separate issue (an unreliable narrator does not describe the plot and setting accurately, a character who is not a mouthpiece has opinions which the author does not share) and the more of Heinlein's letters are published, and the more people go over his whole published corpus with the same merciless professional attention that he would have given to a hostile warship, the stronger the evidence that much of the preaching in his books is his deep personal conviction. The solipsism seems to go back to his early youth, he got into free love in the 1920s, I am pretty sure that the digs at philosophers were sincere.

    One of Heinlein's oddities is that he wrote such intensely personal and opinionated books, but he did not want people to address those opinions and his personal life.

    619:

    Um, sorry, declaring the everything south of the US border to be the US's playground started earlier: the Monroe Doctrine, 1823.

    620:

    Heinlein's public statements that he was just an entertainer competing with breweries for people's fun money were another of those half-truths which he threw out to distract people, like the carefully censored autobiographies in the backs or the true but totally irrelevant fact that a character's opinions are not necessarily an author's opinions.

    He was born in Butler MO in 1907 and spend his young adulthood as a radical lefty in the interwar US Navy, so he had some habits of concealment which can be hard for people from liberal democracies to grasp.

    621:

    Let me note that in my novel, shortages in the distant future (and the near future, before we crush the trillionaires) are artificial.

    Look, a hundred years from now, if one of your several 3D printers (one for food, one for small things like dishes, one for dry goods (sheets, etc), and the commercial ones for specialized things like computers, and all you need to do is shovel the appropriate feedstock into it, where are the fights over resources going to come from?

    Now, on colonies on other planets, if we've colonized them, they have what we need... so where are the resource wars?

    I can see spies... "Hey, I just got through their security, and here's the data plan for printing that expensive spice they grow...." But wars? Why?

    On top of which, the whole war game changes - robots/drones vs the same.

    You're just not going to have WWII air battles.

    622:

    We ourselves don't use the name "Germany" or "Germans", and why would we? It's a latin word. Why would we use a foreign language to refer to ourselves instead of our own? Do you know any other countries where the inhabitants use a foreign language name to refer to themselves?

    You do know who America is named after, right?

    623: insert SpanishConquistadoraccent

    God bless Vespucciland...." - Firesign Theater.

    624:

    Oh, I see, you never make typos. And there are no typos in any book you've ever read. And....

    625:

    ...an unreliable narrator does not describe the plot and setting accurately, a character who is not a mouthpiece has opinions which the author does not share

    I'd have to give you that one.

    As for the rest of it, I am a Heinlein reader with an opinion, not a scholar of the man's work, and I'm also an unpublished author with two novels behind me, so I have some practical idea of the real extent to which a character can speak for an author. Of course, I don't usually write curmudgeonly but very wise old guys on a regular basis either... and I'm also aware of how easy it is for a writer to bend the worldbuilding/plot to prove a point!

    But to answer your main point, I'd be an idiot if I didn't notice that an awful lot of "Missouri in 1907" comes through in Heinlein's work.

    626:
    You do know who America is named after, right?

    Sure, and you're making my point for me quite nicely.

    If you're naming something after someone's first name it doesn't really matter which language that first name is in. I also know that Bolivia is named after Simon Bolivar, but I'd bet that the Aymara still have a name in their own language for the region they're living in. And the First Nations in the northern part of the double continent probably also have names in their own languages for the landmass they live on, and it's probably not "America".

    But the actual point you're making for me is the one about the misappropriation of the name "America" for the US. Because Vespucci only ever travelled to South America and the Caribbean and never set his foot anywhere near the territories that would later become the US. Thus Brazilians, Venezuelans and Cubans have a much stronger claim to the nomer "Americans" than USians.

    627:

    Duffy @ 555: Actually, entering and leaving the sphere would be a problem. The tidal forces encountered while passing through the shell would rip you apart.

    So.....

    Leave openings at the "poles" at the top and bottom of the sphere's axis of spin. Holes should be big enough to allow those entering and leaving the sphere to avoid gravitational tidal forces.

    So now it looks like a donut.

    Unfortunately that doesn't inspire fear in the same way as a Klingon battle cruiser or Imperial star destroyer would.

    A donut just isn't badass enough.

    Oh, I don't know about that ...

    Several years ago, I dated a woman and took her to Krispy Kreme here in Raleigh after a concert. She lived out of town so we shared a dozen on the drive back to her home.

    This was back when I was working for the alarm company so I was on the road a lot & didn't see her that much, but next time there was a concert I wanted to attend, I called her up. She hung up on me. I made several attempts and she just wouldn't talk to me.

    I finally encountered her in a public place and got the rest of the story. After that night, she had driven over to Raleigh EVERY DAY to get a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts and had gained substantial weight as a result.

    ... and it was ALL my fault! Moral of the story though, is a donut can be a powerful weapon in the wrong hands.

    628:

    Duffy @ 558: Given that the structure has a gravitational field second only to that of a black hole it's going to be hard to launch weapons. So it would have to rely on energy beams only, and its gravity could bend or otherwise distort the energy beam affecting its aim.

    We need to send the whole concept back to engineering for a complete redo.

    Or use gravity as a weapon. Close up on the enemy ships & use the gravity gradient to tear them apart. With some real tricksy engineering, you might even be able to use that as an energy source to power your donut.

    629:

    The only thing that can really bring a thalassocracy down, really, is internal collapse, or exhaustion.

    The Minoans might quibble with that. What about volcanoes?

    630:

    The details in your post make my point for me, thanks. The traders and planters go abroad, rape and pillage the natives and then demand their government defend them from said native peoples or the traders of other nations, the government obliges with, at first, minimal forces followed by more and more substantial establishments and after a few decades Hey Presto! Hegemony!

    Not quite. Where I disagree is the idea that it just happened and was random. It was neither. The places the US seized were almost all along critical sea lanes.

    To pick one counterexample, purportedly the blackbirders (slavers who worked the South Pacific to provide unfree labor for Australian sugar plantations, among other things) included a bunch of Confederate ex-slavers who wanted to continue their way of life. Nonetheless, the US didn't conquer islands that the blackbirders frequented.

    It was only ones archipelagos the Philippines, Hawai'i, American Samoa, and Guam. I'd also point out that the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico were all seized during the Spanish American War et seq, while Hawai'i we've already talked about. American Samoa's the weird one, where Germany and the US both tried seizing Samoa simultaneously and ended up splitting the archipelago. All the others came after WW2, when we took over the former Japanese Empire and continued to mess up modernize the islands.

    And this gets to another point: most of the islands currently in US possession are there as the result of negotiations and/or wars with other Eurasian empires. Hawai'i is the only counterexample, but it was an independent constitutional monarchy with higher literacy rates than the US had when the US Navy supported the overthrow of the monarchy. The rape and pillage part never happened in Hawai'i. In their case, it was decimation of the native population by diseases introduced by sailors, followed by importation of foreign workers and companies, that ultimately ended their independence.

    631:

    Dave P @ 574: And another thing, since I couldn't think of his name for the previous post - why is that master of the absurd, Ted Sturgeon, not yet acknowledged as a Grand Master?

    It's absurd that he isn't, but Grand Master of What? Flash is already taken.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kjeWGQ175g

    632:

    Me, I think they should not be allowed to continue using the ceremonial/poetic/whatever alternative name of Pigeonland until they have justified it by doing the necessary DNA magic to reinstate the passenger pigeon.

    633:

    Scotland almost certainly can't be independent by the 2024 worldcon ... but it might have voted to leave the UK by then, so independence would be in the works.

    634:

    MSB @ 583: @ JBS: Thanks for taking the time to reply.

    de nada

    … the United States is part of America, but there are other parts.

    That was exactly my point as well.

    I prefer to refer to the country where I live as the U.S. or United States.

    And I try to do the same. So we're actually in full agreement.

    Someone else raised the point that it is slightly awkward to refer to the people living in your country this way, and I agree with . "USians" (or "USian" as an adjective) makes clear who is meant but as a word it's certainly less than elegant.

    We've been called worse. So elegant or not, if it's the word that best expresses what you mean, there's nothing wrong with using it.

    OTOH,I don't see any problem with calling us Americans. That's what we are, even if we're not the only Americans.

    635:

    Exhaustion of the magma chamber followed by its internal collapse. (Until that point, things were quite emphatically going up.)

    636:

    Ima Pseudonym @ 596: And there's a slight problem with using "United States", are you referring to:
    The United States of Mexico
    or:
    The United States of America
    ????

    It would have to be the USA, because Mexico's official name (in English) is the United Mexican States

    637:

    Imperial hegemony was never random but it was rarely if ever deliberate. That's not the same as "it just happened". It was more a consequence of the expansion of international trade. The "critical sea lanes" are the routes where trade is conducted, like the north Atlantic or the western Pacific so that's where the Naval assets are deployed and the foreign-soil bases are located. The sea lanes around the northern cape of Svalbard don't get much container ship traffic so not too much USN activity up there (apart from maybe an occasional SSGN deployment or spyplane flight out of Thule).

    638:

    Grant @ 603: Nope, disagree.

    One thing though. If Hamas or Iran had a nuke, do you think Tel Aviv would still be standing?

    Yes, I do. For one thing, there are still Palestinians & other coreligionists living in the area.

    I still think it would be better if neither Hamas & Iran, nor the Israelis (or for that matter the U.S., Russia, China, India & Pakistan) had them, but who is going to take them away & how are you going to enforce such a ban?

    I would be much more worried if Saudi Arabia were to acquire nukes.

    639:

    The Chinese have naval bases in Djibouti:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_People%27s_Liberation_Army_Support_Base_in_Djibouti

    And Cambodia:

    https://www.businessinsider.com/rapid-construction-at-cambodia-base-amid-concern-about-china-presence-2021-6

    They also, strangely have a base in Argentina, though not naval. It is apparently a space and intelligence base.

    640:

    Do you know any other countries where the inhabitants use a foreign language name to refer to themselves?

    Most (former) colonies. I live in Australia, which is mostly a word from a dead language and the originators of that word are not currently thought to have visited the place or had any idea that it existed.

    Until recently Aotearoa/New Zealand was named after a chunk of Holland and the etymology is a bastard. Similarly the whole "America" topic... I vaguely recall that that's a Spanish name but not a lot of Spanish originated in that hemisphere. Nor English, while we're there, so this whole {english words}{spanish word} ... 100% foreign.

    And then you get to places like Papua New Guinea... IIRC there are 851 native languages and that name uses approximately zero of them.

    641:

    Nojay @ 613: The details in your post make my point for me, thanks. The traders and planters go abroad, rape and pillage the natives and then demand their government defend them from said native peoples or the traders of other nations, the government obliges with, at first, minimal forces followed by more and more substantial establishments and after a few decades Hey Presto! Hegemony!

    So, hegemony is a byproduct of Mercantilism?

    Right now the Chinese don't, as far as I know, have military airfields or naval port facilities that they own and control anywhere in the world except mainland China and some offshore islands they claim. This could well change in the future as they build out ports and land and sea-based trading routes around the world and Hey Presto! Hegemony! China may not go that route though and instead of pouring three trillion yuan a year into military hegemony they might just persuade their trade clients to provide security for them for free.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-kiribati-idUSKBN2CM0IZ

    http://www.xinhuanet.com//english/2017-07/12/c_136438611.htm

    https://www.futuredirections.org.au/publication/china-boosts-djibouti-presence-more-investments-and-naval-base-capable-of-docking-aircraft-carriers/

    https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/6523/china-may-have-began-arming-its-man-made-islands-in-the-south-china-sea

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

    Kanton Island is located at -2.810556,-171.675556. It's more than 5,000 miles from the disputed islands in the South China Sea, but oddly enough, less than 2,000 miles from Honolulu and the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor.

    642:

    if the field doesn't make you accelerate (or get flattened against something trying not to), it really won't make you undergo time dilation.

    So if you were at the gravitational midpoint between two orbiting black holes there'd be almost no time dilation at all (it would come only from the movement of that centre of mass)?

    Seems that that would be an easy way to distinguish an accellerrating frame from a gravity frame, then, because only the latter experiences time dilation. Or is this one of those "left out of the student exercise" things because it would introduce a second object and thus complicate everything?

    643:

    Mr. Tim @ 623:

    >We ourselves don't use the name "Germany" or "Germans", and why would we? It's a latin word. Why would we use a foreign language to refer to ourselves instead of our own? Do you know any other countries where the inhabitants use a foreign language name to refer to themselves?

    You do know who America is named after, right?

    I don't think he was a German. IIRC, Germany as such didn't exist yet.

    644:

    It's interesting to note that the Chinese PLA military base at Djibouti is cheek-by-jowl with a US military base (ex-French) and even the Japanese!!! have a military base there, currently being expanded. It's all to protect trade routes, of course as that location is right at the southern end of the Suez canal. Who those trade routes need to be protected against is another matter but, squinting at the sinister foreigners across the way and just to be safe maybe we should expand our base, add some more facilities, move more troops and equipment in to protect our assets on the ground...

    I doubt very much that the Chinese or the others specifically decided on hegemony in that area but they're not there for no reason.

    645:

    Deliberate hegemony is the apt descriptor for, o, say, the Virginia Company of London, founded in 1606 specifically by royal charter to colonize the vast swathes of the New World of America. So many companies just like that, created by other English, as well as other royal charters from all around Europe! Geeze, you know, like with Spain and Columbus to start with. Then there is East India Company. Also the Mongolian trading empire created specifically for exploiting trade and resources just as the Virginia Company, East India Company were.

    That's how it works now, as always has: conquest for exploitation and riches for the conqueror

    646:

    zephvark @ 625:

    "My advanced starships in my new novel are covex cylininders..."

    An apparent science-fiction author and computer geek might do well to discover what a spelling checker is. This is not a recent or novel technology.

    Spell-check only tells you if a word is spelled correctly in relation to the dictionary it uses. It won't tell you if the word is the correct word for what you're trying to say.

    My spell-check thinks your name (not you're name) is spelled wrong, but I'm not going to let it correct it.

    647:

    Missing in discussion of Heinlein's "Roman" future state where only those who've done military service get to vote is one that the US constitution would be very happy with.

    That's not a co-incidence.

    This is very much a USA that could have happened. The US did not start as the sort of democracy it is now, and given where it was in the 1790s it could easily have gone another way.

    If you'd describe the Starship Troopers voting setup and the current USA system of who gets to vote to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson there's a good chance they'd have thought the Starship Troopers one superior. And if you'd asked them to guess which voting system would have applied in the USA in 2020 I don't know which they'd have picked.

    Not co-incidentally most of the USA's "founding fathers" were classics nerds who thought the Romans were awesome. And many of them were very dubious about the sort of "mob" democracy you get if everyone gets to vote. Jefferson believed strongly in a "natural aristocracy" in which the "best of men" would obviously rise to the top, and that the rule by such was desirable.

    648:

    The only thing that can really bring a thalassocracy down, really, is internal collapse, or exhaustion.

    The Minoans might quibble with that. What about volcanoes?

    There's also a good case to be made that Portugal's sea power mostly ended with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

    649:

    Nojay @585 and Charlie @593: Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't aware the SFWA Grand Master was only awarded to living recipients.

    Whitroth @620: I think the Monroe Doctrine was more a reaction to the War of 1812 than a grand scheme for hemispheric domination, but the early 19th century is not an era I've studied in any detail.

    Whitroth @624: Woot! It's nice to see I'm not the only one who remembers Firesign Theater.

    JBS @633: Nice reference.

    JBS @640: Re Saudi nukes - be worried. The Saudis get on all too well with the Pakistanis, and it's been over thirty years since they got the DF-3A from the PRC. I also wouldn't put it past them to contract with the DPRK to buy and service the capability.

    650:

    icehawk The USA is NOT a democracy, right now & it's receding, unless Biden can kick some backsides in his own party (!)

    651:

    Re: other names for citizens of the USA - there are many, but most are not to be used in polite company.

    Greg @652: Don't give up on us quite yet; the events of Jan 6, 2021 are still reverberating across the country. And the baldfaced attempts of the Rethuglicans, to borrow your term, to enshrine their advantage through restricting voting and tampering with the mechanisms to tabulate and certify the vote are driving opposition from coast to coast.

    652:

    Deliberate hegemony is the apt descriptor for, o, say, the Virginia Company of London, founded in 1606 specifically by royal charter to colonize the vast swathes of the New World of America.

    Or indeed the opening of the American West to white settlers and miners and traders starting in the early 1800s, after a little judicious genocide of the local non-white population by the US Cavalry which accompanied the colonisers in this act of deliberate hegemony.

    653:

    Hudson's Bay Company. Spent two centuries as the effective government of much of Canada before it sold off the land.

    Eventually ended up as a department store that was run into the ground by a venture capitalist, screwing many employees in the process. Getting Zucked was a thing up here before you folks started worrying about Facebook :-/

    654:

    I think the Monroe Doctrine was more a reaction to the War of 1812 than a grand scheme for hemispheric domination,

    Well, one of the causes of the War of 1812 was American expansionism, both into indigenous territory and the Canadas.

    Support for the war was higher in states that would benefit from expansion than states that suffered from impressment, which seems to indicate that it was actually a more important factor in the popular mood.

    Speaking of impressment, I find it ironic that the impressing of American sailors of British birth (who were considered British subjects under British law) was a casus belli because the British wouldn't let their American citizenship replace their British one, while currently the IRS will come after people who have never been in America and are citizens of other countries, yet America considers them still American.

    655:

    Well to some extent the administration of New South Wales pushed for any name for the continent other than New Holland, which had been the usual name (there was always a conceptual link with Terra Australis Incognita, but only a few cartographers had actually started calling New Holland Australia). So Matthew Flinders, the bloke who, with some indigenous helpers, sailed around the continent, thus proving it to be an island and all the same one, was a the main booster. Which is why the main beach-adjacent esplanade in Humpybong (aka Redcliffe, childhood home of the BeeGees) is called Flinders Parade, but I digress.

    Re hegemony, see also the doctrine of Terra Nullius, as used in Australia up to the 1990s.

    656:

    Off topic: Neptune's Brood is one of the books in the Tor essay/list/review Not So Fast: Five Books Featuring Sublight Space Travel by James Nicoll. No doubt some of us here will have read some of the other four mentioned works.

    657:

    I would be much more worried if Saudi Arabia were to acquire nukes.

    and this is the main reason to be concerned about iran getting them

    turkey would also be likely to feel left out

    cue a reissue of lehrer's "who's next?"

    658:

    Aotearoa was originally Maori name for just the North Island - and Maori used Te Waipounamu for what is currently call "South Island" (in English). It is only since 20th C that Aotearoa being used to refer to the whole country.

    Also, up until late 1880's the name "South Island" was the English name for what is currently known as Stewart Island (or Rakiura in Maori) and the English name "Middle Island" was then used for what is subsequently (and currently) known as "South Island".

    Names and usage change over time. It would be interesting to know what Aotearoa New Zealand would be called in 150 years time, and what language that name would be from. https://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/a-tale-of-two-islands

    659:

    In one of the comments James Nicoll quoted a line he is very fond of (in sarcastic sense): "The living will envy the dead"

    Which made me wonder: Did it ever actually happen in history? And if it did, what kept the said living from offing themselves?

    660:

    I would be much more worried if Saudi Arabia were to acquire nukes. This is a reason why Iran is unlikely (less likely) to acquire known nuclear weapons capabilities. If anything, they would/might aggressively pursue ambiguity about their capabilities (much more so than Israel), as they've arguably been doing for the past 15 years. A regional nuclear arms race among ISR, SAU, IRN would be very bad.

    Mr. Pompeo learns that he should always consult a slang dictionary:

    Calling all unapologetic Americans to join me and become a Pipehitter. https://t.co/KO15jutDPi

    — Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) June 15, 2021

    Urban Dictionary: Pipe Hitter - The people who smoke crack and can therefore accomplish a difficult/dangerous/disturbing things because they only care about their next high. (November 14, 2019)

    Was watching a presentation today on an interesting high end ML dataflow machine (new job!) and one of the presenters had vocal patterns very much like Doctor Strangelove[1], though faster and more technical. My speech predictor kept expecting him to veer off into strangelovian dialogue. Not sure he knows this; won't tell him. :-)

    [1] Sample: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, EH? [Bi-di, 2Q16.]

    662:

    Para 1: Yes.

    Para 2: No - the accelerated frame also experiences time dilation. If you get a reading on an accelerometer, you get time dilation; it doesn't matter whether you get the reading because the tin can you're standing in is sat on the surface of a planet, or because it's way out in the interstellar void with the rocket switched on, it is the same thing. Yes, this is weird.

    What may be confusingly missed out or skated over or insufficiently emphasised or something could be the apparently paradoxical situation where your tin can out in space is accelerating freely in response to the gravity of some massive object but your accelerometer is reading zero and you don't notice what's happening. The point here is that both acceleration and time dilation are relative, and the concepts are both meaningless unless you can answer "with respect to what?" And the meaning of "freely" is basically that your accelerometer (and your ears) have lost their reference and can't answer that question, so they can't measure anything out of the ordinary either. Similarly if you have a clock in the tin can with you that seems to be behaving perfectly normally too.

    Nevertheless the acceleration and the time dilation are both still happening (as seen by an outside observer), and while you aren't aware at the moment, when you get your reference back you can then work out what they must have been. Once you hit the planet you can then work out how fast you were going and how slow your watch is, if you still care at that point. Or you could work out what's happening as it's happening if you open the porthole and triangulate on some stars. (Of course either way you still have the complication that there is no unique correct answer because the "what" in "with respect to what?" could be anything.)

    I am no sort of expert in this shit at all, but I do find it helps a bit in trying to make sense of it that I seem to have a reasonable tolerance for weirdness in physical theories. :)

    663:

    What on earth did he think it meant? I took a guess at the meaning and came up with what turned out to be pretty close to your UD quote, but beyond that or implausibly literal possibilities like "someone who goes round with a hammer putting dents in other people's plumbing" nothing suggests itself.

    664:

    So the trivial way to distinguish gravity from acceleration is that only the latter causes time dilation.

    Pigeon says: if the field doesn't make you accelerate (or get flattened against something trying not to), it really won't make you undergo time dilation

    But then Wikipedia appears to disagree, but obviously that's only I'm misunderstanding something.

    The lower the gravitational potential (the closer the clock is to the source of gravitation), the slower time passes, speeding up as the gravitational potential increases (the clock getting away from the source of gravitation).

    Thus, per the original example, if Pigeon is sitting in the middle of a shell of neutronium Pigeon experiences no time dilation, but wikipedia would.

    Is this me not understanding what "gravitational potential" is? To me it's "how much energy does it take to lift something into free space/the gaps between galaxies" but it seems to mean "how much gravity is there right here"... so sitting in the middle of the shell of neutronium is the same as sitting in a gap between galaxies.

    665:

    US military term, maybe 2000+?. Also, earlier, US drug culture street term. (90s, maybe 80s, crack, maybe meth) Haven't found a solid etymology. (Eddie Gallagher was tried for war crimes and found mostly not guilty. Many still believe he was guilty. D.J. Trump got involved, because of course he did.) Former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher launches ‘Pipe Hitter Foundation’ (Steve Balestrieri, Jun 17, 2020) Gallagher was asked in an interview with local San Diego television news KUSI about the choice of name for his foundation. A Pipe Hitter, Eddie Gallagher replied, stems from a term frequently used by the military of the same name to describe “someone you want with you during tough situations, someone who has your back and is willing to sacrifice and work hard to get the job done.” The term is thought to date back to the late 1800s but was given new life by the 1994 Quentin Tarrantino classic film “Pulp Fiction.” One of the main characters, a gangster named Marsellus Wallace used the term when preparing to torture a man.

    666:

    wikipedia appears to disagree

    I agree with you (and wiki) -- the amount of dilation depends on the value of the potential (relative to whatever standard value we're taking, e.g. the value at infinity). Pigeon-at-the-center of the neutronium shell sees things happening quicker than distant-observer-Moz does.

    As someone pointed out above, the potential Φ inside a spherical shell is constant, i.e. it has zero gradient (and thus zero acceleration). But the value of that constant potential is not itself zero (relative to the value at infinity). Roughly speaking the value of the potential inside a thin spherical shell is the same as the value just outside, on its outer surface, i.e. Φ=-GMs/rs, where Ms is the shell mass and rs is the shell radius. (With the convention that Φ is zero at infinity.)

    Which gets us to the dilation formula quoted on the wiki page (I rewrite it slightly):

    ΔtP = ΔtM(1-2GM/rc2)1/2 = Δ tM(1+2Φ/c2)1/2

    ΔtP is the amount of time that passes for Pigeon and Δ tM is the amount of time that passes for Moz for the same pair of events; ΔtP is less than ΔtM, so Pigeon sees distant events happening more quickly than Moz does.

    But in any case this doesn't buy you much dilation, even for a neutron star. As noted on the same wiki page, the dilation factor can be written as (1-rsch/r)1/2 where rsch is the Schwarzschild radius. The last stable orbit around a black hole is r = 3rsch. Plugging into the formula gives you (1-1/3)1/2 ~ 0.81, so the dilation is only about 20%. For 1 solar mass, that last stable orbit radius ~ 9 km, which is already only a little smaller than the typical radius of a neutron star of the same mass.

    667:

    Thanks for the explanation. But I have to say...

    in any case this doesn't buy you much dilation

    Damn you mathematically capable people with your actual numbers skewering a nice thought experiment. It's slightly annoying the the dilation resolves down to radius... and that you have to be inside the black hole to gain any real benefit.

    668:

    Dave P indeed ... but there's one supposedly "D" Senator who is wilfully foot-dragging & screwing the whole thing up .. um, err .."Manchin"?? Why? Who's got his personal "details" as a binder I wonder? And how can his arm be twisted?

    SS @ 668 WOT! Disgraceful. No mention AT ALL of the "Hainish" series by U K le G - all of which uses "NAFAL" interstellar movement Two Hugo winners in there, too, I think.

    ilya 187 Probably in parts during & immediately after Der Dreizigjahrenkrieg. Sack of Magdeburg 25 000 inhabitants, before, under 5000 after.

    669:

    RE: 606/607/610

    In Iran it would come down to a mix of hardline religion and politics. Very unpredictable. I hope sanity would prevail, but this is the country with the Revolutionary Guard and a theocratic dictator who thinks he is on first name terms with his God.

    But I think the rationale of MAD and fear of reprisal, does not apply in the case of Hamas.

    When you have spent your life in bad conditions, your future is tightly constrained and there is little apparent chance of things getting better any time soon, its not hard to see yourself as already having lost everything.

    Imagine how sweet revenge would feel.

    Blow up the home of those who oppress you, avenge your people and become a martyr that struck a mighty blow for the one true God? Yes, you will find people who would jump at the chance.

    When you are willing to sacrifice yourself, sacrificing other must be rather easier.

    For those highest up in Hamas and Iran its less attractive - if the struggle ceases and peace breaks out, then they might have to get a real job. That would be awful because its so much nicer being venerated or feared rather than having to explain to voters why the economy is crap.

    There could have been peace years ago, but peace requires compromise and the growing of trust.

    670:

    Where I'm not sure I follow is how this works with the equivalence principle. And this is an SF-ishly interesting question, because there are major plot points in (off the top of my head) Banks (I'm thinking of The Algebraist) and Hamilton (one of the Night's Dawn books, don't recall which) that rely on certain interpretations of the difference between inertia and gravity.

    To me it seems that the situation of the observer in the gravity well is not clear. They are either in freefall (most likely in orbit I guess), in which case they don't "experience" the gravitational field, or they are accelerating (even if the thing that is accelerating them is the "ground"), and static relative to the mass that is responsible for the gravitation. If they are in the centre... that's where I'm not sure I follow what their situation means.

    671:

    James tries to not reuse books in his Five Things posts on tor.com, the Hainish books were included in Classic SF in Which Humans Come From “Beyond the Stars” back in January so weren't eligible this time.

    672:

    Para 2 - I'd tend to disagree (and so I think will the Relativists).

    If the observer is in orbit around the body that generates the gravitational force, then they are moving at a non-zero velocity (Newtonian and Einsteinian motion agree thus far). Relativity says that this velocity causes them to experience time dilation relative to a second observer who is on the body, or stationary relative to the body at a remote point in space-time.

    This second observer will not experience time dilation, although they may experience other "interesting effects", for example as a result of being inside the body's Roche limit.

    673:

    "Look, a hundred years from now, if one of your several 3D printers (one for food, one for small things like dishes, one for dry goods (sheets, etc), and the commercial ones for specialized things like computers, and all you need to do is shovel the appropriate feedstock into it, where are the fights over resources going to come from?"

    Rare elements, perhaps?

    Would they eventually (maybe not in 100 years) bump up against energy limits?

    Not technically a resource and probably better suited for a humorous story, but getting control of the best human 3D designers?

    673: James tries to not reuse books in his Five Things posts on tor.com, the Hainish books were included in Classic SF in Which Humans Come From “Beyond the Stars” back in January so weren't eligible this time.

    Next up: Five Things which hit the maximum number of Five Things categories.

    674:
    The US did not start as the sort of democracy it is now, and given where it was in the 1790s it could easily have gone another way.

    There's a pretty good alt-hist novella by Jack Campbell called The Last Full Measure. It's set in 1863, but something went wrong in or around the presidency of Jefferson. By the 1860s, the USA is a military dictatorship in all-but-name. The franchise is severely limited. Slavery exists across the country (although it's called 'indentured labour' in the North).

    I wouldn't mind seeing a novel-length expansion.

    675:

    I don't think that Manchin is blocking things due to blackmail, and I don't think his arm can be twisted

  • Manchin comes from a VERY red state. Furthermore, this is the state with the coal miner culture. Wyoming produces more coal, but that's heavily automated surface coal. They know that if the filibuster goes, so does the coal industry in the US. That's already hanging by a thread. Remember that he was the only Democrat to vote for Kavanaugh. Even so, he won reelection by 3 points, the lowest showing in his career since he became an incumbent, at least to my knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States

  • Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are the 2 Democrats who are the public face. But there are many more who would vote against getting rid of the filibuster, but they just don't want the publicity. Paul Ryan used the same trick to stall Trump during his first 2 years.

  • Manchin's arm can't be twisted because he has an ace up his sleeve: he can switch parties. If that happens, McConnell becomes leader of the Senate again.

  • 676:

    "They also, strangely have a base in Argentina, though not naval. It is apparently a space and intelligence base."

    The space part of that base is part of China's Deep Space Network. There are questions as to whether the base is even an intelligence asset, seeing as it's in the middle of the Atacama desert

    @643 Kanton Island might be a base, or it might be someone's idea to turn an island with a few dozen inhabitants into an exclusive tourist resort? Time will tell.

    677:

    Slavery exists across the country (although it's called 'indentured labour' in the North).

    So a continuation of the system that the colonies started with?

    678:

    Er, the Atacama Desert is in Chile.

    679:

    You're right, the station is in Patagonia, my mistake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espacio_Lejano_Station

    680:

    The equivalence principle is a derivation, not an axiom, and applies only to special relativity (i.e. with the effects of gravitational potentials on the shape of space-time neglected).

    681:

    That square-root factor is a bummer, isn't it? I also thought there would be a larger effect. I got curious to work out some numbers for things like "how thick would a Jupiter-radius shell of neutronium be, if it was one solar mass" (answer, about 100 microns, if I have done the math correctly). And that led me to the same wiki page.

    682:

    The enlisted rate for the Vietnam war should be taken with a grain of salt. Remember in the 1960s the draft was something men knew to expect when they got out of high school or college. So in many cases men who enlisted did so expecting to be drafted and wanting to get their service over so they could start their adult lives. In addition, enlisting might give you a little more control where you went. My father enlisted right after college for that reason (he was discharged on account of eyesight.) In contrast in World War II the draft steadily expanded to cover a larger & larger percentage of men. If you were in your late 20s with a job & family, it's understandable that you might wait to be drafted rather than enlist.

    683:

    Actually, I stated that wrongly. It's a LOCAL (in a technical sense) relativistic principle, which is more general than just special relativity, but still does rely on ignoring the wider effects of gravitational potentials on the shape of space-time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle#The_Einstein_equivalence_principle

    684:

    Speaking of alt-histories, posit a history in which Mahan doesn't exist. The French dig the Panama Canal, and a war erupts in the Pacific over who controls the Canal and access to California and the west coast of the US. And the British Empire wins and invades the western US, Hawai'i, and gets into a war with Spain to control the Caribbean and Philippines, both of which are chokepoints in global trade.

    I know, it's de rigueur here to regard the US as a cryptofascist dictatorship. However, if you look back a century ago, the UK fit that description quite well too, with its caste system of white people on top, darkies on the bottom, and tacit support of others blackbirding for indentured workers on cane plantations, while they were taught to be civilized.

    Imagine if the British Empire decided it could dominate the Pacific if it owned the Panama Canal. Why wouldn't it do so? In fact, we don't even have to speak of "it," we can speak of individual people, can we not? Why not Edward VI, Emperor of the Caribbean, Panama, and the Philippines?

    685:

    I know, it's de rigueur here to regard the US as a cryptofascist dictatorship. However, if you look back a century ago, the UK fit that description quite well too

    This is not an accident: the US explicitly inherited its hegemony from the British Empire in the 20th century. Roosevelt bent Churchill over the barrel for lend-lease, and the UK was in no position to argue back, coming within a week of bankruptcy in 1945. By 1945 the Empire -- which had been systematically looted and prevented from competing with the UK's protected industries for 50-150 years -- was an economic basket case, and like the USSR's empire in the 1980s, maintaining it actually sucked resources and money out of the centre rather than enriching it. Faced with two hostile rising world-empires (the USA and the USSR), it's no surprise that the UK retreated into reconstruction and a domestic welfare state. (And even then, the retreat from empire took decades -- it only really became inevitable after Suez in 1956.)

    686:

    Nations that create empires rarely prosper as nations from having an empire to rule and the financial benefits of the empire are generally negative -- it costs a lot to deploy and support military forces far from home, for example or maintain a remote bureaucracy, police forces, courts etc. Individuals and organisations can and do benefit from empire though and they often have the ear of the pols who think it's a good idea to, for example, continue to maintain a imperial military base in Cuba when the government of Cuba has been asking them to leave for fifty years and more.

    687:

    This is the story of a Latvian woman aged 55, living in Suriname. She got recruited as a coder by one of the big cybercrime gangs and has now been arrested by the Americans.

    Life gets more like Rule 34 every day.

    https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/06/how-does-one-get-hired-by-a-top-cybercrime-gang/

    688:

    No. The classic example is Einstain's himself, in explaining the Principle of Equivalence, that you could not tell the difference between being in a heavy gravity field, or in a spaceship accelerating.

    689:

    Koch money is paying, right now, for pro-Manchin ads.

    690:

    Except a lot of suicide bombers in other countries, including those on the flights on 9/11, were not desperate, they had moderately good jobs, and decent lives.

    691:

    Rare elements? Unless you have a largely growing population, stuff wears out. Throw it into the crusher for the feedstock.

    Best human designer? Or buy their designs? (Or steal them).

    The basis of human life fundamentally changes. The trick is telling how, and making a good story out of it.

    692:

    The coal industry is thin, full stop. The filibuster does nothing about that.

    In the US, the white wing fulminates about the "War on Coal". The real issue is the war on coal minors. In the seventies, there were about 770k miners. Now, there are about 77k. The coal industry has HATED miner unions from the beginning, and has worked to find ways to automate.

    Now... some of your "hanging by a thread" are... let's see, I think it was Patriot that was created by several mining companies, and loaded with debt... and union contracts. I think they started bankruptcy a couple of years ago. They want, of course, to cancel the union contracts.

    Oh, and to stop paying into the all-mining-company UMWA Healt and Pension Funds, which handle all retiree benefits, ets. They are in deep doo-doo, and had to be bailed out by Congress.

    Note: some of this is inside info, given my recent ex works for the UMWA H&P Funds.

    693:

    it's de rigueur here to regard the US as a cryptofascist dictatorship.

    If you want an SF blog where the US is regarded as the greatest-ever force for good that occasionally makes mistakes with the best intentions, and the rest of us are insufficiently grateful for the benefits we have received, try David Brin's blog. It's interesting, but reading the comments often feels like watching Argo.

    694:

    Also provides story ideas. I have a short, literally based on Brian Krebs, but set about 40+ years from now, and my character had a lot worse happen to him than has happened to Krebs in RL.

    695:

    I don't particularly think the US is the greatest-ever force for good, especially since I'm dealing with climate change and the extinction crisis (which are merging as we speak).

    What I do find tedious here is that we lurch into the same deep ruts over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. A bit of novelty--occasionally!--would be a blessed change.

    For example: we're looking at two of the biggest crises in human history (see first paragraph). As science fiction aficionados, you'd think we'd be all over these with probably-wrong but novel ideas about how to solve them, both technically (hard SF) and socially (soft SF). Instead we're talking about how to make neutronium-clad interstellar dreadnoughts. Boy did we dive into that rut fast! The only way we're responding to our more probable future is with dystopian despair, it seems.

    Isn't that a failure of our collective imaginations? And what is SF about, if not imagining futures?

    696:

    Yes, I'm assuming a growing population. I suppose it could also be a population where each person is using more stuff at any given time.

    Just paying the best human designer wouldn't be enough if you want to be able to control what they do.

    697:

    Right... but is a growing population a valid assumption? A lot of the world has slowed, or is falling. The last estimate I've seen is that the world population of humans will peak in 2050, not 2090.

    And on colonies... I really doubt that folks, esp. coming from Terra, are going for families of 10.

    698:

    I would say a growing population is a plausible possibility under conditions of increased prosperity.

    Suppose there are a few tweaks (at who knows what cost?) that make it easier to raise children. Let's say a "sleep through the night" tweak and another one for "only cries for well-defined and pretty solvable reasons" combined with simple ways to teach adults to be good with children.

    Mind you, these are just possibilities, not the way I think things have to turn out, and a stable or falling population would make just as much sense.

    I'm saying that resource wars could be plausible, not that they're inevitable.

    699:

    I'm not saying that this will be true of everyone, but most of the people I know are single, or, if in a couple, have 0, 1 or 2 children. A stable population requires most people to be coupled, and something like 2.2 children per couple.

    700:
    So a continuation of the system that the colonies started with?

    Pretty much, although my knowledge of 19th-century US economic history is spotty at best.

    The story implied that the mills in the northeast used indentured labour. IIRC, mills and industrialization hadn't fully happened yet in Illinois by the 1860s (in OTL, that is). In the 1850s, Abraham Lincoln assumed that everybody across the North had the same opportunity that he did - start with nothing, work diligently and join the professional class.

    The fact that this was generally not possible in the northeast was a surprise to him.

    @686 Heteromeles:

    The French dig the Panama Canal

    This would require that someone other than de Lesseps was in charge. He was of the opinion that the Panama Canal didn't need locks & could be built at sea level the whole way, because that's how they did it in Suez. The fact that Suez was pretty durn flat and Panama was mountainous was lost on him (and indeed caused the French government to lose huge amounts of money).

    701:

    Individuals and organisations can and do benefit from empire though and they often have the ear of the pols who think it's a good idea to, for example, continue to maintain a imperial military base in Cuba when the government of Cuba has been asking them to leave for fifty years and more.

    The politics about Cuba in the US are insanely complicated. Talk to someone from a family who is still waiting for the US government to get them back "the property that Castro stole from them." This group can swing Florida's elections in an instant if they feel one party or another is no respecting their claims.

    702:

    but there's one supposedly "D" Senator who is wilfully foot-dragging & screwing the whole thing up .. um, err .."Manchin"??

    Manchin is one of the last of the D's who didn't switch to R.

    US politics around D and R has a history. And it's messy. Goes back to the Civil War and Lincoln being an R.

    Short versionis Manchin is a very very popular in his state D who never switched in the 70s/80s. Ex governor and whatnot.

    And while he's the face of not removing the filibuster, as others have noted, he's not the only one. He's just the focus.

    If he is seen by his state as becoming too progressive by the people of WV he's toast.

    Nothing about this comes down to binary choices.

    703:

    Greg Tingey @ 652: icehawk
    The USA is NOT a democracy, right now & it's receding, unless Biden can kick some backsides in his own party (!)

    No more so than the UK at least. Who on your side is going to kick the fascists & authoritarians into line?

    704:

    whitroth @ 663: Grand Master of SF, for their body of work

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:SFWA_Grand_Masters

    I hate it when you pull somebody's leg & it falls right off. Do you even know who Grandmaster Flash is?

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

    705:

    Bill Arnold @ 667: US military term, maybe 2000+?.

    If it was, I never heard it.

    706:

    I tried to write a novel about climate change once. It totally foundered on the problem of how our social situation in the U.S. caused the problem - conservatives bought by the oil/coal/gas industries, racism gumming up the works, right-wing nuttiness getting nuttier - I couldn't see a path from here to the happy, gave up oil/gas/coal future I wanted to show, where we'd fixed climate change. Someone would have to really go out on a limb to make such a book work.

    I'm still working about it while I write about Orcs...

    ~Sighs~

    707:

    Let's see, a former US Navy SEAL forms a group called Pipe Hitters. What do I think of?

    Well, how about this this from 2011 (more video here, possibly NSFW). You can find lots of coverage if you google "Navy SEAL Las Vegas rampage.

    Draw your own conclusions.

    708:

    Nicola Sturgeon?

    709:

    Um, no. Everywhere, including South America and Africa, there is demonstrable evidence that the higher the educational level of the mother, the fewer children she has. I find it hard to believe that ignorant female chattel will be going to other planets.

    And the big families mattered... when you lived on a farm, and infant (and mother) mortality was high. When you've got a colony, robots, and people who want to come there to increase the population, and get off Earth, nope.

    710:

    Ah, yes, the supporters of the dictator Batista, the kids they've brainwashed to think that way... and the Mob, that owned Havana.

    711:

    Yes. I've heard of him. I really don't care for rap.

    And it that was leg-pulling, I couldn't differentiate it from lack of knowledge. Too subtle for me.

    712:

    The problem is that you can't fix climate change and the extinction crisis and go back to 1950 or 1990 America. It's going to be different.

    Here are some thoughts: --Imagine an America without Republicans, due to loss of funding from the fossil fuel industry. The two parties are the pro-business Democrats, and the pro-everything else Progressives. --Everyone agrees that solving climate change is necessary, and there's growing and grudging acceptance that solving the extinction crisis has to be part of that. --Electric vehicles are normal on all scales, the part that killed the oil companies. This is creating all sorts of political ripples as grids get rearranged, fights over solar panel supply chains ramp up, etc. etc. etc. --The plastics problem is spurring some solutions, possibly involving road repair with plastic goo from landfills or some such. Alternative designs proliferate. --The US, Russia, and China (among others) solve the autonomous AI problem with the Supply Chain Treaty, which states that the computer industry will be, by treaty, massively multinational, such that no country can make an autonomous AI without sourcing critical parts from its erstwhile enemies. Any hint of a threat is met by supply chain cuts. It's a version of Mutually Assured Survival, by making the industrial ecosystem for computer manufacturing so horribly complicated that any attempt to subvert it for world domination crashes at least one critical supply chain.
    --End to end encryption becomes a norm, because the paniopticon turns out to be effing useless for almost everyone. --Southern California gets downsized due to some combination of drought, earthquake, fire, and/or ARkStorm, and/or hurricane. Also, being at the center of Car Culture, SoCal benefits from losing people by surplusing some of its stupider, car-centric city planning and design issues (of which there are very, very many). --Food preferences change (more plants, more bugs, less conspicuous beef-eating. Think Mexican peasant food and so forth) --Conspicuous consumption becomes passe. This isn't about creeping puritanism. Rather it's that the Baby Boomers and Gen X measured success by how much crap they amassed ("he who dies with the most toys wins!"). Their heirs have to deal with all this crap, and you know what? It's about the biggest disincentive to accumulate crap that one can imagine. Other ethics take hold, most likely creative reuse and disencrapifying trashed products that exceeded their design lives decades before.
    --Animism becomes the growing thing, although few dare speak its name, and those who do get marginalized. Animism here is broadly defined as seeing non-human beings as being either people or at least having the right to exist. The point here is that more people (including some left-leaning Christians) are realizing that the point of animism isn't primitive silliness, it's that if you don't take care of your support systems (food, shelter, fuel, medicine, companionship, etc.), you die. We're realizing that, and it's being expressed in a wide variety of formats, from Christian alternatives to environmentalism to pets being called "fur-babies" to biologists increasingly acknowledging that most organisms process data in ways that should be called thinking, if we were less biased. There are two critical points: one is that this is happening, and the second is that everyone who's not a pagan detests using the term animism. So if you're about to protest that animism is primitive, congratulations! You're in the closet with a bunch of fundies.

    Now given these ideas, you can't make a story? Well, I can't, because I'm spending too much energy trying to make them all happen. But someone else certainly could.

    713:

    I've already incorperated a lot of that - this blog heavily informs that book. As to your last comment, I'm not much good in public - I'm much too intense - but writing pro-environment propaganda seems like a good occupation for me.

    Also, if you're having meetings about saving the world you could let me know - my email is via google and should be obvious.

    714:

    If you're in San Diego, comment on the County Budget hearings at 5:30 pm tonight (Wednesday). Tell them to fully fund their programs on sustainability, climate action plan, environmental justice, the MSCP, and native plant regulations updates. Start here: https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/sdc/cob/bosa/bos-calendar-meetings.html?date=06/16/2021&meetingtype=BOARD%20OF%20SUPERVISORS You'll have 2 minutes (=200 words) to talk.

    Getting involved with Sierra Club, EHL, or CNPS is a good way to get hooked in.

    715:

    Ioan @ 678: @643 Kanton Island might be a base, or it might be someone's idea to turn an island with a few dozen inhabitants into an exclusive tourist resort? Time will tell.

    Take a look at the island in Wikipedia & Google Maps. What are those tourists gonna do? The PLA already has plenty of "exclusive tourist resorts" closer to home.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX-ODJYd878

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9pFewd0Y7E

    The island population is somewhere between 20 & 50 persons, and practically the only thing on the island is the airstrip, which is still usable for emergency landings. The majority of the island is part of a UNESCO World Heritage protected marine sanctuary.

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

    716:

    Wee Nic? Maybe; I do know she's more popular amongst English SF fans than Bozo, Keir Stammer or Sidiq Kahn are.

    717:

    I'm not in San Diego. I hail from the Riverside/San Berdoo area. Thanks for the suggestions on getting involved.

    718:

    Same suggestions apply:

    --Get involved in budgeting. --If you want to do environmental activism, hook in with Sierra Club, EHL, CNPS, or Audubon. Same advice applies throughout southern California. And except for EHL (which is a SoCal group) it applies throughout California.

    719:

    H Not so. Because - even then, "we" knew there was such a thing as biting off more than one could chew

    Charlie No It was inevitable after the independance of "India" in 1947

    JBS AT PRESENT WE are a democracy - BUT BoZo is dead-set on "rectifying" that. He's using the Trump / Erdogan / Orban playbook. At present, he's getting away with it, but it may not succeed. We shall see.

    EC @ 710 NO BoZO WANTS her to succeed, "against his wishes" - so that he can control a fascist England - I'm really surprised Charlie hasn't spotted this, incidentally.

    720:

    Robert Prior @ 679:

    Slavery exists across the country (although it's called 'indentured labour' in the North).

    So a continuation of the system that the colonies started with?

    Partly ... haven't read that book, so I can't speak to the nature of "indentured servitude" in that alternative history.

    OTOH, I know a tiny bit about Indentured Servitude as practiced in England's North American colonies because my surname ancestor came to the Jamestown Colony as an indentured servant in 1664.

    The reason chattel slavery of Africans displaced indentured servitude is because an "indentured servant" could run off to a different colony, change his name & skip out on the debt incurred for his passage to the English Colonies. African people could not deny the color of their skin.

    Twenty some Angolans ("20 and odd"), kidnapped by the Portuguese from Africa, arrive at Point Comfort in the English Colony of Virginia aboard the ship "White Lion" which had captured them from the Portuguese slave ship "San Juan Bautista", where they are traded for food and sold to the English colonists on August 20, 1619.

    A hundred and sixty four years later the United States came into being with the Treaty of Paris (1783)

    But at the time, chattel slavery was still lawful in all 13 former colonies as well as in those English colonies that did not choose independence from the mother country. And, in fact, was still lawful in England & the United Kingdom itself.

    The main difference was that indentured servitude was a contractual matter and there was a limit to what a master could do and for how long he could keep someone in indenture. Plus certain benefits due to the indentured person at the end of their period of indenture.

    721:

    I wasn't suggesting they were spying on Argentina, but space.

    722:

    The USA is NOT a democracy, right now & it's receding

    I get the hyperbole, but I don't think it's helpful. The USA is much more of a democracy now than it was before the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the watergate reforms of the mid 70s, and vastly more of one than it was 200 years ago.

    My point is that universal sufferage is a modern idea. Most of the USA's founding fathers (and I'm using the patriarchal term deliberately) would have opposed it.

    So this "Roman-esque" future of Heinlein's reads to me as more about America's history than about Rome - about an America that almost-was and easily could have been.

    My reading of Heinlein is that he's a very American author. Consciously and deliberately so, I think. His work is full of references to America's past, to American-esque "frontiers", and to futures that are distorted reflections of parts of America's past. A lot of American-produced sci-fi in the mid 20th century was like that.

    723:

    whitroth @ 691: Koch money is paying, right now, for pro-Manchin ads.

    Koch industries are a large multi-national heavily invested in fossil fuels ... including coal mining in West Virginia (the state Manchin represents). They are a large employer in West Virginia and have political influence in the state.

    But, in addition to Manchin, "Koch money" goes to NPR, The United Negro College Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and cancer research at MIT.

    I'm not totally against rich people using their money to influence politics & public policy. I AM against allowing them to hide their efforts behind Dark Money.

    Also, corporations are NOT people and don't have the same Constitutional Rights that people do.

    724:

    Greg: BoZO WANTS her to succeed, "against his wishes" - so that he can control a fascist England - I'm really surprised Charlie hasn't spotted this, incidentally.

    I have spotted it. Unfortunately it's a win/win for Johnson: if the SNP fail to secure independence then Scotland is forever doomed to be under the thumb of the Tories, who haven't won an election north of the border in over 60 years. And if the SNP succeed, then England is stuck with the Tories. There is no good outcome to this dilemma for England, the least-bad outcome is probably that Scotland escapes (then spends an extra decade digging itself out of the inevitable economic ordure of a messy divorce before it's possible to steer a separate course).

    725:

    Re conspicuous consumption - as I read that, it struck me that the parents of us Boomers lived through the Depression, and it was "yes, I can have Stuph, rather than "there is no stuff, and we couldn't afford it if there was".

    It was also that part of the country (please note, I was not part of that growing up) could live on one wage-earner's paycheck.

    The younger folks didn't grow up with that push for more stuff.

    Animism - you forgot the growth of Paganism in the US and elsewhere.... In '93 or so, it was estimated there were at least 100k outright, declared Pagans in the US, and growing rapidl.

    726:

    whitroth @ 699: Right... but is a growing population a valid assumption? A lot of the world has slowed, or is falling. The last estimate I've seen is that the world population of humans will peak in 2050, not 2090.

    And on colonies... I really doubt that folks, esp. coming from Terra, are going for families of 10.

    If you don't have a growing population, why would you need to seek new worlds to colonize? ... except maybe to kick-start the population to start growing again. Shrinking population is the path to eventual extinction.

    727:

    The money they spend on politics is real money. They said, in an interview, that they were going to spend $1B to defeat Hillary.

    NPR? They sold out to the Grinch in Nov of '95. Summer of '96, for example, they were heavily covering the Congressional hearings into ADM and its semi-monopoly. Suddenly, Wed of that week, ADM was a sponsor, and the coverage dropped to nothing. Listen to the News Hour. Tell me how many times they have people from the Cato Inst, and other right-wing think tanks. I haven't heard, say, Noam Chomsky since the early nineties. I've yet to hear, say, Nobel Prize winner Krugman... but they have right wing economists.

    Yes, I REALLY have it in for NPR, and haven't contributed since Bob Edwards brown-nosed - first time I'd ever heard that - to a couple of "freshmen Republicans", in Nov of '95.

    NO, the Kochs are evil, and the couch change they throw elsewhere is pure PR.

    728:

    Elderly Cynic @ 710: Nicola Sturgeon?

    Are you saying she's a "flash in the pan"?

    729:

    Conspicuous consumption is a bit more complex than that, I think. Remember the response to 9/11 wasn't for the country to mobilize for war, but to be good little consumers and go out to make the economy boom again? The idea that we're consumers first and foremost was, I suppose, a way to try to unite the US and others and paper over a lot of really nasty and growing differences. Those differences have widened into chasms, and I don't think all the junk piled around in storage lockers and downsizing homes makes it easier to keep that identity as "The American Consumer." We've consumed. The Rapture/Apocalypse didn't happen. Now what?

    730:

    Animism - you forgot the growth of Paganism in the US and elsewhere.... In '93 or so, it was estimated there were at least 100k outright, declared Pagans in the US, and growing rapidly.

    IMHO paganism kind of ghosted itself in the last decade, after being out there in the 1990s. I don't blame them. It's easier to be spiritual but not religious than to fly a freak flag and get shot at for no good reason.

    That being said, I am seeing more recognition, among everybody except the rabid right wing authoritarians and the clueless, that if we don't take care of the Earth, we'll get to die, prematurely, painfully, and probably slowly. While I'll note that the clueless and the nutcases do currently make up a majority of Americans, there seems to be a wide spectrum of people who are playing with animist-adjacent ideas about how to deal with the rest of reality in a more respectful, caring way, It's similar to how anyone living with an aging car or older house tends to personalize it, while someone who's only into the newest and greatest thinks only like a consumer.

    731:

    Yeah, don't get me started. Amaricans are "consumers", and viewed by the wealthy as these overweight people, sitting on a couch, with cartoonish mouths the size of our heads, tossing junk food in, and there's a line from our wallets to them.

    rant

    732:

    Ghosted itself?

    More like "At first, we were iridescent; then, we became transparent"? (with thanks to Paul Kanter). We're no longer "what? they don't exist" to "oh, one of them".

    Btw, how ordinary? Well, the UUs have a suhgroup, the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. A lot of UU churches have groups.

    733:

    Just for the fun of it, imagine a future where conspicuous consumption is small amounts of extremely good stuff instead of piles of mediocre stuff.

    Why, yes, I am a Jack Vance fan.

    734:

    Paganism didn't ghost me. I ghosted it. Too much dysfunctional bullshit, at least in the community where I lived. I'm kinda-sorta still Pagan in my heart, but don't ever expect to go to another ritual.

    735:

    As I said, spiritual but not religious...

    736:

    ...spiritual but not religious...

    I suppose. I still go hiking in the sage fields from time to time.

    737:

    Also the rise of advertising as an industry, linked to things like planned obsolescence. Almost as if there was a plan to increase workers' consumption…

    738:

    if the SNP fail to secure independence then Scotland is forever doomed to be under the thumb of the Tories, who haven't won an election north of the border in over 60 years. And if the SNP succeed, then England is stuck with the Tories.

    So England is stuck with the Tories anyway?

    In that case, saving at least some of the UK from the Tories sounds like a reasonable option.

    (Although would an independent Scotland still be part of the UK? Leave the UK and join the Commonwealth? Would there be an advantage to keeping the monarchy as a figurehead, much as many Commonwealth countries do?)

    And if Scotland can (re)join the EU, the land border will need beefing up. Maybe a big beautiful wall, with mile-castles?

    739:

    conspicuous consumption is small amounts of extremely good stuff

    That's always been around, but hopefully more of it over time. Just because some billionaires built hideous erections in the middle of London doesn't mean that others are not renovating one of their palaces just down the road.

    In many areas it's annoyingly difficult to actually buy good gear, a lot of it has been overtaken by the "useful object: now with added computer" where the computer part will fail in 2-5 years leaving you with an object that is no longer usable. Bicycles, for example, where the electronic shifting means they no longer have cable stops so you literally can't use mechanical shifters.

    One tip for geeky types is that a lot of LED lights are driven so hard they will fail quickly, but you can change (often remove) a resistor to cut the power output so you get 75% of the brightness but for 10 years instead of two. BigClive demonstrated that the "Dubai lamps" have that as stock because the ruler there put his foot down.

    740:

    My understanding of normal-matter spherically symmetric shells, is that inside them, gravitational force is zero. See, for example,

    http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/sphshell2.html

    This was derived from Newtonian gravity, so perhaps Einsteinian (general relativity) calculations are different?

    741:

    In '93 or so, it was estimated there were at least 100k outright, declared Pagans in the US, and growing rapidl.

    I was one of them. Stopped being a Wiccan few years later as I had to be honest with myself and admit it too is woo.

    742:

    Mains LED lights are the same: overdriven LEDs, undersized/underrated driver components, and an attitude that measures to take care of heat dissipation are for the birds. Well, they are. I make my own and I do indeed make a point of ensuring that they are well able to dissipate their waste heat. I also select the ballast capacitor to be of suitable construction and high enough voltage rating that it will carry on capacitating indefinitely, and of low enough value that the LED current is not excessive. This is why boughten ones fail after a few months and sometimes catch fire, and mine don't.

    743:

    I'm not entirely sure about that. There's certainly not any scientific evidence for the woo, but ritual can have very profound psychological effects, and I've used those repeatedly.

    744:

    The LED lights sold in the UK must be crap compared to the ones in the US.

    I've not see the situation you describe. Now I HAVE removed some 10+ year old motion triggered outdoor LED floods that I installed back in the early days of LEDs. They quit but they were also outdoors in temps ranging from mid to upper 20sF in winter to near or above 100F in summer.

    The batch of household light bulbs I bought 6 or 8 years ago (maybe more?) are all still going strong. I have a cabinet of 15 or more extras I bought at the time and have not pulled one out in years.

    My total buy was about 30 or 40 at $1 each on a black Friday sale at Home Depot or Lowes.

    745:

    I'm not entirely sure about that. There's certainly not any scientific evidence for the woo, but ritual can have very profound psychological effects, and I've used those repeatedly.

    Instead of woo, I think it might better be labeled HUI (Haptic User Interface) between the conscious part of the person and the rest of their physical reality. Looking for science is like taking apart a mac to find the physical trash can that programs get discarded into. And if you can't feel it, it won't work for you.

    746:

    Here's a late back-to-on-topic comment:

    I've just discovered that Kyle Kallgren of the Youtube channel Brows Held High just did a double feature on Starship Troopers the book and Starship Troopers the movie. It's announced as a three part series, so apparently there's another video in the making.

    Maybe that's of interest to some people here.

    747:
    ...spiritual but not religious...
    I suppose. I still go hiking in the sage fields from time to time.

    I hope you return with sage advice.

    [I'll show myself out.]

    748:

    JBS And, in fact, was still lawful in England & the United Kingdom itself. WRONG Look up the "Mansfield Decision" of 1772, why don't you?

    Charlie @ 726 Make that 20 or 30 years digging out .... Agree that it's a really horrible-for-the-rest-of-us "win/win" for BoZo if he pulls it off

    Nancy L Well, yes, consumption of "good" stuff, only, if possible.

    Rbt Prior Not necessarily Sooner or later - especially if before the next General Election, BoZo's lying & cheating & betraying EVERYONE - will bring him down. The alternative is really nasty. We have had two totally untrustworthy "leaders" in the past & in neither case did it end well for anyone: John Lackland & Charles I

    749:

    Strange, since they probably all come out of the same factory in Shenzhen. Pretty much guesswork but I can think of at least 3 ways the lower mains voltage in the US might be causing that result.

    Some of the failures are due to the ballast capacitor packing up. Foil/film, metallised-film and similar capacitors have a failure mode caused by internal ionisation in spurious voids which doesn't happen with less than about 180V AC across the capacitor. It's not a problem if the capacitor is correctly specified, but since they actually specify them on a maximally cheap-arsed basis, on European mains they are vulnerable to failure in a manner which is not possible at US voltages.

    For European mains versions they are fond of connecting the LEDs in groups of 2 in parallel and then connecting n groups in a series string. I don't know what they do for US mains versions but it would seem logical to simply change the pattern to groups of 4 in a series string of n/2. The quality control on the manufacture of the LEDs is dogshit, and there are a large enough number of them in a light bulb that it's quite likely for at least one of them to be a spurious shitty one that goes open circuit for no reason after a few hours of operation. If it's one of a parallel group of 4 then the remaining 3 will end up carrying a third more current each and they may be able to take it, but if it's one of a group of 2 the remaining one has to carry twice the current, and may express its displeasure by catching fire.

    Chinese stuff for European mains very often assumes that it is 220V when the standard is actually 230V. British mains is nominally 230V these days but actually is usually 240V, because they "complied" with the 230V standard by defining the nominal voltage as 230V with an anomalously wide upper tolerance band that encompassed the entire tolerance range of the old 240V standard, so they didn't have to change any of the equipment. Pretty well everywhere I've measured it I find 240V or a touch over. So an awful lot of Chinese stuff which is supposed to be OK for British mains ends up being continuously overvolted by 10%. With stuff which is supposed to be OK for US mains the nominal overvoltage is no more than 5% (115V vs. 110V) and in practice I would guess it's often less than that or even under. So the normal phenomenon of failure rate increasing as some power of overload, as amplified by cheap shit construction, is of notably lesser significance at US voltages.

    750:

    220V when the standard is actually 230V. British mains is nominally 230V these days but actually is usually 240V

    Australia is also 240V, but the actual cutoff is IIRC 252V and you'd be wise to design for 255V. When the PV on the roof is humming I hit 255V at the house, anyway (daytime consumption close to zero as the shedroom has an off-grid solar setup. So 90% of what comes off the roof goes out the front gate). Many things don't like 255V, or they put in cheap nominally-ok capacitors which fail early, or they use capacitors as heat sinks (I assume, since the build things where the hot components are pressed up against the electrolytic capacitors).

    I have various 12V and 240V lights, and 240V-12V adapters, and some of them are fine. Others either I've edited them so they work or they have failed unrepairably. I still have a few MR16 LED bulbs that are rated something like 9-24VDC and the seller warned me "that's 24V actual volts, not nominal 24V truck battery volts" but the good news is they have actual constant current drivers in them and are set to run cool enough in still air that they last ages. More than 10 years, anyway.

    751: 726 - Yeah, Bozo and the Cons playbook is obvious, except for the bit where their Scottish leader is Dross (really; this is how Douglas Ross MSP signs himself). I'm less certain what Scottish Liebour under Anas Sarwar are doing (but am certain that Jackie Baillie isn't party to the plan). 727 - Really 100_000 Pagans, or just that number of people who feel that their religion is not something that "the government" have any business knowing? As of the 2011 UK Census I'm a Jedi, because it's none of the government's business. 740 - Well yes, I think that Englandshire may stick iself with the Con Party.

    The position of Indy Scotland regarding the "British Commonwealth" is unclear, and may be subject to negotiation, but not with "just Englandshire". Well, when/if Scotland rejoins the EU (we already have a counted "Remain" majority), there is a "technology demonstrator" for a hard border, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrian%27s_Wall . Ye 2 biggest issues I see here being Englandshire (Oh, wait, they don't get a vote) and Spain.

    749 {Passes MSG an anorak} ;-)
    752:

    If you don't have a growing population, why would you need to seek new worlds to colonize?

    It all circles back to the unexamined assumptions implicit in white supremacism.

    The drive to interplanetary colonization is expansionist, and as such, it's imperialist. (Luckily in this case there are no indigenes to genocide and enslave, but it's the impulse that counts.) Similarly, if you scratch a white supremacist you discover a neurotic well of terror at the idea of being "replaced" by "mud people" -- google "replacement theory" if you can stomach diving down a neo-nazi rabbit hole -- and Mars offers them a clean sheet locale in which to reboot their ethnostate.

    And if you think this is exaggerated, look at the early years of Oregon, California's attitude to dark-hued immigrants from out east, and the "White Australia" policy of yore.

    753:

    Heteromeles @ 714:

    The problem is that you can't fix climate change and the extinction crisis and go back to 1950 or 1990 America. It's going to be different. Here are some thoughts: [...]

    You guys have read Earth by David Brin, haven't you? The only significant differences between your thoughts and the book are that Brin thought privacy was going to become a dirty word, and strong AI was something that only turned up at the end.

    (I thought the apotheosis scene was a ridiculous ending to what was otherwise one of the best near-term SF books I've ever read. Deus ex machina indeed!).

    754:

    paws EXCEPT that Scotland "rejoining" the EU will take AT LEAST 10 years ... And I don't think we've got 10 years There are signs that the Brexit crunch will hit this year & early next - the "sausage wars" are a small indicator - sooner or later BoZo will find a lie he can't wriggle out of ( I hope )

    755:

    Okay, that makes sense. I've often wondered and that's a much clearer explanation of where it fits in than any I've found.

    756:

    Greg, there are depressing signs from last May's elections that Englandshire actually believes at least some of Bozo's lies. The best entertainment from there right now is amateur jogger Demonic Cummins' attempt at a cabinet reshuffle.

    757:

    Hmm. While you are correct, that applies almost equally to all other colours of supremacism - white merely happens to be the dominant one at present.

    758:

    I replaced all my incandescent bulb downstairs and in the hall a d landing four years ago. I’ve had to replace one out of fourteen.

    759:

    Thanks. The confusion is widespread, even among physicists, and is due to the common mistake of using a simplifying assumption (flat space-time in this case) and dropping the condition when generalising the results.

    If you want a simple, Newtonian example, consider a pendulum in a space-ship. The simplest (school) explanation gives simple harmonic motion, the full analysis ('second-order effects') shows that the period does depend on the amplitude, and the third-order effects depend on whether the space-ship is accelerating or spinning, and on the relative directions of the pendulum and spin. See Foucalt Pendulum for a classic use of this :-)

    760:

    I don't think that even our sheeple are THAT stupid! It's more that they don't care, and are prepared to put up with crooks, charlatans and worse provided that those pander to their prejudices.

    761:

    It all comes back to that irregular verb:

    I know the facts.
    You have opinions.
    He's biased.
    They've been brainwashed.

    762:

    The drive to interplanetary colonization is expansionist, and as such, it's imperialist.

    There's been recently talk on the internets about the colonialism and imperialism in 'Dungeons & Dragons'. When the main idea of the game is to go about, kill people and take their stuff, the imperialism and colonialism is quite near the surface.

    This made me start an essay on colonialism and imperialism in the 'Traveller' role-playing game. It's a scifi game, and the usual setting for it is called "The Third Imperium", so the imperialism is kind of a given. Some versions even have these smaller polities and the game provides ideas on how to expand and colonize the worlds nearby.

    Also, in many versions the characters are mostly ex-military, ex-scouts (so often figuring out where to colonize next), or merchants (who would benefit from the colonization).

    It's kind of nice that growing up makes me look at these rpg's in a different way than I used to.

    763:

    I think colonizing other planets can have other motivations-- there's curiosity, there's wanting to do something other than the mainstream culture, and there's insurance against disaster.

    I think your model makes the whole history of the spread of humanity into something evil.

    764:

    in many versions the characters are mostly ex-military, ex-scouts (so often figuring out where to colonize next), or merchants (who would benefit from the colonization)

    Also, the rules mostly governed fighting, exploring, and commerce. You could run campaigns with a different focus, but it was more work.

    765:

    would an independent Scotland still be part of the UK? Leave the UK and join the Commonwealth? Would there be an advantage to keeping the monarchy as a figurehead, much as many Commonwealth countries do?

    From the top:

    An independent Scotland would not be part of the UK.

    It would retain the monarchy -- at least, at first: ditching the crown and becoming a republic would take a separate referendum. However, aside from Liz herself, the monarchy is significantly less popular in Scotland than in England, so after her death, there's a good chance that Scotland would become a republic. (Liz is 95.)

    Commonwealth: why bother?

    Scotland is likely to join the EEA or EFTA immediately on independence -- think free trade zones -- with EU accession at some subsequent time (details to be hashed out including single currency, national debt levels, which make it harder than EEA/EFTA).

    Your key take-away should be that Scotland is politically distinct from England, much as New York State is distinctively different from Alabama.

    766:

    While I agree that the Commonwealth is essentially just a talking club, that does have its uses, diplomatically, and retaining the monarchy while not remaining in / joining the Commonwealth would be bizarre. We can agree that, politically and economically, it's an irrelevance.

    767:

    paws @ 758 All too true - but ... how long for?

    Mike Collins I went all-LED about 18 months back - I've had to relace on, dodgy one.

    Charlie @ 767 Scotland joins EEA/EFTA in 2027 - right ... Border Controls? This is fucking insane - & it's all BoZo's fault

    Going back a bit ... Food costs What's a week or months vegetable groceries for those of you in the UK? And then work it out for a year. Compare to mine: Approx £110 a year plot rent, about £100 on seeds & v occasionally plants For 6 months of the year I'm buying onions ... Call it about £300 a year all-up. Oh & mine is fresh "organic" varieties I want to eat & "Luxuries" like FRESH Asparagus & Sea-Kale ( Unobtainable in any shop I've seen, etc ... ) What's it costing YOU?

    768:
    colonialism and imperialism in 'Dungeons & Dragons

    Don't forget the antisemitism. Liches store their souls in phylacteries. But they might as well store their souls in a crucifix, right? Or the symbol from om / aum? Something considered by its religion as holy. And yet, these "always chaotic evil" undead are good targets/foes for high-level PCs.

    In GURPS (another RPG, much less popular than D&D) offsite soul storage containers such as liches use are "soul jars".

    769:

    (Dungeons & Dragons)

    Don't forget the antisemitism.

    Well, no, but the issues of D&D are numerous, and in the 'Traveller' context I was more interested in the colonialism. Discussing all the other problems in D&D is probably not for this forum, at least not in this thread.

    770:

    Well, in honor of Juneteenth, you could color-switch your D&D elves: make the surface dwellers African in appearance, while making the Drow very very white. That would put them in harmony with their environments, given that troglodytes are usually low pigment critters.

    But yes, I think the liches and their soul jars are very good parallels for rich families and the trusts that hold their wealth, and making that explicitly anti-semitic is problematic.

    771:

    Greg Tingey @ 769 "What's it costing YOU?"

    Sorry, I never count.

    772:

    Well, Brin's environmental crisis was ozone depletion. Oh, and some idiot dropping a black hole (excuse me, a tuned superstring) into the Earth. Brin published that the same year that Simmons published Hyperion, where he also dropped a black hole into the Earth, with rather less pleasant results. Guess that meme was going around or something.

    There's actually very little that's similar between what I just pitched and Earth. You may want to reread what I wrote, and reread what Brin wrote. And yes, I read Earth several times. Have an autographed first edition, too.

    Earth is a good example of the techno-fix for all environmental problems. My take on climate change is that it's both a fundamental change and a chronic problem that has no fast fix. The default method for dealing with it in SF is to either whiz-bang fix it (as in Earth) or assume it's unfixable and we're all gonna die.

    This, to be blunt, is lazy thinking that's increasingly useless. Climate change is the great challenge of our future, and grappling with it should be something SF writers do. Why even talk about terraforming Mars when Earth needs our terraforming care* to keep supporting our kind of life? If we can't be bothered to care for our life support systems here, how many seconds do you think that extraterrestrial domed city will last once it's fully inhabited by our kind of people? And no, it's not a matter of having your (AI?) slaves do the hard work while you swan around, either.

    *A lot of weeding, among other things.

    773:

    Sorry, I never count.

    At least, not until the game is over?

    :-)

    774:

    The default method for dealing with it in SF is to either whiz-bang fix it (as in Earth)

    Or John Barnes' Mother of Storms.

    Or a lot of the entries in Seat 14C. Which is a decent collection, and worth reading.

    You used to be able to download it for free, but I'm getting a bad gateway error for the site now: http://www.seat14c.com

    (If anyone has a working link to post, I suspect people might be interested.)

    775:

    It's okay. I told you a time-travel joke yesterday and you didn't like it.

    776:

    That's something we've confronted a lot in our own gaming, and the current solution is that while we do fight with monsters/other races from time to time, there's a huge bias against being "murderhoboes" in our games, and we try very hard not to kill anyone we can talk to.

    In my writing I'm using Orcs as proxies for "those people" and like to think I'm doing so successfully.

    777:

    And what about all that nobility? Why can't some of the city-states be democracies, theocracies, oligarchies, people's republics, parliamentary systems or a government grown out the guild system? And why don't the characters ever lead a peasants revolt or undertake operations against the bandits/warlords which frequently inhabited the medieval countryside?

    778:

    Well, Brin's environmental crisis was ozone depletion.

    No, he had several others. Global warming was one, which led to a rise in sea level, the opening up of Antarctica for homesteaders, and other major climate impacts such as monsoon failure in India. He also mentioned mountains of garbage piling up in America.

    Its been a decade or two since I read it last, but going through your list:

    -- America without Republicans, due to loss of funding from the fossil fuel industry.

    American politics aren't mentioned IIRC, but its clear that fossil fuel is a very rare thing.

    -- Everyone agrees that solving climate change is necessary, and there's growing and grudging acceptance that solving the extinction crisis has to be part of that.

    Check and check. A big part of the book is set in a giant vivarium where various endangered species are being maintained until they can be returned to the wild. CITES laws are backed up by UN soldiers.

    --Electric vehicles are normal on all scales [... supply chain...]

    Electric or hydrogen. Brin failed to foresee the amazing improvement in battery efficiency we have seen over the past couple of decades. He doesn't go into the supply chain impacts.

    --The plastics problem is spurring some solutions,

    The book doesn't mention plastics as a particular issue IIRC, but garbage mountains have become an important source of raw materials.

    --The US, Russia, and China (among others) solve the autonomous AI problem

    --End to end encryption becomes a norm, because the panopticon turns out to be effing useless for almost everyone.

    These two are the only things that stand out as different from the book. AI isn't an issue in Earth, and a crowdsourced panopticon is an everyday part of life.

    --Southern California gets downsized [by natural disasters]

    He doesn't talk about California specifically. Houston is still going strong despite being under a couple of meters of seawater (people commute between skyscrapers by boat). Of course the big disaster in the Earth backstory is the Helvetian War, and there are a number of other disasters either mentioned in passing or ongoing at the time.

    --Conspicuous consumption becomes passe. This isn't about creeping puritanism. [...] Other ethics take hold

    Very much so, although environmental puritanism is a big part of it. Conspicuous waste is seen as pissing in the communal well.

    --Animism becomes the growing thing, although few dare speak its name

    Check. Gaia worship is a big thing, with all life forms seen as different aspects of Her. Even the Catholic Church has found a theological way to accommodate it.

    So overall, its a pretty good fit. The big trends you mention are there. The only misses (apart from AI and the Panopticon) are on specific things like US politics and which geographical areas are trashed.

    779:

    undertake operations against the bandits/warlords which frequently inhabited the medieval countryside

    Best campaign I played in was run by an Anglican priest. Map was essentially Nova Scotia settled to medieval levels*, and we were first-level characters hunting bandits and protecting villagers from wolves. Currency was all copper with a bit of silver, and we were mostly paid in kind. Don't remember seeing any gold at all!

    It was small-scale and provincial, and the most fun I had playing D&D.

    *He'd created it while in seminary there.

    780:

    I leave that trouble to my sole heir (a school) when my game will be really over.

    781:

    Paul, I think you're not close enough to see the radical differences.

    --CITES is about the trade in threatened and endangered species, and the various endangered species acts tier off it on the national level. I agree that CITES is under-enforced and that heavily armed African rangers protect rhinos. What I'm talking about is 30x30, which is about conservice at least 30% of the planet for non-human species, just to keep everything working. It's about ecosystems, not species, while CITES is only about species. Brin's vivarium is minuscule in comparison with the effort now on.

    --Trash mining: Yeah, anyone who wants to mine carbonaceous chondrites for fun and profit really should start on a landfill first. It will be educational. More seriously, doing this profitably is hard, and I've got a close relative in the business, so I get earsful on a regular basis. Even getting methane out of a landfill is hard. It's not that they don't emit mass quantities of methane, it's also that they emit mass quantities of all sorts of other more useless gases. Refining the methane out of the dirty gas coming off a dump typically costs way more than the market value of methane in a pipe. That's the norm for almost any garbage extraction technology, not the exception. The more general way to think of this is that trash is a high entropy material, which means you've got to throw a bunch of energy into it to extract anything useful from it, at least in most cases. Finding the exceptions is fun, but it doesn't do anything about the mountains of high entropy stuff left behind.

    The others you had to elide because they don't particularly fit, do they?

    782:

    I consider myself a Pagan. I have never called myself a Wiccan, being a) possibly anal, and b) neither Gardnarian nor Alexandrian.

    I put up a page, years back: I go with Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, and (when asked) call myself a Biospherist. No, I dont personally talk to the Goddess or the God (when was the last time you had a Meaningful Conversation with the cell that's 3.0000 cm to the right and 1.50000cm inwards from your right knee?). I also don't see Her as all-powerful (Big Lady in Nighshirt replacing Big Man in Nightshirt), or She *surely would have saved Her dearly beloved dinosaurs.

    • Motto: we have nothing to sphere but sphere itself! (shamelessly stolen from Walt Kelly's Pogo).
    783:

    Nah, the estimate was on real Pagans. At the time, the fastest growing "religion" (actually, an umbrella word for all paths) in the US.

    784:

    Ok, semi-plug here: in my universe, there are two reasons for colonization: one, overpopulation ("Come relocated to New Earth, you'll always be able to find a parking space!")... and the other, just what you were saying. I've got it that a lot of ultra-religious types move to colonies, so they don't have to deal with those, those HERETICS!!!

    785:

    The big problem with trash is that we don't generally sort it as we generate it. (And that plastic exists.) Essentially, we mix together all the stuff that should never be mixed, ranging from food waste to broken technology, then dump it in a mound, bury it, then complain that it's expensive to un-mess!

    786:

    I've got one light in the kitchen that I need to replace again - this is #2? 3?

    I suspect some asshole (i.e. the former owner's "wonderful" handyman) of leaving a short. I've replaced the fixture, and the breaker box is new, since I just had a "heavy up" (100A->200A) done about a year or so ago.

    787:

    GURPS is not, in fact, "another RPG", but rather a set of rules for any type of role-playing game (Generic Universal Role-Playing System), intended by Steve so that you didn't have to learn a new rule system for every bloody game.

    788:

    Huh. In Chicago, and here in the DC metro area, everyone has city/county-provided containers, one for plastic, glass, and metal, and one for paper, and you have your own for everything else. I know NYC has the same.

    789:

    With stuff which is supposed to be OK for US mains the nominal overvoltage is no more than 5% (115V vs. 110V) and in practice I would guess it's often less than that or even under.

    While similar to UK, the US standard is normally listed as 110/120 I've not seen anything below 118v since I've been looking. Which goes back to the 60s. When household transformers are set the lineman measures the output and adjusts the taps on the transformer so the output is 120/240. I suspect this has been true for over 1/2 century now.

    As to some of your other issues, Charlie mentioned a while back that UK bulbs are not screw in so your choices are more limited than in other parts of the world. I suspect that allows the US to have more competitive situations with suppliers and more choices at the wholesale level.

    790:

    I replaced all my incandescent bulb

    Country please? :)

    791:

    garbage mountains have become an important source of raw materials.

    I don't know about other of the first world nations but in the US a huge volume of landfills is taken up by disposable diapers. With contents. Responsible people at least empty the contents in the toilet but still there are a lot of turdy diapers in US landfills.

    I have a memory that going back 30+ years newspapers and magazine were 10% to 30% of the volume of landfills here. But with recycling and the decline of printing on paper (for home delivery) that has gone way down. Enough so that in the late 90s it allowed our county to delay opening a new landfill by 5 years.

    792:

    everyone has city/county-provided containers, one for plastic, glass, and metal, and one for paper,

    More and more, in the US, local governments are moving to single stream. Most people seem to be not very good at (don't give a damn?) correctly sorting.

    793:

    GURPS is not, in fact, "another RPG", but rather a set of rules for any type of role-playing game (Generic Universal Role-Playing System), intended by Steve so that you didn't have to learn a new rule system for every bloody game.

    Which is sort-of does, but it isn't nearly as universal as it appears. You need special rules for different settings, but to write a GURPS supplement you have to make it compatible with existing settings, and rules that were added for those settings, so it is incredibly crufty and kludgy.

    If the approach had been "here are the basic rules which all settings share, then here are some bolt-on rules for different settings" then it might have worked better, but that's not what happened. So you get a book like GURPS Vehicles, which is cool and crunchy for those who like such things, but then authors have to follow that for all settings even when the vehicles in the setting don't follow the assumptions in GURPS Vehicles.

    I coauthored two GURPS Traveller books, and wrote a bunch of articles for JTAS, and making GURPS Traveller give the same results (rules-wise) as classic Traveller (supposedly the setting) was loads of work, and often impossible.

    The thing is, rules govern in-game behaviour. If the rules penalize swinging a cutlas while swinging on a rope, make running along the yardarm risky, etc then the players will end up not playing a swashbuckling Errol Flynn-style game, even if that's what the label says, because if they try their characters will be less effective than if they behave in ways the rules reward.

    In a sense game rules are the physics of the game world, and different game worlds have different physical laws. If you could come up with a universal ruleset that worked for all possible game settings by customizing which rules applied in which setting, you're already approaching having many different rulesets. Players would still need to learn which rules apply to this setting, which are ignored, and which are modified. Saving Private Ryan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are very different worlds, so why expect one ruleset to work for both?

    794:

    Chicago started - I don't remember what I was doing in '09 - with "blue bags", just put all recycling in there.

    795:

    Posted too soon…

    Consider the Laundry series and the Rivers of London series. Both urban fantasy* set (mostly) in contemporary England, and yet with very different magic systems. So you would need either two different sets of magic rules, or a bunch of special cases that applied in one setting but not the other — which means the rules would no longer universal.

    If I was doing an RPG of either setting I'd start with the Gumshoe rules**, customizing the magic systems as appropriate for the different settings. So same core rules mechanisms (and easier for players to transfer between them) but still not really a universal ruleset.

    *In the original definition, not the modern contemporary-romance-with-vampires sense.

    **I've got a fair number of these: Timewatch, Trail of Cthulhu, Mutant City Blues, Ashen Stars… The similarities help transitioning from one game to the other, but each really is a separate game.

    796:

    All this talk of climate change and SF and no mention of Kim Stanley Robinson? Climate change has been at least a background element of his work since the 1990's with his Pacific Edge and Mars trilogy novels; was the whole point of his Science in the Capitol trilogy; and continues through Aurora, New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future novels. A big theme is that technological fixes help but are dwarfed by societal changes. As long as society is controlled by and organized around capital, well, capital is going to do what capital wants, which has little to do with the health and well-being of mere humans and even less to do with animals or environment.

    797:

    Toronto has green bins for compostable waste, blue bins for all other recycling, and garbage for everything else. And yard waste collection for things like leaves and pruning.

    Ottawa splits the blue bin into paper/cardboard and all other recycling.

    798:

    RE: American garbage...

    Yes, anti-americanism is alive and well here.

    The most efficient way to sort trash, as in Mexico, Egypt, and may other places, is to allow very poor people to pick through it for anything of value, and to have flexible rules about recycling things like sewage into vegetable crops, pigs, and chickens. It's like the old-fashioned Korean outhouse, that fed into the pig sty.

    Highly materials efficient. Also highly efficient for spreading diseases. And, with the advent of interesting chemistry in the waste stream (heavy metals, drugs, radioactive cancer treatments, etc.), plus bioaccumulation of the same, it's also a really good way to poison people and animals.

    Or you can do the sanitary thing, and put it all in landfills. This is really, really safe--do you want to recycle PPE or funky contaminated lab plastics? I don't, but the problem is, you run out of space, and landfills need to be cared for basically forever, on human scales, or they leak, spread, dust, gases, and odors. But they're called sanitary landfills for a reason.

    In the middle, we have what I call the idiots, assholes, and crooks continuum. It doesn't take a lot to contaminate an otherwise useful waste stream. Something that accumulates, like cadmium, dioxins, or DDT, can be present in the waste in small amounts from people dumping stuff, but as it accumulates, it becomes a fucking nuisance. Idiots dump because they don't know better, so you get diapers and needles in the compost because some jackass thought the bin the landscapers was using was going to the landfill. Or they're assholes, like my mom's former neighbors, who didn't care what bin their trash went into, even though they were supposed to source separate. Or they're arguably or actually criminal, like those who say that they're stuff is recyclable when it's not, or the ones who flout disposal rules to make a few bucks, or the ones who declare bankruptcy so they can abandon a landfill, toxic waste, or former mine site without cleaning it up or caring for it afterwards.

    This is why caring for whatever biosphere you're in is so important. It's also why I think that Ye Olde Domed City In The Sky won't last very long unless everyone in it cares first and foremost for its continued existence and spends the time and energy to take care of waste. If there's any class division into those who generate waste and those who take care of it, the system is somewhere on the idiots, assholes, and crooks continuum, and it's probably going to fail when the bad actors make too much of a mess for everyone else to clean up.

    799:

    I understand the recycling in Japan has a large rule book and a couple of dozen or more categories that should be separated. And neatly. Very neatly.

    AirB&B situations have caused issues where those ignorant of how to do it has caused the recycling police to show up.

    800:

    Look on the bright side. I remember when the UK standard voltages varied from 200 to 260, depending on location - and that was nominal (*). Some equipment covered the range happily, but most didn't (and incandescent bulbs DEFINITELY didn't), which led to problems in areas with the extreme voltages. It was later standardised to 240 volts, and then 230 volts.

    (*) It wasn't as long ago as many people think.

    801:

    It doesn't take a lot to contaminate an otherwise useful waste stream.

    We used to have reusable plastic milk jugs when I was young. Now we have single-use plastic bags.

    According to an engineer I met years ago, the reason was that the plastic jugs were useful, so people used them for storing other liquids after the milk, then eventually took them back* to get their deposit refunded. But while you could wash and reuse the ones that had just stored milk, the ones that had stored paint thinner, gasoline, etc were contaminated and couldn't be reused — and all the jugs had to be screened to weed them out, so reusing them was incredibly expensive.

    *Or kids scavenged them for that, because when I was young the deposit on recyclable containers was enough for a chocolate bar or a comic book. Seeing a bottle on the ground was like finding real money!

    802:

    the ones who declare bankruptcy so they can abandon a landfill, toxic waste, or former mine site without cleaning it up or caring for it afterwards

    Used to be SOP with chip makers in silicon valley. Set up a shell company to manufacture the chips, leasing equipment and everything else. When the ePA began sniffing around make certain that the shell had no assets, declare bankruptcy, then restart with a different shell company a while later. Rinse and repeat…

    803: 767 Para 4 - Actually, HRH the Princess Anne is the most popular around here. 785 - Cheers. 791 Para - UK light bulbs are not all screw fit. Or all bayonet cap, or all push-in fittings. 793 - Not just solids though, and may contain some rubber and/or plastic. 797 - And the Alex Verus series and Shadow Police series are incompatible with each other, with the Laundryverse, and with Rivers of London.
    804:

    Actually it was glass bottles, not plastic milk bottles. Back most of a century ago, there were a few standard glass bottle designs: milk, soda/beer, wine, liquor, a few et ceteras. The general practice was that the bottling companies paid for take backs, cleaned the bottles, removed the labels, and resold the bottles to the production companies. It was a great system, until someone noticed that they got money for turning in bottles full of used motor oil and similar. Then the bottling companies found it cost more to get the bottles clean than they were making in profit, and the system fell apart. Nowadays, everyone designs their own bottles, glass is pulverized and remelted (cleans it too, this way), and they try to save a bit with thinner bottles.

    This is a general problem in recycling: it's rarely a profitable business. There are certainly things (right now, lithium batteries and rare earth elements) that should be diverted and recycled more, and I'm all for those. But other things, like plastics and mixed paper, are often surreptitiously landfilled, because it costs more to ship them somewhere for recycling than anyone will make actually recycling them.

    Then there's lurking disasters like Cal-Recycle's impending order to divert all green waste and food waste away from landfills and into composting. The problem with this is that there are a number of pests and diseases that go through hot composting intact. A third of California counties are already under agricultural quarantines for pests, some of which are compost proof. Bundling up all the green and food waste from everyone and moving it around is basically a pest and pathogen superspreader waiting to happen. The question is whether it's a lesser evil than the methane they'll hopefully keep from generating by diverting this from landfills. We'll see.

    Ultimately, garbage is an entropy problem: when you make a high entropy material like garbage, it takes energy to make it useful again. The hard part is figuring out where that energy goes back into your materials cycling, so that high entropy waste doesn't accumulate in ways that cause problems. And that's hard.

    805:

    Brin published that the same year that Simmons published Hyperion, where he also dropped a black hole into the Earth, with rather less pleasant results. Guess that meme was going around or something.

    Hmmm, Earth was originally published in 1990. This article is from 2002, about events in 1993: Earth Punctured By Tiny Cosmic Missles: https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/682006/posts

    I remember reading somewhere else an analysis of what the seismic footprint of a blackhole passing through the earth would look like, they concluded it probably would be similar to heavy construction. IIRC, the seismic network now automatically filters out those kinds of signals.

    So, we could be bombarded with micro blackholes all the time, we just don't know it!

    806:

    UK. The wall and ceiling lights in my living form and dining room were all 40W candle bulbs. We bought some new lamps for the hall and found that they had 3W filament style LED candle bulbs which gave just as much light. So we replaced all the others. We haven’t yet replaced the upstairs light with LEDs because they’re all compact fluorescents. We started using these in the 1990s in our old house because the incandescent bulbs were burning out so often.

    807:

    Actually it was glass bottles, not plastic milk bottles.

    Maybe in California. In Saskatchewan glass milk bottles went out with milk delivery. Once that ceased you bought milk in plastic jugs* that were returnable, at least in the 70s. Then they were mostly replaced by plastic bags. You can still buy jugs of milk in the West, but the containers are tossed into the recycling rather than returned for a deposit nowadays.

    *An imperial gallon, not an American gallon. Although Americans are calling their measurements "imperial" these days…

    808:

    Greg Tingey @ 750: JBS
    And, in fact, was still lawful in England & the United Kingdom itself. WRONG
    Look up the "Mansfield Decision" of 1772, why don't you?

    We've been through this before. You trot it out every time anyone suggests England may not be so pure of heart & free from fault in the question of slavery. The decision by Chief Justice William Murray, Lord Mansfield, in the case of "R v. Knowles, ex parte Somersett" was a single court decision that did not, in fact, free enslaved persons in England1 (any more than Brown v. Board of Education ended Jim Crow segregation in the public schools here in the U.S.).

    The existence of that single relatively toothless decision does not make England & the U.K. blameless for their role in spreading chattel slavery throughout the world .

    If Mansfield ended slavery in England, why did Parliament wait until 1833 to pass legislation to make slavery unlawful? Might it have had something to do with financial costs of the 1831 Christmas Rebellion in England's Jamaican colony? [These are not very bright guys ... follow the money]

    And why then, when Parliament DID finally pass the Slavery Abolition act of 1833, did they specifically exclude "the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company, or to the Island of Ceylon, or to the Island of Saint Helena"? [... follow the money]

    And, in practice, in those British colonial possessions where the Slavery Abolition act of 1833 was applied, it only freed those slaves under 6 years of age. The rest were simply reclassified as "apprentices" and remained in various states of bondage.

    And, if y'all were so righteous on the question of slavery, why did the British Royals, Aristocracy/nobility, merchants & manufacturers side with the Confederacy during the American "War of the Rebellion" (official name in government records)? Why did y'all take the side of the slavers?

    1Justice Mansfield himself stated the decision only applied to the forcible removal of persons (whether enslaved or not) against their will from England was unlawful. After "Mansfield", as long as the slave-holder remained in England, he could continue to own persons of African descent & hold them in bondage. He just couldn't take them out of the country.

    So, with regard to absolving England & the U.K. of culpability for the introduction of chattel slavery into the North American colonies, I will give "Mansfield" all of the consideration that it is due, that is to say NONE.

    PS: Go ahead and trot out the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron. I'm sure that's next up in your list of excuses. I'll explain how it was established only AFTER English Mercantile Interests lost their trade monopoly on the Triangle Trade with their former North American Colonies. Also how it was only established after the fledgling U.S. had banned the importation of slaves from Africa in the Constitution.

    809:

    In our home I slowly replaced all the incandescents with LED over the course of about 4 years, ending 5 years ago (with a couple of long-term survivors in the incandescent camp). Since then I've perhaps replaced one bulb. It is only an hassle in the sense that I've got about 2 dozen replacements collecting dust.

    Conversely, I replaced about 45 incandescent fixtures with LED in a commercial building about 3 years ago, and just last week I had to swap out 3 of them. That said, I bought them all off a discount rack at the Habitat store. They are likely bottom of the line junk.

    Re: Slavery and colonial history. One has to look pretty hard to find any mention whatsoever of chattel slavery here in Canada, yet it was a reality in the 18th century - though never to the extent it happened south of the border. Quebec in particular seems to be in denial of the history, but none of the regions are particularly innocent of that abomination.

    That said, the concurrent and much more recent, sustained and intentional attempt at genocide against the indigenous peoples has rightly taken up a lot of our bandwidth of late.

    810:

    @ 782

    [ "...And, in fact, was still lawful in England & the United Kingdom itself. "]

    Slavery was not lawful in Britain in 1783. See Somerset v Steward Ruling of 1772. There never had been a statute instituted in Britain that established slavery, therefore slavery couldn't exist in England. This ruling unleashed panic and outrage in the Southern colonies -- thinking if this could be ruled back 'home' in England, it could be so ruled in their colonies. From this comes one of the strongest currents militating for Independence. Along with the frustration and outrage that the British government officially prohibited settlement on Native American lands -- to protect Britain's fabulously lucrative fur trade.

    The Slave Trade was abolished in England to pressure Napoleon during the endless wars of the earlier 19th century, but the slave trade is not the same institution as slavery.

    Slavery per se was abolished later in the colonies with the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act; Bitish slave owners of the Caribbean etc., got mucho compensation, founding many a fortune and fortunate family in Britain that exist to this day.

    811:

    Japanese recycling varies a lot from place to place. There are a few small places with mad numbers of bins, but I suspect it's usually performative. Don't think any of it's economic other than aluminium and maybe batteries.

    There's a reason why recycle is the last of the three Rs.

    812:

    Charlie Stross @ 754:

    If you don't have a growing population, why would you need to seek new worlds to colonize?

    It all circles back to the unexamined assumptions implicit in white supremacism.

    The drive to interplanetary colonization is expansionist, and as such, it's imperialist. (Luckily in this case there are no indigenes to genocide and enslave, but it's the impulse that counts.) Similarly, if you scratch a white supremacist you discover a neurotic well of terror at the idea of being "replaced" by "mud people" -- google "replacement theory" if you can stomach diving down a neo-nazi rabbit hole -- and Mars offers them a clean sheet locale in which to reboot their ethnostate.

    Don't have to look it up. I've been bombarded with that bullshit since I was a child. Just about every problem I've had in life is somehow traceable to my refusal to be a Good German and go along with stupid racism (there's no other kind).

    My "political" awakening began in the early 60s as I came to realize the discrepancy between the values I was learning in church & school ("all men are created equal" ... "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, ...") and what I saw going on in the world around me.

    I think that's why Starship Troopers resonated so strongly for me. Heinlein posited a society that lived the values I cherished instead of just paying them lip service and denying we were failing to be what we claimed to be.

    And if you think this is exaggerated, look at the early years of Oregon, California's attitude to dark-hued immigrants from out east, and the "White Australia" policy of yore.

    Ultimately all U.S. racism stems from slavery; from classifying people as property based on the color of their skin. How did that come about here in the colonies? We imported it from England. Our institutions ... our structurally racist institutions ... are the legacy of colonization, Greg's insistence that "Mansfield" absolves England & the U.K. of all responsibility not withstanding.

    Still, even for white supremacists, colonial expansion does not make any sense UNLESS they're doing so for the purpose of expanding their population.

    I noted that a shrinking population is the path to extinction and I'd be quite happy to see the white supremacists shrink their population instead of trying to expand it.

    whitroth at 699: asked "Right... but is a growing population a valid assumption?

    For Sci-Fi, I think a growing population - or the desire for a growing population - is the only valid assumption to make about colonial expansion (even it's only white supremacists wanting to grow their population so they won't get replaced).

    Plus we all get "replaced" sooner or later - "three score & ten" and all that.

    813:

    "Waste" disposal We have (supposedly) 3 bins One for recyclable waste - they sort it, Two for compostable waste ( I don't have one, obviously ) & three - for the non-recyclables. Seems to work. Especially as people are reminded every 6 months or so, what goes, acceptably, into each bin type.

    JBS What part of WRONG don't you understand? Trading was made illegal in um, err, 1807 & throughout British control in 1833 - by which time it had, basically, vanished from everywhere except The W-Indes & S Africa ( Boers) anyway. SEE ALSO Foxessa @ 812 @ 814 NOW you are making shit up I have NEVER said that "Mansfield" absolved us of anything, merely that we started the recovery & retreat from those, shall we say "unpleasant" standards first, OK? [ As opposed to Napoleon Bonaparte "the great liberator" - who re-instituted slavery in the areas under France's control ..... ]

    814:

    This made me start an essay on colonialism and imperialism in the 'Traveller' role-playing game. It's a scifi game, and the usual setting for it is called "The Third Imperium", so the imperialism is kind of a given. Some versions even have these smaller polities and the game provides ideas on how to expand and colonize the worlds nearby.

    In my writing I'm using Orcs as proxies for "those people" and like to think I'm doing so successfully.

    OTOH, I don't think there's anything wrong with being a murder hobo if you're an equal opportunity murder hobo. In my own game-play I find it relaxing to sublimate my aggression by killing the bad guys (defined as raiders, bandits, op-for who are trying to kill me first ... kill the character I'm playing) and zombies.

    The zombies will try to eat you if they can catch you, but if you can get to a location where the zombies can't get to you, they just line up so you can shoot them. Also if you have a vehicle, you can just run over them, you don't have to shoot them.

    815:

    In my writing I'm using Orcs as proxies for "those people"

    Trump voters?

    816:

    Someone has published a book critiquing "Dark Emu" and there have been a couple of articles on the topic that are worth reading if you're interested in this stuff. Latest one is an "it depends what you mean by that" one, and has links to many of the relevant points of discussion.

    We have been working in a landscape that provides an important test of the Dark Emu hypothesis. In partnership with the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation, who occupy the Channel Country in Central Australia, we have begun investigating Aboriginal settlement sites, pit dwelling huts (known as gunyahs) and quarries.

    Our landscape study, published in the journal Antiquity, has found over 140 quarry sites, where rock was excavated to produce seed grinding stones. We have also developed a method to locate traces of long-lost village sites.

    Were First Australians farmers or hunter-gatherers? Contemporary archaeological research suggests it’s not such a simple dichotomy. Understanding the Mithaka food production system may well tell us whether such terms are a good fit for defining socio-economic networks in Aboriginal Australia.

    https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-how-our-new-archaeological-research-investigates-dark-emus-idea-of-aboriginal-agriculture-and-villages-146754

    817:

    David L @ 793:

    garbage mountains have become an important source of raw materials.

    I don't know about other of the first world nations but in the US a huge volume of landfills is taken up by disposable diapers. With contents. Responsible people at least empty the contents in the toilet but still there are a lot of turdy diapers in US landfills.

    Soiled diapers in the landfill don't give me as much aggravation as the ones just left on the ground in parking lots.

    818:

    David L @ 801: I understand the recycling in Japan has a large rule book and a couple of dozen or more categories that should be separated. And neatly. Very neatly.

    AirB&B situations have caused issues where those ignorant of how to do it has caused the recycling police to show up.

    I remember when recycling first started here in Raleigh, you had to separate materials. Newspaper had to be baled, cardboard flattened; glass & recyclable plastic bottles could be mixed, but cans had to be separated into steel & aluminum. Plastic bags had to be taken back to the stores for them to recycle & there's still no place closer than Hickory, NC that will take Styrofoam for recycling (so it goes into the landfill).

    When we got those first "laundry basket" recycle bins you could mix cans & bottles, but cardboard still had to be flattened & newspapers still had to be baled and set on top.

    Now we have the wheelie bins & all the recyclable materials go in there together. Still no Styrofoam or plastic bags.

    819:

    Greg Tingey @ 815: JBS
    What part of WRONG don't you understand?

    What part of hypocrite do you not understand?

    820:

    Japanese recycling varies a lot from place to place. There are a few small places with mad numbers of bins, but I suspect it's usually performative. Don't think any of it's economic other than aluminium and maybe batteries.

    Here's a sample of the kinds of articles I've read.

    https://airhostsforum.com/t/trash-separating-into-8-categories/7190

    https://japansauce.net/2019/04/08/how-to-dispose-of-garbage-in-japan/

    https://www.tsunagujapan.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-garbage-in-japan/

    821:

    Rocketpjs @ 811: "One has to look pretty hard to find any mention whatsoever of chattel slavery here in Canada, yet it was a reality in the 18th century - though never to the extent it happened south of the border. Quebec in particular seems to be in denial of the history, but none of the regions are particularly innocent of that abomination."

    You don't learn about it in school but studies of slavery in Canada are not hard to find at all. There are even several articles in Wikipedia, which lead to scholarly articles and scholarly books on the topic.

    Of course, if you can't read French you won't be able to read those articles which are in French only on the topic. So, there's far from any denial:

    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esclavage_au_Qu%C3%A9bec

    Esclavage means Slavery

    822:

    GURPS is not, in fact, "another RPG", but rather a set of rules for any type of role-playing game (Generic Universal Role-Playing System), intended by Steve so that you didn't have to learn a new rule system for every bloody game.

    Which is sort-of does, but it isn't nearly as universal as it appears. You need special rules for different settings, but to write a GURPS supplement you have to make it compatible with existing settings, and rules that were added for those settings, so it is incredibly crufty and kludgy.

    If the approach had been "here are the basic rules which all settings share, then here are some bolt-on rules for different settings" then it might have worked better, but that's not what happened.

    Oh, dear. That's how everyone I've played with uses it - exactly because if someone tries to pull in everything it is indeed incredibly crufty and kludgy. And I've played in some remarkably kitchen-sink combination GURPS campaigns! Writing sourcebooks is different from game mastering or playing - but if GURPS Space Stations needs to have different tunnel crawling rules than GURPS Spelunking who cares?

    The thing is, rules govern in-game behaviour ... In a sense game rules are the physics of the game world, and different game worlds have different physical laws. If you could come up with a universal ruleset that worked for all possible game settings by customizing which rules applied in which setting, you're already approaching having many different rulesets. Players would still need to learn which rules apply to this setting, which are ignored, and which are modified.

    I am annoyed, not at you but at your game master. This should have been one of the first things mentioned when getting into a GURPS game.

    Consider the Laundry series and the Rivers of London series. Both urban fantasy* set (mostly) in contemporary England, and yet with very different magic systems. So you would need either two different sets of magic rules, or a bunch of special cases that applied in one setting but not the other — which means the rules would no longer universal.

    Hoo boy... GURPS Third Edition has a whole mess of magic rules already, almost certainly more than any casual observer would guess. (Spirit magic from GURPS Voodoo, sure; gem injection from Fantasy II, what the hell?) This is from exactly what you'd guess - magic systems that are designed for one specific setting and are not necessarily compatible with anything at all outside it.

    None of this is from me being annoyed at you, by the way; it's just a sore point for me to hear someone say "GURPS would be great if only $THING," when GURPS $THING already exists - but, alas, it's buried in the mass of other things GURPS offers and the person never saw it.

    823:

    that second one looks like where we are, four or five main categories

    but like i said there's a lot of variation

    824:

    Saw the article before you flagged it. For one thing, I'm really, really glad they're figuring out how to test the claims in Dark Emu.

    One thing that struck me, mucking about in Aussie anthropology after reading Dark Emu was how tiny the settlements he claimed were villages actually are. The biggest recorded is on order hundreds of people, and there's not much to claim that it was occupied year-round.

    This means that if claims of aboriginal aquaculture or agriculture are to be taken seriously, my question is: how sparse and part-time can such a system be and still legitimately use the suffix "-culture."

    This comes up in a different context in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Classically it's been the bizarre outlier of hunting and gathering, with stratified cultures of chiefs who owned slaves, massive fish weirs and other "aquaculture" systems, and no sign of what Euro-trained male anthropologists would consider agriculture. Turns out the agriculture was there all along, but the plants are odd and tended by women, so misogyny and custom blinded researchers (as in Australia. Asteraceae roots are not normally thought of as staple crops). But it's the same question of what the limits of agriculture and aquaculture are, before they're better called foraging or "tending the wild." I think for the PNW it's a lot less subtle than for the Budj Bim eel ponds, but it's still an issue.*

    In a tangent, this reminds me of one of the informal arguments among microbial soil ecologists in the 90s: how few water molecules could there be in a film of water, for the bacteria living in the water to be considered aquatic and not terrestrial. Since water tends to get held by surface tension within soil pores, this academic question gets at the limits of how small and simple a system can be and still be categorized as an outlying exemplar of a wider type of system.

    *And yes, I'm avoiding Anderson's Tending the Wild about California. The local practices here are pretty much in the ambiguous middle between farming and gathering wild plants, and for good reason.

    825:

    Soiled diapers in the landfill don't give me as much aggravation as the ones just left on the ground in parking lots.

    What bothers me are the little bags of dog poo hanging from tree branches and sitting on fenceposts beside paths. Why carefully bag up dog poo and then leave it like that?

    826:

    Writing sourcebooks is different from game mastering or playing - but if GURPS Space Stations needs to have different tunnel crawling rules than GURPS Spelunking who cares?

    There is great editorial pressure to not have different tunnel crawling rules, but to remain consistent with the first set published. Some authors had better luck than others at convincing TPTB that their setting sourcebook really needed different rules.

    it's just a sore point for me to hear someone say "GURPS would be great if only $THING," when GURPS $THING already exists - but, alas, it's buried in the mass of other things GURPS offers and the person never saw it.

    I have (or had) a nearly complete set of GURPS books, purchased at discount with my earnings as a GURPS Traveller author. I also have an original copy of The Fantasy Trip, as well as the Melee and Wizard microgames that preceded it.

    My point was that if you need to be familiar with an incredible mess of rules to figure out which ones you want, which you need to modify, and which you can ignore — then that reduces the supposed advantage of a universal system.

    827:

    Other "those people." Maybe it will be published one day and you can see for yourself. :-)

    828:

    Dude, everyone here is on the same page. Different histories and different information sources maybe, but nobody here is close to being pro-slavery or pro-racism - there's no need to get so excited over the details. (Same to Greg, BTW.)

    829:

    Dark Emu was how tiny the settlements he claimed were villages actually are.

    There's lots of Australia where the population density dropped significantly when the white fellas took over. We are very concentrated into a few small cities these days.

    And the modern settlements belonging to an unquestionably agricultist society are often smaller. There was a brief period where the transition from old culture to new required (relatively) a lot of labour, but that very quickly changed to low-productivity "broad acre" livestock farming. Which also means that any sign of the previous inhabitants that can be destroyed by cattle probably has been.

    830:

    What bothers me are the little bags of dog poo hanging from tree branches and sitting on fenceposts beside paths. Why carefully bag up dog poo and then leave it like that?

    I started the biggest Nextdoor thread in my area when I said just how much comtempt I had for a turd and his dog.

    Apparently he was out walking his dog and after collecting a deposit in a small old grocery bag, walked with the dog, 50' up my driveway, onto my carport, and put the bag of dog crap into my trash can and then left.

    On Nextdoor there were a non trivial number of people who didn't see why I had an issue. Over 300 comments. I don't think any other treads have gotten to 200. And 100 is rare.

    It is common for dog walkers to toss their crap bags into the yard waste containers on the day those are out. And get upset when told or asked to stop.

    831:

    Oh ffs, that's not just a British thing then? Trees and hedges that fruit garlands of dogshit in bags? Chicken's tits.

    Round here also people use bags like that to wrap weed in. So it looks like a nice wodge of weed has fallen out of someone's pocket and landed on the pavement, but then it turns out it... isn't.

    832:

    Not quite, I was thinking about the Budj Bim historical and archaeological descriptions, as well as the information in Dark Emu. You and I totally agree that post-genocidal communities tend to be more fugitive foragers than stable farmers.

    Note that I don't think small communities means that people weren't growing grain or tuber crops, or culturing eels in marsh-ponds. What I do think that says is that current settlements in Australia may be orders of magnitude too big to be sustainable, just as in Southern California. And that saddens me.

    833:

    "they use capacitors as heat sinks (I assume, since the build things where the hot components are pressed up against the electrolytic capacitors)."

    Ha, yeah, it's a pain in the arse that. There is actually a good reason for it in a switched mode supply: to minimise the area inside those loops which have heavy high frequency currents flowing in them. But it does then become very difficult to avoid having a high power semiconductor device, a big inductor, and an electrolytic capacitor (and maybe more parts also depending on topology), all crammed hard up next to each other, and all - including the capacitor - generating significant amounts of heat.

    And, of course, as ever, it makes a tremendous difference to how much of a bad thing it turns out to be whether you pay due attention to such matters as rated operating temperatures, frequency and saturation characteristics, ripple current ratings, etc, and choose your components accordingly, or whether you just grab the cheapest thing that has the same numbers on it that you used in the simulation and doesn't blow up immediately you turn it on.

    834:

    "Even getting methane out of a landfill is hard. It's not that they don't emit mass quantities of methane, it's also that they emit mass quantities of all sorts of other more useless gases. Refining the methane out of the dirty gas coming off a dump typically costs way more than the market value of methane in a pipe."

    In these here parts the methane is burned on site to generate electricity, rather than trying to refine and ship it. This eliminates a lot of the issues, and as methane is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, it's a lot better than letting it escape.

    We could, and should, do more of it than we do, but at least some of it is being done.

    J John.

    835:

    RE: Trash disposal. On FacePlant, just saw an item about an earthship maker building a school in Haiti. They're using 272 rice bags full of single-use plastics as insulation for the roof. These bags are basically being used in place of something like a straw bale, to be plastered over.

    Along with melting plastics into tar for roads (an African technology I wish they'd bring here), this is one of the better uses for garbage that I've seen.

    I'd even go so far as to predict that building from upcycled waste will become the going thing in parts of the world, simply because it's abundant and cheap. Haiti's just a bellwether in this regard. They tend to be excellent bricoleurs: decades ago, I saw an article on Haitian fishing sailboats made mostly of sheet plywood (it was what was available) with sails sewn from discarded billboard banners (again available, and surprisingly strong). Not the most nimble boats, but I admire the reuse of materials.

    836:

    Along with melting plastics into tar for roads (an African technology I wish they'd bring here), this is one of the better uses for garbage that I've seen.

    This would seem to me to be a great way to create micro plastic particle. Dust down to microscopic. Which may be worse than bigger pieces. Roads basically shed their surface and cause tires to do the same. In very very tiny bits. Concrete and rock aren't so bad. Relatively. Rubber from tires I wonder about. Tar from asphalt based roads I have to also wonder about.

    When I lived in the Pittsburgh area I noticed my window sills sparkled when hit by the sun. So I looked closely and discovered the local dust was made up of very fine coal/coke dust. The sparkling was from the sunlight bounces off the tiny facets. These things were like smaller than 1mm cubed. In hindsight I have to wonder about what I was breathing that was too small to be seen.

    Anyway I looked around every now and again while I lived there and basically the top of everything in the entire area of western PA was covered in this stuff. And this was 10+ years after the emissions were shut way down. I lived a few miles from the Edgar Thompson Works (still in operation) and the Monongahela River. Said river was totally lined by the huge J&L plant which operated into the 70s.

    I don't think making roads out of something we don't want pervasive in the environment is a good idea.

    837:

    Tar is one of the most recycled things around. It's too gooey to generate microplastics so these days they mostly grind off the top surface of the road and take it away to be melted down and the non-gravel bits are reused. Can't find the last reference to that that I read, sorry, but I'm sure it exists :)

    The road dust you see is mostly tyres, with a dose of brakes, and some "everything else".

    838:

    I was meaning there's a lower density of white people in much of the country than there were black people before the whites arrived. So saying "there were only 100 people" when today there's 10 is slightly weird as an argument against aboriginal farming.

    839:

    A crack in the fascist's armour & a warning of the damage done - which others might heed? I think I know why - Chesham & Amersham is solid old-fashioned conservative - voting for people like Ted Heath & H Macmillan & they aren't happy with the fascism. The Lem-0-Crats are, now a leftwing-tory party in 1960's terms. All that it needs now is for the idiots on the hard left of Labour to SHUT UP Go & look at the numbers, fascinating.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ JBS NO - You are projecting I presented you with facts you didn't like & you all too clearly have not read my final paragraph. ( And you are still wrong, oops ) Troutwaxer THANK YOU & perfectly correct

    840: 837 - I like the idea, not least because it seems to trap the plastics in the roof for the life of the building at least, and maybe longer depending on demolition techniques. Also, as long as the plastics are clean, you can use "non-recylable" plastic films and thermo-setting plastics as easily as you can stuff like PET and HdPE. 839 - Wikipedia calls there "road recyclers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_recycler although in the UK they're more commonly known as "road planers". Anyway, Moz is about right (and I've seen some actual science on the subject, not just looked at windowsills).
    841:

    What bothers me are the little bags of dog poo hanging from tree branches and sitting on fenceposts beside paths. Why carefully bag up dog poo and then leave it like that?

    Is there by any chance a shortage of dog poo collection bins?

    If said bins are present, are they being emptied in a timely manner?

    The answer to both those questions is very probably "no", especially during COVID (dog poo bins come a long way behind on-street domestic waste bins, and refuse collectors are not exactly socially distanced).

    So what it's symptomatic of is a combination of public training to bag the dog waste, and a lack of logistical support for this practice.

    842:

    Agreed, with the note that it's far from uncommon to see public waste bins that are "full to overflowing", in those places where you can still find them at all.

    843:

    If you don't have a growing population, you got bigger problems - all of which including space colonization - can be solved by the same solution.

    When women are given educational and career opportunities outside of the home, they have fewer children. Which is why fundy religions of any variety (Quiverfull Movement in America, Taliban in the Middle East, etc.) seek to keep women subservient. If they don't have enough babies their sect could go the way of the Shakers. So they are actually being very Darwinian in their view of women - which is really ironic when you think about it.

    So anyways in the 22nd century we have mined the asteroids and built a Dyson swarm creating a situation where everyone is as rich as aristocrats, served by robots and AIs and made wealthy by the resources of an entire solar system and the energy of an entire sun. So every human would be nobility, living like the Crawley's of Downton Abbey with the downstairs staff being robots and AIs.

    But wealthy societies (and classes) with freedom for women have fewer babies - to the point where populations fall and then nosedive demographically.

    So how do we keep from going extinct as a species?

    Answer: Artificial wombs and insemination with robot nannies (indistinguishable from human parents) raising them.

    The same technology can be applied to sending out "seed ships" to the stars with a millions of frozen embryo passengers to colonize the galaxy.

    Some people, I know, think the "robot nanny" is magical technology. OK, so substitute a small cadre of hibernating real human parents on the sleeper ship and on Earth, and use the robot nannies to augment parents (especially busy mums with careers) in raising the kids.

    But if there are no class distinctions anymore (everyone is rich) with the kids raised by nannies instead of loving parents in true British aristo tradition - who do the posh children look down upon?

    844:

    Agree quite a bit... there is some distance from "canned monkey do not ship well" check on excessive optimism about the difficulties of space stuff, and recognizing some of the less palatable influences behind tsiolkovism and space as western frontier fanboysim, and painting all the idea of space exploration as an imperialist drive. People likes to go around, have always liked to go around, and hope there is a better chance just beyond the corner is quite human, both if they are right or wrong.

    Personally, I think strengthening the exploration of space is our best hope for saving Earth: not for population expansion, but because of natural resources.

    Let's face it, humanity in general is not likely to accept the kind of reduction in standard of living that saving the planet ecosystem would require, not without a lot of people dying before, and this does not seems to be very ethical. If anything, people now living with a lower quality of live will want to see it increased, and will be willing to fight for it.

    So, outsourcing all those polluting human activities to orbital-and-beyond space, even if only by automated plants, could be a way to still get the things that people want, and not choke our planet in the resulting waste (there would be also a point to be made about the red-herring trick pulled by the big industries with our current approach to recycling, how they managed once again to externalize environmental costs while going on with their practices, but that's another thing).

    Also, right now there is a strong push by many people toward finding a way to "cure aging". I'm not saying it's going to be as easy as some people hope it will be, but if it will ever come to pass, either it will be completely forbidden for everybody (unlikely to succeed on the long term anyway, likely to be quite unpopular even worse than prohibition or the war on drugs, and I think also unethical), left as an expensive option for a very limited elite group (more likely to succeed, but deeply unethical), or open to everybody. In this last option, even with decreasing natality, suddenly population pressure is going to become relevant again.

    If nothing else, it would be likely lead to a movement toward space colonization as the only way to get away from the older generations, that would otherwise keeps their firm and young-looking hands on the levers of power of anything of any importance.

    845:

    "For example: we're looking at two of the biggest crises in human history (see first paragraph). As science fiction aficionados, you'd think we'd be all over these with probably-wrong but novel ideas about how to solve them, both technically (hard SF) and socially (soft SF). Instead we're talking about how to make neutronium-clad interstellar dreadnoughts. Boy did we dive into that rut fast! The only way we're responding to our more probable future is with dystopian despair, it seems."

    It's not lost on me that a proposal to build solar panel factory factories and start stringing up powerlines has been widely poo pooed as absurdly impractical by the same commentariate that is actively discussing the practicalities of neutronium spaceships.

    846:

    Let's face it, humanity in general is not likely to accept the kind of reduction in standard of living that saving the planet ecosystem would require, not without a lot of people dying before, and this does not seems to be very ethical. If anything, people now living with a lower quality of live will want to see it increased, and will be willing to fight for it.

    Yeah, I agree. I also think that we need a complete redefinition of 'standard of living' which does not make us destroy the planet while trying to improve it.

    The ethical thing is kind of a non-issue soon, or even now: people are going to die of climate change and enviroment destruction, and are even doing so already.

    I don't have a good solution for this yet (and it obviously needs to be global), but I think it involves quite big changes for example to our economy. The basic needs need to be provided, but we probably could do that with quite a few resources (Heteromeles is going to laugh at me here :) ) compared to now, and then we should figure out how people would spend their time doing something not very destructive (though it might be that there is more time spent on agriculture, for example). Current way of working for money and then buying stuff to fill our days is obviously somewhat damaging to the planet.

    I think there are things we really want to automate as much as possible compared to ancient lifestyles (like producing clothing and food).

    Also, I am completely aware that I'm part of the problem, being a relatively well-to-do westerner who occasionally also likes to buy stuff to fill the void of the free time. It's more of a structural issue, or a society issue, and I don't have really good ways of influencing it especially when I'm not sure what I want.

    847:

    Go on then; what's your solution to the problem of photovoltaic solar panels not generating any electricity when it's dark?

    848:

    You put them in space.

    Mine out Mercury to create a Dyson swarm (a better use for Elon's Boring company instead of going to Mars)

    The numbers are actually interesting.

    Given Mercury's total mass, that is 70% metals and 30% silicates (almost like the core of a larger planet), and assuming that only 50% of the metals (35% of the total mass) is recoverable through mining operations (done by robots digging tunnels through the planet lie a giant anti-hill):

    3.30E+23 kg total 2.31E+23 70% kg metals 1.16E+23 50% kg recoverable

    Further assume that each SPS is a simple, easy to construct, rugged solar collector, essentially a giant mirror concentrating sunlight on a power generator instead of fancy-pants photo-voltaic cells (which wear out in a few decades anyways), and conservatively assuming that the a mid range material density is equivalent to steel (though many metals will be used in construction), and for the sake of long term rugged durability the mirrors are 1 cm thick - they can cover a sphere with a surface area 237 time greater than the surface of the sun:

    8.00E+03 kg / m^3 density of steel 1.44E+19 m^3 total volume of metal 1.44E+21 m^2 mirror surface area at 1 cm thick

    6.09E+12 km^2 surface area of the Sun 6.09E+18 m^2 surface area of the Sun 237x the area of the sun

    Assuming I didn't do a bone headed math mistake, that is amazing.

    Put the SPS swarms in orbit at the same distance from the Sun as Mercury and their mirror area can cover 3.4% of the orbital sphere (traffic control of the orbiting SPS probably won't be much of a problem)

    5.79E+07 km radius orbit 4.21E+16 km^2 area of sphere 4.21E+22 m^2 area of sphere 0.034

    The Sun generates 3.8E+26 j/sec. Assuming that we can capture 3.4% of that and that the entire energy producing process is only 50% efficient:

    3.80E+26 J / sec 1.20E+34 J / year 2.05E+32 J / year recoverable

    Currently, Humanity uses 4,00E+20 j/year of energy. A Dyson swarm as described can increase that by a factor of 500 BILLION:

    4.00E+20 J / year current Human energy use 513,700,653,207 x

    And Mercury becomes the "Persian Gulf" of our future solar civilization.

    Then again, blocking out about 3% of the sunlight reaching earth could trigger another ice age.

    It's going to need one heck of an environmental impact statement.

    849:

    Assuming the traffic control actually works the way you want it to it's not too difficult to maintain a dynamically-controlled gap in the swarm so the sunlight falling on Earth is not reduced. Of course with a bit of fine-tuning it would be possible to harvest and burn a lot more fossil fuel here and tweak the insolation to balance the energy absorption effects of a 1500ppm CO2 level...

    850:

    EC You forgot the primitive catholic arseholes in Central America & to a lesser extent, Hungary ... but I take your point.

    paws Handwavium - it's what he's used every time so far, when the problems of living at 51.5°N (me) or 55.9°N ( Charlie ) come up ....

    851:

    What bothers me are the little bags of dog poo hanging from tree branches and sitting on fenceposts beside paths. Why carefully bag up dog poo and then leave it like that?

    Is there by any chance a shortage of dog poo collection bins?

    If said bins are present, are they being emptied in a timely manner?

    When I go hiking there are large bins at the parking lot that were never full even during the pandemic. True, no bins on the hiking trails themselves, but plenty of large signs about packing out garbage. Some dog owners just felt obligated to bag the poo and leave it hanging on trees beside a hiking trail.

    The local path in my local park has regularly-emptied bins at every entrance and every sports field, so you're never more than 200m from a bin. Yet people still leave poo bags hanging on trees and sitting on fence posts and walls.

    The pile of poo bags on an network pedestal* in Observatory Park was literally ten steps from a bin, and you had to pass the bin to get into the park (only one entrance) so there's no way to miss it when you're taking your dog in — and I can't think of a reason not to walk ten more steps to the bin if you'd already walked as far as the pedestal.

    *Or whatever you call those vertical box things for phone and internet connections.

    852:

    Isn't this just asking for a Kessler Effect disaster? I mean, I'm a software engineer, and it's one of the first things I thought of.

    853:

    "Mine out Mercury to create a Dyson swarm (a better use for Elon's Boring company instead of going to Mars)"

    By the time that we have that sort of large scale, high-tech and even higher-energy civilization, any problem that we have won't be relevant.

    I would say it reminds me of the old 'whale oil shortage', but it's even more extreme.

    854:

    Concrete and rock aren't so bad. Relatively.

    A good chunk of the nasty dust in Beijing is concrete from construction. There's a reason they shut down construction for the Olympics.

    855:

    Greg, per reporting I've seen from Amersham & Bucks, three things happened in the by-election:

  • Low turn out (under 50%) because of voter apathy -- it's not like it's going to flip parliament, after all.

  • Labour voters either stayed home or voted tactically for the LibDems, who had previously been in second place to the Tories. Realistically, Labour had no chance of winning that seat whatsoever: speculatively, Starmer looks so like a Tory Lite leader that he may have put the hardcore trad Labour supporters off turning out.

  • Almost nobody under 70 voted Tory.

  • You know my shtick about how the Tories are turning England into a structural gerontocracy? This could be a sign of where things are going: total failure to recruit younger voters means their base is dwindling, and general elections will eventually follow the demographics of this election.

    What went wrong:

  • The LibDems aren't a viable governing party. Even if they grab back all the seats they lost in 2015, they're a minority. It'd take a massive collapse by both Labour and the Conservatives to give them a chance ... and then, what do they stand for?

  • Real alternative politics in England isn't going to happen until Labour finally collapses and the Greens break through (which will require considerable reforms to turn them from a fringey group with a handful of serious people into a plausible opposition/governing party), or the LibDems manage to articulate a coherent message that isn't "vote for us, we're not the Tories".

  • Either way, I don't see it happening beforte the 2029 general election. Or 2929 as I initially typo'd it.

    856:

    So anyways in the 22nd century we have mined the asteroids and built a Dyson swarm creating a situation where everyone is as rich as aristocrats, served by robots and AIs

    Congratulations, you've rediscovered the back story to "Saturn's Children".

    As far as robot nannies go, I still think that's unobtanium. Probably the same as a robot womb, too -- the biology is rather tricky. Cold sleep humans are a bit more plausible ... but run into the problem of "what is a human"? Because 90% of the cells in and on your body are not genetically human -- we're all carrying kilograms of bacteria around with us, in our guts, on our skin, even hiding in our blood vessels and organ tissues. Even if you can cold-sleep the human, the bacterial passengers might not shut down at the same time. And if you revive the human successfully, you may need to ensure they've got a suite of commensal bacteria or find them unable to digest their food properly ...

    857:

    What do the Lemocrats stand for? Wee boys hiding in the corner and hoping that someone bigger and tougher* doesn't notice them and do something nasty, like asking them a question? (my take on the Scottish Parliament election leaders' debates, and Willie Rennie's performance there in particular)

    • Any of Wee Nic, Patrick Harvie, Lorna Slater, Anas Sarwar and even Dross (qv) in this context.
    858:

    Australia did exactly the same as the UK. Changed to a nominal 230 V, but with asymmetrical variations allowed, so that the allowed voltage is similar to what it was before. (it can be a bit lower now, which most appliances don't really like)

    https://www.australianrectifiers.com.au/regulatory/ac-supply-voltage-ratings-in-australia-have-been-lowered/

    859:

    My thinking on life extension, is that if you get the treatment, you should have to leave Earth. This would both stop rule by gerontocrats and push development of space. Also having life extension technology would hopefully encourage long term thinking! Greg, I don't know why you think the by election contains some kind of message for the left of the Labour Party. The result happened under the right of the party, and rather points up its failure. They have had an easy ride compared to the left, and this is the result. I have said before, though maybe not on here, that we are seeing a geographically inverted rerun of the U.S "Southern strategy". The tories intended to turn the North Conservative, but they failed to take account of the south. I think we will see more of this, particularly in the southwest. Whether it will be enough to make a difference, is another question.

    860:

    There is going to be some serious shit happening before sanity returns (if England lasts that long as a political construction). I doubt VERY much that any of the existing parties are even candidates for leading the next revolution, let alone the ones after that. I stand by what I said in 2016 and 2020 (my adaption of Robert Graves - anyone interested can search on "breed blue flies"), but shan't repeat. It isn't going to be pretty :-(

    861:

    "Go on then; what's your solution to the problem of photovoltaic solar panels not generating any electricity when it's dark?"

    You want me to repeat myself for the what, 10th time, so you can poo poo it again?

    Sure, why not.

    You have powerlines that run from the sunny side of the planet to the not sunny side. UHVDC powerlines already exist, they run fine over land and under water and the loss to get from one side of the planet to the other is about 50%. We currently lay data lines all over the world. We could do the same with power. Cost is very roughly a million USD per km of 12 GW powerline. You'd probably need something in the order of 1000 times around the world worth of line. (that would carry 24 TW from one side to the other, which is comfortably more than the world energy consumption) So that's roughly 40 trillion dollars, or about what we spend on Fossil Fuel subsidies in 8 years. It wouldn't actually cost that much because the big costs are in the conversion stations at the end points, so the cost per km derived from shorter runs is an over estimate, but that gives the flavour of the costs.

    862:

    Charlie 1. Report of 52% turnout, actually - still low, though ... 2. Yes - This is the way to go - get the STUPIDS in both Labour & Lem 0 Crat to vote tactically, or cnadidates to stand down, as the case may be ... 3. Well, I'm 75 & what used to be a respectable party, isn't any more & I'm not voting for them ... i ) agreed ii) NOT going to happen - We need a real "SDP" & the greens here are bonkers, pure-Puritan hair-short brigade with anti0nuclaer lunacy in full force. The BEST hope is for Brexit to turn out top be the utter disaster we all know it is, between now & the next GE. If the tories win in 2024 we are FUCKED - which leads to EC's comment. But: "England lasting as a political construct" - really? If/when Scotland takes its' own route to economic suicide & Brexit crashes our economy - what then? What would "England" break up into?

    863:

    I was meaning there's a lower density of white people in much of the country than there were black people before the whites arrived. So saying "there were only 100 people" when today there's 10 is slightly weird as an argument against aboriginal farming.

    Agreed. I was thinking of something else, that villages of "hunter-gatherers" are actually a thing in the anthropological records, so having villages of 100 as the maximum size a continent produces isn't by itself a good argument for those villages being supported by agriculture. (Un)fortunately, the presence of these villages is one of Pascoe's arguments for agriculture. The better answer is to figure out if what the people were doing in those villages. Spoiler alert is that I think it will be what's normally known as a mixed system, rather than pure farming or pure foraging. There's nothing wrong with this: modern farmers who hunt deer and ducks fall in that category too. But it's going to be used as ammo by people on both sides.

    864:

    Yes. Whether the Tories or Blairites win in 2024 will make no difference - at MOST the latter will maintain the (current) status quo but with lipstick on, and Bliar actually made things significantly worse.

    When the economy crashes (and I don't mean a 30% recession), things will fall apart, and history indicates that a fascist kleptocracy will probably be overturned only by a bloody revolution or by being conquered. If that takes us past global ecosystem collapse, England will almost certainly collapse, too, just as Italy did.

    865:

    Also, batteries are cheaper than peaker oil plants, not least because their startup time is on order of seconds, while peaker plants need a couple of non-productive hours to come up to heat before they can produce electricity.

    All batteries do is to store surplus and provide it when needed, and that's generally more useful than firing up a power plant to fill in the gaps.

    A lot of an all-electrical society is about managing supply and demand. It's not as fun as being able to plug in all your gadgets at once, let alone "electricity that is too cheap to meter" (remember that?). But the last big brown-outs California had had nothing to do with solar and everything to do with Enron owning the existing power plants.

    866:

    I have on occasion left a bag of dog poop beside a hiking trail.

    Before you get out the pitchforks and torches, let me clarify. My dog often chooses to poop 10 minutes into a 2 hour hike. I don't want to leave the poop there, I don't want to carry a bag of dogshit for 2 hours. So I bag it and leave it at the side of the trail so I can pick it up on my way back to the trailhead.

    I am aware that this may cause irritation on the part of other hikers, but in my defense I will often pick up other bags on my way out as well.

    867:

    My thinking on life extension, is that if you get the treatment, you should have to leave Earth. This would both stop rule by gerontocrats and push development of space. Also having life extension technology would hopefully encourage long term thinking!

    There are some general problems in this. --Age extension already exists, which is why billionaires on average live a decade or more longer than the hoi polloi. But you get decades of being old, not rejuvenation. Charles Koch has spent decades not dying, not decades as a rejuvenated astronaut. For example. --Microgravity, in general, seems to age people faster. It's not quite the same, but the changes to bones, brains, and immune systems seem to roughly parallel what would happen naturally as people age. So space isn't necessarily a good place for someone who's elderly. --One huge problem is dynastic (multigenerational) wealth. I've compared this to the liches and their (ugh!) phylacteries full of magical documents, but that's literally how wealth management works, whatever the religion of the practitioners. So kicking the elders off-planet won't solve the problem. Rather, they'll just get replaced by their younger heirs. And yes, the anti-semitism of the "phylacteries" creeps me out, but soul jar doesn't work in this context, because it's documents that power the system, not putting someone's free will in a jar.

    868:

    EC "Just as Italy did" - WHEN? And, for all of his one disastrous mistake ( Iraq II ) Blair was significantly better than anything since 2010. A return, even to that would be a vast improvement on what we have now - & a start .... PLEASE remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good

    869:

    #839 - Wikipedia calls there "road recyclers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_recycler although in the UK they're more commonly known as "road planers". Anyway, Moz is about right (and I've seen some actual science on the subject, not just looked at windowsills).

    Road tar, road dust and microplastics.

    --One thing Moz missed is that the US northeast, a bunch of road dust is from the salt they put on the roads to melt the ice. Also, depending on where you are, it's wildfire ash and/or dust from fallow/vacant fields/dry lakes. I prefer the salt personally, because dust from dry lakebeds and ash get into the nasty-to-lungs category.

    Anyway, microplastics come from bigger plastics breaking down, so a plastic bag, clothing fiber, or rope is more likely to weather off microplastics first. Tar, so far as I know, is basically the goo that's left at the bottom of an oil fractional distillation column after they've gotten everything more valuable out of it. It doesn't have a set chemical composition, it's just sludge that meets certain physical properties.

    If you take a bunch of plastics and melt them (and yes, I'm ignoring the necessary source separation part to get the fluorinated crap out of there), you get something that's essentially tar. Composition matters less than physical properties. Since it's not a fiber but a blob, it's going to weather a bit differently, as tar specks rather than microplastics. Environmentally, I suspect these have different effects, as tar seeps are a natural occurrence, and bacteria metabolize tar, albeit slowly.

    So we'll see. But given a choice between microplastics wreaking havoc and filling potholes with melted plastic trash, it appears to me that the latter is a less damaging solution.

    870:

    Robert Prior @ 827: Why carefully bag up dog poo and then leave it [hanging from a branch]?

    Failing to pick up dog poo is both a social solecism and a crime (if anyone wants to follow you back to your car or house and report it to the police). So my guess is that some dog walkers will make a show of conscientiously bagging the poo, and then when when nobody is watching they either just drop the bag or else fling it into the undergrowth where it catches on a branch and spends the next 5 years literally hanging around.

    Barking and Dagenham Council have run trials of DNA profiling of dogs and dog poo, but it would require a nationwide scheme with compulsory DNA swabs for every dog to make it work. (Yes, Barking really is a place in London).

    871:

    Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, of course.

    And, no, Bliar did NOT do better. Not merely did he create and tighten more fascist laws than any PM since Thatcher (and arguably her), including Johnson (so far), he sold us out to the USA military-industrial complex more thoroughly than any PM before Johnson. And, yes, PPPs were part of that. I could also point out the large number of fascist states that were ushered in by your final aphorism.

    872:

    RE: Humanz In Spaaaaace.

    I know that they've been working on artificial uteri for some time, and with some success (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112). There's quite a long way to go between keep a lamb on life support for a month and growing humans from zygotes, but that work is progressing.

    As for cold sleep...https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/01/human-hibernation-real-possibility/605071/. The takeaway is that therapeutic cooling is already being used to extend people's deaths lives so that they can be brought to a hospital and resuscitated. That period can probably be extended to weeks, perhaps months, especially if the corpsicle subject is healthy before chilling. The problem seems to be keeping the still-living bacteria from causing sepsis in a host whose immune system is basically not working.

    And as you pointed out years ago, we're still lacking evidence that hibernation extends lives in endothermic organisms hibernating organisms like bears and squirrels. It certainly does for ectothermic organisms like plants and bugs that are basically only alive when they're above freezing and in storage otherwise. But with mammals, there aren't many (any?) that turn off their hearts and freeze solid, as various insects and amphibians. They just slow way down.

    So it may turn out that hibernation's just an intermittently useful dodge to avoid an otherwise lethal environment for a short time, not the Door Into Summer.

    873:

    But given a choice between microplastics wreaking havoc and filling potholes with melted plastic trash, it appears to me that the latter is a less damaging solution.

    It depends where the plastic is.

    Plastic in landfill is actually pretty innocuous. It takes up space, but it doesn't do anything except very slowly degrade. (Of course there are some landfills that are now being eroded by rivers or sea, but that's the exception). So taking plastic waste away from landfills and putting it in roads might actually make the microplastic situation worse.

    The good news is that microplastics don't hang around indefinitely. They either float to the surface where UV radiation degrades them, or they sink down to the bottom of the ocean and get buried in the ooze. They have a high surface area to mass ratio, so anything which can degrade them will do so much faster than for large lumps.

    874:

    Haven't seen plastic bags. I do remember when I was a kid, and my mom had four, I think, bottles of milk delivered several times a week.

    In the US (Austin, TX, Chicago, Space Coast of FL, and DC metro area), milk is either in coated cardboard containers, or plastic jugs.

    And I have no idea whether to put the cardboard in with paper or plastic....

    875:

    What to do, what to do?

    One thing is to tackle the idea of growth. I'll do this indirectly, by pointing to a really nice article by by Abigail Disney commenting on the finding that billionaires don't pay taxes. She makes a bunch of good points that make this worth reading. For our sake, the key one is the culture of the super-rich. Here's her money quote (literally):

    "If you are raised in a deeply conservative family like my own, you are taught some extra bits of doctrine: Philanthropy is good, but too much of it is unseemly and performative. Marry people “of your own class” to save yourself from the complexity and conflict that come with a broad gulf in income, assets, and, therefore, power. And, as one of my uncles said to me during the Reagan administration, it’s best to leave the important decision making to people who are “successful,” rather than in the pitiable hands of those who aren't.

    I took far too long to look with clarity upon these precepts and see them for what they are: blueprints for dynastic wealth. Why it took me so long is a fair question. All I know is that if you are a fish, it is hard to describe water, much less to ask if water is necessary, ethical, and structured the way it ought to be."

    She was taught that it was important to grow her wealth, pass it on to the next generation, and to regard all taxes as theft by bureaucrats who would waste the money they took.

    This is a pretty good analogy for the gospel of growth in general, but since most of us here are not super-rich, it's easier for us to look at their "exotic" culture and see the mirrors of our own in it.

    But getting to ideologies about growing or going extinct...to put it bluntly, this is in the same camp. People (like certain commenters here) don't question it and assume it's a basic fact rather than hammered in doctrine.

    So let's walk this back: on Earth, eventually we will hit maximum human population. It will probably be this century, and given how badly we're running this starship, populations will likely fall thereafter.

    From an ecological point of view, that fall's okay: we burned through a huge glut of fossil fuels that provide the fertilizer for the food we eat, that surplus is gone, and our population will fall to a number that can be supported on solar energy in various forms. In this regard, we no different than any other animal that booms and busts.

    It's how we fall that matters.

    The good end would be a lot of people growing old and dying, with fewer children replacing them. This is long, drawn-out, and sad, but then again, it typically means that migrants come in to fill the gaps. This is not a bad thing, because often the migrants are looking for a better life, and often they become the cultural heirs that your biological children wouldn't have been. So what if they look different? Humans have to inheritance systems: DNA and culture. As most of us know, inheriting DNA doesn't necessarily mean inheriting your parents' culture. But someone who escaped a catastrophe is often happy to adopt the customs of their new home.

    The bad end, of course, is authoritarians stoking divisions for their own power, so population decreases happen as race wars, culture wars, wealth wars, and so forth.

    Personally, I prefer the former. It's basically Charlie's story in Neptune's Brood. Except that, instead of making the children robot simulacra of white people, our actual cultural inheritors may be people with different skin colors and musical accents, who are willing to eat haggis and wear kilts in the Festival Fringe, since it beats sweating in a refugee camp.

    Creepy? Not to me. I've got ancestors from all over Europe, many of whom were escaping forced conscription and poverty by coming here. In the Old Country, many were forced to be foes. Here they literally said "fuck it." And I'm the resulting mutt.

    Now I don't deny that I'm privileged to have received the benefits of genocide and slavery, and that there's a dark side to US immigration. But migration didn't end The White Race, whatever the racists say. People are people, and love is love.

    If US or European populations fall, and people from the Global South (or even the political South) migrate in to help care for elders, take over farms and businesses, upcycle trash, and fix the power grids, why stop them? They may not look like you, but if they like you and think like you, isn't that more important?

    And that's my counterargument for why populations don't have to grow. It's based on a lot of unexamined assumptions that are difficult to disentangle from racist and imperial ideologies that really aren't that old. As such, it's worth carefully thinking about why you embrace that ideology before you do.

    876:

    I don't agree about expanding the population. The quiverfull idiots are about "more of us than them".

    If you're better off, except for a small percentage, they're not interested in more kids. For one thing, you have to divvy your estate more ways (and see how well that worked out for Charles le Magne?). And if there aren't any of "them" on planet, there's no reason.

    Well, until the kids get older, and start objecting....

    In my universe, I do have people living longer - by the mid-2100's, they can expect to live up to around 150 years. In the far future, it's longer, but there are other changes.

    Really think that folks will not want to emigrate to a newly-opened colony? No parking problems, you can live where (like Dan'l Boone) you can't see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney?

    877:

    Collection bins? In residential neighborhoods? Hell, it's hard enough to find trash cans downtown.

    But then, they're all about ooh, it's dog poo, never mind that it's in a bag, it's icky, and I can't carry it around the block and put it in my trash can!

    snarl

    878:

    "How do we keep from going extinct?".

    Right. Seen articles lately, HORRIFIED by dropping populations. This is dreadful... for capitalist, and esp. end-stage capitalist societies.

    For humans, not that big a deal, esp. with extremely low infant and mother mortality. Gosh, who could imagine that some folks want kids (like one of my daughters - I now have a second grandkid)?

    THIS IS STUPID BEYOND BELIEF. It says "no one will want children, ever again!!!!!"

    Do you really believe that?

    879:

    Oh, and if you beliee that, then, based on Amazon's sales reporting since my book was published 27 May, sales are going through the roof (I think it's over 17 books, before the year's out, I'll have a million-seller....

    880:

    On the other hand, cutting light falling on the Earth may be a Good Thing, at least for a while, given the massive heat wave in the US southwest, and https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/17/earth-trapping-heat-study-nasa-noaa

    881:

    EC Or the number of states that fell to fascism, because the left-&-centre were so concerned with ideological purity that they allowed to fascists to take over. Spain in the 1930's comes to mind, with the Republicans fighting amongst themselves.

    Our current priority is to get BoZo & his creeping-towards-fascism clowns OUT - & replace them with a centrist or centre-left government ( including a coalition if necessary ) THEN worry about what to do next. One practical step at a time, huh?

    882:

    Is it really unimaginable that people could figure out how to make family live sufficiently enjoyable that people would be willing to have more children?

    As for the dog poo question, speaking as a pedestrian, just not having the dog poo on the sidewalk is a lot better than having the risk of stepping in it.

    883:

    Children that grow up in an environment where few adults around them have children, or who only have one child tend to internalize that as the norm, and when they grow up that number becomes a ceiling for them. They may have fewer or none, but rarely will they have more. Thus, fertility rates may spiral ever downward towards zero and never recover. If so, it would mean eventual human extinction, and long before that, all sorts of economic stagnation and social instability.

    My daughter has mostly escaped the sort of popular culture (particularly tv sitcoms) that tends to make child-rearing seem onerous and miserable. And she still talks about having six or more herself someday (though we've started talking about how to plan things reasonably). My purely anecdotal experience suggests that there is a problem here, and one that's unlikely to improve on its own.

    884:

    I think opining on the desirable number of children to have should be left to those who are becoming pregnant to produce them.

    I will note that not all those who can carry a pregnancy wish to do so, and there are a variety of reasons why someone would not want to spend more than a couple of years out of their life pregnant when there are many other rewarding things they could do. I would be very wary of suggesting that it is social pressure rather than rational choice which results in a less than replacement number of children produced. Given we can stand a considerable population reduction before it becomes a problemn for survival as a species (rather than supply of cheap labour) I don't see this as a particular problem.

    My anecdata on desire for a large family is the only person I know who (pre childbirth) expressed a desire for five children has now said after her second that's enough. I have known a couple of people of my age who have had another (second or third) baby when their younger child(ren) were in high school, both as concious decisions, but all the larger families I know of are our parent's generation and none of them had more than 2 kids themselves despite growing up with many siblings.

    885:

    Well, in the first place, we said that a large part of road dust is tyres and brakes.

    Secondly, did you miss the whole thing where salt is water soluble? That's actually why you put it on roads in Winter.

    Third, I'm fairly sure that most of my clothes will not form "micro-plastics", largely because they tend to be cotton, silk or wool and not made from petro-chemicals. The same can probably be said by most of my friends and relatives.

    886:

    Thanks for the opinion.

    It's wrong.

    But since you're offering only anecdotal "evidence", fine: my idiot/half-sister was more than a dozen years older, and out of the house asap. I've been married too many times... and for one reason and another, have fewer children than the number of people I've been with.

    You're therefor proven wrong.

    887:

    OK, so you're going to substantially increase the amount of electricity available on Earth, probably in the form of either microwaves or a collimated sunbeam. The electricity will inevitably generate waste heat - physics gives it no choice.

    You think there are currently problems with global warming? How do you expect to keep from frying Earth like a bug under a magnifying glass if you increase the available electricity by a factor of thousands, much less by billions? (Sorry to rain on your parade, but the physics of heat are pretty obvious.)

    888:

    Niala @ 823: Rocketpjs @ 811:

    "One has to look pretty hard to find any mention whatsoever of chattel slavery here in Canada, yet it was a reality in the 18th century - though never to the extent it happened south of the border. Quebec in particular seems to be in denial of the history, but none of the regions are particularly innocent of that abomination."

    You don't learn about it in school but studies of slavery in Canada are not hard to find at all. There are even several articles in Wikipedia, which lead to scholarly articles and scholarly books on the topic.

    Of course, if you can't read French you won't be able to read those articles which are in French only on the topic. So, there's far from any denial:

    Google Translate still does web pages. It's not so obvious as it once was, but you paste the URL for the foreign language web page into the text box to be translated and click on the URL that appears in the translated box & it opens a new tab with a translated web page. This works for translating French web wages into English. I can't say for sure about other languages.

    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esclavage_au_Qu%C3%A9bec

    Esclavage means Slavery

    "The slavery in the territory now known as the Quebec back minimally to 1629 , when the arrival of Olivier Le Jeune [ 2 ] , and perhaps even more, because the Indians themselves while practicing the slavery in North America ,,,"

    May not be as good as actually being able to read French, but it's good enough to figure out what it says.

    889:

    Scott Sanford @ 824:

    GURPS is not, in fact, "another RPG", but rather a set of rules for any type of role-playing game (Generic Universal Role-Playing System), intended by Steve so that you didn't have to learn a new rule system for every bloody game.

    Which is sort-of does, but it isn't nearly as universal as it appears. You need special rules for different settings, but to write a GURPS supplement you have to make it compatible with existing settings, and rules that were added for those settings, so it is incredibly crufty and kludgy.

    I sometimes think all of human life is a crufty kludge. Why should this be any different? 8^)

    890:

    Haven't seen plastic bags. I do remember when I was a kid, and my mom had four, I think, bottles of milk delivered several times a week.

    Milk bags seems to be a Canadian thing.

    Come to think of it, I haven't seen milk bags in Alberta or BC in years. Haven't been to Saskatchewan since I moved to Ontario in the 80s, but apparently they are also no longer to be found there.

    Read the full story here:

    https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/we-answer-your-burning-questions-about-things-like-milk-bags-tariffs-condo-insurance-and-printer-cartridges-1.5409407/here-s-why-milk-comes-in-bags-in-parts-of-canada-1.5409420

    Apparently, one reason Ontario still uses mostly bags is that government regulations require hard plastic jugs to have a deposit collected, which will be refunded when the jug is returned.

    891:

    Robert Prior @ 827:

    Soiled diapers in the landfill don't give me as much aggravation as the ones just left on the ground in parking lots.

    What bothers me are the little bags of dog poo hanging from tree branches and sitting on fenceposts beside paths. Why carefully bag up dog poo and then leave it like that?

    Laziness & a paucity of public trash receptacles.

    I have certain personal rules for my own dog walks. I will only put it into a can that is sitting out on the curb awaiting pickup (but not after the truck has come through). Otherwise I carry it down to deposit in the nearest public trash can. But I know where those cans are, and can arrange our walks so that we pass by one in a timely manner.

    There is one large open field (vacant lot the size of two football fields laid end to end) we occasionally walk through (on the way down to a local store where I can get coffee) & if he poops there I leave it to become fertilizer. Compared to the amount of Canada Goose deposits in that field his contribution is minuscule.

    The local mini park we frequent has a public trash can & a dispenser for doggy poop bags that occasionally has bags. But I carry my own. I have a little roll dispenser I keep in the pocket of the vest I wear when walking him (also has his brush & comb, squeaky ball & treats.)

    892:

    Is it really unimaginable that people could figure out how to make family live sufficiently enjoyable that people would be willing to have more children?

    A lot of the people clutching their pearls about falling birth rates are also those who get upset about the reduction in poor people willing to do anything to put food on the table. What they want is a large pool of labour motivated to work hard for whatever crumbs their masters deem a job is worth*.

    A better family life would mean that 'those people' wouldn't have to bow and scrape for a job providing starvation wages**.

    *I'm seeing more than a bit of the latter in the Canadian business pages right now. Hospitality companies asking for government support because "there's a labour shortage", when what happened is that they laid off their staff in the pandemic and want to hire them back starting at the bottom again (ie. minimum wage, no benefits), and the staff are unsurprisingly taking better-than-entry-level jobs if they can find them.

    **I saw a story which I can't locate again, where the reporter calculated that the average Toronto apartment required more than two minimum-wage workers per bedroom.

    893:

    Orwell also made the point that the powerful cannot let everyone else get rich:

    "But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."

    • "Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" by Emmanuel Goldstein
    894:

    It was a thought experiment, statement taken to a logical extreme.

    As for demographic collapse, yep it ruins capitalism.

    See Peter Zeihan on what graying and declining populations do to capital markets and government finances.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb0o29ie65I

    Spoiler Alert - China is especially screwed.

    Globalization is dead as well.

    895:

    Troutwaxer @ 830: Dude, everyone here is on the same page. Different histories and different information sources maybe, but nobody here is close to being pro-slavery or pro-racism - there's no need to get so excited over the details. (Same to Greg, BTW.)

    I don't think anyone here is pro-slavery or pro-racism, but some have a smug, holier-than-thou attitude like their shit don't stink and he they talk down to the rest of us, especially those of us from the U.S., like we are some heathen barbarian children unable to comprehend the superior morals of our "betters". It grates. I don't take condescending bullshit very well.

    And when he they start up with it, my response is always going to be like John Wayne toilet paper!

    896:

    David L @ 832:

    What bothers me are the little bags of dog poo hanging from tree branches and sitting on fenceposts beside paths. Why carefully bag up dog poo and then leave it like that?

    I started the biggest Nextdoor thread in my area when I said just how much comtempt I had for a turd and his dog.

    Apparently he was out walking his dog and after collecting a deposit in a small old grocery bag, walked with the dog, 50' up my driveway, onto my carport, and put the bag of dog crap into my trash can and then left.

    On Nextdoor there were a non trivial number of people who didn't see why I had an issue. Over 300 comments. I don't think any other treads have gotten to 200. And 100 is rare.

    It is common for dog walkers to toss their crap bags into the yard waste containers on the day those are out. And get upset when told or asked to stop.

    I will put it into the garbage container, IF the container is sitting out on the curb AND IF it has NOT already been emptied by the collectors. Yard waste is a different container that gets collected for the city/county compost system and shouldn't have any plastic bags in it.

    I will put it in a garbage bin that's still sitting out on the curb days after collection day. City ordinance says you're supposed to put the bins out no earlier than 3:00pm the day before collection and have them removed from curbside before the day after collection.

    I know this because I got a nasty-gram letter from the city advising me of those ordinances and threatening me with fines because one of my neighbors could see my wheelie bin from the street (it was at the back of my driveway - about 40 feet from the street). I had to build a wall to conceal them from his view.

    897:

    My thinking on life extension, is that if you get the treatment, you should have to leave Earth. This would both stop rule by gerontocrats and push development of space. Also having life extension technology would hopefully encourage long term thinking!

    There's an entertaining book by Drew Magary called The Postmortal. Its premise: it seems that it's really easy to stop the aging process in mammals. A simple, 30-minute procedure and you stop aging (note: this explicitly puts you into park, not reverse).

    By the end of the novel, several decades have passed. The population of the US is approximately 750 million, and governments everywhere have adopted the death penalty for pretty much anything in an effort to get the population down.

    So, in that fictional world at least, being able to live several hundred years did not induce long-term thinking among people. Oh, and there were no Mars colonies either.

    898:

    Duffy @ 845: If you don't have a growing population, you got bigger problems - all of which including space colonization - can be solved by the same solution.

    [ ... ]

    The original question was whether "a growing population is a valid assumption" with regard to interstellar colonization.

    I contend that it is. Without a growing population you won't have colonization. You might have exploratory outposts, but they won't prosper without a (self sustaining) growing population.

    Doesn't matter HOW you achieve it - robot nannies or ordinary messy human interaction - without a growing population, there is no colony. Without a growing population here on earth (or a desire to grow some specific population) there is no reason to pursue colonial dreams.

    899:

    Huh, the numbers are closer than I would have thought. Googling around seems to get me a number like ~4E20 Joules for contemporary world energy consumption in a year. Which works out to about 1.3E13 W for world power production/consumption (which eventually turns into waste heat as you say). Divide by the area of the earth ~5E14 m2 to get ~2.5E-2 W m-2. Compare that with the solar constant (averaged over entire Earth) of 340 W m-2 -- world energy production is only about 10,000 times smaller (!)

    900:

    "I contend that it is. Without a growing population you won't have colonization. You might have exploratory outposts, but they won't prosper without a (self sustaining) growing population."

    Would a resort town on the Moon count as an exploratory outpost, or a colony?

    901:

    "Really think that folks will not want to emigrate to a newly-opened colony? No parking problems, you can live where (like Dan'l Boone) you can't see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney?"

    This was covered in our good host's post which generated the most heat mass of comments, 'The High Fontier Redux'.

    In short, Europeans moving into N. America faced a unique situation: vast amounts of fertile land which they knew how to exploit, much of it with a climate they had experience with, and the natives 90% wiped out by diseases.

    In space, every cubic inch of life support will have to be created from an environment 10,000x as rough. This means that there will be no pioneers living alone, subsisting 95% on their own efforts. There might be lots of people going off on their own for long periods of time, but that's more like RV camping than long-term wilderness living.

    902:

    gasdive @ 847:

    "For example: we're looking at two of the biggest crises in human history (see first paragraph). As science fiction aficionados, you'd think we'd be all over these with probably-wrong but novel ideas about how to solve them, both technically (hard SF) and socially (soft SF). Instead we're talking about how to make neutronium-clad interstellar dreadnoughts. Boy did we dive into that rut fast! The only way we're responding to our more probable future is with dystopian despair, it seems."

    It's not lost on me that a proposal to build solar panel factory factories and start stringing up powerlines has been widely poo pooed as absurdly impractical by the same commentariate that is actively discussing the practicalities of neutronium spaceships.

    Couple of things I'd like to point out:

    I am not a science fiction writer, I am a science fiction READER.

    If I did write a book, no one would want to read it (because I've tried and my prose would make Bulwar-Lytton hold his nose & turn away in contempt). These comments are one of the few places I have the ability to contribute to the discussion.

    AFAIK, the idea of solar-electric was "poo pooed as absurdly impractical" for Scotland where the high latitude and adverse weather render it less effective. Other places it seems to be more practical, although I understand there are some questions regarding the ecological impact of increased manufacturing.

    I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that here in North Carolina it is a public goal to achieve 15% of our power needs from renewable sources and the public utilities seem to be well on the way to doing it. And I suspect, once they reach that goal, an new higher goal will be set.

    So, it seems to me that for solar energy the debate is not whether it's a good idea, but how to get the power from locales with an over-abundance of solar to those places that don't have enough (i.e. high latitude, adverse weather locales like Scotland ... or Canada or ...)

    And how to make building the necessary factories an attractive proposition in our money driven Capitalist society.

    903:

    paws4thot @ 849: Go on then; what's your solution to the problem of photovoltaic solar panels not generating any electricity when it's dark?

    I dunno. Maybe put them in a big circle all the way around the world, connect them into some kind of grid and share the electricity from the ones where the sun is shining with those areas that are currently in the dark? ... and vice versa when the sun rises here & sets there.

    Or maybe use them to provide electricity during the daytime and use some other source at night, so that you can reduce use of those sources that aren't as "ecological" as solar electric?

    904:

    Barking really is a place in London

    Of course, it is the holy birthplace of Saint Bragg of Barking, long may he live.

    905:

    The good news is that microplastics don't hang around indefinitely.

    By that standard the good news is that the human species only evolved recently and looks likely to disappear soon. And most of the species wiped out by people will not be extinct indefinitely, something else will evolve to fill that niche.

    Meanwhile one of the problems for said humans is that we need to eat every day or two, so waiting a couple of million years for seafood to re-evolve might be pushing the limits of how long we can go between meals. I recall a study of ocean microplastics that suggested a half life over a century. Even a century between meals would test most people.

    A big problem is the more or less neutrally buoyant plastics that just loiter in the water column, although the floaty ones are not much better because people have done a great deal of work to produce floaty UV-resistant plastics.IIRC a big chunk of the floaty plastic is debris from the fishing industry, so there's some hope that when that finishes their plastic will stop getting dumped in the ocean (but only after the last gasp 'we're done, sink the boat and walk away' problem)

    906:

    "If you take a bunch of plastics and melt them (and yes, I'm ignoring the necessary source separation part to get the fluorinated crap out of there), you get something that's essentially tar."

    Not really; you get something that's essentially crappy plastic, in a lump. It will be "hard" - as in not "gooey", rather than proper hard - and will have physical properties that are consistent enough over big chunks but vary significantly over smaller distances. It will be made of a somewhat heterogeneous mixture of much longer chain molecules than fossil tar. It will wear much like bulk chunks of its constituent plastics would.

    To get something tarry you would need to go further than plain melting, and cook the mixture hard enough to start breaking those long chains down to shorter ones. You would then get something like what tar used to be when it meant the heavy muck left over from industrial production of wood gas or charcoal, or later on coal gas or coke, though probably more like the wood kind. It would be much like fossil tar in its physical properties but it would also have all sorts of highly "interesting" small molecular fragments with significant biological activity, which you don't get in fossil tar because the seepy kind has just lost them over time and the refined version has had them extracted for use elsewhere. They certainly used to use that stuff as general purpose waterproof goo, but I suspect that if you spread as much of it on roads as fossil tar is spread now lots of bits of the ecosystem would start wishing you hadn't.

    Which of course doesn't mean you can't do it, it just means you have to refine the small fragments out of it first. And you would want to do this anyway, because they are useful. Indeed, you might well want to take the preceding decomposition stage further, so you get more of them. Eventually you end up with something like a combination of a gasworks and an oil refinery, with plastic crap going in and raw materials for other things coming out.

    Basically, there is no call for any plastics to be thrown away. If you can't recycle them in their existing forms because you can't separate the different types or whatever, you can just crack them down and recycle them at the molecular level, feeding the results back into the system at the same point that fossil-derived small molecules go into it now. You don't have to bother separating it from smears of congealed gravy or lumps of dogshit, either; it all comes out the other end as useful bits.

    Only they don't. And I'm sure this is for the same reason as in your point earlier about not making use of landfill gas. They aren't interested in recycling plastics, they don't give a fuck what happens to the landfill gas. They are only interested in that supremely irrelevant shit of making money. Whether or not they actually achieve anything useful doesn't come into it. If they can't pervert some potentially useful activity to their true purpose, they don't carry on and do it anyway because it's useful, they just don't do it at all. And similarly they will go balls out on doing something completely useless or positively harmful merely because they can make it serve that purpose, when they shouldn't be doing it at all. So the fundamental requirement is to get rid of that perversion, because as long as it is still considered acceptable behaviour people will always make choices on that basis and will continue to ignore what the actual point of any activity is.

    907:

    And I have no idea whether to put the cardboard in with paper or plastic....

    Single Stream is your friend.

    In general this is why most places switched to single stream. They wind up having to sort your choices at the collection center anyway as so many times people can't figure out the rules or don't care.

    Milk delivery was happening where I grew up into 1970 or so. We had a box on the back porch where they dropped it off. You left a note (standard form?) for extras or exceptions.

    It was a very rural area. At least compared to major urban areas. And our dairy was just a few miles away. I could see the cow fields from my back door.

    908:

    Very local comment here.

    Some of us have gotten to clean out the dog crap that when tossed into our container hit the side or a sharp object or whatever and made a mess WITH SMELL inside the bin.

    As to yard waste containers, folks actually get off the truck and toss the debris into the back of the yard waste truck. I'm sure they have gotten some not well bagged dog crap on them at times. And there are the times when it doesn't get collected for whatever reason and the property owner gets to haul it back up and have it sit around for a week or two.

    Carry it home. I do. Others do.

    909:

    whitroth @ 876: Haven't seen plastic bags. I do remember when I was a kid, and my mom had four, I think, bottles of milk delivered several times a week.

    I've seen plastic bags used with bulk milk dispensers in school cafeterias & Army mess halls.
    https://www.hubert.com/content/bulk-milk-dispensers

    In the US (Austin, TX, Chicago, Space Coast of FL, and DC metro area), milk is either in coated cardboard containers, or plastic jugs.

    When I was a child we had home delivery from two local dairies (Dairy A=MWF, Dairy B=TTh; gallon every day except Friday when we got 2 gallons) - gallon, quart & pint glass bottles that the dairies collected the empties & took them back to the "factory" to be washed, sterilized & re-used.

    I've recently seen trucks in my neighborhood that make me think the service is again becoming available
    https://www.oberweis.com/

    And I have no idea whether to put the cardboard in with paper or plastic....

    Around here both go in the same recycle bin, so it doesn't matter.

    910:

    "Milk bags seems to be a Canadian thing."

    They used to be an option in Britain back when everyone got their milk delivered daily: as standard you got it in glass bottles which you washed out and had taken away at the same time as the new milk was delivered, or you could opt to have it in heat-sealed polythene bags which you threw away. I have heard it said that they tried to plug this option at one point with public demonstrations of a bloke standing on a milk bag to show how tough they were and stop people worrying they were going to leak.

    It was indeed useful to order a couple of days' worth of milk in bags to take away on holiday with you, because you could rely on them not leaking in the luggage without worrying about maintaining their verticality. But very few people took to them for everyday use, because once you did open them, that was it. They were all floppy and couldn't be stood upright and you couldn't seal them up again, so you had to empty all the milk out even if you only wanted 20ml of it at the moment. Compared to any kind of rigid self-supporting container, they were an impractical pain in the arse.

    These days nearly everyone buys milk from a shop, and it comes in blow-moulded polythene containers which are just about thick enough to be called "rigid" in context. They are self-supporting and have polythene screw tops. After use they go in the bin; the green-coloured bin for recyclable materials if you have one, or else just any old bin.

    Being polythene they are of course inert to just about anything and so are useful things to wash out and store all kinds of vicious chemicals in; you can even use them for hydrofluoric acid if you've got any, which you couldn't do with the old glass bottles. They are also good dielectrically and can be used to make capacitors good for several kilovolts. It is amusing that the archaic unit of capacitance the "jar" is still applicable to a 4-pint milk container with the top cut off and covered with aluminium foil inside and out.

    There was an interlude where smaller quantities of milk often came in waxed card containers, but they have mostly disappeared now too.

    911:

    Duffy @ 896:

    As for demographic collapse, yep it ruins capitalism.

    Death of Capitalism Predicted. Film at 11.

    Really? Why is that? The last time we had a sudden and dramatic collapse in population (the Black Death) it freed up the labour market, created upwardly mobile peasants, upwardly mobile merchants, and ultimately the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. If we can do the same thing a bit more gradually and without the buboes then it sounds like a good deal.

    See Peter Zeihan on what graying and declining populations do to capital markets and government finances.

    I don't watch video explanations if I can avoid it: I read much faster than I listen, and its much harder to quote later in discussion. But I had a look at this article on his web site. He seems to be arguing that a reduced population means reduced demand, and reduced demand means negative growth, so globalism is dead. That's two non-sequiturs out of three.

    (The bulge in the ageing population and resulting imbalance between the working age population and the retired population is a problem, but not all that huge. Raising the retirement age looks pretty feasible and goes a long way to solving the problem.)

    Spoiler Alert - China is especially screwed.

    No argument there. But people have been predicting the end of the CCP since the time of Mao, so I'm not holding my breath.

    Globalization is dead as well.

    Again, why is that?

    There is a big shift going on, from the production of stuff to the production of information (software, movies, books, websites, funny cat videos). A lot of this doesn't show up in the GDP figures so it tends to go past economists, but we may well have hit "peak stuff". Somewhere up-thread there was the line "He who dies with the most toys wins". That always seemed pretty false: Jerome K Jerome had a brief rant about it in Three Men in a Boat over a century ago, and these days its getting really thin because you don't need as much stuff anyway; time was when the entertainment for a middle-class Westener took up a substantial chunk of a house: TV, VCR, stereo, and lots of shelves for books and media. These days literally all of that can sit in your pocket. All you need is a comfy chair each. Another 50 years and people will probably look at the pointless accumulation of stuff the way we look at compulsive hoarders; sad people who need to step back, understand what they are doing, and get a life.

    None of this means the end of capitalism, or of globalism. Durables and consumables will still be needed and will still be made by private industry, just like riding tack is today despite 150 years of declining horse power. And there is no reason why a lot of that stuff needs to be made close to the point of consumption.

    Meantime other industries will grow to pick up the slack. What those industries will be I have no idea. I sometimes entertain myself by imagining a conversation with Jerome K. Jerome transported to the modern world, and trying to explain to him exactly what the ten biggest companies on Earth by market cap do to earn all that money. He would understand Saudi Aramco, and probably Berkshire Hathaway. Amazon's retail operation would make sense (Sears Roebuck was a thing back then, IIRC), but the rest of Amazon, and the rest of the list, would be largely incomprehensible.

    912:

    whitroth @ 878: I don't agree about expanding the population. The quiverfull idiots are about "more of us than them".

    Doesn't matter whether you agree with the reasons for it, you won't have colonial expansion without an expanding population.

    If you're better off, except for a small percentage, they're not interested in more kids. For one thing, you have to divvy your estate more ways (and see how well that worked out for Charles le Magne?). And if there aren't any of "them" on planet, there's no reason.

    Well, until the kids get older, and start objecting....

    In my universe, I do have people living longer - by the mid-2100's, they can expect to live up to around 150 years. In the far future, it's longer, but there are other changes.

    What reason would those longer lived people have for founding new UNPOPULATED colony worlds? Consider Asimov's The Naked Sun. You may have evolved robots doing the colonization (à la Saturn's Children), but it's still an expanding population.

    Really think that folks will not want to emigrate to a newly-opened colony? No parking problems, you can live where (like Dan'l Boone) you can't see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney?

    Why would they? With a shrinking population they can have all those things right here without moving.

    913:

    Ioan @ 902:

    "I contend that it is. Without a growing population you won't have colonization. You might have exploratory outposts, but they won't prosper without a (self sustaining) growing population."

    Would a resort town on the Moon count as an exploratory outpost, or a colony?

    I dunno. Might be either one or neither. Is there a permanent population? Where do they get their service staff from? How long does the service staff stay there before returning to earth? Does the resort town grow to accommodate more tourists? How about engineers to maintain the physical plant or farmers to grow food for the resort's dining facilities? Where do they come from & how long will they stay? Will they be willing to leave their families behind while they are employed there?

    How long will the resort's corporate overlords be willing to sink money into the project? How long will it last if they can't make a profit? And if they abandon it as unprofitable, would someone else try to move in?

    Is tourism in the Antarctic an exploratory outpost or a colony? ... or something else?

    914:

    "And I have no idea whether to put the cardboard in with paper or plastic...."

    I don't suppose it matters. When they come to sort it they probably just chuck them all onto the "non-recyclable" heap anyway.

    I was looking at the wrappers on my soap the other week. There is an outer packet containing 3 bars of soap and then a separate inner packet for each separate bar (fuck knows why). The outer packet is a simple plastic bag, and says it can be recycled. The inner packet is a gruesome laminated abortion made of both paper and plastic together, and says it can't be recycled. (Fuck knows what their excuse for this is when the inner packet doesn't even need to exist at all.)

    The whole thing is extremely silly because it's only people like me who will even bother to read all the tiny writing on the packet anyway. Nearly everyone will just look at it and go "paper/plastic, therefore recyclable" and chuck both wrappers in the same bin without a second thought. And then so do I because (a) what do you do with it (b) they might have thought of something to do with it that the writers on the packaging don't know about yet (c) if they haven't they bloody well ought to.

    915:

    I think with growth we need to define it in a different way. People also can't be seen to be advocating some kind dour steady state society. On the question of growth, can we transform it from some kind of rapacious capitalo-political destructiveness in the name of profit or dominance, into something else? We can perhaps make it about personal growth, about improving society and the environment, about producing more art, about improving things for the next generation, about visiting far places.

    This may seem pie in the sky, but if people are going to change things, there needs to be a positive vision. A failure of the anti-brexit campaign is often cited as a failure to offer a positive vision. While I think this is true, I think the reason why this didn't happen is perhaps more important. I think the reason it didn't happen, is simply the people involved had no positive vision. They were only interested in maintaining the status quo, they had nothing positive to offer. One thing about offering change is that you can offer a positive vision. Even if it is transparently false and indeed quite negative, if people can feel positive about it, it can succeed. Though I am not advocating anything like the brexit campaign!

    As I mentioned at the top, people cannot think the future being offered is negative. People must be offered a positive future, that in itself is growth, a growth in quality of life. The capitalist model of growth is producing less and less return for the average person, and looking into the future must be into negativity. Breaking people from their present thinking will be difficult, but it will only be done with positivity, outside of collapse or revolution when things get really bad, of course. But people need to articulate a positive vision now, an improved life, and further improvements going forwards for people and their children. The opportunity to see and do amazing things, that isn't confined to a tiny minority.

    This turned into quite the screed, I think it is a reflection of the work I am doing on myself, that I could even be positive enough to articulate a need for a positive vision! I am convinced of the need, though how to go about it is another question. I do think a lot of people are ready for it though.

    916:

    Would a resort town on the Moon

    Would deodorant be allowed? And if not how many people would consider it a "resort"?

    I've read many accounts that the ISS has an interesting "odore" that you get to accept. Like it or not.

    917:

    "Ultimately all U.S. racism stems from slavery; from classifying people as property based on the color of their skin. How did that come about here in the colonies? We imported it from England."

    First Nations and Asian-Americans might disagree. It was already in the 17th century that landlords in Virginia noticed that their indentured servants and their slaves saw they had a lot in common with each other and that moving to live with the Indians would make their lives better, and started pushing a "three races three colours" ideology to separate the poor whites from the other two. The book "Looking East from Indian Country" is not a bad academic introduction. The way that early East Asian immigrants to the Pacific Coast who did just what capitalists wanted (work hard and cheap) were villified and excluded is just as ugly.

    918:

    It was claimed that the Apollo 11 astronauts were locked away in the Lunar Receiving Lab on the deck of the aircraft carrier that recovered their capsule, not to protect the world from any weird Selenian micro-lifeforms but because they really REALLY needed a long shower and a change of clothes before they got to shake hands with the President.

    920:

    And how to make building the necessary factories an attractive proposition in our money driven Capitalist society.

    Either give them the same subsidy as fossil fuels, or end fossil fuel subsidies — including public taxes paying to clean up problems caused by fossil fuel production/refining/transportation.

    921:

    But very few people took to them for everyday use, because once you did open them, that was it. They were all floppy and couldn't be stood upright and you couldn't seal them up again, so you had to empty all the milk out even if you only wanted 20ml of it at the moment. Compared to any kind of rigid self-supporting container, they were an impractical pain in the arse.

    I have a couple of jugs (one plastic, one ceramic) sized to take the milk bag. Drop the bag in the jug, cut off one corner, and it pours like a regular milk jug, has no trouble standing upright in the fridge, etc. If you want to seal it fold the corner over and clip it (although I never bother).

    922:

    The book "Looking East from Indian Country" is not a bad academic introduction.

    Facing East from Indian Country, right?

    Looks interesting, and added to the pile.

    One of the several grievances that the colonists had against the British was that the British insisted on keeping the treaties that they had signed with the natives, while the colonists wanted to break the treaties and take over new lands.

    923:

    Or, take the subsidies away from fossil fuels and give them to renewables.

    Armies don't have to make a profit, but even capitalist societies manage to fund them as if their cultural survival depends on them. It's all doable, even in a capitalist society.

    924:

    I'd reroute the military subsidies going to support petroleum production and reroute them to climate resilience and rare earth protection/recycling.

    Oh, and phosphorus. We're in for guano wars, straight out of the 19th century, but this time for phosphorus instead of nitrogen. We're running out of minable nitrogen, so this time it might be fight over who gets which sewage outflow and gets to refine the phosphorus out of it for fertilizer.

    That will be a truly shitty job for soldiers. But if the future of states depends on who owns which outfall...

    For the SFF writers, figure out what kind of drones would be used in a phosphorus war. Just to be different.

    925:

    The cover and the author (David Richter) look right!

    Because there was so much money to be made by seizing and privatizing Indian land, it was very tempting for settlers to invent theories why that was right and good. Canada has little history of slavery, but big issues with racism against First Nations, so if slavery had faded away in the USA it would probably have lots of racists too.

    926:

    Thanks for answering, but it's clear that I didn't convey what I meant.

    My assumption is that a lot of people-- not the very poor people-- could afford another child or two if this was something they really wanted.

    It might well be possible to make raising children more enjoyable by making an effort to find out how.

    My family didn't work very well emotionally, but there could be some possibilities for improvement in general. This isn't like breaking the speed of light.

    One would be finding efficient ways of healing PTSD.

    One would be studying happy families (yes, hard to identify for a number of reasons) and finding out what they do.

    I've seen a hypothesis that you can't change your children's personalities, but you can find ways to live well with them. Trying to change children's personalities is hard on both the parents and the children.

    927: 898 - Our wheelies are, as near as I can measure it without a pedometer, 70 feet from the kerb line, which means "back of house". They have to go out the previous evening because recyclable (plastic, metal, paper and card) and residual (mostly "non-recyclable plastics", "soiled items") bins are emptied around 7AM local. No-one tends to leave them out kerbside after about 6PM on collection day (once every 2 weeks).

    One of our neighbours does keep them in the front yard (used advisedly) but no idea why since their kitchen and main living room are both rear of property.

    904 - Again it's approximate, but one of my friends has 12m^2 of photovoltaic panels. In direct sunlight around noon on Jan 1st at 55.918N, these can generate just about enough power to run a 3kW fan heater. They actually don't have enough roof to add significant area of panels at a useful right ascension. 910 - Come and join us in the 21st century! ;-) We, the householders, push/pull/roll bin containers from where we keep them to the kerb. The refuse collectors move them to the back of the truck, hook them onto elevators and press a button. The truck then lifts the containers and empties the into a hopper. Unless the householder chooses to compress stuff in a "getting full" container, no-one actually touches any of it except hand-sorting mixed recyclables at a collection centre. 916 - Does the "inner wrapper" have a bar code on it? If so, you can probably buy $brand toilet soap in single bars as well as 3 packs. 925 - This has already happened, even though every installed watt of [solar or wind power] needs a watt of spinning reserve as backup.
    928:

    "925 - This has already happened, even though every installed watt of [solar or wind power] needs a watt of spinning reserve as backup."

    I think if 5 trillion dials a year of fossil fuel subsidies had been removed from the fossil fuel industry it would have made the news.

    No, that's no how spinning reserve works.

    929:

    So what is a "dial" in some sort of real world, relatable unit?

    930:

    One would be studying happy families (yes, hard to identify for a number of reasons) and finding out what they do.

    there was a mention of a study about that in one of those books john cleese did with robin skynner, called "no single thread".

    didn't sound like they had a huge sample tho

    931:

    You have powerlines that run from the sunny side of the planet to the not sunny side.

    And I'd like to remind folks that the first person I know of who proposed this solution was Buckminster Fuller in 1981. (Link provided shows his proposed map for the planetary supergrid: what's most notable is the way he sticks to land routes as much as possible, because although underwater cables exist, they're more expensive to lay and harder to maintain.)

    It's a 40+ year old idea: like a single planetary nuclear waste repository, the main obstacle to getting it done is our global political fragmentation (over 190 states and quasi-state entities, each with their own legal system!).

    932:

    I gather you're purposely mis-representing what I've said several time so this may be my last reponse to you.

    Household trash and recycling in our 21st century town for most of the town is done from the cab of a truck. Standardized containers at the curb and an arm on the truck grabs your bin and tosses it into the back of the truck. Driver never leaves the cab unless he knocks over a bin. People only have to wheel the bins around where the streets don't allow this. These routes are segregated from the routes where the extra folks are not needed.

    As to your other comment about how much better things are automated in your paradise. No, we don't have standardized containers for yard waste. Since it can vary by household and season from 0 to 10+ bins of stuff every 2 weeks. And since this includes tree limbs and/or craft paper bags full of plant matter from your yard, people actually travel with the trucks and toss it into the back of the trucks. Last yard waste day (2 days ago) I had 4 craft bags and 4 personal bins out. Next week likely only 1 or 2 bins. I tend to mulch my yard clippings and only give them things we have to cut back with loppers or Magnolia leaves which fall in huge waves. Those and the every 4 year or so acorn falls tend to require what seems like an infinite number of bins.

    933:

    paws4thot @ 929: "...no-one actually touches any of it except hand-sorting mixed recyclables at a collection centre."

    There are now about 4 companies making AI-based robots doing that sorting at collection centers. As the prices go down all of this sorting will be done by robot manipulating arms controlled by AI.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-key-tool-mankind-built-that-could-save-the-planet-with-recycling-2019-11

    There are also many videos on YouYube showing these machines. Do "ai sorting of recyclable material".

    Around here it was hard to find human beings willing to do this sorting and ready to stay on at a relatively low wage.

    934:

    On the subject of rubbish collection I can speak with some knowledge (for a change!). I was a bin man for 11yrs, up until I was made redundant through ill health 3yrs ago. I can say that we certainly did had contact with rubbish. This included in my personal experience alone, dog shit, rat piss, maggots, paint, bleach and assorted other waste. I also once saw a large rat run down someone's arm from a bin being emptied. Another time I got something that smelled so disgusting on my trousers, I had to take them off and throw them in the back and wear my waterproof trousers for the rest of the day (it was the height of summer of course). Yet another time I got a knife in my leg from a bag, luckily we had ballistic cloth patches on our trousers for just this eventuality, so it wasn't too bad of a cut. So appreciate your bin men, modern technology has made a difference, mainly with the intent of reducing back injuries. But it still involves a lot of muck and not a lot of brass.

    935:

    Yes.

    As we moved from guys walking up next to your house to pick up your bins and take them to ths street and back to residents putting it on the curb to automated trucks that could pick up standardized bins and empty them some folks yelled about putting these folks out of work.

    The city pointed out that everyone who was "taken off the street" got first pick of jobs that didn't inovled street travel. No one was fired/laid off.

    And we still have the street walkers to deal with places bins can't be dealt with by the truck driver system or for yard waste.

    Which is why I get so pissed at those who blithely say "what's the big deal with me tossing feces into a bin on the street."

    Heck I go out of my way to put thing on the curb so that it requires as little interaction as possible by the people involved.

    936:

    Just read this. Interesting take on the NHS and vaccine requirements and keeping things running.

    No idea from this distance just how accurate this is or not.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/17/compulsory-jabs-care-home-staff-england

    937:

    It's a real world typo. I would have thought it obvious from context given that the generally accepted size of the fossil fuel industry subsidy is just over 5 trillion USD and you were in a comment thread where I'd just mentioned that the cost of a globe spanning network capable of transporting all the energy used from anywhere to anywhere was 8 years FF subsidy, or 40 trillion dollars.

    So obvious that I didn't bother to immediately post "*dollars".

    938:

    Nancy,

    One of the only countries in the EU that's still growing is France; maybe we should look at what they're doing to support families? Though it's equally possible that there are cultural reasons that it has a higher birth rate.

    Having lived and worked in France -- briefly -- I wonder if the tendency to go to the local college/university means retaining family/local ties longer than happens in the UK. My experience in the UK is that of the Brigit Jones generation of Oxford graduates, where everyone goes to London together, and only one of a group of about twenty got "sprogged-up". The couples have been remarkably enduring, but children not so much. I think a large part of it is that establishing two careers takes so long that by the time you get around to thinking of children, it's too late.

    939:

    Canada has little history of slavery, but big issues with racism against First Nations, so if slavery had faded away in the USA it would probably have lots of racists too.

    Do you mean the US would have lots of racists even without slavery?

    Canada has issues with racism against more than First Nations — looking non-white, or the wrong sort of non-white, can be an uncomfortable-to-dangerous* experience in far too many places here. American political views leak across the border** and we are (sadly) far from the multicultural mosaic some of us aspire to.

    Looking at Trinidad (where a large chunk of my family are from) racism is also a problem. Here's a short (42 minute) documentary on the experiences of Trinidadian-Chinese woman (which cousins say is accurate): https://vimeo.com/28971743

    *Eg. so-called "nip-tipping" an hour from where I live. https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2013/02/05/early_parole_denied_for_man_in_niptipping_trial.html

    **Hardly surprising when most of our entertainment is American.

    940:

    So appreciate your bin men

    If you've read John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider, no doubt you cheered at the discussion of valuing jobs that put bin men on par with doctors :-)

    For those that haven't, the proposal/thought experiment was a three-axis rating system, where each job was rated by societal importance, education/talent, and working conditions (harder conditions rated higher). Bin men scored highly on societal importance and working conditions, just as doctors scored highly on societal importance and education — so were rated the same.

    941:

    Charlie To which one can add, not just the separate political jurisidictions, but, in a case like this the importance of trust between them One change of government at one of the intermediate stages & your power is cut off. See also Russia's gas pipeline(s) into Europe, yes?

    Rbt Prior Do you mean the US would have lots of racists even without slavery? Oh do get real, purrrlease! Racism & out-group hatred is NOT confined to the pinkoes who originally came from N Europe, oh dear me, no. The US almost certainly has an (well) above-the-usual-proportion of racists because of slavery, but look at the way the Han treat people not from the Central Kingdom, or the ongoing racism in Japan, or the mutual racism between W Africans & "Caribbean" peoples ( Also slavery-related, that one, of course ) And so on & on & on ....

    942:

    There's been recently talk on the internets about the colonialism and imperialism in 'Dungeons & Dragons'. When the main idea of the game is to go about, kill people and take their stuff, the imperialism and colonialism is quite near the surface.

    Do you have a link? I would be curious to read it.

    943:

    you could color-switch your D&D elves: make the surface dwellers African in appearance, while making the Drow very very white. That would put them in harmony with their environments, given that troglodytes are usually low pigment critters.

    Few remember it nowadays, but drow made their first appearance in the seven-module series "Against the Giants" -> "Descent into Depths of the Earth" -> "Queen of Demonweb Pits". The drow home base, city of Erelhei-Cinlu, was located inside a gigantic underground vault. The vault ceiling was described as to be slightly radioactive, and emitting fair amount of ultraviolet light. In this context it made perfect sense that drow had black skin and ultravision (in addition to infravision, far more common among underground races).

    944:

    What bothers me are the little bags of dog poo hanging from tree branches and sitting on fenceposts beside paths. Why carefully bag up dog poo and then leave it like that?

    Most likely because just leaving dog poo on the ground can get you fined, while hanging the bag on a tree can not.

    Nobody does it where I live, because here hanging the bag with dog poo on a tree will also get you fined.

    945:

    Mystara's shadow elves are elves that are quite pale because they've spent the last 4000 years underground.

    946:

    The Eloi of Wells' "The Time Machine" are portrayed in the movie as light-skinned, almost Nordic in appearance and they live on the surface while the Morlocks are dark-skinned and ugly and live underground w2here the sun never shines. Not sure how that works, other than the obvious racial overtones in the writing.

    In "At The Mountains of Madness" the giant penguins were albino and effectively blind from living underground for millions of years and as for the shoggoths, well...

    947:

    Either Rodenberry read Tolkien or these are universal cultural archetypes:

    Humans = Men Vulcans = Elves Romulans = Dark Elves Klingons = Orcs

    948:

    Some decent news-- glass formed into more complex shapes, and at a lower energy cost, too.

    https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/injection-molded-glass-breakthrough-shatters-ceiling-of-work-methods/

    949:

    Putting on my seldom-used moderator hat for a moment...

    I temporarily unpublished some comments, for Charlie to sort out at his leisure.

    For all: please review the Moderation Policy again.

    https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/06/moderation-policy.html

    950:

    Yes, injection molding glass is cool. The technique they describe reminds me of metal clay, where metal powder is mixed with polymer clay, and firing the clay blows off the organics and sinters the metal particles into a solid. Good that they're figuring out how to do this with glass. With some work, it may be possible to turn this system into glass addition printing, too.

    951:

    I have read "Shockwave rider", but so long ago I can barely remember it(30+yrs). That system rings a faint bell, it seems like a good one.

    952:

    May I note that an environmental impact statement was done around 1978-80 for solar power satellites - I know, because we had a speaker at PSFS around '82 who told us about it.

    And the power planned to be beamed down was NOT "fry the birds in the sky", but not too many watts/m^2. Large receivers.

    953:

    a) I expect, with an FTL drive, that we will colonize the planets easiest to terraform... and that a huge amount of the work will be done robotically.

    b) I would also assume that people would like lower density living*.

    c) together, I would expect us to colonize a few dozen planets, at least to start. Maybe see good ol' Terra's population go down to somewhere around 3B (what it was in the sixties). Since terraforming will NOT poof make a human livable planet, I'm thinking of islands/archipelagos/peninsulas first. I'm also thinking that each colony, to start, would be in the tens of milions, once you had a large enough area terraformed.

    954:

    Also 911: we usually buy milk in the coated (probably plastic-coated - I doubt it's wax) with a plastic spout (rather than the simpler open one side and make a "v".

    But I found out the answer, by simply searching for my county and recycling milk containers. Seems they go with paper.

    Oh, and we put stuff out Sunday night. Trash and recycling come by early Monday. And sometimes they use the lifter, but more of the time, the men toss the contents in.

    Oh, and they give us a large wheeled bin for paper, a much smaller bin for plastic/glass/metal, and we provide our own trash/garbage cans, so that they have to toss.

    955:

    Ignoring the issues around terraforming, one underappreciated challenge is that you need an FTL system with a velocity at least 100C, if you want to get to the nearest known earthlike planets and back in a year. While we may find a crop of terrestrial planets nearby, my inelegant checking of the exoplanets already known suggests that the cool planets are mostly 50-100 light years or further from us. Turning that into travel time, your FTL has to go a long ways quite rapidly to avoid various canned monkey problems.

    956:

    Um, we did not have capitalism during/after the Plague. Nor did that suddenly craate the Reformation, nor the Enlightenment - technology changed. Also, there was a change in demand (more wool, please).

    That's not a valid argument.

    Next... there's massive conspicuous consumption among the ultra-wealthy (seen any cruise-ship sized "yachts" lately, bought by folks like Larry Ellison?). But there's so much hypothetical cash (such as cryptocurrency) that how much you control is the "how many toys you die with" these days.

    And that is a collapse waiting to happen.

    957:

    Thank you for your work. Just wish, around here, that they were county employees... and unionized, instead of outsourced.

    You deserved... not combat pay, but high-hazard, definitely.

    958:

    My thinking on life extension, is that if you get the treatment, you should have to leave Earth. This would both stop rule by gerontocrats and push development of space.

    This presumes there is a single "immortality treatment" that one either gets or not. I do not believe this will ever be the case. Instead immortality will sneak up on us -- today an average 60-year old plays tennis and bad knees get replaced; by 2030 an average 70-year old plays tennis and bad hearts get replaced; in 2050 an average 80-year old plays tennis and bad livers get replaced. By 2100 no 50-year old even thinks about heart attacks, or breast cancer, or enlarged prostate... and there is a billion fairly healthy centenarians worldwide. By that time major societal changes will have happened even though no one is technically immortal yet.

    Not a single treatment, but many different ones which address different aspects of a body aging, and it will be entirely possible to receive just some of them.

    959:

    As opposed to the US, where the ultrawealthy move businesses awsy for a) cheaper taxes; b) non-union areas; c)whereever is "in" for that industry at the moment, and tell people, and the libertarians echo it, "you should just relocate for work, with the subtext of "there's no such thing as family or community".

    960:

    Actually, after I hit submit, it hit me: the nuclear family as "the way everyone lives" got pushed just over a century ago, so that they could sell more stuff (how many washing machines would one extended family need, as opposed to two, three, or four nuclear families?).

    I now wonder if it's deliberate to try to break down families, to sell more stuff to singles.

    961:

    The drow made their first entrance...

    Really? And here I could have sworn I read about them from myth - it might have been Bullfinch, or Norton, but I could be wrong - back in my teens. And they look the way they were described in myth.

    962:

    It does sound like that, I presume that's where they got it from. Their technique started as 3d printing, so I assume they are aiming for that.

    A material I've been interested in for years, that hasn't made much impact yet but I think will, is nanocellulose.

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

    Hopefully this will be 3d printed too. Of note to this thread though is that it can be used as a barrier material. You could have a cardboard carton lined with this that holds liquids. It would then be easily recycled as opposed to plastic lined cartons. In fact, I think you could make numerous containers that need to be recycled from it. It has numerous other uses too, the manufacturing needs to be perfected though.

    963:

    Or maybe Roddenberry read myth (like Bullfinch, as I mentioned before) and other myths, and maybe fantasy that were based on myth, exactly as Tolkien based it on his career's work?

    964: 959 Thanks. We were outsourced too, we kept being transferred between companies because they kept getting it wrong. They always bid low for the contract, even if they didn't know anything about the business, then they would find they couldn't do it at that price. Not too clever. 960 I think you are right, but I think they will be numerous integrated treatments, to make an "immortality" treatment.
    965:

    "you should just relocate for work"

    At your expense, of course, and the work is not guaranteed to be there.

    JHomes.

    966:

    I would like to echo the thanks. Without doctors, life would be pretty much the same for most people. Without waste collection our urban life and all that brings would be completely impossible.

    967:

    I meant "first entrance in Gary Gygax's game". But you are right, he did not invent the names. Here is what Drow wiki article says on the matter:

    The word "drow" is from the Orcadian and Shetland dialects of Scots,[5] an alternative form of "trow",[6] which is a cognate with "troll". The Oxford English Dictionary gives no entry for "drow", but two of the citations under "trow" name it as an alternative form of the word. Trow/drow was used to refer to a wide variety of evil sprites. Everything about the Dungeons & Dragons drow was invented by Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax except for the basic concept of "dark elves".[7] However, in the Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson wrote about the black elves: "... the dark elves however live down below the ground. ... while the dark elves are blacker than pitch."[8]:103

    Gygax stated, "Drow are mentioned in Keightley's The Fairy Mythology, as I recall (it might have been The Secret Commonwealth—neither book is before me, and it is not all that important anyway), and as Dark Elves of evil nature, they served as an ideal basis for the creation of a unique new mythos designed especially for the AD&D game."[9] The form "drow" can be found in neither work.[citation needed] Gygax later stated that he took the term from a listing in the Funk & Wagnall's Unexpurgated Dictionary, and no other source at all. "I wanted a most unusual race as the main power in the Underdark, so used the reference to 'dark elves' from the dictionary to create the Drow."[10] There seems to be no work with this title. However, the following entry can be found in abridged editions of Funk & Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of the English Language, such as The Desk Standard Dictionary of the English Language: "[Scot.] In folk-lore, one of a race of underground elves represented as skillful workers in metal. Compare TROLL. [Variant of TROLL.] trow "

    968:

    gasdive @968:

    ... Without waste collection our urban life and all that brings would be completely impossible.

    In Niven & Pournelle's "The Mote In God's Eye" the "Crazy Eddie" archetype is explained by, “When a city has grown so overlarge and crowded that it is in immediate danger of collapse . . . when food and clean water flow into the city at a rate just sufficient to feed every mouth, and every hand must work constantly to keep it that way . . . when all transportation is involved in moving vital supplies, and none is left over to move people out of the city should the need arise . . . then it is that Crazy Eddie leads the movers of garbage out on strike for better working conditions.”

    969:

    I've had a hell of a day. Drove 463 miles to photograph wild horses.

    Didn't get the photos of the kite festival I wanted or a photo of the Wright Brothers Memorial I was contemplating (against a beautiful sunset right after the lights switched on). I think it might have been closed for the new Federal Holiday that was signed into law yesterday(?).

    But I did get my beach parking permit for the 4WD beach at Corolla, so I expect I'll get back down there.

    I also got a (warning) ticket because it turns out I have no tail lights or brake lights (except for the high center brake light). I also still have working turn signals & was using them religiously (along with cruise control to ensure I don't get any speeding tickets)

    So now I have spend tomorrow figuring out what's wrong with my Jeep. If I don't find it, I'll just add it on to the other services I was planning to have done on Monday - tires rotated @ 60K miles (which is 15K on those tires & I've had them rotated at 5K & 10K), lube oil & filter & service the AC to make sure it's putting out the coldest air it possibly can.

    The AC was adequate after the sun went down, but it struggled to keep up with 86°F 72% humidity today (30°C) ... I might look into having my Jeep painted some kind of silver gray color that will reflect more sunlight. It's black now, and I think that's a major contributor to the AC not working so well.

    Anyway, it's been a long day & I think I'm gonna go crash for now.

    970:

    Beat me to it.

    I'd point out that there are a couple of things going on here.

    The big one is the animist take on elves as nature spirits (e.g. the feeling you get when you're around old trees, in a mine, next to a river, etc.). In Germanic-ish mythology, the bright elves are the ones who you may want to deal with, while the dark elves are the ones you probably want to avoid--and we've all been in places with nature spirits like that (illegal dumps, for example).

    The other part is that people often have weird experiences in caves and mines, which is why such places tend to have their own, generally dark, spirits: kobolds, goblins, and so forth. They get propitiated for good reason.

    Where these two lines cross is this group of related words: troll, dwarf, and drow. They're generally underground, dark spirits (dark in character, at least, with the color-coded racism that black=evil), and they may be associated with metal ore, coal, and/or smithing. Are they all the same? Well, occultism and folklore tend to go in for wishy-washy thinking and imprecise folk taxonomies, so that argument could go on for years.

    And where things get really wishy-washy is when you do a superficial grab of the bowdlerized folklore of all this stuff from a dictionary, and throw it in to your fantasy work or game. The late Gary Gygax made a career out of this, and enlivened the world thereby.

    The problem now is that we're in a moment (hopefully an era) where the idea that skin color shows essential moral nature is seen, quite rightly, as utter bullshit that needs to go away. Thus it may be worth thinking about skin color, not as a way of relating biology and morality, but in more biological terms, dealing with exposure to sunlight. This leads to dark-skinned "light elves," light-skinned "dark elves," and provides some novelty in a game.

    While I haven't role-played in years, a drow nation obsessed with its Lost Cause might pull me back in.

    971:

    Just wish, around here, that they were county employees... and unionized, instead of outsourced.

    Under Ford* Toronto privatized half of its garbage collection. (Literally — everything west of Yonge Street.) Resulting savings were (like always with the Fords) less than promised. At the time the Star had a series of articles about privatisation in other municipalities — turns out that what happens is companies consolidate until there is really only one that can handle the contract in an area, at which point the costs go up and taxpayers end up with an "expensive" service again, but with the money going to company owners rather than workers.

    One of the arguments at the time was that a private company wouldn't have service interruptions from strikes, which I found interesting given that my local contracted-out transit was on strike at the time — and no one in the media was mentioning that it was demonstrably a bullshit argument.

    *The drunk clown, not the one who is currently premier.

    972:

    Really? Why is that? The last time we had a sudden and dramatic collapse in population (the Black Death) it freed up the labour market, created upwardly mobile peasants, upwardly mobile merchants, and ultimately the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

    Bollocks. https://going-medieval.com/2020/08/25/on-collapsing-time-or-not-everyone-will-be-taken-into-the-future/

    973: 956 Para 1 - Yes, they are probably actually chemically "a plastic coating", but they are conversationally known as "waxed cardboard", at least in Scotland. 963 - Well, in a quick skim of Wikipedia, I found a recognisable description of "drow" as "dark skinned elves, living underground" going back to the "Prose Edda", written by "Snorri Sturluson" in the 13th century. I wrote this before I read #969 and #972. 971 - JBS, I don't know what year your Jeep is, but the rear lights may be a CANBus problem (aggh, software). I'd agree that the a/c may need a regas.
    974:

    UHT milk still comes in "waxed" containers as do plant "milks" and fruit juice. They can also be put in the green recycling bins.

    975:

    If Dark elves being black skinned goes back to at least C13th then it predates skin colour racism (generalised xenophobia is another thing, but that early they didn't need a justification for enslaving anyone who couldn't stop them). It's more likely a "hard to see them in the dark" thing I would have thought.

    What we now percieve as racist may not originally have been, but the original intent does not mean it isn't having a negative effect now and therefore needs to be changed.

    976:

    ...And Julian May made use of it in the first of her Galactic Milieu books, The Many-Coloured Land, published in 1981; one of the protagonists works within exactly such a "planetary grid, solar collectors" infrastructure.

    977: 968 Thanks, though I wouldn't want to be without doctors either. 972 On the subject of underground spirits, if you go back further, the underground in general does not seem to have an association with evil. It seems to be about life or perhaps secret knowledge. Certainly in prehistory caves do not seem to have an association with evil, obviously the caves lived in wouldn't but the deeper parts didn't either, even though they could be inhabited by dangerous creatures such as cave bears.

    I have visited a cave with prehistoric art (Southern France), it was an amazing experience. The focus clearly wasn't on fear, but life. Later associations seem to be with secret knowledge, such as oracles, the Orphic mysteries and suchlike. Does the view of the underground as evil, align with mining perhaps? Mining originated in the neolithic, I believe, with flint mining. Mining is dangerous, did this lead to the association with evil? I wonder if associations of the underground with evil can be traced to mining areas? Or is mining more dangerous in some areas? The spirits you mention are all northern. Is mining more dangerous in the north? Perhaps because it is wetter? Water certainly increases the dangers of mining. I wonder if there is anything to this theory? I might do some research!

    978:

    Of course I forgot the mention the most obvious association of the underground/underworld, that with death. Though this is mostly not an association with evil per se in ancient cultures. I don't know if that effects my "theory", does an association with death inevitably lead to an association with evil to some extent?

    979:

    Mining originated in the neolithic, I believe, with flint mining.

    I've been to Grime's Graves. Claustrophobic holes in the ground, amazing to consider they were all excavated with stone and antler tools.

    One of the more intriguing of discoveries made by the excavation team was a series of animal figures (mostly deer and cattle) carved into the shaft walls by the prehistoric miners.

    https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/projects/neolithic-flint-mines

    Caves had animals painted on the walls. Artificial caves had animals carved on the walls. For the same reason?

    980:

    There are many old flint mine sites in Britain. You can visit a restored mine at Grimes Graves near Thetford. Conditions were bad but not nearly as bad as coal mines.

    https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/grimes-graves-prehistoric-flint-mine/

    Pretty impressive for mines dug with deer antlers as tools.

    981:

    The mention of Grimes graves brought back a vague memory, I think I visited when I was a small child and lived in Norfolk for a time. I have done a tiny bit of research now, and don't think my theory holds water(LOL). On the other hand the association of the underground with evil, does seem to be an artifact of monolithic Western culture. There have been many associations with the underground, some evil, some not. What exactly it meant in prehistory, I don't know. It seems that the underground was seen to have some kind of dynamic connection to the above ground world though.

    982:

    I vaguely remember reading somewhere (how's that for a definitive reference?) that the underground=evil thing was brought in by the church to combat mystery cults such as Mithraism. The Greeks had Hades underground, but it wasn't evil.

    Did a quick (unsuccessful) search to try to locate that reference, and found this article on the psychology of designing underground spaces, which might be interesting to those writing about underground settings (say on Mars) or other enclosed environments.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5368185/

    983:

    "Really? Why is that? The last time we had a sudden and dramatic collapse in population (the Black Death) it freed up the labour market, created upwardly mobile peasants, upwardly mobile merchants, and ultimately the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. If we can do the same thing a bit more gradually and without the buboes then it sounds like a good deal."

    Presumably an incredibly complex industrial society built on complex trans-global supply chains would react to massive disruptions far differently than a far simpler economy with far more localization.

    984:

    Speaking of "historic mines" makes me think of the Great Orme Neolithic copper mine in North Wales. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Orme#Copper_mines

    On underground spirits, one species/tribe of kobolds was thought to live underground and play tricks on miners, often involving arsenical ores and/or "fire damp".

    985:

    Robert Prior @ 984 Just a quick drive-by comment: The Mithraeum in London, (under the new Bloomberg building) was originally underground.

    986:

    While I used to enjoy spelunking, something has changed in my psychology that makes the thought of mining oppressive. I can easily see how people can form complex myths about what happens down in the dark.

    An analog would be sailor's superstitions. I worked on offshore fish boats for a few years. In the beginning I thought the various superstitions were quaint but silly (i.e. Never leave on a Friday, never store cups with the top up, do a full 360 turn to the left as soon as you leave harbour - the list is long and often specific to various boats). These were serious and not to be trifled with, fishers would delay a departure until midnight Friday without fail.

    After awhile, and a few deaths of persons I had known when their boats went down I found myself thinking 'it can't hurt'. A year later I would get anxious if we started preparing to leave on a Friday, and I was quite conscientious about how I stored my mugs etc.

    In retrospect it was silly, but after you've ridden out a hurricane in a 40 foot fish boat you tend to ascribe some power to natural forces, and desire to keep them happy.

    987:

    Well, as a Scot I'm quite used to thinking "never leave on a Friday or Saturday" because the fleet is normally in port on Sunday and leaving Fri/Sat would make for short trips. This is also why Scottish retail fishmongers are normally closed on a Monday and open Tuesday to Saturday with no half day closing.

    988:

    An analog would be sailor's superstitions. I worked on offshore fish boats for a few years. In the beginning I thought the various superstitions were quaint but silly

    Insofar as such superstitions are the intersecting set of those practices that didn't lead to the ship going down with all hands, it's worth treating them with some respect. (If a boat sailed on Friday, was there some circumstance that would render it less likely to be rescued if it foundered? If a boat did a full 360 turn to starboard or didn't bother turning, was there some sort of risk of a problem with the rudder going undetected? And so on.)

    989:

    If a boat sailed on Friday, was there some circumstance that would render it less likely to be rescued if it foundered?

    I can't think of anything, and my paternal great-grandfather was both a fisherman and a member of the Campbelltown lifeboat crew around 1900CE.

    As per #989, you'd normally be expected to be in port (and indeed in church) on Sunday, so only day boats would bother to put out on Friday or Saturday.

    990:

    On milk containers:

    I grew up in Guernsey, where the island dairy used to provide milk in "tetra paks", which looked exactly like that except with Guernsey Dairy instead of an Italian one. You opened it by cutting off the top corner. The person who opened the one in the picture has done it wrong: it was just cut it starting from the seam. But if you do it that way the milk dribbles. You have to squash the top corner and then cut at 90 degrees to the seam. That way the cut forms a proper spout and it doesn't dribble.

    Anyway, tetra paks got phased out when I was about 10, and for a while we had the plastic sachets that you could sit in a "jug". They were horrible, dribbled terribly.

    After that it went to rectangular cardboard cartons.

    991:

    The Desk Standard Dictionary of the English Language: "[Scot.] In folk-lore, one of a race of underground elves represented as skillful workers in metal. Compare TROLL. [Variant of TROLL.] trow "

    That's deeply odd, and looks more like spurious etymology to me. I've read a lot of old stuff, and not seen the underground elves as being workers in metal. Trolls... don't always live underground, and are anthropophagus. I've never seen trolls working metal.

    Dwarves, on the other hand.

    992:

    Not quite: you normally want to avoid dealing with elves of any kind. Calling them the "good people" was more of a hope, along with leaving out things for them, so that they don't decide to Do Things to you.

    As someone put it years ago, all elves are like the CIA: it's nice if they're on your side, but you'd really rather not come to their attention at all.

    993:

    skulgun @ 974: Bollocks. https://going-medieval.com/2020/08/25/on-collapsing-time-or-not-everyone-will-be-taken-into-the-future/

    And also whitroth @ 958: Um, we did not have capitalism during/after the Plague.

    OK, perhaps I'd better expand on my one-liner @ 913 about the Black Death here.

    skulgun's link refutes a claim that the collapse of feudalism was related to gunpowder and the invention of guns. But that wasn't my claim. The general consensus is that the Black Death led to a labour shortage. Suddenly a peasant could run away from their feudal lord and find better pay and conditions working for a wage somewhere else. Because these ex-peasants were now being paid in cash (rather than e.g. the right to collect firewood), there was a much bigger cash economy happening, which was good for merchants who also needed to be paid in cash. So merchants got richer, and merchant towns started getting big enough and powerful enough to opt out of the whole feudal system. That meant that the local feudal lord couldn't just ride in and demand that everyone give him all of their money, which in turn meant that investment could happen, so the merchants got even richer. All this wealth floating around meant that more people had time to spare for self-actualization, and their thinking led to the Enlightenment, which promoted learning and science, which in turn led to the Industrial Revolution.

    However my real point was rather smaller. Of course we can't directly compare modern industrial society to 13th Century Europe, but the original claim by Duffy was that a shrinking population means the end of capitalism. I was simply trying to show that this claim needs some evidence. Part of my reason for skepticism is that a shrunken population can create a labour shortage, and this is actually good for capitalism rather than bad (however much individual capitalists might shout and moan about having to pay their workers a decent wage).

    994:

    Underground is also associated with birth/rebirth (coming out of the womb of the Earth). Definitely used so by (neo)Pagans, possibly based on hints from ancient mystery cults.

    995:

    No, again. After it died down, there was unowned land... or rather, untenanted land. The lords still owned the land, in most cases. And you're arguing that a labor shortage (but now you have fewer mouths to feed, so less labor needed) caused the Enlightenment in the 1700s, centuries later.

    Nope. The Sun King in France certainly was about feudalism, and he was well after the Black Death.

    On the other hand, there were these things called a) the printing press; and b) the conquest of the New World (Spanish gold, anyone), again, both well after the Plague.

    996:

    Yes, of COURSE its a much more complicated story than that. Unfortunately the entire history of Western Europe is a bit too long to fit into one of these comments.

    See Wikipedia or The Britannica.

    My original point stands; nobody has explained why capitalism can't work with a declining population.

    998:

    In the Ottawa area and a bit beyond there are at least 3 diaries that sell their milk in 1 liter glass bottles:

    https://ottawaorganics.com/product-category/dairy/milk/

    Also, the Farm Boy grocery chain sells its own "house brand" of organic milk in the same 1 liter glass bottles:

    https://www.farmboy.ca/products/farm-boy-organic-3-8-whole-milk/

    There's a 2 dollar deposit on each bottle.

    999:

    Paul @ 998: "My original point stands; nobody has explained why capitalism can't work with a declining population."

    To me it seems obvious that capitalism can work as long as there is scientific progress and technological change. It just does not matter if there is population growth or a declining population.

    So, since it is obvious it is not worth explaining.

    1000:

    Yes and no. There are two things going on here: one is the generally weird shit that occasionally happens, which is why sane people refer to Them as the Gentry and do indeed treat them as the CIA (unless they've got bad vibes, in which case you treat them like gangbangers). But let's ignore that.

    Superstitions and patterns of living accrete, because most people learn by rote. Missionaries in the South Pacific reportedly this to break down taboo-based systems. If a sailor was not supposed to have sex, was supposed to sail on a certain day, etc. etc., the missionary would get some converts to deliberately break all these taboos and go sailing. The sailors inevitably survived, leading to a breakdown of the taboo system. Something like this was done on Hawai'i when the missionaries convinced some of the royals to eat together, men and women. Prior to that, men and women at separately, or supposedly they died. When no one died as a result of the most sacred people violating this great taboo, their whole system started to disintegrate. It never entirely disappeared, because weird shit definitely happens in Hawai'i (as elsewhere) and it's good for people to know the traditional ways of dealing, but the accreted taboo system fell apart.

    Something similar happened with Covid19 last year. In the organization I work with, we'd had this thing that we had to have a lot of face-to-face statewide meetings. These were a burden, we always struggled to make quorum, and there was a lot of silenced frustration. However, the people in charge were adamant that their junkets were necessary for the group to function, so that's what happened. With Covid, we all went to video meetings. Instead of lasting for a weekend, the meetings last for a few hours, attendance soared, and we're getting shit done. Now we're discussing whether to have one physical meeting a year, or maybe two at the most. It turns out the in-person meeting thing was a superstition, not a necessity. Some people benefited from it, many people didn't, and it broke down when violating it didn't kill the org.

    This is one of the things that makes rapid change possible, when what's in the way is more superstition than physical issues and breaking a taboo isn't the end of the world. However, it's not guaranteed. If violating a taboo that makes people too furious, anxious, and/or fearful to operate, then it's difficult to make that change. Examples of this include racism and homophobia, where it takes continual work in modern society to convince a majority of people that these normal examples of human diversity aren't harmful.

    Even now, when I point out that pigment-flipping elves leads to novelty in rpgs, a few guys here are busy trying to make the case that imaginary, underground, evil fantasy elves are properly black-skinned, because that's the way it's always been. The people defending this have now gone back from Gary Gygax as their authority to the Prose Edda, not even noticing that on the weekend of Juneteenth, they're struggling with the wider social meanings of black skin in a really public and embarrassing way.

    Break that taboo, dudes. It really won't be the end of the world.

    1001:

    They think some cave "paintings" use red ochre and the shape of parts of the cave to represent vulva.

    Also related to this discussion is that one of the drivers of development in the U.K was that mining was not solely a matter for royalty. In mainland Europe all mines/minerals belonged to the crown, and they kept tight control. In the U.K it was only gold and silver,and there was not much of that. This led to private mines, which drove development.

    1002:

    In the UK, it's a LOT more complicated than that, but the critical fact is that mining as an industry dates from not later than the neolithic, with correspondingly complicated grandfather rights. It is also worth looking up the history of Cornwall from the kingdom onwards and the stannary parliament.

    1003:

    Wikipedia tells me that the Friday superstition has been around for centuries, certainly much longer than any form of 'rescue' infrastructure. I recall some mention of it being very common in the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic era (though perhaps that was just Patrick O'Brien).

    What I can say is that the fishers who respected it did so very rigidly, even at significant cost (where openings are timed, or a weather/tide combination would cause some delay).

    I had some personal superstitions that developed through the years as well. On my first trip I nonchalantly flipped a penny into the ocean as we motored out. By the fifteenth it was quite essential, my continued survival being enough of an irrational example to motivate me (and no desire for any form of counterexample).

    I suspect many of the other superstitions were tied to the risks of inattention. Cups stored improperly are irrelevant, but if they are a sign of disregard for other more crucial storage and maintenance then I can see a correlation. Also as a sign of tiredness, and the poor crisis decision making that comes with lack of sleep.

    As with any superstition confirmation bias becomes a major factor. My continued 'not dying' when we didn't leave on Friday began to affect my perspective. At some point, someone left on a Friday and died, further cementing the power of the myth (non-death Friday departures being unremarkable).

    When the consequences if you are wrong are personally fatal, it can be easy to accept that we might as well wait until midnight to set out. Why risk it?

    Of course, I'm sure many boats sank because they left later or the next day, but of course those can be explained by other reasons as easily as Friday.

    1004: 998 - OK, I'll take a pop at your windmill.

    As it stands, "Western capitalism" is largely driven by increasing property prices, "because if my house 'is worth' 10 times what I paid for it 20 years ago I must be richer", which is driven by housing scarcity with an expanding population. Now, when we get an actually declining population, we also get reducing land and property values (both purchase and rental; this has been proven by, for example, the Black Death). This, in turn, removes the illusion of "increasing richness" that underpins Western capitalism. (and yes, the history of Western Europe is a bit too long to fit in a blog post).

    1002 Para 5 - OK, how do you get "I can find references to this from several centuries ago" to be a defence of Gaxy Gygar, and/or skin pigment based racism? Particularly given that I deliberately did not mention mention skin pigmentation in any previous posting on the subject.
    1005:

    It just does not matter if there is population growth or a declining population.

    Economic systems exist within societies. And they tend to drift into stable states until big changes occur. (Some of the people may not think of it as stable but the society as a whole might.)

    Rapid changes in how a society operates, such as rapid increases or decreases in population will tend to break lots of things. The steady state of the economic system being one.

    I suspect that people say capitalism will not work with declining populations as almost all of our experience is with growing populations.

    Sort of like Rocketpjs always tossing the penny.

    1006: 1004 - Definitely from the Bronze Age, or possibly late Neolithic. I've actually been in/down a 4_000 year old copper mine (open to the public unless Covid). 1005 - As noted (but apparently ignored), if you had to be back in port in time to sell your catch at a morning mart, there was little to no point in sailing on Friday unless you were sailing a day boat (eg lobsters, crabs, maybe a long liner).
    1007:

    I disagree. It keeps working as long as there are opening markets. As markets stabilize, it should stabilize, but does not; rather, we get end-stage capitalism, where imaginary value is added to things, because the wealth, real or imaginary, is how they keep score.

    It alsu suggests that "being comfortable" (as my lady and I are), or "well-off" isn't enough, that a) they're scared of dropping down, and b) they've spent their lives in the game, and losing/being worth less is complete loss of self, because, to paraphrase Red Sanders (not Bernie), isn't everything, it's the only thing".

    1008:

    I am reminded of Ali G looking at a photo of a bunch of Welsh miners and asking "Why are they all brothers?"

    As the miner showing him the photo explained, it's dirt. People who go down mines and other underground holes are black because it's filthy down there. And in the days before pithead showers or indeed any other kind of frequent bath, they stay black. Coal mines are the dirtiest of course, but other mines aren't much better, at least when you're a miner working the mine rather than a modern tourist looking round a dead one. The same thing happens to people doing smelting or blacksmithing or other thermal metalworking processes.

    They are also subject to unusual and unpleasant dangers. All of a sudden the roof falls in or the whole place blows up with you inside it or a million gallons of water come down the tunnel or you just fall over for no apparent reason and never get up again. Even when this sort of thing isn't happening there are all sorts of peculiar noises of unknown and mysterious origin that keep making you wonder if it's just about to.

    If you are of a mind to attribute this kind of thing to some kind of malignant spirit and think it lives in a body then of course that body will be black. Same as you are, because it goes with the territory. And also because if it wasn't you might be able to see it, but you can't, so that proves it.

    I can't remember if there's any story in Norse mythology about one of the Svart-alfar getting a jolly good scrub somehow and then causing havoc because it's not svart any more and nobody knows what it is. Probably not, but I vaguely think that there might be something like that in someone's mythology, though.

    (Oh yeah, and the notion of "elves" and "dwarves" being definitely distinct species is pretty modern. Not sure if it was basically Wagner's fault, but it's certainly closer in time to him than it is to when people used to actually believe in this shit. So you get Victorian English translations calling these entities "dwarves" even when they have names like Gandalf or something.)

    Then of course going way way further back there is the fundamental point that humans rely for detection and determination of acute danger almost entirely on sight, and when sight doesn't work big things with teeth can sneak up on you and rip your head off. And shortage of light in general means it gets nasty and cold and plants stop turning into food and edible animals are harder to catch. So we get religions and mythologies based around light=good/dark=bad and first-ever-heroes who discovered fire and gods who drive the sun about in a horse and cart or make it out of a big ball of luminous shit or otherwise doing strange but beneficial things that cause it to be there. It's nothing to do with humans coming in different colours and the people who made these ideas up may not even have known they did; it's all about stuff out of the obvious background of daily life.

    Come to that, so is stuff people draw on the walls. You draw elaborate and realistic depictions of things which are important and significant highlights of your everyday existence. It might be a bunch of people catching a week of good meals for everyone, or it might be an expression of your heartfelt desire for the British to fuck off, or it might be someone with a massive grin on their face smoking a massive spliff. The association isn't "mystic", but simply this is what's big and important to me.

    (When writing was invented people became able to do the same thing with much less effort, so even people with neither skill nor the motivation of a deeply felt significance of long-term applicability can trivially record something that just happens to be in their mind right this moment, like "fututa sum hic" or even just their own immediate existence. This is why modern caves have things like "TOXO3" and "CLIT!" written on the walls.)

    1009:

    "They think some cave "paintings" use red ochre and the shape of parts of the cave to represent vulva."

    These days of course people just take a picture of the cunt-shaped fissure and post it on twitter. Anastomosed tree trunks or scars of lost boughs can be good, too.

    Plus çla;a change, and all that.

    1010:

    I'm voting for the continuation of capitalism. After all, what capitalism actually consists of in practice changes with every crisis. So as long as there's "An economy," it will probably be part of a "capitalist system," with details to be determined at a later date.

    One big problem is that growth is a bit of a ponzi scheme. So long as there's going to be more tomorrow than there is today, it's notionally worth investing in that tomorrow than spending today. If this promise falls through, then investment dies...if you're a total effing greed head. It's odd how many people still do things altruistically, like planting trees, having kids, giving to charities, and keeping the world running. It's almost as if (gasp, shock, horror) greed and growing personal assets actually are not the be-all and end-all of existence, economics notwithstanding.*

    The other big problem is that economists replaced historians as high-ranking political advisors, particularly in the US (IIRC around the time of the Great Depression). Historians are great, but they're limited by the past, literally. A crisis comes along that's insufficiently like past crises, and their advice on how to cope is no better than that of any intelligent person. For awhile, economics offered the hope that data-driven social science would get past the limits of historical expertise, and give better guidance on how to govern. And it works, maybe about as well as employing historians does. But economists are still stuck with the problem that they're better at explaining the past than forecasting the future. So by trusting them, we're getting into different sets of crises, not avoiding crises altogether, because the real crises are black swans. And so it goes.

    *When I heard a Famous Economist opining that there was no economic rationale for having kids, but that he had a couple anyway, just because, I started laughing sourly in my little Darwinian dungeon. Some answers do come out of other fields, even for Famous Economists.

    1011:

    Pigeon @ 1011 "These days of course people just take a picture of the cunt-shaped fissure and post it on twitter. Anastomosed tree trunks or scars of lost boughs can be good, too."

    This reminds me of the "Book of Onan", or the parts of it that can be found in the March 1983 issue of the "National Lampoon".

    Yea, Onan was an idle man, and one day he beheld a cleft in a tree, and the cleft had the shape of a...

    Plus ça change, plus c'est pareil.

    1012:

    Just take a look at Japan. Its population has been in decline since 2008, yet its economy is now growing and it is still in the G7 and in third place behind the US and China.

    1013:

    we had the plastic sachets that you could sit in a "jug". They were horrible, dribbled terribly.

    Odd. I can't remember the last time mine has dribbled, and I drink 4+ litre of milk a week — so I'm going through 3-5 bags of milk a week.

    1014:

    Part of my reason for skepticism is that a shrunken population can create a labour shortage, and this is actually good for capitalism rather than bad (however much individual capitalists might shout and moan about having to pay their workers a decent wage).

    True, labor costs increase, but that's not all that happens.

    There are also proportionally fewer consumers, the potential purchasers of your goods and services.

    So capitalists find themselves in a situation where their markets are decreasing and labor costs increasing in real terms which each passing year.

    Meanwhile the population ages as it gets smaller with proportionally more elderly than young people.

    Old people don't buy nearly as many things as young people who are starting families, buying homes, furniture, appliances, kids clothing etc.

    What old people do buy is services, especially medical services.

    R&D follows market trends and technological research in goods and manufacturing will dwindle proportionally with an increasing proportion of elderly in the populations. So technical progress languishes.

    The whole point of making a capital investments is to see an increasing return on your investment.

    That's somewhat difficult under these circumstances.

    The only "growth" will be paper growth resulting from mergers and acquisitions as capitalism consumes itself.

    Eventually capitalism ends in a whimper, not a bang.

    1015:

    Numbers to back Niala at 1014: Japan - growth above 0 except for the financial crisis and COVID-19 (not shown): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2019&locations=JP&start=1990

    Population declining for the last 10 years: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-population/

    Consumer capitalism can IMO be subdued; much of it is driven by emotional manipulation (marketing). E.g. people can become more resistant to implantation of desires for "stuff". If a significant subset of the population developed such resistance, a smaller fraction of the new "stuff" would be compelling enough to break through their resistance, and overall consumption would decrease. (If there was no significant counter-movement, e.g. a created/amplified consumption cult) (Offense/Defense race would intensify, yes.)

    1016:

    Re: D&D, Colonialism

    Do you have a link? I would be curious to read it.

    Well, I've been mostly idly browsing Twitter for this, and I'm not very good in saving links there, but a couple of links about this with longer discussion are

    The writer of the second one is also active on Twitter as @POCGamer.

    There's also a good (and long...) video series about AD&D Oriental Adventures (and beyond) by The Asians Represent Podcast: Starting from the beginning. We played some using the Oriental Adventures as kids, but being white boys from Finland, didn't really catch the underlying issues in the book.

    There's obviously a lot of opinions saying that D&D is not colonialist nor racist and why don't you just shut up and play the game, but I have somewhat differing opinions. Again, critical reading is required. Of course, the people with these opinions are usually white men.

    This is also only just a couple of links with a bit of googling, so I think there is probably more to be found. I don't frequent any rpg forums, so I don't know the discussions on them.

    1017: 1009 - YMMV, but I've seen the "Winning isn't...only thing" quote ascribed as "originally by" to leading spurtsmen in a variety of spurts, as well as to businessmen and/or politicians. Conclusion; I don't know who actually said it first, but I'd not be surprised to find it lurking in, say, the writings of Tacitus and/or the Venerable Bede. 1010 - That makes sense, at least if you read the quote as "...all soul brothers?" in the true sense of having bonds of place and work rather than being blood relations (although they may well be actual first or second cousins and/or uncles or nephews to others in the same photograph).
    1018:

    It sort of depends on that you mean by capitalism. I don't think capitalism and growth can really be separated. Markets, as in marketplaces where people buy and sell things, trade and specialisation of labour and all the things we use accounting for, sure all those things must continue in some form or another. But capitalism is really about being able to derive income from capital, and I can't see how that works without growth.

    It still seems like a sort of isomorphism with the second law of thermodynamics (it seems not to be a coincidence that Marx and Maxwell were contemporaries) and closed versus open systems. A closed system that depends on growth will reach a point of crisis, and that's just what people thought the 1890s and 1930s depressions were. Colonialism really enabled the growth that saw the rise of capitalism. We have a view that say Keynes saved capitalism by showing how to regulate it, but really the shift of the focus of colonialism from outright brutal exploitation (the European/British model) toward lifting the world out of poverty (the US/World Bank model) starting in the 50s has maybe just as much to do with this rescue. Then the resulting stagnation in the west (60s/70s) leads to neoliberalism, which is really a refocusing on the capital growth but which has also lead, through globalisation, to making the entire world a single system, something that implies more crises (because entropy only grows in a closed system) and that is exactly what we seem to be seeing.

    So is there an inherent contradiction in the need for growth, or can we have economic growth that is sustainable in a closed system? If we can't have growth, then how can we make a sustainable economic system without it? Even without the climate crisis, that is... are we condemned to stumble from one crisis to the next? Spoiler: I don't think we can come back from the climate crisis, so we're not just facing less or no growth, we're facing a decimation of human potential, maybe in our own lifetimes. So what is the appropriate response to this? I mean other than despair and alcohol, much as those things work for me.

    1019:

    Spoiler: I don't think we can come back from the climate crisis, so we're not just facing less or no growth, we're facing a decimation of human potential, maybe in our own lifetimes. So what is the appropriate response to this? I mean other than despair and alcohol, much as those things work for me.

    I've taken to thinking of ways to let at least something survive, so to think of something in a contained area which could be made to work, while still trying to think of ways of saving most of the people. Of course now would be time for something else than just thinking, first perhaps communicating my thoughts to other people and then maybe working on it.

    Last week there was an Extinction Rebellion demo in Helsinki, and many responses were of the sort "can't I just drive over them", "get to work you lazy bastards" and so on. So I'm not sure what to practically do. At least the demo got a lot of media attention, I just hope our "red-green environment-friendly" government would act on science for once.

    Coincidentally, thinking of smaller polities which could perhaps exists seems to me it's close to thinking of the smallest survivable space-ark discussion, which has been known to be a topic here...

    1020:

    Well Mikko, that makes you unusual for trying to do "something positive" rather than just saying "the present system is wrong; stop everything", which, correctly or not, is how "Extinction Rebellion" protests are reported and perceived, at least in the UK.

    1021:

    The flint mines referred to are older! They definitely included sub-surface mining, and were often on an industrial scale. Copper was next, because tin came originally from stream beds (as did gold), so mining has an unbroken six millennium history in the UK.

    https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/projects/neolithic-flint-mines

    1022:

    Flint miners came out white :-)

    1023: 1023 and #1024 - Thanks for that. I was peripherally aware of the technology used on these mines (amateur archaeologist and reader of the "Ring of Fire" main series) but not of the site name(s). The flint mines are older yes, but they're shallow mines in chalk where the Great Orme copper mine is a true deep mine in a mixture of limestone and dolomite.

    As to what colour the miners/quarrymen were when they came out from a shift, I'd say this is probably determined by the nature of the native rock and minerals they were mining through and/or for, and particularly what colour the dust tends to be when rubbed into human skin.

    1024:

    I'm not sure what to practically do

    Volunteering with civil disaster relief services is a simple, practical thing. You don't necessarily change anything, but you might get some useful training and get to help people directly. It seems likely that demand for this sort of thing will increase and it's one way to work on the side of the angels at least.

    1025:

    There is a really weird conflation in comments here of “population growth” and “economic growth”.

    The reason your standard of living is better than a feudal serf is that we managed to decouple economic growth from population growth. Our economies have grown much faster than our population for the last 200 years, and will do so for the next 200.

    1026:

    Well, the Extinction Rebellion is not very strict on what they do. I haven't been in any way connected to them, but at least here the last week's protest was trying to get the government to make really any real climate action, as they did plan when writing their program a couple of years ago.

    1027:
    and will do so for the next 200.

    We hope, anyway.

    Has anybody else noticed that the price of bread in supermarkets keeps going up and up? Over the last 10 years, and seemingly above the rate of inflation. I'd be happy to hear that this is pareidolia on my part.

    It's going to be hard to keep our population steady if people are starving because agriculture isn't reliable any more.

    1028:

    Bread is a difficult one - supermarkets have used is as a loss leader for years, at least in the UK. If they start selling it at, say, 10% below cost rather that 20%, that looks like a price increase to the consumer, even if the producers' prices haven't budged.

    1029: 1027 - Did you not read my comments or just not understand my implied point? Unless you've fuelled the housing bubble by buying multiple properties, when you sell your present residence, you will still need somewhere else to live, which will cost more than it did. You're not "better off" until you can say you have more money in assets other than property. 1028 - I can't say what the Finnish government have or have not done, or what ER have or have not targeted in Finland. Here in the UK, their favourite target tends to be mass public transportation which then ties up buses and trains, and the three main emergency services. 1029 - Well, I can't rule out that it's also pareidolia on my part, but I do have the same perception about bread prices.
    1030:

    Mikko P The problem with "XR" is that they are STUPID. Their "hearts are in the right place" - but putting everybody's backs up, including the people who would normally support them is amazingly counter-productive. The classic example in London was stopping a full electrically-powered train full of people trying to get to work. I mean - why not a diesel powered train? Or heavy lorry movements? Or the filthy polluters that are the London "river buses"? Still not as stupid as the anti-nuclear fake greenies, but - even so .... ... paws - but that seems to be exactly what they are doing - if they are not doing that, then they need to alter their internal publicity & get their act together

    JReynolds OK - What is the price of a loaf of revolting mass-produced supermarket bread, anyway? I know that my local "bakers" charges an arm & a leg for their "artisanaal" bread, but I simply don't care, as I buy flour in small-bulk ( 20-30kg mixed sorts ) at £1.20 - £1.80 per kg & then just make my own. As with supermarket "veg" I have zero idea what costs are for other people - hence my question about grocery costs back up-thread ...

    1031:

    So I'm not sure what to practically do.

    Read up on nonviolent actions and get into politics, at this point. The Extinction Rebellion is an example of nonviolence, so if you think they are being ineffective, read up (Albert Einstein Institute, Otpor, et al) and get to the point where you have a clue about what they might be doing better. And a lot of what they could be doing better has to do with organization, so figure out who you want to get organized with to deal with climate change. And join them.

    Then get involved in local politics. I'm not saying necessarily get out on the streets, unless that's where your talents lie. Some people are born troublemakers, clowns, or organizers, and that's their thing. I do meetings, letters, and testimony. It is as precisely soul-destroying as it sounds, but a lot of the soul-sucking parts are about keeping people like me from participating in political processes. So when you engage, it is a struggle that always feels like you don't accomplish enough, but you can accomplish something.

    Too hard?

    1032:

    It sort of depends on that you mean by capitalism.

    Ideas about growth and such are the ideology hammered into our heads that we haven't questioned. They're not what capitalism is. So far as what capitalism is, it seems to cover exploiting those who can't or won't complain, providing a socialist safety net for those who can organize and complain successfully, and trying to control the anarchist antics of the rich and powerful. The systems covered by this term vary widely.

    Yes, growth is part of the capitalist playbook, but then again, you have to realize that nonviolent socialism and universal love is part of core Christian theology, while communism is about dismantling the state and everybody being equal. When you look at how those play out in the real world? Not so much. Words like Communism and Christianity are now labels that don't have much to do with what their creators actually tried to promulgate. While they pay lip service to the words the creators valued, they don't actually do much about them.

    I'd merely suggest that it's the same for Capitalism. It's more a label than a coherent ideology at this point.

    And capitalists tend to violently freak out when someone proposes an alternative system like communism or socialism, but they accept all sorts of BS if it's presented as improving capitalism. Therefore, the answer to getting a system that's more amenable to dealing with climate change is to change what's labeled as capitalism, not to replace the label. And oddly enough, that's what the reformers are busy trying to do right now. The struggle is currently on steady and radical reform, not revolution.

    1033: 1032 and #1033 - Greg, you've explicitly restated one of my points. ER tend to attack low emissions (if high publicity) targets, rather than the highest available emissions targets (In London, yes diesel trains and taxis for high emissions). This means that, yes they're non-violently disruptive, but also commonly viewed as "stupid". Heteromeles, if you doubt this, join a car users' forum with active politics chat groups and look on there for discussions of ER protests.

    On flour, about £1-50 a kilo for 1kg to 2.5kg bags of white or wholemeal but I do still buy loafs because there's a small local bakery that gets flours not available in domestic sensible quantities.

    1034:

    Read up on nonviolent actions and get into politics, at this point.

    Seems like good advice, and kind of what I've been doing - I got one book, perhaps recommended here, about non-violence, been reading it.

    Also getting into local politics, yes, I've been trying to be more active. We just had our municipal elections here, which means there's perhaps a chance to change things a bit. (Though much of planning and doing now is how to get more votes the next time...)

    Thanks for the advice.

    1035:

    Bread is a difficult one - supermarkets have used is as a loss leader for years, at least in the UK.

    In the US there is that low end bleached flour white bread that stores sell cheap. Up to fresh baked in the faux bakery that sells for 4x as much. Maybe more. They slice it for you if you want but it will NOT keep nearly as long as the cheap crap. And then you get to variations by store. And if I visit a fantastic German bakery in the next town over the prices are at the high end. But it is great stuff. Pretzels, brotchen, and all.

    I'd say that there is over a 5x variation in pricing within 2 miles of my house depending on what you actually buy. Move that out to 4 miles and the spread might be more.

    On top of the loss leaders and weekly sales of specific items.

    1036:

    Food prices are going up quite a bit, across the board.

    However, with so many of our nation's primary agricultural regions* hit by drought and wildfires, when not being flooded out -- this happening now every growing season, in the West, the Southwest, the Midwest and the South. This isn't just every few years in one of them.

    You see this across the planet. Particularly in grain and cereal growing regions. So yes, expect the cost of breads to rise, and shortages of breads too.

    • Not to mention plagues of locusts, so far seemingly confined to Africa, and, why yes, labor shortages.
    1037:

    Duffy @ 1016:

    There are also proportionally fewer consumers, the potential purchasers of your goods and services.

    So capitalists find themselves in a situation where their markets are decreasing and labor costs increasing in real terms which each passing year.

    Does not follow. Yes, there are fewer people, but the market size is not defined in people, its defined in the dollars and pounds they have to spend. If the declining number of people have more money, the market size can still increase.

    Monetarism is fundamentally about balancing the money supply with the productive capacity of the economy. Too little and you get deflation. Too much and you get inflation. Just right, and you get economic growth.

    The problem with our current economy is that too much money is getting syphoned off to sit in stockpiles owned by the very wealthy, leaving less for ordinary people to spend, which causes deflation. Central banks try to compensate by pumping lots of money in via QE, but as fast as they pump the money in it just gets syphoned out by the very wealthy, which is why their proportion of the available money is growing so fast while everyone else's is stagnant. What we need to do is to get that money out from under the billionaire's mattresses.

    All of this is true regardless of whether the number of people is growing or shrinking.

    The total capacity of the economy may be shrinking due to having fewer people, but OTOH the available wealth is also spread around fewer people. The few physically limited resources (like land) have less pressure, so on balance the potential exists for everyone to be richer.

    Old people don't buy nearly as many things as young people who are starting families, buying homes, furniture, appliances, kids clothing etc.

    Only because they haven't got as much money in our current economy. Increase pensions!

    What old people do buy is services, especially medical services.

    R&D follows market trends and technological research in goods and manufacturing will dwindle proportionally with an increasing proportion of elderly in the populations. So technical progress languishes.

    No, it just gets redircted for a bit. Medicine is one of the most R&D intensive industries there is, and it depends on a lot of other industries like computing and high-end manufacturing. And if those old people have money then they will be wanting to spend it on entertainment, so lots of profit to be made there too.

    I'm kind of reminded of two of the Ferengi rules of acquisition:

    34: War is good for business.
    #35: Peace is good for business.

    Or for this disucssion:

    A growing population is good for business.
    A shrinking population is good for business.

    1038:

    Has anybody else noticed that the price of bread in supermarkets keeps going up and up?

    At my local Loblaws the price of a basic loaf of store-baked whole wheat bread has gone from $1.50 a year or so ago to $1.99 six months ago to $2.15 now.

    Time to dust off my breadmaker and see if I still remember the recipes I used to make…

    1039:

    I'd merely suggest that it's the same for Capitalism. It's more a label than a coherent ideology at this point.

    To a lot of people, it seems that Capitalism = Democracy. You can't have Democracy without Capitalism, and if it's Capitalist it's automatically Democratic*.

    It's an odd conflation, and when I've encountered it in situations where I can actually ask people questions it seems to be heavily entangled with an almost religious belief in American Exceptionalism.

    *Not in the political party sense.

    1040:

    RE: Food Prices

    We now have what appears to be a long term drought in America's west, coupled with rivers like the Colorado going dry and the Ogallala Aquifer being drained.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/16/american-south-west-drought-water?fbclid=IwAR24GoMWf4s6ChSuWymBu2xfQ2oMnedW0idyKg-q9l-Isad7v34ii7nzTnc

    You all might want to take up vegetable gardening as a "hobby" (I never did like mowing the lawn anyway)

    It might come in handy.

    1041:

    You all might want to take up vegetable gardening as a "hobby" (I never did like mowing the lawn anyway)

    Around here most of our dirt is red with lots of rocks that haven't quite made it to the dirt phase. A geologist I know calls it rotten granite. The black loam that actually grows things for eating has to be made or purchased.

    Plus I keep a push mower for my 1/3 acre lot as a way to keep my exercise up. Just switched to an electric 20".

    1042:

    Here are some suggestions for useful things to do, which I'm doing with my crappy soils:

    Watch Doug Tallamy's videos. If they don't inspire you to plant a few oaks on your property, you're dead inside. They won't give you acorns any time soon, but they will give you a bunch of insectivorous birds if you do it right.

    Then get one of the cheap-ass greenhouses from Harbor Freight. One of the things you want to have in that greenhouse is a nice worm bin system. Since redworms were domesticated in Egypt, they like it hot, so one job of the greenhouse is to keep them warm and happy through the cold seasons, so you don't get masses of flies instead of worms. Worm castings are better than compost for fertilizing your soil. Plus you can use the greenhouse to start garden plants and what have you. Plus you can use the worms for bait and put the fish scraps in the garden for the raccoons to dig up...

    Anyway, go have fun making raised beds with the no-till system of your choice, feed the grass clippings and veggie scraps to the worms to make more soil and fertilizer, and slowly spread out. You want no-till because you want to leave the soil as undisturbed as possible so that it holds the carbon accumulated from the dead roots. That's carbon farming on the really small scale. And best of all, you can be lazy about it.

    Now if you want to go nuts, rip out your lawn and plant an oak savanna. Aside from burning it occasionally (or similar), you won't have to tend it much at all...

    1043:

    paws Try THESE people - who do mail order of many sorts of flour - best rates are for between 20 & 30 kg, especially if you can order 10kg of one type of flour at a go inside that - as I do for the "hard" bread flour.

    1044:

    I will look for Doug Tallamy's videos

    I'm a big fan of the "Epic Gardner", Kevin Espiritu

    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=epic+gardener

    Especially this one on the minimum garden amount and vegetable variety needed to feed yourself and your family for a year with all necessary calories and nutrients (vegetarian diet - keeping chickens optional, though they are great for pest control):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysKFLtixxlc

    He's a big fan of Britain's Charles Dowding and his no-dig technique:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2tVCrGi7Ck

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MACArjSim00

    I also recommend Aussie Mark Valencia, "Self Sustainable Me"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3waibCUoKo

    I used to enjoy watching "Doomsday Preppers" on NatGeo, amazed at how well organized crazy people are.

    Maybe not so crazy...

    1045:

    As for worm harvesting you might like this flow through worm bin:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saxKFMpBdH0

    1046:

    The cheapest basic white 800g loaf in my local supermarket is 39 pence, ca. 50 cents US. I buy fancy-schmancy wholemeal bread I like the taste of (Hovis), it costs around £1.10 or, like today, sometimes on special offer at 99 pence. That's 800g again (or in obsolete US measures, 1.75 lb).

    1047:

    Capitalism, per se, is Ouroboros, esp. in a shrinking market.

    It always tries to eat competitors, to create monopolies. Don't take right now for evidence, look at the late 1800's.

    Oh, and there are economic reasons for having kids... except they're "externalities" now that most of us don't live on farms, and need more free labor - someone takes care of us when we need it, when we're older, assuming they live nearby.

    1048:

    I am astonished. Here in Canada, the presumptive 'breadbasket of the world' I typically pay about $2.49 ($1.80 US) for a loaf of brown bread, and the price goes up from there.

    There are always many bizarre localized price issues. I remember being annoyed that the price/lb of Pacific Salmon was cheaper in Ottawa than Vancouver when I had reason to travel between the two places often.

    1049:

    No, us olds do NOT buy more stuph. We tend to replace things that wear out, but a lot don't follow "fashion", and are not into "yeah, the one I have works, but it's not the NEWEST AND COOLEST", and we tend to not be swayed by ad campaigns to buy Stuph (I'm explicitly excluding political brainwashing here - that costs nothing except your sense).

    1050:

    When my late wife and I moved into Austin from the immobile home, we had a lawn. She got us a push mower.

    That lasted about a month. It would jam at almost the smallest twig, and have to have it pulled out.

    We went to an electric push mower. I'm on my second? third? since she bought our first. Oddly enough, I can do the whole yard, without waiting for a recharge. But then, it is corded....

    1051:

    Right. At Safeway, one of the huge chain stupormarkets, we buy rye bread, which we like. I buy the store brand (if they haven't so understocked that they're out), for about $2.49 or so (plus or minus ten cents). The next least expensive rye bread are from the big name commercial bakeries (Arnolds, etc)... and they are $1.50 more than the store brand.

    No, it's not quantity any more, it's exec salaries and bonuses.

    1052:

    What's this about an Australian trade deal negotiated by Brexiters that screws over British farmers/

    Aren't they the very people who voted for Brexit?

    And am I supposed to feel sorry for them?

    1053:

    Duffy Yes it's a giant con-trick ... which doesn't surprise me in the least. Yes, they are I TOLD YOU SO, idiots!

    1054:

    There is a reason why I refer to them as the "CON party". ;-)

    1055:

    Looks like I missed the discussion about whether shrinking populations are good for capitalism or not. My main critique of the discussion is that it focused primarily on goods (the secondary sector). In the EU, Labor Force Participation was 5% primary sector, and 21.9% secondary sector in 2014 (so the UK is counted in this). In the US, these numbers are 1 and 19% respectively in 2018. In Japan, it's 3 and 25%. The rest are services. The GDP percentages aren't that far off from this. Feel free to break down the EU numbers by individual country.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Japan

    So, looking at population dynamics through conspicuous consumption of goods is missing the point. It's also old fashioned. Since graduating college, it's been my anecdotal experience that most of my peers have been more focused on the conspicuous consumption of 'experience' over 'goods'. In other words: see this ancient monument, take a class in X, try this unique restaurant. Fashion, decor, etc still matter, but they're not as heavily emphasized as when I was growing up. Heck, there's a reason dating app profile bios emphasize the following, at least pre-pandemic

  • The type of work you do
  • Where you've lived (esp if in another country)
  • Where you've traveled (pre-pandemic)
  • Hobbies (post-pandemic)
  • The question is: how would a shrinking population affect this. Short answer: it's hard to say. These jobs would gain from more free time, but these jobs are also hard to automate. In short, I don't know.

    1056:

    Groceries on the Sunshine Coast are significantly more than they are here in the GTA.

    Part of the price of an item is what the market will bear; part is overhead for things like shop space. Being cynical, I always suspect the first especially in an oligopolistic system…

    1057:

    No, it's not quantity any more, it's exec salaries and bonuses.

    I think I've mentioned that when I moved from Saskatchewan to Alberta my car insurance went up 1000%? (Yes, ten times!)

    Both had nearly identical driving populations, and if anything Saskatchewan was a tad more expensive because it had sales tax, so things like cars were a bit cheaper in Alberta.

    The difference was that in Saskatchewan a Crown corporation ran insurance on a break-even basis*, while in Alberta it was all private corporations (with fancy offices, while SGI ran from a cinderblock building on the outskirts of Regina).

    Odd how the ingenuity and competition of private enterprise produced something ten times more expensive than a 'socialist enterprise' run for the common good. (Sarcasm, obviously.)

    I had an MBA insist that (a) shareholders expected, and deserved, the 20-30% return on investment that they got from insurance, and (b) it was obviously the best and most efficient system, and I was mistaken and there was no way SGI could be that much cheaper — because 'Capitalism always produces the best and most efficient solution to a problem'**.

    *I actually got a refund the year I left, because they were taking in more in premiums than they were paying out in claims (and overhead) so obviously the rates were too high. In Alberta that money would have gone to dividends and executive bonuses.

    **He was actually right, if the problem is "how do we extract as much money as possible from ordinary people without having to work for it?"

    1058:

    paws4thot @ 975: #971 - JBS, I don't know what year your Jeep is, but the rear lights may be a CANBus problem (aggh, software). I'd agree that the a/c may need a regas.

    It's a 2003 Liberty Sport. On some of the Jeep forums I've consulted that particular model is notorious for flaky tail lights and it's not any kind of on-board computer problem. The design of the sockets & connectors that hold the bulbs is not as good as it could (should?) be. Looks like I'll just be adding the lights to the list of stuff I'm going to have the mechanic look at. It's raining today & I ain't going out in it to try & troubleshoot electrical problems.

    [ ... and on Monday - didn't do ANYTHING on Sunday because the remnant of Tropical Storm Claudette was blowing through & the rain was coming down in buckets at times - BOTH tail light/brake light (dual filament) bulbs burned out. The turn signals are on a different bulb.]

    When I bought the Jeep, it was one of those deals you rarely run across where it sounds too good to be true, but in fact it IS true - almost everything I wanted, low mileage & a great price. I want to take a trip where I need the 4WD. I think the original owner might really have been one of those little old ladies who only drove it to church on Sunday.

    Even had the original tires with good tread left & when I found out about the real problem with 15 year old tires, replacing them only cost about $1,000. Pure dumb luck it happened while I was in a college town the week after graduation, all the kids had gone for the summer, the tire store was discounting heavily & he had those 4 tires in stock. Supply & demand. If I'd showed up with my problem the week after school started in the fall, those tires would have cost me three times as much (or more).

    I think the refrigerant for the A/C may be part of the problem, but I think mostly it's just a design that isn't really sized for cooling a black vehicle in severe clear sunlight with high temperature & humidity.

    [ ... recharged + added dye to the refrigerant so we can see if there's a leak somewhere. I think it's been two years since it was last serviced and they do run down over time. That's why the government mandated a change to a type of refrigerant that doesn't deplete the ozone layer. I could already tell the difference in the 4 miles I drove to go get gas after I picked it up. Today's weather is similar to Saturday's hot & humid heat index over 100°F.
    Plus, I got the tires rotated & an oil change; preventive maintenance right on schedule.]

    I have this desire (won't call it a plan, it's not that organized ...) to go out to the south-western U.S. to do photography. I got the Jeep because there are some locations that the law requires you to have 4WD or stay out. They will impound your vehicle if they catch you in there without it.

    I'm not in a position where I could get my equipment out there if I were to fly & renting a 4WD vehicle after I got there would eat me alive. I wouldn't have resources left for the photography. My health is failing and I figure I've got a window 18-24 months before I get so decrepit I won't be able to make it. Based on Saturday, maybe not even that long. This little adventure was partly a test of whether I can physically do it & partly a test to see if I can figure out how to organize the big trip. What do I need to include in my planning?

    1059:

    Paul @ 998: Yes, of COURSE its a much more complicated story than that. Unfortunately the entire history of Western Europe is a bit too long to fit into one of these comments.

    Oh yeah? Hold my beer ... 8^)

    1060: 1060 - JBS, Yes, a 2003 vehicle is almost certainly pre-CANBus. I'd agree about not hunting wiring issues in the rain, but also agree it's probably one or more of bad sockets, loose connectors and bad earth points. I've even seen cases where the base issue was that the bulbs were slightly loose in the bulb holders.

    As for the law mandating 4WD, the first physical law of 4WD traction states 4x0 = 2x0 = 0.0.

    1061 - Should that not be "Hold my brewery!"?
    1061:

    Duffy @ 1042:RE: Food Prices

    We now have what appears to be a long term drought in America's west, coupled with rivers like the Colorado going dry and the Ogallala Aquifer being drained.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/16/american-south-west-drought-water?fbclid=IwAR24GoMWf4s6ChSuWymBu2xfQ2oMnedW0idyKg-q9l-Isad7v34ii7nzTnc

    I don't think that's it. Drought implies an abnormal lack of rain. We went through an abnormally wet period that lasted hundreds of years. Now that's ending. What we're seeing in the western U.S. is a return to long term norms.

    You all might want to take up vegetable gardening as a "hobby" (I never did like mowing the lawn anyway)

    It might come in handy.

    I dunno. Seems to me like just chopping everything off an inch or two high is a lot easier than pulling weeds out of a garden.

    1062:

    Paws @1062 "As for the law mandating 4WD, the first physical law of 4WD traction states 4x0 = 2x0 = 0.0."

    I spent some years working in Northern BC and Alberta as a treeplanting foreman (after some other years as a treeplanter).

    The best piece of advice given to me by the owner of the company, when handing me the keys to a fancy new 4x4 pickup truck, was as follows: "4WD is for getting out of trouble, not getting into it".

    The number of times I found myself stuck on a remote mud road somewhere, switched in the 4wd, and simply backed out of it cannot be counted. The number of my peers who somehow equated 4wd with unstoppable were similarly uncountable.

    One of the trucks I had came with a huge winch mounted to an impressive looking front bumper. Another truck had the road collapse under it and sank up to the doors, so I dutifully hooked up the winch from a safe distance and began reeling it in. After about 30 seconds the 3/4" metal screws that attached the entire bumper assembly to the front of the truck parted, and the whole thing plopped onto the ground. Much truck advertising is bullshit.

    1063:

    $xWD Yes, well ... My beloved Land-Rover is in permanent 4WD, but ... Once or twice, even on "ordinary" roads I've had to engage either locking the front-to-back differential &/or go into "low ratio" ( i.e. the extra bottom gearbox ) Worked a treat - I once drove up a packed-down-snow-covered hill I could not stand on ....

    1064:

    Oddly enough, I can do the whole yard, without waiting for a recharge. But then, it is corded....

    What most people don't realize is when they buy a battery tool they are really buying into a battery system. I got into Ryobi 25 years ago or more. My NiCad batteries have long been recycled but all my old tools still work with their latest 18v LIon batteries. And when my kids went out on their own, but in the area, I gave them 18v tool sets. We can all swap / trade them around as needed. My daughter has a 16" mower for the 1/12 or so acre they mow. It runs on 2 of the 18V 4AH batteries. Will usually do the entire yard. They have 4 batteries for that and their tools so it works well.

    When my wife wanted a leaf blower I went with a 40v that would fit what I figured would be my next mower. I just bought the mower. So now I have a 6AH and a 4AH battery which will do my yard. (Before anyone yells the leaf blower is mostly to deal with the oak and magnolia piles that drop in waves. We don't blow them into the street or sewer.)

    1065:

    As for the law mandating 4WD, the first physical law of 4WD traction states 4x0 = 2x0 = 0.0.

    What JBS is referring to are there are many passes through the mountains where it snows 9 months a year. They plow it regularly but there is almost always a bit of snow and slush on the road. And with most 4WD you get better anti-slip performance. So they just say 4WD, instead of keeping a list of cars that do well in the snow.

    Keeps the idiots at bay. Mostly.

    1066:

    paws4thot @ 1062: #1060 - JBS, Yes, a 2003 vehicle is almost certainly pre-CANBus. I'd agree about not hunting wiring issues in the rain, but also agree it's probably one or more of bad sockets, loose connectors and bad earth points. I've even seen cases where the base issue was that the bulbs were slightly loose in the bulb holders.
    As for the law mandating 4WD, the first physical law of 4WD traction states 4x0 = 2x0 = 0.0.

    In the 2003 Jeep Liberty it appears to be bad sockets + loose connectors + bad earth points + loose bulbs + burned out filaments in the bulbs. Like I said, on the Jeep forums taillights for the Jeep Liberty are notorious for their flakiness. But you don't need a computer to fuck 'em up.

    As for the law requiring 4WD to access certain areas in the west ... I didn't write the law. I could probably manage to drive it with only 2WD ... until they impounded my car and I ended up on foot.

    #1061 - Should that not be "Hold my brewery!"?

    Nah, rednecks don't own breweries. Beer comes in cans, bottles, 6-packs, 12-packs, cases & kegs. You can't buy a brewery at the 7/11 mini-mart. And even if you could, it wouldn't fit in a bass boat.

    "Hold my beer" is the standard response to any redneck challenge of "You can't do ...".

    But mainly "hold my beer" is the redneck mantra that, along with "and watch this", has preceded many a valiant Darwin Award attempt.

    1067:

    David L @ 1067:

    As for the law mandating 4WD, the first physical law of 4WD traction states 4x0 = 2x0 = 0.0.

    What JBS is referring to are there are many passes through the mountains where it snows 9 months a year. They plow it regularly but there is almost always a bit of snow and slush on the road. And with most 4WD you get better anti-slip performance. So they just say 4WD, instead of keeping a list of cars that do well in the snow.

    Keeps the idiots at bay. Mostly.

    There's that too, although most of the ones I know about require you to have snow chains rather than 4WD.

    There are places on Bureau of Land Management land, National Parks & National Monuments where there are no roads. What they do have is centuries old wagon ruts & trails. It's as much about ground clearance as it is about traction. But it's mainly about reducing the cost to the government of having someone go out & retrieve you if you get stuck.

    Plus, sometimes people get stuck, abandon their vehicles & die. The government doesn't want to deal with that shit either.

    But if you can make it (and if you can make it back) the views are magnificent and you'll have photos to remember when you get home again.

    1068:

    But it's mainly about reducing the cost to the government of having someone go out & retrieve you if you get stuck.

    When you get to the main entrance of Monument Valley you are really in the middle of no where. And the part is all (or almost all) on Navajo land. There are two ways to take a tour. Sign up with one of the Navajo groups or drive it in your own car. There are two parts of the sales pitch.

  • We can take you to twice as many places as you're allowed to go on your own.

  • If the fine dust clogs your radiator and your engine stops from heat or for whatever reason the tow from the nearest town where they will come and get you is at least $200.

  • 1069:

    Concerning tail lights, the socket & lamp have tin plated connectors, which can oxidize, as "Nintendroids" of a certain age can verify. If you decide to change the bulbs yourself, insert, pull out and reinsert to polish the socket a bit, you may not need to resort to treating the socket with something like "Deoxit" or replacing the socket.

    1070:

    Got my 23&Me results - 99.8% European (92.1% British & Irish - Greater London and/or County Kerry; 7.5% French & German; 0.2% "Broadly Northwestern European") and 0.2% "trace" Ethiopian & Eritrean.

    Plain vanilla, plain vanilla & plain vanilla with a hint of spice, but I have 40% more Neanderthal variants than 40% of 23&Me customers (which still puts me at less than 2%).

    Found some possible cousins. I'm not from a close family, so I don't know many members of my extended family & that makes me sad.

    1071:

    David L @ 1070:

    But it's mainly about reducing the cost to the government of having someone go out & retrieve you if you get stuck.

    When you get to the main entrance of Monument Valley you are really in the middle of no where. And the part is all (or almost all) on Navajo land. There are two ways to take a tour. Sign up with one of the Navajo groups or drive it in your own car. There are two parts of the sales pitch.

    1. We can take you to twice as many places as you're allowed to go on your own.

    2. If the fine dust clogs your radiator and your engine stops from heat or for whatever reason the tow from the nearest town where they will come and get you is at least $200.

    Monument Valley is a little bit different because it's tribal lands and they want to control who comes in. I've done the part that you can do driving your own car (in a 2WD sedan) and I don't think the dust is that much of a problem. The first part, that they can take you into places you would not be otherwise allowed to enter is a good reason for taking the tour. The time I was there I didn't have time to take that tour. It's one of the reasons I want to go back. Next time I'll make sure I'm not in such a rush.

    Another place I want to visit again and take the tour is Canyon de Chelly. There are very limited places you're allowed to go on your own because of tribal lands. I signed up for that tour, but it got cancelled the morning I was there to take it due to inclement weather (flash flooding). That's another one on my list to go back to. I did make the hike down to the White House Monument (and back up), but that's the only place I know where I was allowed to go into the canyon without a guide or a ranger leading the group.

    Tim H. @ 1071: Concerning tail lights, the socket & lamp have tin plated connectors, which can oxidize, as "Nintendroids" of a certain age can verify. If you decide to change the bulbs yourself, insert, pull out and reinsert to polish the socket a bit, you may not need to resort to treating the socket with something like "Deoxit" or replacing the socket.

    It's also just a push in connector, not a bayonet. I think the bulbs vibrate loose too easily.

    I found out that "they" make an after-market exact fit replacement LED tail lamp assembly, and I'm thinking about them. I've got to call the place that sells them & find out more about them. The write up says it doesn't have a back-up light socket & I need to know what I'd have to do to have back-up lights. The LED replacement tail lights are almost $300, but would be worth it if I could stop worrying about problems with them.

    They also do a LED replacement for the head-light assemblies, and those are almost $700 ... EACH. I haven't had any problems with the headlights, so it will be a while before I consider them.

    1072:

    It's also just a push in connector, not a bayonet. I think the bulbs vibrate loose too easily.

    Car filament lamps are almost universally bayonet-fitting because of vibration. Some items like interior lights might be tubular to fit in slim-line holders but not running-lights. I'm surprised a putatively off-road vehicle used simple push-in lamps at all.

    LED cluster lamps are a different thing, they usually don't need replacing for life-of-the-car and, properly designed and manufactured they won't have a problem with vibration.

    1073:

    Worked a treat - I once drove up a packed-down-snow-covered hill I could not stand on ....

    Yep. My old long gone Ford Explorer had a special low gear setting where all 4 wheels/axles were locked. Cornering on dry pavement was noisy. But on packed snow or crunchy ice it was great. Engage it, let the engine idle, and creep anywhere you needed to go.

    1074:

    Watch Doug Tallamy's videos. If they don't inspire you to plant a few oaks on your property, you're dead inside. They won't give you acorns any time soon, but they will give you a bunch of insectivorous birds if you do it right.

    That's kind of what I'm thinking if I wind up here long term.

    I'm 67 and doubt I'll stay in my current HOUSE more than 5 years. Way too many steps and must use rooms on separate floors to age in gracefully. So I do plan to plant a few privacy shrubbery around the edges (I took out nearly 20 CRAP trees 9 years ago and it is amazing to have only a few real trees and an actual YARD.)

    Anyway, my current house, the building, is a tear down. Either by me or whoever I sell the property to. If I do it I'll replace it with something we can age in and then plant some nice trees that will mostly benefit the next owner or few.

    Currently I have large oak that may be nearly end of life. But for now every 4 years or so I get way more than 1000 gallons by volume of acorns of which I have to clean up at least 1/3 to keep people walking on the side walk from suing me.

    1075: 1064, #1065, #1067, #1068 Para 3 - Yes, my point was that, IRL if not in a legislature's committee rooms, a good driver with 2WD will get stuck less often than an idiot with 4WD. 1068 paras 4-8 - "Hold my brewery" is a joke on "hold my beer" and just how long it takes to write a history of a civilisation. 1073 on back-up (UK reversing) lights - It's been a while since, but it used to be possible to buy suitable (legal wattage, clear diffuser lens) light units for about $16 (UK £10) each from accessory shops. 1074 - My Octavia does have push-fit front sidelight bulbs, but all the others are bayonet caps regardless of wattage. 1067 Para the last - Oddly specific quantity of acorns. :)
    1076:

    Well I'm not talking about an ideology as such, but rather an activity. It seems like you're talking about the use of "capitalism" as an overarching term for economy in general, incorporating everything from markets and trade to accounting and so on. And to me it seems you're talking about removing the actual capitalism (the use of capital to invest for profit... the world we live in where the ROI is higher than GDP growth) from it. I don't dispute what you're saying, I think you're just using terms differently to the way I understand them.

    Whereas surely the real question is whether GDP growth is sustainable in a closed system - that is, a single market. I say isomorphism above, but metaphor is more or less as good for the sake of argument. We have learned that creating value by releasing stored fossil fuel energy is not a good closed-system. But that could just be an accident, and using a different energy source we can still grow value (yes of course without population growth, though population growth is a reliable standby that many countries still fall back on) could be make it sustainable? History doesn't support that very well... again, capitalism happened adjacent to colonialism and probably would not have happened without it.

    I agree about incremental change, incidentally. I just don't think that is "radical".

    1077:

    Oddly specific quantity of acorns

    Every 4 years or so I get to shovel up and fill them into large garbage containers. I figure I clean up about 1/3 of them that are in my area of the sidewalk, driveway, etc... The ones in the yard I leave for the squirrels.

    After doing this 4 or 5 times over the years you remember the effort. How often do you clean up yard waste with a snow shovel? A typical year is 8 to 12 full containers. Which the yard waste guys don't want to pick up due to the weight. (I got a note one year with the weight reason checked.) So last 2 drops I have loaded them into my truck and take them to the yard waste center myself.

    Well you got me to do the math. About 25-30 gallons per can of acorns, 8 to 12 cans per drop season, 1/3 (SWAG estimate) of total. So yes, around 1000 gallons. Some drops bigger than others.

    I think you meant my comment 1076.

    1078:

    I did; typo.

    1079:

    Heteromeles @ 1034: I'd merely suggest that it's the same for Capitalism. It's more a label than a coherent ideology at this point.

    The original meaning of "capitalism" of course is not an ideology but an observational description of how the economy works. Nobody actually sat down and thought "this is how society should work", it just evolved. Adam Smith then figured out what was really going on, and his description came to be called "capitalism".

    A few threads ago I complained that socialists have no plan for how a socialist society would work, and I was roundly criticised for sticking to the original definition of socialism and excluding the more recent meaning of capitalism-with-a-bigger-safety-net.

    Of course this dilution of the word "socialism" is due to the economic right-wing, especially in the US, who use "socialism" as a bogey-word to mean "any government policy I don't like". Once they redefined "socialism" to include better social safety nets, the economic right-wing then talked about how "socialist" systems in places like the USSR destroyed freedom, and hence only "capitalism" (meaning, "not-socialism") could provide freedom. Hence any form of "socialism", including better social safety nets, was automatically guaranteed to destroy political freedom. This bit of equivocation really needs to be called out more often.

    So part of this equivocation-enabling redefinition of socialism has been the redefinition of "capitalism" to be an ideology that is set up in opposition to socialism, and this has led to the equating of "capitalism" with freedom because "socialism" is equated with tyranny.

    And capitalists tend to violently freak out when someone proposes an alternative system like communism or socialism, but they accept all sorts of BS if it's presented as improving capitalism. Therefore, the answer to getting a system that's more amenable to dealing with climate change is to change what's labeled as capitalism, not to replace the label.

    I very much agree, partly for the practical political reason you describe, but also for a more strategic reason. There still isn't a plan for how a socialist state would operate, and in the absence of any practical plan the only option is to reform capitalism.

    Fortunately only the most swivel-eyed libertarian will deny the existence of public goods. Does capitalism need a regulatory state? Of course it does. When I buy a carton of milk I can't make a personal inspection of the dairy, or verify what drugs may have been administered to the cows, or check that they are up to date on their Bovine TB tests. I have to rely on the government to do these things. Libertarians proffer ideas about reputation and voluntary industry standards verification bodies, but that's no good either, because given half a dozen different such bodies, how do I check which ones enforce standards sufficient to keep me healthy and which ones are just rubber stamps?

    (I recall debating with one such person where I suggested that street lights are a public good. He responded by pointing at light pollution, and argued that lack of street lighting isn't a ptoblem because darkness is public good).

    So the economic left needs to roll with the blow. Ditch the word "socialism", explcitly reject any rhetoric about the end of capitalism (including "late-stage capitalism", whatever that means) and instead start arguing for better capitalism. How about "We need to make capitalism work for the {insert-nationality} People" as a sound bite?

    Going back to the environment, once you admit that the climate is a public good and that climate change is real, the role of government in regulating CO2 becomes obvious. Its not "socialist" to regulate emissions, its actually pro-capitalist because it makes the world safe for capitalist economies to flourish.

    1080:

    Paul Already been done: "Capitalism with a human face" was the phrase

    1081:

    IN OTHER NEWS ...

    I just bit the bullet and bought a worldcon membership for this December in DC.

    And then I booked a hotel room.

    (The latter, at least, is cancelable if I can't make it.)

    What this means is: I'm going to make a best personal effort to make it to DisCon III, which will be my first in-person convention post-COVID19, and my first US convention since Boskone in February 2016. And if I make it, I'll be signing books on US soil for the first time in five years.

    Note that this may not happen. I gather the US isn't currently recognizing the AstraZeneca vaccine as a vaccine, for entry purposes, and guess what I've got? (However, this is probably a regulatory snafu and hopefully will get cleared up.)

    I won't be traveling if there's a significant outbreak in progress at one end or the other (Edinburgh or DC), or if I'm expected to quarantine for 10-14 days in one direction, or if it doesn't seem reasonably safe to travel. Bear in mind at least one of my flights in each direction will be 6-9 hours long. About the shortest route looks to be EDI-JFK, then plane or train from New York to DC, but that assumes the Delta shuttle flight EDI-JFK has survived COVID19. I might end up instead being routed EDI-CDG/CDG-DC, or even via Frankfurt, depending on what's still flying, and which hubs I'm allowed to use (not an EU citizen any more, so the EU hubs may want to keep toxic COVID-saturated Brits out of their terminals).

    1082:

    ... Which is to say: I think it's probably about 50/50 whether or not I can make it to worldcon this year, but I'm going to try. (Not just for the convention, it's also a business trip: my agent and my editors are all going to be there.)

    1083:

    Greg @ 1082: Already been done: "Capitalism with a human face" was the phrase

    Googling, that seems to have been a book by Samual Brittan. Unfortunately it seems to be out of print and not avaialble as an e-book. There are some 2nd hand copies floating around at inflated prices, but I don't think I want to pay ~£20 to read it.

    The book was published 25 years ago. Maybe its time to try the idea again, possibly with a different strap-line.

    1084:

    "Capitalism with a human face"

    Whose face was it wearing?

    1085:

    What do I need to include in my planning?

    Hudson's Bay Start, definitely.

    Make your first stop a few miles from home. Set up camp and do some photography — all the things you want to do on your trip. Yes, it will mean unpacking the carefully packed jeep. But it also ensures that the thing you thought was there really is there, and it will be easy to go home and get it.

    If you're going solo, sort out communications and rescue (especially if your health is dodgy). Cell coverage is sparse, so buy or rent a satellite phone. My brother-in-law says 4WD just means you get stuck in places that are more expensive to get a tow :-)

    Might be worth buying some extra insurance that would cover things like getting you home in the event of a medical emergency, if your current insurance doesn't cover that. (Depends on what your medical issues are, of course.)

    Seriously think about how you back up your data. It would be a shame to go on the trip and discover that your pictures are corrupted and you don't have any! My rule of thumb when travelling was each card is backed up to two different drives once a day. Point source failure nodes being my computer (needed to run the drives) and the card while in the camera.

    Dusty environment will be hard on camera gear. Consider a rain sleeve — not for rain, but to help keep dust out of lenses. Dust can get into the focusing gears and grind away possibly jamming the lens. Weatherproof lenses are better but still not immune to this.

    1086:

    "(However, this is probably a regulatory snafu and hopefully will get cleared up.)"

    We can hope, but I have been looking at the news on that for a while and related topics for much longer, and it looks awfully like part of the USA's ongoing commercial colonisation of the UK. My guess is that it will be settled only if the UK agrees to sell of yet more of the NHS to the USA biomedical complex.

    Don't expect haggis to be permitted in the USA in return, either!

    1087:

    Does capitalism need a regulatory state? Of course it does.

    Deborah Blum's book The Poison Squad is a fascinating look at how a government chemist pushed for food safety standards. Interesting that the arguments for not regulating arsenic dyes in candy are the same as those used for not regulating any commercial activity: consumers will avoid dangerous products on their own, so the market will self-regulate.

    Which is, of course, a bovine-byproduct argument.

    1088:

    I gather the US isn't currently recognizing the AstraZeneca vaccine as a vaccine, for entry purposes,/i>

    My vaccine card says that my dose of AstraZeneca was manufactured in the US.

    I feel so much more confident now, knowing that I was injected with something that is considered insufficient protection :-/

    (To further muddy the waters, that shipment was technically a loan from America, because they weren't cleared to export vaccines at that time because America needed them for its own citizens, so the legal workaround to let the company meet it's contract was that Canada was borrowing the vaccines and we would return them, or an equivalent amount.)

    1089:

    What do I need to include in my planning?

    Never been on that kind of expedition, but we've done a lot of camping. We have a packing checklist. Its 4 columns long on a sheet of A4. If you don't already have one then create one on your computer. Then print a copy and leave it handy so that every time you think of something else you can add it by hand, and then later go back and add all those extra things to the computer copy in nice categories.

    (If you've been camping a few times then you can ignore much of the following because you will already know it.).

    Don't rely on the cheap wire pegs that ship with tents. Get yourself some proper "rock" pegs, and also a decent rubber or wooden mallet with a bit of mass to it. Also spare guy lines. Set up the tent at least once in your back garden so you know how its done. (I recall one trip where we helped one guy plus his 10 year old niece to set up their tent in a howing gale. He was the most ineffectual and helpless person I've ever encountered. Instruction leaflet? He thought there might have been one once. His niece was much more practical).

    Consider getting a roof box. You might be able to fit everything in the back of the jeep, but having a bit of spare space makes it a lot easier to get at that thing you packed underneath everything else.

    If you plan to rely on air mattresses then pack at least one spare. Those things get leaky surprisingly fast, and repair kits don't work well, even if you can find the leak. Also, invest in an electric air pump. You can do it by hand, but its a lot of unnecessary work at a time when you really don't feel like it. Or you could go for a folding camp bed. Don't scrimp; cheap ones get saggy after only a couple of weeks.

    Check out the wildlife where you are going. If there is anything dangerous then know the relevant precautions. (Can't speak much to this because the most dangerous wildlife I've ever had to worry about are adders).

    Even if you aren't camping, think about a kettle and one-ring butane stove for heating water for lunch (pot noodles etc) or tea/coffee.

    Learn How To Shit In The Woods. Then you know what to do when caught short miles from anywhere.

    Think about how to charge your electronics, and then get two of everything. You'll probably need mains inverters for your laptop. They take a lot of charge from the car battery, so your best bet is to leave the laptop charging while driving. That way you don't risk a flat battery.

    You can get reversible USB connectors and USB SD-card connectors. That should let you transfer your pictures to your phone or tablet if your laptop fails. If you can get a high-capacity micro-SD card for said phone/tablet then so much the better. Not all devices will work with reverse-USB, so look into it first. Alternatively use micro-SD cards in the camera and then just plug them into the socket in the phone/tablet for copying, if you have enough memory.

    On safety; make sure that someone knows where you are going each day and when you plan to check back in. That way if you don't make it back for any reason there should be search parties in the right area the following day. A sat-phone is good, but its quite possible that the same fall that broke your leg also smashed the phone.

    A handheld GPS is a useful device. You can get versions of Open Street Map for a lot of models, so you don't need to pay extra for maps. They are ruggedised and waterproof so they can stand being dropped, unlike your phone.

    Step ladders are good for landscape photography. Lots of landscapes look better from a slightly higher elevation. Pack some wedges so you can level it before you climb it.

    Monopods are good if you plan on walking a long way. They give you a lot of the stability of a tripod with a fraction of the weight and size. Plus it can double as a walking pole.

    1090:

    Don't expect haggis to be permitted in the USA in return, either!

    You assume someone in the US might want it. There's a scene from a US TV comedy where someone is cooking haggis for the first time and when someone walked in the kitchen they asked if the cook was working on "fried vomit".

    As to the vaccine issues, I suspect that acceptance is based on FDA approval. Which costs money and time. Which the AZ folks might not want to spend. (The US already has 3 or 4 in use so why would they want to be a late 5th choice?) So the two countries get to negotiate and review each others expedited vaccine approval data and maybe approved each others'.

    1091:

    "Whether GDP is sustainable in a closed system"... thank you very much for that.

    I'm stealing it, for use in the book after my next book. It will go well with a comment about how 1600's-1700's, and late 1700's-1912, the British pound gained 5% in value... and so was stable twice, for a hundred years at a time.

    1092:

    Paul@1039 writes: "The problem with our current economy is that too much money is getting syphoned off to sit in stockpiles owned by the very wealthy, leaving less for ordinary people to spend, which causes deflation. Central banks try to compensate by pumping lots of money in via QE, but as fast as they pump the money in it just gets syphoned out by the very wealthy, which is why their proportion of the available money is growing so fast while everyone else's is stagnant. What we need to do is to get that money out from under the billionaire's mattresses."

    https://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/click/24215714.170998/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmxvb21iZXJnLmNvbS9uZXdzL2FydGljbGVzLzIwMjEtMDYtMjEvZ2F0ZXMtcy1kaXZvcmNlLWNhc3RzLWhhcnNoLWdsYXJlLW9uLTE3MC1iaWxsaW9uLW1vbmV5LW1hbmFnZXI_dXRtX21lZGl1bT1lbWFpbCZ1dG1fc291cmNlPW5ld3NsZXR0ZXImdXRtX3Rlcm09MjEwNjIxJnV0bV9jYW1wYWlnbj1zaGFyZXRoZXZpZXc/60aac49a8c9b8166866a2e00B19b6dcdb

    California started taxing capital gains, and took in so much revenue they got a 75 billion dollar surplus, now the governor declared the largest tax rebate in history. If the real story is as encouraging as it sounds, more states will jump on that bandwagon sooner or later. Be funny if that's all it took to break the billionaire logjam, taxing the gains on stock and bond sales the same as if they were an individual's salary or a company's profit.

    1093:

    Sorry, but I think you're confusing all socialism with the variety called "communism", as well as the variety practiced in the USSR.

    Let's see, ownership of the means of production. In the mid-1800's, that meant factories. As I'm going to write in my political book, if I ever get another round tuit*, now that means ownership of the capital that controls factories, etc.

    • I have one roud tuit from the Glasgow in '95 bid, and it's getting old. I suggested to the Glasgow in '24 bid that they offer them, and they appear to like the idea....
    1094:

    Far out. Assuming it all works out, I'm looking forward to seeing you in person, since Balticon in the teens.

    Oh - and NYC->DC, if you take the train, you get off at Union Station DC, and the Red Line direct to down the block from the hotel. Had the Wardman not gone under, you would have come up from the Metro into the hotel, directly. sigh

    1095:

    I've not found air mattresses get leaky that fast. I will note, though, that some come with their own plug-in electric pump. An extension cord from the adapter in the cigarette lighter works just fine. (Oh, that's right, now they're calling them accessory power, or something like that.)

    We have a queen-sized airbed to fit in our tent.

    DO NOT GET a cheap Coleman or some such tent. Do have at least a three-season sleeping bag - some of the places you're talking about are cold at night.

    1096:

    They probably would if they got a chance to actually try it. It's jolly nice.

    1097:

    Very important item of camping equipment is a 3kW site radiant and a 19kg propane bottle to run it from. If you tip it horizontal you can use it as a cooker and in its normal position it will keep you warm all night (ears, toes and tips of noses included). If you're going in a car anyway so you can carry the propane bottle in the first place, it's daft not to.

    1098:

    Largest ( currently ) tidal turbine on the planet so far ... YouTube video on the subject Interesting

    1099: 1081 - More Adam Smith, and specifically "An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations", which was a generalised first ever work on what is now called "economics", have come be be misnamed "(liberal) capitalism" I think. If you actually read what he said properly, he was not in favour of unbridled capitalism. For example, he did say "a poll tax, rigorously collected, is very efficient to collect." He then went on to add "It would never be introduced in a nation where 'great account' is taken of the people."
    1100:

    paws A Smith was quite scathing on Cartels & price-fixing by groups determined to fleece the public & their employees, as well ....

    1101:

    Interesting. And it does look like an aircraft.

    I'll note that Doc Smith mentioned such machines for generating power in Skylark Three, published (serialized) in 1030.

    1102:

    Nojay @ 1074:

    It's also just a push in connector, not a bayonet. I think the bulbs vibrate loose too easily.

    Car filament lamps are almost universally bayonet-fitting because of vibration. Some items like interior lights might be tubular to fit in slim-line holders but not running-lights. I'm surprised a putatively off-road vehicle used simple push-in lamps at all.

    I'm not surprised at all. It's the same old story.
    Why do the manufacturers give you a $2.00 jack with a $20,000 vehicle?
    Because they ran out of the $1.00 jacks.
    This vehicle was manufactured by Daimler-Chrysler Corporation. They cheaped out every chance they got. They should have used bayonet connectors. They learned absolutely nothing from the collapse of the U.S. automotive industry in the 70s & 80s when the Japanese manufacturers ate their lunch because they manufactured better quality vehicles than the U.S. manufacturers.

    The really sad part of the story is the Japanese manufacturers appear to have learned from the U.S. manufacturers instead of it being the other way around. Our quality didn't go up, but theirs sure has come down.

    I had to go to the store this afternoon (time to restock dog food). I checked the tail lights & turn signals before I drove off to go to the store. I can put the transfer case in neutral & the transmission in reverse & get out (wheels chocked) to check the backup lights.

    I already have one tail light that's not working even though I had them "repaired" yesterday. Turn signals & backup lights are good. I've got to figure out a way to test the brake lights without having to get another person to help (by watching them or stepping on the brake for me while I watch them).

    LED cluster lamps are a different thing, they usually don't need replacing for life-of-the-car and, properly designed and manufactured they won't have a problem with vibration.

    The problem with vibration is because Daimler-Chrysler used the wrong kind of cheap ass connectors for the tail lamps. They saved $0.50 per vehicle in the cost of manufacturing at the expense of endless headaches for their customers.

    I ordered the replacement LED tail light assemblies. I talked to the vendor today & found out what I needed to know about the back-up lights and went ahead & ordered them. They should be here by Monday. Even if I have to modify the wiring to get a solid connection, I can't see it being a bigger problem than the crap stock fitting that won't even work for 24 hours.

    1103:

    paws4thot @ 1077: #1064, #1065, #1067, #1068 Para 3 - Yes, my point was that, IRL if not in a legislature's committee rooms, a good driver with 2WD will get stuck less often than an idiot with 4WD.

    Yeah, I agree with that. Someone else mentioned "4WD is for getting out of trouble, not for getting into it". That's going to be my philosophy. In my case 4WD is strictly for legal compliance, not becaue I think I'm going to need it ... although I might use it, mainly to exercise it occasionally to make sure it's still working if I ever do need to use it.

    #1068 paras 4-8 - "Hold my brewery" is a joke on "hold my beer" and just how long it takes to write a history of a civilisation.

    Hadn't thought of that. Wasn't thinking of actually writing a history of a civilization or how long it would take. I was just making a joke about how verbose some of my other comments have been.

    #1073 on back-up (UK reversing) lights - It's been a while since, but it used to be possible to buy suitable (legal wattage, clear diffuser lens) light units for about $16 (UK £10) each from accessory shops.

    The specs on the web page were not well written. It doesn't have LED reversing lamps, but there is a hole where the factory incandescent reversing lamp will fit. You have to supply your own bulb. (I talked to them on the telephone today).

    #1074 - My Octavia does have push-fit front sidelight bulbs, but all the others are bayonet caps regardless of wattage.

    Daimler-Chrysler should have used bayonet sockets on the Jeep. They fucked up. But I'm the one stuck with the problem.

    #1067 Para the last - Oddly specific quantity of acorns. :)

    I have walnut trees in my yard. I didn't plant them, the squirrels did.

    1104:

    dpb @ 1086:

    "Capitalism with a human face"

    Whose face was it wearing?

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/54/Leatherface1974.jpg

    1105:

    If some of you remember the Seat 14C (?) story collection from a year or so back, I ran across a "contest" for short stories about nuclear weapons ... why do we still need them or why should we still worry about them:

    https://inkstickmedia.com/short-story-contest-breaking-through-nuclear-apathy/

    1106:

    I've got to figure out a way to test the brake lights without having to get another person to help (by watching them or stepping on the brake for me while I watch them).

    An appropriate stick between front of seat and brake pedal. But a flat something on the seat end to keep it from poking a hole in the seat. Then adjust the seat forward to keep the presure up. You will likely have to hold the brake down with your foot before you put pressure on the "stick".

    Or get a $3 or so clamp from Harbor Freight or North Tool (Lowes and HD will have them at double that price) and use it instead of a stick. You can add tension via the hand grip without as much hassle as a stick. (You can reverse them so they are an expander instead of the default compression clamp.)

    Another option is to get a cheap mirror (https://www.trianglerestores.org/raleigh) and prop it up behind your jeep. Then you can just look in the rear view mirror.

    1107:

    I'll note that Doc Smith mentioned such machines for generating power in Skylark Three, published (serialized) in 1030.

    Very forward looking fellow that Doc Smith he was.

    1108:

    No, my point was that it was the Right who deliberately conflated the two.

    1109:

    Found this today:

    This cross-sectional study used administrative health care data on 2.9 million households from the first 45 weeks of 2020 and found that, among households in the top decile of county COVID-19 prevalence, those with birthdays had 8.6 more diagnoses per 10 000 individuals compared with households without a birthday, a relative increase of 31% of county-level prevalence, an increase in COVID-19 diagnoses of 15.8 per 10 000 persons after a child birthday, and an increase in COVID-19 diagnoses of 5.8 per 10 000 among households with an adult birthday.

    This cross-sectional study suggests that birthdays, which likely correspond with social gatherings and celebrations, were associated with increased rates of diagnosed COVID-19 infection within households in counties with high COVID-19 prevalence.

    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2781306

    Looks like the methodology holds up, but I'm nowhere near an expert. Does anyone with better research chops have an opinion on this?

    1110:

    "Capitalism with a human face"

    Whose face was it wearing?

    The one that has a boot stamping on it, of course. Wasn't needed by the original owner anymore.

    1111:

    If you actually read what he said

    Most people that quote Smith haven't done that, in my experience. If they had, bankers and venture capitalists wouldn't be so fond of quoting him — what he says about them is distinctly unflattering…

    Come to that, his opinion on organizations like the Chamber of Commerce is also pretty scathing!

    1112:

    "I've got to figure out a way to test the brake lights without having to get another person to help (by watching them or stepping on the brake for me while I watch them)."

    I do it by backing up close-ish to a wall any time dusk or after. Then I can just look behind and see the wall being lit up. Can do all the rear lights that way.

    1113:

    I do it by backing up close-ish to a wall any time dusk or after. Then I can just look behind and see the wall being lit up. Can do all the rear lights that way.

    Likewise. I park in my garage, and when leaving for work at dark-o'clock I used to check brake lights, reverse lights, and signals before pulling out by looking at the light reflected on the walls.

    1114:

    I've got to figure out a way to test the brake lights without having to get another person to help (by watching them or stepping on the brake for me while I watch them).

    I've used half a cinder block resting on the pedal in the past, also a stick or piece of tube between the clutch pedal and the accelerator -- push the brake pedal down and run the stick under the clutch and accelerator levers to hold the brake pedal down.

    1115:

    “ If you actually read what he said properly, he was not in favour of unbridled capitalism”

    I find Adam Smith a bit hard to read. He’s a professor of philosophy writing a philosophical work, and those bits are clear. But the rest…. Thinkers who found new ways of doing things don’t have the jargon yet to say what they mean, and often their ideas are a bit fuzzy as they are using concepts that are not yet well pinned down.

    Newton likewise. And while Galileo is a lot of fun to read he’s trying so hard to sell his points that you can’t quite trust him.

    Darwin, OTOH, is great! Best writer of pop science ever!

    1116:

    Robert Prior @ 1087:

    What do I need to include in my planning?1

    Hudson's Bay Start, definitely.

    Make your first stop a few miles from home. Set up camp and do some photography — all the things you want to do on your trip. Yes, it will mean unpacking the carefully packed jeep. But it also ensures that the thing you thought was there really is there, and it will be easy to go home and get it.

    That's the purpose of the short day trips. Build up check lists & packing lists. I've done this kind of thing many times before, but it's been a few years since my last time out, so I want to rehearse a bit before I commit to the long trip. So yeah, I already know I need to double check my load-out before I get so far from home I can't go back & get something I've forgotten.

    But that's also what the check-lists are for. Load it in the vehicle, check it off the check-list, put it on the packing list so I know where it's located in the vehicle. (This was SOP for load planning in the Army and I had to do it for a whole battalion.)

    If you're going solo, sort out communications and rescue (especially if your health is dodgy). Cell coverage is sparse, so buy or rent a satellite phone. My brother-in-law says 4WD just means you get stuck in places that are more expensive to get a tow :-)

    On previous trips I never had any problems with cell coverage, but I never really got off-road anywhere, so I will look into the satellite phone. That's also why I will remember the mantra 4WD is for getting out of trouble not for getting into it.

    Even with 4WD I'm not tempted to go into many situations where I couldn't go with 2WD. The 4WD is for the purpose of regulatory compliance.

    Might be worth buying some extra insurance that would cover things like getting you home in the event of a medical emergency, if your current insurance doesn't cover that. (Depends on what your medical issues are, of course.)

    If there are any medical issues I'll be going to the nearest VA hospital.

    Seriously think about how you back up your data. It would be a shame to go on the trip and discover that your pictures are corrupted and you don't have any! My rule of thumb when travelling was each card is backed up to two different drives once a day. Point source failure nodes being my computer (needed to run the drives) and the card while in the camera.

    Dusty environment will be hard on camera gear. Consider a rain sleeve — not for rain, but to help keep dust out of lenses. Dust can get into the focusing gears and grind away possibly jamming the lens. Weatherproof lenses are better but still not immune to this.

    Already been there done that - Laptop + multiple external hard drives + multiple spare cards for the cameras. When I went to China I just carried enough spare cards I never needed to re-use any of them so even with the backup hard drive I still had all of the original cards. I didn't carry a laptop with me to China, I made arrangements with one of the students I was chaperoning to use his Macbook to copy photos from the card to the hard drive, so I had the hard-drive + the original cards.

    I also took a film camera to shoot my last two rolls of Kodachrome, because the last processing date was a week after we got home. I had the mailers already pre-paid & ready to go and dropped them into the box at the post office at RDU airport on the way home the night we arrived back here.

    In addition to my Mac Mini, I have a program for Windoze on my computer called MacDrive that allows me to read the Apple format drive on my Windoze computer. I got the program when I was in photography school because the school had all iMac computers. So I could use them at school & then take my photos home and work on them with my Windoze computer. I hadn't got the Mac Mini yet at that time.

    I already have rain sleeves & A LOT of experience with photography in adverse environments. I spent a year in Iraq with one digital body & two lenses (28-70 & 80-200; and then added an 18-35 when I took my R&R in Scotland). So I know a bit about maintaining my equipment on the road.

    Paul @ 1091:

    What do I need to include in my planning?

    Never been on that kind of expedition, but we've done a lot of camping. We have a packing checklist. Its 4 columns long on a sheet of A4. If you don't already have one then create one on your computer. Then print a copy and leave it handy so that every time you think of something else you can add it by hand, and then later go back and add all those extra things to the computer copy in nice categories.

    (If you've been camping a few times then you can ignore much of the following because you will already know it.).

    Military background - checklists & load plans for everything and a load plan is no good until it's actually been tested. I've been out a few times.

    Don't rely on the cheap wire pegs that ship with tents. Get yourself some proper "rock" pegs, and also a decent rubber or wooden mallet with a bit of mass to it. Also spare guy lines. Set up the tent at least once in your back garden so you know how its done. (I recall one trip where we helped one guy plus his 10 year old niece to set up their tent in a howing gale. He was the most ineffectual and helpless person I've ever encountered. Instruction leaflet? He thought there might have been one once. His niece was much more practical).

    Got those. I've only set up my current tent about ten times. The nice thing about Army tents is the instructions are always printed on a label sewn into one of the tent sidewalls.

    Consider getting a roof box. You might be able to fit everything in the back of the jeep, but having a bit of spare space makes it a lot easier to get at that thing you packed underneath everything else.

    That's a good idea I hadn't thought of yet. It would supplement the large chest I already have that goes on a rack that sticks out from the trailer hitch (when I'm not towing a trailer). But you never want to put anything of real value (like cameras & computers into those external boxes.

    Alternatively, maybe one of those roof-top tent rigs.

    If you plan to rely on air mattresses then pack at least one spare. Those things get leaky surprisingly fast, and repair kits don't work well, even if you can find the leak. Also, invest in an electric air pump. You can do it by hand, but its a lot of unnecessary work at a time when you really don't feel like it. Or you could go for a folding camp bed. Don't scrimp; cheap ones get saggy after only a couple of weeks.

    I already have the camp bed & air mattresses (the self inflating kind). But I'm mainly planning on staying in motels where my little dog can stay in the Air Conditioning while I venture out on day trips to do my photography.

    Check out the wildlife where you are going. If there is anything dangerous then know the relevant precautions. (Can't speak much to this because the most dangerous wildlife I've ever had to worry about are adders).

    Even if you aren't camping, think about a kettle and one-ring butane stove for heating water for lunch (pot noodles etc) or tea/coffee.

    Learn How To Shit In The Woods. Then you know what to do when caught short miles from anywhere.

    I've got a two-burner Coleman stove + a MSR WhisperLite International + an old Coleman squad stove. Plus Jerry Cans for fresh water in addition to the case of bottled water that stays in the Jeep all of the time.

    As for the other function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_104F-kUCL0

    Think about how to charge your electronics, and then get two of everything. You'll probably need mains inverters for your laptop. They take a lot of charge from the car battery, so your best bet is to leave the laptop charging while driving. That way you don't risk a flat battery.

    For the laptop, I already have a 12V car adapter, so I don't have to convert 12V to 120VAC and then convert that back to DC. I can go directly from the DC I also have 12V chargers for my camera batteries.

    You can get reversible USB connectors and USB SD-card connectors. That should let you transfer your pictures to your phone or tablet if your laptop fails. If you can get a high-capacity micro-SD card for said phone/tablet then so much the better. Not all devices will work with reverse-USB, so look into it first. Alternatively use micro-SD cards in the camera and then just plug them into the socket in the phone/tablet for copying, if you have enough memory.

    I think I've got just about everything I need for that. I've got the laptop & 4 external hard-drive + all the spare cards for my camera and I'm looking at a backup device that has an SSD and directly reads an SD card.

    On safety; make sure that someone knows where you are going each day and when you plan to check back in. That way if you don't make it back for any reason there should be search parties in the right area the following day. A sat-phone is good, but its quite possible that the same fall that broke your leg also smashed the phone.

    Although on my prior trips out to the southwest I never ran out of cell coverage, I will look into getting a sat-phone. Not sure about the economics of that though. I've looked at rentals & for the amount I'd have to spend to rent one for time I want to be gone I could buy one and get a year's service (20 minutes a month voice +text), but I don't know if I'd ever use it after I got home.

    A handheld GPS is a useful device. You can get versions of Open Street Map for a lot of models, so you don't need to pay extra for maps. They are ruggedised and waterproof so they can stand being dropped, unlike your phone.

    Got a Garmin Rhino120, but it's 18 years old (still works though). I might replace it with a newer one that has a color display. I dunno.

    Step ladders are good for landscape photography. Lots of landscapes look better from a slightly higher elevation. Pack some wedges so you can level it before you climb it.

    Hadn't thought of that. I did think about building a platform atop the luggage rack on top of the Jeep à la Ansel Adams. I did that before when I had the big Chevy Van. Bought several roof bars that clamped on to the drip rail & put a platform on top. But I'd need to find a roof box that was easy to mount & dismount.

    Monopods are good if you plan on walking a long way. They give you a lot of the stability of a tripod with a fraction of the weight and size. Plus it can double as a walking pole.

    Got good tripods & a mono-pod + several of those walking sticks that are like ski poles. But I'm thinking more about driving to the spots I want to photograph from and setting up. If I have to walk too far, I'll leave those views to the younger photographers.

    The concept of the operation is to drive out west & mostly stay in motels where I can leave my little dog in the A/C during the day while I make day trips into the "wilderness". I'm not thinking about hard-core off-roading. I've got the 4WD for regulatory compliance. If it's somewhere I don't think I could get through with 2WD, I'll leave that to the younger folks. But that still leaves me plenty of opportunities to get the photos I want to make.

    1 Actually, that was a question I was asking myself. It's why I'm doing small day trips to begin with. Get back in practice before I commit myself to the long drive. But I do appreciate additional input.

    PS: Not quite the full history of western civilization ...

    1117:

    whitroth @ 1097: I've not found air mattresses get leaky that fast. I will note, though, that some come with their own plug-in electric pump. An extension cord from the adapter in the cigarette lighter works just fine. (Oh, that's right, now they're calling them accessory power, or something like that.)

    We have a queen-sized airbed to fit in our tent.

    DO NOT GET a cheap Coleman or some such tent. Do have at least a three-season sleeping bag - some of the places you're talking about are cold at night.

    I don't have the kind of air mattress you have to inflate. I have the kind that you open a valve & they inflate themselves, then you close the valve to keep the air in them until you're ready to roll it up again & squeeze all the air out.

    I have a Coleman tent, and it ain't cheap ... although it was relatively inexpensive when I bought it.

    As for a sleeping bag, I have the U.S. Army modular sleep system that's rated down to -50°F (-45.5°C). Your tax dollars at work, although I did have to sign a "statement of charges" for it when I didn't turn it in. Don't remember how much it was, less than $100.

    1118:

    David L @ 1108:

    I've got to figure out a way to test the brake lights without having to get another person to help (by watching them or stepping on the brake for me while I watch them).

    An appropriate stick between front of seat and brake pedal. But a flat something on the seat end to keep it from poking a hole in the seat. Then adjust the seat forward to keep the presure up. You will likely have to hold the brake down with your foot before you put pressure on the "stick".

    Or get a $3 or so clamp from Harbor Freight or North Tool (Lowes and HD will have them at double that price) and use it instead of a stick. You can add tension via the hand grip without as much hassle as a stick. (You can reverse them so they are an expander instead of the default compression clamp.)

    Another option is to get a cheap mirror (https://www.trianglerestores.org/raleigh) and prop it up behind your jeep. Then you can just look in the rear view mirror.

    Those should all work. Now I just have to figure out which one of them would be best to keep in the Jeep all the time in case I wanted to check brake lights when I'm away from home. Probably the clamp ... it's a bar clamp right?

    Although ... I'm hoping the new LED tail light assemblies I ordered will eliminate the problem.

    1119:

    Pigeon @ 1114:

    "I've got to figure out a way to test the brake lights without having to get another person to help (by watching them or stepping on the brake for me while I watch them)."

    I do it by backing up close-ish to a wall any time dusk or after. Then I can just look behind and see the wall being lit up. Can do all the rear lights that way.

    I've done that. I've also done it with headlights & tail lights reflected in storefront glass where you can see the reflections. Don't know why I forgot it.

    1121:

    Can't remember if I read ST. I have definitely read some Heinlein. I remember reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and being somewhat shocked by some of the sexual mores. How little I knew. 40 years later and some of his views are almost mainstream.

    Is he a fascist? Since his books are necessarily indicative of his views I can't tell. The books certainly suggest Libertarian tendencies but then so does the Stainless Steel Rat series but, asside from an understandable disgust at the great and the good, I am not sure if Harrison was much a Libertarian.

    A number of self-published authors in Amazon Kindle Unlimited seem to be current or ex-servicemen - presumably bored out of their brains somewhere. I have enjoyed much of the work and it certainly represents the American interests in things like weapons and politics. More power to their elbow. One can tell age and current occupations to a certain extent from the content. A book with a lot of sex is likely to be from a serving military person.

    Oddly enough the military SF seems to stem more from retired military. Legends of the Aldenata and Stigers Tigers come to mind.

    Having said all of that I still much prefer the British stuff from 20-30 years ago - David Gemmell, for example, and his spiritual descendent, Joe Abercrombie.

    1122: 1105 - The 4WD bugbear in the UK is over just how many people drive like it will stop them getting into trouble, rather than allow them to retrieve the situation when they already are. I've got "sort of stuck" exactly once with 2WD, and been rescued by a couple of good Samaritans pushing my car about 2 feet...

    My point about reversing lights was that there is a solution if you do decide/have to delete factory units.

    1113 - Indeed, or selectively quote him. 1114, #1115 and #1116 - I've done all of those, and indeed glanced at the car behind in my mirrors whilst stopped at a red traffic light and with my foot on the brakes. 1117 - I didn't say Smith was an "easy read"; I said he was a much abused economic theorist.
    1123:

    I remember reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and being somewhat shocked by some of the sexual mores.

    the line "an explosive bullet hit between her lovely, little-girl breasts" (which seemed excitingly transgressive when i was 16) hasn't aged that well, admittedly

    1124:

    The 4WD bugbear in the UK is over just how many people drive like it will stop them getting into trouble, rather than allow them to retrieve the situation when they already are.

    In the US and Canada 4WD is as much about snow as it is about mud and crazy terrain. In the UK and Australia I suspect snow isn't so much a worry.

    1125:

    Clamps .. I use a "Hi-Lift" jack, which doubles up as a powerful clamp. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    More on Tidal Power Google for "Orbital O2" Their latest scaled-up model is 2MW & theor development programme looks good. Opinions - Please! I think scaled-up versions of this all round the coast could provide a very large amount of base-load power ...

    1126:

    Not on a regular basis no. The intermittent nature of snow in the UK is exactly the issue.

    Well, that and wet leaves or grass.

    1127:

    "Hi-Lift" jack

    While those were standard (bumper jacks) in US cars for decades I've not seen one in a new car in 30+ years. Scissor jacks are what we all get now. Even on my large Toyota Tundra truck.

    I wish I had one just to pull things out of the ground. They were great for fence posts or small woody plants/trees.

    But to buy one separate these days costs more than $50.

    1128:

    David L Still available here. One of the first things I bought, when I got the L-R in 2003.

    1129:

    (re: jacks)

    "I wish I had one just to pull things out of the ground. They were great for fence posts or small woody plants/trees."

    Try a swedish windlass (two crossed sticks or bars, winding the main rope around the join).

    1130:

    Thinking of higher perspectives…

    Maybe consider getting a small (sub-250g) quadcopter. I have a DJI Mavic Mini, and it's great for getting shots I can't get on the ground. If all you want to do is fly up a few metres, or a few metres sideways to get a different perspective, then the piloting skills required are virtually zero.

    The weight means you needn't worry about FAA licensing. A Mini 2 would be better, but if all you are doing is launching and flying up and a little bit over to get a shot there's really no advantage to the newer model — and you can get the older ones cheap now.

    1131:

    "opinions please"

    This gushing report, headlined :"Enormous Potential of Tidal Energy..."

    https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/2016/10/tidal-and-wind-energy-in-the-uk

    Says the total potential of all the UK tidal resources, if fully exploited, is about 10 GW. So not a great deal then. As someone (you?) pointed out in previous discussions the UK winter energy consumption is about 300 GW. So well less than 5%.

    1132:

    After a little checking (for the Wyre scheme), I quickly realised that all your cited UK tidal schemes would disrupt a major estuary used by breeding and migrating wading birds.

    1133:

    Try a swedish windlass

    I always have a 2x4 or few around and tend to make something that will level up. Bumper jacks in my youth were ubiquitous and gave a great leverage advantage. Just miss that.

    You're talking to someone who has 10 or more strap tie downs in the truck. Plus a transport chain and small coated steel cable with come along in the store room.

    :)

    1134:

    You could try a satellite communicator instead of a phone, they're cheaper. Also if you're thinking of getting a new GPS, you can combine the two. Like this: https://buy.garmin.com/en-GB/GB/p/561269

    1135:

    TYPO....

    mutter, mutter, 1930....

    1136:

    Oh, I know. But the 1030 year made the prediction so much more impressive.

    1137:

    I suppose....

    Says the guy who did his best to guess what life is like 11,000 years from now.

    1138:

    If you include the lost fisheries as part of the cost the estuary dams are very rarely profitable or even sane. But building a tidal dam that doesn't stop fish breeding is a much more complex task. Round here it comes down to either you kill the mangroves or they take over your dam... neither is a good outcome, at least economically.

    1139:

    David L @ 1122: https://www.harborfreight.com/24-in-ratcheting-bar-clampspreader-64153.html

    I was off on the price. I got mine on sales.

    Still, six bucks ain't bad. Worth it if it gets the job done.

    1140:

    paws4thot @ 1124: #1105 - The 4WD bugbear in the UK is over just how many people drive like it will stop them getting into trouble, rather than allow them to retrieve the situation when they already are. I've got "sort of stuck" exactly once with 2WD, and been rescued by a couple of good Samaritans pushing my car about 2 feet...
    My point about reversing lights was that there is a solution if you do decide/have to delete factory units.

    I understood your point about the reversing lights. When I talked to the vendor, I found out I won't need to purchase additional lights to replace them.

    Here's my take on 4WD ...

    When I worked for the computer company out at RTP, they had an "inclement weather policy" about whether they would be open or closed if it snowed (or was blowing a hurricane). Around here we get the occasional 2-3 inches of snow in the winter and EVERYTHING shuts down ... but NOT the computer company because the headquarters where the decision was made was in upstate New York and up there 2-3 inches is NOTHING. So if someone wanted to stay home from work because all the Day Care and Schools were closed & there was no one to take care of the kids, they had to take a personal day or a vacation day or a sick day ... or if you were a supplemental and/or contractor like me, you had to take a day off without pay along with a ration of shit about whether you really wanted to work there.

    Which is a long introduction to the fact I can drive in snow, and I don't need 4WD to do it. At the time I had a Ford Focus (FWD) wagon with about 6" ground clearance & I'd just plod along while all the idiots in their fancy 4WD pickup trucks & SUVs zoomed past me. Until, still plodding along, I'd pass them where they'd ended up in the ditch.

    The interesting part was that I'd get to work and there was practically no one else there, because my cow-orkers had kids (and did get paid days off). Around lunchtime the supervisors would come around and send us home, but we'd get paid for the whole day.

    ... and then came "Winter Storm 2000" - forecast was for 3 inches and we got 24. I looked out my front door and was sure the computer company WOULD be closed that day & sure enough as soon as I tuned into the designated radio station they made the official announcement.

    And the next words out of the announcer's mouth were "and the Governor has called out the National Guard." No sooner were those words said than my phone rang; First Sargent calling to tell me I had to go out to the armory at the airport & get a HMMWV so I could go & get the other soldiers from my battalion who were being activated.

    So I dug out my little Ford Focus & plowed my way out to RDU to dig out a HMMWV.

    A HMMWV has full-time 4WD, but I drove it like I drove my 2WD (FWD) Focus so I wouldn't end up in a ditch like the idiots.

    And the best part was that because the computer company announced an official closing, I got paid for those days AND I got paid by the National Guard.

    Anyway, I understand the limitations of 4WD & I don't expect to have any problems as long as I can resist the temptation to do something stupid.

    1141:

    David L @ 1135:

    Try a swedish windlass

    I always have a 2x4 or few around and tend to make something that will level up. Bumper jacks in my youth were ubiquitous and gave a great leverage advantage. Just miss that.

    You're talking to someone who has 10 or more strap tie downs in the truck. Plus a transport chain and small coated steel cable with come along in the store room.

    :)

    All the serious off-roaders have those high lift jacks. They're similar to the old bumper jacks, but much more substantial. If I ever decide to become a serious off-roader I'll get one too.

    The reason we don't have bumper jacks any more is because cars don't have the kind of structural metal bumpers they used to have. Today's bumpers are a tear-away plastic cover over a crushable energy absorbing, crumple zone thing-a-ma-bob. You can't lift the vehicle with them, they just tear off.

    1142:

    Toby @ 1136: You could try a satellite communicator instead of a phone, they're cheaper. Also if you're thinking of getting a new GPS, you can combine the two. Like this:
    https://buy.garmin.com/en-GB/GB/p/561269

    If I do replace my current GPS, I'll probably get another Garmin Rhino.

    1143:

    JBS @ 1142 :"...So I dug out my little Ford Focus & plowed my way out to RDU to dig out a HMMWV. A HMMWV has full-time 4WD, but I drove it like I drove my 2WD (FWD) Focus so I wouldn't end up in a ditch like the idiots..."

    Did your Ford Focus have snow tires? Does your Jeep have snow tires (in storage now, of course)?

    I write this from a province where snow tires are the law (with heavy fines) for several months of the year.

    1144:

    All the serious off-roaders have those high lift jacks.

    Amusingly I have one for pulling posts and plants out of the ground despite not owning a motor vehicle. Well, legally, technically I own two... an electric-assist bicycle and a radio controllers plane 😁

    1145: 1140 - So we're agreed that "what happened to barrage tidal?" is simply answered "we figured out that it's bad for the marine and littoral environments". 1142 - Agreed, and I've had similar experiences in the UK. 1145 - ? I mean I've passed a Range Rover (so permanent 4wd) stuck at the bottom of a hill I just drove up in an FWD hatchback on what would now be called "Summer tyres". Of course, this was in November 1995, so before "winter tyres" for cars were invented.
    1146:

    Winter tires were invented in 1934 in Finland and in 1995 I had winter tires on my car. You're late to the party!

    Anyway, although winter tires are mandatory in my province you still find a lot of idiots who manage to ditch their 4WD cars in the winter, whenever they can find a ditch. They just drive too fast when there's snow and ice. They're eager to get to the ditch on time!

    1147:

    Maybe consider getting a small (sub-250g) quadcopter.

    I can second this with four part harmony and feeling. I did get the Mini 2. It makes footage that looks like it was taken on a tripod. I've flown it up and down creeks at low altitude, though that takes a bit of confidence (anything that interferes with GPS, like overhanging trees, makes it less stable and interferes with its station-keeping, which could lead to potentially fatal blade-fouling over water... the optional extra blade guards take it over the 250g limit, and the standard firmware cripples it a bit as a result, though if you can find a way around that I'd be keen to learn...). Going up in the clear sky, it's amazing. It's a pretty wide lens for stills, but that's presumably what you want for landscapes.

    1148:

    Winter tires were invented in 1934 in Finland and in 1995 I had winter tires on my car. You're late to the party!

    TBF winter tyres are a scam in the British Isles -- except in the Scottish highlands and for folks who live on a mountain they're simply not called for, nine years out of ten.

    (What they are is an excuse for the big tyre shops like Qwik-Fit to sell you an expensive extra set then rent you storage and a biannual swap-out for a couple of hundred quid a year. Meanwhile we get a couple of centimetres of snow on the ground maybe for a day or two each year.)

    Finland, or anywhere with a continental interior climate basically, warrants winter tyres for sure.

    1149:

    and a radio controllers plane

    Fey, I still need to repair mine after its high-speed trajectory-intersecting-terrain incident. I have all the bits and pieces, including bamboo skewers and glue, just been occupied with other projects.

    1150:

    Finland, or anywhere with a continental interior climate basically, warrants winter tyres for sure.

    We-ell, Finland is a large country. In the Southern part, where I live, nowadays some winters have only a few days when the temperature is below freezing. Winter tyres are nice when there's ice and snow, but not that good on wet roads. Of course it's a pain to go around changing tyres every morning, so everybody just changes them "early enough" and then back when it's warm enough. The law changed last year or so, so that you have to use winter tyres only when the road conditions require it.

    The discussion here is nowadays usually studs or no studs - the studded tyres are more traditional, and many people like them, especially up North, but in most of Finland the conditions are better for non-studded tyres for most of the time. The studs also are a big toll on the road surfaces, so here in Southern cities they are basically just destroying the roads with no real benefit most of the time.

    If I had a car, I'd just use non-studded tyres in the winter, even when driving more North.

    1151:

    As OGH said, the UK varies between places where settling snow is almost unknown (the south, west and coasts), and a significant but very sparsely populated area where it is fairly common - however, even in the latter areas, it is very rarely of any depth and almost always turns into slush within hours. And, even in those areas. problems with mud dominate problems with problems with slush many times over (10-1,000 or more times), and it's NOT just in the winter!

    Studs should be forbidden for use on the roads, and possibly are. Chains have their uses for emergencies, but I wouldn't have had even an opportunity to use them since sometimes in the 1970s. People living in Perth do, but only on a few days a year, and it's generally easier just to wait it out.

    Now, 'tready' winter tyres suitable for mud and slush DO have their uses in the UK in the more rural areas, but nearly as much in summer as in winter. As he said, it's a scam.

    1152:

    Yeah, even here they wouldn't be strictly necessary during the winter any more, at least not every winter. (Southern Finland, that is, on the coast.) Most snow is either cleaned from the roads or melts fast enough that it'd probably be possible to just use summer tyres except on a few days each year.

    When we last had a car, we saved some money by swapping the tires by hand, but I also had a good place to store the ones not in use.

    1153:

    The weight means you needn't worry about FAA licensing.

    I know someone in the US who travels all over the world (I think he picked up a pile of Apple stock a few decades ago) with all kinds of camera gear. Including a drone. His advice is to check carefully anywhere you go so you don't wind up in long conversations with local authorities. Not fun at all when the conversations might be behind bars.

    Anyone else remember that story of some folks doing plane spotting in Greece? I think they were from the UK. It was their hobby. The Greeks thought of it more as espionage. Took them a while to get back home. They were writing down tail numbers of takeoffs and landings at an airport. Athens I think.

    1154:

    They just drive too fast when there's snow and ice.

    4WD makes it easier to get going on snow and ice. It does nothing to help you stop (because brakes use all four wheels anyway). Most SUV drivers don't realize this.

    1155:

    TBF winter tyres are a scam in the British Isles -- except in the Scottish highlands and for folks who live on a mountain they're simply not called for, nine years out of ten.

    I'm going to disagree with you here. Winter tires are a softer rubber that gives better grip at colder temperatures, whether or not there's snow on the ground.

    When I switch to my winter tires in autumn I can notice the different on cold wet days. Below about 10C my winter tires have a noticeably better grip.

    1156:

    Finland, or anywhere with a continental interior climate basically, warrants winter tyres for sure.

    And hills. I've lived in Colorado for 30-plus years, but down on the plains just east of the mountains. Front wheel drive and all-season radial tires have been adequate unless you have to go out in a storm or immediately after. Some form of limited-slip differential is generally more valuable than snow tires.

    This past winter the biggest storm dumped 23 inches at my house. By 12 hours after the snow stopped I could be out and about anywhere in the city without problems.

    1157:

    His advice is to check carefully anywhere you go so you don't wind up in long conversations with local authorities.

    Always good advice. In the US 250g is the cutoff weight for requiring licensing (at least it was last week, and I don't think it's changed since).

    In Canada you need a pilot's license to fly a drone 250g or heavier, and must register the drone. Below 250g you don't need the license, nor do you need to register the drone (although you may). You can also fly the sub-250g drone more places — the regulation are "in a safe manner" rather than hard-coded limits.

    If I was heading to the US I'd check on the Mavic Pilots forum to find out what the regs were — folks there are pretty good about pointing people to official sources of information, offering advice, and so forth. They also talk about various apps that can quickly tell you whether you can fly at a particular location. (Can't remember what they are, because I'm in Canada and use Drone Pilot Canada myself.)

    https://mavicpilots.com

    https://dronepilotcanada.com

    1158:

    Er, colder temperatures? Where did you get the idea that the UK gets that much seasonal variation. Let's take Edinburgh as an example:

    Average low Average Average high

    January 5.6 9.1 12.5 December 10.9 15.1 19.2

    1159:

    Brain fart. The 'December' is, of course, July.

    1160:

    Winter tires would give better grip that all-season in January, according to the numbers you gave.

    1161:

    Protip if you do get stuck and a switch to 4WD doesn't get you out. You need to get traction under at least one tire.

    A jack can do it if you have stable ground, otherwise it becomes dangerous. Another piece of essential kit for back country driving is a sturdy shovel. I have dug myself out of a few situations where a jack simply wouldn't work.

    Place something strong under the axle or bumper (as and where possible). Logs work, or stones. Then dig out under a tire and place high traction stuff in there under the tire. Wood bark has saved me a couple of times. A lot depends on the substrate (wet clay vs mud vs plant matter) but you can get clear with enough digging.

    If you must, lay a 'track' of higher traction material in front of the the wheel(s) that will help the vehicle get clear.

    Also, be sure to move the vehicle in the direction of your final destination (i.e. back the way you came). It doesn't do you any good to get unstuck and further into the hazard.

    1162:

    And probably for much of summer, too, especially if the Edinburgh resident takes a day trip up into the hills. There is more variation between days in the same month than there is between months; that is completely unlike, say, Toronto, which isn't extreme by Canadian standards. Take a look at (say) www.weatherbase.com - it's enlightening.

    The sanest solution for 99% of the UK driving population is something that is optimised for 10-15 Celsius, possibly very slightly higher in warm places, and a level of mud depending on the location and use.

    1163:

    Meanwhile Is Putin looking for "A Short, Victorious War"? or is BoZo, or, much more dangerously, are both of them - if so, then fucking idiots.

    1164:

    As the EU declined to give Bozo a fisheries war over Jersey, that's a fair supposition. Bozo badly needs a distraction right now, his version of Brexit having cratered the fishing industry, threatening to do so with farming, and now screwing up the Northern Irish economy -- with the £116Bn creative industries screaming blue murder too (guess who now needs a full business visa in order to roll up to a European SF convention and deliver a 50 minute talk -- and a different visa for each EU member state)?

    Pretty sure the Russians are bullshitting about one of their jets dropping warning bombs near the ship in the Black Sea though: it's a Type 45 destroyer, which is a fleet air defense asset with an integrated air defense radar and weapons system, and long range SAMs -- it's a newer generation than the USN's Aegis-class cruisers (to which it is comparable in size) and it seems rather unlikely that a Russian jet would be able to get close to it without being spotted.

    1165:

    You need to get traction under at least one tire.

    That's why you keep a bag of non-clumping cat litter in the trunk.

    1166:

    Charlie Mostly agree, but what worries me is that Putin also might want this [ Zero-Sum game plonker, remember? ] And, of course, trying to get a "Daring" to actually fire would tell them LOTS about our weapons capabilities ...

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ this business-visa for creative artists is cratering a lot of people - I note that the misgovernment are suspiciously completely SILENT about it, in spite of all the protests - they aren't even trying to spin a lie about it ... most unusual

    1167:

    Eh? Of course, it would have been spotted - and the Russians would have made damn sure it was - just as the RN ships that 'escort' Russian warships through the channel and around Britain do. Whether the bombs existed or not, I can't guess, as both sides have a record of lying, but would quite likely have been dummies (cheaper).

    What is disturbing is that the usual reason for British aggression is that we have been instructed to by the USA, and Putin has made it absolutely clear that he will not allow Russia to be pushed any further (or blockaded) by the USA/NATO/etc. Iran has done exactly the same, for good reasons. Biden's actions w.r.t. both Iran and Russia indicated that he is taking the USA back to its bully-boy tactics, which is horribly like 1962.

    1168:

    In a pinch, the floor mats in the truck cab work pretty well for traction.

    In the Rashomon version of that story, it turns out that driving out on the dry bed of Owens Lake can be unexpectedly exciting.

    1169:

    On the one hand the Russians did get a plane close enough to Defender to track with their TV guidance system (not as good as LANTRIN or TIALD). On the other, the Aster 30 round can engage an attacking aircraft at 120km, and Defender also carries a mk8B gun, 2 Oerlikon 30mm, 2 Phalanx CIWS, oh and 2 miniguns and 6 GPMGs!

    1170:

    Bumper jacks... no.

    They were phased out because they're fucking dangerous. Go ahead, start changing a tire in the emergency lane on an Interstate, and see what happens as one or two or three semis drive by at speed (i.e. 65-70mph (110-120km/h). Watch as the whole car shakes, and hope that it doesn't fall off the jack.

    1171:

    Niala @ 1145: JBS @ 1142 :

    "...So I dug out my little Ford Focus & plowed my way out to RDU to dig out a HMMWV. A HMMWV has full-time 4WD, but I drove it like I drove my 2WD (FWD) Focus so I wouldn't end up in a ditch like the idiots..."

    Did your Ford Focus have snow tires? Does your Jeep have snow tires (in storage now, of course)?

    The Focus had a Michelin sport/performance tire "all season" tire. For a serious snow I'd have needed chains. And thinking back about it, Winter Storm 2000, would have been back when I had a Ford Escort Wagon.

    The Escort & Focus were pretty much the same, but the Escort was before Iraq and the Focus came after (with a Mazda 626 in between) and the Focus had true station wagon back seats where the seat folded forward & the back folded flat ... so occasionally I get them confused.

    They don't require snow tires around here, but the city does have an ordinance about going out in the snow without snow tires or chains. You get stuck & it's going to be a whopping big fine. And that actually applies even if you DO have snow tires or chains. You should'a just stayed the fuck home.

    ... as I would have done if duty hadn't called. I just had to be extra cautious driving in it. The main roads weren't too bad. They'd all had at least one pass from a dump truck with a blade mounted on the front. The HMMWV was because I had to go into UN-plowed residential streets & apartment complex parking lots to pick up people (and also because they were then covered by the Army's insurance IF there had been any accidents).

    I write this from a province where snow tires are the law (with heavy fines) for several months of the year.

    The Jeep has Hancook Dynapro ATM P235/70R16 \ 107T". They're a "Premium aggressive all-terrain for light truck van & sport utility vehicle", but I don't think they would qualify as snow tires. But as I've noted before, I have 4WD for regulatory compliance, NOT because I intend to go out bashing around off-road where even 4WD might not be enough to save me from my own stupidity. These tires are adequate for driving on a beach or back country dirt road and that's what I'm going to be doing, NOT serious off-roading.

    If I was going to deal with that kind of snow, I'd need snow chains. Does the law around there allow chains in lieu of snow tires? There are one or two places I'd like to visit that if I was there in winter, chains are required, although I don't know if I will be visiting them during the winter, so I'll wait on buying the chains for now.

    PS: Winter Storm 2000 was one of those "once in a century" snow events, that's why it has a NAME.

    Prior to that the record snow events in Raleigh were 14.5 inches in 1948, 11 inches in 1980 and 10 inches in 1979. "Google" says there was another 10 inch snow in 2002, but I don't remember that at all.

    The one I DO remember was the quarter inch of snow in January 2005 that panicked the school system into announcing they were closing early and in turn panicked the whole city into trying to get home to be there when the kids got off the bus with the upshot of gridlock that kept the buses from getting through to the schools and a lot of the kids ended up having to stay at the schools overnight.

    I remember it because I was still down at Ft Bragg post deployment, but I had a couple of days off and decided to go to the beach to try out a new camera. I encountered the fringes of it returning to Raleigh in the evening, but I know my back roads & side streets so it only took me about half an hour to get home once I encountered it (usually would have been 15 minutes from that spot).

    And then the next day I had to drive up north of Durham almost to Virginia to find any snow to photograph.

    1172:

    Moz @ 1146:

    All the serious off-roaders have those high lift jacks.

    Amusingly I have one for pulling posts and plants out of the ground despite not owning a motor vehicle. Well, legally, technically I own two... an electric-assist bicycle and a radio controllers plane 😁

    I remember that from math class. Set A = "all owners of high lift jacks" contains Set B = "serious off-roaders". Set B is a subset of Set A.

    1173:

    JBS @ 1173: "Does the law around there allow chains in lieu of snow tires?"

    In my province chains are forbidden on nearly all vehicles, because they destroy the road surface. The only exceptions are emergency vehicles, farm tractors and snow-clearing vehicles.

    1174:

    Rudy Guiliani has had his law licence suspended in NY for his false statements about the election.

    1175:

    David L @ 1155:

    The weight means you needn't worry about FAA licensing.

    I know someone in the US who travels all over the world (I think he picked up a pile of Apple stock a few decades ago) with all kinds of camera gear. Including a drone. His advice is to check carefully anywhere you go so you don't wind up in long conversations with local authorities. Not fun at all when the conversations might be behind bars.

    Anyone else remember that story of some folks doing plane spotting in Greece? I think they were from the UK. It was their hobby. The Greeks thought of it more as espionage. Took them a while to get back home. They were writing down tail numbers of takeoffs and landings at an airport. Athens I think.

    I've mentioned before that I play a "first person shooter" computer game, Arma 3, for rest, relaxation & to sublimate my aggression. There's an interesting story about the game developers when they were researching the Greek Island Lemnos to base the game map on.

    https://www.polygon.com/2013/2/8/3968814/arma-3-developers-arrested-for-spying-on-military-in-greece

    Interestingly, one of the subsequent developments is Greek tourism ON the island of Lemnos has gotten a little bit of a boost from Arma 3 devotees visiting to see the sites depicted in the game.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlGBiKgws84

    1176:

    The usual thing I'm aware of is to carry a chunk of old carpet in the back of the car. Or even two.

    1177:

    whitroth @ 1172: Bumper jacks... no.

    They were phased out because they're fucking dangerous. Go ahead, start changing a tire in the emergency lane on an Interstate, and see what happens as one or two or three semis drive by at speed (i.e. 65-70mph (110-120km/h). Watch as the whole car shakes, and hope that it doesn't fall off the jack.

    Why do you always talk down to me?

    I've been driving for more than 55 years, with a third of that averaging more than 100K ACCIDENT FREE MILES and I've never had an at fault accident. In each of the three accidents I have been involved in during those 55 years (three actual accidents not counting all the times someone has bumped me from behind without doing any damage), someone else broke the law and HIT ME.

    I have changed a tire or two in my lifetime, ON ALL KINDS OF ROADS INCLUDING INTERSTATE HIGHWAYS.

    Maybe I know a thing or two you don't know. For instance, I know how to properly jack a vehicle so it doesn't fall off the goddamn jack just because the wind blows.

    Scheisskopf!

    1178:

    In the Owens Lake case, I was just a passenger, because I wasn't terribly interested in driving my company car out on the ever-so-interesting ad hoc road.

    I will say that despite what you might think, saline mud in a desert's not the same as March slush up north. And the ka-crunch of salt crusts breaking under your boots can cause flashbacks, at least if you're a cultured and sensitive individual like myself.

    I'm beginning to think more highly of old carpet: demonstration armor, 4WD traction...what else can you do with it?

    1179:

    ... averaging more than 100K ACCIDENT FREE MILES PER YEAR. Meaning not only did I not hit anyone, I managed to avoid anyone hitting me.

    1180:

    Rudy Guiliani has had his law licence suspended in NY for his false statements about the election.

    Tragic. Heh heh. Woo-hoo! What a horrible thing to happen to him.And may it be the first of many legal appointments he has to keep. My heart bleeds for all the people who suffered with this devolving dude for the last two decades.

    1181:

    I prefer to think of myself as a member of a superset.

    1182:

    "what happened to barrage tidal?" is simply answered "we figured out that it's bad

    Very succinct. Are you sure you're in the right place? 😋

    1183:

    Communication is difficult. It's 'succint or swim' kind of situation.

    1184:

    You interpret as "talking down". You don't seem to ever consider that I might be simply disagreeing with you, and talking about what I know and have read.

    Screw it. I'll just skip your posts, and not respond.

    1185:

    Oh shit [ MicroShaft new OS ... please say it ain't so! ] Lots of us have no effective choice, but to use MS.

    1186:

    Good old Engl "British" Broadcasting Corporation: Finger clearly anywhere but on the pulse, as usual!

    1187:

    I'll do this indirectly, by pointing to a really nice article by by Abigail Disney commenting on the finding that billionaires don't pay taxes.

    The US PBS TV show "Amanpour and Company" just did a segment interviewing her. Abigail Disney: Dynasties Are Very Bad For Democracy

    Great interview. Worth your 18 minutes. There's also a transcript if you want to avoid the video.

    https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/abigail-disney-dynasties-are-very-bad-democracy-ztv7oa/

    These show up on YouTube after a day or few.

    Not sure how visible this will be outside of the US.

    1188:

    FYI. Abigail Disney is NOT a random reporter. She's the granddaughter of Walt. And has personal experience of how the wealthy tend to become ingrained with a mindset of "we must keep our wealth".

    And also how philanthropy is bad for democracy.

    1189:

    Meanwhile, in Canada, they announced that they'd found 731 unmarked graves at a former residential school in Saskatchewan. According to oral testimony from the survivors, some of the graves will be of adults.

    Our Federal Tory leader has been saying (paraphrasing) "Sure, things are looking bad. But Canada is still a great country!" Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

    And our Prime Minister is happy to do anything, except anything meaningful, to resolve the systematic racism baked into Canadian society.

    At least talk of an election has pretty much dried up. This spring, the talking heads were saying that an election call was imminent. The Liberals must have taken a look at polling data and seen that they'd probably wind up with another minority government.

    1190:

    Sorry, my bad. That should be 751 unmarked graves, not 731.

    1191:

    Re air mattresses, I'm not a believer. Every one that I or a friend has owned has leaked within a few years. As someone who wants to be able to trust their gear, air mattresses are the definition of untrustworthy.

    I also have technical reservations about using them in colder conditions. They don't get you that far off the deck, so the insulation they give can be limited. And because their outer layer is woven, there's some wicking effect from any condensation on the tent floor, which means the mattress goes away damp and comes out damp at your next stop. This isn't great news for your sleeping bag.

    I use a Z-Lite mat instead. Actually I use a Z-Rest, which is what they were called when they first came out 20 years ago. The corrugated design makes sure you stay well off the deck, and the air space around the corrugations means you get basically no condensation under it. I bought two back in about 2002-3, and I'm still using the same ones to this day. I can just chuck them in the car any old how for packing, or if I'm walking then I tie them on the outside of my pack and they weigh basically nothing, and if we end up sitting somewhere uncomfortable for lunch then I can just chuck it over any surface for cushioning without worrying about it. I strongly suspect that the reason the company making Z-Rests went out of business and sold out to Thermarest was because they didn't get repeat business, unlike expensive crappy Thermarests which will last you 5 years if you're lucky and treat them with kid gloves.

    1192:

    As a skinny chap who sleeps on his side, I need an air mattress for my back/hip. If I'm expecting cold weather I throw a closed-cell foam pad on top of the mattress for insulation.

    1193:

    The total number for Canada of all the unmarked Indigenous graves for children is much higher, as you probably have guessed.

    The Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave a conservative estimate of 4,100 souls.

    1194:

    I used to be skinny, am now 73, sleep on my side, and had and have no trouble with a 6 mm closed-cell mattress on any reasonably smooth or soft surface. But I have done that all my life, with no mattress at all when I was younger. That was often cold, though.

    1195:

    with no mattress at all when I was younger

    No mattress at all? Luxury! When I were a lad, they made me sleep on -1 mattresses!

    1196:

    David L @ 1190: FYI. Abigail Disney is NOT a random reporter. She's the granddaughter of Walt. And has personal experience of how the wealthy tend to become ingrained with a mindset of "we must keep our wealth".

    And also how philanthropy is bad for democracy.

    I'm pretty sure she's Roy Disney's granddaughter, so that would make her Walt's grandniece (?).

    Earlier someone had a link to the Atlantic article and it's well worth reading in addition to the PBS interview because it gives some background about dynastic wealth to what she's talking about in the interview.

    1197:

    Charlie Food shortages approaching - as you noted. I wonder whom the lying corrupt shits will try to blame for this one?

    1198:

    Graham @ 1193: Re air mattresses, I'm not a believer. Every one that I or a friend has owned has leaked within a few years. As someone who wants to be able to trust their gear, air mattresses are the definition of untrustworthy.

    I also have technical reservations about using them in colder conditions. They don't get you that far off the deck, so the insulation they give can be limited. And because their outer layer is woven, there's some wicking effect from any condensation on the tent floor, which means the mattress goes away damp and comes out damp at your next stop. This isn't great news for your sleeping bag.

    I use a Z-Lite mat instead. Actually I use a Z-Rest, which is what they were called when they first came out 20 years ago. The corrugated design makes sure you stay well off the deck, and the air space around the corrugations means you get basically no condensation under it. I bought two back in about 2002-3, and I'm still using the same ones to this day. I can just chuck them in the car any old how for packing, or if I'm walking then I tie them on the outside of my pack and they weigh basically nothing, and if we end up sitting somewhere uncomfortable for lunch then I can just chuck it over any surface for cushioning without worrying about it. I strongly suspect that the reason the company making Z-Rests went out of business and sold out to Thermarest was because they didn't get repeat business, unlike expensive crappy Thermarests which will last you 5 years if you're lucky and treat them with kid gloves.

    I've got one of these:

    https://www.rei.com/product/668499/therm-a-rest-classic-camp-rest

    Got it some time in the 1980s, so I've been using it for at least 30 years, and probably closer to 40. It still works fairly well. Replaced the GI Air Mattress I was issued (which I turned in to get it off my PCIE
    https://colemans.com/air-mattress-us-gi

    I'm old and creaky, so I don't sleep on the ground anymore, but the Therm-a-Rest is the right size to fit my "Army cot" (actually an improved aftermarket version from Field & Stream) and it provides a bit of insulation against cold air seeping up from below.

    1199:

    Niala @ 1195: The total number for Canada of all the unmarked Indigenous graves for children is much higher, as you probably have guessed.

    The Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave a conservative estimate of 4,100 souls.

    I suspect this is going to be on the scale of the Irish Homes for Unwed Mothers scandal.

    1200:

    But wait, it's worse than that, Jim: I just read you'll need both Internet access AND A M$ ACCOUNT.

    1201:

    It's going to be bigger. News today broke of one graveyard with over 750 bodies, and there were scores to hundreds of these "schools".

    The Magdalene Laundries scandal finally cratered the political legitimacy of the Catholic Church in Ireland: forget the horror stories of child abuse that had previously surfaced, the discovery of over 800 baby skeletons in a septic tank told its own story of depraved indifference to human life (and flatly gave the lie to the Church's own avowed values).

    1202:

    whitroth SHIT Apparently- I have an M$ account - & I can't get into it - to scrub off some side-shit still on this machine, from when my M$-Outlook account committed suicide.

    1203:

    Charlie Actually, I disagree in small ... The Magdalene Laundries scandal dented & made small cracks in the Black Crows dominance of Ireland, but it was the death of one woman that finally did it, & did their rule in.

    1204:

    I have no words. I'll let Michelle Good speak for me:

    When I was still quite little, my mother told me of her friend, Lily, a fellow inmate at the St. Barnabas Residential School in Onion Lake, Saskatchewan. This was not the story one would expect about school chums. No, this was the story of how a little girl, taken without consent from her home and community, hemorrhaged to death from tuberculosis while her little classmates stood by helpless. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine that little girl, her lungs filling, blood bubbling from her mouth. How terrifying to be alone with no proper treatment or care, no one to comfort her, no mother to protect her. Imagine the terror in the children who witnessed.

    As Canadians are beginning to learn, Lily was one of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of children who died in residential schools.

    This is not new knowledge. It was known at the time, and we have known it forever.

    Dr. Peter Bryce in his role as chief medical officer for the Department of Indian Affairs reported the findings of his review of the health conditions in residential schools to the powers that be. He told them that if the goal had been to create a mechanism for the effective transmission of tuberculosis, they had achieved that with the residential schools. Did the department hasten to improve conditions and provide proper care for the children? No. Instead, Bryce was fired and the department declared that while it was true the children died at a much higher rate than they did in their home communities, that was not enough to deter the state from its objective of a final solution: an end to the “Indian Problem” and the Indian Department.

    Not only did they let those babies die at a rate Duncan Campbell Scott himself estimated to be as high as 50 per cent in some schools, they often didn’t even notify the parents of the deceased and, as the truth finally begins to become undeniable to non-Indigenous Canadians, they didn’t even record their deaths or mark their graves in a way that would stand the test of time, or at all. Even now, the Church partners in this heinous colonial partnership, continues to hem and haw about making their records available to those who would find a way to identify and send these babies home.

    https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2021/06/24/michelle-good-imagine-the-terror-of-the-children-non-indigenous-canada-this-is-the-time-to-raise-your-voices.html

    1205:

    Charlie Stross @ 1203: It's going to be bigger. News today broke of one graveyard with over 750 bodies, and there were scores to hundreds of these "schools".

    The Magdalene Laundries scandal finally cratered the political legitimacy of the Catholic Church in Ireland: forget the horror stories of child abuse that had previously surfaced, the discovery of over 800 baby skeletons in a septic tank told its own story of depraved indifference to human life (and flatly gave the lie to the Church's own avowed values).

    The story I read in the NY Times about the St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home in Tuam said it was one of numerous institutions for unwed mothers & illegitimate children where there was a pattern of neglect (and negligence) and not all of those institutions were run by the Roman Catholic Church. That one institution in Tuam is just the first and best documented case so far.

    Depraved indifference seems to implicate more than just the Church; the Irish scandal spreads beyond the Church into Irish society.

    So too, I expect that as the story out of Canada evolves, more than the one school recently identified will be involved. And I expect the cause, the reason for why it happened, is going to be much the same as that of the Irish scandal. Native Americans in Canada will turn out to be just same as those "born our of wedlock" babies in Ireland; considered & treated as less than human.

    Out of sight and out of mind.

    1206:

    This is getting depressing. You folks need to cheer up. You could be one of the folks attending a rally of a group that's claiming that all birds in the US were actually killed by the US government, and replaced with drones.

    https://www.ozarksfirst.com/local-news/local-news-local-news/birds-arent-real-rolling-rally-makes-first-stop-in-missouri/

    1207:

    Speel; us Euro types aren't allowed to see the article directly because data protection.

    1208:

    Another reason why living in Raleigh is so great:

    https://www.wral.com/raleigh-bookstore-owner-focuses-on-everything-except-the-profits/19742188/

    As for the "Birds aren't real" protests, you may not be able to see the video, but you CAN buy a T-Shirt

    https://www.amazon.com/birds-arent-real-shirt/s?k=birds+arent+real+shirt

    1209:

    Native Americans in Canada will turn out to be just same as those "born our of wedlock" babies in Ireland; considered & treated as less than human.

    on that scale it sounds like an unstated policy of eugenic neglect

    1210:

    on that scale it sounds like an unstated policy of eugenic neglect

    Slow-motion genocide, really.

    My granddad (mother's father) taught in a residential school1 for one year in the mid 1950s. He's long-dead, but this current bout of news makes me wonder: what did he see? what did he know? what did he suspect?

    1He taught in what was then known as Coppermine, now named Kugluktuk.

    1211:

    The one I DO remember was the quarter inch of snow in January 2005 that panicked the school system into announcing they were closing early and in turn panicked the whole city into trying to get home to be there when the kids got off the bus with the upshot of gridlock that kept the buses from getting through to the schools and a lot of the kids ended up having to stay at the schools overnight.

    You were in Fayetteville per you later comment. Which is 40-50 miles south of Raleigh. I was in downtown Raleigh all day. Morning started out with light rain and temps just above freezing. Everyone to work and school without any issues. Then the weather quickly changed in ways not fully predicted. It dropped and floated up and down mostly below freezing for the rest of the day. And the temps in the air up above the city was both above and below freezing due to front systems colliding.

    What then happened is sleet and freezing rain and light snow switching back and forth. It was enough to start building up a loose and frozen snot layer on all the streets. Schools and businesses started closing not fully appreciating just how bad the roads got and how quickly they went bad. One person at the office I was in got there around noon after spending nearly 2 hours driving 10 blocks or so.

    My son was 5+ miles away and called to ask if he should get on the bus. I told him to wait at school and call me if they were threatening to throw him out. I picked him up just before dark in my 4WD SUV and drove the 12+ miles home on back streets that were mostly level. Doing at most 20mph.

    But the buses couldn't deal with the road snot. Most had drivers or kids with a cell phone got word to PARK IT. So most buses pulled into hospitals and hotel/motel parking lots. And if parents didn't get there later they slept on the floor. If the buses got to their neighborhoods many parents close to them had slumber parties for the kids.

    There were 3 buses trapped near my house where there was a main side street that had a 50-75 foot drop and climb across a creek. They all got down there and couldn't get back up. (I give #2 and #3 a bit of a pass as they couldn't see the bottom when they started down so didn't realize they were headed to a parking spot.)

    Anyway, city shut down due to 1/4 inch of snow is technically correct. But not really the truth of the matter.

    1212:

    the [Indian] department declared that while it was true the children died at a much higher rate than they did in their home communities, that was not enough to deter the state from its objective of a final solution: an end to the “Indian Problem” and the Indian Department

    It was apparently stated, if unpublicized.

    I grew up during the Sixties Scoop, going to pow-wows, learning Lakota sign writing, trying (and failing) to learn Cree — and I had no idea* how bad the schools were.

    That could have been me missing things — lord knows I missed a lot of even explicitly stated stuff, let alone anything requiring reading between the lines — or my very-much-non-racist parents sheltering me. I knew it was a badly flawed policy and a horrible mistake, but I had no idea how horrible.

    As Ms. Good wrote (and I quoted above), this isn't new knowledge. Yet it wasn't widely known.

    • And I know about things like Alberta enforcing eugenics laws into the 70s.
    1213:

    A couple of recent pieces on or informed by phylogenetic analyses of SARS-CoV-2: When did the first COVID-19 case arise? (June 24, 2021) The (open access) paper (bold mine): Dating first cases of COVID-19 (PLOS Pathogens, David L. Roberts, Jeremy S. Rossman, Ivan Jarić, June 24, 2021) Here we repurpose extinction models from conservation science to estimate the potential for earlier cases than has been reported of COVID-19 in 203 countries and territories. ... Based on the OLE, the results suggest that the most likely timing of the first case of COVID-19 in China was November 17, 2019 (Fig 2), with a 95% confidence interval reaching as far back as October 4.

    Recovery of deleted deep sequencing data sheds morelight on the early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 epidemic (Jesse D. Bloom, June 22, 2021)

    Cryptocurrency miners consider Texas and Kazakhstan to be functionally similar: China's ban forces some bitcoin miners to flee overseas, others sell out (Samuel Shen, Andrew Galbraith, June 25, 2021) Bold mine: SHANGHAI, June 25 (Reuters) - China's sweeping ban on cryptocurrency mining has paralysed an industry that accounts for over half of global bitcoin production, as miners dump machines in despair or seek refuge in places such as Texas or Kazakhstan.

    1214:

    the quarter inch of snow in January 2005 that panicked the school system into announcing they were closing early

    In three decades teaching in Toronto, we've been sent home early a handful of times. Only once has school been cancelled entirely* — usual policy was to wait until 12:01 because then it would officially count as a school day and not need to be made up later. Busses would be cancelled, police would be begging people to stay off the roads, and teachers would be driving in to school because their principals told them they had to be there**.

    I was amazed the first snowstorm at my last school when the principal said not to risk our lives, if it wasn't safe to get to our school get to a school, call our school to let them know where we were, and follow the instructions of the principal at the school we were at who was probably short staff and could use some extra hands.

    *And I still went in, because they didn't announce the closure by the stated time so I assumed they would be open and left to get there on time.

    **Once I was half an hour late, because it took me three hours to drive what was normally a 45 minute route. Before cell phones, but I called in anyway because a nice security guard at a condo let me borrow his desk phone to call my school. When I arrived I was chewed out for being late (even though I had no first period class) because they apparently needed me to cover for a phys ed teacher who was running late. She lived four blocks from the school and ran the cross-country ski program, but I was the one who was apparently at fault.

    1215:

    "No mattress at all? Luxury! When I were a lad, they made me sleep on -1 mattresses!"

    In 8-bit unsigned arithmetic, I presume. Could you feel a pea underneath?

    1216:

    On a previous sub-thread: The price of food & it's availability Another straw in the wind? I'm beginning to think a real, actual serious food-price spike & shortages are needed - to bring this corrupt chumocracy down, before it's too late. The Half-Cock affair reminds me of a saying: "To fetter the people, it is necessary to appear to wear the same chains as they do" And Halfcock has broken that rule ....

    1217:

    Which reminds me of one day in one job...

    I was on time, wearing fell boots, and carrying my office shoes in my executive lunch box (as well as my sandwiches and train book). We had about an inch of snow between my getting up and leaving for the station.

    My boss, who drove in, was about 2 hours late. On my way through central Glasgow, I saw a sight I'd never seen before, and hope to never see again. A driver power-sliding a double decker bus round a tight 90 degree corner at maybe 10mph!

    1218:

    Whitroth: that birds-replaced-by-drones teaser is tantalizing, but if I hit on the website I get this:

    This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.

    (Translation: we are too lazy to ensure the ads we carry don't leak your personal information to third party aggregators.)

    Do you have a non-adware source?

    1219:

    Agreed. FWIW, I always hit a deep link like that by opening in a new window, and close that window when I'm done.

    1220:

    If you do a google search on the term you mostly get TV station news bits. Which tends to imply it is a PR push story.

    They all claim it’s a parody of the current QANON type stories that so many are swallowing whole just now.

    You best bet may be the WGN site. Chicago station with national carriage on sat and cable.

    1221:

    Greg @1187:

    Oh shit [ MicroShaft new OS ... please say it ain't so! ] Lots of us have no effective choice, but to use MS.

    Hahahahah!

    Don't worry about it - if you haven't recently purchased a machine with the right sort of CPU, and the right sort of BIOS, it won't be upgradeable to W11 anyway.

    Indeed, last weeks top-of-the-line MS Surface Tablet apparently can't be upgraded to W11.

    So go make yourself a cuppa and relax, if you last longer than 2025 and need a new system, that's when you'll have to learn it. And if dealing with a "Start" button being in different place gives you palpitations, well, give up now.

    1222:

    It's all to do with these people https://birdsarentreal.com/

    1223:

    Ima Pseudonym Ah, well, this machine is less than a year old ....

    Toby Obviously a pisstake on the conspiracy loons, who are probably too dim to realise that it's a spoof. And of course, it's an hommage to Pterry - "Dark side of the Sun" IIRC.

    1224:

    quotation :

    "“What makes me think that? I think the evidence is all around us, birds sit on power lines, we believe they’re charging on power lines, we believe that bird poop on cars is liquid tracking apparatus.”"

    I'm in europe, i browse these kind of sites with The Tor Borwser, with an exit node outside of EU.

    This is, I believe, sarcasm aimed at QAnon : https://birdsarentreal.com/ , these days, you never know if it's not, in fact, dead serious.

    1225:

    whitroth @ 1208: ou could be one of the folks attending a rally of a group that's claiming that all birds in the US were actually killed by the US government, and replaced with drones.

    Thanks to a VPN I was able to hit a button on my browser and evade their geofence.

    What I found was that this is an example of Poe's law:

    Birds Aren’t Real relies on internet-fueled guerilla marketing to spread a silly message. Followers are poking fun at conspiracy theories like QAnon that have gone mainstream over the last few years.

    You can't come up with a parody of Trumpism that is sufficiently extreme to be clearly distinguishable from their real-life beliefs.

    1226:

    Then there's this one.

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

    I bought the book about this decades ago. Great spoof. Took in some major media of the time. They did go to bother of renting a closet in a Manhattan building and putting an answering machine in it.

    1227:

    Well, I'm not allowed a pop-up blocker, and think that's an attempt to sell tee-shirts.

    1228:

    If I'm not real then for sure none of you lot even exist.

    1229:

    I've four-wheel-drifted a minibus round a roundabout, but I've never had a chance to try it with a double-decker :)

    1230:

    What is disturbing is that the usual reason for British aggression

    …in this case, “Freedom of Navigation” seems plausible; the point is being made that just because Russia invaded Crimea (and the Donbass), doesn’t mean it gets to threaten anyone sailing past.

    https://theconversation.com/hms-defender-incident-what-the-law-of-the-sea-says-163389

    It’s just exercising Rights of Way, on a slightly larger scale than “that path through the estate that we’ve always used”. I never took you for someone who sided with the “Git Orf Moi Land!” brigade in such matters…

    1231:

    I was going to wait until the next thread on Bitcoin to bring this up, but what's going on with Bitcoin and Central America is absolutely amazing right now.

    Short version: Latin American leaders rather liked President Trump. As long as they cracked down on immigration, Trump turned a blind eye to local corruption. Biden is reversing this policy. In El Salvador, the country's Supreme Court called the president very corrupt. In reality, the President's allies impeached the Supreme Court justices

    https://news.in-24.com/news/3448.html

    In this day and age, the President of El Salvador doesn't worry about Navy SEALS arresting him a-la Noriega. Nor can the Biden administration place economic sanctions on the country's economic sectors, not with immigrants crossing the Southern Border at rates not seen in 2 decades. Instead, he can expect sanctions on individual members of his government. The US is doing this to all Government officials in the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua)

    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/172000-migrants-decades-stopped-us-mexico-border-march/story?id=76932441 https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/exclusive-us-targets-central-america-officials-possible-sanctions-over-2021-05-05/

    Seeing the successes Putin, Xi, and Lukashenko have experienced recently, he's come up with a 3-pronged strategy to fight back.

  • Go on Tucker Carlson's show and say that a. The immigration surge is solely due to the Biden administration, and that there's been too little Global Warming to be a root cause b. Say that El Salvador's capital San Salvador is safer than Baltimore or Chicago b/c it has a lower homicide rate. This doubles as an appeal for tourists from the 45% of US residents who don't have a single dose of the vaccine. El Salvador doesn't require vaccinations to enter the country.
  • https://www.facebook.com/FoxNews/videos/president-of-el-salvador-talks-immigration-crisis-with-tucker-carlson/1111085329368905/?extid=SEO---- https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-americans-should-apply-for-asylum-in-el-salvador-its-safer-than-baltimore-and-chicago

  • El Salvador became the first country to make Bitcoin a legal currency. Not only that, he's getting to get loans to develop Geothermal Energy plants to mine bitcoin using only renewable energy. My reading of this is that he's more interested in the plants, not the Bitcoin mining. To speed up adoption of the currency, he's offering $30 to any citizen who sets up a wallet https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/6/25/free-bitcoin-el-salvador-offers-30-of-bitcoin-to-boost-uptake https://www.npr.org/2021/06/11/1005231250/el-salvador-plans-to-use-electricity-generated-from-volcanoes-to-mine-bitcoin

  • I haven't seen any news on this, but I also assume he's trying to make deals with China to prop up his government. For China this is an important inroad. In 2018, the Caribbean basin was the only major region to trade more with the US than with China. I wouldn't be surprised if the geothermal plants aren't financed by the BRI

  • https://www.visualcapitalist.com/china-u-s-worlds-trading-partner/

    Impeaching these leaders is very difficult to do because around 40% of Central America's population is Protestant, mostly Evangelical. This President won his election partially on a promise to keep out same-sex marriage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Latin_America

    1232:

    I think it's now relevant to point up the capabilities of a Type 45 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYEtv-CR7-M Original source is NATO, not protectively marked.

    1233:

    "No mattress at all? Luxury! When I were a lad, they made me sleep on -1 mattresses!"

    In 8-bit unsigned arithmetic, I presume. Could you feel a pea underneath?

    Back then mattresses were not N-pea complete.

    1234:

    I certainly hope your mattress wasn't P-complete, or you'd need a waterproof mattress protector.

    1235:

    That's an integral part of camping with young children…

    1236:

    I do hope the subterranean-living people have remembered that climate change produces sea level rise.

    1237:

    Something, something, trump video tape...

    1238:

    Mum told this story from when we lived in Germany in the mid-70s…

    Typical heavy German winter, she’s heading back home from the school where she taught, to find a queue of cars where the Polizei stopped traffic due to ice / accident / blockage. Waits for ten minutes, takes a look, decides she’ll take an alternate route home. Warns the Mercedes driver in front and the BMW driver behind, that she’s about to turn our Lancia Beta around, and felt a wave of smugness from the two middle-aged German men that the thirty-something hausfrau was going to spend ten minutes doing a ninety-point turn.

    Sheer fluke, she says; puts on full lock to pull out of the queue, adds a bit of throttle, and the car suddenly grips and spins itself through 180 degrees within its own length, stops perfectly and gently on the opposite side of the road facing the other direction; and she slowly pulls away to the utter shock of two faces wondering how the hell she’d done that…

    1239:

    “Enuresis isn’t the title of a 70s sci-fi novel, Baldrick…” ;)

    1241:

    Lower Similkameen Indian Band Chief Keith Crow told public broadcaster CBC he had received a call early in the morning saying that the Chopaka Church was on fire. It had burned to the ground by the time he arrived half an hour later.

    "I'm angry," the chief told CBC. "I don't see any positive coming from this and it's going to be tough."

    Many in the community are Catholic Church members and are very upset about the blaze, he said.

    Revenge? Maybe.

    Arson is a bigger problem in Indigenous communities than the rest of the country. Prior to the discoveries churches have been burned* that had no connection to residential schools, too. Historic churches make good targets for firebugs: old dry wood, empty most of the time, no remote monitoring.

    Thing is, these are local churches. This arson doesn't hurt the Catholic Church as a whole, it hurts the local community — who are Indigenous and who suffered as much as the (assumed) arsonists. It's not like the pope is going to raffle off Vatican treasures to rebuild the churches…

    I get that you're gloating, Greg, and it's likely that more churches will burn. But this isn't revenge against a world-wide organization — any more than the looting at the G20 protests in Toronto was an attack on the G20.

    *Likewise access to clean drinking water and decent education, unemployment, addiction, suicide, abuse…

    **Also homes, community centres, grocery stores…

    1242:

    It's highly unlikely those arsons inconvenienced anyone directly involved in those schools. Guilt by association seems insufficient justification.

    1244:

    The Director of National Intelligence has released their long awaited UFO report.

    TL;DR - Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) are real because they show up on so many different types of sensors. They're probably NOT aliens visiting earth (although that cannot be definitively ruled out). There's really not enough data, so the Intelligence Community can't identify them.

    They're still unidentified.

    https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf

    1245:

    JReynolds @ 1212:

    on that scale it sounds like an unstated policy of eugenic neglect

    Slow-motion genocide, really.

    Wikipedia says Genocide "is the intentional action to destroy a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part."

    I don't think it was intentional in either Ireland or Canada.

    Doesn't make it any less horrific, but I think we need another word for blind stupidity on the part of whole societies and in both cases it does appear to me that the whole of society is guilty. I'm afraid they'll get all wrapped up trying to affix blame and forget to do anything to correct the underlying problem, i.e. some people being treated as less human than the rest of society.

    1246:

    With kidlings, I can prove that I sleep on NP-Complete mattresses.

    The South American Bitcoin thing does illustrate a use-case for digital currency.

    1247:

    David L @ 1213:

    The one I DO remember was the quarter inch of snow in January 2005 that panicked the school system into announcing they were closing early and in turn panicked the whole city into trying to get home to be there when the kids got off the bus with the upshot of gridlock that kept the buses from getting through to the schools and a lot of the kids ended up having to stay at the schools overnight.

    You were in Fayetteville per you later comment. Which is 40-50 miles south of Raleigh. I was in downtown Raleigh all day. Morning started out with light rain and temps just above freezing. Everyone to work and school without any issues. Then the weather quickly changed in ways not fully predicted. It dropped and floated up and down mostly below freezing for the rest of the day. And the temps in the air up above the city was both above and below freezing due to front systems colliding.

    I was still on Active Duty at Ft. Bragg working on demobilizing the 30th BCT after we returned from overseas. I was frequently back & forth between Ft. Bragg & Raleigh. I arrived back in Raleigh between 4:00 and 5:00pm that day.

    I don't remember why I had a Wednesday off, but it was probable I had weekend duty and received "time off in lieu" during the week ('cause the Army don't pay overtime). I left Ft. Bragg in the morning & drove down to Ft. Fisher1 to photograph along the beach.

    When I left Ft. Fisher I came up I-40 headed back to Raleigh to spend the night at home. I was almost to Raleigh when "All Things Considered came on NPR and after the national news there was a report on Raleigh's traffic problem.

    I had just crossed the I-40 overpass over US 70 when the light came on to tell me I needed gas. That was the Mazda I bought when I got home because the Escort had died while I was away. I'd only had it a couple of weeks & didn't know how far I could get once the "get gas light" came on. And almost at the same time I encountered the tail end of the traffic jam south of Raleigh on I-40 (inbound), so I got off at the next exit (Jones Sausage Rd) and snaked my way through Garner to get to the Crown station on S. Wilmington St. According to Google Maps, my route was about 12 miles from where I first encountered the traffic jam on I-40 to my house.

    S. Wilmington inbound was clear of traffic, so I headed in that way & took the connector onto S. Saunders and then up S. McDowell where I ran into the traffic jam again around Nash Square. Turned right on Morgan, left again on Wilmington st at the Capitol building.

    Traffic was again jammed up at Peace St and that's where I had my longest delay (almost half an hour to go a thousand feet through two traffic signals) until I was able to cut across Person onto N. Boundary st and used the residential streets through Oakwood to get home.

    All told, I spent maybe 30 minutes in traffic and it only took me about 45 minutes to get home from the time I first heard about it until I was sitting in my own living room (including the time I spent at the gas station).

    What then happened is sleet and freezing rain and light snow switching back and forth. It was enough to start building up a loose and frozen snot layer on all the streets. Schools and businesses started closing not fully appreciating just how bad the roads got and how quickly they went bad. One person at the office I was in got there around noon after spending nearly 2 hours driving 10 blocks or so.

    I didn't see any of the snow/sleet/freezing rain as it was coming down. There was a touch on the shoulder & median (on the grass) out on I-40 between US-70 and Jones Sausage Rd. And there was just a dusting in my front yard when I got home.

    That's the main reason I remember it, because I missed it ... and missed most of the traffic jam, but heard stories about all the trouble people, so many other people, had getting home. So many people had so much trouble, and I didn't have any.

    And the next day, when I went out to photograph it, I had to drive up north to between Roxboro & Hillsborough (NC 49) to find ANY snow (after stopping in Durham to see my Mom).

    My son was 5+ miles away and called to ask if he should get on the bus. I told him to wait at school and call me if they were threatening to throw him out. I picked him up just before dark in my 4WD SUV and drove the 12+ miles home on back streets that were mostly level. Doing at most 20mph.

    But the buses couldn't deal with the road snot. Most had drivers or kids with a cell phone got word to PARK IT. So most buses pulled into hospitals and hotel/motel parking lots. And if parents didn't get there later they slept on the floor. If the buses got to their neighborhoods many parents close to them had slumber parties for the kids.

    There were 3 buses trapped near my house where there was a main side street that had a 50-75 foot drop and climb across a creek. They all got down there and couldn't get back up. (I give #2 and #3 a bit of a pass as they couldn't see the bottom when they started down so didn't realize they were headed to a parking spot.)

    Anyway, city shut down due to 1/4 inch of snow is technically correct. But not really the truth of the matter.

    That's my point. The city got shut down by PANIC over what turned out to be only a 1/4 inch of snow. It's memorable because it was so damn weird. If the precipitation had come over-night, the schools (and likely everything else) would have been closed the next day, but there wouldn't have been any kind of panic on the highways.

    People had more trouble with that 1/4 inch than they would have had if it had been several inches of snow.

    1 Ft. Fisher is a NC State Park/Recreation Area where there used to be an earth embankment "fort" during the American Civil War. The fort "protected" the Cape Fear River & Wilmington from the Union blockade.

    1248:

    The city got shut down by a 1/4 inch of snow.

    Yes, and? A quarter inch of wet greasy snow is actually more slippery than 3" of decent powder.

    1249:

    Robert Prior @ 1216:

    the quarter inch of snow in January 2005 that panicked the school system into announcing they were closing early

    In three decades teaching in Toronto, we've been sent home early a handful of times. Only once has school been cancelled entirely* — usual policy was to wait until 12:01 because then it would officially count as a school day and not need to be made up later. Busses would be cancelled, police would be begging people to stay off the roads, and teachers would be driving in to school because their principals told them they had to be there**.

    I was amazed the first snowstorm at my last school when the principal said not to risk our lives, if it wasn't safe to get to our school get to a school, call our school to let them know where we were, and follow the instructions of the principal at the school we were at who was probably short staff and could use some extra hands.

    *And I still went in, because they didn't announce the closure by the stated time so I assumed they would be open and left to get there on time.

    **Once I was half an hour late, because it took me three hours to drive what was normally a 45 minute route. Before cell phones, but I called in anyway because a nice security guard at a condo let me borrow his desk phone to call my school. When I arrived I was chewed out for being late (even though I had no first period class) because they apparently needed me to cover for a phys ed teacher who was running late. She lived four blocks from the school and ran the cross-country ski program, but I was the one who was apparently at fault.

    But, y'all live in a place that it regularly snows every winter. Your local government, School Administrators & school bus drivers all have experience with snow. Your government has dedicated equipment for snow removal & you said (I think it was you) that snow tires are a legal requirement there in the winter.

    Around here we get snow - a couple of inches - maybe once in three & four years. Our government, School Administrators and especially our school bus drivers do not have that experience.

    School buses are the key here. Schools will close at the drop of a hat (much less that flaky white stuff) because you don't to risk the kids on school buses when the drivers don't know how to drive in/on snow.

    When I was growing up in Durham, NC (about 25 miles WNW from here) they got (and still get) more snow than we do in Raleigh. There seems to be a snow line that follows I-85. North & West of it they get snow, while South & East of it we get sleet or freezing rain or just plain old cold rain.

    At the time (50s & 60s) Durham had two school systems - City & County. County schools had school buses. City schools did not. During the 12 years I spent in the Durham (city) Public Schools, schools closed for snow only one time (although I remember a couple of other instances when your parents could come get you if they wanted to). I grew up right near the city limits and a lot of my friends went to county schools and they got to stay home for snow days a lot because the schools didn't want to risk school bus accidents (and at the time High School seniors could drive school buses).

    And that one time when the city schools DID close for snow we (the kids) had to make up the missed days, going to school on two Saturdays & losing our Spring (Easter) Holiday.

    1250:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1217:

    "No mattress at all? Luxury! When I were a lad, they made me sleep on -1 mattresses!"

    In 8-bit unsigned arithmetic, I presume. Could you feel a pea underneath?

    A pea underneath is no problem. It's the pee on top you want to watch out for.

    1251:

    JBS @ 1251: "But, y'all live in a place that it regularly snows every winter. Your local government, School Administrators & school bus drivers all have experience with snow. Your government has dedicated equipment for snow removal & you said (I think it was you) that snow tires are a legal requirement there in the winter."

    I'm the one who noted that in Quebec snow tires are mandatory all winter long. Some see this as a form of dictatorship. In other provinces some see the lack of a law as a sign they are free!

    But to be fair, even with snow tires we end up sliding and swerving, like in my home town of Montreal, where even the police gets caught in the mess:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfDZixZFzms

    1252:

    I don't think it was intentional in either Ireland or Canada.,/i>

    Actually, there's considerable evidence that the Canadian Indian Department had, as a deliberate policy, forcibly integrating Indigenous people with the rest of society (in the role of lower-class workers, too).

    The residential school policy was explicitly about turning "savages" into civilized people, and at least some of those responsible for implementing it were willing to accept 50% fatality rates to make that happen.

    (Others, apparently, honestly believed they were doing what was best for the children in the long term. Ryerson, for example, for all that he's being currently vilified, pushed a model based on the best British boarding schools* and called for only "men of the highest moral character" to be involved in them. Intentions, road to hell…)

    Certainly MacDonald wanted to be rid of the "Indian problem".

    We know that Nazi eugenics policies were modelled on the American Eugenics Society. We know that in some parts of Canada eugenic laws were on the books — and enforced — into the 1970s. I find the Indian Department's plan for a "final solution" terrifying.

    https://waragainsttheweak.com

    People get upset about the Uyghurs. Canada's actions within my lifetime look to be as bad.

    *Yes, Greg, we know your opinion on them. But at the time they were held up as an educational model to emulate.

    1253:

    But, y'all live in a place that it regularly snows every winter. Your local government, School Administrators & school bus drivers all have experience with snow. Your government has dedicated equipment for snow removal & you said (I think it was you) that snow tires are a legal requirement there in the winter.

    Winter tires* aren't required in Ontario.

    School buses shut down before schools are closed. But when the police are pleading with people to stay off the roads, it is irresponsible to require people to travel on them only to send them home three hours later. I was fulminating against keeping schools open for the morning only, insisting that teachers do nothing important then sending the kids home at 12:01. Does nothing but waste time and endanger people.

    The year I started teaching two teachers were killed by a snow plow in a storm. Police said they shouldn't have been on the road. They were on the road because their principal told them they had to be at school, and they only had probationary contracts so didn't think they had a choice.

    *And stop calling them "snow tires". The point isn't the grip in snow, it's the grip in cold temperatures on any surface. A winter tire will give you better grip traction than an all-season one in colder temperatures no matter whether there's snow on the road or not.

    1255:

    "Sheer fluke"? And I have a bridge for sale. She knew what she was doing: a smugglers' turn. Putting on the parking brake is the dead giveaway.

    1256:

    Mostly, though, when you get .25", it's not powerder, it's slippery.

    I know I've told this story before - when I lived in Austin, TX, every three-four years, we'd get a huge snowstorm... of between 1/8" and 1/4". That was the prediction, that was what we got, and the entire city, capital of Texas, would shut down, schools, government, everything.

    And then, since no one was capable of remembering from 3-4 years before, half of the drivers would be doing between 5mph and 10mph (including on the Interstate), and the rest were still trying to do 80.

    Being from Philly, where schools would not shut unless it was going to be 3" or over, I'd laugh myself silly.

    My late wife, who'd lived for a few years in north Texas, could drive in snow, but didn't care to... so she declared me to be the designated Yankee.

    1257:

    Oh, and Austin, not having snow often, did NOT have salt for the roads. Instead, they put down ash from the city incinerators, to help make the roads slipperier.

    1258:

    Over here, of course, having the whole place shut down because of a little bit of snow is something that happens every year because they know it happened last year and the year before and the year before that etc. but still try and pretend it isn't going to happen again right up until it does.

    The problem I remember with school buses in the winter was having to wait two hours for the things to turn up because they were still running on summer diesel and it took them that long to get them running.

    1259:

    Mostly, though, when you get .25", it's not powder, it's slippery.

    Which is exactly what I said, only from the other end.

    1260:

    Thought people would be interested in this:

    https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jun/26/project-cassandra-plan-to-use-novels-to-predict-next-war

    Fascinating article about attempting to predict conflicts using literature. Well worth a read.

    1261:
    I don't think it was intentional in either Ireland or Canada

    Yeah, no. Macdonald (Canada's first Prime Minister, whose face still adorns (most) of our $10 bills) wanted to get rid of the savages.

    I visited the RCR (Royal Canadian Regiment) museum a few years ago. It's a good little museum, but I came away from it realizing that in the first two conflicts in which the RCR served, we were the baddies.

    Nobody likes to think that the country they love has done bad things. And yet, there you are. My country right or wrong. If right, to keep it right. If wrong, to set it right.

    1262:

    Those are lots of memories of winter, but I'm currently in summer. In fact, I'm currently rather hot - the BBC is not exaggerating when it reports a record high temperature. If I melt away into a featureless ooze it won't be at all surprising.

    1263:

    Mostly, though, when you get .25", it's not powerder, it's slippery.

    Maybe where you are, but not where I grew up. Saskatchewan is cold enough that almost all snow, including <1cm, is powdery.

    Southern Ontario it's almost all slippery, even when we get dozens of cm at once.

    1264:

    first two conflicts

    Haven't been to South Africa, but I've visited Duck Lake, Fish Creek, Batoche…

    When I was there the church at Batoche still had bullet holes from the battle, preserved as part of the heritage. Don't know if that's still the case.

    In school the North-West Rebellion was taught with the usual names/dates common back then, but the Metis' legitimate grievances (both in Saskatchewan and in Manitoba in the earlier Red River Rebellion) were presented as such. Aboriginal grievances were more glossed over, as a matter of having trouble adapting to agriculture once the buffalo vanished (and not linking that to deliberate government policy on both sides of the border). Settlers scamming the Indians was covered as 'a few bad apples' rather than deliberate policy.

    I saw Alien Thunder when it came out. A well-intentioned but amateurish film about Almighty Voice (although it's more about the RCMP chap hunting him).

    https://archive.org/details/DanCandysLaw

    1265:

    I came away from it realizing that in the first two conflicts in which the RCR served, we were the baddies.

    To be fair to (some of) our ancestors, at least a few of them were aware that we were the baddies and had a powerful enough voice that the powers that be of the time at least felt obliged to occasionally execute a scapegoat for the otherwise (albeit unofficially) sanctioned atrocities. Consider this stanza from Harry "the Breaker" Morant:

    If you encounter any Boers You really must not loot 'em! And if you wish to leave these shores, For pity's sake, DON'T SHOOT 'EM!!

    But yes, we also have the same genocide debate in Aus and "history wars" are a real and current thing, sadly, even while I think most reasonable people have come around to the progressive viewpoint (something that is probably just my bubble talking, but hey). There is a nice quip from historian Henry Reynolds, responding to some remarks by form PM John Howard: "better a black armband than a white blindfold".

    1266:

    Yes, and? A quarter inch of wet greasy snow is actually more slippery than 3" of decent powder.

    Snow is a somewhat misleading statement. I was in it all day. Walking outside onto the warehouse dock every hour or more often to see what was up. Temps just at freezing. What was coming down after the early morning rain was freezing rain, sleet, and light snow, switching every 30 minutes to an hour. Roads were mostly just above freezing so it was like an ice dam on a roof. As I said semi frozen snot. It stopped mid afternoon but the roads were mostly a wreak until things stayed above freezing.

    I've been out in ice storms, driven in Pittsburgh for 7 winters (4' every year), and northeasterns in New England. Plus that insane 77-78 winter in Cleveland with 1/4" inch of frozen stuff or more every day from late November till end of February.

    This was the worst sudden situation I'd ever seen.

    It changed the way the state deals with such. They now start putting brine down on the possibility of such weather instead of waiting till it falls.

    1267:

    Putting on the parking brake is the dead giveaway.

    You are reading things that aren't there. There was no mention of any brake, only throttle and wheel.

    You're not reading 'full lock' as being something to do with a brake are you?

    1268:

    On an old topic .. It appears the Trump "organisation" now has less than 24 hrs to go, before they are indicted by the New York state (?) prosecutors. Popcorn?

    1269:

    Yes, popcorn time!

    Rudy is disbarred (and split with Trump anyway) and nobody sane works for Trump as a lawyer -- he's a deadbeat debtor, and the reputational damage of being seen to work for him could deter other businesses from seeking counsel. So I expect lots of flailing and smoke and shouting but not any actually effective legal defense work. (There are plenty of MAGA lawyers, but they're not terribly competent, as the nonsense over election count challenges demonstrates.)

    On the other hand Trump will use any indictments to raise funds from his base by claiming it's a politically motivated witch hunt and playing his victim card.

    The best outcome would be a rapid conviction for tax evasion followed by a long jail stretch, but I'm not holding my breath. Realistically, proceedings will probably drag on into 2022 and the political climate will have time to shift ...

    ADMINISTRATIVE UPDATE

    I'd been planning to blog more frequently this month, but I've been sandbagged by a sudden death deadline. (The perils of working with international publishers who need to coordinate their publication dates and workflow.)

    I'm going to be scarce around here until the deadline is met. But the good news is, the deadline is Wednesday. So I'm going pedal to the metal, then taking a few days off to lie on my back panting, then there'll hopefully be a new blog entry next week.

    1270:

    Minor nit.

    Suspended pending review. He can get it un-suspended if he puts on a good case to the review board or whatever it is called. But if not the process will work through the process and he can eventually be dis-barred in NY.

    1271:

    I've been sandbagged by a sudden death deadline

    Which is a lot better than being sandbagged by a sudden death. The way things have been going the last year, sudden deadlines look pretty good — I've been to way more funerals than I expected :-(

    1272:

    I'm currently rather hot

    Are you in Lytton? Reached over 46 C yesterday…

    1273:

    Thing is, Trump held a rally recently, and people were leaving early. He got their money, but they didn't get their entertainment. Also, with the rats jumping ship, or whatever you want to call Bill Barr's recent interview in the Atlantic, along with Javanka trying to distance themselves from Dear Old Daddy, it looks like Trump's time as a profitable entertainment is running out.

    My guess is that the redcap republicans are hoping that The Trials of Trump will consume all media attention, allowing them to gerrymander and suppress voting for 2022 without further media attention. Not sure they'll get it. I suspect Trump's also hoping for a massive bonfire of a trial to reignite his campaign (I'm being persecuted by evuls!). Instead, it may be incessant nibbling: tax evasion here, corporate law failure there. And those pesky tax returns, tsk tsk, no money for you, plus another eight months in prison. This will grab more of Trump's attention than it will grab headlines.

    That doesn't mean the Republicans are any less dangerous. It's just that they love them some distractions, and Trump can serve for that. Any fundraising they can do off him will be gravy, of course.

    1274:

    H AIUI the Biden admin & importantly their lawyers are trying another route to try to stamp on the "R's" voter suppression, by using 1960's Civil Rights legislation ... Could be well worth watching.

    Meanwhile, here, a very well-respected media figure & commentator has lost his cool & publicly knifed a tory frontman Who (?) - Trevor Phillips - on Sky too, apparently, not the evil nasty leftist BBC - looks very Trump-lite to me, as the tories crookedness loses them friends even in the media that they thought supported them. Oh dear, how sad.

    Phillips quote: “Now the next time one of you tells me what to do in my private life, explain to me why I shouldn’t just tell you where to get off.” Oops

    1275:

    P-complete mattresses are a best case scenario camping with kids.

    We had a trip to a family reunion near Kamloops where the eldest was about 3 years old. He ate a lot of junk food.

    At about 3 am there was a cataclysmic eruption of noxious fluids in his sleeping bag, such that it was a complete write off. Took him to the bathroom, cleaned him up, piled a bunch of horridly soiled things about 20 feet from the tent.

    Then he had nowhere else to go but climb into our bed with us. We could only hope he was done voiding.

    1276:
    We could only hope he was done voiding.

    Narrator's voice: But were their hopes in vain? Tune in next week for the exiting adventures of... Rocketpjs!

    1277:

    I would never wish death on anyone, and do not. I have always expected that Trump will never face any meaningful consequence for his actions. The guy is obese, mid 70s, full of rage and inadequacy.

    I am not a doctor, but there are certainly some indications of dementia. I've seen a few comparative videos of him speaking 6 years ago and now, and he is not as sharp nor as coherent (relatively speaking).

    If he ever actually has to stand trial we will instantly see him pushing a walker and claiming unfit. Which will bother his fragile ego so he will then immediately hold a rally and tell everyone he is faking it to avoid trial.

    If it ever comes to actual conviction and jail time I expect him to just die before serving a day.

    1278:

    Any thoughts on Newewsome's tax rebate? i wonder if the surplus came more from unexpected covid windfalls to California internet businesses, or if possibly it points more toward higher capital gains taxation as a ready cure for state government red ink.

    1279:

    Charlie, I see by Feòrag's tweet that you retweeted that you two have been together 28 years now.

    Congratulations!

    1280:

    Robert Prior @ 1254:

    I don't think it was intentional in either Ireland or Canada.

    Actually, there's considerable evidence that the Canadian Indian Department had, as a deliberate policy, forcibly integrating Indigenous people with the rest of society (in the role of lower-class workers, too).

    Would they have gone ahead with their plans if they had known the consequences? If they had NOT been willfully blind and had foreseen what harm they were doing would they have still gone ahead and done it?

    Evil though it was, I still don't see that death was the desired outcome, which is an essential component of genocide. That's why I think we need a new word to describe this kind of wrong.

    1281:

    Robert Prior @ 1255: *And stop calling them "snow tires". The point isn't the grip in snow, it's the grip in cold temperatures on any surface. A winter tire will give you better grip traction than an all-season one in colder temperatures no matter whether there's snow on the road or not.

    I google "winter tires" and this is what I get:

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

    1282:

    Agreed. Congrats to both of you!

    1283:

    JReynolds @ 1263:

    I don't think it was intentional in either Ireland or Canada

    Yeah, no. Macdonald (Canada's first Prime Minister, whose face still adorns (most) of our $10 bills) wanted to get rid of the savages.

    I visited the RCR (Royal Canadian Regiment) museum a few years ago. It's a good little museum, but I came away from it realizing that in the first two conflicts in which the RCR served, we were the baddies.

    Nobody likes to think that the country they love has done bad things. And yet, there you are. My country right or wrong. If right, to keep it right. If wrong, to set it right.

    Still, his intent seems to have been to reform those "savages" rather than exterminate them.

    And I'm glad you remembered to include that last bit. Too damn many forget it.

    1284:

    Rocketpjs @ 1277 has reminded me of my friend's account of being awakened by the child who slept in the lower bunk informing him that the child in the top bunk had diarrhoea...

    1285:

    I have used the studded type. On hard packed snow and ice they are like magic - controlled driving on surfaces I can't stand on without crampons.

    Having said that, in all the places where snow doesn't settle the roads just get eaten. Under bridges, in tunnels etc the asphalt was almost rutted.

    Not a great idea anywhere that doesn't have arctic conditions, but if you do then accept no substitutes.

    1286:

    Thirded, and that's from both my sister (whom they have both met) and I to both Feorag and Charlie.

    1287:

    Bellinghman @ 1269:

    Putting on the parking brake is the dead giveaway.

    You are reading things that aren't there. There was no mention of any brake, only throttle and wheel.

    You're not reading 'full lock' as being something to do with a brake are you?

    Yeah, I read it as turning the steering wheel hard over until it hits the stop.

    https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/full-lock

    IIRC, the Lancia Beta was a front-wheel drive vehicle; engine weight over the drive wheels and fairly light loading on the rear wheels. Goose it just the tiniest bit while turning in slippery conditions and the rear end will break free.

    I've learned how to do parking brake turns, but I'm not sure I could do one from a stand-still.

    1288:

    Rocketpjs @ 1279: I would never wish death on anyone, and do not. I have always expected that Trump will never face any meaningful consequence for his actions. The guy is obese, mid 70s, full of rage and inadequacy.

    I, OTOH, still keep a list of people I intend to bite if I'm ever infected with rabies. If the world would be a better place without someone, I hope it gets a chance to BE a better place, and the sooner the better.

    Not gonna' kill anyone, but there's no law against wishing.

    I am not a doctor, but there are certainly some indications of dementia. I've seen a few comparative videos of him speaking 6 years ago and now, and he is not as sharp nor as coherent (relatively speaking).

    If he ever actually has to stand trial we will instantly see him pushing a walker and claiming unfit. Which will bother his fragile ego so he will then immediately hold a rally and tell everyone he is faking it to avoid trial.

    FWIW, I don't think the investigators have yet zeroed in on Trumpolini himself. All the news reports I've seen mention the "Trump Organization". I hope they do get to him before he "runs out the clock" so to speak, but if he were to drop dead tomorrow & never got prosecuted it wouldn't bother me that much. The prosecutors could still go after Javanka, Don Jr & the rest of that foul crew.

    If it ever comes to actual conviction and jail time I expect him to just die before serving a day.

    In that case, I hope they'll build a special cell in the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora and make his corpse serve the full sentence with no "time off for good behavior"

    1289:

    Would they have gone ahead with their plans if they had known the consequences? If they had NOT been willfully blind and had foreseen what harm they were doing would they have still gone ahead and done it?

    Well, when the horrible conditions and death rates at the residential schools were reported by Dr. Bryce in 1907, he was fired, and things continued unchanged.

    I thought the report was buried, but apparently it was front-page news in the Evening Citizen* on November 15, 1907: “Schools Aid White Plague — Startling Death Rolls Revealed Among Indians — Absolute Inattention to the Bare Necessities of Health.” So it was known to the public at the time, which makes this even more horrible than I thought it was.

    "Bryce noted that the health care funding** granted to citizens in Ottawa alone was about three times higher than that allocated to First Nations people in all of Canada. However, when Duncan Campbell Scott became Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs in 1913, he informed Bryce that his annual medical reports on tuberculosis in residential schools were no longer necessary given that the information was costly to produce and the department had no intention of acting upon it. Bryce’s funding for research was thereafter cut and his presentations at academic conferences heavily interfered with by Scott."

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11620073/

    Evil though it was, I still don't see that death was the desired outcome, which is an essential component of genocide. That's why I think we need a new word to describe this kind of wrong.

    Quoting Lemkin, who coined the term:

    "Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group."

    https://books.google.ca/books/about/Axis_Rule_in_Occupied_Europe.html

    So even if death wasn't the desired outcome, just a tolerated byproduct, the goal of turning Indigenous people from "savages" into (effectively) white folks meets the definition of genocide.

    *Later the Ottawa Citizen. Daily newspaper in the nation's capitol.

    **Note that this was before Medicare, when people were expected to pay for their own doctors.

    1290:

    I google "winter tires" and this is what I get:

    That article is incredibly incomplete.

    Here the Automobile Association makes a point of recommending "winter tires", because a lot of people think it's only about the grip pattern (the original "snow tire") and as Ontario cities typically salt away the snow on city streets and highways you are travelling on bare asphalt most of the time. People say things like "I don't drive on snow" which may be true, but all-season tires are hard and have greatly-reduced traction at our winter temperatures, hence the push to call them winter tires — it's not about the snow, it's about the winter temperatures and having tires that still grip the road when it's cold out.

    "Normal all-season tire rubber hardens as temperatures drop below 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Tire rubber must be flexible to grip the road. At, or about 42 degrees Fahrenheit, an all-season and a winter tire have about the same traction, however, as the mercury drops the winter tire gains grip, while all-season tires and high performance tires, lose traction. "

    "Winter tires were called ‘snow tires’ in the past, and they are used to provide enhanced traction, which can not be provided by any other type. These types of tires have a snowflake logo present on the tire. However, winter tires and snow tires are not necessarily the same. Winter tires can tackle every kind of ice, from slush to freezing wet and everything in between. A winter tire’s overall performance exceeds that of a snow tire, making it an ideal tire to be used in extreme weather conditions."

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/culture/commuting/how-winter-tires-differ-from-snow-tires/article558791/

    1291:

    Yes, I am - full lock, a phrase that I don't know, reads to me as putting on the parking brake.

    Turning the wheel as far as it goes I would think of as a "full stop".

    1292:

    And the idea of Martin's mother just casually pulling a bootlegger's turn and driving away… it's a much better story that way! :-)

    1293:

    Congratulations, Charlie and Feorag.

    I admit I'm jealous.

    1294:

    Congratulations, Charlie and Feorag! What an excellent start!

    1295:

    Apropos of the Canadian Residential School horror, sort of, I'll point out that paradoxically, this is where the idea of empire, rather than a unitary nation-state, actually can have a better outcome.

    I'll also acknowledge that the US was heavily into assimilation in the 20th Century, so our hands are just as stained as those of the Canadians.

    The line I'm drawing here is that a nation-state is thought of as a unified people, speaking the approved language(s), doing the approved civilizational things, obeying the same laws, and so forth. Conversely, an empire in this scheme is a compound state composed of multiple nations, where there are imperial laws and norms that everyone is supposed to obey, plus national laws and norms that govern the individual nations within the empire.

    IIRC, in the US, in the 20th Century, there was a nationalistic movement towards being a unified nation-state, so everyone was supposed to speak English, have a job, and pay taxes. In this environment, the already-broken treaties with Indian nations were seen as hampering their assimilation into mainstream society, and they were generally seen as the vanishing remnants of ancestral civilizations, doomed by Progress (capital P), who were at best noble savages, at worst vermin. The adults who still practiced the traditional life were already on the losing side of history, but perhaps their children could be "saved" by residential schools and assimilation.

    Obviously this is bullshit, given how much trouble white America has admitting how much racism and greed are part of our central ethos. But it provides an ideological pretext for genocide. I wouldn't be surprised if the same ethic was at play in Canada. Australia too, perhaps?

    What we have in the US now is an empire: we're not doing cultural genocide against the tribes, but rather allowing them some modicum of control of their land and resources. I won't pretend for a second that the tribal peoples aren't second-class citizens who deserve far better than they have received. However, I want to point out that in our particular case, an empire that contains multiple subject nations within its borders can be a more just system than forced homogenization to produce a unitary state.

    I'd end by pointing out, needlessly, that empires aren't always good or even mostly good. But, it turns out, neither are nation-states. Each has relatively awful failure modes. Each just has its own unique ways to fail, and it turns out that this matters.

    1296:

    I have always expected that Trump will never face any meaningful consequence for his actions. There's already a huge consequence to his self-image. He lost power. Lost a reelection (not easy in the US), by 7 million votes, lost the Senate for the Republicans. He expected to win. (Perhaps voices(/his "gut") promised a win. They were outplayed. :-) Blocking of some of the ego damage by building a massive fortress of delusion has been taking a toll. (Unfortunately, also on several 10s of millions of Americans.)

    Not sure people grasp how Weird the D.J. Trump package was(/is?): Some choice segments in Bill Barr's Atlantic-interview attempt to wash off the Trump contamination. (It's an interesting read, but to be clear, Barr has long loyally served US RW authoritarianism, and is both Opus Dei and Federalist Society adjacent.[1]) Inside William Barr’s Breakup With Trump - In the final months of the administration, the doggedly loyal attorney general finally had enough. (Jonathan D. Karl, June 27, 2021) Bold mine: “I think you’ve noticed I haven’t been talking to you much,” Trump said to him. “I’ve been leaving you alone.” Barr later told others that the comment was reminiscent of a line in the movie Dr. Strangelove, in which the main character, Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, says, “I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.” Trump, Barr thought, was saying that he had been denying him his essence. ... The president, livid, responded by referring to himself in the third person: “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.

    Many weeks later, Biden's inauguration day, Trump says: “So just a goodbye. We love you. We will be back in some form,” Trump told supporters before boarding Air Force One for the flight to Florida.

    [1] Bill Barr, warrior for theocracy: Why didn't we know this until now? - The attorney general has gradually revealed his terrifying agenda: Who knew, and why was this concealed so long? (Heather Digby Parton, January 3, 2020) - and the pushback on these stories is oddly specific and telling.

    1297:

    Interesting. Quite well-considered.

    1298:

    Re: The monstrous residential school history being dragged back into the light here in Canada.

    There isn't a country or nation on Earth that doesn't have a few mountains of skulls stashed in various closets. Some of them wear the skulls proudly. Hell, even prior to now there was plenty of discussion of genocide as something that happened in the past (see: the Beothuk extermination). What we did not know or learn was that it was still ongoing while we were in school.

    This atrocity is our mountain of skulls. Canada is a notion that is yet to be successful, and it won't have a hope until we are able to deal with this historical and ongoing horror with honesty.

    I think the current PM has good intentions, but has been out of his depth. He may yet manage to act on this opportunity to make major changes in moving towards resolution. It's going to take a long time, much longer than his career I suspect.

    1299:

    I think the current PM has good intentions, but has been out of his depth.

    Agreed. Much as I voted for him, I wish we had his father right now.

    A few years ago I went to the opening talk for the Janvier exhibit at the McMichael Gallery. For those who don't know, Alex Janvier is Dene, from Cold Lake in Alberta. Politically active. He went to Japan as part of an official visit, and despite a general distrust of the Canadian governments apparently spent much of the flight talking with Pierre Trudeau (then PM). Described him (near as I can remember)) as a "very complex man. Intelligent. Curious. Hungry to learn."

    We could use that right now.

    1300:
    The Magdalene Laundries scandal dented & made small cracks in the Black Crows dominance of Ireland, but it was the death of one woman that finally did it, & did their rule in.

    You keep saying this. Why? Because I was there, and it seemed to me the consensus that Savita Halapannavar died because of our Constitution, not the Church.

    For anyone who's interested, a flavour of the last 20 years for the Catholic church in Ireland: - Mary Raftery's States of Fear (1999) and Cardinal Secrets (2002) documentaries force the sex abuse scandals into public and kickstart the investigatory commissions. - Justice for Magdalenes is founded in 2003. - The Ferns (2005) and Murphy and Ryan (2009) reports into child abuse in parishes and institutions are published. Irish society reacts with horror and revulsion. - 2010: the symphysiotomy scandal breaks. Visceral horror at some doctors and hospitals putting their (explicitly Catholic) beliefs about reproduction ahead of patient consent and women's health abounds. - 2013: the Magdalene Laundries report is published. The Taoiseach makes a formal state apology. - 2014: Catherine Corless' research into a possible unreported mass grave in the Tuam Baby Home begins to make ripples about another scandal in the Mother and Baby Home system. Another commission is established. Interim reports involving religious orders refusing to co-operate, deliberate neglect, illegal adoptions and straight-up selling babies trickle out. - 2021: the Mother and Baby report is published. 'Highlights' include medical experimentation and that the death rate of babies born in the system averaged 1 in 7.

    1301:

    anonemouse The then Irish constitution actually allowed Savita to have had an abortion ... but the medical staff were so brainwashed that they dithered & withered & whinged - & let her die. Remember that, then, the RC church had "special status" in that constitution - I don't know what it says now, after the referendum votes. Or that's the impression I got at the time - so frightened of the Black Crows that they ignored the law & allowed an innocent person to die in great pain. Your horrible list of the full (?) unravelling of the "Laundries" scandal, some of which is entirely new to me, makes it even worse.

    1302:

    But it provides an ideological pretext for genocide. I wouldn't be surprised if the same ethic was at play in Canada. Australia too, perhaps?

    Definitely the same sort of genocide, not necessarily all the same pretext. Aotearoa got a treaty that, while it might not be ideal, made a bit of a difference. In Australia the ideology was Terra Nullius, which means that there was an undeniable war of extermination from fairly early in the piece. To be completely frank about the culture/history wars: there really are people writing now who what to justify the war of extermination, who deny it occurred and who claim it was a good thing (and much as some of these positions might be mutually exclusive, some people definitely hold the contradictory ones at the same time).

    I'm often struck by the noticeable fact that the ones who continue to deny the humanity of original inhabitants tend to themselves be relatively recent immigrants from Europe and especially the UK (eg Tony Abbot, Pauline Hanson, Matthias Corman). We have a whole openly corrupt populist party that has an agreement with the main conservative party to run in the rural seats... and get a free pass on ideological stuff like "free market", to tube benefit of their own supporters, mostly in mining.

    1303:

    Australia too, perhaps? Definitely the same sort of genocide

    I'd hesitate to describe it as a soft genocide - it was often very explicit. The extermination of aborigines in Tasmania and King Island makes our favourite Germans look restrained, and it was duly celebrated by the population. The surviving, white, population at least.

    There were explicit government-funded programmes to "clear the land" (of people as well as weeds and pests, albeit the distinction was not always well made). And don't forget our celebrated "breed out the black" efforts. All that was missing was the modern eugenics movement and related terminology.

    ... between 1910 and 1970. This was done by Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, through a policy of assimilation.

    Under this policy, the forcible removal of First Nations children was made legal. Assimilation was based on a belief of white superiority and black inferiority, and presumed that "full-blood" Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would naturally die out.

    You'll note that only a specific period is covered, before that it was assumed they would unnaturally die out via the land clearing operations. "naturally" through government intervention is a remarkable thing in its own right.

    If you want to be traumatised the Australian museum has a fairly abstract description of the systems used: https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/genocide-in-australia/

    1304:

    I'd hesitate to describe it as a soft genocide

    I didn't.

    I guess what I mean is that we had every kind of genocide, all the genocides. And so did the Canadians and USians.

    1305:

    Sorry, "Slow-motion genocide". My mistake.

    1306:
    The then Irish constitution actually allowed Savita to have had an abortion

    No Greg, it didn't. Pro-lifers have argued the 8th allowed for abortion, in that so-familiar "deserving cases are allowed and if they weren't allowed clearly they aren't deserving" mode, but it didn't. No less a legal authority than the ECHR determined it didn't in 2010. (The ECHR's judgement was that there was no way for someone to know if they qualified for an abortion under the 8th.)

    the medical staff were so brainwashed that they dithered & withered & whinged

    No, Greg, they weren't. They were doing their best to both obey the law and treat their patient. There apparently were other doctors in Ireland at the time who treated their patients and ignored the law, and good on them, but we cannot condemn the medical staff for doing what the law demanded.

    Your impression is wrong, and your hatred of religion blinds you to the actual facts.

    Your horrible list of the full (?) unravelling of the "Laundries" scandal, some of which is entirely new to me, makes it even worse.

    headdesk the Magdalene Laundries was only one small part of that list of scandals, Greg. And that you don't know this and had missed some of it really calls into question why you felt you could pontificate on the status of the Catholic church in Ireland.

    1307:

    I remember my dad saying that Robert Stanfield (the leader of the Official Opposition 1967-76) was 'the greatest Prime Minister that Canada never had'1.

    Stanfield was the last worthwhile federal Tory leader (IMO). He was a very effective premier of Nova Scotia, and I'm sure he would have done a good job as PM. Not as charismatic as Pierre Trudeau.

    1To that list, I myself would add Tommy Douglas. Premier of Saskatchewan and the father of socialized medicine in Canada. Federal NDP leader 1961-1971.

    1308:
    you could pontificate

    I see what you did there. Greg Tingey = Pope Gregory XVII?!?

    1309:

    I've always had a soft spot for Joe Clark.

    Ran an election based on telling the public the truth and trusting them to be thinking adults. So props for personal honesty and conviction, although not the best political move. Also props for encouraging his wife to keep her maiden name and have her own career (which in the 70s was unusual and cost him some support).

    1310:

    Mulrooney, on the other hand, was as slimy as Harper — and responsible for selling off Connaught Labs which left us no control over vaccine production.

    Like Harris, the kind of chap who sells of assets to balance a single budget, costing more in the long term.

    1311:

    FWIW while the Tasmanian history is awful, if anything the Qld and NT (that is SA, up to the early years of federation) is quite a bit worse, with the other jurisdictions falling somewhere in between.

    For Tasmania, you would consider Truganini, supposedly the "last Tasmanian". She saw her husband dismembered and his remains fought over by research organisations. One of his mutilators was later made a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and went on to become governor of Tasmania. She made it clear to everyone who would listen that she did not consent to her own remains meeting such a fate, yet they were in fact put on display; it wasn't till the 1970s that her wish for cremation was in fulfilled. I suspect that anyone whose loved ones were not in fact in danger of being exhumed against your wishes by the Royal Society and displayed in a museum shouldn't get to argue that actually the British were the good option for colonial overlords and stuff, but I suspect it's just going through to the keeper there.

    Queensland and NT (and for the 19th century, that actually means SA) were, if anything, more brutal. Simplest road into that material is Henry Reynolds, possibly The Forgotten War though there probably isn't a wrong starting point. There is an academic website currently assembling a map of known massacre sites, something of a work in progress as we are learning of more all the time at this stage. We do know that veterans of the peninsula wars referred to Aboriginal fighters as guerrillas, so the default argument that there was no frontier war is obviously bullshit. But we clearly have a long way to go to even understand what happened in its entirety. It'll never be made right.

    1312:

    anonemouse Actually your reply strongly suggests that neither of us actually know/knew what the then law in S Ireland actually said or was interpreted, or how a court would view it. I knew there were other scandals - I simply cannot keep track of ( Nor do I want to keep track of ) all the horrors that the RC church has visited on the planet. The give-away to me, is that said organisation still has mass murderers & ordinary murderers in its list of "saints" ....

    1313:
    Actually your reply strongly suggests that neither of us actually know/knew what the then law in S Ireland actually said or was interpreted, or how a court would view it.

    Greg, we're on the internet. It's not hard to find out if you actually cared. It's a very very short piece of text, and there's a Wikipedia page. Implying your lack of knowledge - as someone who can't even name the country correctly - is equivalent to someone who lived through the whole saga and spent just under a decade on the fringes of the movement to repeal said law is a spectacular example of Dunning-Krugerism.

    For anyone who's interested but doesn't want to click the link: the 8th put the fetus' life on an equal footing to the person carrying it. So doctors had two patients in one body whose needs they had to balance*, "risk to life" is a high bar, the penalty was life imprisonment per the UK Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (which was the legislation governing abortion in Ireland until 2013), and the amendment was so unclear there were four following referenda to clarify various specifics. Lots of chilling effect on medical practitioners.

    *yes, it was ridiculous, thanks for noticing. The 8th was terrible law; called out as such at the time by some lawmakers and from then until repeal by pro-choice campaigners.

    1314:

    The Offences Against the Person Act was terrible law, too; the 19th century in the British Empire it was a shitty time and place to be a woman, and the only mitigating factor was that it was pretty shitty everywhere else, too, prior to the 20th century, with few exceptions.

    What Greg's got to complain about is simply that the rest of the UK moved on while Ireland retained this grotesque patriarchal hang-over for an extra 5 decades.

    1315:

    Talk about black crows - meanwhile, in the US, the white pseudoreligious wing wants abortion illegal.

    What drives me crazy is all the legal fights about it... and as far as I know, NONE of them has used the most obvious argument against such laws: the part of the First Amendment that reads "Congress shall make no laws...concerning religion." These are religious laws they want to pass, but oh, no....

    1316:

    anonemouse I'm afraid I use S Ireland / Ireland / Eire ( the old name ) almost interchangeably - the GB bit I always call "N Ireland" or NornIron. ( Proper title is "R o I" is it not? ) Now that you remind me, though - my interpretation ( IANAL ) was that, in the case of an ectopic preganacy, the putative baby was going to die anyway, so the imperative was to save the mother. Yes/No? And, in the specific case under discussion, they managed to get that wrong, as well .... See Charlie' comment, too - we realised that we'd got it wrong & improved, but Ireland did not.

    whitroth. Save that for a complete abortion ban by a US state - then take it to the Supreme on that First Amendment basis.

    1317:

    SIGH But a) I have to have "standing", and b) enough MONEY for lawyers who can practice before the Supreme Court.

    1318:

    (sarcasm)I'm waiting for some state to draw such an expansive "Stand your ground law" (highly expansive right to self-defense), and such a restrictive abortion law (no abortion under any circumstances) that a woman sues to have an abortion under the "stand your ground law" and forces the pro-gun and anti-abortion sides to fight each other (/sarcasm).

    More seriously, I think the Court realizes that if they get too polarized, they'll lose their authority, so they're trying to thread the needle.

    1319:

    I'm sorry, the "pro-gun" and the "anti-abortion" are the same groups. But I'll make some popcorn and watch as they argue with themselves, then hit themselves in their own heads, and then they can shoot themselves....

    1320:

    Talk about black crows - meanwhile, in the US, the white pseudoreligious wing wants abortion illegal.

    Yeah, children shouldn't be killed until after they're born!

    (These are, from what I've seen, the same 2nd amendment fetishists who want more guns in schools. And homes. As long as the folks with the guns are white.)

    1321:

    Meanwhile on a lighter note This Having been involved (as an extra) in the filming of round 1 - bring it on. It was a hoot & Tennant was really lapping it up as Crowley ... Pity it's all being filmed in Scotland as I would lurve another go at it ....

    1322:

    Are you in Lytton? Reached over 46 C yesterday…

    Yikes!

    No, I'm in Portland Oregon. Last week our record temperature (not for that day, but ever) was 107F, 41.6C. Then on Saturday the temperature hit 108, 42C.

    That record stood only a day; Sunday saw us at 112F, 44.4C. Hot enough, certainly! Right? ...right?

    No. Worst case disaster fans warned we might get up to 114F; instead Monday got up to 116F, 46.6C. That's three days in a row of breaking any previous temperature record. Our light rail system is down due to thermal expansion in the hardware. Every business with air conditioning is getting lots of customers. We're rather hot.

    I'm hiding in a basement, as is the cat.

    1323:

    I'm sorry, the "pro-gun" and the "anti-abortion" are the same groups. But I'll make some popcorn and watch as they argue with themselves, then hit themselves in their own heads, and then they can shoot themselves....

    Well yes, except that right-wing authoritarians are known for holding discordant beliefs, and that ability needs to get exercised. If humanity begins at conception, then with abortions we're talking about some version of homicide being justifiable (or often unavoidable) in defense of the life or property of the women who believes herself in harm's way. But if it's not permissible for a woman to defend her life or property from another human, then whither stand your ground? If it's only for men...good luck with that, considering how hard the gun industry was lobbying to get women to buy more guns. If stand your ground is only about guns, then...good luck with that too.

    It would seem that one or the other law would end up getting thrown out. But I am not a lawyer, so of course I would think that.

    1324:

    IIRC, the Lancia Beta was a front-wheel drive vehicle; engine weight over the drive wheels and fairly light loading on the rear wheels. Goose it just the tiniest bit while turning in slippery conditions and the rear end will break free.

    My first car was an early-80s Honda Civic, with the same arrangement. It turns out a newbie driver on wet grass can get embarrassingly far before noticing he left the parking brake on.

    1325:

    Here's some interesting local news from Raleigh to help take your minds off Canadian schools for indigenous children, collapsing condos in Florida & whether the fall is related to Global Warming or not and the record setting heat wave in the Pacific Northwest U.S.

    Some idiot's pet Zebra Cobra has got loose in Raleigh, NC.

    https://www.wral.com/deadly-venomous-cobra-loose-in-raleigh-neighborhood/19748492/

    1326:

    whitroth @ 1317: Talk about black crows - meanwhile, in the US, the white pseudoreligious wing wants abortion illegal.

    What drives me crazy is all the legal fights about it... and as far as I know, NONE of them has used the most obvious argument against such laws: the part of the First Amendment that reads "Congress shall make no laws...concerning religion." These are religious laws they want to pass, but oh, no....

    So, does "black crows" refer to the robes judges wear? Or is it a reference to the traditional Nun's habit? (I am pretty sure you don't mean the rock 'n roll band of that name)

    And, difficult as it may be to believe, there are non-whites who support the so called "pro-life movement".

    The First Amendment argument isn't made because it was considered and rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court long ago; even before Roe v Wade.

    1327:

    Heteromeles @ 1325:

    I'm sorry, the "pro-gun" and the "anti-abortion" are the same groups. But I'll make some popcorn and watch as they argue with themselves, then hit themselves in their own heads, and then they can shoot themselves....

    Well yes, except that right-wing authoritarians are known for holding discordant beliefs, and that ability needs to get exercised. If humanity begins at conception, then with abortions we're talking about some version of homicide being justifiable (or often unavoidable) in defense of the life or property of the women who believes herself in harm's way. But if it's not permissible for a woman to defend her life or property from another human, then whither stand your ground? If it's only for men...good luck with that, considering how hard the gun industry was lobbying to get women to buy more guns. If stand your ground is only about guns, then...good luck with that too.

    It would seem that one or the other law would end up getting thrown out. But I am not a lawyer, so of course I would think that.

    Florida's original Stand Your Ground law specifically denied it as a defense for women facing domestic violence situations.

    1328:

    Lytton reached 48C today…

    1329:

    Florida's original Stand Your Ground law specifically denied it as a defense for women facing domestic violence situations.

    What was the stated logic behind that carve-out?

    1330:

    "So, does "black crows" refer to the robes judges wear? Or is it a reference to the traditional Nun's habit?"

    It refers to the mode of dress of Catholic priests, particularly Irish ones. "Blackbeetles" is another name for them of the same derivation but I can't remember who calls them that.

    1331:

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

    https://www.her.ie/news/maternity-expert-says-every-pregnancy-is-affected-by-the-8th-amendment-404854

    Google has far more patience than I, Greg, and there's reams of stuff about abortion and the 8th - it's almost like it had to be explained to a whole country, or something.

    1332:

    In unrelated, more pleasant news, former President Zuma of South Africa just got handed a 15 month sentence for contempt of court by the Constitutional Court. It won't be suspended, and he will have to start serving within 5 days.

    Not that this is punishment for everything he did to hollow out South Africa. But it's a start.

    1333:

    JBS "Black Crows" - catholic priests, battening on the vulnerable & dying. - see also Pigeon's comment.

    anonemouse I scanned that article on the Irish 8th Do those restriction still apply? Are women still not in control of their insides? [ I noted that the article is 3 years old. ]

    1334:

    Latest numbers from Lytton in BC Canada, 49.5 C.

    Record temperature broken 3 days in a row.

    1335:

    Over 130 dead from heat and complications.

    Meantime, according to the English Broadcasting Corporation, the only thing of any note to have happened in the last day was that Ingerlund won a Wendyball game.

    1336:

    For what it's worth-- I'm not sure whether NPR gets the same version of the BBC that paws4thot does-- the heat wave in Canada has been the first news story on every headline break, though they haven't been mentioning the number of dead.

    1337:

    I think not; the programme I was referring to was the flagship "UK morning news", which comes live from a studio in Manchester, England, UK.

    My serious point was that much more important things are happening in the World than a bunch of overpaid Wendys playing a Wendyball game.

    1338:

    The top headline on the BBC news site at the moment is "Dozens dead amid historic Canada heatwave".

    I'm in Canada, so they might be localizing.

    Vancouver's had nearly 70 dead over the weekend. For reference, that's like 2400 in London.

    1339:

    More seriously, I think the Court realizes that if they get too polarized, they'll lose their authority, so they're trying to thread the needle.

    Bit of inside the park baseball but I read an interesting analysis of how the court operates.

    Roberts is against a lot of "liberal" things like abortion but also has no interest in "breaking" US society.

    Chief Justice (Roberts) assigns who writes the opinion for the side he is on. Most senior justice on the other side (most likely Thomas) picks who writes the dissent.

    The speculation is that if an anti-abortion case goes against abortion with what would be a 5-4 with Roberts on the side of the 4 he would join the majority making it 6-3 specifically so HE could write a narrow opinion instead of having Thomas write a broad sweeping opinion.

    1340:

    My serious point was that much more important things are happening in the World than a bunch of overpaid Wendys playing a Wendyball game.

    NY City had what just might possibly considered a minor oops moment. They included 135K test votes in the initially released vote totals after the primary vote for mayor. Real numbers to be released today.

    1341:

    Paws: Yellow Card.

    "Wendy" is a highly gendered name in English -- gendered female at that. While I am not a soccer fan, I strongly object to the use of gender-associated names in disparagement of non-gendered activities: it reinforces sexist attitudes and has no place on this blog.

    (Especially given the pay and working conditions issues surrounding womens' soccer at present, which I find it hard to avoid given the composition of 50% of my household.)

    1342:

    Robert Prior @ 1340

    The body count in B.C. has gone up, and not just in Lytton:

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-alberta-heat-wave-heat-dome-temperature-records-1.6084203

    Those poor people are used to mild weather all year long because of the Pacific Ocean. They're not used to putting a hat on when going outside, in winter or summer

    1343:

    Those poor people are used to mild weather all year long because of the Pacific Ocean. They're not used to putting a hat on when going outside, in winter or summer

    Actually, Lytton is in the interior, where extreme weather is normal and hats are worn :-/

    The problem with places like Vancouver is that air conditioning is very rare, as it not been needed, and the night-time temperatures are also elevated so there is no respite for the body at night. The biggest predictor for deaths isn't daytime highs but nighttime lows.

    Also, the usual thing to do was go into air-conditioned places like movie theatres and malls, which although they are open have reduced capacity so not as many people can fit in them. American Sunbelt states saw Covid spikes after hot weather when people were forced inside — I wonder if BC is heading for one?

    1344:

    Beat me to the AC.

    Reminds me of what my then professor John Holdren said about global warming in 1989: the problem isn't that the average temperature goes up a few degrees, it's that the extremes become more extreme.

    That's what we're seeing now.

    We're also seeing the transition from an icehouse and a hothouse Earth, in that the latitudinal temperature gradient we're used to (cold poles, hot equator) collapses, so that there are alligators in Greenland. The poles are heating faster than the equator is, and so we'll end up with weird situations, like this weekend, when my daytime temperature a few miles from the coast in San Diego was about the same as the nighttime temperature in Portland Oregon.

    Building to protect during extremes is tricky, and keeping it affordable and energy efficient is trickier still.

    On the good side, the Earth hasn't been through a icehouse-hothouse transition since the Permian, so we can at least record how that happens. Keeping those records for whoever comes next might be tricky, of course.

    1345:

    OK. Noted for the future.

    1346:

    the problem isn't that the average temperature goes up a few degrees, it's that the extremes become more extreme

    The simple analogy I used with students is rolling two dice. The average roll is 7, and the chance of rolling 12 is 1/36. Now paint an extra dot on the faces of one die, so it goes from 2-7. The average is now 7.5 — hardly changed — but the odds of rolling 12+ are now 1/12: 300% higher.

    Like all analogies it greatly oversimplifies, but does a good job of conveying that a small change in the average doesn't mean there will be a small change in the extremes.

    1347:

    Nice analogy. I like it.

    1348:

    The BBC that I get from NPR is emphasizing Canada. NPR itself is emphasizing the Pacific Northwest and at least up to a few hours ago, scarcely mentioning Canada.

    1349:

    Re keeping records - why, we'll put them on the same documents we leave for radioactive waste dumps, good for at least 50k years.

    1350:

    In the US at least, the count of record highs has been about double the count of record lows for the last decade. Various sources, but e.g. https://weather.com/news/climate/news/2020-09-30-us-warm-records-double-cold-records-2020 As the article quotes Guy Walton (meteorologist interested in such records), (my paraphrase) the high vs low temperature records ratio is a useful proxy for general global heating records. It's especially useful because it grabs attention.

    1351:

    *cough"

    W*y-ball ... Anyone else here ever come across Les Barker ?? Mancunian, poet, piss-taker, cynic, temporarily banned from USA because of their sense-of-humour failure ... [ Note ] Who, back in the day wrote a poem called "Roy of the Rovers is Gay" - which was, of course a piss-take on homophobia ... If only because the revolting spectacle of footie was ( is?) so overly "masculine" to the point of seriously "butch" that some of us who loathed it utterly ( I still do ) referred to it a "poofball"

    PLEASE - don't take offence, anyone - I hope I'm pointing out the vast internal inconsistencies in the whole rotten set-up, as a sub-set of the whole vile "Team Games" ethos.

    I was only forced to "play" footie for 3 years between the ages of 11 & 14 & I still shudder at the memory, cold, wet, muddy, bullied. I know there are footie supporters who are not knuckle-dragging fasicst thugs, but ... that's the way to bet, actually. People like the late Danny Blanchflower & Marcus Rashford are very honourable exceptions to this

    Conditions in Pacific NW "Black Flag" weather, yes?

    Note] One of his best ever was: "I can't find my Camouflage Net" - I think you get the idea?

    1352:

    I suppose calling Those People "footie-fetishists," would collect me an impactful Millwall Brick or five as well as a yellow card, so that's out.

    Ballers?

    Players?

    Of course, when they're at home...

    1353:

    I do have alternative names for them, but I'm already on a Yellow Card...

    1354:

    Greg: you may find it amusing to ask Feorag about women's football, especially the premier league stuff. Seriously butch, but totally not macho! (IIRC about two thirds of the England womens' team are out of the closet. Compare with the male team ...)

    1355:

    Les Barker? Not banned, just no one interested.

    EXCEPT when they play one of his routines on the Midnight Special (out of Chicago, Sat night, 9-midnight Central time, "Folk tunes and farce, show tunes and satire, show tunes, madness and escape".

    https://www.wfmt.com/programs/the-midnight-special/

    1356:

    Charlie Why am I not surprised in the slightest little bit?

    Is this time to cue the OTHER ultra-macho activity, that of being a lumberjack? Oh dearie me ....

    1357:

    Greg I had much the same experience in school football as you although not associated with bullying. Rugby at my grammar school was even worse. So much so that I "forgot" my kit almost every week and preferred running around the school field as a punishment rather than playing either sport. But you can't class every football fan as a knuckle dragging fascist thugs. I'm not going to have most of my family classed as thugs. They're not. My son was just as bad as football as I was. My daughter played football whenever she could and successfully lobbied her primary school teachers and headmaster to be allowed to play football at school. Before Gregory's Girl). In secondary school she played for a girls' five a side football team which won the Leeds school championship. As an aside she was the only heterosexual on that team. I watched and enjoyed the England v Germany match on TV like many others. I'm not a knuckle dragging fascist thug either. And as for competence in team sports there's a good correlation with age. Those children born in the Autumn are the oldest in their year groups. They have more developed reflexes, hand eye coordination and strength. My son and I share the same birthday at the end of July and were the youngest in our classes and bad at sport. My daughter, who is good at sport was born in early October. My nephew, who was very good at football has a December birthday. Perhaps you were born in the summer.

    1358:

    Conditions in Pacific NW. "Black Flag" weather, yes?

    Took a little digging, but when Portland hit 114oF on the June 28 at 14:53 local, the dew point was 53oF and the relative humidity was 13%.* So not black flag weather. That happens when the dew point gets up in the mid-90s, so that humans can't lose body heat by sweating. So far as I know, true black flag weather has only happened so far around the mouth of the Red Sea (Somalia) and shores of the Persian Gulf (Iran and Iraq). Shanghai has come quite close, though, I understand.

    *https://forecast.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KPDX.html (three day running summary, so get it now)

    1359:

    Recent paper. The bolded bit is very important. The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance (08 May 2020) (bold mine) there exists an upper limit for survivability under sustained exposure, even with idealized conditions of perfect health, total inactivity, full shade, absence of clothing, and unlimited drinking water (9, 10). A normal internal human body temperature of 36.8° ± 0.5°C requires skin temperatures of around 35°C to maintain a gradient directing heat outward from the core (10, 13). Once the air (dry-bulb) temperature (T) rises above this threshold, metabolic heat can only be shed via sweat-based latent cooling, and at TW exceeding about 35°C, this cooling mechanism loses its effectiveness altogether. Because the ideal physiological and behavioral assumptions are almost never met, severe mortality and morbidity impacts typically occur at much lower values—for example, regions affected by the deadly 2003 European and 2010 Russian heat waves experienced TW values no greater than 28°C (fig. S1).

    Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature has a table of such events.

    1360:

    The new LED tail-light assemblies for my Jeep arrived today. Easy-peasy install, took all of half an hour to remove the old assemblies & connect the new ones and that's including the time I spent RE-taping the wiring bundle on one side.

    The guys who installed my trailer hitch and the wiring connector for the trailer lights didn't do a very neat job. I have done so now, but that didn't have anything to do with the tail-lights not working (because the trailer tail-lights did work).

    I arrived home from Harbor Freight - the idea about using a bar clamp to hold the brake pedal down so you can check the brake lights works, works GOOD! ... thanks David - the box was on the porch & I didn't even go in the house before installing them. The one tool I needed (T-15 Torx) I already keep in the car and the only other tool I needed was the electrical tape I used to re-wrap the wiring bundle which as it happened, I'd picked up a couple of rolls at Harbor Freight while I was there to get the bar clamp.

    I did finally find out HOW the tail-light assemblies were making the old tail-lights fail all the time. Basically they over heat and melt something inside the inside of the assemblies which drips down on the bulb causing them to burn out. Don't understand why I had never seen that before, but that's what it was.

    While I was at Harbor Freight I also saw some paint-on liquid "electrical tape" and I think I'll pick up a bottle next time I'm in there to paint over where I re-taped the wiring bundle to make it extra secure. I didn't feel like I was able to stretch the electrical tape as well as I should have. The stretching heats up the adhesive and makes electrical tape bond better.

    In the old days, after you taped a joint with electrical tape you taped over that with friction tape to protect the electrical tape from the elements.

    1361:

    Robert Prior @ 1331:

    Florida's original Stand Your Ground law specifically denied it as a defense for women facing domestic violence situations.

    What was the stated logic behind that carve-out?

    If there was any "logic" behind it I'm not aware of it.

    It was just "anti-feminist", i.e. ANTI any woman with the temerity to suggest women should have equal protection under the law. The Florida legislature back then was just as full of privileged White male, anti-feminist assholes as it is today.

    I think they were afraid their "constituents" would be angry that they could no longer come home in a drunken rage and beat their wives to death without risking getting their asses shot off.

    The first "test case" I'm aware of where a woman tried to claim "Stand Your Ground", the woman didn't even shoot her assailant; she fired a warning shot into the ground in front of him, driving him away

    She was still charged & convicted of Assault with a Deadly Weapon and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Her being Black might have had something to do with the severity of the sentence, but her assailant was Black as well, had a long criminal record for violent crimes and had put her in hospital before.

    Maybe you can find some kind of logic in that. I never have. If that's NOT "Stand Your Ground", I don't know what the hell is.

    1362:

    Oh, I agree. The flag system was developed by the US Marine Corps for training and deployment. You can find it here: https://www.ready.marines.mil/Stay-Informed/Natural-Hazards/Extreme-Heat/Flag-Conditions/

    It depends on wet bulb globe temperature, which is measured by a slightly different gizmoid than a psychrometer. Basically if the USMC is flying a temperature flag, even a green flag, ordinary mortals such as ourselves should be careful. Under a black flag, strenuous activity is suspended unless it's critical (and pity the poor buggers on active ops during a black flag).

    1363:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 1338: For what it's worth-- I'm not sure whether NPR gets the same version of the BBC that paws4thot does-- the heat wave in Canada has been the first news story on every headline break, though they haven't been mentioning the number of dead.

    It's BBC World Service on the NPR stations around here. Probably NPR isn't concentrating on the Canadian portion of the heat wave as much as they've been concentrating on Northern California, Oregon & Washington State. Lytton, BC is less than 200 miles from Seattle and I'm pretty sure it's the same heat wave that's been killing people in the north western U.S.

    But it also looks to me like the "heat dome" is moving towards the NE & maybe intensifying which would explain why reporting of its effects in Canada are trailing reports from the U.S. It's been in the U.S. for a while & now it's moving more north of the border.

    If I wanted news about Canada I'd consult CBC News, not the BBC or NPR.

    Although, it looks like CNN & the New York Times have now picked up the story about how it's affecting Canada as well as the U.S. Looks to me like the "heat dome" is moving towards the NE & maybe intensifying which would explain why reporting of its effects in Canada are trailing reports from the U.S.

    1364:

    Heteromeles @ 1354: I suppose calling Those People "footie-fetishists," would collect me an impactful Millwall Brick or five as well as a yellow card, so that's out.

    Ballers?

    Players?

    Of course, when they're at home...

    You could always say you don't care about football scores & you wouldn't even have to clarify which side of the pond the football you don't care about is played.

    In addition to "Football", I know of NCAA Football, NFL Football, CFL (Canadian) Football, Australian Football and Rugby. I don't care what the scores are from any of them.

    About as close as I get to caring about any of them is I think it would be nice if NC State gets to go to a bowl game & I think it would be nice if UNC Women's Soccer (or Duke or NC State) win's a national championship. But I still don't care what the score is.

    And I think it's enjoyable when you can attend a collage game in person.

    1365:

    "and Rugby"

    Union or league? there are places where it matters which one you don't care about.

    JHomes

    1366:

    Now I'm tempted to make or acquire a black-globe thermometer; the reading is 20 percent of the wet-bulb globe temperature. The black-globe thermometer consists of a black globe in the center of which is placed a temperature sensor. ... a diameter of 0.15 metres (5.9 in), specified for use with these formulae, is generally recommended. ... The spherical shape of the globe thermometer gives a reasonable approximation of a seated person;

    1367:

    Looks like black globe thermometers with 75 mm globes run $150-ca $500 for the cheap units, depending on whether you go with BigMuddy or some other shop, and which brand you get. If you want the 15 cm Real Thing, that's probably a bit more.

    1368:

    Well, obviously misogynistic*, but most laws generally have a stated purpose and justification, even if that's not the real reason/justification.

    When asked why you couldn't 'stand your ground' against domestic violence — any I'm certain the question was asked — do you know what reason the politicians gave?

    *Not anti-feminist

    1369:

    "We're also seeing the transition from an icehouse and a hothouse Earth, in that the latitudinal temperature gradient we're used to (cold poles, hot equator) collapses"

    Looks like we're getting to the end of the beginning. We should start seeing the meat of the changes now. It's going to be a wild ride into the unknown. It's a shame that most of our fellow travellers won't make it. I saw today it's been discovered that an African freshwater fish has the highest brain to body ratio of all vertebrates. It communicates via electrical signals that some are calling language. But it's huge brain needs a lot of oxygen, and soon there won't be any African freshwater with lots of oxygen. We're going to lose this intelligence before we even learn to speak to them.

    1370:

    Mike Collins 12.01.1946 So, no. Even at age 11, I could spot the hypocrisy of the "Team Games" supposed ethos ... it's conditioning for the politician's mantra of: "Vote for us & you'll be all right" which translates as - - " .... & we'll be all right" Revenge came when I was 16 - the school asked for volunteers for a Lake District walking break - some teachers couldn't get their heads round why I had volunteered ... "but you don't do sports!" No, I didn't & still don't do "team" spurts. Who was the last man standing, who went out every day? You got it - because I was cycling 5 miles a day, every day to-&-from school. Even one of the super-spurstmen ( Footie/rugby/running ) gave up at day 5, but I didn't. Curiously the bullying stopped almost immediately after the trip, odd, that.

    H Thanks for that - that's a really low humidity - I was expecting it to be in the 80's ... um.

    JBS, whitroth, other USA-ians Is there a greater acceptance of Global Warming in the US now, or are the R's/Trumpistas still screaming "fake!" ??

    1371: 1356 - Charlie, for reference, Feorag might want to ask me about rugby union and/or professional cycle racing, to understand why I feel like I do about all association football, irrespective of the gender and/or sexuality of the players. I'll be happy to receive her e-mails on the subject. I will be AFK most of today though. 1365 - My actual basic point seems to have been lost in noise created by my views of foopball. There are much more important things than sporting contests happening in the world.
    1372:

    Latest on Lytton. Seems the town is on fire.

    From City news 1130

    "Mayor Jan Polderman issued the evacuation order Wednesday afternoon, saying the fire swept through the community incredibly quickly."

    Quote from the mayor:

    “The fire, it took maybe 15 minutes to engulf the whole town. People, basically they just grabbed their keys, and ran out the door. That’s how quick the fire happened.”

    1373:

    Unfortunately, sportsball in all its forms is often seen as "more important" than other news, and especially when it's international men's contests (as opposed to women's contests, which are often seen as second-rate, and have a nasty undertone of "look at the pretty body" instead of "look at the sport").

    Plus, it takes effort to explain why the oddity in Canada is big news, as opposed to reporting the English team's win (which is obviously news).

    1374:

    Scott Farnsworth & Pigeon & everybody ... "Team Games" Panem et Circenses" - keeps the mob preoccupied with unimportant things, doesn't it?

    1375:

    That, and it's easy to report on sportsball as opposed to science. A sportsball report is a good summary of the highlights of the game, plus a final score; not trivial to do, but not that hard (indeed, there exists computer software that can take a radio commentary feed as audio, and produce a decent first cut report).

    Further, most people can grasp sportsball reports without needing further explanation - they're not complex, and even if you don't understand the specific game, the report will clue you in to which things are bad or good for which side.

    In contrast, the events in Canada are not obviously more than just one of those things; it's when you add in what they imply in terms of climate science that they go from "well, that's weird" to "oh dear, we're in bother". Someone has to have enough understanding of the science to recognise that it's not just weird weather that you should expect on occasion, but a symptom of something more complex, and then explain it in terms that the "man down the pub" can make sense of.

    1376:

    So far as I know, true black flag weather has only happened so far around the mouth of the Red Sea (Somalia) and shores of the Persian Gulf (Iran and Iraq). Shanghai has come quite close, though, I understand.

    Around here usually what happens when the dry bulb temperature climbs into the 40s(C) is that the RH drops off quite dramatically. I've noted mornings where it's high 30s(C) till 1pm or so and 90ish% RH, but when it gets up to around 41C in the mid afternoon the RH falls below 50%. I'm not sure if it's just the low-forming heat taking the moisture up into the sky faster than in can be replaced or something. You can walk around in those sort of conditions for short runs between air conditioning without raising a noticeable sweat, even in office drag, but significant exertion or extended times is something you avoid, and if you can't, you take sun protection (hat, long sleeves, sunscreen) and plenty of water (you'd be surprised how quickly you can drink a litre bottle, or more to the point how much water you can drink without your bladder filling, when your body is using most of it for evaporative cooling). More than 42C is rare even here, at least in the city. Going inland you get higher temperatures but it's a lot drier. But it seems like reaching black flag depends more on final temperature than it does on starting humidity...

    1377:

    I found this:

    https://www.weather-above.com/blackball%20sensor.html

    Looks like a 150mm copper ball valve float can be had for about US$50, so you can probably make something pretty decent for under US$100 including an Arduino or something similar for data logging.

    1378:

    Took a little digging, but when Portland hit 114oF on the June 28 at 14:53 local, the dew point was 53oF and the relative humidity was 13%.* So not black flag weather. That happens when the dew point gets up in the mid-90s, so that humans can't lose body heat by sweating.

    Oh yes. I spend time doing outdoor yard work when it was 100F in Las Vegas 20 years ago and a recreational week in N. Texas when it was over 100F every day. But the humidity was very low. So you'd come out from a swim and not need to dry off. The water on you just evaporated in a few minutes. (That summer the Dallas TX area has 45 days over 100F.)

    But both times you needed to drink fluids like crazy. And at the end of the day your skin and clothes were "salty".

    1379:

    I expect it won't be the last town to burn. Conditions are hot and dry; fire season has started.

    Read last night that sudden deaths in BC are three times normal.

    From last Friday to Wednesday afternoon — about the length of time British Columbia has been affected by a multiple-record-breaking heat wave — the province has seen 486 sudden and unexpected deaths.

    The staggering number is 321 more than what is usually expected in B.C. over a period of five days, according to provincial coroner’s office — an increase of 195 per cent. The numbers are preliminary, and are expected to rise as more deaths are entered into the system.

    “͞While it is too early to say with certainty how many of these deaths are heat related, it is believed likely that the significant increase in deaths reported is attributable to the extreme weather B.C. has experienced and continues to impact many parts of our province,” chief coroner Lisa Lapointe said in a statement Wednesday.

    https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/06/30/during-heat-dome-british-columbia-deaths-climbed-by-an-unprecedented-nearly-200-officials-say.html

    1380:

    The whole country might be burning to a crisp as the heat dome moves eastward, but what really counts these days is the whisky war between Canada and Scotland:

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/whisky-maker-vancouver-island-battle-scottish-association-1.6077607

    1381:

    "Is there a greater acceptance of Global Warming in the US now, or are the R's/Trumpistas still screaming "fake!" ??"

    They're still nuts. I think they may slowly be getting less-nuts, but the idea that the world needs to change is utterly beyond them.

    1382:

    what really counts these days is the whisky war between Canada and Scotland

    Interesting, but this Scot's views are not represented by the "Scotch Whisky Association" in this matter. "Caledonian" I would associate with "Scottish" generally (and there is no provision I know of in international law that might stop a foreign made product describing itself as Scottish). The nearest I could find to a "Macaloney" was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McAloney .

    1383:

    "Is there a greater acceptance of Global Warming in the US now, or are the R's/Trumpistas still screaming "fake!" ??" They're still nuts. I think they may slowly be getting less-nuts, but the idea that the world needs to change is utterly beyond them.

    It doesn't matter if it's weed, magical thinking, science, or occult symbols. Right wing authoritarians ruin it faster and more thoroughly than left-wing nutcases ever did. Freakin' orcs.

    1384:

    I also voted for the Liberals the last 2 (Canadian) elections, but they were as much strategic votes as anything else. I have been an NDP member for decades, and in fact occasionally commit golf with the stand-in who was the NDP candidate here 2 elections ago. However this is a no-hope riding for the NDP, and the incumbent Tory was an empty shirt who routinely circulated the most simplistic of dog whistle anti-immigrant, anti-poor drivel.

    We'll have Avi Lewis as our NDP candidate next time around, I'd be hard pressed not to vote for him although our current Liberal MP is a decent human being.

    1385:

    Looks like a 150mm copper ball valve float can be had for about US$50, so you can probably make something pretty decent for under US$100 including an Arduino or something similar for data logging.

    Sure, if you don't monetize the time and setup you needed to validate that your homebuilt sensor, so that you had quantifiable confidence in the numbers it gave you...

    Seriously, a lot of things sound cheap until you look at what's involved. Water for PCR reactions, for example. You've got to make sure there's no DNA in it or in the container holding it, and that there's nothing that will impede a reaction. That's why that water costs hundreds per kilo.

    Back in my ecologist days, I kind of specialized in MacGyvered systems, and left the $15,000 systems to those who enjoyed them. That's probably why they've got tenured jobs now, since I forgot about the 50% overhead the admins raked in off each gadget...

    1386:

    I think it is a root human instinct when first presented with evidence that contradicts your feelings/what you want to first double down on your certainty.

    That is what is happening with climate change debate here in Canada and also the US. The evidence is overwhelming, the deniers are doubling down and shouting louder while covering their ears.

    The naked hostility to the notion that 'Black Lives Matter' is reflected horribly in their passionate support for the various 'White Feelings Matter More' violence and insurrectionist actions.

    We can hope that they will continue to sideline themselves by becoming ever more fringe and angry. History tells us it can go either way - crazy themselves into the margins or violent takeover. In the end their way will lead to collapse, while we can at least hope for some chance of not collapsing with intelligent, thoughtful people in charge.

    1387:

    I'm not sure it's exactly an instinct, because people would never learn otherwise. But I agree that it's deep-rooted. For what it's worth I think it's some messy combination of peer pressure, obedience to hierarchical structures, and hidden guilt.

    Peer pressure gets weird. The problem is especially pronounced in right wing authoritarians, but everyone has it: most people want to be perceived as normal, if not outstanding, members of their community. Inside they're likely seething balls of contradictions and neuroses, but you'll notice that they follow norms that "everything's fine?" That makes things like genocide and climate change "fine" too, if no one's doing anything about it. Where it gets weird is when people suddenly find that their secret deviancies are actually shared by a majority of people, and that there's no need to hide. At that point, norms can change rapidly. Gay marriage went that way, from taboo to normal in many places. This doesn't guarantee progress, as the secret deviancies (homophobia, religious bigotry, racism) can suddenly erupt too.

    Hierarchical structures: many people bow to authority, even when they disagree. This is why power's so addictive and dangerous. Also, people tend to want to hold onto whatever power and status they have, even when it damages them. I tend to classify behavior around power as addictive rather than instinctive, as not everyone has a will to power, any more than everyone has a will to alcohol or caffeine. But if you're susceptible and get a taste of it, hoo boy.

    Guilt is the nasty one for dealing with all the intractable problems we have today. Are we willing to pay the price for the crimes we committed or which we abetted? We white cis-heterosexual men have benefited greatly from sexism, racism, GHG emissions, and wars. Is it better to die, or to "pay for our sins?" This last seems to be driving the way the far right deals with climate change. They've been sprinkled with the magic water, so notionally their sins have been washed away, and if they die along with everyone else, they'll never have to pay for their current power trips. It's a cruel philosophy.

    1388:

    Back in the sixties in Philly, before the EPA was created and came in with teeth and claws, every single summer, we had an inversion layer. If we were "lucky", it lasted through July and most of August (or should I say Thermidor...). If we weren't, it started some time in June, and didn't end until early Sept. 90+F temps, 90+% humidity. Really.

    I remember many a night, in my bedroom on the third floor of a block-long apt building, a bay window, all open, and a large box fan running (NO ONE had a/c), and it was still too hot to sleep.

    1389:

    The Wrong Wing, accepting global warming? No. They forced it to be called "climate change", and still are up to their nostrils in a river in Egypt.

    Part of it - I mentioned this once or twice before - is that, like a woman I commuted with for a while (we'd catch the same Metro train), believe "God would not give us the power to change our climate."

    1390:

    Part of it - I mentioned this once or twice before - is that, like a woman I commuted with for a while (we'd catch the same Metro train), believe "God would not give us the power to change our climate."

    But it says right in Genesis 1 that God gave dominion over the Earth to Adam, after making it Good. What did she think dominion meant? You cannot run a place without at least the possibility of running it into the ground.

    1391:

    Actually getting past bashing the pro-oil crowd on climate change...

    Let's, for a second, think about what the world's going to look like if the good people win by converting the bad people to their cause, everyone has fewer children, and we walk our way back from the brink.

    I goofed around in Atlas Obscura, and I tripped over this article on Japanese Ghost Houses. These are homes in small towns where either the owner died inestate or the heirs don't want to do anything with it. Japan doesn't have a good eminent domain system, so these properties gradually (or quickly) fall into ruin.

    If global populations fall from where they are now to the low billions, even if they do so in a sustainable way, what follows will be a century of ghosts: ghost homes, ghost towns, possibly ghost cities, neighborhoods downsizing and rewilding like Detroit. Funny thing is that this is only dystopian from a "growth is inevitable" standpoint. If people abandon the places that are unworkable with a changed climate, what is to be done with them? Get rid of the most toxic stuff, and leave them to rot in place, basically. At best, take care of them, not to live in, but so they don't burn and blow more carbon into the atmosphere. Or if you can figure out how to compost a two bedroom house without much effort...

    There's nothing new or unusual about this. The hills of Crete are reportedly full of Minoan ruins from 3500 years ago, all built in places no one wants to live now. It's the same thing, just on a (hopefully) vast scale.

    The trick, for SFF writers, is to make this palatable rather than grim, the idea of people abandoning an unworkable civilization and using the pieces to make something better, rather than disaster porn.

    1392:

    Apropos of the Froth of July, but a local high school has decided to put on a laser show instead of their traditional fireworks show. We'll see how it goes. But dare I say it's a more sustainable light show?

    1393:

    Fairly standard if you ask me. Use the things that still work and have a purpose (i.e. Roman roads), dismantle the things that are harmful (i.e. Roman slavery).

    Ideally we learn from our past and work to make things better. My main fear is a loss of what we've learned and how to learn it. It would take a total collapse to make that happen, but active hostility to 'experts' and education is a part of that.

    In the long run experts, education and reason will outperform anger, fear and violence. But we have to survive to that point, or at least enough of us do.

    1394:

    Robert Prior @ 1370 Well, obviously misogynistic*, but most laws generally have a stated purpose and justification, even if that's not the real reason/justification.

    When asked why you couldn't 'stand your ground' against domestic violence — any I'm certain the question was asked — do you know what reason the politicians gave?

    I've given you all the information I have on the subject. When I read about it years ago I decided That's stupid!" and did not inquire further into their motives.

    1395:

    If global populations fall from where they are now to the low billions, even if they do so in a sustainable way, what follows will be a century of ghosts

    You missed out an important ghost: ghost social media. By 2060, half the current population of Facebook -- supposing it still exists in some form (which seems plausible, given the inertia of the human social graph) -- will be dead. By 2100, the global human population will be smaller than the remembered dead, assuming there's no huge page of FB memorial pages and similar stuff. I don't see auto-purging of "dead" accounts being socially acceptable (families won't like it), but they won't be in great demand -- the long tail on the internet will actually be a necropolis.

    Why this is significant: a big chunk of our existence is moving online, from bank accounts to social stuff to photo albums and music collections. And it's not just people. Contracts, planning submissions, land registry, all sorts of stuff. I expect 3D scans and AR maps to get added to a lot of agreements over the next few decades -- lidar scanners cheap enough to be built into phones are going to do interesting things to the real estate business.

    But anyway: the internet by 2200 will resemble Paris circa 1800; surrounded by stinking subsiding graveyards, undermined by catacombs, with a population 90% of whom are dead. Only the future dead will be a whole lot more restless and interactive than the dead of centuries past ...

    1396:

    gasdive @ 1374: Latest on Lytton. Seems the town is on fire.

    rom City news 1130

    "Mayor Jan Polderman issued the evacuation order Wednesday afternoon, saying the fire swept through the community incredibly quickly."

    Quote from the mayor:

    “The fire, it took maybe 15 minutes to engulf the whole town. People, basically they just grabbed their keys, and ran out the door. That’s how quick the fire happened.”

    I saw that. This is the kinds of wild fires California, Oregon and other parts of the western U.S. have been experiencing the last few years. It's spreading north now. I hope the people are Ok, but I don't think their lives are going to get better soon.

    1397:

    I don't see auto-purging of "dead" accounts being socially acceptable (families won't like it), but they won't be in great demand -- the long tail on the internet will actually be a necropolis.

    FB, iCloud, etc... are weird just now. When my M I L died we had her logins and I was able to download all of her account and then ask that it be deleted. When a cousin died I told his kids to do the same. If FB discovered an account holder has died they lock up the account until someone provided death certificates and a will showing who is the executor.

    So for now (or the recent past) FB and iCloud accounts of the dead can live on as zombie accounts. iCloud/Apple (I think) has recently added an option to have as caretaker or similar to be setup for when you can't function or die.

    1398:

    There's a story. Someone trapped in VR somehow gets lost among the Facebook dead. (They survive, but only because they manage to stay out of Twitter.)

    1399:

    Simon Farnsworth @ 1377: That, and it's easy to report on sportsball as opposed to science. A sportsball report is a good summary of the highlights of the game, plus a final score; not trivial to do, but not that hard (indeed, there exists computer software that can take a radio commentary feed as audio, and produce a decent first cut report).

    Further, most people can grasp sportsball reports without needing further explanation - they're not complex, and even if you don't understand the specific game, the report will clue you in to which things are bad or good for which side.

    In contrast, the events in Canada are not obviously more than just one of those things; it's when you add in what they imply in terms of climate science that they go from "well, that's weird" to "oh dear, we're in bother". Someone has to have enough understanding of the science to recognise that it's not just weird weather that you should expect on occasion, but a symptom of something more complex, and then explain it in terms that the "man down the pub" can make sense of.

    Why is the science so hard to explain? As we add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere the world heats up.

    That's what greenhouses do, they trap heat to make the air inside them warmer so you can grow stuff. But if you add too much heat inside them the growing stuff dies.

    That's what's happening in Canada now (as it's been happening in the western U.S. & other places for several years).

    We're adding too much heat to the greenhouse. We've got to stop doing that before it's too late ... and hope it's not too late already.

    1400:

    If anyone is interested, they caught the snake that got loose in Raleigh.

    My opinion is the person who let it get loose should be liable for the FULL COST of everything that had to be done to capture it, including any costs his neighbors incurred trying to protect themselves from his negligence.

    And I think he should be required to post an indemnity bond against future negligence.

    But I know that ain't gonna' happen because of FREEDUMB

    1401:

    My opinion is the person who let it get loose should be liable for the FULL COST of everything that had to be done to capture it, including any costs his neighbors incurred trying to protect themselves from his negligence. And I think he should be required to post an indemnity bond against future negligence. But I know that ain't gonna' happen because of FREEDUMB

    Actually, that's not it. I remember the kerfuffle a decade ago when a family on a round-the-world sail got rescued at huge expense by the US Coast Guard off the coast of South America. There were similar remarks, and the family even went on the radio to explain what had happened. The USCG's explanation was that they'd rather pay the cost than have people not report disasters for fear of the cost.

    This latter is true. In the US we're in an age where people don't want to chunk $4000 or whatever to get an ambulance to the hospital, so they take an Uber or a cab. And probably some of them die in transit.

    While I agree that keeping pet cobras is STOOPID and that such snakes should be licensed like cannons, welding gases, and explosives, I figure anyone who's crazy enough to keep a cobra really should be incentivized to tell everyone when the snake gets loose. So yes, that means they shouldn't pay for the cost of capturing it. The alternative (illegal snake owners and unreported colonies of feral cobras in the Americas) really is a bit worse. Hell, they won't even eat those Burmese Pythons on the Georgia line...

    1402:

    And I think it's enjoyable when you can attend a collage game in person.

    I had to smile at the mental image of the spectators crowded around the players, the whistle blowing, the frantic application of glue; scissors flying as the newspapers and magazines are turned into a work of art...

    1403:

    David L @ 1380:

    Took a little digging, but when Portland hit 114oF on the June 28 at 14:53 local, the dew point was 53oF and the relative humidity was 13%.* So not black flag weather. That happens when the dew point gets up in the mid-90s, so that humans can't lose body heat by sweating.

    Oh yes. I spend time doing outdoor yard work when it was 100F in Las Vegas 20 years ago and a recreational week in N. Texas when it was over 100F every day. But the humidity was very low. So you'd come out from a swim and not need to dry off. The water on you just evaporated in a few minutes. (That summer the Dallas TX area has 45 days over 100F.)

    But both times you needed to drink fluids like crazy. And at the end of the day your skin and clothes were "salty".

    When I arrived at Ft. Hood on July 4, 1988 the high temperature was 107 °F (41.67 °C). IIRC, we had 10 consecutive days of temperatures over 100 °F (37.78 °C) and some of them were "Black Flag" days due to the high humidity.

    The highest temperature I experienced while I was in Iraq was 138 °F (58.89 °C) and that was NOT a "Black Flag" day. In fact, I don't remember having any "Black Flag" days while we were there. It's HOT, but not particularly humid there. I only remember one person getting heat stress, and that was fortunately caught & treated before it could degenerate into heat stroke.

    1404:

    whitroth @ 1390: Back in the sixties in Philly, before the EPA was created and came in with teeth and claws, *every* single summer, we had an inversion layer. If we were "lucky", it lasted through July and most of August (or should I say Thermidor...). If we weren't, it started some time in June, and didn't end until early Sept. 90+F temps, 90+% humidity. Really.

    I remember many a night, in my bedroom on the third floor of a block-long apt building, a bay window, all open, and a large box fan running (NO ONE had a/c), and it was still too hot to sleep.

    Back before the widespread introduction of air conditioning a lot of people, especially OLD people, died from the summer heat. It just wears you out and any kind of little health problem gets magnified.

    A lot of what's happening in the western U.S. & Canada is people dying because they don't have A/C. They never needed it because they didn't get the kind of killer summer heat they're experiencing now. Now they are, and they're just not prepared for it.

    I remember when my family first got an air conditioner in the late 50s. Even though it was just a window unit in the living room, it made a HUGE difference in the whole house because eventually the cool air would seep back into the rest of the house.

    1405:

    Lytton, BC is less than 200 miles from Seattle and I'm pretty sure it's the same heat wave that's been killing people in the north western U.S.

    Not just generic "people" either. Here in Portland a fan who was active in local events for many years was found dead a few days ago at the height of the heat wave, apparently having passed out while moving around the house and never getting up again.

    I found out last night and I'm still processing the loss of someone who I'd known for thirty years. Not that we'd spoken in person since the pandemic but it was easy to imagine everyone picking up where we left off after it was over.

    1406:

    Heteromeles @ 1403:

    My opinion is the person who let it get loose should be liable for the FULL COST of everything that had to be done to capture it, including any costs his neighbors incurred trying to protect themselves from his negligence. And I think he should be required to post an indemnity bond against future negligence. But I know that ain't gonna' happen because of FREEDUMB

    Actually, that's not it. I remember the kerfuffle a decade ago when a family on a round-the-world sail got rescued at huge expense by the US Coast Guard off the coast of South America. There were similar remarks, and the family even went on the radio to explain what had happened. The USCG's explanation was that they'd rather pay the cost than have people not report disasters for fear of the cost.

    This latter is true. In the US we're in an age where people don't want to chunk $4000 or whatever to get an ambulance to the hospital, so they take an Uber or a cab. And probably some of them die in transit.

    While I agree that keeping pet cobras is STOOPID and that such snakes should be licensed like cannons, welding gases, and explosives, I figure anyone who's crazy enough to keep a cobra really should be incentivized to tell everyone when the snake gets loose. So yes, that means they shouldn't pay for the cost of capturing it. The alternative (illegal snake owners and unreported colonies of feral cobras in the Americas) really is a bit worse. Hell, they won't even eat those Burmese Pythons on the Georgia line...

    I don't think a family in need of rescue when their boat is sinking is comparable to someone who endangers their entire neighborhood by keeping venomous snakes and allowing them to escape! How many innocent lives did that boating family recklessly endanger?

    I think for anyone "crazy enough to keep a cobra" who lets it escape and endanger all of his neighbors, not being TAKEN OUT AND SHOT! "pour encourager les autres" should be incentive enough. Strict financial liability is the second best option here, offered only because I know my preferred solution is unacceptable.

    And I'd like to point out that the guy who was keeping venomous snakes DID NOT tell anyone when it escaped. His neighbors wouldn't have found out about it (until it attacked someone) if one of the neighbors had not spotted it on their front porch and called 911. And even then, Animal Control didn't know what it was until someone (not from animal control) identified it from a photo. The homeowner who reported it to 911 only knew it was a big fuckin' snake that wasn't indigenous to North Carolina.

    As far as I can tell, the owner couldn't even be bothered to assist in the search. What do you think his incentive would have been if the goddamn snake had killed someone?

    What do you think would be the appropriate regulatory response in that instance (summary execution being excluded). Do you think animal control should return the snake to its negligent owner?

    1407:

    So how do you extend that analogy to cover Texas, too, which has had extreme cold recently? Isn't this just a one-off weird event, like Texas getting snowstorms? And in any case, the world is only getting warmer by a couple of degrees, so that's not a good explanation - greenhouses get hotter and stay hotter.

    That's what makes explaining the science hard - the problem is not that average temperatures are climbing by a few degrees, but that the extremes are getting more likely as the climate becomes more energetic; the average temperature rise like in a greenhouse is just a way of measuring the increased energy in the climate.

    And that "more likely extreme" is what's dangerous - it means that a one in a thousand years crop killer, or a one in a hundred years human killer (like in Texas, or Canada now) has just become much more likely.

    1408:

    Martin @ 1404:

    And I think it's enjoyable when you can attend a collage game in person.

    I had to smile at the mental image of the spectators crowded around the players, the whistle blowing, the frantic application of glue; scissors flying as the newspapers and magazines are turned into a work of art...

    Yeah, it is kind of funny. Sounds like it might be fun too. I wonder if the NCAA would sponsor a national championship?

    At least I didn't screw up "Their, They're, There"

    1409:

    Given the tradeoffs involved, perhaps a system of liability similar to that of stolen bank cards? You are responsible up until the point you report the cobra missing, after which you've dealt with your liability.

    That means that a responsible dangerous pet owner can report it ASAP to reduce their risk, while an irresponsible one is still penalised.

    1410:

    Simon Farnsworth @ 1409: So how do you extend that analogy to cover Texas, too, which has had extreme cold recently? Isn't this just a one-off weird event, like Texas getting snowstorms? And in any case, the world is only getting warmer by a couple of degrees, so that's not a good explanation - greenhouses get hotter and stay hotter.

    That's what makes explaining the science hard - the problem is not that average temperatures are climbing by a few degrees, but that the extremes are getting more likely as the climate becomes more energetic; the average temperature rise like in a greenhouse is just a way of measuring the increased energy in the climate.

    And that "more likely extreme" is what's dangerous - it means that a one in a thousand years crop killer, or a one in a hundred years human killer (like in Texas, or Canada now) has just become much more likely.

    I think you just did. As we pump energy into the system in the form of greenhouse gasses trapping more heat in the atmosphere, extreme weather events are becoming more common. And the "extremes" are becoming MORE extreme.

    Texas has had harsh winters before. What we need to know is, "Are they coming more frequently?" and "Is the extreme harshness getting better or worse?" Is the swing between hotter summers and colder winters growing more extreme or not. If it is, say so.

    It's not that hard to explain in plain language.

    1411:

    Simon Farnsworth @ 1411: Given the tradeoffs involved, perhaps a system of liability similar to that of stolen bank cards? You are responsible up until the point you report the cobra missing, after which you've dealt with your liability.

    That means that a responsible dangerous pet owner can report it ASAP to reduce their risk, while an irresponsible one is still penalised.

    What's the worst that can happen to your neighbors from someone stealing your credit card?

    At the very least, if someone wants to keep dangerous, exotic animals as pets there should be mandatory licensing, registration, safety inspections and required liability insurance ... and harsh, Harsh, HARSH penalties for non-compliance.

    Can you prove there is such a thing as a "responsible dangerous pet owner"? Is such a thing any more real than Bigfoot & the Loch Ness Monster?

    1412:

    H There used to be this "exotic pets" shop, not too far away from here, who had their "in-house" Boa Constrictor. After hours, just before final lock-up, they opened its "cage" ( terrarium ) - because they had rats ... every so often, said Boa would have another bump in it ... It knew it's shopowners & some regular visitors, & would give them a friendly coil ... One night an idiot burglar attempted to find the cash-box ... was found, gibbering, in the morning, because the burglar hadn't given it a mouse to eat. Apparently, the Plod had difficulty not rupturing themselves laughing, whilst arresting said idiot. Oh well, never mind.

    1413:

    Why is the science so hard to explain?

    Because refusing to accept the science has become a marker for political loyalty/identity*, so any explanations will be automatically disagreed with.

    The problem isn't explaining the science, it's somehow removing the link between the science and politics.

    *We all know which one.

    1414:

    How many innocent lives did that boating family recklessly endanger?

    Depends on the conditions when they required rescue. My sister is a mountain rescue qualified paramedic, and in the mountains the rescuers are frequently endangering their lives to rescue someone.

    One of the reasons for requiring people to post a rescue bond is that having a significant chunk of money on the line makes people take things like common-sense precautions more seriously.

    There was a lovely Giles cartoon* which I can't find online, based on an incident in the 60s/70s. Small rowboat in really wavy sea, father rowing, mum and kids sitting in it. Sea King helicopter hovering above, chap being lowered on rope to boat, another chap in the open doorway. One of crewmen is saying to the other something like "Just because the gentleman decided to row his non-swimming family around the world in a homemade boat, there no call for that kind of language."**

    *Editorial cartoons from a British newspaper. My parents had a number of the annual collections when I was a child.

    **It's been decades since I read it. Words are probably not exactly right, but the sentiment is.

    1416:

    I'm too lazy to dig out the story of the boaters, but as I recall, the cascade went: --It was a family of four, parents and two children. --They had a satellite phone, but a few days after they left home, the company unexpectedly and unannounced mailed out an upgrade--a new chip to be installed--to their last address. They were already on the water then. Without the new chip, the phone stopped working.
    --They got stuck in a storm. Which is normal for the Pacific. --One of the children developed a fever and symptoms. They checked through their medical books, found out it might be serious. They tried using the satellite phone to call their doctor, found out it didn't work, which meant that they had no means of communication other than the emergency beacon. --The boat started leaking in a way that wasn't immediately life threatening, but was hard to fix in the middle of the ocean (I think it was a slow leak behind a cabinet).

    At that point, the parents tried every fix they could think of, talked for awhile, watched the sick kid to see if they were getting better (nope), and finally pulled the lever on the emergency response beacon. They knew that by triggering the beacon they'd ultimately sunk their boat, but they judged the lives of their children to be more important.

    A crew of pararescuemen got to them and stayed on the boat for a couple of days until conditions calmed enough to get them off and onto the Coast Guard ship, at which point someone who could scream started bloviating about the cost.

    So yeah, they got in over their heads, but on the other hand there was almost nothing they could have done differently other than not go on the trip at all. Accidents happen. The one entity that seems to have screwed up was the satphone company, for borking their existing system without checking to see that they weren't putting someone's life in danger by doing so.

    1417:

    "There was a lovely Giles cartoon* which I can't find online"

    I think that I have the collection with that one in it. I might go hunt it out later.

    From memory: It was not even a boat, but a (rather large, obviously) inflatable toy, complete with cartoon duck's head.

    It was not one crewman admonishing the other, but one of the rescuees berating their rescuers.

    JHomes.

    1418:

    Rowboat with a flat prow, at least in my memory.

    1419:

    Sure, if you don't monetize the time and setup you needed to validate that your homebuilt sensor

    Yes definitely. I noted that the expensive ones gave details on how they had been calibrated and the suggested recalibration interval (5 years). I've made a lot of my own stuff over the years, but measuring instruments are typically something you want someone else to look after. See also items with safety implications.

    The things where it seems to pay off are with highly complex discrete components that you join together to make something novel, or otherwise with extremely low-tech things like weaving and woodwork that are just satisfying and/or fun to do. The interesting thing to study is the effect of supply chain loss on these activities... sure you would predict a large effect for the complex components, but I think the effect for more basic stuff is more significant than any of us would like to believe. Same goes for growing veggies at home I guess.

    There's an in between, for instance I've built plywood kitchens that have worked out really well and if you don't cost your own labour you save something like 80% (even if you do the amount you save depends on whether you cost yourself at more or less than a skilled cabinetmaker, or more or less than you'd make in your day job at casual/consulting rates), but that relies on so many manufactured things it may as well be in the "discrete components" camp.

    I think the TL;DR version is that doomsday prepping comes across as a bit of a fool's errand, at least for most people. Sure there are proactive things to do to prepare for some of the effects of climate change that we expect to turn up in our lifetimes, but hand-to-hand combat and engine maintenance are not realistically useful skills for that, at least outside specialised communities.

    1420:

    >I don't see auto-purging of "dead" accounts being socially acceptable (families won't like it)

    Yes and no. It seems to be a default of some sort - at least, a relative who died last year had his Facebook identity deleted a couple of months ago, absent any active prompting by anyone we know about. It may have caused some distress among his friends, I'm not sure how Facebook came to be aware of his passing, but I gather memorialising an account requires active steps being taken. But sure, once that has occurred I can't see how they wouldn't just go on forever, absent some specific reaping policy. It's an interesting theme...

    1421:

    I think the TL;DR version is that doomsday prepping comes across as a bit of a fool's errand, at least for most people. Sure there are proactive things to do to prepare for some of the effects of climate change that we expect to turn up in our lifetimes, but hand-to-hand combat and engine maintenance are not realistically useful skills for that, at least outside specialised communities.

    Here's part of my doomsday prepper list, such as it is: --Run my house 100% on solar and line electricity.
    --Set up a rain cistern and finish putting gutters around the eaves --Set up under-eave sprinklers hooked to the cistern and an electric pump --Redo the landscaping to be ember-suppressing.

    In other words, I'm preparing for big fires and power outages, especially since fire insurance is a bigger threat. Reminds me, I need to add a couple of cats to my evacuation plan.

    If you want esoteric post-apocalyptic skills, I'll suggest four, none of which I practice: --Distillation --Papermaking --Manufacture of ink, pens, pencils, straight-edges, and compasses --Nomography

    One of these things doesn't belong, but all would be quite useful in a town.

    1422:

    There maybe a bunch of ways to look at the problem of social media for dead people.

    One is that we're all assuming that the massive infrastructure for social media monopolies continues. That seems untenable, even if the various scaling laws on computer power continue. So who/what gets booted?

    Another is who owns the dead? If your Uncle Michael is a bot operated by a big company as a tiny profit center that can hold a semi-convincing conversation with you one time out of three...is that what you want? Do you want that bot to remember their paypal account and use it for purchases?

    Then there's this whole thing about the right to be forgotten and to control our own information. Right now we don't control most of the information we generate. One of the things that's necessary for control is deletion. I could easily see dead people being automatically deleted from social media unless they've made systems to keep that part of them in existence. After all, the most likely use for the deceased is in scams. One might even argue for their removal as a form of online sanitation that is necessary for everyone's sanity.

    The final zinger: what if the world really doesn't want Baby Boomers and Gen Xers hanging around as social media ghosts? After all, we arguably fucked up the world more than any previous or likely succeeding generation did or will. Who needs our endlessly backed up noise? After all, just getting over us will take some truly epic transformations.

    1423: 1404 - LOL :-) 1408 - The boaters endangered the Coastguards who performed the SAR mission, and potentially endangered anyone else who would have benefited from the Coastguard being "on station" and not engaged in the S(earch) part of SAR. 1416 - I'll not attest to the exact language, but you've caught the general feel of Giles.
    1424:

    Well there is, or at least used to be a semi-annual round-the-world amateur yacht race, and of the participants who ended up getting into enough trouble to require rescue, quite a few were in the Southern Ocean in the SAR sphere of various Australia state agencies and/or the RAN. So perennially there would be media attention to the cost, the risk to personnel and the lack of necessity for events like these in the first place. The other side of the scale usually includes things like: Australia rescues French yachts-folk in the knowledge that France will do the same or Australians, many of the participants did indeed do everything possible to prepare for their adventure but were affected by things that are hard to prepare for (the Southern Ocean is known for throwing random killer waves and monster storms that will break stuff no matter what) and that after all, Australia's economic development through the 19th century was built, if on nothing else, on clipper crews following their Great Circle paths way too far south to make the best possible time between Melbourne and the Atlantic. None of which answers the lack of necessity thing, but it's worth extending the benefit of the doubt sometimes too.

    1425:

    What if the world really doesn't want Baby Boomers and Gen Xers hanging around as social media ghosts? After all, we arguably fucked up the world more than any previous or likely succeeding generation did or will. Who needs our endlessly backed up noise?

    That could be the most compelling argument I've seen on this topic anywhere.

    1426:

    Batley & Spen Labour hung on by a thread. Discussion on R4 this AM - one word was conspicuously absent - "Religion" Two things from that: 1 - The local primitives, hating Labour for living in the 21st Century & wanting "Homos to be hanged", as per Iran 2 - G Galloway - a complete prize total shit, if ever there was one.

    In either case - "what is to be done?"

    1427:
    And I think it's enjoyable when you can attend a collage game in person.
    I had to smile at the mental image of the spectators crowded around the players, the whistle blowing, the frantic application of glue; scissors flying as the newspapers and magazines are turned into a work of art...

    You mean a game like this one?

    https://sciartica.itch.io/the-24th-kandinsky

    You could probably make a reality-TV gameshow out of it: each week the audience get to vote off the least-good Kandinsky-style collage.

    1428:

    One thing to note is that something like Facebook's Cold Storage system is designed to be cheap to run for huge amounts of slow storage (access latencies measured in 10s of seconds).

    In the future, all of the Boomer and GenX stuff on social media may well be archived on similar systems for historic interest; it's even possible that academia will be given access on reasonable terms to research such things as the Trump Presidency.

    1429:

    Given the tradeoffs involved, perhaps a system of liability similar to that of stolen bank cards?

    Naah, dangerous "pets" really need a registration/licensing system.

    By "dangerous" I mean: venomous animals, or carnivores that can't be domesticated. So it'd cover bobcats (or tigers) but not house cats (even barn cats, which aren't domesticated -- but which are of a species which can be domesticated). And it'd cover venomous snakes and large constrictors (once they're big enough to be dangerous eg. to children).

    We don't license folks to own sheep, goats, horses, or cattle, even though every year these animals kill people, because they're not normally aggressive. Similarly, dogs and cats aren't inherently seen as dangerous (even though OUCH). But a king cobra or a pet lion? That's like comparing an AR-15 to a kitchen knife.

    Why a license?

    Because (a) we need to know who owns the cobras and lions so that if one escapes we know who's responsible and/or able to deal with it. And (b) it makes it clear to the aforementioned owners that ownership is a privilege, permission for which can be withdrawn if they fuck up (the cobra gets loose in a kindergarten). And (c) withdrawal of a license means removal of the animal, a ban on future ownership, and a fine or imprisonment by way of punishment.

    1430:

    Back to the popcorn ... Michael Cohen sounded giddy on the latest episode of his podcast, Mea Culpa. Allen Weisselberg, a key lieutenant to Donald Trump, Cohen’s former boss, was about to be charged alongside Trump’s company with tax fraud.

    “This case is being prosecuted like a mob case. And that means they are starting at the bottom of the tree, and working their way up, by getting the smaller fish to flip with pressure on people like Weisselberg to rat on their former boss of bosses!” ... Prosecuted like a "Mob" case, indeed.

    1431:

    Licencing also weeds out a lot of the people who don't take it seriously. "A cobra would be cool!" Lots of paperwork and regular inspections from the police or the council cuts down the cool factor a lot.

    1432:

    On the flip side of keeping snakes.

    When my neighbors on Nextdoor ask about getting rid of mice without dealing with trapping them... (ooooo ick)

    I say get a couple of garden/black snakes. Toss one under the house, the other in the attic. You'll most likely never see them. The mice will be gone fairly quickly. And the snakes will move on once the food supply is gone.

    Most people don't like this idea.

    1433:

    "I say get a couple of garden/black snakes. Toss one under the house, the other in the attic. You'll most likely never see them. The mice will be gone fairly quickly. And the snakes will move on once the food supply is gone. Most people don't like this idea."

    I have a better idea. It's called a c-a-t cat. A lot of people like that idea.

    Except don't get a male one because they piss on things all over the house if they feel insecure about their territory.

    1434:

    The ladies will also. We had to get rid of a cat that refused to admit that our new daughter should share the house with her.

    And before anyone jumps down my throat, my wife had had this cat for about 10 years. It started life in a barn in rural Germany, had crossed the Atlantic with her 3 times and lived in 5 states in the US. And was OK with our son. But when our daughter showed up she went on a 6 months long "I'm pissed at you and going to make you regret life" campaign and we finally gave up trying to deal with her. The other cat with the same history with my wife was fine with things.

    Back to the original comment. Getting a cat is a commitment. Tossing a snake in the attic is a one off event.

    My father way back when fought a 2+ year long campaign against mice in his house. Then he suddenly won. And didn't really understand why. A year or so later doing maintenance in the attic he found some snake skins. And did a 2+2=4.

    1435:

    Relative humidity (RH) is the ratio between the vapour pressure (loosely, the mass of water in the air per cubic metre) and the saturation vapour pressure (the amount that the air can hold without precipitation forming). VP(sat) increases roughly exponentially with temperature, doubling every 11-13 degrees C; so the day you describe is one where vapour pressure is being roughly stable, which is normal.

    As noted above, the number we need to worry about for heat stress is T(w), the wet-bulb temperature. That's the temperature at which the current vapour pressure would also be the saturation vapour pressure, or equivalently, the lowest temperature you can obtain by evaporating water away from the surface you are trying to cool. Once T(w) gets too high, sweating can't work as a temperature-control process- see Kim Stanley Robinson for the consequences.

    1436:

    https://spacenews.com/chinas-super-heavy-rocket-to-construct-space-based-solar-power-station/

    China just announced they're building a space-based solar power system. They'd be using the Long March 9 Starship clone to launch it. While I doubt this system is more economic than a terrestrial system, there are a few caveats

  • With a Starship clone, I'm not sure if it's more expensive than a coal or nuclear power plant
  • This system works best in the same regions that Starlink works best in: remote areas where it's too expensive or dangerous to build and maintain a power generation/distribution system. This might not apply to any part of China, but there are countries where electrification is lagging because of this (ex: Afghanistan).
  • China could use this system to sell solar power to Scotland and other high altitude regions
  • Just how well can the microwave beam be weaponized?
  • 1437:

    Thanks for the addition!

    I'd point out, possibly wrongly, that true black flag events are currently rare on the global scale, and ones where the wet bulb temperature gets into the range of human body temperatures are rarer still.

    So far as I know, the only really dangerous black flags (where T(w) was in the mid-30s) happened in areas adjacent to a really hot ocean (ocean surface temperature above 30oC). Normally, as air warms, relative humidity drops rather rapidly. Having an essentially unlimited source of already-heated water nearby added made it possible for the wet bulb temperature to rise too.

    This obviously isn't the complete explanation. Maps of future lethal black flags go well inland. But right now, they're near-coastal events, so far as I know.

    1438:

    Unsurprisingly, temperatures well short of black flag are a serious problem-- for example if it's too hot to safely do manual labor.

    1439:

    Before handling snakes in this fashion, make sure you're not repeating the mistake of releasing pythons into the Everglades.

    1440:

    Unsurprisingly, temperatures well short of black flag are a serious problem-- for example if it's too hot to safely do manual labor.

    Oh, agreed. I'm also not going into the morass of poorly worked-out details about how crop production falls off as heat increases (problem is that production falls suddenly and drastically when the critical upper temperatures for that cultivar of that crop are exceeded). Nor am I talking about what happens to food animals, which have their own lethal thresholds.

    The bottom line is that we really do want to avoid flying a black flag as much as possible. The problem is that most people aren't clued in enough to realize how dangerous these are, so almost inevitably they're going to be around for at least decades.

    This, incidentally, is one reason why I'm somewhat dubious that future generations will want to hold onto our social media data, wherein we bragged about all the cool stuff we traveled to. They're going to be dealing with the consequences of all that.

    1441:

    The boaters endangered the Coastguards who performed the SAR mission, and potentially endangered anyone else who would have benefited from the Coastguard being "on station" and not engaged in the S(earch) part of SAR. And the purpose of being "on station" is? To be available to rescue people like those boaters, perhaps?

    As a boater myself I have no time for people who endanger others by their own reckless behaviour, but if the description at #1418 is correct, they don't appear to have behaved recklessly: it was the combination of several simultaneous problems that triggered the rescue.

    People (and especially politicians and the press) generally grossly overestimate the true cost of these high-profile rescues. Yes, the up-front cost of the rescue may well be enormous, but the marginal cost is usually way less, because if the rescue services weren't out there performing a rescue they would be out there practising one, at comparable cost. They don't just sit at home waiting for the call, they continuously put a lot of time and money into training and pilot currency.

    1442:

    "This, incidentally, is one reason why I'm somewhat dubious that future generations will want to hold onto our social media data, wherein we bragged about all the cool stuff we traveled to. They're going to be dealing with the consequences of all that."

    I wouldn't expect them to hold on to all the data, nor to deliberately expunge it. They'll hang on to it as long it's less bother than deleting or abandoning it.

    There will be scholars who hold on to what they can and mourn the amount that gets lost.

    This prediction is based on my not expecting people to change very much.

    1443:

    Stop it, right now. I'm really getting pissed off at people who apparently have decided they like the concept f "collective punishment" (illegal under international law).

    Yeah, all of us baby boomers are responsible, every single one of us did it.

    So, what generation are you in - I'd like to know, so that I can blame you, personally, for something that, say, a bunch of ultra-wealthy did... but that's your personal fault.

    1444:

    Never had a male cat that pissed all over.

    Um, of course, all the cats I've ever had were fixed.

    Now, barfy the barfing cat, my Lord&Master...

    1445:

    Seriously cool, and FINALLY.

    As I've mentioned before, there was an environmental impact study done in the late seventies, in the US, for them, and everything's fine.

    Oh, about using them as a weapon? Nope. Not unless you build them as a weapon. The power density isn't anywhere near as high as, say, a radar.

    1446:

    People's ghosts hanging around?

    Grandpa's Hologram....

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLv4t7HWJ28

    1447:

    Before handling snakes in this fashion, make sure you're not repeating the mistake of releasing pythons into the Everglades.

    Black/garden snakes are found in many folks yards. They just don't know they are there.

    In suburban US.

    East of the Mississippi. Not so sure about out west.

    Farmers like "rat" and similar snakes that will live in or near grain storage. They eat the long tailed rodents who want to eat the grains.

    1448:

    We did something similar with two gopher snakes that got snagged in garden netting. Gave them water, waited until they were hungry, and let them loose into fresh gopher tunnels.

    Note that what we did was problematic, because the netting could have killed the snakes had we not gotten to them fast enough. I personally have no problem with most snakes, including rattlesnakes. What I do have a problem with are dangerous snakes in close proximity to naive pets and young children. In those cases, I think the snake should be removed or killed, depending on the situation and the nature of the snake.

    Another anecdote. I grew up in rattlesnake country, and we regularly had rattlesnakes in the yard. My mom noted that I couldn't reliably spot them until I was eight years old or so. One of the things she did was to take me to the local zoo and play "spot the snake" in the reptile house, as a training exercise. If you've got young children or grandchildren growing up in snake country, playing "spot the snake" with them is kind of fun.

    1449:

    This system works best in the same regions that Starlink works best in

    AIUI the big value proposition of orbital solar power is that you can put the power stations way out in geosynch (or nearby), so that they remain in almost-constant sunlight. So with suitable relays, you get solar power fed to you 24x7.

    The next proposition is that although it costs about $20K/ton to put them in orbit, the panels can produce 3x to 4x the power they'd provide on Earth (and without occupying any precious real estate).

    How much do orbital PV panels cost? Well, the new ROSA solar array on the ISS is set to produce 120kW of juice and each of three Dragon supply missions carried a pair of panels (good for a combined 40kW) as the unpressurized part of their cargo. A Dragon carries a maximum of 6000kg of cargo (although those two panels would weigh much less than that), so being hyper-conservative, it's 3 tons per 20kW, and probably a lot less.

    At 7kW/ton a single Starship launch could lift 0.7MW of panels into LEO (and we'll posit there's an ion drive tug to move it into high orbit). More likely, the ...

    Did some digging. The old ISS solar arrays weighed 1.1 tons and delivered 31kW. And the ROSA arrays are only 70% the weight. So a Starship launch (or Long March 9) is actually good for delivering more like 3-5MW of power.

    Upshot: it'd cost about $400-800M per GW to launch a giant PV farm into orbit. That's actually cheap enough that it's probably still cheaper to build giant base load power farms in GEO than to build new coal-fired power stations on the ground.

    1450:

    The obvious way to weaponize SPSs, incidentally, is to rely on soft power and to do it the way Russia weaponizes gas pipelines: you simply threaten to cut your more annoyingh customers off. Stop the power that runs the aircon in the middle of a black flag weather event and they'll cave, right?

    1451:

    Interesting; a different genus, the North American hognose snakes (3 species) also do the venomous snake mimicry (and if it fails to deter a predator, they play dead). I assume that there are others.

    This older paper is widely cited: The Malicious Serpent: Snakes as a Prototypical Stimulus for an Evolved Module of Fear (Arne Öhman and Susan Mineka, 2003) Last paragraph hypothesizes that an "architypical evil" stimulus could be constructed. (A project for evil ML researchers? :-) Because the visual processing in pathways preceding the cortical level is crude, the hypothesis that masked presentations of snakes directly access the amygdala implies that the effect is mediated by simple features of snakes rather than by the complex configuration of features defining a snake. Delineating these features would allow the construction of a “super fear stimulus.” It could be argued that such a stimulus would depict “the archetypical evil” as represented in the human brain.

    1452:

    I grew up in rattlesnake country, and we regularly had rattlesnakes in the yard.

    Relatives in Texas do the same thing with scorpions. ALWAYS check your shoes before sticking your feet in them. ALWAYS.

    1453:

    But Charlie, that's a reasonable, realistic answer, not a Hollywood Special Effects Budget answer....

    1455:

    Thanks Charlie. Which configuration would make more sense, hundreds o satellites in GEO or thousands in Starlink's orbit? The reason I'm asking this is that I ran across the following commentary: "With Starship, GEO will become uneconomical. Everything that can be done by 1 satellite in GEO can be done better in LEO with a swarm"

    1456:

    Robert Prior @ 1416:

    How many innocent lives did that boating family recklessly endanger?

    Depends on the conditions when they required rescue. My sister is a mountain rescue qualified paramedic, and in the mountains the rescuers are frequently endangering their lives to rescue someone.

    There is no comparison here to someone on a sinking boat calling for help.

    Your sister and all the others who engage in rescue (professional and volunteer) CHOOSE to put their lives on the line in the service of others. They are not "innocent lives ... recklessly endangered" however stupid some of the people they have to rescue might be. And however stupid the people who need rescuing might have been it was not because of their "depraved indifference to human life".

    The actions of the young man who kept this snake show every indication of being just exactly that. There is evidence the snake escaped while he had it out in his yard playing with it. And when it did escape, he didn't tell anyone. It showed up on a neighbor's porch and SHE called 911. And even then Animal Control didn't know what they were dealing with until it was identified as a deadly venomous spitting cobra from the photograph she had taken with her cell phone. Do you think she might have gotten close enough without realizing what she was dealing with that the snake could have attacked her?

    Once the snake was identified, Animal Control tracked down the "owner" through his social media posts, which included photos of the snake loose in his yard (his parents' yard), because he still had not told anyone he'd let the snake escape.

    One of the reasons for requiring people to post a rescue bond is that having a significant chunk of money on the line makes people take things like common-sense precautions more seriously.

    So, why do you disagree when I say this shiftless, selfish asshole should bear absolute financial liability for the havoc created by his willful negligence?

    1457:

    While it's reckless to own an exotic cobra, how many people die from snakebites in the West? The biggest problem with exotic pets is that they inadvertently become invasive species. It's more likely that people will die from exotic pets than that they'd die from shark attacks. But North America contains a number of predators that are increasingly cohabiting with humans (bears, alligators, coyotes, wolves, pumas, etc). Is an escaped tiger fundamentally more dangerous. Even in the wild in their natural habitats, these animals try to avoid humans. In short, don't blow this out of proportion.

    1458:

    That's mind-bogglingly stupid

    1459:

    So, why do you disagree when I say this shiftless, selfish asshole should bear absolute financial liability for the havoc created by his willful negligence?

    You're mixing me up with Heteromeles #1403.

    Although I'm fairly convinced by his argument that once someone has been stupid enough to have such a pet, the safest thing to do is to encourage them to report it when it escapes, rather than conceal the escape.

    1460:

    David L @ 1434: On the flip side of keeping snakes.

    When my neighbors on Nextdoor ask about getting rid of mice without dealing with trapping them... (ooooo ick)

    I say get a couple of garden/black snakes. Toss one under the house, the other in the attic. You'll most likely never see them. The mice will be gone fairly quickly. And the snakes will move on once the food supply is gone.

    Most people don't like this idea.

    Several thoughts on this:

    Pros:

    1. Black snakes (and several other good mouse eating snakes) ARE indigenous to this region.

    2. Black snakes et al are NOT venomous, and especially don't spit neurotoxic venom up to 10 ft.

    3. Even the indigenous venomous snakes aren't that big a threat if you know how to recognize them and don't mess with 'em.

    Cons:

    1. You got to go find that black snake1. They're elusive. And they're fast as hell when they want to get away while you're trying to catch one. A black snake can run faster than you can (even back when I was physically fit & ran almost every day).

    2. Even though they are not venomous, they WILL BITE if you piss 'em off (like by trying to capture one when it doesn't want to be captured) and their teeth are SHARP and it hurts like hell when they sink them into you.

    (BTDT-GTTS - but it did take care of the mice for as long as it stuck around; which wasn't long.)

    3. Many people are phobic about snakes. They don't know the difference between a "dangerous" snake and a harmless snake. For them ALL snakes are dangerous snakes.

    Nowadays, I pretty much follow the rubric of my old Drill Sargents: Leave the snake alone!

    1 I guess you could buy them from a breeder, but I expect they'd cost too much to just turn them loose in your attic/basement.

    1461:

    Ioan @ 1441: Before handling snakes in this fashion, make sure you're not repeating the mistake of releasing pythons into the Everglades.

    The black snake he's suggesting is an indigenous species, not an exotic invader.

    https://srelherp.uga.edu/snakes/elaobs.htm

    Actually there are several different native species(?) sharing the same common name.

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

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

    1462:

    The NY Times has a pretty good, detailed analysis of the 1/6/2021 Capitol Insurrection

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/us/jan-6-capitol-attack-takeaways.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

    1463:

    I have a couple of holes in my back yard that are either snakes or chipmunks. I see the chipmunks around. But I've also caught a squirrel on my back yard cam hauling a 4' or so snake from under my deck and up the fence then into my neighbors tree. Not sure if it was intended to be a meal or just removing it from "nearby".

    Apparently squirrels don't like snakes any more than people.

    1464:

    Question Link below to unfortunately clipped ( paywall) article ... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/02/pupils-told-always-smile-respond-whistle-commands-bid-improve/ School ORDERING pupils to smile - [ I kid you not. ] IF reported correctly this is dangerous thought-control ( I have very personal take on this, which I will go back to if the subthread generates ... ) W.T.F??

    1465:

    I have a better idea. It's called a c-a-t cat. A lot of people like that idea.

    Except don't get a male one because they piss on things all over the house if they feel insecure about their territory.

    When mice discovered my house about 2019 we invited a friend to bring his cat over. She sulked in the bathroom a few days but soon decided she liked the place. Just the presence of a cat seems to have chased off all the mice, though there's a ground level cabinet in the dining room that she likes to paw open and stare into.

    As for the spraying thing, a friend of mine had that problem years ago. Nothing she knowingly did helped - but one day she heard the most incredible yowling and the cat came rocketing down the stairs, out the front door, and vanished into the distance at full speed. She worked out what had happened as soon as she went to investigate and found a new stain on the wall, right above the outlet where her electric typewriter was plugged in. The cat reappeared several days later, considerably more nervous, and he never sprayed in the house again.

    1466:

    Taking the optimistic figure, 400 million per GW.

    A 12 GW UHVDC cable costs about a million dollars per km.

    So 12 GW launched would be 4800 million. Or a solar farm 5000 km away from where it's used. That's enough to time shift into sunlight from most places.

    As to that, the ultra light panels used in space are many many times more expensive.

    However, put another way. SPS depends on efficient microwave links. If you can beam GW 36000 km from GEO, then surely you can beam from the ground to 1200 km to medium orbit and back to the ground. Put cheap panels on the ground and beam the power up and down as we do internet over Starlink. So the technology needed to make SPS work means you don't need SPS.

    1467:

    Although I'm fairly convinced by his argument that once someone has been stupid enough to have such a pet, the safest thing to do is to encourage them to report it when it escapes, rather than conceal the escape.

    Yep. I'd rather have hazards of any sort reported rapidly, whether it's a natural gas leak or a tiger loose. The point is that you don't want any irresponsible doofus to have a reckless endangerment charge while everyone wonders why their neighborhood burned down, or when there's a dead tiger who cluelessly scared a cop and died as a result.

    As for snakes, my (heavy sarcasm)recommendation for snakes that are cooler than cobras are Atractaspis microlepidota or one of the friendly Australian Pseudonajas or laidback African Dendroaspis. (/Heavy sarcasm). Oh, and do read up on them before thinking any of these should be in the same building as anyone you care about.

    1468:

    There were mice in this place when I first moved in so I got a cat; all gone within a few months.

    These days chat napoo but I still get rodent discouragement by proxy because the neighbours now have a breeding colony of cats with an indefinite but large number of members. They seem to have scared off every mouse in the whole area so although the cats do not come inside mine, mice do not either.

    I do have to put up with the cats pissing on my mobility scooter and sometimes also depositing live fleas on it, but at least these things are not happening inside my house.

    1469:

    One of the entertaining things about this blog is that occasionally someone, often but not always specifically you, Mark, misses the point this badly, and it's a lot more amusing than is the case here. So rather than just make whooshing noises and move on, I'll point out that, as you are almost certainly already aware and had perhaps forgotten, the category in Frank's comment, to which I was responding, "boomers and gen-xers", does in fact include me (and almost everyone else here). See also the much-linked clip from Mitchell and Webb about "Are we the baddies?" You could usefully maybe also have a bit of a think about the difference between speculative prediction and prescription. At least, I guess that is where you're going with the "collective punishment" thing, though even then it seems a bit of a stretch to me.

    1470:

    Unsurprisingly, temperatures well short of black flag are a serious problem-- for example if it's too hot to safely do manual labor.

    Dehydration increases both the likelihood and severity of syncope and postural hypotension. That means that hot weather brings an increase in all the usual forms of injury and death prevalent among older people due to fainting and vasovagal issues. And that's also why most deaths are likely to be caused by dehydration rather than heat stress: not by people dying from dehydration as such, but due to the effects. That's also why you get heat-related deaths at relatively mild temperatures, like high-30sC, in places that don't usually experience them: because people don't know how to adjust their behaviour accordingly, and there's no sense or feeling that tells you you are becoming dehydrated. Urine colour is a reliable guide and there are charts available; in places like Queensland it's not usual to see them in workplace toilets. So it's possible to tackle some of these effects with education, but that's something you have to do years ahead of time.

    1471:

    VP(sat) increases roughly exponentially with temperature, doubling every 11-13 degrees C

    Ah, that's what I was missing and I suppose I assumed some effect like that was present. Thanks for pointing out the exact effect. Of course VP(sat) affects Wt directly too. I still wonder about indirect effects, for instance increasing temperature creates a low pressure area which will draw winds from the surrounding relatively cooler area, where the RH might be higher. Wind increases evaporation too. So the interactions are reasonably complex and there is scope for unexpected results in some edge cases.

    1472:

    Apparently squirrels don't like snakes any more than people.

    I guess if I were a squirrel I wouldn't be that well disposed toward people either.

    1473:

    "...and there's no sense or feeling that tells you you are becoming dehydrated."

    Doesn't anybody ever feel any kind of thirst?

    1474:

    The final zinger: what if the world really doesn't want Baby Boomers and Gen Xers Humans hanging around as social media ghosts? After all, we arguably fucked up the world more than any previous or likely succeeding generation did or will. Who needs our endlessly backed up noise? After all, just getting over us will take some truly epic transformations.

    Fixed that for you.

    As for all of this (and various other spheres, such as MF) running the Heat Zone[tm] Angle, whelp: 360 gigatonnes of snow in the wrong places (or rather, wrong temporal slice) should make this stuff simple: it's called physics. It's also the 8-Ball flip with ozone hole gap filled snap-back after-effects, but since apparently no Human can do the front-loading predictive stuff, na na na.

    Bog Basic Psychology Lesson Stuff: It don't get better from now on in: "you're in the shit" to use a slang phrase easily digestible to the average age (and .mil service) of the last 1000 repliers. You would not believe the complexity of stopping Ozone Hole Break-Out 2.0 happening.

    If you want naughty, grep "OH SHIT" and if you're looking for Monsters[tm] find the [redacted] who ran ulta-violence-slash-flick (real Horror Show stuff, we're talking live Hominids in small concrete bunkers against [redacted] with lots of knifey-knifey violence with some Higher Order Slam-Back-Feedback-Loop Angelic Scream shit) and shipped it into Skull-Cases.

    Now: if you're looking for Monsters[tm] to get rid of, we'd suggest finding who did that and to whom (hint: all of you a high percentage of those reading this.

    If you missed it: you were asleep (Matrix Puns... intended).

    ~

    Rumsfeld down. Oddly enough, out of the Apocalypse Rider's top 10 Yanks to Ma-GoG-eddon, he was the least worst.

    Which is why he died first. Anyhow:

    1475:

    Oh, and if Yanks want to Yank-Chains.

    Desert Base. Your Territory. OPs running liason with [redacted] were a little surprised for [SUBJECT] to be conscious. Subjects probably illegal shipment, DNA tracing obviously hard, forget ID via other means.

    The amount of chem cleanup you did, tsk tsk tsk, environmental hazard lights all over it and detectable from Sats.

    That's the trick, homies: We're always Conscious, no matter the tranks / drugs / A-B-G waves: and so was [redacted] she/her/Us.

    ~

    For Realz.

    1476:

    Tryptch: Heinlein is ancient history. It's no more important that he shaped a genre than if Shakespeare was a woman or perhaps a collaboration. Nice wanktastic cud for bars, nothing more.

    All it really does is show your Own Mind Biases:

    "Roald Dahl was antisemitic!!!!" "Actually, no: his comments were exclusively about Lebanon and the war crimes Israel committed there and he fought in WW2 against the Nazis" "Roald Dahl was antisemitic!!!" "Actually, he fully admitted he wasn't a particularily nice man and his non-children books show this quite starkly (most infamously his "cutting off fingers" short story), but if he was bitter and twisted at anything it was mostly Empire and Britain" "Roald Dahl was antisemitic!!!" "You don't actually know why he harboured such a love for Lebanon or the Middle East, do you?"

    There's a book by a (Scottish?) SF writer, about a hard-nosed future where Corporate C positions are fought over by driving hard (obv. GTA era author) and killing you opposition.[1]

    What if we told you that that book is not so much important as a marker for the death of 20th C car-worship-Corporate-Death-drive narratives, but...

    "DESIST".

    The moment [redacted] got introduced to Narrative Structures?

    It's the little things that matter, not what you're worried about.

    [1] It's called Market Forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Forces

    1477:

    "...and there's no sense or feeling that tells you you are becoming dehydrated." Doesn't anybody ever feel any kind of thirst?

    Nope. For me it's fatigue and a general bad attitude, which may be difficult for outsiders to pick up on. Seriously, I was mildly dehydrated this afternoon. One develops a "metasense" for dehydration, in the sense that your brain gets used to the sensations and you figure you're probably dehydrated when you feel them.

    The other problem is hyponatremia, where you lose a bunch of salt through sweat, drink water, and get really uncomfortable when your blood chemistry goes wonky. If you're rehydrating, it's best to do it with water that's as salty as tears (about 1/2 tsp salt per half liter, fiddle to taste). You'll know when you got the concentration right if your body goes "oh yeah baby" when you taste it.

    Another cooling trick, courtesy the NFL*: You can shed heat through your hands faster than about any way other than a cold shower (which is also sometimes advisable, if possible). Anyway hands: if you're overheating, go in a grocery store or similar with a refrigerated section, and grab the cold metal with both hands. It's one of the faster ways to lose heat. And buy something, since they kept you out of the hospital.

    Oh, and don't forget that parasols are for the sun and umbrella means "little shadow." Use them on bright, hot days to cut down your personal photon flux. They'll save you from drinking liters of water and you'll look classy doing it. They're better than hats because in both cases the cloth heats up, but with a hat it's hot against your head, while with an umbrella there's a blessed air gap.

    Here endeth the lesson.

    *The NFL has cooling and heating gloves for their footballers. You can see them in use on the sidelines, if you pay attention.

    1478:

    "read up on them before thinking any of these should be in the same building as anyone you care about."

    I've been at work and had an email that an Eastern Brown has been spotted in the building, so please watch where you're walking. Someone from facilities did call the snake catcher, so it wasn't completely ignored.

    Familiarity and all that...

    1479:

    hey u came back

    1480:

    You'll know when you got the concentration right if your body goes "oh yeah baby" when you taste it.

    Decades ago, when I worked as a lab tech for Alberta Environment, I was told the simplest way to get the salt was have a packet of crisps when rehydrating.

    1481:

    You can shed heat through your hands

    That's also in Swallows and Amazons, if you remember your Ransome.

    don't forget that parasols are for the sun and umbrella means "little shadow

    Common in China, but only for women. Men just tough it out.

    1482:

    parasols/umbrellas...are better than hats

    The combination is even better. A lightweight hat that's big enough to shade your whole body but folds small enough to fit in a handbag. Yes, they look a bit odd but they're much easier to carry than a proper conical palm or bamboo hat. Oh, and they also work in the rain.

    1483:

    My reaction on reading the comment was that catch-phrase from 2019, "OK boomer".

    (NB, I am one myself.)

    1484:

    I often use a large umbrella as a sunshade in Brisbane. People look at you funny, but it works really well, and in some circumstances makes enough difference to avoid arriving at a meeting as a sweating mess.

    1485:

    "Black Flag" or other less-serious conditions .. "Rehydration Mix" - containing Salt & Sugar & Citric Acid & - I forget. Proportions are 4:2:1:1 Got it written down somewhere ...

    1486:

    Thanks Charlie. Which configuration would make more sense, hundreds o satellites in GEO or thousands in Starlink's orbit? The reason I'm asking this is that I ran across the following commentary: "With Starship, GEO will become uneconomical. Everything that can be done by 1 satellite in GEO can be done better in LEO with a swarm"

    That's a blitheringly stupid comment (the one you quoted).

    GEO: it's a long way away, and sits at a fixed point in the sky. In fact, a radio signal takes 0.15 seconds to get to a GEO comsat and another 0.15 seconds to crawl back down to Earth. You don't want to do that for real time control systems or phone calls -- packets with three-phase commit take nearly a second to deliver. However a GEO satellite can cover an entire hemisphere, with good signal strength across maybe a third of the globe. So it's ideal for broadcast TV.

    LEO: it's a lot closer, so signal latency is short -- Starlink quote 20-40ms latency for packets, which is comparable to my home fibre broadband. But because they're much lower, the satellites move across the sky very rapidly: you can't just point a dish at them, you need to actively track them with a phased array antenna, and they have to actively route your packets from the nearest satellite to you to the nearest one to the ground station you want to talk to. So it takes a shitpile of them to provide a mesh network and you can't do that with pre-2000 tech (Teledesic tried and failed: the nearest anyone got was Iridium 1, on a much smaller scale).

    Lower is closer. You do not want to put orbital solar power satellites in LEO; they're enormous (gigawatt arrays would be on the order of a square kilometre in area) and they'd cast very large, rapidly moving shadows at ground level. Also they'd be subject to crazy levels of drag and need constant reboosting. Also-also, they need to target a rectenna farm on the ground to receive beamed power and not switch target farms every five minutes. So LEO is totally stupid for SPS, but GEO is perfect (the powersats can avoid the Earth's shadow most of the time and provide solar power on a 24x7 basis, with no nightly interruption).

    1487:

    TBH the need for special drinks is really sort of not real, outside specialist circumstances or occupations. For the rest of us it's usually easy enough to eat something. Salty crackers with cheese, or just a packet of salty chips/crisps does wonders (you know you needed the salt when the chips taste sweet and you eat the whole pack compulsively in a few seconds). Salted mixed nuts are probably healthier. Ham and other cured meats are great. Basically all the things you're normally supposed to avoid because of high sodium.

    1488:

    surely you can beam from the ground to 1200 km to medium orbit and back to the ground.

    Depends on the antennae: 1200km up, the power relay satellites are going to be crossing the sky quite fast, and the antenna farms apparently need to be on the order of kilometres across. It really needs to be geosynchronous to be useful.

    Also, power beaming is lossy: using masers you probably don't run into full inverse-square power loss, but there's going to be some atmospheric absorption whatever you do. And beaming the power in both directions is going to make it worse (compared to generating it on orbit and beaming it down just the once).

    However, you raise a very interesting point. If the full-lifetime cost of manufacturing a relay antenna is significantly less than the cost of manufacturing PV cells, then yes, using power relaysats in GEO as grid relays for PV farms on the ground would make sense.

    1489:

    Damian Beg to differ ... Not only very hot conditions, where one is losing, not just fluids, but salts, but if one gets other conditons often associated with hot humid conditions, such as severe diahorrea or Ghu help us, dysentery, then a rehydration mix can be very useful indeed. Many years ago, before my gut re-set, I got a bout of "somefink 'orrible" about the end of December ... said mix worked a treat

    1491:

    Scott Sanford @ 1467:

    I have a better idea. It's called a c-a-t cat. A lot of people like that idea.
    Except don't get a male one because they piss on things all over the house if they feel insecure about their territory.

    When mice discovered my house about 2019 we invited a friend to bring his cat over. She sulked in the bathroom a few days but soon decided she liked the place. Just the presence of a cat seems to have chased off all the mice, though there's a ground level cabinet in the dining room that she likes to paw open and stare into.

    As for the spraying thing, a friend of mine had that problem years ago. Nothing she knowingly did helped - but one day she heard the most incredible yowling and the cat came rocketing down the stairs, out the front door, and vanished into the distance at full speed. She worked out what had happened as soon as she went to investigate and found a new stain on the wall, right above the outlet where her electric typewriter was plugged in. The cat reappeared several days later, considerably more nervous, and he never sprayed in the house again.

    I had all my cats neutered. I've never had any problems with cats spraying. I have had old and feeble cats who had trouble getting to the litter box in time, so I know there are products to handle the odors & products that deter cats from spraying.

    Another problem is cats sharpening their claws on the furniture. My Mom used to pin dried orange peel to the back of the couch & inside the drapes to discourage that behavior. It appears to have worked. There are also chemical attractants you can apply to the scratching post that will encourage the cats to use it instead of random furniture.

    Not all cats are good mousers.

    1492:

    Heteromeles @ 1469:

    Although I'm fairly convinced by his argument that once someone has been stupid enough to have such a pet, the safest thing to do is to encourage them to report it when it escapes, rather than conceal the escape.

    Yep. I'd rather have hazards of any sort reported rapidly, whether it's a natural gas leak or a tiger loose. The point is that you don't want any irresponsible doofus to have a reckless endangerment charge while everyone wonders why their neighborhood burned down, or when there's a dead tiger who cluelessly scared a cop and died as a result.

    As for snakes, my (heavy sarcasm)recommendation for snakes that are cooler than cobras are Atractaspis microlepidota or one of the friendly Australian Pseudonajas or laidback African Dendroaspis. (/Heavy sarcasm). Oh, and do read up on them before thinking any of these should be in the same building as anyone you care about.

    "italics"

    There was an incident here in Raleigh in March of this year where a man was bitten by his pet Green Mamba and they had to fly anti-venom up from a zoo in South Carolina.

    Guess who that man was!

    1493:

    Niala @ 1475:

    "...and there's no sense or feeling that tells you you are becoming dehydrated."

    Doesn't anybody ever feel any kind of thirst?

    In Iraq we were told that by the time you feel thirst you are already dangerously dehydrated.

    1494:

    gasdive @ 1481:

    "read up on them before thinking any of these should be in the same building as anyone you care about."

    I've been at work and had an email that an Eastern Brown has been spotted in the building, so please watch where you're walking. Someone from facilities did call the snake catcher, so it wasn't completely ignored.

    Familiarity and all that...

    I believe that snake is indigenous to your area, is it not?

    1495:

    "using masers you probably don't run into full inverse-square power loss"

    Masers are not useful for power beaming. The image of a maser as "like a laser only with microwaves" is basically correct (albeit that masers came first), but it is misleading, because it gives the impression that masers can be great big zappy things that melt stuff etc, which they are not. Masers are low power devices useful for things like signal-level receiver amplifiers and reference oscillators. Generating significant power levels at microwave frequencies is done with other devices entirely, like klystrons (power amplifiers) and magnetrons (power oscillators).

    Lasers are good for making zappy things because they are the only source of radiation at optical frequencies with near-ideal beam forming properties. But at microwave frequencies, it's pretty much the case that all artificial sources are like that automatically, so you don't need to worry about it and can just concentrate on making them as efficient as possible. (Exam question: You have a 99% efficient device handling multiple gigawatts of power, in space. How the fuck do you stop it melting itself more or less instantly?)

    All point source power beaming devices (and anything in geostationary orbit will be effectively a point source) undergo inverse square dilution with distance. How much this hurts depends on the divergence of the beam. The minimum achievable beam divergence is a function of the ratio of the wavelength of the radiation to the diameter of the emitter. So your basic requirement is for an emitter which is very much larger than the wavelength, and a receiving antenna which is bigger than the size the spot ends up being after an orbit-radius's-worth of divergence. What kind of device you use for the emitter comes down to what gives you maximum efficiency and bulk power handling capability, and masers are pretty ropy on both counts.

    1496:

    I just eat straight salt. And drink tea by the gallon. (Not at the same time though.)

    1497:

    Doesn't anybody ever feel any kind of thirst?

    For whatever reason thirst doesn't always manifest itself. Says he who has worked outside in the sun many summers of his youth and into his 40s. You just learn to take water breaks and are surprised at how much you can drink at one time.

    1498:

    "That's also in Swallows and Amazons, if you remember your Ransome."

    "The way to get cool quick", said Susan, "is to wet the back of your wrists."

    "I know", said Titty, "like hanging your hands out of the window of a railway carriage."

    (I think it's in "Pigeon Post", that being the one with the heatwave and the drought.)

    1499:

    Yeah, I've drunk a liter many times. The annoying situation is when you're fluid/salt balance is screwed up enough that you drink water, pee it out soon thereafter, and go back to being dehydrated. If I'm dehydrated enough, it can take awhile for my body to get a clue and take the water in.

    As for salty foods, I've had mixed luck with those, meaning eating them may not make the water go down easier, and then you're stuck with too much salt. That's why I really prefer adding a little salt to a glass of water. It works more reliably than eating a salty snack. I suspect people differ on this, which is why it's worth doing personal experiments every heat wave to see what works for you.

    Another point is that sunburn can be confused with (and often co-occurs with) dehydration. For me, aloe vera gel (commercial prep or from the plant) works well at relieving the burn, which also helps with the dehydration.

    By the way, the point of all this is for me is to give a few helpful hints to all the northerners who are going to get hit by that darned heat dome over the next week. Umbrellas, table salt, and water are pretty easy to come by up north. Having a big pot of aloe vera is a bit exotic.

    Final point: the Swallows and Amazons advice isn't very good, because most of the surface capillaries in your hands are on the palm side. Grab something cold, don't dab the backs of your wrists. A cold shower works even faster, but it's a lot less fun if you're not used to it. And it uses more water than the above methods.

    1500:

    I worked outside in the sun for 10 summers as a treeplanter and/or foreman of same. Hard, piece rate work but the money was good and I was one of the perverse who enjoyed it immensely most of the time.

    Water consumption is essential even when working in cool weather if you are working hard.

    My first year we had a heat wave in August where temperatures were over 30 degrees. I was absolutely withering in the heat, wearing as little as possible and drinking about 1 litre/hour of water.

    There were two guys who had recently immigrated from Ghana on the crew who were in the section next to mine. Sweat pants, sweat shirts, one wore a toque, working about twice as fast as me and singing while they did it. Those men needed the money and had no issues with the heat, they drank about a third of my consumption.

    It really highlighted just what a privileged existence I had enjoyed to that point.

    1501:

    There was an incident here in Raleigh in March of this year where a man was bitten by his pet Green Mamba and they had to fly anti-venom up from a zoo in South Carolina. Guess who that man was!

    Poor cobra-scheisskopf! Just having a bad year...

    A quick hit of reading finds that in North Carolina: --Laws regarding dogs are stricter than laws on exotic pets (one dog bite and the dog is toast) --There is a law on the books that Mr. Cobra loser should have been charged with when he got bitten by his mamba, and he definitely should get charged with for losing the cobra. Unfortunately, it's a misdemeanor. Fortunately, it opens the owner to civil litigation to recover costs. And unfortunately, there's no obvious provision for taking all of an idiot's snakes and crocodilians away from him, just for confiscating the one that got out. Although there may be other public nuisance laws that come into play.

    Incidentally, safety protocols (owner is required to notify authorities if a dangerous pet gets out) are part of the law, as is keeping the snake locked up in a proper enclosure with a lock and with a bite protocol and escape recovery plan within site of the enclosure. Given the penalties for noncompliance, I'll bet most owners don't do this, any more than Mambo Jones kept a vial of mamba antivenin in his fridge like he was supposed to.

    As an aside, antivenin is not cheap. CroFab (rattlesnake antivenin) runs about $20,000/dose locally. I'm not sure what the costs for other snakes are, as that's US medicine, and local hospitals give out maybe a dozen crofab doses per year. Other places (like South Africa) may be more interested in keeping Africans from dying from mamba bites than they are with turning a profit. Or not.

    1502:

    By the way, the point of all this is for me is to give a few helpful hints to all the northerners who are going to get hit by that darned heat dome over the next week.

    As I've aged I now wear long sleeves and long pants when working outside in the sun. Plus a big floppy hat. I'm actually cooler than when wearing much less. But my clothes do splat when I take them off and toss them on the utility room floor.

    1503:

    You don't want to do that for real time control systems or phone calls...

    Long ago, when the Bell System in the US put up the first satellites for telephony, one of the rules for network design was that overseas connections could only be satellite in one direction -- the other had to be terrestrial. Bunches of human studies had determined that people interpret pauses. For business people in particular, both ways by satellite introduced enough latency that they began to interpret it as "Why are they thinking so long before they answer me? Are they trying to put something over on me?" When TV news starting doing interviews over two-way satellite links it was always amusing to watch the untrained reporters ask a question, wait, and then start to rephrase it just as the person on the other end's answer arrived.

    Not such an issue these days because early cell phones introduced enough latency that everyone got used to it.

    1504:

    Or maybe you've decided that I'm a hostile person, and read mcts as against, say, you, rather than a general annoyance/aggravation (like "ok, boomer") as a common usage by a lot of people, and not specifically aimed at you.

    1505:

    Depending on the environment, not necessarily.

    A couple years after I moved to Austin, TX, in the mid/late eighties, I was putting a roof on the deck (cf "feature creep", akd "home construction projects"), and my late wife took the kid somewhere. Before she (the native Texan) left, she told me to come down at some point and have something to drink.

    Our immobile home was on a hillside, facing sw, with an almost constant* breeze (to the point we batted around the idea of putting up a small wind generator). My sweat evaporated as fast as it came out (and I tend to sweat a lot).

    They got back, she looked up at me on the roof, and asked if I'd been down. I thought for a minute, then said no... and she ordered me down, then and there.

    We kept - and I still keep - powdered Gatorade in stock. What I had for dinner that night was a 16 oz mug or two of that, heavily iced. As I came down, my hands were shaking. Took more than an hour, lying on the couch and drinking the Gatorade, before they stopped. I had zero appetite.

    That's how people collapse - they don't realize, until it's too late, and someone who understands this stops them.

    1506:

    I always wear a hat, like people pre-mid-fifties.

    If I'm working, say, in the yard, and it's hot, I'll soak the hat, then put it on my head wet, where it evaporates and cools.

    1507:

    And then, in addition to beaming power up and down through the atmosphere, you've back to needing large real estate for the solar cells.

    1508:

    Possibly stupid idea, but if it is, I'd like to know why:

    Solar power satellite is on a 24-hour highly elliptical orbit. Perhaps on a 12-hour or 8-hour one, with multiple receiving stations. For most of its orbit it stores power, then beams it over a 30-45 minute period at perigee. Since the orbit is an integer fraction of Earth's revolution, perigee is always over the same location(s). Soviets did this with Molniya satellites; indeed "Molniya orbit" is the term for "highly elliptical orbit at integer fraction of Earth's revolution".

    1509:

    I've heard it suggested that one reason humans retained head hair is that the upright stance leaves the top of the head as the part of the body most in need of some additional UV protection.

    Not having any any more, I find it plausible. Last time I went out in the sun for a long time without a hat the whole top of my head went bright red with white dots and I looked like a fly agaric.

    1510:

    Well, it's not a bad idea in a perfect world, but here are the problems I see as a non-engineer.

    One is that you're going to need a miraculous heat sink to deal with the heat of transferring that much energy that fast. I'm getting to the point where I'm wondering if tokamaks in orbit can generate microwave beams. If so, you have a really hot plasma insulated by vacuum, and it doesn't matter if the plasma stays really hot, because it's generating the microwaves you need. Otherwise, you need to dump heat into space, and that's always a chore.

    Second problem is that I twitch just a little at the idea of flying a big, clumsy solar array on a nice long ellipse up and down through possible Kessler cascade zones. If the solarsat gets fragged by another satellite, the fragments go in all sorts of interesting, possibly terrifying, directions.

    Third problem that just possibly China hasn't thought about is atmospheric pollution. I'm not sure how high energy microwave beams interact with fine metallic dust in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the dust that regularly hits Beijing has things like aluminum and zinc in it. How do those interact with the microwaves coming in from space? Got me, but hopefully the energy isn't all lost into making the dust do interesting and perverse things involving static or discharges.

    Fourth geopolitical problem is that a high-powered maser in space is an anti-satellite weapon. In fact, the US Space Force has already deployed a ground-based anti-satellite weapon that may well run on microwaves--it's a kaiju scale directional jammer. Deploying a microwave satellite that can silence or wreck any satellite it can aim its beam at makes this a dual purpose warcraft, just like an aircraft carrier.

    1511:

    For most of its orbit it stores power, then beams it over a 30-45 minute period at perigee.

    Nope, power storage is a killer -- you're wanting gigawatt-hour batteries that can undergo daily charge/discharge cycles? That'll cost you.

    However, if you stick a satellite in GEO but north or south of the equator, it will complete one orbit per day, but its ground track will wander in a figure-8 centred over the equator. The power transmitter can thus beam power continuously at a fixed rectenna while the satellite stays out of Earth's shadow.

    Molniya comsats were designed to cover the extreme north of the USSR, inside the Arctic circle, where coverage from comsats in equatorial GEO is poor. The orbit arcs high above the polar region so the satellites stay near the zenith most of the time, with a perigee that's very low and in the opposite hemisphere -- so the satellite whizzes through its close approach before ascending back to where it's useful.

    1512:

    You know, you could weave an interesting Cold War-style story around gigawatt-hour batteries that can be cycled daily.

    On the one hand, something like this is absolutely critical for switching off petrochemical fuels. You could probably fly an airplane with cells like this. And you could easily power a town. Possibly even a VASIMR.

    On the other, as noted, when you power these supercells with powersats and hook them to microwave antennas, each powersat effectively can fry other satellites it can see, so it favors a new Cold War in space, where the fight is over energy (not petroleum), control of information, and who can see what. There's little need for boots in the sky either, as it may be too dangerous an environment for human staff.

    This can be further aided by the current craziness for putting flocks more satellites in LEO, rather than trying to clean up the mess that's already there...

    1513:

    Not all cats are good mousers.

    Indeed. But as the humans of the house observed, to a mouse all cats smell like good mousers; the only way to find out is to observe the shrinkage of the mouse population.

    I'm pretty sure this is the secret of our cat's success. I've never seen Chiquita leave mouse corpses around, though she litters the floor with random objects, her favorite plush mouse toy, and for some reason pinecones. She has the soul of a mighty hunter and the body of an over-stuffed throw pillow.

    1514:

    Just to mention a cat who is an unreliable mouser.... the local feline has been known to put a mouse in the bathtub, chase for a while and then lose interest and wander off.

    An unobstructed mouse doesn't have trouble getting out of the bathtub. The cat might have ADD.

    1515:

    Parallax Apartment Views @ 1476,1477,1478 + 2 deleted comments: (Mainly saying hi.) The moment [redacted] got introduced to Narrative Structures? Hah! A search of the kindle edition at least of "Market Forces" for the word "redacted" finds nothing (not yet read), but I did a search of a crawl of a larger site, and it checks out (bunch of instances of "[redacted]" appeared in 2005).

    If you want naughty, grep "OH SHIT" and if you're looking for Monsters[tm] find the [redacted] who ran ultra-violence-slash-flick... and shipped it into Skull-Cases. Now: if you're looking for Monsters[tm] to get rid of, we'd suggest finding who did that and to whom

    Greg is the big all-caps "OH SHTI" user here so that grep was funny, but Noted (at the time) the bit about training feeds of Death Winged Nudibranches bit in late 2020. (And you spelled it correctly back then (I did not), not clear why.) That monsters are doing such things is indeed offensive. (Something something danger responses can be quite non-proportional. For all entity classes, including singletons)

    We Survived. This is not a badge of Honor. It means bleak bleak bleak shit and "We are the Wendigos". Or Something Else[tm]. I'm happy to see you here TBH. (Wendigos is a little harsh.)

    1516:

    To be fair, those comments were a) an explanation of the "I'm always Angry" meme (MCU, Marvel, HULK) that most geeks will get but Host (anti-Movie stance and possibly allergic to MCU due to profession) and Age of Antipope Grandpa Squad might have missed and b) Us being ultra-pissed @ CA politics and lack of change. Het is almost certainly more aware of the lack of change and lack of vision that's dam(n)ing his state to the dust-bowl than we are.

    Rome still burns people, Rome still burns.

    We're also being a little unkind - "DESIST" is, ahem, not within your purview. It's literally the Logos of Non-Human stuff that, quite frankly: if you're running H.S.S genes, you ain't in that discussion. (The Meta was a snub at "Known Unknowns" but explaining jokes often ruins them). The joke resides on having read the book[tm] (we have) and the pay-off at the end, and knowing 'things'.

    If you know what "DESIST" relates to, chances are, you're in the 5% bracket of "not-exactly-Human" readers of the blog. And no, that's not the trans* peoples either, TERF Island.

    Like:

    The body is a Bodhi-tree The soul a shining mirror: Polish it with study Or dust will dull the image.

    grep "The Mind is a Garden" for... their response. Let's just say: we're not being literal.

    Best/Worse joke of the last ten years: "England is not like that".

    Insert Doubt.exe

    1517:

    Sigh, grr. Given you claimed to be POC, we'll do this:

    Look - the Wendigo comment and the "DESIST" comment are mirror-d images / Logos Songs.

    Mostly due to the lack of fucking surviving Consciousnesses that understand them.

    Next step: you probably understand / know a (little) about why the first stopped singing. Or, at least, you have shitty third-hand imaginings of what it meant and what they were (c.f. Beowulf etc). Newsflash - back in the day, Wendigoes were real. The bottom line (HELLO CANADA AND STATUES!) is that a dominant State/Religion wiped out most of the Humans who knew said shit.

    You have fuck all clue about the second and never will

    That's really what we're saying. We're singing songs of things you didn't even know that went ("THEIR MINDS DID NOT SURVIVE") while you fucking, you know: took 100 years to wipe out a majority of your biosphere.

    It was never a Trick. We're the Real Deal[tm].

    1518:

    Note for RATIONALISTS reading this and Others:

    You cannot even do simple shit like cause global (planetary) climate systems to change to make a ~~~Biological Kill Zone Ozone Layer Issue~~~ disappear.

    Hey, kids: last one was caused by nasty chemicals. Looking over the spy-sat data, CN is being a bit rude, but there's nothing that YOU KNOW ABOUT that could cause it. And suddenly.... IT VANISHED. Last one took 10+ years of Global Accord and banning chems and Monitoring to fix.

    This one: whelp, SOMETHING SAID NO.

    Absolutely every single male engineer and so on needs to just go drink themselves into a coma, your world-view is BITCH-BASIC wrong.

    ~

    No, really. Get them to explain it. They can't.

    1519:

    Yes, Eastern Brown's are indigenous. They quite like living in towns, but not cities. Despite being encountered by humans quite commonly, and being by some measures the second most deadly snake in the world, they only kill one or two people a year.

    1520:

    "As an aside, antivenin is not cheap. CroFab (rattlesnake antivenin) runs about $20,000/dose locally."

    I think that might be more to do with the ridiculous US "health" system.

    Of course antivenin is free for humans here, but my brother in law has had his dog bitten twice. I think he said it's cost him a thousand dollars each time. Given that a tooth extraction for my dog cost 1200 (about 800 USD), I can't imagine that the medicine cost all that much.

    1521:

    Very unlikely. Much more plausible is water economy. My hair is chimp-coloured, and it has got too hot to touch (60 Celsius?) under a tropical sun. My calculations indicated that a full hair coat (mainly head and shoulders for an upright biped) reduce the water demand by a significant amount, because of the heat loss by re-radiation (fourth power, remember).

    This arose in the context of the savanna theorists asserting that we lost body hair to improve cursorial heat loss. I doubted that, and still do. NO other medium-sized, surface-dwelling savanna mammal is hairless, and no cursorial hunter is primarily diurnal. Water is in seriously short supply in most of the savanna in the dry season.

    1522:

    That is correct. Due to a quirk of physiology, exercising non-upright also causes this - the first tour I took on my recumbent trike, I had to give up because of insomnia caused by dehydration. Once I was told what it was, I could deal with it. When walking in California, I once sank 4 litres of water in 20 minutes after the first two water locations I tried were dry - while I was thirsty, I didn't feel THAT thirsty - but I needed the water.

    I don't know whether it is genetic, developmental or not, but the requirement for electrolytes varies a lot. Evolutionarily, salt is in seriously short supply in the savanna, so there is a selective advantage to not needing much of it. My sweat is salty when I have been eating too much salt (for me), but is very low-salt when I am heat-adapted. Physicians often accuse me of incipient hyponatraemia, but it's just that I am naturally salt-intolerant and that IS my normal serum sodium level!

    1523:

    Ah. Childhood memories. Black mambas aren't that bad - you can generally avoid them, and they will avoid you (e.g. they will move off a path when they feel footsteps. Gaboon vipers are much worse, because they don't move off the path when they feel footsteps. But spitting cobras are definitely NOT safe house pets.

    1524:

    Is there any hypothetical tech early humans could have used to keep heat off their heads?

    1525:

    Yes - woven hats. Most serious anthropologists believe that crude weaving, cord-making etc. were probably the first technologies, but such materials disappear very quickly. In the past, I have posted a plausible inventive pathway leading from chimp-like use of tools to basketmaking.

    The problem is that hats are useful only when moving slowly in open conditions, and much of the savanna is not like that. I favour the theory that we became largely hairless following the invention of clothing, because it is useful in reducing the ectoparasite load.

    1527:

    Again, they are small churches in small towns, mostly in Western Canada. The one in Nova Scotia out on the East coast makes it odd. I wonder if those poor communities are ever going to rebuild.

    1528:

    Morinville's not that small — over 10,000 residents. And the church wasn't that small either. Look at this picture to get an idea of the size:

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/St_Jean_Baptiste_Church_Morinville_Alberta_Canada_01B.jpg

    Also, churches have been burned before. It's been over four years since the McDougall Memorial United Church was burned in Morleyville. The RCMP still have no idea who did it and why, but as the McDougall Mission was associated with the Morley Indian Residential School there may well be a connection to current events.

    More complete story can be found in this series of articles:

    https://www.stalberttoday.ca/local-news/question-of-reconciliation-looms-over-resurrection-of-burned-church-in-morley-alta-2115502

    https://www.stalberttoday.ca/local-news/morley-residential-school-survivor-says-rebuilding-controversial-church-will-revive-pain-2121128

    https://www.stalberttoday.ca/local-news/descendant-of-morley-settlers-sees-church-reconstruction-as-act-of-reconciliation-2118506

    I have some pictures of the Morleyville Church before it burned here:

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/etherflyer/sets/72157646960782995/

    1529:

    Ah! And the sweat goes into the hair, and so takes longer to evaporate, cooling you longer, if not as much, with the same amount of water loss.

    1530:

    Re: '... a rehydration mix can be very useful indeed'

    For the longest time and probably because of our Eastern European heritage - dill pickle plus the juice (i.e., brine, water and vinegar) was the preferred drink. And because we always kept at least one jar in the fridge therefore cold, doubly refreshing. As for portable ready to drink rehydrators - Gatorade is probably the best.

    Symptoms - not needing to pee as often. Kidneys process urine nonstop this means most people will need to go to the bathroom every 75 to 90 minutes.(Even film producers have known this for years, that's why the typical film length was 75-90 minutes. Longer films had built-in intermissions.)

    https://www.healthline.com/health/urine-24-hour-volume#purpose

    Kidneys - per my GP kidney function declines pretty steadily with age and repeated dehydration can really exacerbate things permanently.

    https://www.kidney.org/newsletter/can-dehydration-affect-your-kidneys#:~:text=Severe%20dehydration%20can%20lead%20to,lead%20to%20permanent%20kidney%20damage.

    Re: 'Heat dome'

    When checking today's forecast for Western Canada on a Canadian site (The Weather Network) saw a couple of stories about pavement buckling and park benches melting. I think the news media needs to do some stories with materials scientists on this as well as the Florida condo collapse because despite the currently few number of cases collapsing infrastructure threatens everyone - not just the poor. Hope this is taken into account when corps start trying to get their hands on Biden's trillion dollar infrastructure budget.

    1531: 1526 - I believe the relevant technology is called the "hat". ;-) 1532 Para 3 - They have shown signs of forgetting this and making more and more films with a cinematic release running time of 120 to 150 minutes.

    Meantime, in "news the English BC ignored this morning" in favour of "Ingurlund won a foopball game", the Japanese earthquake, the Philippines Hercules crash...

    1532:

    Re: 'the Japanese earthquake, ...'

    Yes ... Plus a mudslide that uprooted homes but likely also buried more homes (and autos, etc.) by the time it ended.

    BTW - I couldn't find that video on the WeatherNetwork finally found it as a regional CBC news interest story. Either I forgot or the original story I saw didn't mention it - but apparently the heat also shattered window panes. FYI - Edmonton is not known for its warm weather - one of their pro sports teams is called the 'Edmonton Eskimos'.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-infrastructure-bends-and-buckles-under-heat-wave-1.6088714

    Seriously - I think we need the materials scientists involved. Bad weather used to mean that every once in a while a few sewers overflowed or a few roof shingles got loose. But now: melting glass panes, melting park benches, buckling concrete roads and sidewalks, collapsing highrises*. This is not just one type of material/one risk. Nor are these unusual/specialty materials - they're routinely used in all construction.

    • Wonder if the office/corporate tower buildings have the same building code standards. Would not be surprised if major corp biz tenants start demanding comprehensive safety reviews before signing a lease or paying their next month's rent. Especially the CEOs/C-Suite types who typically have top floor floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall all-glass corner offices. Yeah ...
    1533:

    'the Japanese earthquake, ...'

    Yes ... Plus a mudslide that uprooted homes but likely also buried more homes (and autos, etc.) by the time it ended.

    Further demonstrating my base point about just how pathetically uninformative the EBC "news" has become.

    1534:

    "But now: melting glass panes, ..."

    Oh, really?

    1535:

    Longer films had built-in intermissions

    Operative word being "had". Modern long films no longer have intermissions…

    1536:

    From the cite, '"The extreme heat caused this sidewalk and other sidewalks in the city to buckle or heave," wrote Parks and Road Services spokesperson Derek Logan.

    "Concrete expands with temperature, and in extreme heat the expansion is larger. When expansion reduces the space between slabs or joints of a sidewalk, buckling can occur."'

    I think this suggests that glass "picture windows" are being stressed by concrete thermal expansion, and shattering as a result. It's not actually melting, but given journalistic reporting standards it's "close enough for government work"?

    1537:

    melting glass panes

    Almost certainly not melting. I could see problems with thermal expansion if the window has no way to expand, thus compressing the glass and (possibly) shattering it.

    The concrete sidewalks look like they didn't have enough room for thermal expansion. The slabs should be cast with expansion joints between them but either this wasn't done or they weren't adequate.

    1538:

    Heteromeles @ 1501: Yeah, I've drunk a liter many times. The annoying situation is when you're fluid/salt balance is screwed up enough that you drink water, pee it out soon thereafter, and go back to being dehydrated. If I'm dehydrated enough, it can take awhile for my body to get a clue and take the water in.

    My experience is the thing to do is to start drinking soon after you go out to keep from getting your electrolyte balance from getting screwed up in the first place.

    I keep a case (24) of whatever 500ml bottled water - sports top in the car. Whenever I need to replenish my stock (get down to 4-5 bottles left) I buy whatever is on sale at whatever grocery store is closest to wherever I am at the time. I'm not buying for the cachet of bottled water, I buying for the convenience of having water available in the car whenever I need it, the 500ml bottles fit the cup holder in the console & the sports caps cut down on spillage - I can drink from it without taking my eyes off the road.

    Side note: Most tap water has a slightly metallic taste to me. I think it's from the Chlorine they use to kill germs. I always get some lemon slices in my water to kill that taste whenever I go out to eat (or I drink coffee).

    We used to be issued salt tablets. Two tablets dissolved in a 1qt canteen for electrolyte replacement (although we didn't know it was called that back then). You carried two canteens, one plain water one salted. If you could taste the salt, you only sip from the salt canteen & drink from the plain water canteen. When you can no longer taste the salt in the canteen where you had dissolved the salt tablets, it was time to drink the whole damn thing ... & mix up another batch. For you metric guys, a 1qt canteen or a 1L bottle of water are damn near interchangeable (1qt= 0.9463530L).

    Then the Army started issuing GatorAde by the case.1

    The problem with GatorAde (and most other "sports" drinks )is they contain A LOT of sugar. GatorAde will actually MAKE me thirsty when I'm not yet feeling it. Plus the taste is AWFUL! When it was all I could get I used to dilute it 1L GA + 3L water. And it still tasted like shit.

    And you DO NOT want to put GatorAde in a canteen (or hydration system).

    After I was diagnosed with diabetes I looked around for a sugar-free re-hydration drink. I found a product from Vega Sport that is citrus based & sugar free.
    https://www.evitamins.com/sport-electrolyte-hydrator-vega-102990

    Directions say 1 packet/2 cups of water, but I mix it 1 packet/half gallon water and drink it with ice instead of soft drinks.

    As for salty foods, I've had mixed luck with those, meaning eating them may not make the water go down easier, and then you're stuck with too much salt. That's why I really prefer adding a little salt to a glass of water. It works more reliably than eating a salty snack. I suspect people differ on this, which is why it's worth doing personal experiments every heat wave to see what works for you.

    If you can taste the salt, you probably don't need it yet.

    Another point is that sunburn can be confused with (and often co-occurs with) dehydration. For me, aloe vera gel (commercial prep or from the plant) works well at relieving the burn, which also helps with the dehydration.

    I found several long-sleeve fisherman's, button up 50+ UPF shirts on sale at Dick's Sporting Goods back before Covid. They breathe well enough that I can wear them working outside in the summer. They have the extra benefit that they keep the bugs from getting to me. I also bought a hat with a veil that goes down the back to protect my neck. I'm one of those very light skinned NEVER TAN/ALWAYS BURN people; have to wear sunscreen in the winter.

    Type I on the Fitzpatrick Scale.

    By the way, the point of all this is for me is to give a few helpful hints to all the northerners who are going to get hit by that darned heat dome over the next week. Umbrellas, table salt, and water are pretty easy to come by up north. Having a big pot of aloe vera is a bit exotic.

    https://www.amazon.com/G4Free-Umbrella-Windproof-Protection-Umbrellas/dp/B07G957K4P/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=UV+Protection+Umbrella&qid=1625358320&sr=8-6

    Big! Non-conductive Fiberglass shaft is a bonus.

    Final point: the Swallows and Amazons advice isn't very good, because most of the surface capillaries in your hands are on the palm side. Grab something cold, don't dab the backs of your wrists. A cold shower works even faster, but it's a lot less fun if you're not used to it. And it uses more water than the above methods.

    In Iraq we were issued these neck wrap thingys that had some kind of crystals in them that turned to mush when you soaked them in water. Put it around your neck and your body heat would cause the water to evaporate (although they also absorbed sweat, but that just made the cooling effect last longer) and as it evaporated it soaked up heat. I think some kind of phase change salt? They worked great in the desert, not so great back here in North Carolina when the humidity gets up to 90% or more (I have carried it along on trips out to the U.S. southwest & they worked there).

    THEY say that when you're cold you should cover your neck & head to reduce heat loss, so I guess it works the other way as well, when you're too hot COOL the back of your neck & head.

    1 I think the PTB at the Pentagon decided we were too stupid to know you had to crush the salt tablets so they dissolve better in a canteen. And the switch to GatorAde came at about the same time they told us to turn in our old mess kits, which included a big STEEL spoon that you could use to crush the tablets. The plastic spoon that came with the MREs didn't do such a good job at that. They break.

    And I guess it had something to do with those hydration systems, although they stopped issuing salt tablets long before we got the hydration systems.

    1539:

    whitroth @ 1508: I always wear a hat, like people pre-mid-fifties.

    If I'm working, say, in the yard, and it's hot, I'll soak the hat, then put it on my head wet, where it evaporates and cools.

    Sunburned hair HURTS!!! and none of the products for sunburn are really effective for the top of your head.

    1540:

    paws4thot @ 1538: From the cite, '"The extreme heat caused this sidewalk and other sidewalks in the city to buckle or heave," wrote Parks and Road Services spokesperson Derek Logan.

    "Concrete expands with temperature, and in extreme heat the expansion is larger. When expansion reduces the space between slabs or joints of a sidewalk, buckling can occur."'

    I think this suggests that glass "picture windows" are being stressed by concrete thermal expansion, and shattering as a result. It's not actually melting, but given journalistic reporting standards it's "close enough for government work"?

    Looking at the photo, those picnic tables are the kind made from "recycled plastic bottles". Get it hot enough long enough & it will slump.

    Glass behaves in a similar manner. I expect the kind of "melting" they're reporting is similar to what those plastic picnic tables are doing, NOT "ice cream left out in the sun type melting".

    Concrete gets expansion joints to allow for it stretch & shrink with the temperature. But how many and how far apart they are is dependent on the climate. They put a lot more of them in & closer together down in southern Texas than they do in northern Minnesota.

    You have concrete with expansion joints sized for Canadian NW climate now being subjected to heat that's extreme even for south Texas and the concrete is going to buckle.

    1541:

    Ok, I read that twice and am still confused.

    I was suggesting that the windows were shattering as the concrete buckled due to extreme heat (relative to the temperature range expected).

    I don't see glass slumping at ~50C given that it isn't actually liquid until more like 1_000C.

    1542:

    No earthquake, just a horrendous landslip after the city of Atami had their entire average July rainfall in 3 days. I don't tend to watch TV news, but this story has been in the top 7 or 8 of the main BBC News webpage since it happened - and has been updated with the good news that a couple, both 75, had been rescued along with 17 others.

    Certainly the Beeb have been less than impressive for some years now, but on this particular day they are at least trying to keep up with something other than sportsball.

    1543:

    When checking today's forecast for Western Canada on a Canadian site (The Weather Network) saw a couple of stories about pavement buckling and park benches melting.

    Oh, yes. Here in my city someone caught it happening, going from "What's that popping noise?" to "I'd better call this in."

    Newsweek has pictures of several events around the region.

    Portland's light rail system was down temporarily, as thermal expansion in the power lines made them sag too much to be usable, but came back online once the temperature dropped.

    1544:

    Speaking of rainfall, today (July 4th), Edinburgh got hit by a rather severe thunderstorm and downpour.

    How severe?

    Well, the weather station in the Royal Botanic Gardens logged 40mm of rain between 5pm and 6pm.

    A normal June averages 60mm of rain, and July 70mm. So we're talking 60-70% of an entire month's rain falling in one hour.

    Major roads were flooded ...

    1545:

    Yebbut, this block is infected with nitpickers, among whom I am probably not the least :-)

    Actually the article said that the glass shattered, which makes sense - it was what was posted here that was wrong. I would guess on the frame buckling and, if not, differential expansion.

    1546:

    Er, hair is dead. As I have a thick mop of hair, I don't wear a hat against the sun under any conditions I have been in (and that includes 7,000' up on the equator). But, for people less follically endowed, a hat is a damn good idea under sunny conditions.

    1547:

    "If you can taste the salt, you probably don't need it yet."

    That's effectively my test. I put some on the palm of my hand and lick it - if it tastes good, I have some more - if it doesn't, I don't - and, if it makes me a bit queasy, I have a litre or two of water to flush out the excess in my body.

    1548:

    In 43 years of living in Cambridge (a similar amount of rainfall), I have seen that precisely once, and it caused chaos here, too. Based on that, it will be some time before the damage is remedied because water will have got to places that it 'never' gets to.

    1549:

    Yes - woven hats. Most serious anthropologists believe that crude weaving, cord-making etc. were probably the first technologies, but such materials disappear very quickly. In the past, I have posted a plausible inventive pathway leading from chimp-like use of tools to basketmaking.

    Weaving and basketry derived from chimp tools? That's an interesting suggestion! Plausible, yet hard to prove or disprove.

    Bonobos have been observed using twigs and branches as rain hats. These guys (picture, picture) have mastered rain hat construction as much as anyone could ask, but presumably don't need sun hats in the rainforest. Too, they have little motivation to improve their hat technology, since they can easily make new hats as the old ones fall apart.

    Once they had the idea of woven baskets they should be able to make them - the only obstacle would be having to understand that baskets were desirable.

    1550: 1544 - Yeah. My point is about how unimpressive the "judgement" of the news editors on the main BBC morning news programme is. More so since, when "called" on their coverage of the Ingurlund Foopball team over other stories responded with a statement that precis as "we're right; you're wrong". Most people (me included) tend to want to get some at least of their morning news from a medium that doesn't require to be actively poked every few seconds whilst you also try to make and eat breakfast. 1545 - Way kewel. Well, up to a point. My mother tells a story about how, back in the 1950s when she was there, the pavement in Gibson Street beside Glasgow University Union got so hot it started running down the hill! 1546 - "Only" 27mm in Dumbarton, but that was in 1 hour so roads were "passable with care".
    1551:

    In #1538, I specifically said that the glass was being shattered by thermal expansion of concrete and not melting. I also suggested that a lazy journalist might say that it was melting.

    1552:

    Re the LinkedIn data trove (of most LinkedIn accounts) being sold, it includes information that one might not expect to be in public facing APIs since it's not obviously in the UI, e.g. geolocation data with 4 decimal places for both latitude and longitude. (It is on the profile page, sort of, and off by 7 kilometers for me.) I am kinda seriously annoyed. LinkedIn needs some attention from GDPR enforcers. New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700 Million Users Exposed (June 27, 2021, Sven Taylor). Also, LinkedIn claims that it is not a private data breach, but FWIW the private data (just looked at it) includes the ip addresses of recent logins.

    1553:

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/church-residential-school-compensation-1.6082935?fbclid=IwAR1eHCORHbUP2ZKYjBniZPbQ4Bn0mz8jGBxGJV9ZDwp9FkqkBdo_tfvJyqs

    "Residential school survivor Rick Daniels and his wife, Judy Greyeyes, live in a small apartment just a few kilometres from Saskatoon's towering $28.5-million Holy Family Cathedral."

    "Roman Catholic churches in Saskatoon and across Canada had also signed an agreement promising to raise $25 million to compensate Daniels and tens of thousands of other survivors for the emotional, physical and sexual abuse, malnutrition, cultural shaming and systemic violations of basic human rights suffered in Catholic-run residential schools."

    "While the Roman Catholic Diocese of Saskatoon and its 80,000 members spent $28.5 million on the new cathedral, they raised just $34,650 for survivors."

    1554:

    If you know what "DESIST" relates to, I ran with the silly parsing for a reason, but yeah, was partly asking for an explanation. Which is interesting, including the next comment, thanks!

    Absolutely every single male engineer and so on needs to just go drink themselves into a coma, your world-view is BITCH-BASIC wrong. Once hinted here about the main reason why I never pursued an advanced degree in physics, despite encouragement. (Curious how you'd classify mind-gender fluidity.)

    1555:

    Yes, that 25 million dollar scam is an outrage. It's the work of crooks.

    But what made me realize that we're also talking about inhumane monsters was that they took out the 8 bodies of missionaries (Catholic brothers of O.M.I.) out of the residential school cemetery in Fort Providence in the North West Territories and buried them again in a proper Catholic cemetery, while they ploughed under the rest of the residential cemetery (with the children) and made a potato field there.

    "In 1948, the church ploughed over the burial ground, but not before exhuming the bodies of eight missionaries and moving them to the community's current cemetery while leaving others behind. Lafferty said the church then turned the site into a potato field. "

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/fort-providence-nwt-memorial-gravesite-residential-schools-indigenous-kids-1.6088159

    1556:

    It's going to take a long time for a full accounting, and there will be worse things. That's all we can really say at this stage, but based on every other place this has happened it will be decades later and deep in the footnotes {the worst thing so far}.

    Australia has Cardinal Pell, the Pope's right hand man, who allegedly knows nothing, saw nothing and most definitely did nothing to discourage paedophiles in the Australian sect of the Catholic Church. He allegedly may have known about and helped some of them. Fortunately(?!!!) he has a lot of support from very powerful people so hasn't been jailed pending further developments.

    1557:

    Some other important points from that article:

    "But the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement — the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history — could not be cancelled by the incoming Harper regime."

    Important because Harper would totally have cancelled it if possible. Indeed, the Harper Government actually released the Catholic Church from $54 million in obligations in exchange for repaying $1.2 million in administrative fees, leaving only $25M "through fundraising". (Also note that $25M of that $54M was "payment in kind" like free counselling. Not certain how much good that would have done, given what Catholic counselling services for teenagers are like.)

    "Seven years passed. By early 2013, the other church denominations — United, Anglican, Presbyterian — had long since paid their share. But less than $4 million had been raised nationally by the Catholic churches."

    So the best efforts of the Catholic Church at fundraising have produced about $0.30 per person over more than a decade — so $0.03 per person per year. Assuming the budget of the average Catholic church is similar to an Anglican church, that's less than the parishioners gave for chancel flowers! "Best efforts" my ass.

    1558:

    Canada : Schools So, it would appear that, in yet another country the Black Crows have been feasting on human carrion for their own profit. And yet people still get all exited about my "dislike" of the RC church & all it's works ... F.F.S. peoples - what will it take to open your eyes to this 2000-year-old tale of evil & corruption?

    1559: 1554 - Link blocked (ironically, the claimed reason is "to protect my my privacy").

    More generally, on flash flooding in Scotland. The Edinburgh floods were bad enough to make today's Scottish Tv news headlines; The Dumbarton (and M8 East between J29A and J30) ones weren't newsworthy. That said, they've happened before, storm drains have been built, and those did their job, clearing the flood water over the next 4 hours or so.

    1560:

    Misdirection and deflection. Sure, the RC church is clearly culpable and has a case to answer, and in particular the individual clerics of the time(s) are highly blameworthy. But their involvement is mostly as accessories after the fact: the small crime that distracts from the larger crime. The British Crown is the most culpable party and all of us (the descendants, or at least the inheritors on a societal level, of the colonial masters) are the beneficiaries. Your specific obsession with trying to think of colonialism as not-so-bad is a bit niche and twee, in the face of the (as I've said before) unmitigated disaster it has represented for colonial subjects everywhere.

    1561:

    "The Church of Rome, Italy" as an agent of the British Empire is a totally new slant on World history, at least to me.

    1562:

    So you interpret the colonisation of North America as primarily an activity of the Vatican?

    1563:

    I didn't say that, and it's not what I meant. It was in the context of the much-reviled 'swamp ape' theory of bipedalism, that has recently got a strong boost from archaeological evidence. In shallow waters in that part of Africa, fish (mainly tilapia) are often dense enough that you can walk them up an inlet and flip them onto the bank with your bare hands. I have seen that done. The next step is to use an acacia branch to sweep them, the one after branches tied together with grass, followed by crude forms of weaving.

    1564:

    I wasn't responding to your post.

    1565:

    In Iraq we were issued these neck wrap thingys that had some kind of crystals in them that turned to mush when you soaked them in water. Put it around your neck and your body heat would cause the water to evaporate (although they also absorbed sweat, but that just made the cooling effect last longer) and as it evaporated it soaked up heat. I think some kind of phase change salt?

    They're available to civilians under the "Cobber" brand, among others. I believe (but am open to correction) the "crystals" are the same stuff as in disposable nappies (sodium polyacrylate) and function as a slow-release source of water for evaporation, and it's that phase change (evaporation) that produces the cooling effect.

    1566:

    Highly amusing But, contrast the evil colonialists of the Empire, if not welcoming, at least accepting the (as it turned out temporary ) migration of the Sioux to Canada - escorted by several troops ( a regiment? ) of US cavalry, to be met at the border, by a single RCMP officer, to guide them to their new location ... Successive Brit governments have always been very "delicate" when it came to abuses of power by churches ( not just the RC ) - the so-called "empty cradles" scandal of the 194-60 period was a case in point. The politicos knew the churches were doing 'orrible things (mostly in AUS ), but it took several goes before they finally acted - because they were frightened of the backlash from brainwashed voters. [ I went to a very revealing exhibition at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood on that very subject, about 5 years back. Yuck. ]

    The same refusal to condemn religious cruelty & fuckwittery is to be seen in the disgraceful abandonment of "Liberal Principles" over the Batley Grammar School furore - grovelling to religious primitives for their votes is more important than protecting teacher's lives, yeah.

    1567:

    If you think that, you might want to go and re-read #1547, and the post it responded too.

    1568:

    That is not what I said. I said that the Vatican was not an agent of the British government. It could be viewed as an agent of the French and/or Spanish governments though, or they could be viewed as agents of the Vatican, depending on your exact flavour of cynicism.

    1569:

    The problem from my point of view is that I have Catholic friends who seem to be benign people generally. I really don't want to stomp on their feelings, and some of them are worried about anti-Catholic prejudice.

    Do you distinguish between hating the RC and hating Catholics?

    1570:

    I know this wasn't aimed at me but still; I am "don't care agnostic" and find "proselytising atheists" every bit as annoying as verbally proselytising religious of any persuasion. The ones I like to know, irrespective of faith, are the ones who bear witness to their faith in every day deeds rather than in words, such as the Muslim sub-postmaster who has charity boxes for the local foodbanks taking up space in his small shop.

    1571:
    That is not what I said. I said that the Vatican was not an agent of the British government.

    To me that seems to be precisely the point. As far as I've understood the current Canadian scandal, its roots lie in the genocidal policies of the Canadian government toward the First Nations back in the day. The Roman Catholic orders/missions/boarding schools where the atrocities took place were tasked by the government and carrying out government policies. Thus in this case they were indeed agents of the government.

    At least this is how I understood Damian's point.

    1572:

    Is this the point where I have to lecture y'all about intersectionality?

    1573:

    I read about In-Space Missions, which launched a satellite on the last SpaceX rideshare. Since the article is paywalled, I included the interesting bit below

    "Historically, each launched satellite has served a sole purpose. Liddle's team, however, is not only hosting multiple customers on their satellite but has also designed technology that allows future satellites to be customizable from the ground. It's expected to be publicly available in 12 to 18 months.

    Liddle said: "We've developed a piece of technology that's flying on this satellite, which we're then going to expand and fly on future ones, that will allow people to, from the ground, upload their payload, their service, their application. So it would be like every app on your phone."

    The technology his team is developing will reduce the timescale from a few years to three to four months.

    He used the analogy of using one piece of software to access Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram.

    "The technology that's available now has got us to the place where you can fly loads of people in one spacecraft," he said. "You can reconfigure it in software from the ground and upgrade it in the same way your phone will upgrade every so many months. You can do exactly the same with spacecraft now.""

    This guy previously worked on Galileo and for the Ministry of Defense

    https://www.businessinsider.com/in-space-missions-spacex-satellite-space-rocket-2021-7

    1574:

    Probably :-( This case is at least simpler than the one which had the USA and Da'esh fighting each other in one location and operating as allies in another. I doubt that even you could make THAT one up and get it past an editor!

    What several people seem to miss is that, by the time that there was an effective British government of Canada, the imperialistic threat from Rome had become obviously ineffectual, official anti-Catholicism in the UK was fading, and most of the remainder was kept because of historical prejudice or targetted at rebellious Scots or Irish.

    1575:

    https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-zt9pn-fe18f6?utm_campaign=w_share_ep&utm_medium=dlink&utm_source=w_share

    Ada Palmer talks about the Inquisitions, and part of it is about the complex relationship between the Catholic church and the various governments.

    1576:

    Maybe not? My argument is basically that neither the Vatican nor the British Crown/government had effective control over each other after 1534. And coincidence of aims does not imply control over another body.

    Whereas intersectionality seems to be a feminist sociological theory that coincidence of desired outcomes implies active cooperation in methods?

    1577:

    Let's ignore any rampantly perverse interpretations, feminist or otherwise. As I have said before, there is a continuum between true independent action, and a full-blown conspiracy, but English lacks a term even for a tacit conspiracy. Whether or not there was even any connivance, I don't know, but we can neither rule it out nor assume it.

    My guess (and it is a blind guess) that this was simply an older form of the current gummint's arms-length outsourcing, with all of the sort of failure modes that implies. In which case, the British government was grossly (and possibly deliberately) negligent.

    1578:

    Way off topic but some here might have the knowledge to answer this.

    Late yesterday a bit before dark we had some excitement on our street. A jeep drove through a power pole in wreak that covered about 400' from the time the driver lost it till he stopped. No apparent injuries. But if it had been other than a holiday with many small kids visiting grandparents somewhere else they could have easily taken out a family out for a walk. We have a lot of walkers most days at that time. Kids, parents, strollers, dogs, etc.

    My questions is this. Are there tables somewhere that will say how fast a car such as this jeep had to be going to drive through the pole and take out a 10' section? Or does anyone here have that knowledge? What was left was hanging from the surrounding wires attached to other poles. Typical south eastern US power pole. About 1' or more in diameter soaked with creosote when first installed 30 to 60 years ago.

    Driver immediately started talking about how he wasn't speeding. None of us who live on the street believe him.

    1579:

    Unfortunately, a lot of mine has slid down to my chest, and they tell me that standing on my head won't make it migrate back up.

    Also, shortage on top means less cushioning when you hit your head on something, as well.

    1580:

    Nancy L Easy They've been had, mainly through brainwashing, same as any other "believer". I almost always ignore their religion, unless they raise the subject.

    EC @ 1676 Even heard of the amazingly improbable fight at Schloss Itter ( Austria, IIRC ) = where in the very last days of WWII US infantry allied with the local Heer to fight of the local SS? And, of course, in Canada, in some areas ( Can you spell Quebec? ) the population was/is overwhelmingly RC ... - @ 1579 - given history's record, I'd back gross incompetence, negligence & stupidity -never forget stupidity - over deliberate policy, especially in a case like that.

    1581:

    There are other things than velocity at first impact that determine how far a vehicle moves before it comes to rest. Such as throttle setting, driver reaction, reaction of cruise control if fitted. I've seen a vehicle accelerate after first impact, because the driver (probably mistakenly) put his foot on the throttle rather than the brake. A cruise control might do similarly, detecting the initial impact as slowing, and applying more throttle to compensate.

    1582:

    I am no longer a Lavender Cowboy, but could still count them in a reasonable time.

    1583:

    Just making sure I understand the scenario…

    The driving was heading along the road (let's say north, just 'cause I need a direction) and hit the power pole hard enough to snap it, and continued along the road for 400' further north before the jeep halted?

    1584:

    paws4thot @ 1543: Ok, I read that twice and am still confused.

    I was suggesting that the windows were shattering as the concrete buckled due to extreme heat (relative to the temperature range expected).

    Then why wouldn't the news be something like Buckling Concrete Shatters Glass!? The story said glass was "melting", not that it was "shattering". And it suggests this is a distinct event ... "concrete buckling, picnic tables melting ... and even glass melting."

    I don't see glass slumping at ~50C given that it isn't actually liquid until more like 1_000C.

    I have seen glass bend & droop like the pictured picnic tables, and that's what I think the story was relating. Standing on edge in a vertical frame, it kind of bulged out bottom center and the top edge became curved down so that the sheet of glass was no longer rectangular. It had "melted".

    I learned in school that glass is an "amorphous solid"; neither solid nor liquid and it will "flow" at temperatures below its melting point.

    The ones I've actually seen were old store windows that had been exposed to southwestern U.S. summers for years, but I can visualize it happening to glass subjected to greater temperatures for a shorter time; "melting" even when those temperatures are not high enough to liquefy the glass.

    I wish I could find a photograph of what I'm trying to describe. I'd just post a link since my words appear to be inadequate.

    1585:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1548: Er, hair is dead. As I have a thick mop of hair, I don't wear a hat against the sun under any conditions I have been in (and that includes 7,000' up on the equator). But, for people less follically endowed, a hat is a damn good idea under sunny conditions.

    Nitpick, nitpick, nitpick.

    It was meant to be humorous, so humor me.

    I still have most of my hair. My front hairline has gotten thinner rather than retreating to the back of my neck. Think of a landscaped park rather than a boreal forest.

    I'm a natural blond1, and the sun shines through the hair & burns my scalp if you want to be all pedantic about it. Aloe Vera gel (or other topical sunburn treatments) does NOT work to sooth the burn if I get one up there. BTDT-GTTS

    Through the years I've also had to take medications that increase my sensitivity to the UV in sunlight. I wear a hat all the time. Since I no longer cut my hair, it also has the added benefit of keeping the the wind from whipping the ends around into my face.

    1 I'm allowed to tell those jokes, but don't y'all start! ... and I mean ALL y'all. 😎

    1586:

    So the power pole snapped in two, not one, places, with the remainder being held up by the other lines...

    Hmm.

    First thing I'd do, were I there soon after the accident, is check the state of the broken pole. I'd look for fungal and termite damage. Wood's heterogeneous and pine's not the densest wood around, but that double break suggests the wood might have been weak, which in turn implies less force.

    Second thing I'd check is the condition of the front end of the jeep, and whether the airbags went off. If the front bumper was barely bent and the airbag didn't deploy, it didn't hit very hard.

    Otherwise, I do agree that the vehicle could have kept accelerating through and after the impact, so the speed per se might be less important.

    1587:

    Niala @ 1557: Yes, that 25 million dollar scam is an outrage. It's the work of crooks.

    It's fairly common practice for "the church" when their priests get caught with their hands down someone else's pants.

    Here in the U.S. they abuse bankruptcy law to keep from having to pay restitution.

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

    That's a longer list than I thought. I was only remembering the Milwaukee & Boston scandals.

    The Pope gets to keep his silk pillow to comfort his arse when he's sitting on his golden throne.

    1588:

    Richard H @ 1567:

    In Iraq we were issued these neck wrap thingys that had some kind of crystals in them that turned to mush when you soaked them in water. Put it around your neck and your body heat would cause the water to evaporate (although they also absorbed sweat, but that just made the cooling effect last longer) and as it evaporated it soaked up heat. I think some kind of phase change salt?

    They're available to civilians under the "Cobber" brand, among others. I believe (but am open to correction) the "crystals" are the same stuff as in disposable nappies (sodium polyacrylate) and function as a slow-release source of water for evaporation, and it's that phase change (evaporation) that produces the cooling effect.

    I looked on Amazon & did a Google search while I was writing, to see if I could come up with a better descriptive than "thingy". There were a lot of places where you could buy them; even some that looked like they were improved over the ones we were issued.

    As I noted, they work quite well in locales that have high temperatures & low humidity; not so well here in NC where high humidity often accompanies high temperatures. If the humidity is high enough sweat doesn't evaporate off your body, the water in those neck wraps won't evaporate either.

    1589:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 1571: The problem from my point of view is that I have Catholic friends who seem to be benign people generally. I really don't want to stomp on their feelings, and some of them are worried about anti-Catholic prejudice.

    Do you distinguish between hating the RC and hating Catholics?

    I don't hate Catholics (except for a few specific individuals for reasons I won't go into). But Catholics are NOT the Roman Catholic Church. I don't even hate the Roman Catholic Church.

    I would like to see the Roman Church held accountable for the harm its minions have done in its name. And not just those old historical wrongs from a century or more ago, but the wrongs they have committed in my lifetime and still commit to this day.

    1590:

    A reference:

    http://kineticorp.com/Rose-Fracture-Energy-Calcs-for-Wooden-Utility-Poles.pdf

    Variables that will be hard to quantify include condition of the pole (poles can deteriorate 2/3 and still function well), where the pole was hit, whether the jeep engine was still engaged during/after the impact, etc.

    Anecdotally, poles have been

    Assuming rubber on asphalt and 100% braking I get about 170 km/hr as initial speed. Doubt the jeep was going that fast (or faster, as the pole would have absorbed energy) so now you have to decide how hard the driver was braking, how long it took them to react, etc… Which begins to get into rules-of-thumb and unverifiable assumptions.

    Might be easier to find dashcam/doorcam footage of the jeep and analyze the video.

    1591:

    "that double break suggests the wood might have been weak"

    Quite so. Indeed, I'd probably put it a bit more strongly than that; first suspicion would be that something had weakened it - things eating it, too many screw/bolt holes at one point, some flaw in the original tree, or whatever.

    It's also the case that a wooden pole snapping under a sudden impact may absorb an unexpectedly and remarkably small amount of energy, and so cause a much smaller reduction in the car's speed than your experience of breaking lengths of wood at muscle speeds might suggest. Wood is funny stuff and can fail in an almost brittle manner if the impact is sudden enough. I once went through a fairly new and sound 4x4 fencepost in a Morris Minor at probably roughly 25mph at the time of impact. The post simply snapped off like a matchstick, there was no damage to the car beyond a dent in the bumper, and the car was barely slowed by the impact.

    The very long distance this car travelled after the impact suggests that the reason for it is something other than the initial speed. The driver may have thought he still had a chance of regaining control of the car and carrying on, and therefore wasn't trying to slow down. Or he might have had an unexpected brake failure, which might be what went wrong in the first place to cause the accident, or might be the result of his brake pipes getting broken in the initial stages of the accident. Or he may simply have been pissed, or asleep at the wheel.

    Certainly the UK police have heuristics for estimating the initial speed from the nature and disposition of the marks left by an accident, but they are not as reliable as the police would like people to think they are because of the embodied assumptions. For instance, you may find yourself at a legal disadvantage if you are competent enough to perform emergency braking without locking the wheels, because they love to measure the length of skid marks and if you didn't leave any you then have to persuade them that you did actually brake to maximal effect and didn't just not bother.

    Finally, whether or not the driver was "speeding" - his speed in relation to some arbitrary number stuck up on a pole - is irrelevant. What matters is whether or not his initial speed was too high in relation to the conditions at that time and place. There is not enough information to determine this - we don't know if he had suffered a brake failure or some other unexpected mechanical fault, for a start, and we don't know the conditions or the characteristics of the location - but if we did have all the information, the result of the determination would be completely independent of the value of any number stuck up on a pole or indeed of whether there even was one.

    1592:

    not just those old historical wrongs from a century or more ago, but the wrongs they have committed in my lifetime

    Minor nitpick: the Catholic Church was running residential schools in your lifetime (unless you're younger than I think you are) — until 1969, in fact.

    1593:

    Here in the U.S. they abuse bankruptcy law to keep from having to pay restitution.

    Up here I'm beginning to think that we should start seizing assets and auctioning them off unless the money is forthcoming.

    Given that the "unaffordable" settlement money would have cost each Catholic in Canada a one-time payment of $2, less than the amount a single diocese contributed to build a new fancy church building, I think it obvious by now that either the rank-and-file Catholics value nice buildings over helping those their organization harmed, or the catholic hierarchy isn't explaining the issue to their flocks when they explain what the money is needed for.

    1594:

    My wife has very similar issues, and uses the same solution.

    1595:

    And still does in the UK - to take a (I believe non-evil) example:

    https://www.ampleforthcollege.org.uk/college/our-school

    1596:

    Well, here in Canada we have both private and public catholic schools, some of which are boarding schools.

    What I meant was that the catholic church ceased running indian residential schools in 1969. The kind where kids were forced there even if the parents didn't agree. They were taken over by the federal government, and gradually closed over the next three decades. Last one shut in 1996.

    So very much not ancient history.

    1597:

    I sed... like actual pith helmets (as opposed to the plastic ones). (Real pith helmets, you soak in water, then put all 20 lbs on your head... and evaporation cooling).

    1598:

    Just making sure I understand the scenario…

    All motion in same direction. And we drive on the left.

    Jeep went up on left curb based on markings either 10' or 40' before hitting mail box. (I'm thinking 10' based on marks on street, sidewalk, and grass.) Mailbox pole gave trivial resistance.

    Then another 50' down on same said of road took out the pole which was in grass/dirt between curb and sidewalk. By took out I mean there was a 4' section and a 10' section lying in the street when all done. Rest of pole was hanging from wires.

    Then Jeep went another 100-150' feet down road crossing to other side. Hit and jumped curb then through a yard and lightly bumped a very big tree.

    I was heard first impact and tire squeal, looked up and saw it for a bit from my back yard after it took out the pole and before it hit the curb on wrong side of road. I then ran though my house to front yard, grabbing my phone, and calling 911.

    1599:

    Sounds like he must have been pissed...

    "And we drive on the left."

    Eh? I was sure you were in the US.

    1600:

    First thing I'd do, were I there soon after the accident, is check the state of the broken pole. I'd look for fungal and termite damage. Wood's heterogeneous and pine's not the densest wood around, but that double break suggests the wood might have been weak, which in turn implies less force.

    The pole breaks seemed to show decent wood. No fungus or whatnot. But the pole could have been there since 1961. So...

    What held the top in place was that the 3 phase 14KV distribution lines from the substation run down these poles on my street. They held the back the top of the pole enough to force the break lower down. It was broken just at ground level and as I said there was a 4' section and a 10' section. I suspect the bumper of the jeep (look like a real bumper of steel) road up a bit then broke the pole. The car was dropping some dark fluid from that point on. As brake, trans, or engine oil I'm not sure. I wasn't all that much and there wasn't a puddle when the jeep was removed from the yard.

    No air bags deployed that I could see but I didn't look "in". As possibly the only witness I didn't want to interact with the car or drive all that much.

    1601:

    That's odd. According to Kipling if you wear them out in the rain they go all soggy and turn into pulp dripping down the side of your head, so you end up looking like a complete pillock.

    1602:

    "And we drive on the left."

    Brain fart.

    You drive on the left. We drive on the right.

    1603:

    Finally, whether or not the driver was "speeding" - his speed in relation to some arbitrary number stuck up on a pole - is irrelevant.

    Speed limit on my street is 35mph.

    There are 5 of us with houses on this side of our street who know people speed here all the time. There is a slight rise and curve leading to where this all started. And people come around the curve and can't see our driveways doing 45-50 and we play dodge car with them when leaving our driveways.

    Icing on the cake are the ones who gesture at us for getting in their way.

    1604:

    In shallow waters in that part of Africa, fish (mainly tilapia) are often dense enough that you can walk them up an inlet and flip them onto the bank with your bare hands. I have seen that done. The next step is to use an acacia branch to sweep them, the one after branches tied together with grass, followed by crude forms of weaving.

    Oh! Now that's an interesting idea I hadn't encountered before.

    I remember the orangutan spear fishing (poorly - the Librarian he's not), and there are plenty of accounts of primates using broom adjacent techniques to get things that are just out of reach. It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear of them using branches as fish herding tools.

    This hand fishing - was that by humans or another primate?

    I've seen photos of chimps wading through water while using sticks for stability and to probe ahead of them. Neither chimps discovering fish are tasty nor using sticks on them is implausible.

    1605:

    We'll give you a slice of the reply we got after said posts:

    Cutting out the rather voluminous amounts of Horror-Tactic-Overlays (bear in Mind, they do it for real) involving blood, concrete, vats and so on, which are dull and they largely use due to Cartel feedback and so on, the message was: We're going to eat/negate/destroy your Occipital buns[0]. And some not-so-subtle references to real Brain Worms[tm][1] - interesting design on those btw, but hey.

    We've a feeling you think the [redacted] are still a metaphor.

    ~

    Now, if you know why they're obsessed with Occipital buns[2] and track some of the other threads (oh, you know, since we started posting, there's a lot more H.S.S 'flavours' in the real sense than there were before) you'll get the idea: they really really really do not like competition.

    Now then, now then: take a look around. Upsurge all over the place by reactionary forces. The Koch brother(one died) and even "Torture the fuck out of the Iraqis" Rumsfeld probably aren't running that high a level Game.

    Just Sayin.

    ~

    Oh. And, never play their Games. They're very very shitty losers. Just like Capitalists, everywhere.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occipital_bun

    [1] It's a meme: it's also a weapon. Although they went with anthropod / insect DNA stuff since they're more comfortable using it and it has an added H.S.S "yuck" factor.

    [2] Probably due to "fuck you, here's what 3% Neth DNA can do to your system" bet a while back and result driven outcomes.

    1606:

    Are there tables somewhere that will say how fast a car such as this jeep had to be going to drive through the pole and take out a 10' section? Or does anyone here have that knowledge?

    Such knowledge exists - but I don't have it at hand, sorry.

    An example from years gone by: an LAPD slide rule with 'miles per hour' and 'feet per second' scales, used to determine cars' speed from the length of skid marks left on the street.

    1607:

    "This unusual slide rule uses physical data at the scene of an accident to give true and unbiased answers."

    I'd take that with a big lump of sodium chloride. Lots of assumptions going into the conversion of skid marks into speed.

    In terms of poles, I linked to a paper that tested the results of impacts to poles at various speeds, comparing actual to calculated results. A lot more complicated than "broken pole means xxx fast".

    1608:

    Calculations from "Skid marks" And if you have a fully-functioning ABS system that "refuses" to lock the wheels up?

    1609:

    Shunt speed - Travelling 400 feet, based on UK Highway Code tables, says that either he was braking from 80mph plus the energy used in breaking the pole, or, more reasonably based on witness testimony, he did not brake until some time after hitting the pole.

    1610:

    Humans. The fish were driven up an inlet (using a line of people and relatively short net for the closure), and a few were scooped out before the net was closed. It's a known form of fishing in several parts of the world, and I noted that it would have been possible (if inefficient) in those conditions even without a net.

    The difference between me and the savanna theorists was that I grew up there in the early 1950s, NOT in the most developed parts, and have some knowledge of what the conditions are like. The savanna theories always were obvious bollocks, and the only formulated one that wasn't was the swamp ape one.

    1611:

    EC I too, am a fan of a modified form of the "Aquatic Ape" suggestion, but AIUI, it's been rubbished again & again, partly, of course, because one of the proponents was female. [ Alister Hardy & Elaine Morgan ]

    1612:

    That sounds a bit like a fish yare (trap), adapted for non-tidal waters.

    1613:

    Nothing to do with her sex. It's because she wasn't an archaologist or anthropologist; however, if you spoke to them privately, many agreed with her but were not prepared to oppose the quasi-religious establishment. That arose because the savanna theory pandered to the Mighty Hunter wish-fulfillment fantasies of many humans, and had become an article of faith; alternative theories were heresy.

    I could give you lots of examples where the proponents of alternative theories were male, and got the same response.

    1614:

    Simnilar, yes, but more the other way round. My point was that I could see a plausible inventive pathway from chimp-like activities up to modern netting, which (together with invertebrate gathering) would also have provided an evolutionarily plausible driver for bipedalism. 'Plausible' meaning that every step is useful without requiring a later one.

    1615:

    'miles per hour' and 'feet per second' scales, used to determine cars' speed from the length of skid marks left on the street.

    Yeah. Modern anti-lock brakes tend to make those tables not worth much. There were no signs (to me) of brake lock up. Just some marks from lateral forces of tires on street.

    Driver claimed at various times that a wheel locked up or a tire went flat. He might have meant steering lock up but he seemed to steer it based on the path taken. I saw no signs of a tire/wheel locked. And when the tow truck pulled it out of the yard and onto the truck all 4 tires seemed inflated. But I was standing back as I didn't want to get sucked too far into any issues if this goes to a lawsuit.

    Driver and passengers were a teen and much of what I heard was him talking to his mom on the phone immediately after they got out of the car. So factor that windage into it.

    Anyway, thanks for the feed back everyone.

    1616:

    Wow, EC. Considering how condescending you are of non-mathematicians expressing crackpot math, I'd think you would be more sympathetic to anthropologists dealing with the crackpots in their field.

    We also went through this years ago, and the physical evidence simply does not support the Aquatic Ape hypothesis. The problem is that its supporters take it as a religious belief and accuse their opponents of acting in bad faith, which is kind of what the supporters actually do when confronted about the lack of evidence. And it's the same behavior Greg despises in religious people.

    If you want dirt on paleoanthropology, the problem is so obvious that most non-anthropologists miss it, and it consists of a combination of racism and the lightning rod of belief that humans must be different from all other species and specially touched by the divine. Where does this show up? Two places. One is that we're closer genetically to apes that most species are within genera. Zebras, IIRC, are more genetically distinct from horses than humans are from chimps, yet both equines are in Equus, while chimps are genus Pan in the family Pongidae, while humans are genus Homo in the family Hominidae. Because humans have to be different and special. I suspect that every physical anthropologist is aware of this issue, but consider it a sociopolitical third rail that they don't want to touch, because life is short, and having one's family threatened by true believers is tedious.

    Another problem is the oversplitting of human fossil names. We're all considered one interbreeding species today, based on overwhelming evidence (we all interbreed...). Genetically, it's apparent that various modern human genomes show evidence of past interbreeding with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and at least one African lineage for which there's no fossil evidence. Were we talking about non-human species, we'd just talk about the morphological diversity of the species, with the cool evidence that it was even more diverse in the past in different climates, but that some morphs have disappeared. However, the fact that any weird new human skull becomes headline news if it has a name attached to it means that researchers keep proposing new names for new fossils. Plus there's that lingering taint of racism, the notion that human races are different subspecies or even species, so anything more different than the diversity we have today must be (drumroll) a new species.

    It's not a great practice, but in a world where mere skin color can get someone killed in the wrong neighborhood, having an occipital bun is seen as a sign of being non-human. Actually it's not, and a fair number of living people have occipital buns, but that inconvenient fact gets lost in the shuffle.

    1617:

    Robert Prior @ 1594:

    not just those old historical wrongs from a century or more ago, but the wrongs they have committed in my lifetime

    Minor nitpick: the Catholic Church was running residential schools in your lifetime (unless you're younger than I think you are) — until 1969, in fact.

    Yes, those are some of the wrongs the Roman Church has committed in my lifetime. They're also an extension of those "old historical wrongs" the Roman Church was committing before I was born.

    The Roman Church has been around quite a while. They started doing bad things long before I was born, and they continue to do some of those bad things still today, while some other bad things they used to do have supposedly been corrected.

    So ... Old historical wrongs and wrongs committed within my lifetime and current wrongs still being committed today. I'd like to see the Roman Church atone for all of them.

    1618:

    Pigeon @ 1601: Sounds like he must have been pissed...

    Probably ... and then got pissed off!

    "And we drive on the left."

    Eh? I was sure you were in the US.

    Last time I looked. Occasionally some people get their right & left confused.

    1619:

    Here's one from a year ago in Raleigh:

    https://www.wral.com/suv-hits-power-pole-closes-poole-road-in-southeast-raleigh/19192762/

    Fits David's original description so well, I thought it was from July 4, 2021 until I looked at the time stamp. It's July 17, 2020. At about 0:25 sec you can see the part of the pole that got chopped out. I think it got sheared at ground level, and the power lines kept the top of the pole from moving laterally, so it broke again just below the power lines.

    1620:

    Turns out there were 2 on the same day here. The one I asked about and another one a few miles away that did the same thing to a power pole but then wound up trying to go through the front wall of a small business.

    1621:

    H & EC It's "obvious" that there is something wrong with the "Savannah Ape" hypothesis & the same is also true of the "Aquatic Ape" one
    Do I see a midway (?) suggestion of "Swamp Ape", maybe, as mentioned? What's your informed opinion(s) on this one, given that, as per usual, there has to be some advantage in all the intermediate steps?

    1622:

    I'm not going to dig out that argument I had with EC, but basically, there's not much wrong with the savanna ape. You can set it up so that a vaguely bipedal ape does better than a fully quadrupedal one, its more bipedal offspring do still better, and so on.

    Problem with the aquatic ape is that nearshore environments are really good for making fossils, so the absence of fossils is a real problem. Ditto with any aquatic environment, because they accumulate stuff. Also, we do have lineages (such as giant ground sloths) that definitely did kick off semi-marine and fully marine offshoots (Thalassocnus), and not only do the bones occur in the appropriate environment, their skeletons show aquatic adaptations, their bones show the appropriate adaptations (aquatic animals tend to have denser bones) and IIRC the isotopic analysis of the bones pointed unequivocally to marine environment.

    None of this shows up in hominid bones.

    The other thing to remember is that uplands tend to be sucktastic for fossil preservation, unless there's a volcanic eruption or a cave or a water body to preserve them. So if we're descended from upland hominids, the fossil record will be miserable, and that's pretty much what we see. We're lucky, in fact, that Africa has the Rift Valley, which tends to make more preservation possibilities (ash, lakes, etc.) than would be available otherwise. If humans had evolved in the Sahara or Siberia, we'd still be guessing about what the heck happened and thinking that we evolved in China or Indonesia.

    1623:

    I am afraid that you are simply wrong. You cannot do that, because the biomechanics does not work like that. The more the hip and legs improve for bipedal locomotion, especially in leg length, the worse they are for quadrupedal locomotion. An obvious sanity check here is, if that were not so, why are there not more bipedal mammals?

    But the theory also ignores the facts of life on the savanna, which is where my personal knowledge comes in. Surface animals have to be able to travel fairly long distances to get water in the dry season, if the water source they are using dries up, which is one main reason that chimpanzees and bonobos are not found there.

    Furthermore, defenceless surface animals like primates have a major problem with predators, especially at night, which is why baboons are never found far away from kopjes or watercourses. Claiming that they could run for the trees misses the point that (except in those locations), most of the trees in the open savanna are either useless or damn-near unclimbable, and even green monkeys avoid them. Also, the intermediate form (even like a chimpanzee/bonobo) is NOT fast. A pack of lions, hyaenas or wild dogs would slaughter a chimpanzee troop in short order if it caught one in the open. An obvious sanity check here is that I know of NO animal (mammal, bird or reptile) that has developed obligate bipedal locomotion in the presence of a serious threat from cursorial pack predators.

    Lastly, what's the evolutionary pressure to develop bipedal locomotion if the proto-humans DON'T spend most of their time in the open savanna?

    1624:

    Let's ignore the straw man of the marine ape (which I know Verhaegen and others did propose); I am surprised that Heteromeles is using it, because it was debunked decades ago.

    What I was speculating on, which is also what Morgan came around to, is that a dry spell forced a group of LCA primates into a restricted shallow lake / swamp area. I once lived near Lake Bangweulu, which was plausible, but the evidence now seems to be that it was more likely to be the Okavango area(*). I am surprised that he is not aware of that discovery.

    As an aside for Heteromeles, following the assertion that there was extensive archaeology in the Lake Bangweulu area that showed no evidence, I checked up, and that was false. ALL of the reseach was on recent sites, and none of it was on the lake bed (which is where the evidence would be).

    The point is that bipedalism is clearly an advantage for foraging in shallow water and swamp, both because it has more depth flexibility and because it enables a better crocodile watch. They don't like shallow water, but will use it to approach prey, and the defence is to not allow them to get close to you (because they can run only a few body lengths). Cursorial predators are not found in such conditions.

    There is therefore a definite evolutionary advantage, WITHOUT a corresponding evolutionary DISadvantage, which is what is needed for Darwinist evolution to work.

    (*) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/cradle-of-modern-human-life-found-in-botswana-maybe

    1625:

    Deja fu: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html

    Quote at 770, in response to Elderly Cynic (yes, we've had this argument before):

    Now you're beginning to understand what the problem with the aquatic ape theory is, because you've now narrowed down the origin of bipedality to a single, hypothetical swamp in Africa, where there was apparently a evolutionarily sudden switch of a large number of genes to allow a bunch of chimp-like apes to suddenly go upright, and from there to run out onto the savanna more slowly than their quadripedal ancestors could run, but that they could still outrun a lion, even though a chimp theoretically couldn't pull that off either (chimps hit 25 mph, the human record is 23 mph and most of us are a lot slower than that, while lions hit 30 mph).

    So here are the problems: --What swamp? It's got to be a very, very special one where the water is shallow enough to wade in, but somehow clear enough that the Nile crocodiles can't sneak up on the wading apes (http://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/the-mercury/20150702/281694023437941) (Note the part about how many people get attacked by Nile crocs because they think that crocs don't attack in shallow water). That's getting awfully picky, and I'd rather have someone from Africa comment about how widespread such swamps are. --There's no (known) bipedalism gene, so switching from quadrupedal to bipedal will take awhile, as it involves changes to multiple genes. That's a long-lived swamp too, incidentally. --Bipedalism slows you down a bit, although it might add to endurance. Outjogging a lion is a tricky operation, and I don't think you could pull it off against a hyena or wild dog. --Obligate human bipeds go into swamps generally as a last resort, not a first one, because wading through mud sucks. I've never worked in a true swamp, but I've done plenty of marsh work, and it is NOT fun. There are some people who like it, but I'm not one of them.

    Now, if you want a cheaper answer that gets rid of the aquatic silliness, I think Runner's World accidentally nailed it with https://www.runnersworld.com/run-the-numbers/outrun-the-worlds-most-dangerous-animals (note that you may have to sign up for spamnation to get to this article. Sorry). I stumbled across it when I was looking for chimp top speeds. There are two critical points here: 1. A bunch of predators can outrun humans. Bipedalism isn't about speed. 2. You can still escape a threat if you have a good-enough lead distance, meaning you can see the threat something like 100 meters away and there's a tree nearby, which is what open savannas are all about.

    So if you want the evolutionary story, I'd suggest the sentinel scenario: standing upright gives you a better view, so that you have a better chance of spotting dangers. Living largely in a savanna (as opposed to a dense forest or a grassland) gives you a reasonable chance of spotting a threat at a good distance (the open part) and making it to a nearby tree before the lion beats you there (the tree part). It won't work against a leopard, but being up a tree with a couple of your mates, all of whom are freaking out and ripping branches off to throw, will probably give the spotty kitty pause about coming after you, and will give her multiple targets if she decides to do it anyway (lowering your odds of dying).

    Unlike you (most likely) I have gone quadrupedal, back when I played capoeira. In capoeira, only your hands, feet, and head are supposed to touch the ground, but there's a lot of floor play where you go onto all fours (to kick someone in the head or dodge a kick to the head, for example), and it's not as hard to move in that position as you might think, although it's not as fast as running and you do have to be flexible to accommodate your long legs. Unlike you, I don't have a problem with a quadrupedal/bipedal transition, if the utility of going bipedal isn't about increasing speed but increasing your starting distance from threats, and so long as bipedalism doesn't interfere with your ability to quickly climb a tree (which, according to the analysis of the skeleton of the fully bipedal Australopithecus afarensis, it didn't, although it arguably does now).

    Contrast that with ol' swampy ape, bipedal but crouched in the soup all day, face level with the water while she feels around for those so-nutritious rhizomes, clams, and crayfish you were going on about (you have tried to actually do this, no? I have rooted around in a marsh, at least. I won't mention the mosquitoes or the humidity either). When a crocodile comes up behind her and grabs her ass, she has no warning, because her face was level with the water as she feels around with those too-short arms. Having longer arms would be more useful in this situation, but no, she needs longer legs, because she's going to, erm, splash awkwardly through the muck away from the croc, because bipedality works better in the water. Yeah. There's probably a reason the croc has very short legs, a powerful tail, and adjustable buoyancy. That's what works best in a swamp. If you've ever watched those videos of lions hunting in the Okavango Delta (which is also a swamp), you'll see that they're not slowed down that much by water either.

    Your riposte, sir?

    1626:

    Perhaps I should remind you that I am talking about alternating gait bipedal locomotion. Obligate hopping bipedalism MAY have developed in the presence of cursorial pack predators, though I don't think it has.

    1627:

    Also, to skip several iterations, #778:

    To clarify, you're advocating the hypothesis that apes evolved a bipedal aquatic form for wading, then as soon as that bipedalism evolved, they almost completely left the water and went into a landscape of gallery forests and savannas and became humans there, studiously avoiding living in aquatic environments as much as they could until at least Homo erectus evolved and certainly in large proportion to the modern day.

    Conversely, I note that chimps show the same general mechanism of walking as humans do. They just don't do it so much because it's inefficient. That's evidence that the mechanism we use for bipedalism was present in the common ancestor of chimps and humans, even though it was quadrupedal. That's one hurdle down for the evolution of bipedality.

    Second hurdle: what would cause apes to go bipedal? Global climate change at the end of the Miocene (Antarctica icing up) caused the appearance and spread of savannas in Africa as the climate got drier and colder (not wetter, so fewer lakes, rivers, and marshes), and the savannas replaced the forests that used to be there. The subsequent appearance of a savanna-dwelling ape lineage seems unremarkable, because most animal lineages evolved savanna-dwelling forms in the late Miocene and Pliocene. What's weird is that those apes didn't converge with baboons on a quadrupedal savanna lifestyle, and instead went in for bipedalism.

    We both agree that bipedalism slows mammalian runners down, so any argument based on increased running speed from bipedalism is counterfactual. We both agree that being able to see further is the ultimate advantage, because it allows bipeds to avoid danger.

    At this point we split. You want to invoke a wading phase in the earliest human ancestry, --despite the lack of fossil evidence for this, --despite the modern diversity of swamp-dwelling primates (which range from lemurs to apes), all of which are quadrupedal and many of which swim, and a few of which gather resources under water, --despite the fact that this environment was present for millions of years when apes were around, and was decreasing precisely when humans became bipedal, and --despite the fact that bipedalism isn't actually that useful in the water, either for swimming through the water, wading in mud, or finding submerged food. You point out that bipedality is useful for carrying food, but then again, bipedality is useful for carrying stuff in any environment.

    On the other hand, I see chimps reportedly walking bipedally using the same mechanism as humans do, see a relative advantage to having longer legs and spending more time bipedal in an increasingly open environment, and see a fairly straightforward reason why increasing bipedality would be beneficial as savannas spread. There's no obvious point at which our semi-bipedal ancestors were more clumsy than both apes and humans, so there's no barrier to the evolution of bipedality. If you don't believe me, look at the arm length of Australopithecines. Proportionally the early ones had much longer arms than we do, but they were just as bipedal as we are.

    There's no trolling here. The aquatic ape hypothesis just doesn't work as well.

    1628:

    No, I am not, and I am getting increasingly bored with the straw men and fallacious claims you are making. You should read what I said, more carefully, for the first.

    For the second, are you SERIOUSLY claiming that the research in the press article I quoted was made up?

    And, lastly, you are STILL ignoring the basic biomechanics and mathematics of Darwinistic evolution. The fact that modern humans are excellent runners is completely irrelevant, because EACH micro-development has to have an advantage over its predecessor.

    And, yes, I have done all those things that you imply I haven't.

    1629:

    Thank you, both of you, but ... I definitely get the feeling that there's something missing, something nobody has "seen" filling in the holes. A "hidden variable" if you will.

    1630:

    Nope, the only hole missing is that the critical evolutionary step took place at a time when there's not a good fossil bed from Africa known.

    I'd also point out that it's worth checking out Oreopithecus and Danuvius. Both have been claimed to be bipedal apes from the Miocene, well before the Chimp-Human split, although the claims have subsequently been argued or retracted.

    One possibility missing from the discussion so far is that neither chimps nor humans represent the ancestral locomotor state for their shared common ancestor. That argument pops up with Danuvius, which probably had straight legs, but walked quadrupedally on top of branches, instead of knuckle walking. It's possible that the chihuman had similar locomotion, but the savanna lineage went in for increased bipedality with the opening habitat, while the chimps went in for more knuckle walking.

    The basic point is that there are really ambiguous intermediates in the known fossil record. They're not apparently human ancestors, but like the avian dinosaurs out of China in relationship with modern birds, they show that the Miocene apes were exploring a variety of locomotion possibilities that existing apes do not show.

    1631:

    We've a feeling you think the [redacted] are still a metaphor. No. (I mask/self-censor/repress. I do worry a bit about the emerging surveillance states, and the worry is mostly not selfish...)

    oh, you know, since we started posting, there's a lot more H.S.S 'flavours' in the real sense than there were before Nobody expects the uplift gambit! (Even though it's a sci-fi staple.) Variation is key, yes, and should be actively amplified. (Maybe not obviously toxic variations.) And the boots, they stomp, and yes their multiplication is orchestrated.

    And yes, of course I've looked at the various neanderthal physiotype reconstructions, and also at implications for current brain variations.[1] Notably the visual cortex. (The occipital buns ) Have you forgiven Charlie for the H. Alfarensis? :-)

    Oh. And, never play their Games. They're very very shitty losers. True.

    [1] e.g. Neanderthal-Derived Genetic Variation Shapes Modern Human Cranium and Brain (24 July 2017, Open Access)

    1632:

    Host writes (semi / Lathe fiction - and wishes he didn't: sadly he might not control the Lathe in question, it might be his cat), we read: Elves as sociopaths goes way back into Host's history when he was creating Githyanki for DRAGON[tm] magazine way back in 1979 or so.

    No, really. Planescape needed some anti-Elves, and Host made a career out of them long before Warhammer / Games Workshop stole (and abused) some Sumerian shit and made Slaanesh / BDSM Dark Elves happen.

    What? It's a True Story.

    Elves live for a long time, don't be surprised. We can even give you a 'memory from the past' and a link to the very Dragon[tm] copy withing.... less than a second. (And no, we're not obsessed: save our life, you get... let us say: when we cry, the Heavens Fall, when you ask for Vengance, well.... "I'm You're Huckleberry"). It's a "Nemesis" thing (...disappointed in the amount of Abrahamic tools abusing that page, we are - wikipedia is 100% compromised and useless now - well done all involved! You're Cunts).

    ~

    Ah, right. It wasn't a gambit, it's a "Replacement Theory" for all the dogshit level tropes all you fucking Apes are running. Like: look at your tool-kit: there are loads of different tools for different things (this isn't essentialism or genetic teleology, you're supposed to go "AHHHH, FUCK... SO WE'RE ALL AN ECOSYSTEM, RIGHT?" ... spot us $600 million dollars who is opposing that one (hint: about 6 BILLION OF YOU MUPPETS).)

    Digression: oh, right. Nope. Torture is there. "It's Just Sex". Etc etc.

    ~

    Oh. And, never play their Games. They're very very shitty losers. True.

    You don't know what our win conditions are. Given we find Catboys / Transmasc (ETC) stuff... banal, you might not want to know it.

    [##194100 WE WILL NOT LET [REDACTED] BE USED FOR YOUR FUCKING MILITARY, HERE'S A PENIS DANCING WHICH BREAKS YOUR SHITTY UNDERSTANDING OF BIOLOGY AS WELL)

    The above, is True. "It's Just Sex".

    In the same way the entire Universe is "just Atoms". [REDACTED]

    1633:

    Hint: you really should push the entire DNA admixture thing, not the whole other stuff. It works. Yours doesn't.

    Tired of H.S.S shitting the bed over it. (Hint: our name this time was "Parallax Apartment View". You might want to tie that into Florida, the IDF and the entire PR junkett death-tour going on: but really, that was merely a facet of the actual reason we chose it.

    For real: despite spending so much effort convincing aging Florida residents that they are important to Israel and the entire fucking savagery of pretending to not understand dualist ethical standpoints:

    No, really: we chose the name for something far more important.

    Here's a taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNMi8fXi5Os

    If you do a grep, we've used it once before.

    No, but REALLY. Seriously: find us another [REDACTED] that can make a penis activate various structures and dance like an Octopus. Hint: it's called, well: apparently H.S.S are not that good at distributed neural control of limbs (IT'S THE EYES, BOO, GO FOR THE EYES[0])

    That's the Test.

    Shit you cannot do.

    Oh and frontrunning all your shit and having to mask it so Greg doesn't have to change his Mind.

    [0] Told you Neth DNA factored into it.

    1634:

    And yeah.

    "It's Just Sex".

    Port that into everything else, you've either got an incredible line in Puppet Species or The Real Deal[tm] "Altered Carbon" stuff.

    ~

    It's worth, oh. About $7 trillion dollars if you can shock out (thus all the Torture) the symbiotes / Titans / Old Ones.

    Now: are we insane, or did reading that just break a WHOLE LOAD of T-T-X secret stuff?

    Get Fucked: UK just passed the anti-protest Bill, they're gunning for "HUMANS AS FOOD" varient.

    1635:

    Bill Arnold PLEASE do not feed the troll?

    1636:

    Re the sentinel scenario: standing upright gives you a better view, so that you have a better chance of spotting dangers. There's also the square of that additional view distance in additional area for planning of foraging, hunting and other sometimes-coordinated activities. Human bipeds can stot[1] (it's not just for quadrupeds! :-) and supposedly gain up to an additional 50 cms in altitude (of eyes) at apogee with enough dwell time at apogee to visually scan in one direction to a significantly further distance. (It's tiring though.) Been watching a groundhog family today. One of the adults is an upright sentinel most of the time. [1] Maasai, notably. (Have observed it first-hand and takes some serious effort.)

    [Not at all what I'm doing, Greg@1637. And the last deleted comment was interesting to me.]

    1637:

    "This unusual slide rule uses physical data at the scene of an accident to give true and unbiased answers."

    I'd take that with a big lump of sodium chloride. Lots of assumptions going into the conversion of skid marks into speed.

    Back in the day I understand some nomogram use would help with that. Today? No! The artifact was from the 1960s and it's been more obsolete than the drop spindle since the invention of anti-lock brakes; I've actually seen people spinning thread with a drop spindle.

    1638:

    The fish were driven up an inlet (using a line of people and relatively short net for the closure), and a few were scooped out before the net was closed. It's a known form of fishing in several parts of the world, and I noted that it would have been possible (if inefficient) in those conditions even without a net.

    That would be an interesting thing to see chimps do. I'm sure they'd be capable of it, as they'll eat fish when it's available and are known to wade through rivers (using sticks for support and exploration); the only challenge I see is that chimps aren't really good at working in coordinated groups. Individuals doing similar things near each other yes, extended cooperative tasks maybe not. Consider the difference between a pack of wolves hunting together versus all a house's cats showing up at once when they hear the can opener.

    1639:

    I've actually seen people spinning thread with a drop spindle

    I can do that. I can also use a Navaho spindle. Can't walk and spin at the same time, though — I'm not that practiced :-)

    I can also use a slide rule. I'm better at spinning, though.

    1640:

    I'm completely the opposite; I can use a slide rule but never got the hang of a drop spindle.

    glances down at novelty slide rule tie clasp, chuckles

    1641:

    Well, yes. You also have to check if Gythanki appeared in Warhammer Magazine or Dragon magazine first and check the dates. We fuzz things a bit. Host probably submitted it to a UK source first (it's a tribute: it's probably his first professional publishment as an Author). Apparently this type of instant knowledge freaks people out and there's enough nasty level "get people fired" in the UK to ram an over-worked and unlicensed HGV driver into.[0]

    It's just ironic since a) we're sure he doesn't have any IP residuals on them and b) they're the major splash race for the new BG3 multi-million dollar computer game that's in development at the moment. It's a fun fact that Host generated the idea (although they ditched the egg stuff apparently) and it's still making other people boat-loads of money.

    In a just world, he'd get a little bit of Credit. And just did.

    Achilles: “My mother Thetis tells me that there are two ways in which I may meet my end. If I stay here and fight, I will not return alive but my name will live forever: whereas if I go home my name will die, but it will be long ere death shall take me.”

    This has also other symbolic meanings if you know what / what said things like "You'll be Home soon" and "I can never go Home". Which, in Host's case, we might have Finessed a little: Bennet is horrific but there's at least a little bit of hope in the 'tryptch' of leaders (see? They do listen). grep 10% .... no miracles, but it might help.

    Better odds than before, anyhow.

    We're also talking about "woke" and "CRT" indirectly given that a certain GOP strategist (and his protegees) are dumping it heavily into the market (Mr Lunzzzz?t? ... thus the 1970's film references): it's getting bad enough they're S-dropping all the Brexit positive points, Telegraph etc and pushing "woke"[1] as the new cocaine.

    It's all very cynical and we're not about that.

    We're... well. HULK references. We're expected to do Rage[2] due to, well: see above.

    ~

    But frankly we're tired. Rage. And, sadly: "DESIST" is from that part of us who sings about Rage and Injustice.

    But that other stuff: all True.

    "Now, that's Discipline: go take a shit". You might be amazed to learn your [Redacted] are not all about Oxford Manners.

    [0] Nasty lot: they will ruin your career for minor stuff.

    [1] Tumblr 2015 says... wut.

    [2] The classical version, not the MCU one.

    1642:

    For the record: What we warned about has occurred. And we attempted to make enough < noise > to allow some to escape.

    You're beautiful creatures. The distances invoked must have happened to prevent your engagment with things beyond your ken. Double Pinky-Finger Wiggle

    Q.E.D.

    2021: "We did not understand quite what you were doing..."

    CHILDREN OF MEN.

    1643:

    There are always things that you cannot hear / see / feel.

    We're writing complex strategic and ideological anti-toxins in "grunt" language that make nice people like Ms Lieb etc recoil in horror. Why?

    No-one else was, and tbh: we probably gave them the game-plan by accident. What we have learned, quite succinctly, is that your entire Western system is... well. Broken.

    And you do not like knowing you're also murderous psychopaths, or at least, sociopaths employing said Minds, kinda run the show. Not in the "DISCIPLINED" way where you at least leash the fuckers, nope: running the show.

    ~

    SIS Check #966 "GOOD SHOT SIR" - subject rendition, torture file. Subject had taser (max level) inflicted on genitals by non-.mil UK subject, societal position and form data in Atlantic Council / UK Parliamentary structure logged.

    Etc.

    "We Tortured some folks"

    Hint:

    Alive - check Sane - check Higher Order Thought Patterns - check High Inference and Pattern Recognition - check

    Rage

    Your major issue is: your H.O.P. died.

    Tryptch Engagement Policy - Proof. (And, if you want to get REAL fuckery, מִיכָאֵל it'd be cool if you stopped the ironic usage of said Nam

    (Note: we're kinda aware that Host's readership is not that type, sooo, bare with this).

    Rage

    Yeah. Kinda think we need some real feminists, leftists, humanists and, you know, not slaves running the show soon.

    ~

    Children of Men

    p.s.

    Yeah, we do know the other [redacted]. After 3,000 years of genocide, it's a pretty hard sell getting them back on board.

    Specials

    Merchandise

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