I thought I was unshockable.
But if this is real—I think it's most likely a hilariously bleak piece of internet satire, but there's an outside chance it's what it says it is—well, I don't want live in a world where there is a real market for this kind of thing.
Anyway, I present to you: The Billionaire Bone Bureau.
PS: they advertise on Twitter.
PPS: my fingers are itching to write them into a horror story, but only if it's confirmed as real. I mean, you just know supplying them is a profit centre for the Wagner Group, right?
(What's your most shocking find on the internet? No limits!)
💀💀💀
I... can't even tell what it is? Their FAQ page is a good deal less than helpful.
Start by reading the linked pages from left to right.
I suspect the captions on some of the images are a clue that it's satire -- find it hard to believe a Bezos would really allow their name to be displayed on such an exhibit.
It's totally nailed the New Management vibe, though. Rupert de Montfort Bigge would be an Order 206 Hunter's Lodge member for sure.
I still think the Centre for Policy Studies + Braverman recommendations are worse, because we know those proposals are real ....
I suspect the captions on some of the images are a clue that it's satire
Isn't this fishing for your email a take off on the "TV news" in the over the top satire movie version of "Starship Troopers"? I have a memory of each TV news clip in the movie ending with this question and some way to get more info.
Would you like to know more?
Haven't seen the movie ... but I note that mailing list sign-ups are marketing gold dust: the conversion rate is sky-high compared to any other form of internet advertising. So it's worryingly not implausible.
If there is a market for these things, it could drastically reduce the lifespan of billionaires.
Sell the option to bid on the bones.
Use the proceeds to fund "acquisition" of the asset.
Profit?
Surely more ethical than selling rhino horn...
Huh. You read it as a club for collectors of billionaire bones?
Yeah, I could definitely sign up for that. (But it wasn't my first interpretation.)
Would I like to know more? He11 No!!
More seriously, I also had a feeling that it is completely computer rendered. It doesn't have the feeling of an Austrian Beinhaus.
A disruptive business, able to revitalise the relic industry in territories lost by the Catholic church since the reformation. Definitely not NFT's, but "decentralized ownership network technology, we we are able to keep a publicly held, real time verifiable record of the current owner and last sale price of the relics and allow our clients to buy and sell their pieces on their own timeline in our certified auction house".
There are further opportunities that the BBB do not appear to be exploiting that are available to the suitably ethically challenged. Relic futures, or living people, as they are sometimes called. Purchase of and trading in options on a person whose remains may become a valuable relic at a future date. Some much needed cash for say, a struggling young artist, who may make it big in their later career and the comfort of knowing that there will be no funeral bills to pay for their estate.
It's not real. Look at the hashtags on their tweet:
https://twitter.com/TheofficialBBB/status/1599147586136715265?s=20&t=d5_TLc1tgnFe_uphV60krw
I suspect the labels in the images are aspirational, and meant to describe the "original" owner of the bones in question. Their twitter feed makes it explicit: https://twitter.com/TheofficialBBB/status/1599431537799274496
No investor with any wit would waste a dime on this. 'BBB' has long been the Better Business Bureau, who could tie up the domain registration with trademark litigation once they notice. Therefore, it's a gag, a stunt, a throwaway joke.
Two tells: - They misspell "que [sic]" - The legal footer refers to the year 2xxx
What more valuable relic could there be for a "Child of Mammon" than authentic physical relics of departed billionaires? i would imagine that someone who accumulated a fortune pre-Reagan/Thatcher might be considered more sacred than those who made fortunes under a more lenient tax regime.
So, this is necromancers grifting on the blockchain with skeleton ownership NFTs?
Hosted by GoDaddy FWIW.
Yes, I was going to argue that these are legitimate relics for a Mammonist religion.
The thing to remember is that Mammonism isn't Christianity. It's borrowed ideas from Taoism (or, equally likely, come up with them independently).
The points I'd make are:
In Mammonism, money is equivalent to Qi/Chi in Taoism. It's the energy that makes everything work in the Mammonist world, and increasing personal money is a major goal of Mammonism. Also like Qi, flows of money are more important than amounts, but most people are more impressed by amounts.
In Mammonism, a central ritual of consecration is "alienation." In the Mammonite view of the universe, things are worthless until a) someone claims ownership of them, and b) someone is willing to pay the owner for some use of them or to own them in turn. This two-step process of claiming ownership and someone else buying in is the ritual of alienation to consecrate things so that the belong to the Mammonite world and have a monetary value (see 1. above for the importance of having a monetary value). \
3 Note the magic: monetary value is inherently subjective, regardless of attempts to give a science-y aspect to valuation. This applies even more to really expensive things. Money is power, but it comes from sharing an imagined creation. In other words, it's like Qi in Taoism, which also ultimately comes from Wuwei (emptiness). This is what magic is: creation mediated by belief.
Now, what could be a better relic of Mammonism than the alienated bones of someone with a lot of money? Or even better, a con or spoof notionally based on the alienated bones of someone with a lot of money? It doesn't matter if it's real or not, if someone spends money to own the "relic," it becomes a true relic of Mammonism. Especially if the owner can then sell the relic to a bigger sucker, and thereby get the money moving.
Here endeth the lesson.
Your homework, should you choose to accept it: Imagine how radical atheist former Mammonites would live in a Mammonite world that governs from a Mammonite worldview.
The short answer, as subhumans. Longer answer, reprising history, building on "Use it up, wear it out, make it do".
From the Graun a couple of days ago - Death and the salesman: the 22-year-old selling human bones for a living. Definitely not implausible even if this site is satire.
hmmm... why does this sound familiar?
"Quark, believing himself to be terminally ill, auctions off his remains; when he discovers that the diagnosis was incorrect, he must either violate the contract, or end his life in order to deliver the merchandise."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Parts_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine)
let's all support "contract enforcement", eh?
The short answer, as subhumans. Longer answer, reprising history, building on "Use it up, wear it out, make it do".
Normally I'd let the responses build up, but this I strongly disagree with. Anatomically modern humans have been around for at least 300,000 years. Money has been around ca. 2,500 years. 995 of human history was without even the concept of money, and quite a few people on the planet were forcibly inducted into various monetary economies over the last few hundred years of imperial colonialism.
Being fully human has nothing to do with money.
People are not the sum of their debts and assets.
That's the point of the homework: far more than Christianity or Islam, everyone reading this lives in a world permeated by Mammonism. If you recognize it as artificial, see it as unessential to being fully human, and perhaps see alienation as a big part of our most vexing global problems at the moment...where do you go from there? Remember, you are fully human without money. But what does that mean for you?
I mean, there's loads of really horrible things that I can't see any merit in looking for again and linking, like cartel torture videos. There's some promise in things are more suprising than the name might suggest, like the sounding subreddit. Not going to link that either but Googling that much will let you know enough to decide if it might interest you. In terms of weird and totally opaque, I present r/ooer. I used an archive link because it only plays properly on old reddit.
I’m sure it’s real.
We all know Trump has skeletons in his closet.
You are correct, but from the viewpoint of the Mammonites, you will be dehumanized, even if you're an insufficiently blessed practitioner. I'm not particularly social, and that's not improving as I age. Often I feel safer when I think of myself as not quite human.
The part I really love is that you have to "be checked to see if you are up to the rigid standards held by the BBB" to join the Social Club, but to be a member of Order 206 you just have to own the bones! By purchasing their "relics", you have proven you meet the rigid standards.
I'll just point out that the Yale secret society, Skull and Bones, is sometimes called Order 322.
I would bet a shiny nickel (or similar value) that this is a prank/hoax along the lines of The Yes Men, by someone culturally literate in northeast US snobbery.
For me, the most shocking find is a recent one: the planned linear city of Saudi Arabia, which is also on Twitter (https://twitter.com/NEOM). The most stupid geometric shape a city can take (with the possible exception of fractal dust), and allegedly three nomads have already been sentenced to death for resisting displacement. The marketing stuff has to be seen to be believed. The whole thing makes the world cup in Qatar look sustainable and inclusive.
I can't help but note that all the pictures are computer generated. Caveat Emptor.
While there is a black market in human bones, I lean heavily towards that exercise in terrible web site construction being a prank/troll for attention/art project.
We all know Trump has skeletons in his closet.
And they are the BEST skeletons.
Also note the conspicuous use of only black people in their gallery photographs; given that the models look obviously CGI and they probably could've found more photorealistic ones of white/Asian people if they were trying to be plausible, it's clearly trying to be clever by doing a reversal: "what if black people came to gawk at the bones of white men in museums, eh? eh?" (This is very up to the second given the Wellcome fuss.) It may be a NFT crypto grift at heart, but it's doing a good job of imitating the norms of contemporary conceptual art.
They are GREAT skeletons!
Their twitter feed is more obviously satirical than the website.
Charlie Stross @ 2:
Start by reading the linked pages from left to right.
I suspect the captions on some of the images are a clue that it's satire -- find it hard to believe a Bezos would really allow their name to be displayed on such an exhibit.
Reminds me of this Donald J. Trump Library
Friend,
The Country, and the world, need to know. The Fake News won’t tell you, which is why it’s up to us to EXPOSE the truth.
The WOKE LEFT has been claiming that I have sordid skeletons hidden in my closet. I am writing to tell you, friend, that this is another LIE. My skeletons are the BIGGEST and BEST SKELETONS in America. There is nothing sordid about my GREAT skeletons — the GREATEST in our Great Country!
The only way to make sure we are heard is to FLOOD the airwaves with our ad, which is why I am calling on YOU to help raise $2,000,000 for our Trump Ad Blitz Fund.
Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to our Official Trump Ad Blitz Fund to help keep our ad on the air.
I really need you to step up, Friend.
I’ve asked to see a list of EVERY Patriot who steps up to help us reach our $2,000,000 goal, and I want to see your name on there.
We only need 150 more donations today to air this ad. 118 Patriots have already donated - I’m just waiting for you.
Please contribute ANY AMOUNT TODAY to our Official Trump Ad Blitz Fund and to get your name on the list of Patriots I see.
Thank you,
President Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States
Based mostly on regular fundraising emails from the former guy.
I know we're supposed to be unearthing Horrors from The Interwebs, but the biggest shocks I've had via the internet (okay, Zoom meetings and downloaded papers) were good ones.
Among young life scientists and activists, the idea of humans being special and separate from the natural world is breaking down, big time. As much as anything, that speaks to a growing breakdown of Xtianity as the social norm in the US, and it may well be in reaction to, well, reactionary politics in the US. I don't know how far it's spreading, but it feels like the biology-aware are getting pretty comfortable with "all our relations" (the American Indian standard phrase) being a description of reality rather than a bit of poetry. And our non-science activist fellows are becoming more open to getting a clue about what we're talking about.
Symbiosis also seems to be increasingly the mainstream in evolution and biology, after 150 years of competition red in tooth and claw shit. Random example: my wife the clinical worker shrugged when I asked her about a study that showed that human immune systems don't properly develop without various bacteria colonizing infants' intestines. Apparently this is standard medical knowledge now, to the point where she's forgotten that it wasn't when we were in school.
I saw nothing but the initial blurb, because I run with scripts disabled by default on anything new, and I did not think I wanted to enable them there 8-)
Also, finally created an account here - been reading for more than a decade but stayed in touch via twitter, which is, well, you know 8-)
Riderius
Charles Stross asked: What's your most shocking find on the internet? No limits!
This first time we cracked 1.5 above 1850-1900. 3 months spent way above the preindustrial limit set at the Paris agreement just a few months earlier. Like >0.2 degrees above.
https://berkeleyearth.org/archive/temperature-reports/march-2016/
We've broken that limit again most years since then.
The second most shocking is the thousands and thousands of popular articles that pretend like that hasn't happened. Like if you just ignore reality hard enough you can substitute your own. You can just keep talking about how action should begin to start in a decade and gradually ramp up over the following 2 more decades. Just substitute your preferred reality really really really hard and it will just... be.
You have hit on a very rich vein for horror fiction.
Given that financialization will infiltrate everything it can, the inevitable result of creating a market for 'relics' would be the securitization and hedging of those same relics, with increasingly opaque derivatives markets driving an asset bubble - with a correspondingly ghoulish spike in demand for new product.
Take the logic of every real estate huckster out there - 'there isn't going to be any more land, so land will always go up in value!' Similarly, 'the globe cannot carry any more population, so the availability of relics will inevitably go down in the future, driving prices up!'
There is a rich story in the potential experience of a mid-level popular name, something like a recognized genre author. At some point she discovers that the futures market on her bones has been financialized, and due to a collapse in an unrelated commodity the financial system is at risk of collapse unless a hedge fund can make good on its heavily leveraged, securitized and ill-advised futures contract before next Friday. Someone must deliver her C1, C2 and C3 vertebrae to the buyer (itself a massively leveraged hedge fund) in order to prevent a cascading default.
Through a complex set of derivatives and asset swaps, her bones are somehow worth $37 Billion. Since she is only middle aged and relatively healthy, most traders assumed she would survive at least another 25 years, long enough for them to clear their books.
While everyone from politicians to regular folk would agree that it was something of an injustice, when faced with a collapse in the value of their pensions, financial investments and other assets they find ways to rationalize the necessary steps. A deep dive into her past discovers that she once broke up with an ex via text message three days before Xmas, which combined with the financial threat to jobs and 'regular folk' mean that most people either want her dead or look away and pretend it isn't happening.
For any attempted rational counterpoint, I refer you to Dutch tulips, pets.com and the many, many awful real estate bubbles currently extant.
As an aside, creating a demand driven value for relics would create an astonishing backflip on the part of the mammonites who have thus far campaigned against abortion rights. Henceforth they would campaign for mandatory abortion, to keep the supply of future relics artificially low and boost their asset values.
an astonishing backflip on the part of the mammonites who have thus far campaigned against abortion rights ... mandatory abortion, to keep the supply of future relics artificially low
Why settle for a mere bone fragment when you can have a whole preserved human in a jar? Of course it has a soul, there's a certificate attesting to that and everything.
Could go any which way, but my bet is that the current trend to criminalising interstate (intestate?) travel for the purposes of procuring
a prostitan abortion will eventually catch up with those who the law protects as well as those it binds. Not every senator has nice white upper class mistresses, after all. And what's the equivalent when the mistress is male, I'm thinking "rent boy" but that's too derogatory. There's got to be a US-polite euphemism for that (or is gay sex still to dirty to even have a euphemism?) Sigh, morality police make life so difficult.she once broke up with an ex via text message three days before Xmas
I got shit from some friends for how I dumped someone once. They STFU when I explained that the problem started when I developed an STD and their explanation only made the situation worse. I deliberately aimed for "too much information" because fuck people who make judgements based on incomplete information. You want to judge, you deserve to have all the information necessary to make that judgement. Especially if you don't want that information...
China might launch a methalox-fuelled rocket into orbit before SpaceX. Landspace, a private Chinese rocket startup is apparently going to attempt to launch their medium-lift methalox rocket this month some time. See the Dongfang Hour webcast on Youtube for details.
My entry for the most shocking thing I've seen on the internet (lately)
North Carolina Power Outages Caused by Gunfire at Substations, Officials Say
Part of the reason for the state of emergency & curfew was all of the traffic signals were knocked out and police & emergency services were overloaded responding to accidents. Equipment at the substations is damaged beyond repair and the substation equipment will have to be replaced.
Some are linking this to opposition to a "drag show" scheduled in Southern Pines, NC.
I'm not so sure about the "reasons". Could be, BUT there are a LOT of OTHER irresponsible, stupid fucks with guns and it might be just sheer cussedness; some fuckwit's idea of a joke.
Outages in the Carolinas
This is ENTIRELY too plausible, which is the heart of the best satire. That said, I've had the Bone Clones website bookmarked for years and years now. Actually got my sister, an anthropology student, her graduation present from them. Every California girl needs a smilodon skull I say and she agreed.
Wonder if these people also belong to the Morningside Cannibals dining society ?
Some are linking this to opposition to a "drag show" scheduled in Southern Pines, NC.
This has mostly been regulated to "we have no idea of why at this time". Drunk bubba's maybe, but with two targets, not likely. FBI, state police, and I think other federal agencies are all involved now. It was definitely something more than shooting out the window of a truck from the road. They broke down a gate to get close enough. And aimed at the parts that couldn't be repaired in the field.
This happened Saturday night and power will likely not be restored before Thursday. Not that many 230kv step down transformers sitting on the shelf.
The Drag show tie in was due to a lady who is a fierce LGBTQ opponent posted on Facebook after the lights went out that she knew why. So the local gendarmes went over that night and had a talk. After a bit they left saying it was an interesting conversation about how God had intervened to stop the Drag show. They thanked her for the time and conversation and left.
I know that lady. She's a clone of my deceased mother.
Maybe someone really hates golf. The USGA has a major office (HQ?) there in Pinehurst.
If anyone fancies some wild speculation with some facts in about the January sixther who posted that she knew why the substations were shot up - Moore County Sheriff posing with the woman he sent deputies to "pray" with after the substations were shot up.
That is a mis-statement of what the sheriff actually said. The reddit comments even talk about this.
securitization and hedging of those same relics, with increasingly opaque derivatives markets driving an asset bubble
That is an absolutely awesome high concept horror-fic idea, and somebody (not me) should write it.
Not me, because I'm elbow-deep in space opera for the next few months, after which it's back to the Laundry.
Also not me because it needs to be a "fifteen minutes into the future" kind of thing and I can't see how to get to that kind of future in the UK -- it needs someone more familiar with contemporary US idiom to make it work.
(I could transplant it to the New Management setting and swap "soul" for "relics", but that loses some of the impact. But, hey, there's a derivatives market for spiritual essence futures and you're, uh, leveraged so you need to go straight to hell ASAP or the market will collapse is quite a take. And, uh, now I have another subplot for the fourth New Management novel ...!)
well, we all have our personal quarks 'n quirks...
but finding yourself over-extended on the soul futures exchange is just a bit much too quirky... kind of being in a conflict of interest between your accountant and your clergy when both lay claim to some portion of you...
terrible thing for your wife to learn, your heart belongs to another
And now I'm imagining a whole new literal meaning to the song My Heart Will Go On, complete with the fitting video…
Bugger the country/world reverting to the 18th century - this is reverting to the mediaeval period.
I was a thinking about this, and it gave an idea. I have told my family I don't give a damn what happens to my body after my death - I shall have lost interest in it. They have vetoed feeding it to lions at the zoo or throwing it on the compost heap, on the grounds of illegality, and the medical donation people won't be interested (I have checked). But I should be happy for the skeleton to be donated to a local play-group, so they could play with a real skeleton while singing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbl4BNkAq_U
So are billionaires supposed to be the new saints, and are these bones the new relics that we capitalist pilgrims must travel to worship?
What the whatting what now
No Linux? No problem. Just get AI to hallucinate it for you
Worried that your job will become obsolete? Think to the future. Retrain as an AI psychiatrist. Contact the Hypothetical University now.
Not so very far, a reliquary would really take up little additional room at your bank's lobby.
Assuming one's bank even has a lobby.
1/2 of my bank accounts are in banks without a physical presence.
The original version of the story comes from Damon Runyon. The lead character was particularly tall (with a strange-shaped head, if I remember rightly), but not very smart and completely skint. A rich doctor gave him a stack of money to enjoy a lavish last month, after which he had to kill himself so the doctor could have his skeleton. Unfortunately the exact name of the story escapes me right now, and Google isn't helping me find it. It's uncannily similar to the kind of thing Charlie has posted.
I think the most interesting part of this story is the fact that it's shocking to us, because it tells us about culture shifts and what's socially acceptable. Obviously medieval and earlier people were fond of "relics" of saints which were parts of their body, and there are still a whole bunch of places around France, Italy and Spain which have their saint's finger or whatever in a glass bottle.
But also going forwards, the Victorian trend of public consumption of surgery and doctoring as a fun afternoon out was very real, and anyone interested in medical things would generally buy a skeleton. Back then they were all real skeletons from real people who'd donated their bodies to medical research. And by "back then", that basically means up to the 1970s, when decent quality plastic and resin became an option. Certainly the skeleton had some practical value as a demonstration tool, but it was just as much decoration. The "Doctor" series of books and films are fairly clear that their resident skeleton was also the regular hat and coat stand.
Also not me because it needs to be a "fifteen minutes into the future" kind of thing and I can't see how to get to that kind of future in the UK -- it needs someone more familiar with contemporary US idiom to make it work.
Well, picture this...
A young but promising actor signs away first rights to his bones for help making ends meet in school. It's a bit more money than donating plasma and participating in medical trials, which he also does. But not much more money, because promising actors have low odds of ever succeeding.
And, of course, you don't option the body futures of someone who's already famous or powerful, because they have lawyers and greedy heirs to stop you from collecting. The futures market only works if you get 'em young and risky. And Mr. Body's leaving all sorts of data around anyway (plasma, medical studies, social media of all his travels), so the creditors have plenty of data which can be used to verify that they have the body if they ever collect.
Anyway, Mr. Body beats the acting odds a little bit, and becomes modestly well-known as the hunk in a series of medium-budget chick flicks. Then he has a revelation, gets religion, and makes a killing as a megachurch fundamentalist preacher. You know, bodily resurrection, creationism, all that good ol' stuff.
Then he gets leukemia, gets a bone marrow transplant, lives on thanks to the prayers of his flock and modern medicine, and dies tragically young from influenza he picked up preaching for the Christmas pageant one year. Immunosupressants will do that to a guy, even though the show must go on.
Then the agents of his creditor come to collect his bones. And the person who owns the rights to his bones is very wealthy and very determined for $Reasons to own (pwn?) Rev. Body (deceased).
The elders of his church believe in the whole bodily resurrection thing, and refuse to exhume him. And when they lose in court, they try to pass off other things as the body, and that's where the story starts...
Basically this is an excuse for someone to drag the less ethical stretches of fundie American Christendom through the burgeoning swamplands of the American biotech industry, along with highlighting all the insults to bones that Native Americans have had to deal with getting their remains back.
Since Mr. Body left behind an extensive health record (because his death at a young age means he beat destruction of records), attempts to pawn off another skeleton fail (wrong gender and nationality, perhaps). Attempts to clone Mr. Body and pass off the forged body progressively fail, not only because of multiomics (proteomics, transcriptomics, etc) and that pesky bone marrow transplant (two genomes in the bone make it fun to clone), but also because of isotopic and other sampling showing that the cloned bones aren't his (wrong isotopic prints for where he grew up due to the impossibility of getting isotopically correct growth media*, difficulties in replicating the effects of early bone breaks, exercise, and especially cancer therapies, ad nauseum). As the conflict grows there are many such attempts, along with the resulting litigation and financial tortures.
The essential conflict is the Church elders, who are trying to retain the Body dealing with the yawning gulf between the simplistic faith they want to believe in (get baptized, pay your dues, go to heaven after growing the church as a thriving business) and the biomedical esoterica they have to drown themselves in to protect the Body, which all of course challenge their beliefs, as well as little things like ethics and morals.
If someone wants to write this up as a black comedy, go right ahead. It's perfect for someone with a biomedical background who's dealt with this kind of churchianity before.
*Due to the food you eat and water you drink, the isotopes, elemental proportion, and chemicals found in your bone can be used to make a pretty decent guess of where you lived throughout your life. Testing for all this is grinds up a fair amount of bone, but it's probably considerably easier and cheaper than faking it in a cloned body, because not just the chemicals but the isotopes going into the clone have to match the history of the original body, especially when someone moved around a lot as a child.)
All skeletons are confirmed tobacco addicts.
I'm not going there, but I am making notes for the secondary plot thread of a hypothetical New Management Book Four (assuming the sales track of books 1-3 justify continuing the series). One that'll hopefully do for financialization and derivatives what "Quantum of Nightmares" did for supermarket deli counters.
In other local news here in North Carolina:
Emu on the loose in Person County
Not fodder for horror, but weird.
Ugh. How about parents die, and the elder brother financializes his two sisters' and younger brother's bones to provide them a way to live until they're old enough to get jobs.
Then there's a collapse from scum (eg FTX), and the owners of the futures foreclose?
The coat and hat stand? Is that why there's no place to hang my hat or coat when I go to the doctor's - there's no skeleton, only wall posters.
I'm not going there, but I am making notes for the secondary plot thread of a hypothetical New Management Book Four (assuming the sales track of books 1-3 justify continuing the series). One that'll hopefully do for financialization and derivatives what "Quantum of Nightmares" did for supermarket deli counters.
Fine by me! I just want to reiterate that this is all I'm ever doing with this particular idea, so if it inspires someone else, I'll be quite happy with that outcome.
That said, there are real life parallels with this issue, particularly in American archaeology. Native tribes rightfully got upset when scientists dug up their ancestors' bones and kept them as specimens, not just because it violated their beliefs, but because of the inherent power disparity of who got to dictate whose beliefs were violated, why, and whose relatives were processed for science without their consent.
Science as the pursuit of knowledge, moving in tandem with political power, has many parallels with mammonism as the pursuit of loot, moving in tandem with political power. While we often deride traditional Christian beliefs here (with good reason, when it comes to the apocalypse), it's worth thinking about all the possible power dynamics in this scenario. Respectable people (the elders of a megachurch) are being forced to switch back and forth between identities (Pro-Mammon business-people and modern Americans versus believing Christians) as if they were tribal folk fighting to get parents' bones back from a museum.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to get why people in the tribes were so upset and why science properly should respect their limits, but the more family members I bury, the more I get it.
JohnS, see your emu and raise llamas and wallabies in West Dumbartonshire (Scotland).
Well, https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/07/its-possible-to-run-doom-inside-of-doom/ I've also read of people running Linux inside a game.
Yeah, saw a report where this idiot woman (idiot: "non-partisan conservative group) who'd been making a lot of noise against a drag show apparently said "you know what to do" on social media. The local cops pooh-poohed this.
Now that the FBI has come in, however....
I read the article and I am confused.
Are the directory names generated via "ls -al" command actual directories somewhere on the same machine where OpenGPT is running? Or are they complete fabrication? If the latter, what happens if you type say "cd proc" followed by "ls"? Will OpenGPT create on the fly a bunch of filenames? What if you the do a "vi" on one of those filenames?
One that'll hopefully do for financialization and derivatives what "Quantum of Nightmares" did for supermarket deli counters.
Just to be clear I'm talking about RocketPj's original idea, and I'm mulling over how it would work with mana/soul-stuff instead of bones, and quite possibly with leveraging interest-bearing student loan debt (you get a really boring degree and it eats your joi de vivre, or you drop out and, uh, the student loan company repossesses your joi de vivre, with Worse Consequences than a joyless life of wage slavery -- or maybe they just sell the bundle of junk assets that include your soul to a rich PHANG).
"the isotopes, elemental proportion, and chemicals found in your bone can be used to make a pretty decent guess of where you lived throughout your life"
Isotopic terroir or shibboleth, as it were.
Do you recommend any background reading about that?
Are the directory names generated via "ls -al" command actual directories somewhere on the same machine where OpenGPT is running? Or are they complete fabrication?
They're complete fabrications. There's no filesystem there. OpenGPT just has a statistical model of human/computer interactions that is heavily skewed towards a prompt of "ls -al" being followed by a directory listing showing those filenames.
It can't do terminal i/o so vi and emacs are non-starters, but it can understand cat "hello world" >>filename, and it can even execute python code plausibly if it's fed one-liners on the command line. Even though it has no python interpreter!
Why stop at just bones?
https://allthatsinteresting.com/robert-nelson-cryonics
I'm seeing treasure hunt here!
"While we often deride traditional Christian beliefs here (with good reason, when it comes to the apocalypse)"
Do we? Naturally we deride the fuckwits who think we're supposed to make it happen faster, but I don't think that counts as a "traditional Christian belief" (more of a "typical modern US perversion"). But we spend a considerable amount of time posting chunks from Revelation rewritten using modern language and modern cultural references etc, often with links to the newspaper articles the chunks originated from.
*"the isotopes, elemental proportion, and chemicals found in your bone can be used to make a pretty decent guess of where you lived throughout your life"
Isotopic terroir or shibboleth, as it were. Do you recommend any background reading about that?
There are probably textbooks out there, but I'm not familiar with them. I have seen pop science on this issue in books on Stonehenge archaeology, talking about where people interred at Stonehenge traveled during their lives.
Talking of "w.t.f?"
I've come across a couple of minor (?) - maybe not-so-minor nasties. The same bloody thing, to do with environmental damage & degradation & looting the land. The Boss likes/used to like *Chocolate Digestive Biscuits" ( McVities )- the latest batch looked slightly different - & when she tasted them, that was different, too. So, she looks at the detailed ingredients list: Fucking Bloody PALM OIL! The same has happened to M&S luxury "Mince Pies" Fucking Bloody PALM OIL again ... Destroying the "jungles" of SE Asia for fun & profit & robbing endangered species of habitat. for no real long-term return at all. The muck doesn't even taste nice, either. WHY are our stupid manufacturers doing this?
Around half of the world's sunflower oil is produced in Ukraine and Russia. Between drastically reduced output from the former and trade embargos on the latter, Putin's invasion has therefore a huge effect on both available supply and (because supply has halved and demand hasn't changed) prices.
This has (a) left a lot of big food suppliers frantically looking around for alternative food-grade oils they can use instead and (b) caused increased prices and some scarcity issues for other types of food oil, because supply of those is largely inelastic too. (Some more so than others; if you want to increase the supply of olive oil NOW, your grandfather needs to have planted the trees before I was born.)
Palm oil is the cheapest commonly-used food oil, and will therefore be dropped in as a substitute wherever someone was (a) using whatever the 2nd-cheapest oil is, and doesn't want to either raise prices or go bust or (b) caught off-guard and had to make do with whatever oil they could get at short notice.
paws4thot @ 67:
JohnS, see your emu and raise llamas and wallabies in West Dumbartonshire (Scotland).
Running loose? The reason it's weird news is because it escaped ...
I know where there are two Ostrich farms (and I guess Emus are close enough they might be raised on them) and I know of at least one farm where they have Llamas.
And I only mentioned it because it's comic relief from all the other grim news I've been seeing lately.
Ok, the llamas escaped, but seeing them in a residential street in Scotland is a touch surreal. OTOH the wallabies were released on an island in Loch Lomond by Lady Arran, and have appeared on the loch shores at intervals since.
The one I loved was somewhere in Austria that had wallabies running loose. Which got reported as kangaroos often enough to confuse the issue. Just saying "you know, Austria, the place with the wild kangaroos and wallabies" made me happy.
Wallabies seem to go feral pretty easily, I think from all the pastoral people who build their fences too low to be useful. So you get an escaped grazing animal that can easily travel anywhere it likes and has no local predators (other than cars, and they're not very good at hunting wallabies).
In a shocking, shocking turn of events (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/12/06/nyregion/trump-organization-trial-verdict), an American real estate mogul's "family real estate business was convicted on Tuesday of tax fraud and other financial crimes, a remarkable rebuke of the [mogul's] company and what prosecutors described as its 'culture of fraud and deception.'
"The conviction on all 17 counts, after more than a day of jury deliberations in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, resulted from a long-running scheme in which the...Organization doled out off-the-books luxury perks to some executives: They received fancy apartments, leased Mercedes-Benzes, even private school tuition for relatives, none of which they paid taxes on." (story continues on link above)
Which will have absolutely no effect on the various continued nefarious activities of T and his cronies.
Reminds me of John Hunter and his sneaky acquisition of the body of Charles Byrne, the Irish giant. For a fuller recounting of Hunter's fascinating career, The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery is a terrific read.
And buried at the bottom of the Ars comments on the new GPT AI-generated answers temporarily banned on coding Q&A site Stack Overflow.
Obxkcd
JHomes
The ultimate expression of late stage capitalism?
So why is this site listed under Reddits dealing with Non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?
How could pictures of human bones and skeletons be "cryptographic assets on a blockchain with unique identification codes and metadata that distinguish them from each other"?
Which will have absolutely no effect on the various continued nefarious activities of T and his cronies.
Alas.
However, I have an active fantasy life, so I can imagine Donald Trump taking the place of Julianne Moore in a certain scene from Lost World.
Yeah. Kinda repellent actually.
SO anyway, if we're imagining the DoJ as a re-engineered T. rex that's out of her paddock, I'd kind of hope that Trump graduates from the Julianne Moore scene in the second movie to the scene played by Martin Ferrero in the first movie.
Hope these help or something.
Placing a unique (usually copywrong related) identifier in a visual image is a long-standing technology. I presume that making that identifier a blockchain is a simple linking of 2 technologies.
context = UKR / RUS
such bittersweet schadenfreude
quote from CNN: "trajectories are unchanged: Ukraine: cold in winter, but winning and slowly better armed. Russia: cold in winter, but losing and slowly broken militarily. The key variable is Western patience and support."
a slow win is still a win... and basis for legends ("what did you do in the war grandpa?")
a slow loss is still a loss... and leads to embarrassment of a man habituated to pushing people out of windows and spicing up tea with radiological poisons... his inner circle ought to be experiencing quite the anal port pucker factor prior to partaking of afternoon tea with Putin...
schadenfreude(v) 1: savoring someone else's misfortune 2: combo of two German words schaden (harm) & freude (joy)
https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_d560bf41fe883451128d24ccac07054b
Heteromeles @ 89:
However, I have an active fantasy life, so I can imagine Donald Trump taking the place of Julianne Moore in a certain scene from Lost World.
If he did, would you take the Jeff Goldblum role and climb down to save him?
If he did, would you take the Jeff Goldblum role and climb down to save him?
I'll admit I got stuck trying to figure out who would take the Goldblum role.
So maybe a different Julianne Moore scene would be more appropriate? With Trump taking the Hans Gruber role instead?
It can't do terminal i/o so vi and emacs are non-starters, but it can understand cat "hello world" >>filename, and it can even execute python code plausibly if it's fed one-liners on the command line. Even though it has no python interpreter!
Now I began wondering what it would do with a one-liner fork bomb.
So, not so much an internet WTF, but a seriously IRL WTF.
I met a middle aged couple who were looking to buy a house for their daughter and her two little kids. They were walking around the house doing a video chat and chatting (with her mid flight to Sydney), all very 2020s.
I struck up a conversation with the dad and found out that their daughter was had left a high paying tech job and her social networks in Austin Texas (I believe that is in the USA?) because... one of her kids was about to start kindergarten, and the school district required kids to wear a Kevlar backpack to school.
There are places in the US that now require four year old kids to Kevlar wear body armor to attend school.
WTF!
Oddly it makes me think of the section in Cheswick and Bellovin's original Firewalls and Internet Security back in the day, which narrates the story of when they set up a honeypot and ended up simulating a slow response from a loaded unix box to the would-be hacker of said device.
There's a passage in the narrative, where the hacker, who believes they have a root shell and are located in "/" basically gets bored and gives a "/bin/rm -rf *" by way of covering their tracks. The authors regard this as a "declaration of war" so to speak, being a sign of intent to break the machine. I wonder whether the AI would have a similar reaction, and whether it has concepts of retaliatory responses. There's a story in that I imagine.
95:
while Austin the city is on the North American continent, residents will be insistent they are in Texas not citizens of the United States...
much the way holdouts in Montreal still are not accepting they are not citizens of Canada but rather "Quebec the nation"
as to those "kevlar backpacks" such 'performative security theater' is utterly useless since the area protected is less than half of one side of the child's torso but allows everyone to proclaim victory... my suspicions are on some amoral manufacturer (or retailer or both) bribing policy makers into making those useless items mandatory to oblige purchasing...
cheaper-simpler-better to outlaw rifles thereby avoiding the 'performative security theater'... which will never happen unless there are many, many more deaths of "important people" rather than mere children... * sigh *
"school district required kids to wear a Kevlar backpack to school."
As they say, citation needed.
I can find lots of requirements for clear or mesh backpacks. The googling of kevlar backpacks turns up people building and selling them, but no requirements from schools.
It does, however, sound exactly like a Republican propaganda bite.
"but it can understand cat "hello world" >>filename"
...which typically gives cat: hello world: No such file or directory
So many of these things remind me undeniably of stuff that's been around longer than I have, just operating off a much larger data corpus.
My bad, I meant echo, not cat.
There were a couple of wallaby colonies in England, too, but they may have gone extinct. I don't see them as any more unusual than any of the other naturalised animals we have.
One of these places was near Leek in Staffordshire. Wallabies and other animals escaped from a private zoo while its owner was away in WW2. The locals called the Wallabies Kangaroos. While my family was visiting relatives in Leek when I was about 7 or 8 years old and we went to The Roaches (A rocky outcrop which got it’s name in the Napoleonic wars when French POWs called them “Roches”). My relative shouted out “There’s a kangaroo behind you.” I didn’t believe them and by the time I’d turned round it had gone. Their numbers were decimated in the cold winter of 1963 but I think there are still a few left.
"there's a derivatives market for spiritual essence futures and you're, uh, leveraged so you need to go straight to hell ASAP or the market will collapse is quite a take"
This sounds like something that Max Gladstone should write... (in a really different way to how it would be in the New Management world)
Reminds me a bit of Clifford Stoll's honeypot in The Cuckoo's Egg.
while Austin the city is on the North American continent, residents will be insistent they are in Texas not citizens of the United States...
I think you seriously misunderstand the population of Austin.
There are places in the US that now require four year old kids to Kevlar wear body armor to attend school.
Maybe it's my poor google-fu, but I can't locate such a requirement, even when I broaden the search to outside Austin. Lots of sales sites, and a Florida Christian school that is recommending (and selling) them, but that's it.
Yep. Every time something goes wrong in the US some snake oil guy or group comes out with a "fix". But really it is almost always a way to extract money from people with too little sense.
And such things quickly morph into an exaggeration of reality. Like the tale of the sheriff in Moore county who supposedly sent out deputies to pray with a lady about the shot up power substations. (Just down the road from me.) That was NOT what was done. But the story fit the narrative that some liked so it spreads in a hurry.
Now for a really toxic mix of things to avoid, TV preachers (especially the cable only / late night guys) who are selling something to deal with the news headline crisis of the moment.
With Trump taking the Hans Gruber role instead?
More than one person, looking at his potential post-2020 options, were of the opinion that if he fled to Russia it was only a matter of time until he recreated Hans Gruber's exit. That may have gotten back to him, reinforcing his decision to take his chances in the US.
"Do you recommend any background reading about that?"
It's a very big development in archaeology, so there is quite a bit of material out there. For an example, check out 'River Kings' by Cat Jarman. It's academic and dry, but goes quite deep into some of the analysis of various bones (and other objecs) found in some 9th to 11th century gravesites found on the British Isles, as well as Scandinavia and deep into Eurasia.
I gather that isotopic analysis has upended a number of historical/archaeological assumptions, which is a good thing IMO.
More than one person, looking at his potential post-2020 options, were of the opinion that if he fled to Russia it was only a matter of time until he recreated Hans Gruber's exit. That may have gotten back to him, reinforcing his decision to take his chances in the US.
Possibly.
I think the more interesting issue here (with the verdict yesterday) is how difficult it is to disempower a billionaire who's actively resisting.
The other thing that's even more interesting is how much the super-rich world rallies around someone like Trump to insure that his debts won't take him down (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2022/07/29/donald-trumps-great-escape-how-the-former-president-solved-his-debt-crisis/). To me this is fascinating, because if there's one family who could be sacrificed to burnish the global reputation of tycoons, it would be the Trumps. But instead they bailed him out again. It's hard to say this isn't classism at work.
That's why I agree with Retiring, that just because Trump's business is now a convicted felon, it's no more likely to go out of business than other convicted felons like PG&E.
I'd heard that the wallaby colony around the Staffordshire Roaches were wiped out by another cold winter in '97, but a quick search of newspaper and BBC reports just now suggests more recent sightings. I've kept an eye out when visiting the area over the years, including in the mid '90's, when the colony was pretty large, but never spotted one.
The most famous UK wallaby related location is of course 62 West Wallaby Street.
Why would pics of bones (allegedly), with unique numbers, not be salable to suckers as NFTs?
I prefer him as the business guy in one of the two favorite scenes in Aliens. You know, where he opens a door....
I see nothing suggesting a requirement. On the other hand, a GOP propaganda byte - why, because cities?
Agree. The actual attitude of too many (white racist) Texans is they're not really sure Austin's part of Texas, being very liberal, even though the that's the Capital.
wallaby colony
Reading the Wikipedia article on wallabies, apparently the UK is big on letting them loose to form small groups all over the island(s).
How can I resist?
Tie me wallaby group down, boys....
Oh yeah, bodysnatching was big business back then, and medicine has generally always been interested in "unusual" bodies. The difference in Runyon's story was the victim still being a "futures commodity", as someone wonderfully put it above.
"Watch me wallaby's feed, mate, watch me wallaby's feed. They're a dangerous breed, mate, so watch me wallaby's feed."
Heteromeles @ 93:
I'll admit I got stuck trying to figure out who would take the Goldblum role.
So maybe a different Julianne Moore scene would be more appropriate? With Trump taking the Hans Gruber role instead?
A simple no would have sufficed.
David L @ 118:
Reading the Wikipedia article on wallabies, apparently the UK is big on letting them loose to form small groups all over the island(s).
Hmmmm? I wonder if the Red-necked wallaby would thrive here in the American south?
"I wonder whether the AI would have a similar reaction, and whether it has concepts of retaliatory responses."
It's not an AI in that sense. It doesn't really know what unix is, or what python is.
It's a chatbot backed onto a vast dataset. It'll look up a much-more-than-encyclopedic memory based on what textual responses that textual input expects, add in definitions of terms that make it look smart, and attempt basic inference given the semantic connections of the terms.
My experience is that if you ask a typical question, then it'll do very well. And at basic inference, not bad. Ask an atypical question that requires actual knowledge and it'll do less well.
I don't have the transcript, but I asked ChatGPT "When Abraham Lincoln went to Washington, did his left left go with him?" ChatGPT's reponse said that this was not known, gave a nice description of who Lincoln was, and then said that it wasn't known whether his left leg or any other of his body parts went with him went he went to Washington.
It can answer detailed questions about anatomy. It will say "yes" if you ask if Lincoln had a left leg. But it can't say if Lincoln's body parts went with him when he went to Washington.
It's very impressive at taking an input and giving an expected response it's seen elsewhere. Asked "If Bob is Anne's father, then is Anne Bob's daughter?" it got that right. But asked "Is Kanga Roo's mother?" it said that's not known, and then described who Roo is (Kanga's child), who Kanga is (including that she is motherly and her child is Roo).
But it's been extremely well trained to couch its response using grammar and word choice that are social cues that demonstrate knowledgabilty and inspire confidence in its replies. So when it says something wrong it still sounds very smart.
Yup.
They haven't invented Artificial Intelligence; they've invented Artificial Boris Johnson.
Attention conservation notice
I am about to go dark for a few days -- heading off to Dortmund for a friend's pre-Christmas party and some socializing. My flight out takes off at 6am tomorrow, so I need to be in a taxi at 4am; I am going to bed.
Back next Wednesday. (Not taking a laptop, this is R&R!)
You deserve it. Relax, and enjoy yourself.
Surely that's Bonnie Bedelia, not Julianne Moore?
Surely that's Bonnie Bedelia, not Julianne Moore?
Surely it is, and surely I screwed up. Thanks.
So what somebody needs to do next is a DeepFake Johson to present the answers in suitable blather-mode. (Why, yes, we did just watch the second series of 'The Capture'; excellent tech-thriller, recommended)
To me this is fascinating, because if there's one family who could be sacrificed to burnish the global reputation of tycoons, it would be the Trumps. But instead they bailed him out again. It's hard to say this isn't classism at work.
The link gives me "404 File not found" and directs me to other Forbes articles.
However I think it is less classism and more class interests. No tycoon wants to set a precedent which could be used against him. And by "precedent" I mean less in the legalistic sense ("it happened once therefore is allowed to happen again) and more in the sense of lessons learned -- they do not want any law enforcement agency anywhere in the world to have a working example of "this is how to take down a billionaire".
Also, "sacrificing" Trump family will not gain any goodwill to any other billionaires, except MAYBE to one or two who take a major and public role in the said sacrificing. If anything, it moves the Overtone Window on prosecuting billionaires in the direction none of them want it to move.
(Why, yes, we did just watch the second series of 'The Capture'; excellent tech-thriller, recommended)
I think we all need to start saying where things such as this are to be seen. I just looked it up and it's on Peacock. So I can see it. :)
I'd love to have a citation too. Unfortunately, as stated, it was just one meat bag talking to another meat bag, about why their daughter was fleeing the USA and where they were going to house her and the kids. If I read it online I would assume hyperbole, but in real life it is a gut punch.
If I read it online I would assume hyperbole, but in real life it is a gut punch.
In real life it is still possibly hyperbole, misinformation, or mistake. There's a reason hearsay isn't highly regarded as evidence…
I can point you to a large number of people around here (central North Carolina) who will tell you similarly crazy things in person. All nonsense. But firmly believed. For most such things there is a nugget of truth but the story grew as it got passed around.
I can see a school board member proposing or even the entire board of a small rural school voting for such a thing. But so far I really doubt any such thing has passed. Around here it would be in the news within 24 hours, even if done is one of our remote counties. Ditto Texas.
That doesn't mean the state of Texas isn't somewhat over the top with crazy things. And I have friends in Texas who will tell you the same. Plus my wife was a resident of the state for a 10 year stretch that ended with Covid.
The site is satire - or at any rate aspirational about acquiring the bones of billionaires.
From their Twitter:
The Billionaire Bone Bureau
@TheofficialBBB
Which Billionaires are you most excited to see pieces of when we launch our first collection?
#JeffBezos #elonmusk #markzuckerberg #NFT #NFTS #Crypto #NFTinvestor #Whitelist #NFTartist #nftgallery #nftnews #metaverse #web3 #ETH #web3 #opensea #NFTart #ethereum #ETH
131:
try this...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2022/07/29/donald-trumps-great-escape-how-the-former-president-solved-his-debt-crisis/?sh=5d9f77a53970
A good point. We got ‘The Capture’ on big-river prime, but it it was a BBC or maybe ITV show so likely available on quite a few systems. The first series is mostly a somewhat alive young DI discovering how technology can be (mis?)used in intelligence/policing but the second series goes much, much, bigger and more serious.
Sounds like something I needed to read 30 years ago. Queued in my reading list now.
The Capture
Are we talking about the same thing?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8201186/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
Yes, particularly the bit where he rubbed his keys against the wires.
Talking of "wtf?"
This Grauniad piece - showing just how utterly insane, fascist & out-of-control the tory right are at the moment.
oh... crud... just took me twenty minutes to remember how to properly spell "versatile"... about a dozen false starts...
which suggests my brain fog is rolling in again... hopefully just early onset fatigue due to being 61...
I really want to be a hypochondriac about it but there's been at least three intervals when I suspect I have had covid just not the (extreme) respiratory distress warranting hospitalization... brain fog & exhaustion & loss of appetite & other less joyous affects...
so if in coming days I post anything particularly drivel-ish I shall tidy up in a couple weeks (knock woodish veneer)
Regarding Wallabies in the UK, I'm a native of West Sussex and I can remember seeing them back in the 1960's and 70's in the area north of the South Downs around the Steyning, Ashington, Washington area. Not seen any for a while, but being in my mid 70's now I don't get out walking as much as I used to. I found this with only a quick search; https://www.sussexexpress.co.uk/news/people/meet-the-mysterious-animal-lurking-in-the-sussex-countryside-3608612
What shocked me recently wasn't on the internet, but experienced on Tuesday evening at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge. For those that don't live round here, this is the flagship hospital for the East of England, a major teaching hospital, occupies the area of a medium-sized town, etc..
Whilst I was getting details taken and stuff, this guy came in. Vomiting, suspected ulcerative colitis flare-up, couldn't sit up without being in extreme pain. And there were no trolleys free for him to lie on. God knows what they'd have done if someone came in with a broken leg. Anyway, this guy periodically had to lie on the floor whilst he was waiting, because sitting for any length of time was too painful.
You know your NHS is in a bad way when patients have to lie on the floor in the waiting room.
I actually got seen pretty quickly. Suspected viral chest infection, so basically told to bugger off and wait for it to get better on its own. At that point the other guy had still not been seen by a doctor. Neither had another guy who came in shortly afterwards, who'd passed out in the street and was clearly having some neurological issues (hands twitching, periodically drifting off to sleep, and waking up confused and not sure where he was). I couldn't help feeling like this was battlefield triage - get rid of the minor problems first to free up space, instead of triaging by need.
probably safe to assume folks on this blog know what schadenfreude is
think ur calling it in a little early myself
Scott Sanford @109:
More than one person, looking at his potential post-2020 options, were of the opinion that if he fled to Russia it was only a matter of time until he recreated Hans Gruber's exit.
US: We have issued a warrant for the arrest of Donald J. Trump.
Russia: He is unavailable. Your warrant has no force within our borders. Russia, in recognition of Mr. Trump's service, has settled him in a lavish retirement dacha in Defenestritsiya Oblast, and will strongly protect his privacy.
Russia: He is unavailable...
And this could be months after his Hans Gruber moment. They needn't be in any hurry to release any news about the Manchurian Cantaloupe until it suited their purposes, particularly if "Donald Trump" is still issuing profitable instructions to his holdings outside Russia.
HowardNYC @143:
I really want to be a hypochondriac about it but there's been at least three intervals when I suspect I have had covid just not the (extreme) respiratory distress warranting hospitalization... brain fog & exhaustion & loss of appetite & other less joyous affects...
Unfortunately that sounds about right.
I've had COVID 3 times: summer of 2020 (almost asymptomatic, but a couple of weeks later I was asking, "Why am I so fucking stupid???"), late summer 2021 (symptoms minor although confounded by a medication problem -- took me a while to realize that I had renewed my subscription to brain fog), January 2022 (symptoms limited to "WTF, I haven't had a hangover for years? Wait a minute, I only had 2 drinks yesterday..." but then the brain fog got noticeably worse again).
Currently doing better. I still have brain fog, but it's abating again. Furthermore, knowing what brain fog is and how it works has been extremely helpful.
The TL;DR is: Brain fog is not dementia, not depression, not burnout, not an emotional issue. (It gets misdiagnosed as all of those.) Brain fog is a very specific symptom: a disorder of the brain's executive function. Kind of like your modern linux box is suddenly running MS-DOS 6.
The second TL;DR is that brain fog sufferers are subject to Post-Exertion Malaise, which means that it's possible to rise to the occasion and be physically or mentally capable -- but then you pay for it with days, or weeks, of being wiped out and unable to connect the dots. This is a big deal. Whatever you do, don't try to power through. It won't end well. As crazy as it sounds, you need to develop the self-discipline to stop overexercising, and to refrain from overdoing mental work. Which sucks.
I'm educating myself about the nature of brain fog. It's working. I highly recommend it.
If you've got any resources on brain fog, I'd be very grateful if you posted them here.
Graham @ 145
I have a horrible suspicion that it is "deliberate" { Without being Deliberate }
The NHS has been run-down & run-down - in the hope that it breaks & then we can have a wonderful US-style "healthcare" with the NHS becoming Medicaid - ie. a second-class or third-class sop for the poor plebs - i.e. 90% of the population.
But OF COURSE the tories did everything they could to save the NHS. - I wonder if the populace are stupid enough to buy it - after all they voted for BoZo & Brexit, or enough of them did ...
How about this story on Motherboard? The Morningside Cannibals have nothing on these two.
Yup. That’s the show.
"Russia, in recognition of Mr. Trump's service, has settled him in a lavish retirement dacha in Defenestritsiya Oblast, and will strongly protect his privacy."
Heh. I've been wondering today about who would and wouldn't want to see Mr. Trump in a position to win the Republican Nomination in 2024. Or not see him a position to do that. And to undertake measures to promote their desired outcome.
A late entry that I ran across today - Cult 'prophet' Samuel Bateman was 'disgusted' over his child bride's bedwetting, the FBI says. To borrow a line from Buffy, not enough yuck in the world.
Greg said: I have a horrible suspicion that it is "deliberate" { Without being Deliberate }
I followed a few doctors on "covid twitter", here in Australia, a couple of UK, and some Canadian ones for a while.
It looks to me like they were trying to starve the NHS, but then covid hit. So the results are even worse than they intended.
It's a gigantic disaster everywhere, not just the UK. Canadian doctors are beside themselves. As covid has destroyed or damaged the immune systems of so many people of all ages, they've just been swamped. They're telling stories of pediatric hospitals sending sick children home on oxygen, which is unheard-of. They've run out of drugs in some hospitals, they're at ~200% capacity and offloading older children into adult hospitals.
There's an avalanche of heart attack and stroke everywhere (again, all ages) and they're just not being seen in the golden hour.
Here in Australia, the ambulances are sitting on hospital ramps for hours.
So yeah, the UK doctors, and doctors everywhere are reporting battle field triage, three categories. Probably not going to die, send them away, probably will die, don't bother, might die but can be sorted quickly, do them first. Not surprisingly, this is burning up medical staff like nothing else. Australia is currently trying to steal third world countries' medical staff, particularly nursing and aged care staff.
The advice is try not to get sick or have an accident.
I have a horrible suspicion that it is "deliberate"
Really, most things are not deliberate, they're SNAFU.
Troutwaxer @150:
If you've got any resources on brain fog, I'd be very grateful if you posted them here.
It's early days yet, but here are a few links that I've found helpful. Note that these are not medical papers. They are 10,000 foot snapshots written for the layman. If you want medical papers please Google your own. :-)
If anyone finds any generally helpful or pertinent articles, please post them here as well. I'd appreciate it, and I guess others would too.
The gold standard, for a survey of the field, is this one: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/long-covid-brain-fog-symptom-executive-function/671393/
The downside is that I think The Atlantic keeps it behind a firewall. If any of you can't access it, email me. I'm whblondeau, and my email service provider is the mail service of the Great Big Search Engine.
This one describes how brain fog is closely related to ME/CFS ("Chronic Fatigue Syndrome"), and how the pittance of research and care that has accumulated there is giving COVID brain fog care a bit of a running start: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/mecfs-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-doctors-long-covid/671518/
This article describes a lot of the issues that brain fog patients are running into, and discusses some ways to get around it. It's a helpful guide to the deficiencies of medical care, and of health provider education. Useful for navigating health care structures that can't find their collective ass with their collective hands in their collective back pockets, when confronted with brain fog: https://www.popsci.com/health/long-covid-care-chronic-illness/
Hope this is helpful. These articles really helped to orient my thinking, and I've sent these links to some of the doctors & therapists where I get care.
Howard NYC @ 143:
oh... crud... just took me twenty minutes to remember how to properly spell "versatile"... about a dozen false starts...
THEY pounded spelling into us so hard back in elementary school I don't usually have TOO MUCH trouble. And "sound it out" still works all these years later - vers•a•tile.
For the rest, with the hidden/silent letters - where 'e' is pronounced 'a' or 'i' - spell-check WORKS as long as you can recognize the word you want.
I don't use Auto-Correct, but spell-check is my lifeline.
which suggests my brain fog is rolling in again... hopefully just early onset fatigue due to being 61...
Fatigue will do that to you no matter what age you are.
I really want to be a hypochondriac about it but there's been at least three intervals when I suspect I have had covid just not the (extreme) respiratory distress warranting hospitalization... brain fog & exhaustion & loss of appetite & other less joyous affects...
Instead of worrying about it, get tested and know the bad news for certain.
so if in coming days I post anything particularly drivel-ish I shall tidy up in a couple weeks (knock woodish veneer)
If you do, someone will surely point it out for you 😕 /snark
there's basic definition of "deliberate" in the common dialect of the English language and then there's the political variant...
"deliberate" versus "intent" versus "motivation"
each having its place in the linguistic toolkit of politics... I have no doubt a 'political science' wonk has an exquisitely nuanced glossary somewhere amongst the zillions of blogs 'n self-published books (but damned if I know whose version is trustworthy)
actions based on decisions are "intentional" (thinking/selecting) but not always having an outcome that was "intended" (sought out)... with "motivation" driving the policymaking which in turn spurred onwards the decisions made in support of policy drafted to reflect that "motivation"
when I was dating actively a hundred years ago, I had as my "intention" to get laid... if ever a woman had a missed period, it was never "intentional" by her nor my "intentionally" provided DNA to conceive a child... that was not my "motivation" for sex... so pregnancy was not "deliberate" but result of poor decisions and flawed policy and clumsy implementation of decisions in support of glandularly-driven policy...
everyone involved in the health care industry proclaims "patients are number one" and yet here we are... 30 months into a planet-wide pandemic and very few nations avoided mass causalities due to effective policymaking nor was there deep thought prior to decisions leading to laws-regulations-decrees
and 'ditto' on that chain of linked flaws which led to suffering due to nobody ready to prevent economic implosion nor support the 95% of populace not wealthy enough to have a safety net...
here in US we are slowly crawling out of the crazy pit filled with fascist snakes who are (happy news for the rest of us) beginning to attack one another...
whereas in the UK someone seemed to have as underlying "motivation" to implement a nation-wide LARP revival of those most horrid pages from Charles Dickens novels... with involuntary cos-play participation in malnutrition-loneliness-frostbite by the elderly-children-unemployed...
why they are "motivated" towards destroying the lives of the poorest 10 million out of a populace of 67.33 million is a good question to be asking... my gut hunch is whispering "industrialized serfdom" and "debt peonage" and "civil rights rollback"
...my worry is there are crazies in US who find this "deliberate" FUBAR economy in UK to their liking and thus a role model
RE: Covid-19 brain fog: Nat Geo has a bit of a fluffy article that might be paywalled: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/why-does-covid-19-cause-brain-fog-answer-immune-inflammation-synapse?
It's about some research which suggests that Covid may trigger a process that causes damage to synapses between neurons (original article here https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(20)30495-1?)
Those look interesting. Thanks much!
CONTEXT = USA
For folks learning English as a second language, those silent letters are nasty...
...so to help newcomers to America, keep in mind
there is one silent 'K' in "knight"
two silent 'KK' in "knickknack"
and three silent 'KKK' in "Republican"
Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse ...
There's apparently chatter on Twitter now about Musk buying Wikipedia to eliminate its "Left Wing Bias".
It's fascinating to me, how a Congress of lickspittles and (demi)fascists can nonetheless boot out people like Liz Cheney, whose politics I loathe but whom I nonetheless admire for standing up for the rule of law.
I guess, in D&D terms, this is analogous to how orcs beat hobgoblins?
chatter on Twitter now about Musk buying Wikipedia
I suspect that while technically plausible that falls into the wild fantasy set of ideas. It's all non-profit and not shareholding based, so while the current directs could definitely convert it and transfer ownership, the question has to be why they would do that, and what would happen if they wanted to.
Maybe we need a new Laundry Files character, a very rich person who is not competent enough to be properly evil despite trying very hard.
Harmony?
The new one being eHarmony?
I'm sorry, I'll get back in my box now.
Canadian doctors are beside themselves.
Nurses too. Here they've been under emergency orders (which means they can be reassigned to any hospital, even one hours away from their family*), not to mention a government-mandated pay cut**. It hasn't escaped their notice that administrators' bonuses and politicians' 'extra duty pay' wasn't similarly limited — or that they waited until after the police got very nice pay raises before passing the law…
Hospitals were operating over 100% capacity even before Covid. They've been running on fumes since then. Lots of bad blood there, such as administrators getting vaccines before nursing staff (back when we rationing them).
Alberta's worse. But that's a given, unfortunately, with the convoy-adjacent extremists in charge there. There they're deliberately cutting the number of doctors and nurses 'to save money', despite having a budget surplus.
Years ago a former conservative cabinet minister was recorded telling his staff they had to "create a crisis" to force a change in the system (ie. open it to privatization). I think this is more of the same, given what happened with Long Term Care***.
*UK readers note that the UK is over 4 times smaller than Ontario, so "hours" can mean multiples of 24 in terms of driving time…
**OK, a 1% pay raise, which was less than inflation even before Covid.
*** Former conservative ministers own large chunks of the enlarged private LTC sector, and the liability laws were recently changed to make private LTC homes basically unsueable. Fatalities at for-profit LTC homes were four times those in non-profit homes.
It's fascinating to me, how a Congress of lickspittles and (demi)fascists can nonetheless boot out people like Liz Cheney, whose politics I loathe but whom I nonetheless admire for standing up for the rule of law.
I guess, in D&D terms, this is analogous to how orcs beat hobgoblins?
The difference between chaotic evil and lawful evil?
The difference between chaotic evil and lawful evil?
I was about to say more or less that. You beat me to it.
Liz Cheney, whose politics I loathe but whom I nonetheless admire for standing up for the rule of law.
This is US based but I believe the trends apply to much of the world just now.
Liz believed that to win elections you had to convince people your way was better than the other way. And if you didn't convince enough people, well you went home and maybe tried again.
DT has convinced a non trivial number of people it is OK to believe "their" way is right and if a fair election gets in the way of power,
changerig the election or just skip it entirely.Here's an article about the loser of the Arizona Sec of State (who runs elections) where once he lost he went full on nuts. (For bonus point check out the loser for governor there, Kari Lake) (I think you get a few reads of articles before the paywall starts.)
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2022/12/08/mark-finchem-channels-election-loss-in-vitriolic-antisemitic-tweets/69709981007/
H @ 165
It's the difference between "lawful Evil" - Cheny & "Chaotic Evil -the rest of the "R's" (!)
- Ah I see Rbt Prior has had similar thoughts ... nice one.
And what's the equivalent when the mistress is male, I'm thinking "rent boy" but that's too derogatory.
A bit late to say this, but I don't think anyone else has said, a catamite. Lovely archaic word that sounds properly posh.
No, a catamite is a boy kept by a man. "Kept man" is the closest.
gigolo ?
Brain fog: I know all to much about this being nearly 5 years into M.E! As Bill says, M.E seems to be a good guide. The M.E society is a good place to check out, this is a more specific link:
https://meassociation.org.uk/product/covid-19-long-covid-me-cfs/
But the M.E society now mention long covid in the same breath as M.E on their front page. So lots of information:
https://meassociation.org.uk/
RentPal?
"Kind of like your modern linux box is suddenly running MS-DOS 6."
It does. Whenever I want to run PSPICE. QEMU FTW.
"Whatever you do, don't try to power through."
I find it can be useful to switch to something sufficiently different. Avoiding or handling hitting the wall of mud over analogue design by fiddling with software instead, or finding some new book about WW1 or articles on railway or industrial history to read, or something, for example.
"Bit on the side" seems to more or less work and has the advantage that it still works whatever the preferences and genders of the parties concerned.
I'm not sure we have reliable records for all places and times in "99.5% of human history ... without money or the concept"
He stole them.
The wallaby story I heard was of a climber who pulled over the top of an edge which might well have been the Roches, and was face to face with a Wallaby to their mutual surprise. The Wallaby bounced away and the climber ... was leading on a rope with proper protection placed, but also bounced a bit.
Russian agents/dupes/fellow travellers breaking components that will remove spares or production of components required for the Ukrainian power distribution system as part of the Russian special war operation.
Or perhaps not.
I'm sorry, I'm with EC on this, catamite has a specific meaning and no more modern usage to generalise it.
"Bit on the side" doesn't really carry the power imbalance that the politician types seem to need, and "kept man" seems like the least awful. Polite society version, anyway, since fuckbuddy has a word in it that people who can't say "toilet" struggle with. "let me visit the bathroom to consult my kept man" has that ring of euphemism about it.
Well, yeah, but it sounds like it's a euphemism for going for a wank. Possibly a bit too solitary for the context.
Better than coming face to face with a fulmar chick.
Money in this case isn't barter or credit. Nor is it a fixed weight of a precious substance (e.g. a silver shekel). Money as we understand it was first a fixed weight of a precious substance (a metal), molded into a standard shape and often stamped with various symbols of the local ruler, who generally guaranteed the value of the money and generally collected taxes in that money.
In other words, a coin, although when the Chinese did it, they made little knives first.
This form of money demands a bunch of innovations (civilization, metallurgy, a need for coinage abstracted from credit), of which metallurgy leaves the most durable scars on the landscape.
This is where we get into the same mess as that Ancient Apocalypse thing that's reportedly playing on Netflix. The basic point is that metallurgy causes two kinds of evidence that appear to be long-lived.
--One is the disappearance of readily worked surface deposits, for obvious reasons
--The second is the appearance of large debris and slag piles from mining and smelting.
A third bit of evidence is that even local metallurgy leaves a fair amount of atmospheric crap in local glaciers and probably in varved (sediment-layered) lakes in the vicinity. They've used Andean glaciers to estimate the onset of Andean metallurgy about 1300-odd years ago, for instance.
Anyway, without metal, it's hard to get metal for coins and hence money, and we apparently have decent data on when those all started.
Note that I agree with Graeber (Debt) that credit preceded money by at least 1,500 year, and that people have been trading stuff as long as there have been people. The Bronze age ran on silver weight (the shekel being a weight of silver that could be traded to feed a workman for a day), and often stuff was credited against silver or other things stored in temples and castles and borrowed against, rather than people carrying around hunks of silver or bronze and weighing them out (tedious!).
We can also argue about whether the use of cacao beans in Mesoamerica and shell and other beads meet all the definitions of money (being an abstract symbol with a given value guaranteed by an authority who often had an army to coerce full faith and credit for them). That also gets interesting.
But that's where I'm coming from. We're missing evidence for any of this going back very far, and we've even got modern evidence well into the 1920s of large populations (e.g. Highland New Guinea) where people lived without money. It's kind of new, so far as I can tell.
"Bit on the side" doesn't really carry the power imbalance that the politician types seem to need,
Boy-toy?
Adrian Midgley @ 184:
Russian agents/dupes/fellow travellers breaking components that will remove spares or production of components required for the Ukrainian power distribution system as part of the Russian special war operation.
Or perhaps not.
Well, a Russian agent, Maria Butina, DID infiltrate the NRA.
NRA Was 'Foreign Asset' To Russia Ahead of 2016
Interesting thing about that, ... Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022; on 26 February 2022, CONVICTED RUSSIAN SPY Maria Butina appeared on the Russian State TV show Vremya Pokazhet to condemn Ukraine's leadership for passing out guns to civilian volunteers willing to resist the Russian invaders because “people don’t know how to handle them and a child might be killed at home”
[REDACTED]! [EXPLETIVE!! DELETED!!] !!!
"I'm sorry, I'm with EC on this, catamite has a specific meaning and no more modern usage to generalise it."
Yes... it implied not just something about the age of the person, but particular sex roles.
The sodomite/catamite distinction relates to a cultural milieu in which someone who received anal sex was considered a different type of person that someone on the, uh, other end of things.
And whether that was really the views on sex roles in the classical period, or a weird spin invented by classicists in decades past attempting to interpret the classical period through their own bizarre cultural hangups, or half of each, I don't know. But I do know that they're terms with a lot of baggage and I'd stay well clear of them unless I was trying to be very, very offensive.
Q: can we resume discussions of the BBB and cease this chatter of sodomy?
if I wanted to read about unwelcome abuses of power and dry humping I'd be tracking headlines about the US GOP's efforts to turn America into a realm of industrialized serfs and prevent peasants from having unrestricted access to books
Well, to get back to the original topic, consider the following connected mess:
1) creepy dystopian billionaires (our favorite guys Musk and Thiel)
2) crypto (S. Bankman-Fried/C. Ellison)
3) "effective altruism" and "longtermism" (MacAskill, Bostrom, et al.)
4) Bay Area rationalists (thought-leaders S. Alexander and E. Yudkowsky)
5) "human biodiversity" and neoreaction (C. Yarvin et al.)
It's all a bunch of stuff that I find not so much *shocking* as (to echo the song) "kinda funny/kinda sad". Goddess knows I am very sad myself, and am yet another person who fits the demographic of the comment section here. But I should think maybe all these people would do better at creating something a little more stylish and a little less cringey.
The big picture is the rise of fascism and the decay of belief in democracy in “the west”. Billionaires and obscure cults (crypto and Q) are symptoms.
It’s not a coincidence this is happening as the fight against fascism slips from living memory.
Right wing dictators have always been fine for our puppet states. But once our elites would rather break/bend the rules at home than lose within them then we are all in trouble.
Outside the EU the UK is particularly vulnerable. We have always depended on convention and elite consensus. Without that we are a commons majority away from tyranny. I don’t have particular faith in the emergency backstop of a septuagenarian monarch.
H The shekel being a weight of silver that could be traded to feed a workman for a day - ah like the Japanese Koku of rice?
Johnny @ 194
All too true - I've almost given up on commenting on this: The parallels with the 1930's claiming that "Democracy is weak & spineless" are very telling. Encouraged by scum like Cruella Braverman & her extremely nasty friends of course ...
From TODAY's papers: This
and
This too
... Echo from the 1950's & people saying "It couldn't happen here" & my father who saw 1945-48 Germany, up close & personal { CivMilGov } growling in rage that oh yes if bloody well could, all too easily.
remember, "it's only sodomy if it's from the sodom and gomorrah area of mesopotamia, otherwise it's just sparkling butt stuff"
correction, "it's only sodomy if it's in sodom..."
I don't care what folks do for fun, I came here to engage my declining intellect in something approaching challenging brain stuff...
...better yet if we could all mash we collective intellects proper-like we could save the freaking planet by figuring out how to convince everyone to implement EV replacement of ICE at a rate of 5% annually... that and require every city with a populace of 10^6 or more to install a gigawatt of wind turbines annually inside city limits...
...its just crazy enough that it might work
Before the commentariat really offends someone, I've got to point out that a catamite is "a boy kept for homosexual practices," or as we call them, "sex abuse victim." It would probably be a really good idea to make it clear that no one on this blog thinks this is a good idea, even if previous societies condoned it?
The current term for a man whose partner supports him financially is "house husband."
It’s not a coincidence this is happening as the fight against fascism slips from living memory.
Same thing happened even earlier with banking. Once those who lived through the Great Depression were no longer politically relevant, governments relaxed banking rules set up to prevent Boom-Bust, with predictable results.
I think Jane Jacobs got it right in Dark Age Ahead: losing institutional memory as people retire/die is a more serious problem than we admit.
how to convince everyone to implement EV replacement of ICE at a rate of 5% annually
Well, step one would be having EVs available to purchase. Around here the wait time is nearly two years, with dealers charging 'access fees' on top of the sticker price for a customer to actually get a vehicle. (Apparently legal by the fine print in purchase agreements.)
I'm planning on running my ICE car into the ground. I put so few km on it that the economic case for an EV just isn't there even if electricity was free, and practically given that all the environmental costs of its manufacture have already happened it makes no sense to replace it with a new vehicle while it still works. I'm hoping to get at least another five years out of it, maybe longer.
Outside the EU the UK is particularly vulnerable.
I don't understand your point. Hungary, Poland, England, Italy, Turkey, France, and others to some degree are all getting into authoritarianism at various levels.
figuring out how to convince everyone to implement EV replacement of ICE at a rate of 5% annually
or maybe find a way to live without feeling we're entitled to drive everywhere as much as we do before such a way is found for us by (reduced) circumstances
…better yet if we could all mash we collective intellects proper-like we could save the freaking planet by figuring out how to
convince everyone to implement EV replacement of ICE at a rate of 5% annuallyget rid of motorised individual transport…There, fixed that for you.
EVs are not a solution for the impending climate crash. Reducing energy consumption is. And in case of the most energy-consuming nation on the planet (the USA) that means: reducing it by 80% or so. 'Keeping the American lifestyle as it is now, just a little greener', isn't going to cut it.
EVs are not a solution for the impending climate crash. Reducing energy consumption is. And in case of the most energy-consuming nation on the planet (the USA) that means: reducing it by 80% or so. 'Keeping the American lifestyle as it is now, just a little greener', isn't going to cut it.
Oh dear, it's a bit more complicated than that.
American energy consumption is literally cast in concrete, because most major American cities are built around car culture. They were designed with housing generally separated from heavy industry for legitimate health reasons (google "environmental racism" for examples of what happens without this separation), but the upshot is that we don't have the infrastructure to get away from cars anytime soon.
Rather worse, it's reasonably likely that we don't have the raw materials (especially concrete as currently made) to rebuild our cities into a more sustainable configuration, even if there was the political will to rewrite people's land ownership claims on the massive (Cultural Revolution) level required.
Worse still, we've largely built from shoddy materials that only last a few decades, and unlike say, rammed earth or rock, we can't remake the resulting rubble into new building material in energy-efficient ways*, any more than we currently can remake old lithium batteries into new ones, or old solar cells into new ones.
There are some ways around this.
--The easiest one, of course, is to provoke a nuclear war, with the hope that enough people survive to rebuild cities sustainably. I'm not entirely joking: treating the US to a WW2 level fire-bombing campaign is impossible, so that impetus for urban revitalization is off the table. Nuclear war is the only practical method we currently have to force the US to rebuild its cities. So if you want this to happen rapidly, you need to cozy up to Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi. And I think most people (likely including Putin and Xi) would reject this proposal with extreme prejudice.
--Possibly a truly nasty virgin-ground pandemic would do it too. Covid doesn't count, unless we run out of vaccines. And no, I'm not going to suggest cozying up to the anti-vaxxers and wannabe plague engineers.
Otherwise we're stuck with EVs, incremental renovations, finding new materials, staving off the extinction crisis (anyone noticed COP 15? If not, why not?), and working in democratic politics to fight the influence of people who profit from the status quo and spend their influence accordingly.
Which sucks, of course, but here we are. If you're not involved in this (I am), why aren't you? It's not like politics in a democracy is a spectator sport, after all. We're all supposed to be on the field, not in the stands. Otherwise the game becomes an oligarchy or worse.
*Building with trash is where things like earthships come into play. Cue Greg Tingey disparaging these...
@102: there are allegedly wild wallabies in the woods behind my house (Cambridgeshire). I've never seen them, but I know there are deer living there and the only time I see them is when they get into next-door's garden.
It's not implausible: there's a zoo not that far away that has both wallabies (including albino ones) and cassowaries wandering around.
Well, that's Christmas dinner sorted out: if you have the cajones to take one on, of course ;)
Do they admit to any escapes?
H @ 198
You had better look up the classical legend of Ganymede) then.
Sometimes regarded as the avatar of homosexual love, as well as being a "very pretty boy" - NOT to be confused with: "No, he's just a very naughty boy!" { M. Python }
- later -
Covid doesn't count, unless we run out of vaccines. - which looks like is going to happen in China, which could cause an "interesting" partial collapse of the PRC & then the world supply chain - maybe.
Re. Your comment on "Earthships"
- you DO REALISE that re-using old car/lorry (etc) tyres is completely forbidden, here, yes/no? ... for apparently good actual environmental reasons { Like 'orrible chemicals leaching out, I think }
This causes those of us who are saddled with old tyres as to W.T.F. do we do with the damned things & dispose of them?
“any more than we currently can remake old lithium batteries into new ones, or old solar cells into new ones.” Nonsense not supported by facts, with supporting evidence presented several times in the past on this very blog.
“Reducing energy consumption is. ” Not entirely correct - it’s not the energy it’s the environmental damage caused in its production and possibly, usage. If you produce energy without creating pollution then there is no problem. Starting a new coal mine in Cumbria is not an example of doing that.
And finally for this morning, paraphrasing from a Guardian article, Kwareng admits “we didn’t think of the consequences “, which seems like it should be a career ending move. Most definitely a WTF.
"In other local news here in North Carolina:
Emu on the loose in Person County
Not fodder for horror, but weird."
I live in southeastern Michigan, and have seen an emu/ostrich running around on a farm, in February. I didn't know that they could survive 20 degrees (F) and six inches of snow.
"...the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had" ?
Yes, in Trumps! There are some blocks of flats in Glasgow where the serious estimate of the lifespan of the buildings is less than a usual UK 25 year mortgage!
Heteromeles @ 198:
Before the commentariat really offends someone, I've got to point out that a catamite is "a boy kept for homosexual practices," or as we call them, "sex abuse victim." It would probably be a really good idea to make it clear that no one on this blog thinks this is a good idea, even if previous societies condoned it?
The current term for a man whose partner supports him financially is "house husband."
I think the thread has drifted somewhat. I believe the original poster was looking for a male equivalent of a "mistress", not a partner in marriage.
A brief google search & consultation with on-line dictionaries suggests "Gigolo".
Although "kept man" may be more to the point if the woman pays for some arrangement of living quarters (as is common with men and their mistresses).
Is that actually happening though? Last I heard it had been on again/off again for the last 10 years or so, and the majority view was that it was basically a scam based around using regulatory obstacles to play silly money games, and actually getting to the point of doing some mining wasn't really part of what they were up to, just what they pretended to be after to make the scam work. Some Australian outfit involved who had a bit of a habit of doing things like this.
Robert Prior @ 199:
I think Jane Jacobs got it right in Dark Age Ahead: losing institutional memory as people retire/die is a more serious problem than we admit.
Preaching to the choir here brother. Who you gotta' convince is the Gen-XYZ "Ok Boomer!" crowd.
Actually, I just had AN IDEA for horror-tinged hopepunk, or possibly hopepunk-tinged horror (translation: get the brain bleach ready).
This is about Solutions to many of our urban woes, and possibly to climate change: Radical mycology and termite cults.
The point is that much of our stuff in modern civilization doesn't decompose easily. This was seen as a feature, but now it's turning out to be a bug, because we need to be able to trash or at least remanufacture mass quantities of junk without using mass quantities of energy, and that's really hard to do.
For many/most organics, fungi are probably the best decomposers, and people like Paul Stamets have built careers out of finding and culturing fungi that break down everything from carpet to nerve gas (see his book Mycelium Running).
Problem is, mycology gets a bad rap in anglophone science, primarily because of a culture-bound ick factor (eww! mold and rot, mildew and toadstools!), so commercial and academic research on mycoremediation is exasperatingly slow and half-assed (see Stamets. This has also been my personal experience. "Not invented here" doesn't even begin to cover the prejudice against working with fungi).
Enter the radical mycologists, a group of mycophilic biohackers who have decided to take matters into their own hands. If capitalism won't save the world with fungi, they will try to DIY-style. Note, this is a real group, and they're less noticeably wingnuts than most of the groups we talk about here. McCoy's Radical Mycology tome is far larger than my college mycology textbook. Or than Stamet's Mycelium Running. And quite honestly, I support them, at least emotionally. I'm weird.
Then there's the "termite cults", which I tripped over in Fairhead and Leach's (2000) paper "Termites, Society, and Ecology: Perspectives from West Africa," which you can read part of on Google Books (it's in a really trippy symposium publication). Termites, like fungi, are really good at breaking stuff down. And like fungi, they're generally hated on in Anglophone countries (example: let's see how the Aussies respond to Mastotermes darwinensis. Or how about "Formosan Termite" for my southern friends?) This differs from West Africa, where among the Mande people and others, having termites mounds in your field is considered a good thing, because they help make the soil more arable (improve drainage, increase fertility). Termites and their mounds are used in multiple ways there. There are even experts who will ritually establish termite mounds as part of a land blessing, and I'm calling them a "termite cult" although that's almost certainly incorrect.
On a more amusing note, when the French colonized the region, they built their army barracks out of wood. The local termite experts then surreptitiously infested all the buildings, ultimately causing the French to abandon their outposts. The anthropologists who wrote the paper tripped over the story repeatedlt in their work in the region, found out that the French did know they had a termite problem, but never figured out it was sabotage, and that launched them into the research for the paper.
You can see where this is going...
In this story universe,some sensible and creative do-gooders start doing bioremediation, using fungi cultured to break down industrial chemicals and various obnoxious kinds of trash (old garbage, treated wood, plastics of every stripe). And some WhitePeople get the African gospel of the termite (the first being created by God, to the Dogon), and start culturing termites to also deal with the avalanche of house debris that make up so much of landfills.
And these work great! And because they work great, they get scaled up! And because they get scaled up....
...they get out and start spreading uncontrollably.
That's the setting for a story: a near future where the materials of modern life are under attack by enthusiastic little white bugs, and even more by enthusiastic white mycelia.
Resistance is futile, you will be assimilatedAnd these unabashed consumers churn through the cornucopia of stuff we've created, making the world both safe from plastics and increasingly inconvenient for people who grew up with such materials.So what happens as civilization involuntarily becomes totally recycled and then struggles to sustain its new recyclability? It's both a hopepunk story (a sustainable future through natural processes. Cool!) and a horror story (ick! fungi and termites? Gross!) Whether the hopepunk or the horro dominates is up to any artist who picks this up.
And this is as far as I'm going to take this idea. Take it and do what you want with it. Anyone who wants to learn more may want to get copies of Mycelium Running, Entangled Life, Underbug, and possibly Radical Mycology if you have the shelf space. And at least have fun reading these books, all of which are pretty good.
Now go apply brain bleach as necessary.
Robert Prior @ 200:
Well, step one would be having EVs available to purchase. Around here the wait time is nearly two years, with dealers charging 'access fees' on top of the sticker price for a customer to actually get a vehicle. (Apparently legal by the fine print in purchase agreements.)
I'm planning on running my ICE car into the ground. I put so few km on it that the economic case for an EV just isn't there even if electricity was free, and practically given that all the environmental costs of its manufacture have already happened it makes no sense to replace it with a new vehicle while it still works. I'm hoping to get at least another five years out of it, maybe longer.
Same here. My current vehicle is 20 years old. In 2020, 2021 & 2022 (so far) I've averaged about 2300 miles/year. The year before that was less than 5,000. Plus, if I got an EV, I couldn't have a charger here at home. My electric service just wouldn't handle it.
I did all the "right things" all my life - worked hard & saved my money (as much as I could); deferred gratification until retirement - and look where that's got me.
I still hope someday to get out to the western U.S. for a photo safari, but the way the economy is going it don't look so good right now.
"...the dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had" ?
Another Tears for Fears fan?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZvPSpLxCg
Who you gotta' convince is the Gen-XYZ "Ok Boomer!" crowd.
Hey, I'm generation X, at least as Coupland used it. Got taken over by the following generation as a cool-sounding name.
And these work great! And because they work great, they get scaled up! And because they get scaled up....
...they get out and start spreading uncontrollably.
Used as the plot of several SF novels I read in the last millennium. Not necessarily fungi, but bioremediation.
In one, bacteria used to clean up an oil slick ended up using plastics as food, and so essentially all plastics (as well as oil) disappeared. I remember a scene where one of the characters was listening to her cherished CD collection one last time before the CDs decomposed.
I did all the "right things" all my life - worked hard & saved my money (as much as I could); deferred gratification until retirement - and look where that's got me.
I hear you. Travel looks dicey right now, and even without Covid I just discovered I may have arthritis. (Gone from walking 10 km a day to needing support to walk around the house in just a couple of months.)
Not unhappy, but wishing I'd made different decisions.
“any more than we currently can remake old lithium batteries into new ones, or old solar cells into new ones.” Nonsense not supported by facts, with supporting evidence presented several times in the past on this very blog.
Um, you missed the critical word in my statement, which is currently. I agree that there's no theoretical reason they can't be recycled, it's just that we're only starting to figure out how to do that at scale. For example, in my part of the world, there's only one plant in Arizona that can disassemble lithium batteries for raw materials (lithium and cathode, iirc), and it's grossly undersized for the problem.
The real problem is that production is still growing faster than recycling on these technologies. We'll be in better shape when these two are more-or-less equal in scale.
Used as the plot of several SF novels I read in the last millennium. Not necessarily fungi, but bioremediation.
Yeah, I'm aware of that. Western science interestingly tends to be bacteriophilic and mycophobic, except for single-celled fungi like brewer's yeast.
What I'm suggesting here is cringey more than horrific. Horror's all about our culturally mediated addictions to sex and violence. Instead, I'm pointing towards transgressing cultural taboos about what we eat and what eats us, pointing toward the xenophobia inherent in how we've treated people who don't have those taboos, and pointing towards the essential conflict that happens when we're forced to confront these taboos with no recourse.
I mean, just imagine if the most plentiful animal protein you can get either is tentacular seafood or terrestrial and exoskeletal, and crunchy? Lovecraft would have waxed purple for pages over that.
I don't understand your point. Hungary, Poland, England, Italy, Turkey, France, and others to some degree are all getting into authoritarianism at various levels.
All have to varying degrees constitutional protections against tyranny. Mostly around higher thresholds to clear to change the constitution than standard legislation (can’t claim to have checked the constitutions of all you list). Hungary’s protections have been partially bypassed.
The EU in turn acts as a further check on a government intent on eroding democratic norms. Again not wholly successful but better than nothing. I’d suggest, but it’s hard to prove the counterfactual, that Hungary would be a lot further down the road to dictatorship outside the EU. Note that Turkey - significantly more autocratic - is not in the EU.
Compare to the UK. You literally need a commons majority of 1 to back you and you could pass a law removing the vote from all except men over 30 owning property above a certain net value and having both grandfathers as British citizens. You’d need to package it with a bundle of linked amendments to other laws and you are away.
The Lords could delay but not stop the law passing. Then you are dependent on the King using his “use once” power to refuse to sign the law, dissolve parliament and hold an election under the existing rules.
Why are you so pessimistic. About 11 percent of new cars sold in November inthe UK were electric. Plus over 7 percent plug- in -hybrids.
just imagine if the most plentiful animal protein you can get
... is us?
'Tender is the Flesh'.
As a kid I had a copy of 'Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters'. Way before CDs.
Thanks for the fungus book titles; the first three are at my local library.
Hetero said: the upshot is that we don't have the infrastructure to get away from cars anytime soon.
Nope.
You don't have the legislative structure to get away from cars.
The US legislation has been created by car companies for car companies. When you live in a legislative structure it seems natural, but it's not.
A couple of simple changes would turn things around.
25 km/h (15 mph) speed limiters fitted to all vehicles. Remove the laws limiting development to single family homes, and instead allow multi storey mixed use development.
You'd get walkable/cyclable development with shops and businesses on the ground and residential living above because people would want to live there and developers would be allowed to build places people want.
I think the thread has drifted somewhat. I believe the original poster was looking for a male equivalent of a "mistress", not a partner in marriage.
A brief google search & consultation with on-line dictionaries suggests "Gigolo".
Although "kept man" may be more to the point if the woman pays for some arrangement of living quarters (as is common with men and their mistresses).
If the person with the money in this arrangement is female, the term you are looking for is "boy toy".
Preaching to the choir here brother. Who you gotta' convince is the Gen-XYZ "Ok Boomer!" crowd.
I am Gen-X, and I am extremely aware of the concept of institutional knowledge. In fact, just a few days ago I began the task of converting a bunch of database processes NOAA runs daily/weekly/monthly from UNIX cron to Oracle Scheduler... and found that some of these processes had either not run at all, or ran and always crashed, for the last several years. Apparently because passwords were changed, and the processes continued to try and log on with outdated passwords. And nobody noticed. Until I noticed, yesterday.
I'm pointing towards transgressing cultural taboos about what we eat and what eats us, pointing toward the xenophobia inherent in how we've treated people who don't have those taboos, and pointing towards the essential conflict that happens when we're forced to confront these taboos with no recourse.
I mean, just imagine if the most plentiful animal protein you can get either is tentacular seafood or terrestrial and exoskeletal, and crunchy? Lovecraft would have waxed purple for pages over that.
Every post you wrote her over the last couple days makes me laugh because I am the absolute opposite of your intended audience.
First, I am mycophilic. That's hardly a surprise, all Russians love mushrooms. Second, I always had a soft spot in my heart for termites, ever since reading a book called "Bumblebees and Termites" as a child. I perceive them as just another beneficial communal insect, similar to ants and yes, bumblebees. Third, I vastly prefer seafood to mammal meat. Specifically invertebrate seafood, as I am deathly allergic to fish. (Yes, I have the inverse of the usual seafood allergy.) Tentacular meat? Bring it on! And finally, my reaction when I read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" for the first time was "Cool! I'd like to live under the sea forever!" Which I am pretty sure the opposite of what H.P. Lovecraft intended.
For the mycophiles, faceplant has been consistently marketing something called Mud Watr as an alternative to coffee. I won't link to it because it's an easy search, but one of the touted ingredients is Cordyceps.
I don't know much about fungi, but what little I know suggests to me that Cordyceps is about the last fungus I'd be interested in consuming, nevermind on a regular basis.
Can't remember the name of the book, but I remember reading a middling quality zombie novel that used Cordyceps as the somewhat plausible mechanism of infection.
{context: USA et al} EVs are not a solution for the impending climate crash. Reducing energy consumption is.
I think we have enough evidence to say with some certainty that the USA will go to war to protect its high energy lifestyle. Deathstyle. Whatever. It's an addiction, and the addict is willing to use nuclear weapons if that's what it takes to keep the hits coming.
So we're left with persuasion and genocide. Again, the USA is happy to commit genocide so the question really is: is anyone willing and able to commit genocide against the USA? I can't think of anyone, and genocide for environmental reasons seems unlikely, it would take an ecophilosopher in the mould of Pol Pol or Aung San Suu Kyi, leading a coalition of ecovictims.
What happens instead seems to be Modi and Duterte... people whose focus is more internal than external, and the threats they address are local rather than global. Genocide is definitely an option (or practice!) but it's not used against the energy addicts.
Leaving persuasion. And I don't think "this won't work, it can't work, it has never worked and should not be attempted" is a very effective way to persuade people to do something.
Aung San Suu Kyi? What does she have in common with Pol Pot?
Hetero said: the upshot is that we don't have the infrastructure to get away from cars anytime soon.
Nope. You don't have the legislative structure to get away from cars. The US legislation has been created by car companies for car companies. When you live in a legislative structure it seems natural, but it's not. A couple of simple changes would turn things around.
Oh my dear sweet summer child. I've actually been dealing with most of this for the last few months. Let me explain the sick hilarity of your ideas. It's sick, because we've got some new planners on city staff from elsewhere in the country, and to the degree they're planning at all, they're proposing this stuff, and annoying both older planners and professors in local collegiate planning departments.
25 km/h (15 mph) speed limiters fitted to all vehicles.
Well, class 1-3 ebikes are fitted with 30 kph speed limiters, so you've already pissed them off, along with the muscle bikers who'd need to install electronic brakes to comply. The real people burned by this are all the lower-income commuters, who live up to 100 miles from where they work, because that's where the affordable houses are. You're forcing them to spend six hours commuting each way (12 hours/commute) or to pay unaffordable rents ($3000/ month +), or save up for a down payment on a $1,300,000 house. This on less that $65,000 year minus taxes.
Worse, we're in the land where a sizable chunk (majority?) of gun crimes are committed with illegal, untraceable "ghost guns." It's also the land where there was (is?) a profitable aftermarket in diesel car computers that circumvent emissions controls to "improve performance," but which are reset to factory spec for emissions testing.
You seriously think there won't be a burgeoning market for tech to circumvent speed limiters? We don't have enough cops to even investigate bike thefts. Have them prosecute universal speeding.
Remove the laws limiting development to single family homes, and instead allow multi storey mixed use development.
Yep. City of San Diego is doing that. What they're not doing is making those places transit accessible, and they have at best limited plans to expand transit (example, my community of 70,000 has limited transit. I'm about two miles from the nearest bus stop, and it runs a few times per day). I just commented on a community plan update where the community planning board (I know them) pointed out that, by allowing densification without creating new transit or even parking spaces, they were "planning" for permanent gridlock. It passed anyway.
It actually wasn't a planned community update, since all the document did was to remove density restrictions and leave the rest as a gift for the developers to do what they want. Our prediction is they'll put in more high end condos, let the residents fend for themselves on parking, offer no transit, and pay the fees so they won't have to include affordable housing, which is what they've been doing. Meanwhile, the workers who staff the shops in the area will have to drive in hopefully less than 30 miles (2 hours with your speed limiter) and park somewhere, because there's not enough transit for them to get there in less than two hours on a bus.
You'd get walkable/cyclable development with shops and businesses on the ground and residential living above because people would want to live there and developers would be allowed to build places people want.
Nope, you get a mess. However, I'll point out that, with your ideas, you could probably hire on as an entry level planner at the City of San Diego. They've abdicated any pretense of using what they should have learned in school and are currently spouting stuff like this, while their retired predecessors (my friends and colleagues) look on in disgust. Problem is, planning jobs don't pay well enough for you to live within walking or biking distance of downtown, so you'd have to commute...
228 - OK, using the same level of thought you seem to have used in this post:-
1) The legislative and built infrastructure have evolved together over 120 years. You therefore need a similar time to make your changes, and can't change the legislation without matching changes in the built infrastructure in the same timescale.
2) Velocipedes are vehicles every bit as much as IC and EV powered machines are. I await with interest your proposal for restricting my racing bike to 15mph, rather than the present 30mph (burst up to 40mph for a specialist sprinter) on level ground, and up to 60mph for a specialist descender on a mountain pass.
229 para the last - Er, the singer Madonna used the term "boy toy" as a self-description.
Every post you wrote her over the last couple days makes me laugh because I am the absolute opposite of your intended audience.
You and I are more alike than not, although I love eating fish. You may want to get those books I listed, because I think you'll enjoy them.
There is some fun to be had in watching others twitch, too.
The famous opening sentence of Anthony Burgess' ambitious but less successful novel Earthly Powers reads:
"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
That book ended up somewhat less well-known than the one he's famous for, A Clockwork Orange. But it's certainly a striking opening.
You and I are more alike than not, although I love eating fish. You may want to get those books I listed, because I think you'll enjoy them.
I had realized that you and I are alike for quite some time. And I already looked up these books on Amazon :)
Heteromeles --
Out of curiosity, what exactly do you do for work? I do data processing (and occasional odd diving jobs) for NOAA.
" Er, the singer Madonna used the term "boy toy" as a self-description."
I've come across that usage too, in various places.
OTOH, I've also come across "toyboy" to refer to the original idea of a young male in a relationship with a significantly older person, and that does seem unambiguous. I don't know, however, if it can apply to same-sex relationships.
JHomes
Hetero said: Nope, you get a mess
You make a convincing argument that mandatory single family housing and 85 mph speed limits are the most humanitarian possible arrangement, and that anyone trying to have housing on a human scale with walkable cities where people work and live close together are both impossible, and evil. What's more, converting cities to rule by car is a one way process that can't be undone.
However there are plenty of examples where this has been done. All it takes is enabling legislation, and then a groundswell of people appears. If it's illegal to have anything but a single family home, everyone lives in a single family home and then the only difference is proximity to the good things. So the workers have to live far out.
If you allow medium density then you can have shoebox apartments and grand penthouse in the same building. There's suddenly the density needed to support restaurants and shops on the ground floor, that employ the workers in the shoebox apartments. So the workers can walk or cycle to work, and don't have to drive 100 miles a day, at 85 mph getting 15 mpg, and so don't spend the first 6 hours at work earning enough money to get to work.
There's enough density to support public transport at high frequency. So you're not going to be two miles from a bus stop.
As I said, it seems inconceivable when you've never seen anything different, but if you make the enabling changes, change happens.
Right now your reaction is "we tried it in this one small place, with none of the right conditions, and it didn't work, so it can't work."
It would definitely work. We know it works, because it's been done and it works.
What doesn't work is half measures. If you put in cycleways that get you half way to work, but you'll die in the remaining bit, they don't work.
If you have one high rise apartment in a sea of single family houses, it's still a 10 mile drive to the nearest store, school, theater, doctor and park, so every family in the high rise needs 3 cars and so there's no parking, just like you said.
It's very different when you live in an apartment, in a place where there are hundreds of similar apartment blocks. Below you on the ground level of your block there's a bank and a supermarket. The next building has a chemist and a bakery. The next building has a cafe and a bicycle shop. The next building has a medical centre with 12 doctors, the next building has a phone store and a gym, the next building has an underground train station. Across the road is a park that takes up a city block. There's a lake with ducks and the sports field used by the school that's on the other side of the park.
Cities like that exist, and some of them have been made out of the horror that was a car infested hellscape.
Or to put it another way, if you create the right conditions, civic demand does the rest.
https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in-the-1970s-what-changed/
This reminds me of a short story I read once where aliens crash landed and utilised materials belonging to a human who owned the property on which they crash landed. They wanted to repay the human but due to scale differences they couldn't think of what to do, until, from memory, one of them proposed a formula that turned plastic into whiskey and seeded it into their rubbish bin...
Both were unconcerned about the deaths of people who were in the way to the point of genocide.
I think the argument is about how to get there, not whether there is desirable or necessary.
The idea of standing up in the USA and saying something that translates to "shoot me now" to 90% of USA residents is likely to work, just not as an improvement to urban planning systems.
Some people here have spent decades trying to influence urban planning, with a considerable degree of scientific method about it. "let's try this. What happened? Is that what we wanted? Can we change what we did to get more of what we wanted and less of the unwanted?" and so on. Sure, it's a red queen race against people who want very different things and are using similar analytical techniques, with similarly varying results (including, locally, some jail sentences! Ooops, apparently giving money to elected officials if they do what they're told can be illegal... who knew?)
I always enjoyed the expression "Goy Joy Boy Toy", from Howard Chaykin's TIME SQUARED grapic novel https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/time-2-omnibus-hc
Moz said: I think the argument is about how to get there, not whether there is desirable or necessary.
Oh, OK.
That's different.
You can't get there. The rich and powerful want things as they are and they don't care how poor and miserable that makes everyone else. Nor do they care that it will eventually kill them, because they think their money will protect them.
So if that's the conversation, I'm out because it's pointless. I'm on an SF blog, I'm looking for pleasing escapism, like, "just change these two laws, what happens?". Not reality: "is there an actual path from here to a decent planet"
Um...
By rough analogy, what you proposed was akin to me proposing that, as a technical diver, you could double your earning potential by halving the time you spend in decompression and using that time to fly between jobs. You'd quite rightly tell me to either go frack myself or try it myself, because it's a lethally stupid idea. And you'd furthermore be rightly amused if I got angry at your response.
By slightly better analogy...one model planners sometimes resort to is that a city runs like a human body. This is all kinds of BS, but in this case, it helps explain where you went wrong. Your proposal to densify and reduce speed limits is crudely analogous to letting the density of a human's muscle cells expand without limit, while dropping their blood pressure by about two-thirds. Hopefully I don't have to explain why this won't work?
San Diego embodies over a century of previous planning. As a result, it has residential neighborhoods, commercial districts, and industrial districts, among five military bases, a couple of airports and so forth. Because San Diego embodies car culture, these neighborhoods are well-separated. I'm 25 miles from downtown, for example.
Slowing traffic and densifying only works if you entirely rebuild the city into a bunch of smaller, multi-use neighborhoods (the equivalent of chopping up the human and refashioning them into a bunch of cats). AND it only works if people can get everything they need, including a job, spouse, food, medical care, etc. within easy biking distance. AND it only works if the communication and circulation between these villages and special purpose facilities (port, airports, big industrial plants, military bases) is sufficient to sustain both the villages and the other big sites.
While I agree this is what we should be planning towards, in complexity it really is like turning a human body into a bunch of cats, because most of the roads, infrastructure, and buildings have to be rebuilt to serve the neighborhoods more than the City as a whole. And, since we're in a democracy, everyone has to go along with this in some form or other.
Hopefully you're not at all surprised that a good chunk of San Diegans have serious problems with these ideas? And I sincerely hope you agree that planners doing a crap job of actually figuring out how to rebuild San Diego into a "City of Villages" deserve little respect or support for their blunders.
This is also why I suggested that it would be easier to rebuild San Diego after a nuclear war. The nukes, at least, would destroy most of the problematic legacies, and the survivors would be more interested in surviving than in resurrecting past planning mistakes. This does not mean I support getting bombed, but hopefully it makes the scale of the problem clear.
PS, I'm also pointing out that piecemeal solutions don't work.
Just like having bicycle infrastructure that only gets you killed on part of the trip doesn't work.
If you arrange things such that you have a neighbourhood that's not a hellscape, but everywhere else is, 1) Everyone who lives there has to have a car or three to access "everywhere else" and 2) no one who can afford to live there will be willing to work in the jobs there and 3) no ordinary business could afford the rents in such a special place, so the only businesses in the neighbourhood will be selling 10,000 dollar handbags and such.
You need to make everywhere livable, and or, make the unlivable places literally unlivable. Places that are just single family homes 100 miles from shops and work for example. You can either nuke them, as suggested by Hetero, or devalue them so people leave, by making the 100 mile gap to work uncrossable in a day.
Hetero said: and the survivors would be more interested in surviving than in resurrecting past planning mistakes.
No, they wouldn't. They'd be even more interested in replicating the past planning mistakes.
People don't build single family homes 100 miles from everything because they're stupid. They do it because they have no choice. They have no choice because the laws have been carefully crafted to give them no choice.
City planners can't fix that. They're probably not as stupid as you make out (note, this leaves a wide scope for them to be quite stupid)
They're probably doing the best they can "Given the circumstances" (meaning, operating within the laws we have foisted upon us by the fossil fuel industry and the car industry working in tandem)
Working with the stakeholders to try to improve things is a worthy cause, and hats off to anyone who does it. I've tried and it's gigantically shit. However it's not going to do any good in this case if you still have a legal framework that was specifically created, and then carefully honed with the sole objective of making your goal impossible. Not even a nuclear strike would help unless it also vapourised the laws that created this situation. All a nuclear strike could do is prompt people to buy cars better suited to driving without pavement. If it's impossible to live near your work, you either get a giant car that can drive over what's left of the roads, or you starve. Everyone picks "giant car".
Billionaires can be moved. There simply aren't enough angry people yet.
Well the Dutch did it. So it can be done.
Gas: People don't build single family homes 100 miles from everything because they're stupid. They do it because they have no choice. They have no choice because the laws have been carefully crafted to give them no choice.
Okay, more ignorance. I'm in a planned community, designed in the 1960s, built in chunks, using money originally from the Teamster's retirement fund in the 1980s, and finishing out now with the last two parcels bought in the 1960s for investment land now having around 548 town homes and condos built on them.
People buy the houses where they can. Where they're built is planned. Whether they're close to work, etc. is in part up to luck.
And that makes minimizing travel distance hard.
Isn't "where they can" and "because they have no choice" saying the same thing?
OK, so we don't "have" to nuke current cities. "All" we have to do is bomb them flat over 5 years or so, then rebuild them using aid monies from a larger and richer nation. (you were the one who used NL as an argument)
Isn't "where they can" and "because they have no choice" saying the same thing?
That depends on income. But you're saying people build their own houses. I'm pointing out that planners designated where those houses were to be built decades before. One huge problem is the mismatch between what planners designed for decades ago and what is needed now.
The hundred miles thing is because the more inland counties have lower land values, in large part because they're less pleasant places to live. But they're building the same way.
Providing affordable housing in expensive places like San Diego (fifth most expensive place to live in the US, last I heard) is hard.
Hetero said: Whether they're close to work, etc. is in part up to luck.
There's no luck involved if the zoning laws are written so that you can't build a residence above a business.
I haven't seen your planned community, but I've seen a few US planned communities. Chances are, there's a golf course, and a club house with a restaurant. 5 gets you ten that none of the greens keepers can afford to live in the community and they drive an hour to work. That's not luck. No one working in the club restaurant can afford to live there either.
I'm betting that each family has to themselves one sewer connection point. One telephone connection. One data connection. One electricity connection. One driveway. And 20m of roadway.
There will be no supermarket, no bank, no tiny artisan cafe, no hardware store, no nothing. Everything will be 10 miles drive, with no public transport stop inside the community.
There will be basically no work, no business within walking distance. That's not luck.
Just how the car companies want it to be.
[REDACTED]
Charlie is on the verge of closing the blog, so I deleted my response. You're a hundred times more annoying than Catinadiamond ever was.
Changing the topic only slightly, the NEOM linear development in Saudi Arabia is under construction. At least they're digging holes for it.
https://gizmodo.com/saudi-arabia-line-city-satellite-image-built-1849875521
If you still think it's somewhat insane...well, this is an example of how development works. It will take until 2030 to build it out if things go according to plan.
By the way, if you think this kind of big-scale planned economy project smacks of Ye Olde Soviet System, you're far from the first to notice that conservative, wealthy developers sound positively communist when insisting that the plan must be built, even if it's outdated by decades. It's a jarring juxtaposition, the first time you hear it.
There's no luck involved if the zoning laws are written so that you can't build a residence above a business.
doesn't this sort of thing normally go back to someone having once built a capsule hotel on top of a slaughterhouse and having the whole thing collapse one morning
ilya187 @ 234:
Aung San Suu Kyi? What does she have in common with Pol Pot?
Some compare Myanmar's persecution of the Muslim minority Rohingya to the Cambodian genocide. Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticized for not speaking out against it.
They both had awesome theories of how their countries should work, and unfortunately a lot of people died as a result. Neither acted alone but both became the figureheads for their regimes.
When you get people saying "lets limit travel speed to a fast run", implementing that would cause harm in direct proportion to the vigour with which is was applied. I mean, you don't want to see someone get out of the ambulance because it's faster to walk to the emergency department... and think about a major industrial fire, where appliance have to come from some distance away. "hold on, we'll be there in... 18 hours".
People don't build {single family} homes
IMO it's more accurate without the qualification. I expect more than 90% of people have never lived in a home they had any say in the original construction of. More have never renovated beyond changing paint colours or light fittings. Even in Australia when more than 50% of families owned their homes most bought what was built and liked it.
There's a circularity here between people not having any say over their homes, not being interested in planning, and planning being run by and for property developers. It's one of many fun and interesting aspects of urban planning.
There are also many, many examples of good ideas that miss some aspect of the problem they're creating, and as a result are actually bad ideas. Whether that's as simple as combining "shops are allowed to have zero setback from the property line/footpath" with "people are allowed to ride bicycles etc on the footpath" or as complex as political donation rules that allow structuring to avoid disclosure or limits, there are many things to consider when making the rules that govern the behaviour of the people who plan urban areas (in Australia we get all five levels of government playing!)
Moz @ 263:
They both had awesome theories of how their countries should work, and unfortunately a lot of people died as a result. Neither acted alone but both became the figureheads for their regimes.
I don't think she is quite as culpable as he was. She's more in the mold of the "good Germans who did not resist the NAZIS" than an actual bloody handed mass murderer like he was.
Still, I understand the comparison.
When you get people saying "lets limit travel speed to a fast run", implementing that would cause harm in direct proportion to the vigour with which is was applied. I mean, you don't want to see someone get out of the ambulance because it's faster to walk to the emergency department... and think about a major industrial fire, where appliance have to come from some distance away. "hold on, we'll be there in... 18 hours".
I believe I missed THAT argument. It was probably put forth by one of the idiots I block for being annoying idiots. FWIW, I agree it's a damn stupid, ill considered idea.
More What-The-Fuckery from the interwebbies.
Ultimate Transnistria Victory Day Tour
People don't build single family homes 100 miles from everything because they're stupid. They do it because they have no choice.
Well many times neither. In the US coming out of WWII people were fed up with run down multi-family housing. (The 1930s were economically terrible in the US. Just flat out terrible.) And had the money to change. So they wanted different and waived money at builders/developers who would build them a single family home with a yard away from the factory/train track/office tower/whatever. And the builders/developers followed the money.
Planning back then was light weight or aimed at fixing immediate issues. The planning H is talking about developed over the decades since to deal with the issues this "sprawl" caused. But many people (voters) have absolutely no interest in any of the fixes. They want things fixed. Just not in any way that would irritate them.
Now the one issue is a lot of people (kids and grand kids of those WWII folks) want what they grew up with. And
ANYONEerr, any elected official telling them they have to change will mostly get a long walk off a short plank. Especially if they enact laws. They problem is the election cycles (in the US) are mostly 2 years while the issues are on 5 to 30 years tracks.Now my personal knowledge of Europe on this subject is thin to say the least. But I suspect the same issues, only different, are at play there and other places like OZ. To me Brexit is the same basic meal. Only with a different place setting, drinks, and condiments.
A couple of personal notes.
First I grew up in a fairly rural area. We had a mix of country and small town. And I watch what I described happen close up. My father built houses "on the side" and people WANTED out in the country, drive to work, single family housing, with a yard. Period. To the extent that when someone built a duplex in an 18 lot development we started but were done with their neighbors wanted my father to sue to have it torn down. He passed. It was against the deed restrictions he had written but he realized it was the wrong thing by the time of the fight.
I lived in a rental duplex for 5 years in the Pittsburgh area. It was OK but at times listing to the neighbors fight was a hassle that I'd rather not deal with as my work had me trying to sleep during the day at times.
My wife and I just ended a 10 year run of apartment living in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. Neighbors can be assholes. And you many times can't do anything about it. From porch thieves to shooting out car windows with pellet guns to get people to leave the nice parking places for them. Or just lifting (and dropping) weights in the unit above. Four different complexes over the 10 years.
To H's point: Slowing traffic and densifying only works if you entirely rebuild the city into a bunch of smaller, multi-use neighborhoods (the equivalent of chopping up the human and refashioning them into a bunch of cats). AND it only works if people can get everything they need, including a job, spouse, food, medical care, etc. within easy biking distance.
We're trying to do that in my neighborhood. (By neighborhood I'm talking an area 5 or more miles across.) And the push back is fierce. It just caused over half the city council to get tossed. Which has happened mostly now after the same thing for 10+ years. The new enable the dream folks campaign on dreams, get elected, face reality, and don't enable the dreams. Then they get tossed for the realists. The realists actually try and do at least some of what needs to be done. And the activist dreamers go nuts and throw them out for a new crop of dreamers. Fun times.
And to Gas, your US planned communities do exist. In large numbers. But they are no where near the majority of new housing. Just the poster child for what people who can afford it think they want and those who can't aspire to. Most new housing in the US is 2 to 4 story apartments or planned communities which mix up row house/town house/apartments with a few of those golf course houses (maybe without the golf course because land is EXPENSIVE) for the brochure. And most of the folks who own older existing single family 1/4 acre or so lots want these things SOMEWHERE ELSE. Out of sight out of mind.
My last point. People in the US WANT that single family house with a yard. But it doesn't work for most folks when you have 300 million people to deal with. H and I know it. My relatives who moved to Detroit in the 1950s kept telling us to move up to the good life. (1/6 acre lots and 1500sf 2 story housing with a school down the street.) Of course by the 1970s they had moved to the burbs outside the city because, well, things changed and no longer worked. If you have walk to school neighborhoods based on everyone living there having a few kids, what happens in 20 years. Do you evict the empty nesters or close the schools due to too few students.
As to the SF blog aspects of all of this. I think H (me putting words into his mouth) and I get our hackles up when folks start waxing poetic about
colonizing Marserr quick fixing 21st century living in the industrial world. We're living it and it sucks that pie the sky solutions go nowhere. But keep being proposed.Until the current system breaks hard people will keep trying to keep it going.
Is Germany closing down all those indoor heated water parks this winter to deal with the lack of Russian gas?
and instead allow multi storey mixed use development.
There are few places in the US where mixed use business on first floor or few and living spaces above is not allowed. But it costs a lot more than the standalone of either.
If you put business below living spaces you have to really beef up the fire codes and egress situations for the living spaces. Or severely restrict the types of businesses on the lower floors. No restaurants, dry cleaners, auto shops, or most anything with flames or flammable stuff. Basically only businesses with white collar offices or maybe a clothing store. And without those building codes the insurance companies will not insure the properties.
So it comes down to money. When the land cost gets high enough, think New York City, Tokyo, London, etc... and now down the street from me, well then it becomes economically viable. But until then nope. Of course by then you don't get low end stores, you get the high end stores selling over priced stuff to rich folks.
1/3 acre lots in my neighborhood were selling for $450K 3 years ago. Now for $735K+. Ten year ago, maybe $120K.
Adrian Smith said: doesn't this sort of thing normally go back to someone having once built a capsule hotel on top of a slaughterhouse and having the whole thing collapse one morning
No. It goes back to two interests that happened to be fellow travellers.
Racism, and laws that ban it.
Fossil fuel/car companies.
Racism, you set things up so that black people have low paid jobs. Then you zone new housing so that only single family dwellings can be built by developers in all the new suburbs. Presto! You have whites only suburbs without breaking the law.
Fossil fuel companies' interests are obvious.
It's not the developers. (with few exceptions where the developers are also crazy racists). Developers like medium density housing. There's far less cost of infrastructure, there's less land that needs to be acquired, larger blocks with less road (you can't sell roads) less building cost per dwelling, more profit on sales, higher rents to commercial tenants, cheaper finance.
Developers like high density even more. It's all those things, on steroids. Instead of a cafe and a hair dresser on the ground floor you can have a whole shopping centre. Kmart, Target, Woolworths (Australia) M&S, Aldi, Lidle, Tesco (UK) plus a hundred specialty shops.
But when the law is that developers are only allowed to build single family dwellings, they build single family dwellings and people who can't find any accommodation near where they work, have to buy them. And if you grow up in one, there's no jobs near where you live and nowhere to live near jobs, so you must buy your first car on finance and drive 3 hours a day at 85 mph.
It's not, as Moz points out, that anyone had a choice, or "built the house" beyond being a customer for a developer, but in the same way that buying a burger kills a cow, even if you've never seen a bolt gun, they cause the house to be built. Not because they're stupid. Not because they want to sentence their offspring to a 3 hour drive every day, but because they have no choice (or they buy what they can as Heteromeles puts it).
Look, it's late here and I've already got a headache.
Watch this
https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc
It's a "climate town" video and it says everything I'm failing to get across, but funny and engaging and features the young Burt Reynolds of climate change.
And this
https://youtu.be/cO6txCZpbsQ
Which is a "not just bikes" video, and shows rather than tells, and it's also funny and engaging.
Now if you want to talk to me about this, and like paws, you don't watch the linked videos that are part of what I'm saying, please say so, so I can not reply, both for my sanity, and to preserve this blog.
Tackling inequality from the demand side The classic example is the 90%+ top tax rates that prevailed for much of the period between FDR and JFK. The most common critique of that policy is it didn’t raise a lot of money, as very few people ever paid those rates. Why did no one pay those rates? Because it was dumb to earn incomes into a tax bracket from which funds would just be confiscated. So the rich, so good at gaming to pay themselves more money, also proved adept at gaming to pay themselves less. They behaved as if they were less greedy, regardless of whether in some deeper sense they were or were not.
Interesting justification for confiscatory tax rates.
gasdive & H & Moz
AIUI at least 75% of the problem IN THE USA is the "zoning laws" - so you are NOT ALLOWED to have a corner shop, or small collection of them. People would probably love to open such small businesses to serve the inhabitants, but they are immediately faced with penalties & fines if they try it.
Yes?
... later from H: these neighborhoods are well-separated. I'm 25 miles from downtown, for example. which is utterly fucking STUPID.
LASTLY
Amidst all the gloom & Stupidity ...
We get something like this which tells you that "salvation" is possible, if all the politicians & religious leaders were packed off to a reservation.
Greg said: AIUI at least 75% of the problem IN THE USA is the "zoning laws" - so you are NOT ALLOWED to have a corner shop
That's my understanding as well. R1 zoning means single family dwellings and that's it.
That site seems to have all the WTF holidays.
I quite like the look of the Lebanese refugee camp and North Korea tours myself.
reading about the "NEOM linear development" over the last several years what might have been overlooked was attention to certain details regarding water and transportation and security...
if you ignore the authoritarian overtones of a known hereditary dictatorship -- "king owns the country and his male relatives run it as a family-owned business" -- what NOEM could well be intended to be a 'lifeboat'... if not perfect recycling then an attempt at re-use of water as much as feasible with biological waste products quietly pumped to an out-of-sight-out-of-smell assemblage of greenhouses... little doubt of massive battery installations plus square kilometers of mixed photovoltaic and windturbines to provide (my WAG) reliable 2.0 gigawatts per hour
as bad as UK was slammed this past summer, try to imagine living in Saudi Arabia during the 2050s... going out-of-doors during daylit hours will verge upon life threatening to anyone over fifty and life shortening to those forced to work there...
so... for the elite... in a remote locale... "lifeboat"
hey, i'm not out here trying to pick fights (other than about nato/ukraine)
thanks for the links
R1 zoning means single family dwellings and that's it.
Very little of the US is R1. R1 in almost all cases means 1 residential unit per acre. Unless you move way way WAY out, the land for such costs too much for all but the uber rich. My subdivision is typical for my area (3 to 4 million folks depending on the definition of the area) and is zoned R4. (A few years ago we had a zoning fight that sort of got it to R3 but not really but ...) Much of the area is R4 to R10. 4 residences per acre up to 10. But still single family. But there's a LOT of mixed use and/or apartment zoning near me. But many of my neighbors are very dedicated to keeping it as far away as possible.
It's a "climate town" video and it says everything I'm failing to get across, but funny and engaging and features the young Burt Reynolds of climate change.
I watched it. And yes he's funny and engaging. And makes a lot of good points. But he poisons his presentation.
In the second minute he said, and I quote, "We don’t build low-density, low-efficiency housing because America prefers it, we build them because house developers are forced to because of a thing called single family zoning." And by "we" he means the US.
This is assumption permeates his video and to be blunt, it's just not true. Maybe it is true in the social circles he travels. But most of the population of the US wants a single family house. While many of these folks can't afford it, they aspire to it. And any narrative based on his false assumption is a total mis-read of US politics. Or wishful thinking of what "should be" vs. what "is".
He also states that Japan has affordable housing prices. Everything I've read/heard about Japan is that this is only true in farm country there or with commutes that make H's look easy. In the cities where most jobs are it is London type prices for very very tiny spaces.
As to his comment about mixed use as in Europe (13:11 in the video) being uncommon in the US. Well not so much for a while now.
Is Germany closing down all those indoor heated water parks this winter to deal with the lack of Russian gas?
No, they are making them UNheated water parks:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/29/energy/hanover-gas-saving-cold-showers/index.html
[Hanover]'s the first city in Germany to switch to cold showers in public buildings, making hot water unavailable for handwashing and other uses in government facilities, gyms, and swimming pools.
The city, located in the country’s northwest, will also reduce heating in public buildings, as well as stop lighting up public buildings during the evenings. Hanover will also turn off public fountains.
Interesting justification for confiscatory tax rates.
You have never seen it before? I am surprised. "The purpose of 90+% marginal tax rate is to ensure investment and hiring, instead of hoarding" is something I had seen for years. I do not know if that was actually in the minds of FDR-era legislators (I suspect it was not), but it is both empirically true, and has been a left-wing talking point for a long time.
I haven't seen your planned community, but I've seen a few US planned communities. Chances are, there's a golf course, and a club house with a restaurant. 5 gets you ten that none of the greens keepers can afford to live in the community and they drive an hour to work. That's not luck. No one working in the club restaurant can afford to live there either.
Now we get to the crux of the problem: you have no idea what I'm talking about, but you're going to prove I'm wrong and you're right.
Sad part is, this is the second time I've dealt with this kind of ignorance in action this week, and the first time was the result of a real life City planner acting like Gas.
Background: right now the City doesn't seem to be promoting planners within their department, but rather hiring people from other departments or from outside. As a result, there's staff high turnover, and institutional knowledge rests with outsiders: the developers, consultants, community planning boards, and NGO people like me.
So anyway, last year they assigned a community plan update to a brand new planner, fresh out of college and from a state over 1000 miles from here. At least that state has a reasonably-sized city in it and has more people than the city of San Diego does (e.g. not Wyoming, the Dakotas, or Alaska). But they had no idea what they'd gotten into, and like Gas above, they were proceeding from first principles and making the same sorts of mistakes.
And like Gas, they've so far been unwilling to listen when we tell them why their proposals won't work.
Problem is, they're messing with a community that's fiercely defended by a bunch of old and very knowledgeable locals (university professors, people who've run community friends groups for decades). The sad part is, the locals have far more sophisticated ideas about what's wrong and how to fix it. The planners have no institutional knowledge and aren't listening.
Long story short, I'm getting pulled into a coalition to fight this. If the planners don't get a clue, it likely will end up in court, and any effort to fix the problems will be delayed for years.
With the housing crunch we're all trying to deal with, the planning department seems to be defaulting to letting the developers build whatever they want in the way of high density, wherever they can get the land, with no planning to adapt the infrastructure to make it all work. I'm sure all the developers build will be mixed use in part (that's been going on for decades), but I'm betting that most of the housing they build will be surplus high end condos, rather than desperately needed cheap apartments.
Anyway, I'm out of this discussion with Gasdive. Thanks to David L and others who are trying to get him up to speed on American land use.
No, MSB is right. He didn't say it is simple, but that the greenwash of just converting to EVs won't solve anything. In fact, they will only reduce a few of the problems, even if our energy generation were all 'green'.
By the way, if you think this kind of big-scale planned economy project smacks of Ye Olde Soviet System, you're far from the first to notice that conservative, wealthy developers sound positively communist when insisting that the plan must be built, even if it's outdated by decades. It's a jarring juxtaposition, the first time you hear it.
Not so surprising. The Soviet Union was partly designed on Taylorist principles, which were in vogue for large corporations at the same time.
And the technique didn't work. All that happened was that the very rich and greedy found ways to bypass the taxes altogether, and effectively paid themselves more. Vindictive tax rates as a way of reducing social inequality are stupid.
My wife and I just ended a 10 year run of apartment living in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. Neighbors can be assholes.
I grew up in a house. Lived in apartments after I moved out until I finally bought my own house 25 years ago. I would resist going back. I've got an asshole neighbour here, but it's way better having a patch of open ground separating us rather than just a (thin) wall.
It seems to me that you could have a compromise. A housing development would have an area zoned for single family housing, but it would also have an area zoned for business, perhaps along with an obligation to build (at least) a corner-mini-mall type place, plus an area specifically for a (hopefully) right-sized office building. If you wanted to keep the business area away from the residential area, you could separate them with a park/community center/community garden/small wilderness area. I'm not sure you need to put businesses under apartments, but if new residential builds required business and office spaces to be in biking distance of your neighborhood that would be very good, and possibly far more sellable to the public!
No, MSB is right. He didn't say it is simple, but that the greenwash of just converting to EVs won't solve anything. In fact, they will only reduce a few of the problems, even if our energy generation were all 'green'.
Now you're falling into the same quagmire that Gasdive went into.
What you wrote is obvious. If you don't understand that any more drastic solution demands massive rebuilding of cities (what I referred to above as "turning human bodies into a bunch of cats," to highlight the reorganization problem), and that such drastic reorganization is going to take time and huge resources--or nuclear war and survivors' bricolage--then you're just repeating Gasdive's mistake.
In the meantime, we need EVs, because they can be rolled out and adopted faster than we can renovate cities.
"In the meantime, we need EVs, because they can be rolled out and adopted faster than we can renovate cities."
THIS! ^^^
Though I might add "powered by Green energy" right after the word "EVs."
It seems to me that you could have a compromise. A housing development would have an area zoned for single family housing, but it would also have an area zoned for business, perhaps along with an obligation to build (at least) a corner-mini-mall type place, plus an area specifically for a (hopefully) right-sized office building. If you wanted to keep the business area away from the residential area, you could separate them with a park/community center/community garden/small wilderness area. I'm not sure you need to put businesses under apartments, but if new residential builds required business and office spaces to be in biking distance of your neighborhood that would be very good, and possibly far more sellable to the public!
Oddly enough, this is what has been built in my area for about 20 years or so. This is what a generic "planned community" looks like around here.
There are some problems though. The big one is that the people who work in the business and especially in the stores generally don't live in the community. This is almost inevitable, since people rarely stay in jobs that long any more, and it's easier to commute than to move.
A new and interesting problem was unearthed by covid, which demonstrated that work-from-home was quite viable. Great news for workers, but it left a lot of businesses paying rents on empty offices, and a lot of business owners paying the mortgages on empty office buildings. I'm pretty sure this is behind the huge push now to get employees back in offices, even though it makes little sense environmentally.
In the longer run, we've probably got a surplus of business buildings, so they'll have to get repurposed, ideally for lower income apartments, which in turn will need surrounding businesses like grocery stores and other amenities which don't occur in business parks, along with upgraded water and sewer to deal with more people.
This is where planning gets messy. In the 1960s we planned for sprawl that didn't happen as planned, resulting in some weird unbuilt roads in some places, and ad hoc roads built where people did end up moving. In the 1980s and 90s we built golf courses everywhere and raised the price of surrounding lots for "the view." For the last decade, golf play has plummeted, courses have closed, and plans to convert them to condos or (gasp) apartments or senior living facilities are being sued over by homeowners who see the lost "view" as a loss to their home values. Now we've probably got surplus business parks, insufficient affordable housing, a need to go to PV wherever we can, and no understanding by planners that buildings casting shade on existing panels will be an endless source of litigation.
And as always, there are whiners like me, who can see the problems coming, but who aren't listened to, in part because the cost of lawsuits is now penciled in to the development price. Potentially this last is one reason they build high end investment properties rather than affordable housing? I dunno.
Not so surprising. The Soviet Union was partly designed on Taylorist principles, which were in vogue for large corporations at the same time.
Yes and no. Their argument is more "this has been planned for decades, so it has to be built now." The stress is on "the plan."
In part I get it, but it's a sunk cost argument. They've been paying property taxes on development parcels sometimes for 40 or more years. The land was purchased as an investment, on the idea that it would be eventually upzoned and sold to a developer or builder. It's this sunk cost that drives their pushing to follow "the plan," even when the plan makes little sense.
This is another kind of inertia in the system. We need rapid change, but many parcels have millions of dollars invested in them becoming something else. Often, litigation solves the problem of who pays to make that dream get lost, or whether it gets built. That, in turn, adds to the cost of whatever happens to that land, and it also makes it harder and slower to change.
And so it goes.
This is almost inevitable, since people rarely stay in jobs that long any more, and it's easier to commute than to move.
So we make commutes hard! Very slow cars with 15mph top speed (didn't someone propose that?) would theoretically make commutes too painful to bear, and effectively chain people to the jobs they already have! Problem solved!
You are backing the motor lobby, unquestionally. Even assuming that 50 mile commutes are the norm and cannot be reduced, there is no need to use multi-ton juggernauts to transport one or a few people. Furthermore, there is no need to continue to head in the wrong direction, as far as most aspects of city building are concerned.
If we don't want people working from home, and we don't want them driving to work then the obvious solution is to bring the work to to them.
I propose the development of itinerant office buildings and factories that roam the landscape, collecting and depositing employees as they go.
Optimising paths between employee housing is NP complete, but it can be fixable with "hot bedding" and "hot jobbing" - the employee is deposited in a free house at the end of their shift and collected by a new workplace at the beginning of their next one.
Having all their worldly possessions in a single bag will reduce environmental impact.
Whether or not the workplaces walk around on chicken legs TBD.
I propose the development of itinerant office buildings and factories that roam the landscape, collecting and depositing employees as they go.
As satire, this is a delight!
In reality...
...This actually appeared in print a few years ago. Some industries depend on cheap labor. Clothing is a big one, since there's always a demand for cheap garment workers for cheap clothes. As a result, the garment industry has gone global, with each piece (spinning, weaving, garment manufacture) in a different country where local laws and economics favor that particular bit.
One exec in the garment industry suggested something similar to what you proposed: putting garment factories on big ships. These would move from one hurricane-ravaged port city to the next, exploiting the demand for any paid work in the aftermath of disasters to keep costs down. When the city recovered enough that the garment workers started demanding higher wages, the factory ship would simply fire them all and move on to the next port. The person proposing this idea suggested that it was a humanitarian operation, providing temporary jobs in areas that needed them. Whether you view it as that or as exploitation of the vulnerable is one of those interesting questions, and it may be why we can't have nice things.
Anyway, great idea. And I'd vote for chicken legs over cassowary legs (or rooster legs, for that matter). Maybe those chicken legs need to be on e-scooters? I dunno.
So we make commutes hard! Very slow cars with 15mph top speed (didn't someone propose that?) would theoretically make commutes too painful to bear, and effectively chain people to the jobs they already have! Problem solved!
Exactly! Heck, and while you're at it, stop paying your workers entirely and just own them. Then you can fine them if they try to run away at more than 15 mph. I mean, they emitted a lot less CO2 when slavery was legal, didn't they?
Ok, with the note that some illustrations of Baba Yaga's hut make it quadruped rather than chicken legged.
I should have remembered that modern capitalism is impossible to satirise.
The Hut of Baba-Yaga
There you go - { YouTube clip + Mussorgsky! }
Whether or not the workplaces walk around on chicken legs TBD.
It would of course be more carbon-friendly if the workplaces simply drifted with the wind, hung from giant dirigibles.
If you had hung around here long enough you would know all the talking points about hydrogen as fuel or lifting gas, and cheap helium is out as fusion is 50 years away.
It seems to me that you could have a compromise. A housing development would have an area zoned for single family housing, but it would also have an area zoned for business, perhaps along with an obligation to build ....
Around here there is much of that. But you have to drive a mile or so to the shops. Which is way better than 5 miles. This is how my area now works. Groceries, food, movies, restaurants (cheap and fancy), etc... are all within 1 1/2 miles of me. So while I need a car, it's not like it was in the Dallas area where the gas gauged moved after going to get groceries.
Of course this makes my area VERY desirable for the new folks showing up with their new Apple or Google badge and a suitcase full of money to pay for the house next door. And totally pisses off the old farts who want the world to go back 30+ years.
Where the issue bites hard is re-development or urban areas. My best client is an decently sized architecture firm. They deal with re-developing urban warehouses, older department stores, urban infill, etc... a lot. All kinds of fire code and similar issues come into play to make these things work. If you make it work first floor retail, second floor and maybe a few more of offices, maybe a few floors of parking, then residential on up can make for a vibrant urban area. But you can't just have just one block. And without groceries and pharmacies, people will have to drive.
Re: 'If you've got any resources on brain fog, ...'
Here's a general nutritional overview mostly based on other immune disrupting conditions but believed to also be relevant for long COVID.
Short answer: try the Mediterranean diet.
'Dietary Recommendations for Post-COVID-19 Syndrome'
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8954128/
'Patients with COVID-19 have shown alterations in the composition of the gut microbiota, especially in the context of antibiotic use, and this can have both short- and long-term consequences for physical and psychological well-being, including recovery and the occurrence/severity of post-COVID-19 syndrome '
Personalized diet plans are also mentioned: everyone's different, their bodies/organs' cells will react differently.
About the brain fog - below is a preprint about an existing med that's shown promise in a lab animal study. (Also, from my POV, answers why medical problems with certain organs may increase risk for people.)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.01.438122v1
I'm guessing the above will see publication - researchers are from University College London (UK), neuroscience dept.
Re: Original topic thread about 'weird' --
I've recently seen some 'illusion sculptures' on Twitter - unfortunately without the artist's name. Very interesting and I'm wondering whether they can be achieved via holograph image maybe for one of Charlie's book covers.
Here's an example of this art form - the video is 4:38 long.
'Illusion Sculptures Only Appear If You Stand In The Right Spot' | Master Craft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BorcaCtjmog
And now for a different topic since we're at or about 300 posts...
Re: SKorea/golden oldies music covers
Recently saw this pulled up by the YT algo. Best version of 'Scarborugh Fair' I've ever heard. Apart from the vocals, kudos to whoever did the music arrangement - really gave it a Celtic feel. (Group's name is Forestella - not KPop, but popera like Il Divo.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWo1l3w69Ng
Vindictive tax rates as a way of reducing social inequality are stupid.
But it does create a and sustain the industry of tax avoidance. If your accountant will charge you $500K to save $10 mil in taxes, why not?
Your comment is a great summary of our current food fight over zoning. Folks are yelling about the PLAN. They city council is not following the PLAN. And they voted many of them out last month.
When I ask what should be done when the plan is based on 10K people moving to area X and 30K show up ... crickets.
There are 1 million people in my county, 1/2 million in my city. 67 people a day move to the county. And have been doing it for over 30 years. The PLANNED growth folks keep saying this is temporary. I want to know just when the temporary kicks in. Oh, we have world class universities here. Did you tell your kids to move somewhere else when they got their degrees? Crickets.
Basically they want to have a top 10 place in the country to live (most every survey for 30+ years) but no one allowed to know about it or move to here.
Oh, well.
Sounds like being the 90th or the 100th "best place in the country to live", is actually better than being in "top 10". I live in Gloucester, MA. Nobody ever claimed Gloucester is in top 10. But I very much prefer it to either Boston, or Boston's immediate suburbs.
I will NOT argue against your point.
Me, I do NOT like cold. Not at all. 7 years in Pittsburgh and 2 in Connecticut with frequent trips to Boston, Chicago, etc... convinced me to move south to a climate like where I grew up.
While typing this US CBS Sunday morning is playing over my shoulder with a segment on the Nakagin Capsule Tower Building. It is being torn down.
Oh, I completely agree with you about the weather. My ideal place to live would be something like Kihei, HI -- which my ex-wife disparagingly called "Gloucester with palm trees". But when comparing same-climate places, to me Gloucester wins out over Boston. And Kihei wins out over San Francisco.
A friend lives in a 100 or so year old house in an older section of town. He's been there for 30 years or so. It was a crime infested area with street walkers and drug dealers on the nearby streets when he moved there. Over time he and other gradually worked to make things better. Now it's a nice area to live. But some of the people are seriously complaining about how the result was to increase their property values and thus their property taxes. They just get mad if asked if they want the street walkers and drug dealers back to lower their taxes.
San Diego?
Oh, I completely agree with you about the weather. My ideal place to live would be something like Kihei, HI -- which my ex-wife disparagingly called "Gloucester with palm trees". But when comparing same-climate places, to me Gloucester wins out over Boston. And Kihei wins out over San Francisco.
Kihei's quite nice. Gotta get back there someday. Personally, I also like Hilo, which is sort of like a warm mini-Seattle. And unlike Seattle it's downslope from some reasonably friendly volcanoes...if you give Tutu Pele and her family proper respect, of course. Fortunately She doesn't do Mt. Rainier-style lahars, unless you really, specially piss her off.*
*to the atheists in the crowd...yeah yeah. If you're ever on Hawai'i and see an old lady hitchihiking on a deserted road, give her a lift and be polite. Hawai'i's got a tradition of vanishing hitchhikers who are also gin-loving volcano goddesses, and it generally pays to be nice to them.
There's some weird preconceptions here.
Medium density housing and slow commutes = modern slavery.
Take major hospitals as an example. A major hospital needs a population from which to draw patients. That's roughly 800,000 people.
Housed in typical US suburban density that's 1100 sq km. A circle radius 18 km. That implies hospitals would be about 36 km apart.
Housed in medium density mixed, equal to Barcelona that's 50 sq km. A circle radius 4 km. That implies hospitals will be about 8 km apart.
Housed in high density mixed, equal to the dense parts of Barcelona that's 16 sq km. A circle radius 2.25 km. That implies hospitals will be about 4.5 km apart.
If you're a hospital worker, and you chose your accommodation because it's next door to the hospital, and you decide to make a change of employer, at an average of 50 mph, you can drive to the next American hospital in 27 minutes (Freedom! Baby!). There you can park your car in a giant tarmac acreage, and walk 5 minutes to the front door of the hospital.
At 15 mph you can cycle to the next 'Barcelona' hospital in 9 minutes and park right at the entrance. (this is far too long, and you're trapped in one job, slavery! Booo Hisss)
Similar calculations apply to ambulance travel times, commutes to theatres, shops, schools, everything. Medium density just makes everything, including alternative employment vastly more accessible. And it works the other way around. If you want to lay or maintain a sewer system for a community of 800,000, it's cheaper to lay out 16 sq km than it is to lay out 1100 sq km. That applies to garbage collections, road maintenance, water supplies, electricity, phone, street lighting, footpaths (sidewalks), public transport, fire fighting, the lot.
No. I'm in Raleigh NC. H and I are 2400 miles or so apart. Although we each sort of know what the other is dealing with. Growing up with my father building houses on the side (10 or so while I was growing up plus multiple re-models) I tend to look at such issues as I travel about. I think I understand the issues H is dealing with in San Diego more than most here. And here where I am we have the same issues but all the details are different.
I have dealt with living in or dealing with houses in 7 states and 12 cities spread across 2000+ miles.
Gahhh, just did a Mars climate orbiter.
11 minutes to get to the other hospital.
I was thinking of Cavorite paint.
Heteromeles posted on December 10, 2022 21:23 in #235:
Well, CNN seems to be a neutral source (neither the distorions of Everytown nor of the Washington Examiner) https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/11/us/ghost-guns-what-to-know/index.html
San Francisco: About 20% of the guns it seized in 2021 were ghost guns
New York City: 8.33%
Chicago: 3.76% up from 1.15% in 2020
Personally, I feel 80% is too low a hurdle, and I would like to see something more like 20% plus the barrel and the action for permissible DIY gunsmithing, but lack of effective enforcement and prosecution of gun crime, plus the lack of effective rehabilitation in prison, are equally significant problems. IMHO.
A full-grown adult emu can weigh up to 60 kilograms, which equates to roughly the same poundage as 150 well-fed pigeons.
Your pigeon fact for the day, courtesy of an article about a couple of emus that were banned from a pub for being antisocial.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-12/search-for-yaraka-pub-banned-emus/101717988
The problem comes when you say "with completely different infrastructure you'd only need to travel at 30kph, so we will start by enforcing that speed limit on the current infrastructure".
Kinda of like "once you're fit running a marathon will be hard but do-able. So this weekend you're going to run a marathon". Even if the person survives the attempt they're likely to suffer permanent damage from doing so.
Amsterdam quite famously went about it completely the other way round. They started with a political decision to swap from car cultists to a walking/cycling city, and proceeded from there. Which meant building infrastructure to allow walking/cycling even when doing so was at the cost of the motorists.
Which is why I also say, "you can't get there from here"
Even with Heteromeles' tempting solution of nuking the USA flat and starting again.
PS.
If the doctor says to you, "you need to get some exercise, and ideally, a young man like you should be able to run a marathon" then you need to look at what the blockers are. Why are you not running them already.
You might look at willpower. You might look at if you own the right running shoes etc...
But if you never acknowledge that it's literally illegal to get out of bed and that if you try, you will likely be killed, you're not going to make much progress.
At the moment it's literally illegal to have medium density mixed residential in the USA. If you try to walk or cycle, you'll very likely be killed.
You can propose all sorts of work around things, like building 300 million EV cars, and bulldozing neighbourhoods to make more freeways and parking lots, but if you never admit to yourself the real roadblocks, you're not going to get anywhere. Not that I think that's possible.
Robert Prior @ 284:
I grew up in a house. Lived in apartments after I moved out until I finally bought my own house 25 years ago. I would resist going back. I've got an asshole neighbour here, but it's way better having a patch of open ground separating us rather than just a (thin) wall.
I had some asshole neighbors when I first moved in here. I just out-stubborn-ed them & out-lived them.
But I AM determined that now that I'm the old guy on the block that I won't be the asshole here.
Agreed, and thanks for the updated ghost gun figures. I checked again, and the figure cited in SD is that a majority of guns seized by law enforcement are ghost guns.
Anyway, the point isn't about gun crime, but about living in a culture where technocratic fixes are often recast as "attacks on our freedoms." If someone proposes a "simple solution" of a technological impediment that can be easily overcome or just ignored en masse, that solution is going to fail. Heck, even my mom's dog figured that one out, when he destroyed an anti-bark shock collar...then didn't bark much afterwards.
It's like Prohibition, as I've been learning from reading Schrad's history of the Temperance movement. It wasn't aimed at outlawing drinking, but rather at reining in predatory saloons and an unregulated liquor industry that controlled rather too many politicians, much as the petroleum industry does today. As such, it was a bipartisan and progressive issue.
The parallel is that after Prohibition was repealed AND the alcohol industry was heavily regulated, there's been this Big Lie-style push to portray Prohibition as a ban on individual consumption of alcohol and a failure, when it was neither.
It's this culture, that portrays any attempt to make life better through limiting regulation as "taking our freedoms" that's the problem, and I don't think it's a problem that's limited to the US.
Heteromeles @ 288:
A new and interesting problem was unearthed by covid, which demonstrated that work-from-home was quite viable.
Maybe for "information" workers, but not so much for the guy running the 7/11 store ... or the employees at Target, Walmart et al. And how do you run a grocery store on work-from-home? The butcher, the baker ... the greengrocer & the shelf stockers can't just phone-it-in or click a mouse ...
paws4thot @ 295:
Ok, with the note that some illustrations of Baba Yaga's hut make it quadruped rather than chicken legged.
No reason the hut couldn't have four chicken legs.
Maybe for "information" workers, but not so much for the guy running the 7/11 store ... or the employees at Target, Walmart et al. And how do you run a grocery store on work-from-home? The butcher, the baker ... the greengrocer & the shelf stockers can't just phone-it-in or click a mouse ..
I'm not sure why you selectively quoted me, except to argue, but in this case you're wrong. The point I was making was about business parks, which largely employ people to process data and documents. They can largely work at home, apparently.
Conversely, the people you are talking about work in retail and industry, which are different zones in conventional planning codes. I agree with you on that.
"Amsterdam quite famously went about it completely the other way round. They started with a political decision to swap from car cultists to a walking/cycling city, and proceeded from there."
Er, no. They started several centuries before there was such a thing as a car, let alone a cult thereof, and were able to capitalise on the way the city had been built in the absence of cars. Basically, they were undoing a recent change that had proved bad (Yes, I know there is more to it than that).
Changing a city built from the ground up on the assumption that private cars were the way that people got around will be an order or two of magnitude more difficult, even without political interference by those intending to profit from the way things are.
JHomes
I've heard that "garment factory on a ship" proposal. The person talking during the garment factory segment is Tim Maughan, who isn't in the fashion business; he's a sci-fi novelist and futurist.
David L @ 300:
Around here there is much of that. But you have to drive a mile or so to the shops. Which is way better than 5 miles. This is how my area now works. Groceries, food, movies, restaurants (cheap and fancy), etc... are all within 1 1/2 miles of me. So while I need a car, it's not like it was in the Dallas area where the gas gauged moved after going to get groceries.
There's a cluster of grocery stores & other shops around 2 miles from my house (Costco, Wegmans, Trader Joes, Staples, Pet Supplies Plus, Advance Auto Parts & a Trek Bicycle store). I would consider that to be walking distance except for one thing ... NO SIDEWALKS ... although the city has now painted bike lanes on the Atlantic Ave bridge
Of course this makes my area VERY desirable for the new folks showing up with their new Apple or Google badge and a suitcase full of money to pay for the house next door. And totally pisses off the old farts who want the world to go back 30+ years.
Oddly enough I haven't received any calls from people wanting to buy my home in the last month or so. Probably can't get through what with all the people calling me to try to sell me Medicare supplemental insurance.
But thinking back 30+ years (and certainly 40+ years) there were TWO grocery stores (and a hardware store, a drugstore, two barber shops ... AND Krispy Kreme Donuts) all within 1 mile of my house and the streets I had to traverse to get to them DO have sidewalks.
Where the issue bites hard is re-development or urban areas. My best client is an decently sized architecture firm. They deal with re-developing urban warehouses, older department stores, urban infill, etc... a lot. All kinds of fire code and similar issues come into play to make these things work. If you make it work first floor retail, second floor and maybe a few more of offices, maybe a few floors of parking, then residential on up can make for a vibrant urban area. But you can't just have just one block. And without groceries and pharmacies, people will have to drive.
That seems to be what they're doing DOWNTOWN Raleigh with stores & such at ground level & redeveloped apartments above. Downtown is within walking distance & there's even semi-convenient mass transit (bus) service. And despite Publix having a store on Peace St, there still isn't a good supermarket downtown yet.
Heteromeles @ 323:
I'm not sure why you selectively quoted me, except to argue, but in this case you're wrong. The point I was making was about business parks, which largely employ people to process data and documents. They can largely work at home, apparently.
I "selectively quoted" the part of your post I found deficient. Work-from-home is NOT a solution suitable to all jobs as you seemed to imply ... any more than restricting all vehicles to no more than 15mph top speed or banning all privately owned vehicles (as some others have proposed) is going to work to reduce energy consumption.
You argue for a mixed economy while appearing to forget a significant portion of the people living in that economy. Your proposals will work quite well for the upper half of the income economy, but I think you're ignoring the lower half and how your proposals will affect them.
And in that, I don't see anything to choose from between you and gasdive OR the urban planners you were railing against. You're all wrong and too blind to see and too stuck up to consider alternatives that include the economic underclass.
And how do you run a grocery store on work-from-home?
Online, with delivery. It's being done in major cities all over the world right now. Often without permits, or regulatory compliance in general, but it's being done. Little "warehouses" full of groceries, independent contractors freely negotiating terms with the remote employer to perform all the necessary tasks. Often bicycles for delivery in more built up places.
They started several centuries before there was such a thing as a car,
That was amazingly foresighted of them, then. Converting away from car centric planning before cars were even invented.
The author of this article in Politico argues that rather than a failed experiment, Prohibition was a successful tactical action for breaking up a corrupt industry that had a toxic effect on US politics. He seems to put a similar article up around the time of "Repeal Day" each year, something celebrated by, among others, anti-government Libertarians as a sort of proof that government initiatives can't achieve their goals.
Schrad's history of the Temperance movement
Oh hey, snap.
"That was amazingly foresighted of them, then."
Not really. It's quite easy, in my experience, not to base your planning around something that not only doesn't exist, but which you have no idea could exist.
If I have to be more explicit, a lot of Amsterdam's infrastructure was in place before cars, and was still there to be used when they decided to ditch cars.
Or, if you prefer, much of the work that would have been needed for the conversion had been done before cars, albeit not for that purpose, which made the conversion a lot easier.
JHomes
JohnS said: You're all wrong and too blind to see and too stuck up to consider alternatives that include the economic underclass.
I wouldn't say I'm "too blind to see". I said at the start I was wrong.
And
I wouldn't say I'm too stuck up to consider alternatives that include the economic underclass (which is me actually, as it happens)
Would I rather, as a member of the economic underclass, prefer the current system, or the one I proposed (as an alternative to just nuking the suburbs)
Ok, so let's imagine that I'm in the USA, and due to some unfortunate glitch in the matrix, the two unpalatable changes to law were made. (and let's assume I'm a bit younger, as most people are)
So yeah, I'm an orderly at the big hospital in town. The closest place I can find to live that I can afford is 100 miles from my hospital. I earn 15 dollars an hour, 2400/m. I have a 10 year old F-150 that I bought on finance a couple of years ago, that costs me 190 a month in repayments. I work on it myself, and keep it tuned, so I'm getting the EPA rated fuel economy. I think that's pretty good, most people say you can't get those figures. I burn 7 gal each way. 14 gal return, at $4/gal is 56 dollars a day, or 1232/m. Insurance is 144/m. So as long as I don't need tyres or stuff, getting to work costs me 1566, leaving 834 dollars a month for rent and food. When fuel hit 5 dollars a couple of months ago it cost me an extra 300 a month. So that month I had 534 dollars a month for rent and food. I'm living in a converted garage owned by some rich people, and I had to owe them half the 600 for the month. I blame Biden. Trump wouldn't have let that happen, he cares about the little guy.
Now they're saying the speed limit is going to be changed to 15. I don't know what I'm going to do.
Well the speed limit change came in today. This sux big time. I had to sleep in the back of my truck last night to be here in time for work this morning. It was freezing. Then some security guard came round in the middle of the night and told me I had to move. I showed him my hospital pass and he said I could stay. Biden has ruined this country.
It's been 3 weeks now and I'm only going home on the weekends. There's about 60 of us sleeping in the parking lot. Some of them are in tents. It's disgusting what they're doing to the workers. At least there's showers at the hospital. There were more of us, but some of them have got jobs laboring on building sites. There's all these 5 storey apartments being built near here. The hospital is getting desperate. Word is we should ask for a pay rise. The builders are offering 22 bucks an hour plus on site accommodation.
3 months now since I let the garage go and moved here. The building work is a pain. I think they're cutting a lot of corners on safety. They made me buy my own tools. The hospital always provided everything. Seems like a scam. Still, I haven't had to clean up vomit for weeks. Plus I haven't filled the truck for the last 4 weeks. There's like a temporary town set up in old shipping containers. It's just 2 minutes walk from the building site. I don't know how they got permission. The city used to go ape shit if you did anything. I had to laugh at the hospital. We asked for 22 an hour to match what we can get everywhere else and they told us to take a hike. Now I hear they're offering 30 an hour to try to get people. The builders say they've got 10 years work lined up, so there's no way I'm going back to the hospital. Except for the truck, I'm completely out of debt for the first time in years. I'm even thinking about putting down a deposit on one of the apartments. They say there's a deal where they rent it out for me and I only put in 1000 a month and the renter pays the rest. After 15 years I'll own it. Imagine, me a landlord. It's not even going to cost as much as I used to spend on gas. I can't live in these shitty portable cabins for the rest of my life.
Regarding "we can't get there".
Any amount of discussing even fanciful solutions that are not viable is better than any of the things I find myself more likely to do: running around screaming, curling up in a ball and covering my ears. Most of the ideas I see here really do work somewhere, and we all sometimes fall into the trap of saying "that doesn't work for me or my area so it can't work anywhere".
I'm reading a new book by an Australian climate scientist about climate hope at the moment, cautiously optimistic it's a good one ( Humanities Moment ). I gave up on the book about coping with climate grief by a well-known science journalist, finding it too cloyingly auto-biographical and bordering on self-indulgence. But I guess there are bigger and smaller despairs, and bigger and smaller hopes, and there's a path between that might not ultimately be a satisfactory solution but is still liveable for another lifetime or so.
Anyhow, I've got a tonne of running around screaming to do and it isn't doing itself.
Schrad's history of the Temperance movement/Oh hey, snap.
Yeah, I read that same article in Politico, and got a couple of his books.
He's a good writer, easy to read but occasionally goes off on small rants.
Temperance is an interesting subject, because the parallels with other addictive industries, notably social media and addictive drugs, are fairly obvious. I'm still wondering whether it's something I'm reading into Schrad's history as he presents it, or whether it was there all along. Right now, I'm leaning towards the latter. Anyway worth reading, and far better than running around screaming.
With regards to the latter, I decided to start dealing with climate change seriously a few years ago. I'm not an expert compared with what many people are doing, and it's fucking obvious that the big problems are capitalist greed and politics, not a lack of technical solutions.*
What gets me annoyed is when someone who's just starting out pops in with any variation of "if you just did X, it would all work, you idiots. Why don't you do X?"
As if no one ever thought of X, often dozens or hundreds of times before.
Then they get all up in their feelings when you try to point out what you've learned about trying to make some variation of X work, and claim that you're an agent of The Enema because you don't agree with them in every detail.
We. Literally. Don't. Have. Time. For. That. Any. More.
And it's not just bikes and tech. It's college kids seriously proposing that if we just start a social movement like Gandhi or King did, it will all work. They're so naive that they don't realize that the cops study non-violence far more assiduously than they do, and they've figured out really good counters to stuff that worked once decades ago. It's sort of like reinventing WW1 tactics when the enemy's doing modern maneuver warfare and has more far more resources than you do. And if you don't want to watch a modern recreation of the Children's Crusade, what do you do?
People's hearts are in the right place, and I can only hope their expertise catches up soon.
*Affordable housing is a great example. It would be easy, so long as the words "sufficiently profitable to the developers" could be stricken from more projects.
context = world
YMMV... repeating YMMV
by way of random attempts and careful observation, I've noticed there are certain foods making my health better or worse, no surprise there... what is eye-popping is which foods...
bananas... turns out the skin is human digestible just not human edible... your stomach can process but your teeth cannot... so... scrub the exterior, trim the top & bottom lumpy woody chunks... cross cut into one inch lengths... lay flat inside plastic bag... freeze overnight... then 8 ounces of whole milk into blender, 8 ounces of frozen banana chunks with skin, one heaping spoon of unsweetened bitter baking cocoa... "liquefy"... a cheap almost-ice cream milk shake... advantages: insane amounts of fiber, high in potassium, low in fat, easy to prep, tasty, cheap
turns out those weeks when I have failed to have at least two of those (three seems the magic point) I would have irregular heartbeat as well galloping pulse of 140+ BPM.. and severe constipation... okay the blockage I understood why...
turns out a lot of elderly and/or ailing folks need more potassium than young 'n healthy... who knew?
turns out people with superior medical care are being prescribed potassium supplements as part of efforts at half-arsed treatments of longcovid given there's nearly nothing bad about heavy amounts of potassium below toxicity threshold...
lots of trial 'n error with a handful of doctors listening not just talking... they've been cautiously advising patients towards tripling fruit portions... raw better than cooked... ripe good, riper better never mind if fruit turns ugly or soft... blueberries, bananas, apples, grapes, persimmons, etc topping the list...
repeating YMMV
but anyone else noticing easing longcovid by way of over-eating fruit?
There was a piece in the Guardian about a study where they got people who salted their foods to substitute potassium chloride. As long as your kidneys are good to process the excess potassium it does wonders for your sodium intake. And it's a bit more salty than salt and relatively expensive, so I'm using less of it anyway. Been four months since that article prompted me and so far so good.
Golly, you actually like that stuff? I tried a bit once. I wouldn't call it "more salty", more like "half salty, half yuck" (which is about the same as the molar ratio of NaCl:KCl, as it happens). Can't say I'd be wanting to put it on my food. Does have its uses for making explosives though.
Affordable housing is a great example
One of the reasons that property development is perhaps the first* industry I'd nationalise if I were God, or whatever role it takes to arrange such a thing. It's not just in terms of aligning developments themselves along gasdive's ideals (although to be clear that's a big part of it... well and others... there is a lot of thought out there in this space), but much more and more simply around aligning the goals of controlled land use and what sort of societal goods they add up to. The problem with this really is not being God.
* Okay maybe doing hyper-scale renewable infrastructure development and collapsing extractive industry based energy production at the same time requires some nationalisation and maybe that's a higher priority. But counter factual hypotheticals and all that.
Prohibition in the USA
There may have been corrupt owners of alcohol-related businesses affecting US politics { Indeed, I'm virtually certain of it }
SO FUCKING WHAT?
Prohibition was an unalloyed complete disaster, that has/is still making it's deeply unpleasant effects on US society.
The other corruptions of gangland(s) the ongoing criminalisation of what in civilised countries is normal behaviour, the ultra-puritanism of the whole thing.
But I AM determined that now that I'm the old guy on the block that I won't be the asshole here.
do not struggle against ur destiny
(jk)
Re: Potassium chloride
Does have its uses for making explosives though.
Sorry, no. You're thinking of potassium chlorate which is a very different and much more energetic chemical. AFAIK there are no kitchen-top routes to easily convert the chloride into chlorate.
KCl is a common "no-sodium" salt substitute, highly radioactive but good for you because it's not nuclear power or something.
I like those Scandinavian licorices with ammonium chloride too. I have an odd palate.
Electrolysis ;)
I find those things thoroughly unpleasant, but if there is an open packet nearby I will eventually eat all of them.
affordable houses
One of those lovely phrases that no one in the argument agrees to define the same way. When this comes up and I ask for affordable for who, the responses are interesting. It can range from dealing with the homeless folks all the way to why can't I afford the house I want if making I'm making $150K per year.
»KCl is a common "no-sodium" salt substitute, highly radioactive but good for you because it's not nuclear power or something.«
KCl is not "highly radioactive" on any relevant scale: There are only 120PPM K40 in it, and that has a half-life of 1.2B years.
Since every single cell, in every living thing, contains K40 atoms, the hypothesis has been floated that only is our biology adapted to precisely that source of radioactivity, it may in fact be depending upon it, to flip a few K atoms into Ca in situ.
Is that 'Humanity's Moment', by Gergis? It seems not to be out in dead-tree in the UK yet, unfortunately.
Are those figures realistic? the part that stands out to me is "The closest place I can find to live that I can afford is 100 miles from my hospital." [snip] "I work on it myself, and keep it tuned, so I'm getting the EPA rated fuel economy. I think that's pretty good, most people say you can't get those figures. I burn 7 gal each way." I know a US gallon is smaller than an Imperial gallon but that's still 5.8 Imp Gall. That's 17.2 mpg.
I can't get over that. Is that type of fuel consumption typical? Our Skoda Octavia (car buying criteria - can you put a contra-bass clarinet in it?) does mid to high 60s per gallon. T That's a bit distorted because our town driving is in an EV so it only does journies of over 20 miles. he previous Citroen C5 was about 10 mpg less efficient. I've tended to think that Americans drive a lot because fuel is so cheap, but with that consumption it pretty much evens out.
The "some kinds of radioactivity are good for you and others, not so good" sophistry is not uncommon but wrong. If ionising radiation and particles from a nuclear power plant can cause leukemia in kids living fifty miles away (cf Chris Busby) then ionising radiation from ingested K40 is similarly life-threatening. Many folks who grew up on a diet of Godzilla movies can and do hold the first is true but the latter is not.
The radiation hormesis idea has not been proved or disproved as any positive or negative conclusions are buried in the noise levels of the biological results of very low radiation exposures being overtaken by other environmental factors like air pollution, diet, water quality etc.
Or even potassium perchlorate - if you can get it. Probably best not to try to buy it on Amazon.
Not sure about the radioactivity you mention. May be in urban myth territory there.
I've tended to think that Americans drive a lot because fuel is so cheap
Going back in history it was. In the early 70s before the middle east blew up oil supplies there would be gas wars in the communities in the US. Gasoline got down to under $.30/gal. A few times down to $.25/gal.
My understanding was that prices in Europe tended to be 3 to 4 times what it was in the US.
Just now my supply (US) is a few pennies under $3/gal (US). Which I think translates to £0.64/liter. Or about $3.60/gal UK.
Their argument is more "this has been planned for decades, so it has to be built now." The stress is on "the plan."
Like I said, large corporations. Those in charge of planning have a vested interest in those plans coming to fruition. Their careers will be adversely affected if the plans aren't implemented, while they can move on in a blaze of glory if they are (leaving their successors to deal with the failure).
Taylorism, like economics, makes the (invalid) assumption that people/systems are rational and predictable, and that things that can't be measured aren't important. (At least as I understand it. I could well be wrong.)
No radiation is generally better than some radiation, and potassium-40 is radioactive.
Given that it makes up about 0.012% of any given potassium sample and it has a half life of around 1.25e9 years it is so far down the list of things worth caring about that you may as well ignore it though.
Oddly enough I haven't received any calls from people wanting to buy my home in the last month or so. Probably can't get through what with all the people calling me to try to sell me Medicare supplemental insurance.
Up here it's waterfowl cleaning services that make spam calls. Usually speaking English with an Indian lilt, and claiming to be located in buildings that somehow don't appear on Google maps…
I have no clear idea what spam calls here are trying to sell. I have caller id, and they're all from the same few geographic numbers or identified as "caller withheld".
"In the early 70s before the middle east blew up oil supplies there would be gas wars in the communities in the US."
Still happens on a small scale. Typically a few gas stations within a couple of blocks of each other will have prices noticeably lower than in the surrounding area. Checking Gas Buddy shows a current example here, where there's a cluster of four stations having prices of $2.83 or $2.84 per US gallon and the surrounds are at $2.98/$2.99.
I haven't seen your planned community, but I've seen a few US planned communities. Chances are, there's a golf course, and a club house with a restaurant... I'm betting that each family has to themselves one sewer connection point. One telephone connection. One data connection. One electricity connection. One driveway. And 20m of roadway. There will be no supermarket, no bank, no tiny artisan cafe, no hardware store, no nothing.
You're not wrong (and oh boy do American developers like to build unlivable "neighborhoods") but if you're willing I'd be curious for you to compare and contrast your ideal planned neighborhoods with Ladd's Addition in Portland Oregon, the oldest such development in the city.
For the casual reader: It's half a square kilometer of tree-lined streets set diagonally to the city grid, most structures being single family homes, bordered north and south by reasonably major streets.
The predicted "tiny artisan cafe" is on the central roundabout, conveniently located to nobody who's not local; there are others along the main streets. There's a hardware store on the north edge, on Hawthorne (I happen to know someone who works there). There's no supermarket within the development, but one's across the street at the southeast corner and another is just a few blocks east of the northeast corner; there's currently only one 24 hour convenience store. I don't think there's a bank, though there's an elementary school and a large church.
It strikes me as a functional neighborhood. It doesn't have everything in it or immediately nearby but it's got plenty (and is particularly well gifted with quirky restaurants, even after the Vietnamese place burned down a few months back), and there's frequent bus service to the rest of the city.
One of those lovely phrases that no one in the argument agrees to define the same way. When this comes up and I ask for affordable for who, the responses are interesting. It can range from dealing with the homeless folks all the way to why can't I afford the house I want if making I'm making $150K per year.
If I recall correctly, around here, affordable is "affordable for a family at median income for the area." In many local neighborhoods, that actually turns out to be an 800 ft2 (80 m2) or smaller apartment for a family of four.
Locally there are various categories based on cost relative to the median income, from "housing the homeless" to "high end and above," and affordable is near the bottom. The "high ened" are what in the 1980s were considered normal 2 bed/2 bath houses, which now sell for $700,000 and up, in a region where the median family income is closer to $80,000/year.
The essential problem locally is that developers and builders claim that single family homes (including connected townhomes and larger condos) are the only profitable things to build. They're required by law to provide 10% affordable housing within the development, or (previously) to pay a fee to get out of the requirement. While they inevitably make a big deal out of how much affordable housing they are building, it doesn't come close to demand.
Currently San Diego has just about all the single family homes it needs, given that fewer people each year can afford them. Some proportion are being snapped up as investment properties. In contrast, we desperately need housing for the half of the population that's living on below median income. This segment is not getting built in sufficient quantity because it's "not profitable." When it does get built, typically a government program or a non-profit provides several hundred kilobucks to make it "sufficiently profitable" for it to get built.
Yes, our housing system is insane and at best semi-functional. I've very deliberately skimming the surface here.
My suggestion, before anyone decides to get some jollies about proposing fixes, is for them to fully describe how well their local housing system works. And if it has problems, maybe also describe what they personally area doing to try to make it less destructive or insane...?
Incidentally, my job is to try to keep the insanity from causing local plant species go extinct, and normally I go after highly destructive, high end developments out in the countryside.
More electrolysis.
Well, our local housing system doesn't work. We own our home, but only because we rode a wave of absurd housing prices out of the nearby metropole and into our current home. Which is now priced absurdly in the metrics of the area - a nice thought if it wasn't painfully obvious that any big numbers would just have to go into the next home.
Rents around here are now something like equivalent to my monthly mortgage payment for a 1 bedroom apartment. Which is categorically insane, I have friends who are single parents who live very painfully close to the edge, every month.
The local council is making some effort to cause affordable housing to be built. Affordable is defined as costing <30% of a household income. Our recently elected mayor was a homelessness outreach worker immediately previous.
That's nice, but a couple decades ago I made a career out of working with local governments to help them figure out just how to approach the multiple overlapping housing/mental health/poverty crises they were facing, given their very limited resources and capacity. Being willing and open to ideas is not enough, it costs large amounts of money to provide adequate housing for a given population, and local governments don't have it. Senior governments may have it but have competing priorities. And developers aren't interested because they are trying to make money.
When I burned out and walked away from that work (and into front line work) we had made very little progress on resolving any of it. We won't make any serious progress until we take what is a basic need out of the for-profit realm. We don't have to look far to see what happens when core needs are profit centres, and housing is a big cautionary example (health care is another).
»The "some kinds of radioactivity are good for you and others, not so good" sophistry is not uncommon but wrong.«
No it is not wrong, it is worse: It is non-falsifiable: There is no way we can find out if it is true or false.
With respect to nuclear power plants: There is one ugly detail which nobody wants to talk about: When we built them close to cities, the word from science was "antineutrinos has no mass, so there is no way they could damage anything."
This was always a weird kind of argument, given that they /were/ detectable with very low probability.
In the meantime we have now concluded that, yes, they do in fact have mass, not much, but they do, and that means just ignoring them in health-physics is no longer possible.
The way antineutrinos react is to kick a light atom one step to the side, and if you look at the top left side of the periodic table, there are a number of such reactions you wouldn't want in your body.
But again: At the rates we are talking about: No way to prove or falsify that hypothesis.
But it is no longer "scientifically impossible" and that is why nobody is allowed to live within 3km of new nuclear reactors in the self-proclaimed civilized world.
Nojay @ 350: "If ionising radiation and particles from a nuclear power plant can cause leukemia in kids living fifty miles away (cf Chris Busby) then ionising radiation from ingested K40 is similarly life-threatening."
For some value of "similarly".
The question would be, for K40 and each of the radionuclides emitted by power plants, how long does an atom of them hang around in the body once ingested, and how long do you have to wait for it to decay?
Has anyone considered that Russia/Putin has been dicking around in Zaporizhzhia in a very non-strategic way?
Sure, cruelty is a given, even cruelty that goes so far as to undermine their strategic goals. But it feels odd that they are lingering there, especially when they might believe that Zelenskyy is a lunatic who could blow it up. Were he willing to do that, it'd made quite a bit of their eventual prize worthless.
Then it occurred to me. Something was happening behind the scenes that I have not heard talked about in the news media...
Putin and his cronies were looking for evidence of uranium enrichment and/or plutonium breeding. I wish I could listen in on those conversations: "It's there, you're just not looking in the right place, find where it's hidden or else" every 6 hours as they radio back in status reports.
Now, I also think that they were so certain of the results that they made no provision to fabricate them. Why bother with complicated, expensive schemes, when you'll have the real-deal smoking-gun evidence just as soon as you get there?
Given their opsec, I'd be shocked if everyone involved in this is upholding the absurd levels of secrecy needed to hide this from the intelligence analysts in western countries. Maybe the media's being nudged to keep quiet about it? (Are there any reasons to keep quiet about it)?
Also, if they didn't have a nuclear program before, are they planning on pursuing one soon?
Elon emerged from his bubble briefly into the real world. It did not go well. And, predictably, Twitter took the video down.
nobody is allowed to live within 3km of new nuclear reactors in the self-proclaimed civilized world.
Well, apart from the people who work at reactor sites for 1800 hours a year, often within the reactor containment a few metres from 4GW (thermal) worth of nuclear reactions going on. If antineutrinos were really a health hazard to the general population at 2.9km then their effects should show up in the health records of hundreds of thousands of reactor workers over the past sixty or seventy years and... from what I've read, anecdotally, working in the nuclear power business up close to the hardware results in an average or longer lifespan (much less workplace exposure to toxic chemicals, smoke, pollutants etc.) with the same or less incidence of cancer (possibly less because of careful medical condition monitoring of the staff, catching any cancer cases early before they progress to more dangerous conditions).
Affordable is defined as ...
Ah. You and H are using the local government's definition. I was referring to the "man in the street". You know, the one who shows up at the local zoning feedback meeting not having read more than two sentences about what is going on but their neighbor told them someone wants to destroy their local community.
»Putin and his cronies were looking for evidence of uranium enrichment and/or plutonium breeding.«
I'm surprised nobody has latched onto the fact that the two nations Putin is trying to buy weapons from are both very focused on getting enough nukes that USA will respect them.
I dont think the nuclear power plant in Ukraine plays a role, I think that is just about denying Ukraine the electricity.
apart from the people who work at reactor sites for 1800 hours a year
Or the reactor operators on nuclear powered ships?
P H-K
AND - putting weapons launchers really close to the actual reactor buildings, so that UKR can't shoot at them { They hope }
Because potassium is preferentially retained in the body biologically speaking a typical adult human being emits over 4,000 Bequerels of radiation from K-40, that is over 4,000 disintegrations per second. In the human body only Carbon-14 comes close to causing that level of deadly gamma rays coursing unstoppably through bones and soft tissues wreaking havoc on cells and DNA. From the Health Physics Society's webpages:
Potassium-40 content of the body can be obtained from its natural abundance of 0.0117 percent of potassium and calculating the specific activity of natural potassium (30.5 Bq g-1) using the half-life (1.28 x 10^9 y). The potassium content of the body is 0.2 percent, so for a 70-kg person, the amount of 40K will be about 4.26 kBq. Carbon-14 content of the body is based on the fact that one 14C atom exists in nature for every 1,000,000,000,000 12C atoms in living material. Using a half-life of 5,730 y, one obtains a specific activity of 0.19 Bq g-1 of carbon. As carbon is 23 percent of the body weight, the body content of 14C for a 70-kg person would be about 3.08 kBq.
Potassium chloride can be purchased in large sacks from home improvement centres for various purposes such as hot tub conditioning and the like. There are Youtube videos of people with radiation detectors wandering the aisles of those stores and reporting the enhanced readings.
Somewhat to my surprise, there seem to be cases in which neutrinos are a health consideration. They have nothing to do with power reactors, but rather big accelerators/storage rings that have been proposed for muon and neutrino studies.
IIRC, calculations show that the neutrino emission from a supernova would be fatal out to 5e8 km or so and I think such showed up in OGH's Iron Sunrise.
But no, the neutrino health hazard from power reactors is way down on the list of concerns. Citations to the contrary would be read with interest.
Doire @ 349:
Are those figures realistic? the part that stands out to me is "The closest place I can find to live that I can afford is 100 miles from my hospital." [snip] "I work on it myself, and keep it tuned, so I'm getting the EPA rated fuel economy. I think that's pretty good, most people say you can't get those figures. I burn 7 gal each way." I know a US gallon is smaller than an Imperial gallon but that's still 5.8 Imp Gall. That's 17.2 mpg.
I can't get over that. Is that type of fuel consumption typical? Our Skoda Octavia (car buying criteria - can you put a contra-bass clarinet in it?) does mid to high 60s per gallon. T That's a bit distorted because our town driving is in an EV so it only does journies of over 20 miles. he previous Citroen C5 was about 10 mpg less efficient. I've tended to think that Americans drive a lot because fuel is so cheap, but with that consumption it pretty much evens out.
I think the reason "Americans" drive a lot is because we're spread out a lot more. The land area of the U.S. is about 37 times larger than that of the U.K.; Canada is about 5% larger than the U.S. and Australia has about 81% of the area of the U.S., but you also have to look at population distribution & density as well.
A lot of the places you might need to get to are too far to walk and if there's no convenient bus service between them ...
paws4thot @ 356:
I have no clear idea what spam calls here are trying to sell. I have caller id, and they're all from the same few geographic numbers or identified as "caller withheld".
Here in the U.S. it's apparently real easy to spoof caller ID. The problem comes when I'm expecting a call from someone and often I don't know what their number is going to be other than it's going to be within the (919) area code. And nowadays, (919) is not the only area code for Raleigh & the Research Triangle area [(984) overlay].
I have a speaker-phone with an answering machine on my desk and I'll usually let unknown callers go to the answering machine. But the ringer is LOUD and annoying, and when I AM expecting a call I answer it.
I don't know why I even bother with the answering machine any more because hardly anyone ever leaves a message, even the legit callers ... to the best of my recollection, the only messages I've gotten in the past year have been from doctors at the VA (and they usually leave another message on my cell phone as well as sending me a text message) - but the rest of the world has gotten rude as hell & completely forgotten anything resembling telephone etiquette.
When I encounter an answering machine (or the more frequent "voice mail") I ALWAYS leave a message (name, telephone number, reason for calling, repeat telephone number). I even leave a message when I've dialed a wrong number even if it's nothing more than "I apologize, I appear to have dialed your number in error.".
It's not polite to leave people wondering who was that & why are they bothering me.
PS: If you don't answer the calls you can't tell them to put your number on the DO NOT CALL list ... not that that does any good nowadays.
Doire asked: Are those figures realistic?
I tried to make them realistic. I stayed with a guy in Florida who lived in a hut he'd made out of what was once a caravan and building waste he'd collected off the side of the road. Not a completely atypical lifestyle in the woods of Florida for a veteran living on disability payments.
He drove a 10 year old Ford F150. It's the most common vehicle in the USA. His friends we visited had 3 of them in various states, scattered around their campsite/home.
So I felt confident picking that as the transport of choice for the "economic underclass".
The fuel economy figures come straight from the EPA, who helpfully also gave gallons per 100 miles. They gave 6.9 gal/100 miles in mixed urban/highway when the vehicle was new (I actually used the 2010 model as I think of 2010 as "10 years ago", I need to update that). The term YMMV comes from the fact that people don't generally get the EPA claimed economy and I mentioned that.
Hadn't heard of Busby before, so I looked him up...
So what level of deadly gamma rays coursing unstoppably through bones and soft tissues wreaking havoc on cells and DNA would we expect to see from power-station radionuclides (particularly those that aren't in the body anyway, because of biology) at the concentrations at which one might encounter them fifty miles away?
Incidentally, as I think you know very well, the becquerel's a tiny unit (I have several GBq on my keyring), and not a very good measure of life-threateningness. Sieverts per excess banana (or Brazil nut) might be a better choice.
It's been years since I studied this stuff but I believe the interaction cross section for neutrinos scales with energy^4.
I did have a lunatic idea for a story about assassinating people from half way across the planet by aiming a neutrino beam at their house. I bet nobody ever checks exactly where physics experiments are pointed.
Scott asked about Ladds Addition
It looks really nice, but it seems to me to be suburbia done well rather than the kind of medium density stuff I was thinking of. Most suburbia seems soul crushing, and this isn't. It's still mostly gigantic single family homes, out of reach for most people, even if property speculation wasn't driving up land prices.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/WpyGv5xoDvkH2dQf6
I'm thinking more of medium density with shops at street level. Here's an example of it done badly, which is in my opinion a better result than suburbia done well in some respects.
https://failedarchitecture.com/behind-four-walls-barcelonas-lost-utopia/
Which ends up looking like this at street level
84 Rambla de Catalunya https://maps.app.goo.gl/d1wRTPehQtfj3x4e6
If you spin around you'll see most of the buildings have shops at street level. The middle of the street is outdoor dining. People are walking around, something quite absent from the photos of suburbia. The speed limit here is 30 km/h, about 18 mph. You'll also see that the most common vehicle is a scooter, rather than an F150. It's not as cycle friendly as I'd like to see, but it's also not a parking lot desert full of giant trucks. It's pretty obvious, given that most of these buildings don't have off street parking, that very few residents have cars. There's just not that many cars parked around the place.
Scott Sanford @ 358:
You're not wrong (and oh boy do American developers like to build unlivable "neighborhoods") but if you're willing I'd be curious for you to compare and contrast your ideal planned neighborhoods with Ladd's Addition in Portland Oregon, the oldest such development in the city.
For the casual reader: It's half a square kilometer of tree-lined streets set diagonally to the city grid, most structures being single family homes, bordered north and south by reasonably major streets.
The predicted "tiny artisan cafe" is on the central roundabout, conveniently located to nobody who's not local; there are others along the main streets. There's a hardware store on the north edge, on Hawthorne (I happen to know someone who works there). There's no supermarket within the development, but one's across the street at the southeast corner and another is just a few blocks east of the northeast corner; there's currently only one 24 hour convenience store. I don't think there's a bank, though there's an elementary school and a large church.
It strikes me as a functional neighborhood. It doesn't have everything in it or immediately nearby but it's got plenty (and is particularly well gifted with quirky restaurants, even after the Vietnamese place burned down a few months back), and there's frequent bus service to the rest of the city.
Less than a mile across, even on the diagonals (0.21 sq mi). Subdivided in 1891; built up 1905 - 1930, so it mostly pre-dates the dominance of the automobile. Deep inside a city metro area that stretches ~15 miles E-W & N-S (225 sq mi).
It does look like a pleasant place to live, especially if you do have good bus service. I especially liked the "Lounge Lizard" furniture store on SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Planned communities in the U.S. date back to colonial times - St Augustine, FL (1565); Charleston, SC (1672); Philadelphia, PA (1682) ... even New York City (redesigned by the British in 1731)
And then there's Washington, DC and a number of state capitals - including my hometown of Raleigh, NC (1792).
The thing is, as towns & cities grow they outgrow their plans. And if you can't or won't grow UP (upwards), you have to grow out. This was facilitated in the post-war U.S. by automobiles, cheap gasoline & cheap farmland (as farming became more mechanized & industrialized MORE crops could be grown on less land), and has resulted in urban sprawl.
Most cities that did grow upwards had some physical constraint that prevented them sprawling outward (NYC is located on several islands).
Now environmental concerns we didn't worry about 75 years ago require we come up with a NEW PLAN for a post-industrial society of some 335 million people (or else the world is going to die).
But anything that size has a certain amount of inertia. We've been set in one direction for the last 75 years & it's going to take a lot of work to change that direction.
The problem I have with many of the comments here is they just don't account for how hard that work is going to be, and how many difficulties we're going to have to deal with along the way.
Societies DO NOT turn on a dime at the snap of someone's fingers; not even totalitarian societies.
»Well, apart from the people who work at reactor sites for 1800 hours a year, often within the reactor containment a few metres from 4GW (thermal) worth of nuclear reactions going on.«
Those are grown up people, and their cell-division ratio is nowhere near what it is in infants, so alone for that reason, they are a lot less exposed.
»Because potassium is preferentially retained in the body biologically speaking a typical adult human being emits over 4,000 Bequerels of radiation from K-40, that is over 4,000 disintegrations per second. In the human body only Carbon-14 comes close to causing that level of deadly gamma rays […]«
The fact that people as a general rule die from pretty much anything but gamma rays, means that by /definition/ the K-40 decays are not emitting "deadly gamma rays".
(You would be a lot more fun to have around if you could cut the idiotic hyperbole…)
Richard H said: Sieverts per excess banana
That would be good, except that it's zero. In a healthy person potassium levels are held pretty tightly. If you eat an "excess banana" you just excrete the excess potassium and so the additional absorbed dose is nothing.
The whole "you get more radiation from a banana" is lying with facts. You do "get more radiation" from that actual banana, but the amount of additional radiation you're actually getting is zero.
»I bet nobody ever checks exactly where physics experiments are pointed.«
That's not even funny.
At Århus university they had an acellerator in the basement and the landscape outside the building was designed to act as shielding.
…which it did, until somebody hired a landscaping architect to modernize the place.
JohnS - I still get messages from legit callers who use the landline but most legit callers not in the landline directory as, say, Hectorina McG are more likely to call my sister's or my cell than the landline.
Re: '... but anyone else noticing easing longcovid by way of over-eating fruit?'
My guess is that most people hadn't been eating enough fruit/veg before getting sick with COVID - no reserves. Also that there's probably some similarity among which cells get most destroyed/screwed up by COVID in terms of building blocks to replace the damaged cells. (As well as keep everything else going. In many respects kinda similar problem to how do you keep maintaining, building and rebuilding a city according to current and future needs.)
You've looked at radioactivity (bananas), have you looked at different light frequencies - specifically infra-red and near infrared? Different people get different symptoms including for long-COVID. The article below mentions three different mechanisms/paths of long-COVID. (And there's no reason why someone can't have any combination/permutation of the three, i.e., not mutually exclusive.)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01693-6
'COVID and the brain: researchers zero in on how damage occurs Growing evidence suggests that the coronavirus causes ‘brain fog’ and other neurological symptoms through multiple mechanisms.'
Major take-away for me --- There's some (increasing) evidence that astrocytes are a big feature of long-COVID brain fog, very similar to what happens in an aging brain.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20220815/Study-shows-astrocytes-as-breeding-grounds-of-SARS-CoV-2-during-brain-infection.aspx
Below is a very brief case study - concussed athlete who used light therapy.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2020.00952/full
There was a very small clinical trial a few years earlier as well. Although both papers' subjects were trauma patients, my impression is that results would likely also apply in aging.
'Significant Improvements in Cognitive Performance Post-Transcranial, Red/Near-Infrared Light-Emitting Diode Treatments in Chronic, Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: Open-Protocol Study'
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4043367/
No idea whether there are any new clinical trials for light therapy - COVID or other virus related brain/nervous system issues.
The UK is looking at a couple of existing meds to treat some long-COVID symptoms.
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/long-covid/long-covid-research
Inverse square law applies -- someone who works a hundred metres from an operating nuclear reactor vessel will receive a thousand times more antineutrino exposure than someone three kilometres away (roughly thirty squared). They may spend a large part of their working life, twenty years and more within this blast radius, 40,000 hours and more of exposure. For antineutrino decay to have any real effect on human beings it would have to happen thousands if not millions of times a second in thousands of human bodies for decades before the collective damage might be statistically noticeable and there is a sample cohort that meets that requirement, those long-term nuclear power plant workers.
If antineutrino decay "sickness" was a real thing then statistically speaking it would have shown up in the sorts of medical studies carried out on nuclear power plant workers around the world over the past seventy years or so. As far as I can tell it hasn't.
As for the "idiotic hyperbole" I was parodying some of the more crazypants anti-nuclear power pundits like Busby who I mentioned previously. He was the lead "scientist" behind a series of "childhood leukemia clusters downwind from nuclear power plants" reports in the 1980s here in the UK, published by one or other of his grandly-titled one-man research organisations. He had maps and diagrams and everything (this was pre-PowerPoint so he had to use green crayons) and he got his name in the papers and on teevee news a few times. There are a few others like Busby who, in a rational world, would have resulted in the anti-nuclear brigade getting laughed at but we're not in a rational world so his reports got treated like they were real science and many people concluded that nuclear power was a really really bad thing. Instead of going heavily into nuclear power during that time we burned coal and now we burn gas to produce energy and that's okay because no antineutrinos.
Heteromeles @ 359:
If I recall correctly, around here, affordable is "affordable for a family at median income for the area." In many local neighborhoods, that actually turns out to be an 800 ft2 (80 m2) or smaller apartment for a family of four.
[...]
The essential problem locally is that developers and builders claim that single family homes (including connected townhomes and larger condos) are the only profitable things to build. They're required by law to provide 10% affordable housing within the development, or (previously) to pay a fee to get out of the requirement. While they inevitably make a big deal out of how much affordable housing they are building, it doesn't come close to demand.
The reason it doesn't work is the "median" income is just that MEDIAN - half of the incomes in a given area are going to be less than the median income. And while that 10% housing may be affordable TODAY, demand is going to price them out of affordability VERY SOON.
If I didn't already have a home, I couldn't afford to buy one ANYWHERE in the U.S. I could afford to buy another house in some places, but not Wake County, NC, IF I sold my house for the property tax assessed value - but the house flippers don't want to pay me that much. They want to swindle me out of ALL of my equity and I can go live under a fuckin' bridge somewhere.
Currently San Diego has just about all the single family homes it needs, given that fewer people each year can afford them. Some proportion are being snapped up as investment properties. In contrast, we desperately need housing for the half of the population that's living on below median income. This segment is not getting built in sufficient quantity because it's "not profitable." When it does get built, typically a government program or a non-profit provides several hundred kilobucks to make it "sufficiently profitable" for it to get built.
Yes, our housing system is insane and at best semi-functional. I've very deliberately skimming the surface here.
More than insane I think. Late stage capitalism in the U.S. has become a massive criminal enterprise that would make the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge recoil in horror.
My suggestion, before anyone decides to get some jollies about proposing fixes, is for them to fully describe how well their local housing system works. And if it has problems, maybe also describe what they personally area doing to try to make it less destructive or insane...?
Thing is, I think you might be better off there in San Diego than a lot of other parts of the country. The insanity that is housing policy in the U.S. is a nationwide problem. But any real solution is "socialism" and might as well be COMMUNISM. Those who profit from the system as it is have the power to block meaningful reform.
I saw a map of excess-cancer clusters from one of those studies, covering the area around Aldermaston (military nuclear, of course). It was quite clear that the "clusters" (which looked to me like random clustering) correlated better with the major roads than with the nuclear sites.
Re: '... someone who works a hundred metres from an operating nuclear reactor vessel will receive a thousand times more antineutrino exposure than someone three kilometres away (roughly thirty squared).'
Pre and post Chernobyl would make for an interesting test of the above.
Also I'm guessing that not all nuke power plants had the same architecture or used the same building materials therefore each location should be compared against every other location across a number of different factors (medical/health outcomes). This would be in addition to comparisons for socioeconomic and demographic variables cuz who would want to live next door to any power plant!
I have zero knowledge of these particles but a search turned up articles about neutrinos affecting chirality in molecules. Molecular geometry is a big deal in medicine/health - e.g., proteins. Has anyone looked at incidence of L vs R chirality by distance from a power plant?
It's neutrinos, there could be a hundred metres of interstellar vacuum between the Standard Human Radiation Target and the running nuclear core, there could be a hundred metre thick slab of depleted neutronium, neutrinos and antineutrinos don't care, the irradiation dose of the target from neutrino decay would be the same. That's what makes the "nuclear power antineutrinos kills babies" storyline so good for those who are against nuclear power, there's nothing the nuclear power plant designers and builders can do to lessen the neutrino and antineutrino emissions outside the plant.
Radioactive decay doesn't produce neutrinos AFAIK, it's fission that does it and you only really get that from nuclear reactors so post-Chernobyl is not going to show up anything, ditto for Fukushima and even fallout events such as post-Castle Bravo, nope.
The definitive British study published in Nature about ten years ago found no correlation between nuclear power stations and leukaemia clusters in surrounding areas. They did, however find a cluster at the site of a planned nuclear power station which was never built.
D amino acids are found at a low level in humans. Some are actually synthesised but others are ingested as good. ISTR from a lecture by the head of a Leeds University/LGI research unit in 1990 that processed cheese was the major source. But of the over 2000 clinical trials I was involved in I can’t remember any involving D-amino acids. And the Leeds Unit involved eventually closed down and my lab inherited the few clinical trials the had left plus a technician. None of these trials involved D-amino acid either. So I doubt if there’s a lot of data on this.
Re: 'Radioactive decay doesn't produce neutrinos AFAIK, it's fission that does it ...'
Thanks for the explanation. Not sure I understand the difference between fission and decay, but that's another matter - I'll look it up later.
Meanwhile ...
Just saw a couple of headlines in Google news ... FUSION!
https://theweek.com/energy/1019175/us-reportedly-set-to-announce-major-fusion-energy-breakthrough
Jane Jacobs should have been awarded the Nobel prize in economics.
And as I've said a number of times, I want a hybrid minivan. USED ones are currently running more than new.
Fission involves neutrons hitting the nucleus of a fissionable atom like U235 or Pu-239 and breaking it up into two or more chunks, plus extra neutrons and radiation like X-rays and gamma rays. Unstable radioactive elements spontaneously decay, emitting electrons (beta radiation), helium nuclei (alpha particles) and/or gamma rays and become different elements, usually themselves radioactive which will decay in their turn.
That is very simplified, there are a lot of special cases and gotchas, like two-stage decay paths and so on. With fission sometimes the extra neutrons are captured by other atoms transmuting them into a new element -- this is how plutonium is "bred" from uranium.
Here in the U.S. it's apparently real easy to spoof caller ID.
Canada too. Virtually all my waterfowl callers with subcontinental accents are apparently calling from my local area code. And although I have caller ID, many numbers (such as my nieces') just display the number and no other description, so being unable to reemmber all the phone numbers of people who might legitimately call me I answer more spam calls than regular calls.
I do report those like real estate agents to the CRTC, for violating the Do Not Call list (which I've been on since it was created).
From what I dimly remember from my time writing phone switching software decades ago, the phone system was created to assume good faith from someone already in the system, so the designed-in security was in no way ready for internet phones. This could be way out-of-date technically, but my spam experience suggests otherwise.
Here in the U.S. it's apparently real easy to spoof caller ID.
Canada too.
Likewise in Oz: at a point in time some years ago when most POTS landlines were being replaced by VOIP, and every other company was relocating its call centre overseas anyway, it appears to have been deemed too hard for telcos to manage phone numbers, and "CLI overstamping", where businesses could basically manage them themselves, was allowed. Since this led to an explosion in scam calls from overseas posing as listed business numbers, since 2020 the rule has required the overstamping to show a legitimate Australian number with certain parameters. Which is why these days the thing that's most valuable in Australian data breaches where customer accounts are exposed is the phone number list. Scammers use databases of valid mobile numbers both as targets and as numbers to overstamp. It means that the common reaction people have, which is reverse search the number and/or block it is futile and even counter productive (one day it'll be someone they actually wanted to hear from).
This does means it's effectively impossible to block scammers, and also be able to receive calls from people you don't already have in your contact list.
Right, thanks - now I remember that Ganymede was "the Gods cupbearer", which sounds like as good a name as any for a kept man.
What I read was the mine in Cumbria was intended for coking for steel.
That's awful fast for arthritis. I have osteo, and both of my knees were partially replaced. I'd check with an orthopedist, if I were you.
US planned communities - um, nope. Greenbelt, MD. Walkable. And a small shopping center in the middle - co-op, I think, supermarket, ditto a restaurant/club. And a theater. Few other things, walk-to-able, and no golf club. But I think it was planned and built (to start) in the 30's, before Cars Are All.
I think it's a bit different in cities, esp. further north. In the DC metro area, rents increase starting at 1 mi from a Metro stop, and go higher the closer you are.
"1500sf 2 story housing" um, WHAT?!!! I live in a freakin' split level - that's 1.5 floors, and we're listed at about 1494 or so sq foot. Two floors - my house in Chicago was that, sort of a stucco four-square prairie, and it was about 2140sf.
Wish this *was
2 story. Then, too, it would also have a full basement.Well, no, it did. Since Tricky Dick started the lowering of the top tax brackets, the difference between the bottom income earners at corporations and the CEO has increased by a literal order of magnitude.
We know the easy solution: all aboaaaard!
Got a friend who lives in Cary, IL, 40 mi from downtown Chicago. Hell, no, he takes the commuter rail.
Surprise! https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nuclear-fusion-lawrence-livermore-laboratory-b2243247.html
No. Hell, no. I want to walk down to the corner store now, buy some cocoa, so I can make brownies now, not tomorrow or next week.
And there's absolutely no reason that a lot of various kinds of stores can't be downstairs from housing. Bodega, anyone?
It transferred big money from companies to organized crime. Ditto for the "War on (some) Drugs".
Hell, my (late? can't get hold of him) friend, the superannuated outlaw biker, told me that what used to be fun changed in the eighties, when serious drug money came in, and the biker gangs turned into organized crime, rather than fun.
RE: Today's nuclear fusion "holy grail breakthrough" announcement.
Here is a video that throws cold water on any thought of having fusion by 2040. Its a nice look at the boring logistical stuff starry-eyed dreamers don't think about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U (why we won't have fusion power by 2040)
Just the time/cost needed to build any major infrastructure project, let alone a completely untried new energy source, is measured in decades (just try getting a fission nuclear plant built these days).
And this just one on the hundreds of technical breakthroughs to make fusion possible in the first place:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzK0ydOF0oU (the problem with fusion)
"Nuclear fusion is the power of the future - and always will be."
Which is a damned shame.
Because with nuclear fusion we could:
Have a nearly infinite source of clean energy. Use it as a torch to break down and destroy any and all pollutants into their constituent atoms, cleaning up our industrial and hazardous waste. Allow us to grow all of our food indoors with cheap lighting, allowing farm land to return to nature and restore biodiversity. Terraform entire planets easily, and comfortably colonize the solar system out to the Kuiper Belt. Power starships that could travel a significant fraction of the speed of light.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pmgr6FtYcY (the impact of nuclear fusion)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTJHEdf6yM (fusion power)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B_9EbEobMk (fusion propulsion)
P.S. Isaac Arthur's videos are amazing.
My partner orders then, and likes them, a lot.
On the fusion proto-news:
This is, at most, an interesting science experiment. If there's a path from it to reliable gigawatts going into the grid, it isn't obvious. And if there is such a path, it's going to be a long, long one.
(It's amusing that the LIF fuel pellets are teeny versions of the second stage of Teller-Ulam thermonuclear weapons. Swords into plowshares, I suppose.)
And here is a great video on tritium fuel losses, the structural damage caused by continuous neutron bombardment, and other technical stumbling blocks to nuclear fusion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrUWoywZRt8 (what no one else is telling you about nuclear fusion).
You want a simple and inexpensive fusion reactor?
Dig a hole a few miles deep into solid bedrock far away from any fault lines or facture zones.
Drop a small fusion warhead down the hole.
Detonate is when it hits the bottom.
This will create a more or less round chamber with super heated walls that will stay hot for a very long time.
Pump the chamber full of water and pump the now super heated water to a heat exchanger at the surface.
Use the steam from the heat exchanger to flash steam water to run a turbine and then send the now cool water from the chamber back down the hole to be reheated.
Generate electricity.
Keep the chamber hot by dropping nuclear fusion charges down the hole at regular intervals.
Voila! Cheap and simple nuclear fusion.
A commercial molten salt Thorium reactor could be developed at something like 1% of the cost of a commercial fusion reactor, so it is amazing that the latter is fully funded while the former is not.
"Keep the chamber hot by dropping nuclear fusion charges down the hole at regular intervals."
Yeah, I remember that from the 1960s. Don't know if it originated at Livermore, but it sounds very Teller-ish.
You missed my point, twice.
Amsterdam started down the path of car centric planning, but changed away from that.
You keep talking as though never doing car centric planning is the same thing. But it's not. And specifically in the discussion you joined, saying "it never was car centric" means it's useless as an example to refute "but we have car centred planning now so we're stuck with it forever".
Yes, Amsterdam existed before cars. But that's not why I'm talking about it.
Hell, no. I want to walk down to the corner store now,
Yeah, then getting groceries delivered isn't going to work for you.
But the point of the microwarehouses is that they offer delivery within 30 minutes. Like corner shops they have a limited selection, but I think the "higher prices" are shared between the investors and the customers, so the price isn't as high as you'd expect (see also Uber et al)
"You missed my point, twice."
And I still seem to be missing it.
My point, FWIW, is that most of Amsterdam having been built pre-car, and still there when they realised that car-centric was not the way to go, meant that they did not have to rebuild the entire city just to cope with not everything based on cars. Most of what they needed to undo the car-centric policy was already there.
A city built round cars, OTOH, requires massive rebuilding if the cars are to be no longer there. Much time, much money, much opposition from just about everybody affected, even thos who would eventually, many many years down the line, wind up better off.
In case the way I expressed it at first has led to misunderstanding, I will say I intended it the same way I say that I gave up smoking the easy way. I never started.
JHomes
Amsterdam existed before cars. But that's not why I'm talking about it.
Indeed.
I wonder whether it's worth pointing out to the people who keep insisting about this that the cities they are talking about, at least most of them, also existed before cars.
It's a bit like way people say we could never have trams back in Brisbane, because the streets are so narrow and won't someone purleeez think about the poor under-supported cars. I think it would be a great way to reduce car traffic in the CBD.
JHolmes said: A city built round cars, OTOH, requires massive rebuilding.
Does it though? The city centre, even the centre of cities built since cars appeared won't need rebuilding.
The very centre is always walkable anyway.
The outskirts of the centre (ie, the not suburbs, but not central, in Australia we call them the inner city) might need some building changes, but they're not generally a single family dwellings desert.
It's the suburbia that's the problem.
Say you had a small city, say 1.2 million, with 800,000 living in the surrounding suburbia. If you decide that must all be retained, and redeveloped into medium/high density walkable then you're going to have housing for 55 million people.
You don't have 55 million people.
Redevelop 16 sq km closest to the city proper. That will house your 800,000.
The people who live in the chosen 16 sq km should get a fair price, and they can buy a house in the existing suburbs if they want to. The people who are in the existing 1100 sq km of suburbia don't have to do anything. They can stay and work from home, or commute 4 hours a day, or sell and buy in the new buildings close to the city or just walk away and let the bank figure out what to do with it.
Circumstances change and some areas that people used to live aren't worth living in anymore. That's why there are ghost towns, even when the population is growing. There's no contract when you buy a house that it must always be worth lots of money.
Cars made some places that no one should want to live in, places people wanted to live. There's no rule that they must remain so forever. There's no rule that cities must keep subsidising the suburbs forever. Suburbs cost the local council/City much more to maintain than they bring in revenue. They use more water, make more garbage, need more roads, more street lights, and so on. The local taxes being based on land value skew things. The land is cheap (so it's taxed low) but it's expensive to provide services. Councils can never afford public housing while their budgets are draining into suburbs.
Now, as Damian said, (and I wish I had said because it sums up everything so perfectly) I have some running around and screaming to do.
»A commercial molten salt Thorium reactor could be developed at something like 1% of the cost of a commercial fusion reactor«
MSR has so far been very underwhelming in practice.
The origins of MSR is very much also it's curse: Back when people still seriously thought there were money to be made on fission products, the idea that you could continuously "refine" the molten salt for these had great attraction.
However, it transpired that the only valuable element in spent fuel is Pu, which we A) Really do not want people to extract, and B) Is necessary to keep the reactivity up to keep the MSR reactor critical.
However, in order to keep the reactivity up, you have to get rid of the neutron-eaters, so the refining step is not optional.
Apart from the literal chemical horror of sifting out those neutron-eaters from stream of 700°C hot melted salt, it also raises a question about what you are going to do with them, once they have been separated ?
Normal civilian spent fuel processing only happens after the fuel has "cooled" for years.
Even military plutonium processing let the spent fuel "cool" for months.
In a MSR reactor you either have to do it on-line, or design your plant to have only approx 5% of the melt circulating, while the other 95% is cooling, awaiting refinement, before it can be sent back in circulation.
(One exception: You can evaporate out the Xenon, in fact it is very hard to prevent it from doing so, but what are you going to do with it ? Vent it to the atmosphere ? In normal fuel elements it stays put until it has decayed to a solid element.)
The waste-stream from a normal nuclear reactor are spent fuel assemblies, everything nicely packed and encapsulated, so that after cooling in a pool for some years, it can be put in a concrete "casket" and left standing around for decades, until somebody finally decides where to dig a hole to bury it permanently.
The waste-stream from a MSR reactor is pretty much the exact same as it was on Hanford and Windscale: The ugly and highly radioactive end of the periodic table, dissolved in strong acids or other environmentally problematic solvents.
The big "unknown, unknown about MSRs" is what it costs to make them /chemically/ environmentally acceptable.
Nobody wants to talk about that, because it is not really an "unknown unknown": Everything we have learned from the remediation of Hanford and Windscale applies.
From a non-proliferation point of view, MSR+ALIS is a nightmare: Remote sensing cannot tell you if Pu239 is being produced clandestinely, or if it is just a perfectly innocent civilian power producing reactor.
The fact that none of the bomb-wannabee states have gone this route is probably the biggest of all warning signs over the MSR technology.
Say you had a small city, say 1.2 million, with 800,000 living in the surrounding suburbia. If you decide that must all be retained, and redeveloped into medium/high density walkable then you're going to have housing for 55 million people.
Pre-quakes this was something that Christchurch was considering, IIRC. Some people were trying to preserve the green belt and city boundaries by encouraging densification including pushing up height limits. Then the CTV tower collapse made a lot of people quite skeptical about high-rise during the rebuild, and a whole lot of political bullshit happened and it's all very sad.
Sydney is kind of interesting in that regard, it's only 5M or so but has a solid train system and generally pretty reasonable public transit. Plus some real effort to get high rise next to train stations and encourage intensification in the existing city. Unfortunately politics is happening as well, so we get corruption scandals and sundry disasters on the side. Relatively few people die, it's less than 1% of the "everything is back to normal" pandemic death toll that we've all learned to live with*. So that's presumably not worth mentioning.
Both countries are in the transition from local population growth to imported, so there's no actual need for city growth at all, other than an economic system based on endless growth. Oh, and we must have significant immigration from poorer countries, otherwise wages will go up.
* except those who have contributed to the death toll, obviously
"Radioactive decay doesn't produce neutrinos AFAIK, it's fission that does it"
Yes it does. That's where the idea that neutrinos ought to exist came from in the first place - beta decay needs a fudge factor to make the spins add up, and neutrinos were it. Indeed, the process by which these terribly lethal nuclear reactions in the human body are induced by neutrinos from nuclear reactors is essentially that in the incredibly rare event that a neutrino does interact with something, it makes it do a beta decay backwards.
(Of course it works any way round with the appropriate combinations of neutrinos/antineutrinos and electrons/positrons being eaten/emitted, and all that, but this is unnecessary complication for the point in question.)
"Because potassium is preferentially retained in the body biologically speaking a typical adult human being emits over 4,000 Bequerels of radiation from K-40, that is over 4,000 disintegrations per second."
It is not that biology is defenseless against radioactivity-caused DNA damage... I venture a guess here: our repair mechanisms are evolved to deal "well-enough" with the "natural/unavoidable" radiation levels by sources like Kalium40, so if you'd magically remove all K-40 from a human's body you would have "capacity" for addition radioactive material in the body without having to expect considerably worse problems. However it seems rather "hard" to get rid of all the K-40 and hence you need to be careful in how much additional radiation sources you add not to overwhelm our repair capability... As Deinococcus radiodurans* demonstrates, humans are not nowhere near the top of "tolerance against ionizing-radiation" chart by any means, but we have little ways of getting there, let alone quickly.
*) Note it seems that D. radiodurans apparently did not primary evolve to tolerate ionizing-radiation, but this is "merely" a side-effect of a different selection process that resulted in elevated DNA repair capability that comes in handy.
"From what I dimly remember from my time writing phone switching software decades ago, the phone system was created to assume good faith from someone already in the system, so the designed-in security was in no way ready for internet phones. This could be way out-of-date technically, but my spam experience suggests otherwise."
What I vaguely remember is that you are right, and there is so much heavy backwards compatibility stuff in phone systems that doing something about it was next to impossible, so the best they could do was fudges around filtering the inputs and stuff which still left things significantly porous. The compatibility restrictions aren't quite so bad these days but the situation still isn't great. Specific details vary according to which country's phone system you're talking about, but the principles are the same: it's all basically security by obscurity and none of it's obscure any more.
I had a look once at the sequence of tones which precede "This is the United States calling, are we reaching...? ... See, he keeps hanging up. And it's a man answering." The sequence was recorded off a real phone call. It's a string of digits in some version of DTMF which is different from what phone keypads generate, produced by the operator pressing some button, meaning something like "repeat last operation" to the system. Had Pink been so inclined he could probably in theory have replayed the recording down the phone instead of hanging up and thereby retried the call once again. There was a fashion in the US at one point for building your own alternate-DTMF generators to issue similar but more useful commands to make the system do things like put long-distance calls through at local-call charge rates. I don't think that worked on the British phone system, but there were different things that did.
Caller ID in the UK, when it first came out (and I doubt it's changed much), was a total kludge that actually used one of those holes in the British phone system. The connection between calling and receiving phones is established before the receiving phone starts ringing (ringing current being kept separate from the audio by the audio being between the lines while the ringing current is between one line and ground), so if you stick a capacitor in series with the hook switch you can lift the phone without the exchange knowing about it, and people who are prepared to talk over the constant interference can call you for free. Caller ID made use of this by sending a tone sequence generated at the calling end to the receiving phone over the audio circuit immediately the connection was made and the receiving phone started ringing.
So if you built your own tone sequence generator you could override the official sequence with any number you liked, and soon enough people did. I think they knocked that one on the head reasonably quickly, but there are still other ways of doing it.
»What I vaguely remember is that you are right, and there is so much heavy backwards compatibility stuff in phone systems that doing something about it was next to impossible«
Well, it was impossible for a several different reasons.
Much of the trouble started with "Signalling System" protocols which was what official state-sanctioned telcos used to control the exchange of international traffic.
Not trusting your peer telco would be seen as rather bad form, and bandwidth was severely limited, as was processing power.
By the time scammers had become aware how cheap it was to get access to SS7, telcos had gone from "public infrastructure" to "make money fast" operations and expending significant money on a major overhaul, just to protect the customers from a few nuisance calls were clearly not indicated.
The fact that scammers could be quite lucrative for telcos or corrupt telco employees didnt help.
But it is also technically hard to do something about, because by design mobile phones drag their number with them when the roam.
Any telco in the world, can claim that my mobile phone is roaming on their network, and the only way to disprove such a claim, would be to send traffic to the phone via that telcom which makes the phone validate its identity.
This is what the IMEI number was supposed to do, except any telco can just ask for it via SS7, because GSM was designed back when you could clearly trust any telco with enough money to roll out a celluar network.
Needless to say, professional spies, governmental or otherwise, where happy about this, because in addition to knowing where in the world any interesting mobile phone was, you could literally steal its traffic or pretend to be it, if you wanted to.
There is some dispute about precisely how far the british tabloid press went in this respect, but no dispute that they did.
The US gov't is finally starting to tighten the thumb-screws on telcos, but the progress is being politically sabotaged by party-partisans who know the efficiency of malicious spamming right before or on election-day.
All you say is true.
It's still easier to develop MSR thorium reactors than nuclear fusion.
Yes, that's a useful one because we shut down all the coal mines on the basis that we could feed the coal power stations by importing any old shit as long as it burned, and the remaining bits of steel industry have been unhappy about it ever since.
The site the proposal is about is a point on the coast where two or three different mining companies in the old days were all going at it next to each other, so there's quite a maze of badly-mapped or unmapped old workings down there, further complicated by at least one of the old companies having been a half-arsed cowboy bunch that kept having collapses and inrushes and other adverse consequences of unsafe procedures happen while they were working it. They got all they could get under the land and then went out under the sea for more, and only got some of that. What's down there now is two sets of old workings, the set closer in and easier to get at being in a right state and nearly all flooded, and also being in the way of getting at the other set which are thought to be in much better condition, then further out under the sea there's a whole lot more coal that hasn't been worked at all, which is what makes the idea worth thinking about.
They've been doing this repeating cycle of engaging in a bout of surveys and investigative work, then getting into an argument over regulations and environmental legislation, then back to investigations, and so on, with the tendency for the regulations and legislation to keep being tweaked helping to keep this going. But the surveys and investigations have all been piddling around in the region of the bad set of workings, where there's no reason to expect to be able to get coal easily or cleanly in the first place, and making very little effort to investigate the areas that actually would be worth trying to work. So actual miners, including some who used to work in the former pits at the site, being clued-up about what modern mining technology can actually usefully do with the place, look at what's going on and say "WTF are they playing at?". The point seems to be that every time they go round the cycle, it gives them a new and different way to say "well this is a problem, true, and this is going to be a limitation... but this that we'll be able to do is going to be super amazingly great!!!1!" and the fresh blob of new hope can be used to get people to give them lots more money, which they can then find more ways to not spend on getting a mine actually started.
" (ringing current being kept separate from the audio by the audio being between the lines while the ringing current is between one line and ground), "
Except that there is no ground. In the normal UK POTS setup, there are only two line wires into the back of the master socket.
Maybe you're thinking of the (obsolete) party-line system where ringing was indeed between line and ground and the "call exchange" button (which signalled which party to bill for the call) was between the other line and ground?
Tangentially related piece in today's Graun - London’s lost mega-motorway: the eight-lane ring road that would have destroyed much of the city.
=+=+=
typo = "Ebenezer Scrooge recoil in horror."
correction = "Ebenezer Scrooge would avidly scribble notes and request for additional detailing upon advanced scams."
=+=+=
fusion will indeed solve all problems... once all the fiddly bits are resolved...
scaling up something every researcher admits to be flaky will be 20+Y to reach stable engineering and an addition 20+Y to force it through regulatory hurdles...
what will be really funny by 2060s the entrenched industry for energy will be wind-plus-PV not fossil fuels therefore it will be those 'Fortune 500' megacorps manufacturing wind-plus-PV who will grimly fight any attempt to build gigawatt hydrogen fusion reactors
=+=+=
424 Pigeon - Neatly demonstrated by my landline handsets, which include 1 wired el cheapo unit and 3 wireless handsets on base stations (charger, personal directory and answerphone combined). With an incoming call, the sequence of events is:-
1) El cheapo rings
2) Caller id displays calling number, and then switches to personal directory narrative string if available
3) Answerphone plays outgoing message and offers you a chance to leave a message.
It's amazing how often (2) is a recognised number from an exchange where we know no-one (personal or corporate) who knows the landline number, or is "number withheld", and (3) doesn't get a message.
429 Uncle Stinky - Or, without a newspaper's advertising cluff, London Ringway
It's still easier to develop MSR thorium reactors than nuclear fusion
Really? No-one's even proved that thorium can be fissioned, because, well, it can't. What the thorium boosters hide behind the Green curtain is that the fuel system requires thorium (Th-232) to be bred up into U-233 which is fissionable. That is what generates all the power in a proposed thorium MSR, a uranium fission cycle. To do that requires a lot of very tight nucleonics processes since the breeding process uses up a neutron that isn't available for fissioning a uranium atom later. The engineering has to deal with very concentrated radiation fluxes and high temperatures in a small confined space while piping the reactant in and out of the working volume and hoping it doesn't all slag down and melt.
And please, please, PLEASE don't waffle on about the ORNL molten-salt reactor. It was never run on thorium, it used U-233 which was produced at great expense at Hanford via breeder reactors. The ORNL reactor was only ever a lab research tool, it was never meant to be a power-plant prototype.
At that time in the 1960s engineers were throwing everything at the wall, nucleonically speaking, and seeing what stuck and what didn't. Some worked, a lot failed (pebble-bed designs, high-temp gas-cooling etc.) or were shown to be over-complicated and pointless. The "steam-kettle" simple PWRs and BWRs won out, a couple of gas-cooled designs made it into the second generation power station builds. Breeders were tried and failed, other than providing some countries a nuclear weapons breakout capability.
»No-one's even proved that thorium can be fissioned, because, well, it can't.«
Not directly, but in the presence of neutrons it happily absorbs one and become Uranium, which can fission.
Since most neutrons are "wasted" in a normal nuclear reactor, that makes thorium a viable part of fuel for fission reactors of all designs.
USA even tested a nuclear bomb "with a lot of thorium in it" and got a respectable bang.
The biggest problem about Thorium is it is significantly more expensive to mine it than Uranium.
The second biggest problem is all the neonuclear scammers hyping it.
Much of the trouble started with "Signalling System" protocols which was what official state-sanctioned telcos used to control the exchange of international traffic.
Ah, yes. SS7. Since only large trusted phone companies around the planet will talk to each other they can trust each other.
Back before the late 60s / early 70s (in the US and I suspect most else where) companies didn't have switch gear that the owned. The transistors suddenly made it possible for a company to have a PBX (Private Branch eXchange). Lots of legal wrangling across the US (and I suspect elsewhere) but reality moved forward. Then as PBXs got computers things started to fall apart. Suddenly enterprising folks discovered ways to bypass long distance toll calls by routing calls on internal "data only" networks. And so on. Oh yeah. Security was an afterthought on much of the small PBX designs so there was a big underground market in finding unsecured PBX systems and using them to make long distance (around the planet) calls for "free". You dial in via the facility to allow the intended users to call in to someone in the office and then dial back out to Brazil or wherever.
Then deregulation in the US.
Then cell phones showed up. And IPVN took over. In band signalling went away (mostly).
Then, at least in the US, number portability. Which as a side effect eliminated the issue of the US (and other places) running out of phone numbers using the old geographic and CO based numbering system.
As PHK said, suddenly you had to take calls from everyone or no one. And anyone could claim to be from any number.
There is a way to try and clean up the mess. But uptake is slow. Telcos are looking at staggering amounts of money they do not want to spend on working systems. So they are foot dragging in the US. Not sure of the rest of the planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
There is a staggering amount of copper wire in the US that is abandoned. First PBXs replaced Centrex where every circuit on those 6 button phone had a complete path back to the office. So businesses in the US had an incredible amount of 50 pair cables running in the walls and ceilings. Then IPVN and fiber eliminated the need for a copper pair back to the CO from each end point. I wonder if anyone has estimated how much copper is buried in the US never to be used again?
the old companies having been a half-arsed cowboy bunch
Wow. A US idiom being used to describe a UK company.
It's amazing how often (2) is a recognised number from an exchange where we know no-one
A few years back the scammers in the US started using fake numbers with the same prefix as your number so as to try and get you to think it was someone nearby. (Number portability now withstanding.)
In the use for me that would be any 919-332-xxxx number.
I have a few thousand numbers in my cell phone contact list. And the majority of the calls to me are still from "Unknown Number - SPAM Likely". Oh well.
What I read was the mine in Cumbria was intended for coking for steel.
So say the political backers.
There was a well written article I read in the last few days about these proposed mines and the use of the coal for steel production. All of the steel companies they talked with said they had no interest in using more than maybe 10% of the coal. If that. Thank you very much. They seem to be actively working on reducing the amount of coal needed to make steel.
It's obviously falsifiable, but the experiments required to test the hypothesis are ridiculously expensive and complicated, even on mice. Setting up a radioactivity-reduced environment could be done, but I can't see anyone shelling out the gigabucks needed. We already know that significant increases in radioactivity are harmful.
There is also epidemiological testing, but the complexity of that is such that huge amounts of very carefully collected data would be needed, which brings us back to shelling out gigabucks.
The former could be done even for neutrinos, to some extent, by running experiments around Earth and Neptune; we don't have the technology to shield neutinos, so that would test only for solar ones. We could also text higher fluxes by running fission generators nearby, shielded against gamma rays but, again, that's only one source of neutrinos and not for lower fluxes.
It's certainly plausible that a certain level of background radioactivity is important (or even essential) for proper development of our immune system but, as it's not a practically usable result even if true, it will remain speculation.
"However, in order to keep the reactivity up, you have to get rid of the neutron-eaters, so the refining step is not optional."
It's this that is really the whole point of the thing. It's not something that's a nuisance because you can't skip it, it's what you're trying to be able to do in the first place: take all the crap out of the reacting mass continuously at the same rate as it's being formed, so all you've got in there is fissile and fissionable nuclei plus transparent carrier materials and the conditions for the fission reaction are closer to ideal.
The chemistry isn't too bad really. The actual refinement part of the whole chemical processing sequence, which of course any reprocessing method has to do, is basically the easy bit, because all the elements you do want are conveniently chemically special in much the same way and all the ones you don't aren't; so as long as you're not wanting to separate the different fissile/fissionable elements from each other, and only need to concern yourself with separating them in a bunch from everything else, that step is straightforward.
Since you're getting rid of all the neutron-eaters as they are formed, the reactor has enough spare neutrons available that you indeed can stuff any old fissi[onab]le element in there and it'll get eaten eventually, so the only possible way you can have a requirement to separate them from each other is if you want a particular one to make bombs with. So that's that bit taken care of.
The other important bit is separating the reaction material from the carrier material. With conventional reactors this step is where most of the shit comes from, but with molten salt reactors it's a lot easier and the bit that would end up as shit ends up as stuff you put back in. You don't have to process a stream of molten salt at 700°C - they use fluoride salt mixtures with lower melting points than sodium chloride, more like 350 to 450 roughly. You also don't have to work on it in the same state as it is in in operation; you can cool it down and dissolve it, then reverse that once you've finished.
You don't have to have 95% of it hanging around waiting for stuff to decay. It doesn't matter if the stuff going through the process is horribly radioactive, because you're not doing it by hand, you're doing it with a bunch of plumbing and some computers. The plumbing doesn't care, and anyway you can dilute it as much as you want for convenience. You might want to have more than one bunch of plumbing so you can let them cool down one at a time for maintenance, but that's not really the same thing. They're also not particularly big bunches of plumbing, because they're essentially doing the equivalent of processing one reactor's fuel mass in the same time as the refuelling interval for a comparable conventional reactor, at an appropriately low continuous rate.
You can then leave the crap to cool down after you've separated it from the fuel and salt. This is less of a problem for containment than leaving whole fuel elements to cool off, because you're only storing the stuff you're actually cooling plus any suitably benign and inert carrier material that's convenient, and not any other noxious substances mixed in with it. Also, you have the same continuous low flow rate advantage as with the actual reprocessing, so there's not a huge amount of storage needed plus it's only the start of the line that's seriously hot. And the longer-term storage is also a lot easier, because again you've extracted all the stuff that has a really long half-life and put it back in the reactor, so you're only dealing with things that need to stay locked up for a few hundred years.
They are really not very good for making bombs with if they haven't been designed for that to start with. Certainly they are useful for making bombs with if you do design them that way, because the continuous reprocessing gives you a chance to separate out the bomb isotopes and/or their precursors while they are still isotopically pure, and get super-duper bomb juice without double capture products in it. But that means reprocessing at a much faster rate to keep the concentration of wanted isotopes low, plus a whole extra chunk of plant to separate the different heavy elements from each other and extract those wanted isotopes at those low concentrations at that same faster rate. It also means the nuclear properties of the circulating material are not the same because you're not leaving those isotopes in there to make up for the fuel consumed in producing them. A non-bomb reactor is even less use than a conventional one if you're trying to make bombs on the side, because the circulating material is a brew of bomb isotopes plus multiple-capture higher versions all mixed up together, and with a lot more of those higher versions than a conventional reactor because they all just go round and round until they get eaten and you never take any of them out. There isn't an equivalent trick to making an ordinary reactor and just changing the fuel really often, without building the reactor and the reprocessing plant in the first place to make that kind of operation possible which would be really really obvious.
Not that that matters anyway since we have the worked examples of places like North Korea doing the equivalent with conventional fuel cycles, and responding to queries like "oi, that looks like a plutonium extraction plant, you don't need that for generating electricity, what's all this then?" first with something transparently shit like "it's only for research purposes, no honest it is" and then with "piss off", and getting away with it; or South Africa going the whole way from scratch entirely on their own with no help from anyone... and then taking the bombs apart again because they decided it was more trouble than it was worth to have them. I don't reckon all the non-proliferation guff is worth the agonising it gets. Either somewhere wants them badly enough that it goes ahead regardless and nobody cares enough to stop it anyway, or it wants to not have them at all. It might even do both one after the other, but it doesn't harbour a half-arsed desire which is weak enough to be put off by one comparatively and increasingly minor obstacle.
DavidL- I've not had a spam call from $this_exchange, but lots at least purporting to be from major conurbations:-
0121 - Birmingham, West Midlands
0131 - Edinburgh
0141 - Glasgow... 0191 - Newcastle upon Tyne
And yes my cell is in my landline's directory as "Paws Mobile".
By rights "Paws Mobile" should refer to a Captain Cavemanesque camper van or similarly absurd vehicle.
I think I'm getting mixed up between the line wiring and the internal house wiring, for which I think the convention has changed at least 3 times since my first memory of what it was like when all phones were hard-wired... come to that the original master sockets weren't wired quite the same as they are nowadays, though I can't remember what the difference was.
Baba Yaga's camper van? (Camping sites don't allow chicken feet.)
I know a camp site on Dartmoor that has chickens, and they all had feet.
And yes my cell is in my landline's directory as "Paws Mobile".
I don't even think the phone companies in the US put out "white pages" of people/businesses. I may be wrong.
But most land lines are now owned by "old farts" and businesses. But the old farts are dying off. And more and more small businesses just don't have one. Or maybe just one number.
A client that had a DID (multiple numbers into the system) for each employee which was handled by a VOIP provider. These range to the receptionist or direct to a persons desk. Between older management leaving/deaths and the pandemic so everyone went how, we switched it to a single number handler at the VOIP where all the inbound calls wound up. You got a recording which then, depending on the extension picked, forwarded the call to people's cell or to a voice mail setup. (Employee's choice.) When a voice mail was left the person with the extension got an email saying "you have voice mail".
And I know other small businesses that I work with who just do not have anything like a land line. They have a cell phone for the business. And allow people to sign up for appointments and such via Facebook or whatever.
PS: At 68 I qualify as an old fart. And I dropped my home land line 15 years or so ago. $45/mo back in my pocket.
PPS: Many of the people who still have residential land lines (mostly old farts) think they have a copper pair back to the Central Office (CO). This makes them feel secure. They don't want to hear that it's really VOIP to the neighborhood pod where it is put back on copper for them for the last 1000 feet or so. And AT&T no longer will install copper into a house anywhere in the US now unless that's the only way to give service. Not sure about Verizon.
That's awful fast for arthritis. I have osteo, and both of my knees were partially replaced. I'd check with an orthopedist, if I were you.
I have osteoporosis. Just had an x-ray to check if this is really arthritis or something else. Doctor I saw (not my GP — someone filling in for him who was a sport doctor) recommended physiotherapy. The walking problem is probably muscle-related but the root cause might be deeper (if I understood her correctly, I might have seriously strained/tore muscles unconsciously compensating for a problem in the joint).
Anyway, I consider my aging body definitive proof against intelligent design. Ain't nothin' intelligent about all these different failure modes…
Voila! Cheap and simple nuclear fusion.,/i>
Project Plowshare?
See also cheap excavation of harbours, mountain passes, etc…
You parrot quite precisely the basis on which MSR reactors where originally suggested, as an alternative to the "messy" traditional reactor.
However, the fact is that experience has already shown us that very little of what you write holds true on practice.
Waving a magic wand and intoning the incantations of "automation" and "computerized" does not change that reality: Molten salt is a mess, even before you add fissile materials and fission products from the nasty end of the periodic table.
May I remind you, that the class of components in nuclear power which has caused most trouble for the last six decades are heat-exchangers: Trivially simple plumbing, which do nothing more fancy than move heat from one medium to another while keeping them separated.
But thanks for reinforcing my point about neonuclear scammers being the second biggest problem for nuclear power these days :-)
The primary problem being, of course, that it is just too damn expensive.
Not directly, but in the presence of neutrons it happily absorbs one and become Uranium, which can fission.
So, it's not actually a thorium reactor but a uranium reactor. That's not what the thorium boosters want you to hear (they like to use the word "convert" because "breed" has uranium cooties). There are other issues like the startup charge in the "thorium" reactor has to include lots of high-assay uranium and plutonium to kickstart the breeding cycle making the initial fuel load more dangerous to handle than regular PWR and BWR fuel rods. You can find images on the Web showing people wearing light protective clothing (or none at all sometimes) while handling unused fuel assemblies, not something you could do with molten salt fuel.
Since most neutrons are "wasted" in a normal nuclear reactor, that makes thorium a viable part of fuel for fission reactors of all designs.
Those are normal reactors meaning uranium-fuelled cores the size of a bus operating at a temperature of about 300 to 400 deg C with no breeding required to produce heat and generate electricity so they can be profligate with their neutrons (typically a little more than 2 neutrons per fission event on average). Thorium-fuelled breeders NEED 2 neutrons to run and can't afford to waste many hence the small dense cores running at high temperatures because of the reduced surface area.
USA even tested a nuclear bomb "with a lot of thorium in it" and got a respectable bang.
Never heard of this myself but I am just an interested enthusiast rather than a historian of the subject. I do know that the US fired off a couple of U-233 test devices during the 1950s, and I presume their cores were bred up from Th-232 at Hanford. They seemed to work but there may have been technical issues we've never been told about. There might have been some thorium content left over in the cores after processing, I don't know.
Regular enriched uranium was and still is cheap and plentiful and the production facilities were already established. This resulted in the US Department of Energy recently attempting to dispose of a couple of tonnes of U-233 left over from these experiments, I'm not sure what they finally decided to do with it.
One of the "gimme money" thorium booster companies did have some test fuel pellets manufactured with significant thorium content to see if it could be used as a fuel supplement in regular PWRs and BWRs. The fuel rods were going to be exposed in a test reactor in Norway for a couple of years to see what happened to them, the chemical characteristics and nucleonics etc. but the reactor got shut down permanently for safety and engineering reasons and I don't know what happened to the thorium-supplement pellets thereafter.
I have a friend in the float glass business. What he tells me about the maintenance requirements for furnaces containing relatively well behaved hot liquids does not fill me with confidence when it comes to radioactive molten salt.
Keep the chamber hot by dropping nuclear fusion charges down the hole at regular intervals.
In many places if you go down a few miles might you get to rock hot enough to not need the follow on fusion charges?
»The fuel rods were going to be exposed in a test reactor in Norway for a couple of years to see what happened to them«
And true to form for the credibility of the neonuclear fantasts, there have been accusations of scientific improprieties with those experiments.
A nuclear weapon doesn't actually put out a lot of heat compared to a nuclear reactor. 1kg of TNT produces about 4MJ of energy so a 1MT yield fusion weapon would produce about 4 x 10^15 Joules. A 1GW nuclear reactor generates about 3GW of heat when it's operating so it would produce the same amount of heat energy in about 1.3 x 10^6 seconds or about two weeks, and it's reusable for decades unlike the fusion weapon which... isn't.
Someone in Iceland was drilling to find superheated water underground for a geothermal power plant a while back. They hit magma instead. They made some effort to try and recover heat from this but it ate all of the well-string end equipment thanks to heat and chemical action (acidic or alkaline, I'm not sure but anything significantly variant from Ph 7 in either direction plus temps of 1600 deg C is not going to give a good outcome for heat exchanger endurance).
The fuel pellet experiment wasn't anything to do with molten-salt thorium reactors, it was just going to to test a novel fuel mix for conventional PWR and BWR reactors (and maybe CANDU/HWRs too). There were some upsides like less Pu239 and Pu240 production expected compared to regular enriched uranium fuel mixes but it wouldn't eliminate the Pu breeding totally so it wasn't completely proliferation-resistant. Any U233 bred in the pellets couldn't be chemically separated from the U235 and U238 in the spent fuel.
I'm not parroting it, I'm pigeoning it :) working most of it out myself from basically understanding how the things are supposed to work.
"May I remind you, that the class of components in nuclear power which has caused most trouble for the last six decades are heat-exchangers: Trivially simple plumbing, which do nothing more fancy than move heat from one medium to another while keeping them separated."
They cause trouble in non-nuclear power stations too. You're pumping energy into a system with lots of random opportunities for acoustic resonances of reasonably high Q to occur, and also for random exciting frequencies to be generated especially if there is a phase change going on. More fun if you have to withstand high pressures at the same time, and also if you're not operating at constant power level. They're an interesting example of problems which you don't normally even notice on everyday scales which become pains in the arse when you make a huge giant big one... although actually quite a few of them do appear on everyday scales when you start to look for them.
Yes, but if you could look closely enough you'd see that they didn't quite touch the ground.
You might look into the Prius V (the station-wagon version of a Prius) or a Toyota RAV-4, which is an SUV and also a hybrid. The RAV-4s get more like 35 MPG, but that's not bad for a class of car where mileage runs in the 12 - 25 MPG range.
Steam generators in PWRs are replaceable components, usually swapped out at suitable intervals of between twenty and thirty years of operation. The French fleet of M910 reactors has been undergoing just such a scheduled replacement operation over the past few years. The advantage of having nearly all of the French fleet being of a mostly-similar design (the later models had five steam generators, the earlier reactors just three) meant that EdF could order identical fifty steam generators at once, a big saving in time and money.
Watts Bar 2, the last reactor ever brought online in the US just completed the installation of new steam generators, although its timeline is a bit messed up since it started construction, was abandoned and then completed much later.
Fusion Power
So, rather than being 30 years in the future, it's now 20? Or, maybe 15 on a good day?
Seriously, though ....
This needs real serious money thrown at it, because it could be a viable "route out" { ??? }
I think it's 29 years into the future now. And note the exponential curve...
Nope. And I don't want some underpaid Uber driver, who's being screwed by Uber (or Lyft), who is actually a cab driver, not a "ride share", and the company's neither paying taxes on that, nor are paying the benefits due AN EMPLOYEE, to hit a warehouse, where underpaid and overworked workers are trying to keep up. And if I go to a corner store, the money stays in the community, rather than going to some CEO.
You wrote:
Then deregulation in the US.
Then cell phones showed up.
---
Nope. My late wife wanted a cell phone for safety, and we got one around '94 or '95. Dereg - I was working for Ameritech, starting in '95, became a signatory to the Bell dismemberment of '86, then the SOB running Ameritech demanded that we write letters to our Congresscritter and Senators supporting dereg (and by "demanded" I mean my manager told me that I had to write them, and send copies to him to forward to upper management - I wrote something that didn't really say "do dereg", but it was enough to make them happy enough that I kept my job), and dereg was in '96.
OF, here. Not giving up my land line. Why? Well, it doesn't run out of charge. For that matter, I gave up an online vendor I liked... because they moved their call center to India, and over there, they all used cell phones. So, when I couldn't understand her - her accent being that heavy - and there being so much STATIC on the line I could barely understand her anyway, I dropped it, and went to another.
I don't have static on my line.
Not my point. My point was all of these things stacked up to make the system work the way it does now. Sorry if implied too much literally.
Well, it doesn't run out of charge.
Most people I know who want a land line have a memory of the phones working when the power is off for a day or few. Today with the local pod needing to be powered, that land line goes down when the batteries go out. The copper wire pair from their home all the way back to the CO with it's huge pile of batteries and a generator doesn't exist for most of the US anymore.
As to your static issues. Great for you. I can send you to the W. Hartford area in the 70s into the 90s (and maybe even today) where ALL land lines had static if there was a hint of rain. A failed experiment from Western Electric cable division in their water proofing of the sheath. Of course it took a few years to start leaking water. And they did NOT spend the $billion or so to dig it all up and replace it. So static it was.
My point is people should do what works for them. But understand that pass assumptions don't hold true forever.
I'll note something on the telephone battery issue. If you go to a VOIP solution for your burglar alarm, fire alarm, elevator alarm or 911 line and the power goes down, you're in trouble. POTs (plain old telephone service) is the right way to go for these services because the phone company has huge batteries and the power will stay up!
It may in fact be illegal/against the building code to use a VOIP solution for any of these services, so buyer beware.
»Steam generators in PWRs are replaceable components,«
Yes, that's not quite what they said when they built San Onofre, but you are right that steam generators have been replaced but it is hardly routine, and at least three reactors (~1% of all) have been scrapped because replacing the steam generators went bad.
»became a signatory to the Bell dismemberment of '86,«
That's was the exchange area deregulation, that did not really involve SS7 at all.
I was talking about the long distance deregulation in the 1970'ies. The SPC vs. AT&T lawsuits and all that, where AT&T insisted on treating competitors like different countries, thereby forcing them to interface via SS protocols.
As I did in '94, living on the Space Coast of FL. Power was off for about 10 days, buying ice at the stupormarket daily for the fridge.
Power went down on... Sat? Sun? Phone (land line) went out Monday. Came up for about an hour on Thurs, came up and stayed up Fri. Power not until that Sun? Mon?
Cell towers overwhelmed. No power meant no 'Net. Land line...
»Today with the local pod needing to be powered,«
After Katrina the FEMA FCC laid down rules about how long time decentralized kit needs batteries for.
The telcos didn't like it, but FCC and FEMA insisted.
Re: mileage
It seems to me that the US isn't just car addicted, but addicted to comically fuel-inefficient cars as well—and that seems to be the case even outside the silly SUVs.
My own car is not as fuel efficient as your Octavia—for one, it's 15 years old—but I get 50MPG (4.7l per 100km) easily, I'm happy if a can make it under 4.5l per 100km (52MPG) and feel really bad if I do worse than 5.0l per 100km (47MPG). Something as outrageously bad as 30MPG (almost 8l per 100km) would be plainly unacceptable.
After all, we were promised the '3-litre-car' (that would be the 78.4-MPG-car) 20 years ago already. If I were to buy a new ICE car today, that's what I would demand. And it's what everybody should explicitly demand, so that car manufacturers can no longer claim that all their customers only want ridiculously oversized, fuel-inefficient monsters.
whitroth @ 463
What do you do, when, as they are going to do here, go over to VOIP on all "Land-Lines"?
I'm on that, where I live - fibre to the house. There is a battery-backup on the phone line. (And literally, I just replaced the battery yesterday - the phone company doesn't do that....)
"Seriously, though ....
This needs real serious money thrown at it, because it could be a viable 'route out' { ??? }"
Maybe. Dumping tons of cash into laser-driven inertial-containment fusion might in some sweet bye-and-bye produce ReddyGigawatts of sustainable electric power.
Sort of by the way, it occurred to me that in the LLNL scheme being reported, the fusion burn produces a bunch of x-rays of its own. So perhaps a further stage that uses those x-rays to collapse and ignite a bigger fuel capsule? Some design would be necessary, but similar to the "radiation case" and "radiation channel" in the Teller-Ulam concept.
(What's your most shocking find on the internet? No limits!)
Ten months old, but still qualifies from my somewhat retro viewpoint, a collection of apparently living, breathing portraits generated by a.i. to show historical figures in modern attire, based on statues or paintings shown next to the rendered images. Newton, Leonardo, Washington, Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots included.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oR01HYLwmY4
Yep, Australia as well is putting a little SLA battery in the VOIP box. Which is mildly annoying for those that have proper battery systems, but it's a small price to pay for the possibility that one day they might be able to pay even more and get faster than 100Mbits down...
Meanwhile my wifi router offers POTS ports with no battery in that or the cable modem. If I want battery it's up to me. Luckily both run on "about 12V" so will happily run directly off a 12V battery. The wifi AP in my shedroom may never have been attached to the grid at all (I bought it "brand new second hand")
Robert Prior @ 397:
Canada too. Virtually all my waterfowl callers with subcontinental accents are apparently calling from my local area code. And although I have caller ID, many numbers (such as my nieces') just display the number and no other description, so being unable to reemmber all the phone numbers of people who might legitimately call me I answer more spam calls than regular calls.
I do report those like real estate agents to the CRTC, for violating the Do Not Call list (which I've been on since it was created).
From what I dimly remember from my time writing phone switching software decades ago, the phone system was created to assume good faith from someone already in the system, so the designed-in security was in no way ready for internet phones. This could be way out-of-date technically, but my spam experience suggests otherwise.
Here in the U.S. the "Do Not Call" laws are so weak, have so many exceptions and enforcement is so lax (plus reporting is so damn complicated) ... I think the only reason they spoof the numbers is to make it more likely you'll pick up BECAUSE you can't tell if it's someone you know or not.
Plus, I guess it might be an effort to keep you from SPAMMING them back. I'm not a programmer, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of programmers out there who could do it.
I mostly just hang up once I realize what kind of call it is. Occasionally I'll say NO and hang up. Sometimes I will tell the caller to put my number on their "Do not call list" (for all the good THAT's going to do) and if I'm in a particularly vile mood when they call, I'll start telling them things about their parentage they don't want to hear.
Phishing calls I take seriously and will try to gather as much information as I can and I DO report those to law enforcement. Sometimes I'll PHUCK with 'em first.
My all time favorite effort at that was a call I received one time and strung the caller along until I finally told him I couldn't understand half what he was saying because of the a connection and he needed to CALL MY LAND LINE ... and gave him the listed phone number for the FBI office down in Charlotte, NC.
He actually called me back a few minutes later to verify I'd given him the correct phone number. I gave him the FBI's number again & verified that was the best number to reach me.
He didn't call back a second time.
»Dumping tons of cash into laser-driven inertial-containment fusion[…]«
That is a pretty apt description of how they got to the announcement today.
Last I heard a lifetime cost for NIF, they were well above $10B already.
NIF originated in Reagans Starwars, orbital lasers compressing undetectably small neutron-bombs etc.
As far as fusion energy, it total side-show which, at best, will refine some measurements we already know pretty damn well.
It's primary reason for NIF's continued existence is that it provides a way to test certain aspects of implosion designs, without actually imploding them.
And do not make the mistake of thinking that the timing of this experiment, and announcement, is unrelated to the US Congress' budget negotiations.
What do you do, when, as they are going to do here, go over to VOIP on all "Land-Lines"?
That was my point. For all practical purposes I suspect somewhere between 90% and 99% of the US population is on VOIP out of the CO. While they may have copper from a pod to their home, it is VOIP from the pod back to the CO and then to anywhere else.
Here in the U.S. the "Do Not Call" laws are so weak, have so many exceptions and enforcement is so lax (plus reporting is so damn complicated)
Actually the "Do Not Call" law is well enforced and obeyed. By the legit companies. And big fines when they don't do it. But you can't exclude people you've set up a relationship with. And politicians are off the hook.
The rest of it is people in Uganda, run by a shell company in the Azores, selling luxury swamp land in the Amazon rain forest. And routing their calls via malware infected home computers all over the EU. They are illegal operations that are virtually untraceable and don't give a damn about US FCC regulations.
"My all time favorite effort at that was a call I received one time and strung the caller along until I finally told him I couldn't understand half what he was saying because of the a connection and he needed to CALL MY LAND LINE ... and gave him the listed phone number for the FBI office down in Charlotte, NC."
Applause!!
Last I heard a lifetime cost for NIF, they were well above $10B already.
My college roommate was working on his PHD at LLNL back in the early 80s. They were building the first or second large scale laser system then. And knew it would not work to generate power. But would give them lots of interesting data for the next version or two to be built.
He wasn't on that project.
POTs (plain old telephone service) is the right way to go for these services because the phone company has huge batteries and the power will stay up!
POTS like you're thinking of hasn't existed in the majority of the US for at least 10 years. Maybe 20. All of these somewhat hidden CO buildings that used to be full of batteries and back in the day stepper systems are now 70% to 90% empty.
One reason the telcos were all excited about 5G was it would give them a way to use their almost empty CO buildings. They'd rent out the floor space to companies wanting to put caching servers near the users. I'm not so sure this will pan out.
You need to see this then... A bit more than some blinking.
https://youtu.be/9POcNCMlP_s
PS CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR RINGS OF POWER
Pigeon @ 424:
I had a look once at the sequence of tones which precede "This is the United States calling, are we reaching...? ... See, he keeps hanging up. And it's a man answering." The sequence was recorded off a real phone call. It's a string of digits in some version of DTMF which is different from what phone keypads generate, produced by the operator pressing some button, meaning something like "repeat last operation" to the system. Had Pink been so inclined he could probably in theory have replayed the recording down the phone instead of hanging up and thereby retried the call once again. There was a fashion in the US at one point for building your own alternate-DTMF generators to issue similar but more useful commands to make the system do things like put long-distance calls through at local-call charge rates. I don't think that worked on the British phone system, but there were different things that did.
When the U.S. converted to touch-tone dialing the number "411" was reserved for directory assistance and "911" became the national number for emergency (I think in the U.K. it's 999). But did you ever wonder what "111", "211" ... did?
On the Bell System (AT&T et al before the breakup) "711" gave an automated voice that told you the telephone number assigned to a pair of wires - useful when you were working in the telephone room in a shopping mall or large store & needed to find a particular pair associated with a customer's phone number so you could punch down an RJ-31x for their alarm system.
Re: "...do not make the mistake of thinking that the timing of this experiment, and announcement, is unrelated to the US Congress' budget negotiations."
The ONLY reason I could think of for this fusion announcement now was the lame-duck session of Congress. They are massaging the numbers so hard on this experiment they could have done the same announcement years ago, with nary a change in the press release.
David L @ 436:
A few years back the scammers in the US started using fake numbers with the same prefix as your number so as to try and get you to think it was someone nearby. (Number portability now withstanding.)
In the use for me that would be any 919-332-xxxx number.
I have a few thousand numbers in my cell phone contact list. And the majority of the calls to me are still from "Unknown Number - SPAM Likely". Oh well.
That is the one thing I've managed to figure out on my "smrat-phone".
Callers who are in my contact list are assigned a ring-tone that sounds like a telephone ringing. Callers who are NOT in my contact list get one "ding" and go to voice mail where they are instructed to leave a message including name & telephone and whether they want me to add them to my contact list - which I might if it's someone I do want to talk to.
Whenever I have to give someone a contact number (like at a doctor's office) I explain this to them so they'll know to leave a message. If I'm getting repeated SPAM calls on the "smrat-phone" I can also add them to my block list.
It has worked reasonably well so far. I just wish I could figure out a way to do this with my desk phone.
"They haven't invented Artificial Intelligence; they've invented Artificial Boris Johnson."
There's an interesting article on just this point here: https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/davinci-003-chatbot-gpt-wrote-my-obituary.html
They've written an AI bullshitter. A really good AI bullshitter. If it writes something that sounds really plausible but you know is wrong, and you challenge it to produce the data sources it based it on, it produces a really decent seeming set of references - only some of the references are completely made up, and when you check they don't actually contain the data is claims they do.
They're designing - evolving - a system that produces text that looks good.
Pigeon posted in #424 on December 13, 2022 10:00
It's a string of digits in some version of DTMF which is different from what phone keypads generate, produced by the operator pressing some button, meaning something like "repeat last operation" to the system.
The frequencies used by both in-band trunk signalling, and subscriber telephones, are found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box#Frequencies_and_timings
Right. Less service, less batteries. However, the issue isn't the structure of the wiring/fiber optics. The issue is that there is still battery power running the system, so that if your building goes up in flames because your electrical system catches fire, there will still be phone service with which to call 911, run your fire alarm, etc., and your elevators, which are full of people when it happens, can still make that lifesaving outbound call!
VOIP systems go down hard when the power goes out and if you need emergency services at that time... sucks to be you!
David L @ 445:
I don't even think the phone companies in the US put out "white pages" of people/businesses. I may be wrong.
BY COINCIDENCE, I received "The REAL Yellow Pages The original search engine" in the mail today and it has a small "white pages" section for "Featured Businesses". Seems to be owned by AT&T, whoever they are nowadays. 😕
But most land lines are now owned by "old farts" and businesses. But the old farts are dying off. And more and more small businesses just don't have one. Or maybe just one number.
[...]
And I know other small businesses that I work with who just do not have anything like a land line. They have a cell phone for the business. And allow people to sign up for appointments and such via Facebook or whatever.
I don't know if the directory represents land lines or not? I think it's businesses that have service from AT&T and are willing to pay for listing and/or advertising.
Most of the listings do seem to be local small businesses. I saw a few local outlets for "national chains" under pharmacies & restaurants ...
The one interesting entry I spotted in the Yellow Pages section was for "Pedicabs" - it had two listings for pediatricians.
Troutwaxer @ 466:
I'll note something on the telephone battery issue. If you go to a VOIP solution for your burglar alarm, fire alarm, elevator alarm or 911 line and the power goes down, you're in trouble. POTs (plain old telephone service) is the right way to go for these services because the phone company has huge batteries and the power will stay up!
It may in fact be illegal/against the building code to use a VOIP solution for any of these services, so buyer beware.
AFAIK, it's not illegal, just not particularly reliable. Even if you have the modem hooked up to a UPS, if the "cable" goes out you still don't have service. Regular telephone is more reliable. I've lost power a few times over the years (hurricanes, ice storms, ...), but when I had a POTS phone I never had the telephone go out.
The most reliable alarm circuit's were the leased line where the business rented a copper pair that made a circuit through to a local monitoring station; worked by reversing polarity of a DC voltage to indicate an alarm condition. An open circuit would register as trouble and generate a service call - usually to the phone company first so they could check the circuit, and then to me if the Telco said the circuit was good.
Usually when I got there I'd find out the Telco was wrong about the circuit being "good".
It required two circuits if you wanted both fire & burg monitoring.
Many of the customers I serviced switched to a digital communicator (phone dialer) for burglar alarms, but kept the leased lines for fire for as long as they could get local monitoring service, but in many of the smaller communities, "local monitoring" went directly to the police or sheriff's office and they wanted to get out of that business.
Just shortly before I left the burglar/fire alarm business we had started installing cell phones as backup communicators. If the alarm system lost the land line it would switch over to the cell phone and send a signal that the land line was out. It was basically a "bag-phone" mounted in a box above the lay-in tile ceiling with a rechargeable 12V battery pack inside.
Mounted a magnetic "car-top" antenna on the roof of the building sitting up on the HVAC unit.
David L @ 479:
That was my point. For all practical purposes I suspect somewhere between 90% and 99% of the US population is on VOIP out of the CO. While they may have copper from a pod to their home, it is VOIP from the pod back to the CO and then to anywhere else.
But in that case, VOIP between COs, don't the Telcos keep the big batteries (and backup generators) to maintain the system when the power goes out? The VOIP leg is invisible to the subscriber.
Does it matter if it's VOIP between COs if you still have dial tone at the house when you need it?
On the legality issue, it varies from state to state and possibly municipality to municipality. Eight hours of battery backup is definitely a requirement in some of my local cities/counties.
Regards POTS vs VOIP: experience here in NZ after both earthquakes and floods is that you're usually better off with a mobile.
POTS goes down when the wires go, just like the power does. The cell towers have big batteries, and they get diesel generators out to them pretty quickly.
But the mobile data may become severely bandwidth limited.
(The apocalypse will not be live-cast.)
"Does it matter if it's VOIP between COs if you still have dial tone at the house when you need it?"
Between COs, no it doesn't matter. It's VOIP from the CO to the pod where the copper starts that's the issue. The pod cannot draw power from the CO via VOIP, so it's powered from the grid, with backup (maybe) from batteries, which for space reasons cannot have the capacity that the old exchanges had. I doubt very much that pods have generators.
So when the pod batteries run out, so does your connection.
JHomes.
Yes, but my concern, as a professional who installs lots of netorking gear, is that we're talking about automated alarms which reach out through the phone system, or people using business phones to call 911 because the system will automatically find the place's address. If you've gone to a 100 percent VOIP system that can't happen when seconds count.
And of course a single event could never knock out electricity and, for example, start a fire...
Yes, but the solution you're offering is "relocate the building to somewhere that still has POTS" and implicitly "keep doing that as the POTS system is retired". Eventually your business will have to move to Sri Lanka or somewhere that still uses POTS.
My workplace is somewhat on the other end of your concerns, among other things we act as a fallback reporting location for some alarm systems. For that and other reasons we have fibre to the building as well as cellular data connections two two different networks. Those are slow, but adequate since we throttle the in-office users when we're relying on them. There's normal server-style UPS's in the server room, plus smaller ones downstream of those on a couple of key items (so we have network connectivity even after the servers shut down). The boss is still whining about the cost of a solar+battery grid-optional system but I think he'll come round after a couple more power cuts.
The point is that for most people these days, even most "critical businesses", the connectivity that matters is not "can I get a dial tone if I can find a landline phone", it's "does my phone work" and by that they mean a smartphone or at the very least a cellphone.
Even old-school alarm systems these days are starting to leave out the POTS circuitry because people hate it. Or just ignore it. The 1% who still demand it are usually wrong, but we sell POTS alarms to them anyway (viz, they think they have a copper connection to somewhere but they actually have VIOP, almost always VOIP on their premises)
MSR has so far been very underwhelming in practice.
And that's a relief to me. I've said before, and here, that I really don't want to see molten salt reactors catching on until molten salt is a mature technology and a boring way to generate power. Build more Crescent Dunes plants, absolutely (hopefully with less pointy-haired-boss interference). One of the advantages of a solar concentration system is that it's very easy to turn it off; if something went pear shaped at Crescent Dunes they could just shut it down, wait for everything to cool, and fix things at their convenience. This is not so easy with a fission pile.
Tangentially related piece in today's Graun - London’s lost mega-motorway: the eight-lane ring road that would have destroyed much of the city.
Thanks for sharing that. I'm reminded of Jay Foreman's series Unfinished London series, which may be your thing if you take your infotainment as Youtube videos.
As he opens the second installment, "If you've ever tried driving around London, you'll know what a [car horn beep]ing nightmare it is."
I'm not irrationally in love with POTS. There's nothing wrong with VOIP or cellular circuits - in fact they're generally better for most purposes - except that nobody buys the extra equipment which keeps thing working when the power goes down.
Just to be perfectly clear, the issue is not POTS vs. VOIP. It's battery backup vs. not battery backup for services which are still crucial when power goes down. POTS happens to have the backup and VOIP doesn't. That could be changed, but it won't happen until a couple-hundred people die in a terrible fire.
VOIP systems go down hard when the power goes out and if you need emergency services at that time... sucks to be you!
My point is that the US system is not virtually ALL VOIP. Those copper wires into a home or business only go to a neighborhood pod. And for office buildings, even many small ones, the pod is in the building. After the pod it is VOIP all the way. Over fiber.
or people using business phones to call 911 because the system will automatically find the place's address. If you've gone to a 100 percent VOIP system that can't happen when seconds count.
In North Carolina when you sign up for phone service that's NOT on a cell phone you have to fill out a form stating what the address is which will be used for 911/emergency calls. And they will not turn the service on until the form is filled out and registered with the local authorities.
Troutwaxer @ 491
It's all too obvious, I'm afraid: - how long after VOIP is "all over" & some emrgency, as you have described, happens.
And people die, horribly, probably in a fire.
?? Much hand-wringing "no-one could have foreseen this" { i.e. the usual lies } & nothing is done, until next time.
Yes, but if you could look closely enough you'd see that they didn't quite touch the ground.
They paint the feet with cavorite?
While I sympathise a little due to the apparently-magically-self-powering equipment in POTS, to me none of this equipment you're describing should be using VOIP, it should be using IP over IP. At least that makes the problem a little plainer. In some utopian future all those premises could have more than one pair of fibre, so the problem of the device talking upstream is just the device's, the way it is for POTS. In the meantime, it's just about what else needs to be powered to handle the mux/demux at the customer end, presumably a switch with ethernet and fibre or coax media. Well that, and cellular radios are almost easier to have built in than not.
I'll give it a try. I tend to mostly avoid Youtube because my buggered ears are no longer able to do video without subtitles, and if they use the autogenerated ones they seem to be just behind the dialogue and it really makes me nuts.
Para 2 JohnS - Easy. 111 is NHS 24.
In some utopian future all those premises could have more than one pair of fibre
I'm reminded of a cautionary tale I heard in the 80s, while working on fibre-optic systems*.
Company had two buildings they needed connected, and decided to use fibre rather than copper. One fibre would do, but for redundancy they decided to install two so they had a backup in case of stray backhoes. Network engineers didn't know that the operations department saved money by installing both fibres in the same trench, and one backhoe brought down the connection.
*Back when ISDN was the latest craze.
"I struck up a conversation with the dad and found out that their daughter was had left a high paying tech job and her social networks in Austin Texas (I believe that is in the USA?) because... one of her kids was about to start kindergarten, ..."
Aside from that, the Abbott regime is using Child Protective Services as a enforcement arm against non-heterosexuality. If the child says something sexually incorrect, the State of Texas could very well try to kidnap their child.
I'm fairly sure a judge has stayed most of that nonsense. Not that it might come back.
But I wasn't unhappy to be vacating our crash pad apartment in the DFW area 2 years ago.
We have some good friends who live in the DFW area and have interests in the Florida panhandle. Relations and property.
They just grit their teeth when politics comes up.
Reread the second paragraph of my comment directly above yours.
That sounds like antiquated equipment. In California that information gets built into VOIP equipment and transmitted to 911 when a call happens.
Sure. There are lots of solutions which involve low-power equipment which could run for hours on a decently-sized battery backup, including cellular solutions like Cradlepoints, so I see your point.
"That sounds like antiquated equipment. In California that information gets built into VOIP equipment and transmitted to 911 when a call happens."
That was poorly phrased. I should say that all the 911 call centers in the counties I serve have that kind of modern equipment. I don't know about the rest of California.
I did.
That sounds like antiquated equipment. In California that information gets built into VOIP equipment and transmitted to 911 when a call happens.
I've ordered VOIP services several times lately. The voice call provider has NO IDEA exactly where the phone handset is located. Geo location might get them to the proper ISP center. Or not if the ISP has recently re-arranged their IP addresses.
The form you fill out online or in paper says if a 911 call comes from THIS number it is to be assumed to be from THIS address.
Just now I have a client moving to a new office. They have one existing VOIP line (with no physical handset) in their current pandemic crash pad site. We gave the crash pad site as we had to enter something but the handset is in a box in a storage unit so no one will ever call from it until it is connected to the Internet. They will be adding a second line for use in the new site. When I contact the VOIP service next month to add the line they will require me to give them a physical address to use with the phone that will be passed to the 911 service if 911 is called.
Of course people take IP phones home or to to a job site or wherever and never update the 911 information. So I'm sure that 911 centers have more fun than should be had with calls from such phones.
Good. So you know that my concern is not POTS vs. VOIP.
Been away for a week with no laptop. Peace, at last.
Fusion announcement cold-water bucket
If you read the small print, the news about "fusion breakthrough achieved" came from Lawrence Livermore Labs, home of the National Ignition Facility, the world's biggest laser fusion experiment.
It needs to be emphasized: the NIF is a weapons experiment, not a practical design for a civilian power reactor.
Per Scientific American a few years ago, each hohlraum (fusion test capsule) they implode costs roughly $200,000 to fabricate.
Suppose they want to build a prototype reactor with a 250MW thermal output (of which maybe 100MW could be used as surplus). They'd need to scale up massively; even so, you'd be talking about one pulse per second or thereabouts, each yielding 25MJ (not 3MJ). So your "fusion reactor" would cost on the order of $18M in fuel per hour to keep hot.
Without cutting the price of hohlraum fabrication by 3-6 orders of magnitude, it's not economically viable.
So what is it good for?
Well, if you're developing a new generation of H-bombs you might plausibly want to probe the plasma dynamics of the second stage (fusion) booster in the weapon. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty outlaws testing H-bombs. But the NIF lets you generate exactly the conditions that prevail inside the explosion after fission ends, during the implosion of the fusion fuel.
A better headline would be, NIF completes successful H-bomb test (without the H-bomb). But that would put a very different spin on the press coverage ...
And totally unrelated to anything that's being discussed, here's a weird musical composition I came across, composed (in part) for a hadrosaur skull:
https://nime.pubpub.org/pub/opwc2s3x/release/1?readingCollection=bb45043c
By the way, if you think this kind of big-scale planned economy project smacks of Ye Olde Soviet System, you're far from the first to notice that conservative, wealthy developers sound positively communist when insisting that the plan must be built, even if it's outdated by decades. It's a jarring juxtaposition, the first time you hear it.
Inside every capitalism-friendly corporation there is a Command Economy. It may run on three month plans to maximize profit/loss instead of a five year plan to maximize coal production, but it's essentially Stalinist in nature. The management rhetoric is essentially interchangeable too, except that corporations rely on a capitalist superstructure to pick up the externalities (like unemployment sign-ups) rather than having to shoot their own dissidents.
blank sheet... restart...
at some point, there will be such frustration with the patch-worked laws and Rub Goldbergized privacy-location-emergency-services issues and and assembled missteps... someone will sit down and * think *
how about leaving the existing messy network intact but there were to be a second network? to ensure ultimate portability establish a world wide standard of 24 digit phone number with 2 digit checksum, thus ensuring it will not be exhausted prior to a human population of 10^21 (figuring upon each individual getting a set of 10 random phone numbers for some mix of personal-professional-ultra-privacy)... granted manually entering 24 digit phone number is a nightmare but how oft have you got to do manual dialing right now, once per contact to set up entry? in a happier future, it will be done via QR CODE very likely on business cards or better yet my-phone-your-phone F2F...
each person who wants to be on this new network has to endure a once-per-decade in person renewal to ensure 'real human' associated with actual name-identity-non-morbid-status much like driver's licenses, and very likely regional DMV offices will provide this additional service
all devices on the new network have a unique ID chip which is linked to a phone number (linked to a human)... becoming both communications and cashless wallet and medical files... never mind RSA256, there'd be RSA1024 (RSA32K for those ultra paranoid) encryption blended with public-key-private-key to provide hard-to-break end-to-end privacy
anyone spamming will find not only their phone remotely disabled but the phone number also... plus an opportunity to explain themselves in court, after an arrest warrant plus associated civil suits
everyone will grumble at initial hassles but treat as bearable trade-off for sake of barricading against spam and fraud and wastage of time
along with privacy during usage these would be 'lifelong' phone numbers independent of geography-home-martial-status... big pluses given there's going to be tens of millions (hundreds of millions!?) of refugees abruptly dislocated as forests burn, oceans rise and #WSCN attempt further insurrections...
Inside every capitalism-friendly corporation there is a Command Economy. It may run on three month plans to maximize profit/loss instead of a five year plan to maximize coal production, but it's essentially Stalinist in nature.
It's even weirder than that.
The way development works is that someone buys land as an investment and pays property taxes on it. Often the land just sits vacant, sometimes for generations (which can be an effing nuisance when split equally among heirs for generations).
San Diego gridded out its to-be-built streets back in the 1960s, and some people bought properties along these hypothetical streets as investments. Fifty years later, their aging children (who fancy themselves as powerful businessmen) are yelling and screaming that the plan must be built so that they can recoup all the taxes they spent over the years. In the case, I'm thinking of, it's now being built, after 20 years of false starts that didn't pencil out and died, generally after five and six-figure amounts of money were poured into trying and failing to make them work.
So these communist-sounding remarks that "the plan must be built," seem to be coming more from the sunk cost parts of their psyches than from the Stalinist overlays.
The irony is that often their plans are fairly outdated, especially with climate change biting down on centered around ICE vehicles that also ignore shrinking water supplies and increasing fire risks.
Unfortunately, once lines are on maps in approved plans, it often takes long and costly lawsuits to get them abandoned, because people have invested in making those lines a reality, no matter how bad an idea they now are.
Long story short, if you're ever trying to figure out why the frack so many people are living in that place, this may be why, at least in part.
Oddly, this is why I respect good planning. Poor planning is as bad as a vampire infestation. One drop of new blood, and an undead plan is alive and biting again.
Often the land just sits vacant, sometimes for generations (which can be an effing nuisance when split equally among heirs for generations).
Let's add in a couple of divorce decrees plus some remarriages and a step kid or few. Plus are a few decades you get multiple generations interacting with each other. Or not as the commie libbers will not even talk to the fascist authoritarians.
My wife and her 2 sisters each have a 1/6th share in a garden plot in a village in Germany. The village would like to buy it. Her 2nd cousin lawyer, who lives in Germany, who owns 1/12th or 1/24th, is slowly working through the needed documentation from various folks so that the sale will meet with the approval of all including the German authorities. One thing she was mumbling about was how to get the German officials to accept the US certified death certificate. Something along the lines of getting someone certified in both languages to issue the equivalent of a notarized statement that she was dead and these are her current living daughters.
Having been in the circumstance of trying to call 911 (using a POTS line) during a fire, I note two things happened:
1) The phone worked, even though the main power to the house was off (I turned it off).
2) The phone stopped working right after I told them we had a fire and the address. The fire shorted out the telephone wires :(
I no longer have POTS, because Verizon refused to fix it the last time it failed.
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”
-Elon Musk, November 6th, 2022
Twitter suspends account dedicated to tracking Elon Musk’s private jet
Around here, you will find country roads taking multiple dog legs in the middle of nowhere.
Turns out the road is following ancient Anglo-Saxon field boundaries (circa 700AD).
Ditto, of course, land deeds, where farm boundaries can be traced to Anglo-Saxon deeds and wills.
Or severely restrict the types of businesses on the lower floors. No restaurants, dry cleaners, auto shops, or most anything with flames or flammable stuff.
Rubbish.
(Says the guy with a restaurant on the ground floor, who has lived above a dental tech lab with kilns for baking ceramics, and who co-owns another property above a garage.)
Mixed use zoning is normal outside North America, even in countries with a low tolerance for industrial hazards, and you're confusing your local situation/prejudices with actual obstacles.
If your fire/etc code for businesses can't already cope with the fire risk in such premises then it's not fit for purpose and your businesses are unsafe.
(Note that some businesses do not mix with residential zoning. Heavy industry, mining, chemical plants, refineries. These you want to locate far away from mostly residential neighbourhoods. But those are minority employers, and even so, "far away" is relative: Grangemouth oil refinery is only 21 miles from here, for example -- "here" being the centre of a metro area with over a million people living in it.)
Fusion announcement cold-water bucket
The Daily Beast reports even more cold water: Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, noted that the test took “300 megajoules from the wall for 2 megajoules of laser.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-fusion-energy-breakthrough-owes-a-debt-to-nuclear-weapons-research
if you ignore the authoritarian overtones of a known hereditary dictatorship
One aspect of the urban geography of NEOM is glaringly obvious from orbit: it's designed to make it next to impossible to organize a march on the royal palace. (It also makes it easy for the royals with an airfield in their back yard, out in the desert, to escape. And lets you put all the poor folks -- read: servant classes -- a under lockdown long way away while still being within commuting distance.)
Rubbish
What I said was:
There are few places in the US where mixed use business on first floor or few and living spaces above is not allowed. But it costs a lot more than the standalone of either.
I didn't say it COULD NOT be done. But that it is more expensive. And yes you can have a dry cleaner or similar such things below a residence. But the insurance rates make it a terrible thing to do in new construction. Especially for low rise buildings. For taller one with steel and concrete walls and floors things are different. But again, that costs more for a 4 or 5 story building than wood trusses with dry wall over. The dry wall gives the wood trusses and framing a 4 to 8 hour fire rating when done correctly.
And most of what we were talking about was new construction.
You also said So it comes down to money. When the land cost gets high enough, think New York City, Tokyo, London, etc... and now down the street from me, well then it becomes economically viable
Yet I can take you all over Europe and show you (in poor little towns as well as expensive big cities) exactly this typology of buildings - flats above, business below. Commercially viable developments built by private developers.
It’s a choice to create a system where the economic incentives lead to mono-use zoning, sprawl and car dominance.
It’s pretty common in this part of Canada (Vancouver & Vancouver island) too. Shops and commercial offices on the street level, flats above. If you actually want to live in town for some reason, it is entirely doable. Personally, no way. I don’t want to live in a city any more and you really don’t want me living in a city either.
Chicken feet have a tendency to be very slightly magical. They accumulate excess levels of stray background mana particles a bit like a Wimshurst machine accumulates stray charge - something to do with the shape of the scales and claws, or something. This is how they can support the constant mana load of being the locomotor devices attached to the underneath of Baba Yaga's hut. When they are attached to the underneath of a chicken, there is no load, so the charge accumulates and generates a repulsive force until the resultant reduced accumulation rate is in equilibrium with leakage.
Incidentally, this is also how dragons work, since their feet are basically the same as a chicken's only much much bigger and with scales and claws tuned to maximise accumulation rate by selection pressure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gljtvwhcdhc Jonathan Pie presents the news as the right wing media don't. "Moronic seat-warmer blows 30 billion pounds but it's striking bus drivers who are holding the country to ransom".
(yes, pointing out that the BBC has become part of the Tory media... I tend to agree with that union leader who's been bollocking interviewers lately)
You actually believe that about drywall construction!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
That article (did a quick skim) confirms what I though about the incident. The fire broke out of a window then climbed the exterior cladding to eventually engulf the entire structure. Piss poor design of windows and cladding.
Which is a big reason that in the US in new construction there are a lot of rules and regs about windows and their fire rating going in or out. And the fire rating of the exteriors. Especially if there's a commercial use below them.
The fire ratings, in the US, of drywall is periodically tested by labs by putting a very specific flame against it (painted I think) and measuring how long before there's a penetration. While you can use 3/8" or 1/2" drywall in single family homes the walls between units and hall ways are typically required to be 5/8" for a better fire rating.
One odd thing in the article to me was the lack of a whole building fire alarm system. I need to check and see if that's allowed in the US.
One of the first thing the Tories did when they formed a government in 2010 was to assign axe-man Eric Pickles to take a chainsaw to "red tape", meaning building standards and health and safety regulations. They also butchered the legal aid system and courts, making it much harder for, say, poor people to sue landlords for negligence and building code violations.
One of the reasons the Grenfell enquiry dragged on for so long is because a lot of skeletons got stuffed in that particular closet, and sp,e of the parties doing the stuffing are very highly placed in government to this day. (There were complaints by the residents and a residents action group. Guess what? Nobody listens to poor people ...)
My lab did some tests on the Grenfell cladding. They have all the equipment for testing the resistance to temperatures and fire in a controlled, calibrated environment designed for that, and cladding testing is one of their things. IIRC (it was a while ago) the main test uses a temperature ramp and check the resistance to heat, if extra heat is generated by the material, and, a disqualifying event, if ignition happens.
For the Grenfell cladding, not only ignition happened quickly, but it was so intense that they had to abort the test fast to avoid putting the whole lab on fire.
"My wife and her 2 sisters each have a 1/6th share in a garden plot in a village in Germany. The village would like to buy it. Her 2nd cousin lawyer, who lives in Germany, who owns 1/12th or 1/24th, is slowly working through the needed documentation from various folks so that the sale will meet with the approval of all including the German authorities."
We have a similar situation in Spain, where my wife's mother inherited some land near Cedeira, in the upper left corner of the peninsula. After twenty or so years of trying, visiting her lawyer there, coordinating with some more distant relatives, it's clear that it's in the "not going to happen" category. Probably the land will go to the government at some point, which is fine with us.
Charlie @ 540 & Moz @ 537
No, the BBC are not (yet) tory mouthpieces ... but they are fucking scared that, before the next election, the tories will gut them completely & smash an irreplaceable instrument, the BBC itself.
It's very clear that they are treading very carefully, whilst, when they think they can, asking really awkward questions.
There was someone I watched on Youtube who explained the zoning system in Japan, including the big cities, which encouraged mixed-use even in places like inner-city Tokyo. It's not uncommon to see, for example, a welding shop with a roller shutter door on the ground floor of a row of residential properties or warehousing for a small specialist food distributor or the like.
JHomes @ 497:
Between COs, no it doesn't matter. It's VOIP from the CO to the pod where the copper starts that's the issue. The pod cannot draw power from the CO via VOIP, so it's powered from the grid, with backup (maybe) from batteries, which for space reasons cannot have the capacity that the old exchanges had. I doubt very much that pods have generators.
So when the pod batteries run out, so does your connection.
JHomes.
I was really thinking in terms of using a digital commumicator (digital dialer) for security systems with VOIP
If the power is off long enough for the batteries in the pod to fail, the batteries in your home security system are probably going to be dead long before then, so it's probably moot.
When I was doing commercial fire/burg we had backup batteries in everything, but they were only good for a few hours ... some things - like the backup cell phone communicator the power pack would be good for ~ 8 hours, but the batteries in the alarm panels themselves would only hold for 2 or 3. The panels were programmed to begin sending trouble codes for power off after about 10 minutes.
Most of the residential systems I know anything about only had something like a 4.5 Ah gel cell. The commercial panels had a 12 Ah gel cell.
icehawk @ 496:
Regards POTS vs VOIP: experience here in NZ after both earthquakes and floods is that you're usually better off with a mobile.
POTS goes down when the wires go, just like the power does. The cell towers have big batteries, and they get diesel generators out to them pretty quickly.
But the mobile data may become severely bandwidth limited.
(The apocalypse will not be live-cast.)
OTOH, several years back here in NC - can't remember if it was a hurricane or an ice storm (we get both) - knocked out power over a wide area and THEY, for whatever reasons, could not get generators out for several days, and after a few days Cell sites started going down as the batteries started running down & couldn't be recharged off the grid.
I believe a number of those sites now have backup generators in place so they can automatically switch over. The ones I've seen are diesel that run off of natural gas.
And again, my experience when I had a POTS telephone even with downed lines, the telephone continued to function. I'm thinking about Hurricane Fran in 96 when downed trees took out power lines & knocked down telephone poles. The power was out in my neighborhood for more than a week, and by the end of the week cell service was starting to go out.
But my 1SG was still able to call me on the land line to tell me I was called to state duty for the recovery effort.
Same thing happened for Hurricane Floyd & Winter Storm 2000 ... and any number of short (no more than a couple of days) outages due to ice storms taking down the lines.
The power was off, but the POTS phone still worked. If a power outage is REALLY widespread & prolonged, I don't think it matters much what kind of phone service you have.
Unless they have generators to recharge the batteries (which the Telco DID have back in the day when I had a POTS phone), the service is gonna' go down.
Troutwaxer @ 498:
Yes, but my concern, as a professional who installs lots of netorking gear, is that we're talking about automated alarms which reach out through the phone system, or people using business phones to call 911 because the system will automatically find the place's address. If you've gone to a 100 percent VOIP system that can't happen when seconds count.
When I got my cable telephone (VOIP) they had a process to register the phone number (caller ID?) to my address with the local 911 call center, so if I call 911 from my desk phone, it does automatically show my address.
Instead of being in the phone system, it's in the call center's database.
... but they still ask "What is the location of your emergency?"
Damian @ 507:
While I sympathise a little due to the apparently-magically-self-powering equipment in POTS, ...
No magic involved; just big ass rooms (1,000 sq ft OR MORE) filled with row after row of racks holding wet cell batteries connected series-parallel to provide 48VDC with A LOT of current.
My understanding is that the news section is fairly Conservative these days, due to the people who are managing it and the high profile Torys on the board of directors.
The other sections less so.
Charlie Stross @ 521:
Been away for a week with no laptop. Peace, at last.
Fusion announcement cold-water bucket
Well, FWIW, it was supposed to be a joke ... sort of a funny WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot.
Instead of fusion power being 50 years in the future, with this breakthrough, it's now only 49 years in the future.
Re: '... osteoporosis ... recommended physiotherapy.'
Ask the physiotherapist about Tai Chi - there's quite a lot of solid data on it. It's fairly popular now and easy to do at home.
'The Effect of Taichi Practice on Attenuating Bone Mineral Density Loss: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials'
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5615537/
I had a vertebral fracture and was also cautioned about making sure my ligaments/tendons stayed healthy. Collagen is usually the key factor in there. Hmmm... looks like some types of collagen are involved in bone health. I'd ignore the 'women' bit in the title below - there's some evidence that males whose testosterone levels have dropped below a certain point are just as likely to get osteoporosis. (And there's at least one study on using testosterone supplements to address osteoporosis in older males.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5793325/
'Specific Collagen Peptides Improve Bone Mineral Density and Bone Markers in Postmenopausal Women—A Randomized Controlled Study'
What's really neat/weird is the article below - could take some time to roll it out as a therapy though.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05499-y
'A plant-derived natural photosynthetic system for improving cell anabolism
Excerpt from the Abstract:
'... Moreover, the CM-NTUs increase intracellular ATP and NADPH levels in situ following exposure to light and improve anabolism in degenerated chondrocytes. They can also systemically correct energy imbalance and restore cellular metabolism to improve cartilage homeostasis and protect against pathological progression of osteoarthritis. Our therapeutic strategy for degenerative diseases is based on a natural photosynthetic system that can controllably enhance cell anabolism by independently providing key energy and metabolic carriers. This study also provides an enhanced understanding of the preparation and application of bioorganisms and composite biomaterials for the treatment of disease.'
paws4thot @ 538:
You actually believe that about drywall construction!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
The drywall inside the building didn't burn, and the cladding on the outside of the building, which did burn, was NOT drywall. And in addition to being highly flammable (which gypsum board is NOT), the insulation used in the cladding produced hydrogen cyanide gas when it burned.
Most of the residential systems I know anything about only had something like a 4.5 Ah gel cell. The commercial panels had a 12 Ah gel cell.
From what I know it's still the same today. There's a wave of new internet-only alarm systems from new providers that seem to have LiPo batteries but those are designed not to work if there's an interruption to electricity or internet so ... yeah.
We sell a lot of SLA batteries, and they still go into our new alarms. Alarm systems are a grudge purchase for most people, so paying extra to get a better battery isn't on 90% of people's lists. We officially support a couple of LFP "drop in replacement" batteries because they are happy with our lead-acid management stuff, but AFAIK we have hardly shipped any of the batteries. I suspect the people who want them look at our markup and buy the battery direct (markup/overhead... we have to pay someone to buy the things, store them, then ship them)
The flip side is that if you're doing that you might as well buy a bigger battery and be done with it. A lot of the cost of an LFP battery is the BMS and packaging, so going from 10Ah to 50Ah is twice the cost rather than 5x. Our stuff doesn't car, it'll work with the 100Ah battery I got through work (wholesale pricing FTW) because someone in the office decided they'd best make sure my battery was good before they told me it had arrived. 100Ah gives you a week of runtime with everything running normally (ie, if you're dumping an amp or two into lights and sirens you're not getting 168 hours out of a 100Ah battery).
What we are looking at is selling an approved LFP UPS so people can run the alarm, modem, router etc off that and be sure that everything will work during outages. We need the flexibility of 240V AC because not everything accepts 12V-ish DC. I personally have that as a requirement, but there are still 9V and 5V gadgets around. And no doubt also something that takes "12V DC, ±0.1V" 🙄 If we can hit that at about $200 hopefully people will buy them after the first time they ring and say "the alarm didn't go off coz the internet was down".
Also, just to be extra clear: yes, we sell a SIM card option and it even takes dual SIMs and will swap between them depending on which has service. Blah blah etc, but it costs money and a lot of people buy the minimum system that their insurance company will give them a discount for.
Meanwhile I'm writing code for alarm monitoring houses that don't want to pay to transition to IP monitoring so we need a software-only solution that will run reliably on a Windows machine in the monitoring office. {cries} At least I've fought my way into only supporting Windows versions that are still supported by Microsoft. If anyone needs me I'll be under a table at the pub crying into my beer.
In my experience any technical case can be overridden by a sufficiently senior person being taken for an expensive meal by a salesperson.
The most impressive case of this I have witnessed was a "5 9s" uptime requirement being abandoned because visual basic and win98 were suddenly the only permissible tools for the job.
“But the insurance rates make it a terrible thing to do in new construction. Especially for low rise buildings.”
A lot of the high-density new residential construction here is mixed use (shops on the ground floor).
Not so common in low/medium density new builds, because the suburban corner store is dying.
"... but they still ask "What is the location of your emergency?"
That's due to situations like the one a friend found herself in a decade or two back. She lived in Oregon and learned that a friend of her's in Torrance, California had deliberately taken an overdose of pills. So she called the 911 call center in the friend's city... so "what is the location of your emergency" can be a very important question.
A lot of the high-density new residential construction here is mixed use (shops on the ground floor).
Same here. Even nearby. But you can tell which building can handle restaurants and such and which not. You just look at the few story units in our walk about mall and the restaurants and other higher fire possible things will be clustered in a few of the structures.
I was at a presentation by the head of our local 911 (covering about 700K people). This was back when we also had an apartment 1100 miles away. I had added cameras around the house plus a couple inside the house which could monitor the doors since no one might be there for a week or so at a time.
I asked and the 911 person said it was no problem to call them directly if I saw something on my cameras when away. And yes, the first question being the location would certainly make sense.
Urban geography designed to make it easier to oppress the proles is not always awful.
Haufmann’s Paris - with wide straight boulevards that you cannot barricade easily breaking up the medieval maze - was designed to let troops control the Paris mob. It’s rather nice.
icehawk
Which didn't work too well - after the Prussians had left in 1871, did it?
Even the BBC News isn't Conservative, so much as toeing the government line, about as much as Russia Today did (in the days when we in the UK were allowed to see it); they (almost?) never say say anything that contradicts the government's claims or conflicts with its policies. The other political sections seem to have maintained their independence. For this, we can blame That Blair and, to a lesser extent, Thatcher.
Meanwhile in China... They’re shouting ‘nobody panic’ quite loud.
Apparently their policy for perfectly placing non-permeable perimeters surrounding pandemic hot spots via panopticon surveillance having been discontinued...
now replaced with efforts at denying the virus has a happy hunting ground while as well maintaining their version of vax being superior to that of lesser nations...
never mind what is showing up in actual objective statistics on cases-hospitalizations-deaths-etc which are state secrets akin to nuke launch codes... here's hoping national pride does not cause them to need mass graves measured in kilometers...
"Radioactive decay doesn't produce neutrinos AFAIK, it's fission that does it and you only really get that from nuclear reactors"
Beta decay produces neutrinos. And in the case where electrons are emitted, anti-neutrinos
Im very dubious that neutrinos pose any human health risk
context = USA
in related news, attempts to formulate any sort of widely accepted definition of "long covid" seem to be deliberately FUBAR'd by insurance companies and governmental entities and high ranking politicians who are all backpedaling as fast as they can... urging the band to play on and play loudly with passengers advised to ignore the icy seawater seepage...
also not quite at the "They’re shouting ‘nobody panic’ quite loud" phase but given there are for certain 5 million cases in USA (potentially 10? 15!?) each of which will require a minimum of USD$10,000 in annual treatment cost for 2 years (potentially 5Y or lifelong!?) there's nobody eager to do the math on how badly corporate returns (and voter rage) will deal with need to fund USD$10B (potentially USD$30B) annually...
of course that assumes no additional cases as the virus mutates along with vax fadeout
"BBC News isn't Conservative, so much as toeing the government line"
One of the tells (I don't recall when it started) is the weasel phrase "Ministers said...". Ministers who say things should be named (and if necessary shamed :) and take personal responsibility for whatever they said.
I've got a niece and two grandnephews in Beijing. It seems one thing they have done right (and still do) is wear masks to limit spread*.
Of course, they've been doing that for other diseases since before Covid, so it isn't surprising.
Just got (like 30 seconds ago) a text from her. Her family got it — kids recovered fast but she still has high fever. Nearly half of Beijing has it and the hospitals aren't ready. Medicines are running short. Quite worried, actually.
Indeed, when masks were in short supply here and your president was hoarding them for republicans, she sent me a large supply.
Im very dubious that neutrinos pose any human health risk
Any neutrino flux intense enough to cause ionization damage in human tissues would be accompanied by a more conventional radiation hazard on the close order of a supernova cooking off on the other side of the planet, in which case you're dead anyway.
context = UK
so... now I'm shocked... no... stunned... maybe Charles Dickens could write effectively in response but I'm not him nor Mark Twain so all I can do is express my happiness I don't have children because I can see this becoming the new normal in USA if ever the GOP gets control of medical care
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63707689
"The Warm Home Prescription pilot paid to heat homes of 28 low-income patients."
Dr Matt Lipson: "If we buy the energy people need but can't afford, they can keep warm at home and stay out of hospital."
I am afraid this is NOT going to happen in USA, especially if GOP gets control of medical care. What will happen in USA is much worse:
The doctor writes a prescription for the heating. The doctor has to submit paperwork to the insurance company to justify the prescription. Insurance company makes every effort to deny the request. Even if approved, patient is responsible for the deductible and the copay. Meanwhile, heating company, aware of the insurance company's deep pockets, increases heating rates for all customers. "You can't afford it? Just get a doctor's prescription and it will be all paid for!"
It's not the neutrino flux per se that's being put forward as a reason nuclear power plants are inherently dangerous, it's neutrino (and more specifically antineutrino) decay. Assume enough neutrino decay events in a human body, bad things happen at the cellular level, maybe. Nuclear power plants emit lots of neutrinos, neutrinos decay, nuclear power plants bad. It doesn't have to make sense or actually happen, it's enough to worry people and make them scared of nuclear power.
Exactly what do (anti-)neutrinos decay into? And how fast? A reference would be interesting. The clinching argument is that their mass is at least 80 times less than that of the least energetic ionising radiation. Personally, I am more worried about being killed by a basilisk.
But neutrinos don't decay. They very, very occasionally interact with some nucleus, and the result of the interaction is that that nucleus does a backwards beta decay. To worry about adverse consequences of the neutrinos themselves decaying is more daft than worrying about the potential damage to the body from natural proton decay events.
Not that it's really worth arguing about when the whole thing is too bloody silly for words in the first place :)
It doesn't have to make sense or actually happen, it's enough to worry people and make them scared of nuclear power.
BINGO.
Ding ding ding ding.
Give the man his prize.
Additional context: this winter everyone is getting a free lump of money knocked off their bills, regardless of need or medical condition. The size of the lump is also unrelated to need or medical condition; everyone gets the same (400 quid over 6 months), so the effect can be anywhere from barely noticeable to enough to take the bill negative.
Building code here in BC requires a 45 minute firebreak between rooms in Commercial sites. In practice that means 45 minute 'fire rated' doors and 5/8 drywall, well sealed between rooms. It also means attics and other liminal spaces must have drywall partitions. I speak from experience on this, having spent much of 2 years gutting an older commercial property and bringing it up to code.
Combine that with a working sprinkler system (i.e. 100 lpm into whatever room is burning), and modern fire code in BC is pretty good at keeping people alive and buildings intact at least until the Fire Department arrives.
Residential requirements are somewhat different, for reasons I do not know - though I suspect there is a higher requirement for multi-family residential than single family detached. I currently manage a multi-family location that has 5/8" drywall between units and in the halls but 1/2" inside.
Of course, current code is not old code, and we are still occasionally seeing old buildings burn down for various reasons. My cousin recently replaced the 'ball and tube' electrical system in his 150 year old house in New Brunswick - a system that was discontinued sometime in the 1940s.
Re: 911 calls. Here in BC it is much faster to use a cell phone than a land line to reach a 911 operator that can help you. I once made the mistake of calling on a landline, from a fixed address. It took about 6 minutes and 3 rounds of 'where are you calling from' at a switchboard before I spoke to an operator who could actually deploy the police to engage the enraged man with baseball bat on the other side of a glass door.
Using a cell phone took me directly to the local dispatcher. They still asked a variety of stupid questions (i.e. how old is the man in the knife fight in your alley?).
And speaking of building codes and firewall (physical, not computer)... 21 years ago, the last time I was in the 911 Center for the City of Chicago, they had their three servers (fire, police, and communications) in one room, and an identical backup system... on the other side of an ordinary wall, not even a firewall.
In the US new 911 centers have very strict building codes. To the extent they are typically in a stand alone building at the cost increase to the rest of the building in a shared situation adds too much cost.
How do I know? A proposed new municipal building here with the 911 center in it was going to cost so much more than expected the city manager was asking for a tax increase. We had a new city manager not too long after that proposal.
“Which didn't work too well - after the Prussians had left in 1871, did it?“
Quite.
Haufmann’s urban design was to aid troops with cannons in suppressing a rioting ‘Paris mob’.
I suspect that was the problem.
Paris commune seems more like elements of local govt (including local military units) vs National govt? Trigger event was the national army trying to take 400 cannon from the local Paris home guard.
Using a cell phone took me directly to the local dispatcher. They still asked a variety of stupid questions (i.e. how old is the man in the knife fight in your alley?).
That's not a stupid question: it's additional descriptive info for the police so that they can hopefully tell the difference between Angry Baseball-Bat Guy and 911-Calling-Guy when they arrive on the scene. ("ABBG is 18-30 and 911-CG is 50" tells the cops exactly who to point the taser at.)
Certainly, it is a reasonable question AFTER you have dispatched the police to the incident. That said, all the information I had given at that point was that a knife fight was in progress behind my worksite. The age of one of the combatants was not the primary question to ask at that point.
The problem isn't that anything a 911 dispatcher asks is a "stupid" question - they all are meant to solve problems which have come up through use of the 911 system. The problem is whether the question delays things long-enough that the bad things a particular call was made to address might happen.
Troutwaxer @ 557:
That's due to situations like the one a friend found herself in a decade or two back. She lived in Oregon and learned that a friend of her's in Torrance, California had deliberately taken an overdose of pills. So she called the 911 call center in the friend's city... so "what is the location of your emergency" can be a very important question.
It's cell phones in general. Even the ones that tracked people's location weren't accurate enough to get police/fire/EMS to the exact scene. I'm sure the location/GPS functions for cell phones have improved over the years, but it's still better for first responders to have a physical address to respond to.
That's not a stupid question: it's additional descriptive info for the police so that they can hopefully tell the difference between Angry Baseball-Bat Guy and 911-Calling-Guy when they arrive on the scene. ("ABBG is 18-30 and 911-CG is 50" tells the cops exactly who to point the taser at.)
I love the competence of UK police. In the US, taser vs. hand-weapon is considered too equal a fight, and the cops escalate immediately to firearms.
More to the point, too many cops tend to default onto "browner skin equals badder perp" rather than "stop the attacker holding the weapon" and shoot accordingly. That problem is considerably harder to reduce, given how much effort has been spent over the last 400 years normalizing racial bias in this hemisphere.
I love the competence of UK police. In the US, taser vs. hand-weapon is considered too equal a fight, and the cops escalate immediately to firearms.
To be fair, in the UK "knife fight in progress" would automatically get an armed response unit with marksmen sent in a hurry -- any other cops closer to the scene would be expected to proceed with caution, try to de-escalate (viz. talk the knife guy into putting down the weapon from a safe distance) and retreat if threatened. But that's a significant difference between US and UK style policing: instead of instant escalation British cops are trained to negotiate, contain, and de-escalate. That way, fewer people get killed (including cops).
One of the questions I have stopped answering on 911 calls involve my name, birthdate and social insurance number. I'm calling because of something happening at my work, I have no interest in my data being entered for future cross-referencing.
A former coworker spent about 5 years working the night shift at a high-needs homeless shelter in downtown Vancouver. One morning he had a visit from a police sergeant with some very pointed questions about why he had made over 300 calls to 911 in the past year. It was all resolved, but it was distressing for him as he was also working his way through the immigration system.
About previous comments on a couple leaving Texas due to their children entering school.
The Texas government is going through public records looking for transgender people:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/texas-transgender-data-paxton/
I can't imagine a good reason for such a list, compiled by such a government.
Re: Cell towers, POTS and VoIP running out of charge.
There's a couple of companies putting cell towers in space over the next few years. So this problem may go away/change/get worse over the next half decade or so.
But that's a significant difference between US and UK style policing: instead of instant escalation British cops are trained to negotiate, contain, and de-escalate. That way, fewer people get killed (including cops).
To also be fair, I think the US version, properly implemented*, is to work from a position of strength.
That said, the California game wardens are considered the "bad-ass" cops around here, because most of the people they deal with are armed, and they often have no backup. They rarely go in with guns ready (except when raiding illegal cannabis grows), but they generally put everybody in handcuffs as an initial de-escalation, followed by securing all the weapons away from the people, followed by sorting out what's going on, followed by a lot of talking, generally followed by uncuffing and returning weapons to some/all of the parties, depending on what the end result is.
That's their ideal anyway. In mixed-jurisdiction work, the other cops generally let the warden secure the situation, because he has more experience de-escalating people armed with guns than they do.
Nat.Geo. ran a "COPS" style show on the wardens a decade ago, and it was interesting to watch them work.
*I think our biggest problem isn't force spectrum strategies, but that police academy only lasts a few months. Isn't it longer elsewhere?
I think that, in the UK, you graduate from Tulliallan (or wherever else), and then you may opt to do an additional course in firearms training, after which you may, subject to additional regular refresher training, carry out firearms duties. You may also actively resign from being a qualified firearms officer.
David L @ 559:
I was at a presentation by the head of our local 911 (covering about 700K people). This was back when we also had an apartment 1100 miles away. I had added cameras around the house plus a couple inside the house which could monitor the doors since no one might be there for a week or so at a time.
I asked and the 911 person said it was no problem to call them directly if I saw something on my cameras when away. And yes, the first question being the location would certainly make sense.
Back when I worked for the alarm company our remote central station was located in Columbus, OH. Customers who did not require LOCAL monitoring via leased lines used digital communicators (dialers) that sent signals to that monitoring station.
So whenever I was doing a new installation I would have to call up the local 911 call center and get a local (10 digit) telephone number that could be called long distance from Ohio.
The only one I still remember is Raleigh (of course) which was (919) nnn-1911.
Pigeon @ 575:
Additional context: this winter everyone is getting a free lump of money knocked off their bills, regardless of need or medical condition. The size of the lump is also unrelated to need or medical condition; everyone gets the same (400 quid over 6 months), so the effect can be anywhere from barely noticeable to enough to take the bill negative.
Is that happening anywhere other than the U.K.? I know it's not happening here in North Carolina.
Rocketpjs @ 576:
I'm having to replace the surface on some walls in my house as part of my ongoing remodeling/repair efforts. There are places where the original wall surface remains & I have to match it with the NEW wall surface. Five-eighths inch sheet-rock won't do it. The old walls are a 3/8 inch cement board with a half inch of mortar topped by a 1/8 inch skim coat of plaster.
I had to find 3/8 inch and apply it in a double layer.
Troutwaxer
The problem isn't that anything a 911 dispatcher asks is a "stupid" question - WRONG - very much WRONG ...
About 20 years back, I came out of Tottie Court Rd UndergrounD station & called "999" for Ambulance .....
A young-ish woman was clearly distressed, shaking all over, with blood running down her face - which I reported ...
One of the supposed expert responders questions was: "Where is this, what's the postcode?" ...
Me: "Tottie Ct Rd Tube station"
Responder: "Where's that - postcode?"
Me: "There's ONLY ONE TCR tube station in this country & I haven't the faintest idea of the postcode ( There were, in fact THREE possibilities ) - now get someone HERE, you stupid *!"
In the end, I hung up, re-dialled & got someone who knew that "UP" was an actual direction.
I don't EVER want to have to do that again ...
Barry
Der dritte order vierte Reich vielleicht?
Barry @ 587:
I can't imagine a good reason for such a list, compiled by such a government.
Such a government as Texas now has rarely needs a good reason for anything. It's almost always done for BAD reasons.
My experience in Australia and Aotearoa has been largely the opposite. Emergency people have established the location pretty quickly and verified it, then gone straight to a reassuring someone is on the way. "Please stay on the line. What else can you tell me about the situation?" Possibly because I've had it pounded in to me that you must know street name and number plus nearest cross street so I've always had those when I ring? Albeit I have been vague on suburb, but near enough seems to be good enough*.
Which led in one case to an ambo crew basically ignoring me except to kind of look at me and half wave while they picked up the injured lady and drove off with her. As First Dog on the Moon would say "get in the van" :)
I think it depends a lot on which country you're in and how professional the emergency dispatch is. Which is an argument for nationalising it, I think. You want a consistent approach properly funded everywhere, not a generic call centre staffed by people doing it or their benefit gets cut off.
* Sydney is very keen on every suburb having its own street numbers, so long streets will have multiple "One High Street" and the numbers don't always run the same way... there are more than 20 "number one Paramatta Road" along the length of that road. And I'm sure that there are two number one's next to each other when adjacent suburbs number in opposite directions. Plus every suburb has Station Street, King Street and High Street. FFS
In calling in the knife fight another question the dispatcher asked was the address. It was something of an intense situation and I blanked it.
'Outside the homeless shelter in [small town], every police officer in town knows exactly where it is. They were here 2 hours ago!'
'Sir, I can't dispatch without an address.'
'....'
Luckily I remembered the address of the facility across the road and used that.
More to the point, it was outside the homeless shelter in a small town. There are about 6 police officers in total in that community, and I'd just spoken with some of them, on site, about 3 hours previous.
Every single police officer in that town knows exactly where the shelter is, they are at or near it daily. To refuse to dispatch without that bit of technical information was and remains infuriating to this day.
Emergency people have established the location pretty quickly and verified it, then gone straight to a reassuring someone is on the way. "Please stay on the line. What else can you tell me about the situation?"
Last year BC changed policy to allow emergency operators to hang up on callers waiting for an ambulance, so that they can answer more calls.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8418664/bc-911-operators-transfer-process/
It was also common to be on hold waiting to talk to an operator (the average wait time was five minutes at one point). No idea if they played relaxing music while a posh voice periodically said "your emergency is very important to us…"
Every single police officer in that town knows exactly where the shelter is, they are at or near it daily.
Would it be faster to call the police directly?
I have no idea, I was just relating what's happening here this winter for comparison with HowardNYC's article which was mainly about last winter.
Argh. I can live somewhere for years and know everything about the layout of the place and how to get round it, but still have no idea what names most of the streets have. And as for building numbers, it tends to be a case of hunting along the street until you've found two buildings that actually have the numbers displayed (a) at all and (b) visibly, and then counting up or down while hoping the numbering actually corresponds to the number of buildings, which quite often it doesn't.
Still, at least the question can be answered, unlike "what's the postcode?" which would almost certainly get "how the fuck am I supposed to know?" if I wasn't calling from my own house.
I generally have to ask or look, but maps on my phone helps now. Street names are pretty useless to me, not helped by the almost complete refusal of bike path builders to put street signs on them. I'm not riding 500m up a road to find out the name just in case I might need to mention it to someone. Kind of defeats the point of an off road bike paths, neh?
I am pretty sure we've discussed giving directions here before, and how people like you and me are shit for most others because we say things like "go west until you get to the big red house on the south side of the road, and turn north there" where the other 90% say "go up Blobfart Road until you get to the fire station then turn right. I mean left. Or maybe right. Turn away from the fire station. Yeah, probably that".
594 - Greg I've had a similar conversation, only worse because I was calling about an entrapment road accident, and the only person in about half a mile in any direction who might have known a postcode was the entrapped and rather out of it victim!
As it happened, I was able to get the operator to pass my verbal direction "junction of this road and that road" to the local ambulance station, who's response was "Got it. Rolling. ETA 10 minutes", and they delivered on that.
596 - Moz, see above. There were no, repeat no, street names or numbers to use.
602 - Moz "Maps on my phone"; that would be the same cell phone handset I'm calling the emergency operator on, yes?
Yes, at least android phones can normally handle a phone call plus another app. Or you could look at the map on your phone, write down the street names etc, then make the phone call (I assume "remember the street names" isn't an option)
Here in Oz there's an app called emergency plus.
Open the app, it will give you the address, lat/log decimal, and the what3words location that is easy to remember and repeat to the operator. Press a button on the app and it connects you to the emergency operator. There's probably a similar app where you are, given that Australia is generally last out of the blocks.
Here we have an app, too. It knows from the phone's location where you are and can be used to connect to the operators, and passes that info directly to them. Somehow, not sure what it really does, but this is how I understand it works as I've used it a couple of times.
Brilliant, and kind of the thing where even a vague location can help a lot. I mostly spend my time in urbanish environments, but I can imagine it could also be useful in the wilderness with no streets nearby.
I suppose the bit that's worth pointing out, because it might not be common knowledge among the especially curmudgeonly, is that nearly all modern smart phones work perfectly well as speakerphones - feedback suppression and noise cancellation are both now very mature technologies and even cheap devices do them reasonably well. What it adds up to is that putting the phone in speakerphone mode and holding it away from your head in a way that allows you to use other apps at the same time works at least as well as holding it against your ear under most normal conditions. It works even better with some sort of headset, especially a good one.
context = USA / 911
there has always been a surcharge upon basic phone services in USA, earmarked -- supposedly unbreakable black letter legislation -- for continually upgrading emergency response systems ("911")
but...
as always when not enough amongst voting public pays close enough attention such 911 upgrade funds have been diverted... people die... 911 employees are scapegoated... drawnout lawsuits taking 5 to 8 Y churn the muck and sometimes there are massive settlements hidden under NDAs
John Oliver did a credible piece which hits the high points of systemic failures brought on by refusal to honor long term commitment to ongoing upgrades of public infrastructure... which of course is an all too repeated refrain on this blog as well elsewhere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-XlyB_QQYs&t=5s
Money is fungible.
We've had the North Carolina Educational Lottery for 15+ years. It was sold as a way to increase the state allocation to education without a tax increase. (Not going go to the debate about is a state run lottery a very regressive tax or not.) Of course just as with all such "allocated" things over time the base line budget of the allocation gradually goes down over where it would have gone without the special allocation. So now we have a state run lottery extracting money from mostly the poorer folks and education is getting about the same money it would have gotten anyway.
Oh, yeah. This was a Dem party thing when done.
Greg I've had a similar conversation, only worse because I was calling about an entrapment road accident, and the only person in about half a mile in any direction who might have known a postcode was the entrapped and rather out of it victim!
In the US I've never heard of 911 asking for a zip code (your postcode?). I call 911 about twice a year. All but twice in the 30+ years living in this area it was to report something hazardous on the road. A nearly meter diameter truck tire in a 70mph lane on the road or some such. As others have mentioned I'm on I-99 going west bound past the xxx exit.
One time I called to report a pine tree that fell onto my power pole and was caught by the 15KV lines. Pine needles make for interesting flames and are easy to light. Made for an interesting crowd on the street for a few hours.
The other time was the teen doing double or more of the speed limit, drove THROUGH a power pole 2 houses up and wound up sitting in the yard across the street. Ditto neighborhood crowds.
Both times I was able to give my home address. But in this city/county where I've lived for 30+ years I'd be hard pressed to tell someone the name of the street I'm on at the moment (I get around by knowing where I'm going, not be street names), much less a number.
In the US I've never heard of 911 asking for a zip code (your postcode?).
A postcode is much more geographically precise than a zip code -- it identifies a block of about 20 addresses, a postal walk within which the postie can deliver all the letters/parcels they can carry in a messenger bag.
So the post code allows the ambulance (or police) response to get to within about 20 metres of the location of the accident.
(Zip codes in contrast cover a vastly greater area.)
so... yeah... lotteries are indeed "educational"
(1) teaching folks in multiple states (not just NC) to never take their eye off politicians if any chunk of the state budget is 're-allocate / adjust placement' and not fixed in its focus upon spending to a specific target
(2) as well as just how utterly clueless we all are when it comes to grasping statistics whilst gambling
(3) just how un-important educating the next generation of 'lesser caste' children (from their POV not mine) is to those who won the birth lottery in being the grandchild of a multi-millionaire... especially those whose ancestor graduated Harvard and thereby assuring all those descendants for a hundred generations automatic acceptance
Maybe. My anecdote upthread was in a rural area of the UK, and "20 houses" could mean "20 square miles" and/or a similar linear distance along a road.
When the lottery went in in Missouri, it was sold as money for education... they never explicitly said it would be in addition to existing funding, unsurprisingly the previous funding dried up, leaving education in an unimproved financial position.
Zip code + four delivers the higher resolution here, and I would need to look at a piece of mail before I could tell anyone what mine was.
Yes. The US USPS wanted everyone to learn and use their "+4". And except for mass mailers everyone ignored it.
But it does greatly speed up getting mail ready for delivery so the automatic scanners that most envelopes go through will add it via that yellow sticker you get on a lot of letter sized mail.
I still get a chuckle remembering the letter I got from Diners Club years ago telling me to pay up the $15,000 and change I owed and do it quickly. After a few minutes I realized the amount they wanted me to pay we the same as my zip code. Someone messed up the sort and form filling on the mass mailing.
Getting back to the original subject of this post:
The Trump trading cards. But that's not the WTF. There's a yet unconfirmed-by-me report that one can download them from the Trump site without paying.
Trump trading cards.
For a while I thought there would be a contest to see if the US or the UK would have the craziest ex leader.
I'm now convinced there is no way for the UK to catch up to the US and win.
I'm now convinced there is no way for the UK to catch up to the US and win.
To be fair, Liz Truss gave it her best shot. (I mean, I thought Boris Johnson was scraping the bottom of the barrel. But then: Truss! Edit: this news item that dropped today would explain everything about Truss/Kwarteng.)
Right now I don't see any way for the Tories to elect a worse leader than Johnson between now and January 2025, unless somehow they go back to Johnson (which is not impossible). Starmer is utterly meh, but he's not obviously worse than anyone on the Tory front bench (which isn't saying much).
So short of Fabian Everyman turning up and strolling into a by-election victory, I think you're right. For now. (After the next Labour government, though, all bets are off, because that Labour government will have to bite the bullet and admit Brexit failed, and the Brexiteer wing of the Tory party will be livid.)
I wouldn't call either of them crazy, though. BJ was highly skilled at being a selfish weasel, while Truss was just stupefyingly clueless and shit. I think we have to go back to May to find one who displayed signs of being actually gone in the head.
Could he afford to have another go at PM?
I am shocked!
You would think no one in government or advising government would be so stupid.
I mean, after doing something like that you might make a totally incoherent speech, crash the economy or act inappropriately at a funeral.
Fortunately, that has never happened as UK government members are good, upstanding members of society.
Didn't an MP helpfully suggest that it was the cleaners using the white powder found on the toilet cisterns at the HoC?
No, May wasn't nuts: she was simply a brittle authoritarian personality -- brilliantly at home in the Home Office (itself a toxic authoritarian environment) -- but out of her depth doing real politics, which is the art of reconciling irreconcilably divergent factional priorities.
(Before becoming Home Secretary she was briefly Chair of the Conservative Party then Minister for Women and Equalities. Then the longest-serving HomeSec in centuries (which should have been a bit of a warning flag) before being handed the poisoned chalice of leading the Tory party after Cameron bollocksed-up the Brexit referendum and got the wrong result.
The point is, once committed to a course of action she tended to simply power through and damn the torpedoes. It worked with the tough-on-crime agenda and anti-immigration rhetoric, so why wouldn't it work to unify a deeply riven nation behind her?
(Authoritarians never understand principled dissent.)
I think the previous PM who was most clearly barking hatstand mad was Tony Blair, by the time they hauled him out of office in a straitjacket after 11 years in the hot seat. And before him, Thatcher. As the late Hugo Young remarked, ten years in number ten will drive anyone insane.
BoJo has reportedly banked a cool million since leaving Number Ten in June. Coffers replenished, he should be good for a 1-2 year victory lap -- if the party wants him back badly enough, which will only happen as a unity candidate (someone they can rally around and Blame Everything on, or who will give them a forlorn hope of winning the next election.)
London surrendering to the Scots or Welsh would probably work better than a BoJo rerun.
just how un-important educating the next generation of 'lesser caste' children (from their POV not mine) is to those who won the birth lottery in being the grandchild of a multi-millionaire...
"Unimportant"? Try "actively counterproductive".
London surrendering to the Scots or Welsh would probably work better than a BoJo rerun.
Even the French.
The Trump trading cards. But that's not the WTF. There's a yet unconfirmed-by-me report that one can download them from the Trump site without paying.
I've not gone to look myself but I've already seen pictures of them shared around on Facepalm - so yeah. I don't care enough to try to collect the whole set by my own effort. But ten seconds on Google Images turns up several of them right on the first page.
There aren't many places that are that imprecise, but there are quite a few where postcodes cover a few miles. Even in my suburban area, mine covers a few hundred yards.
Yes but with no NFT attached.
The morning news with msNBC suggested taking a screen shot to save your ducats.
Another comment:
The promo "Get yours before they run out."
Commentary. "But just like with the Home Shopping Network when they "sell out", they will likely soon find more to sell.
I do have to use +4... for emails to my Congressman/Senators, and for delivery when ordering something online (and I can look it up at the USPS site).
I've seen the one on faceplant of him as he believes a superhero should look.
He's got it absolutely right... that is, for a wrestler from WWE. Which is 100% scripted....
Speaking of news that dropped today: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/dec/16/ken-loach-says-bbc-helped-destroy-jeremy-corbyn (in the story is also that Labour has lost over 200k members under Starmer, but that's "not a story").
Already been done - I mean, the Frogs did beat the UK in the World Cup.
Edit: this news item that dropped today would explain everything about Truss/Kwarteng.)
To be honest I keep wanted to make reference to Rick's Cafe and Captain Louis Renault.
"download without paying"
Partially true. The NFT is what you have to pay for. The images are right-clickable like usual HTML images.
CHarlie
because that Labour government will have to bite the bullet and admit Brexit failed - I know that, you know that, my Labour MP, leader of the labour Europpe group knows that ... but what will it take to get Stammers to admit it?
Or is he waiting until it's obvoius to at least half of the Brexitloons?
and the Brexiteer wing of the Tory party will be livid. - and b y that point: IRRELEVANT - modern-day Jacobites.
Right now I don't see any way for the Tories to elect a worse leader than Johnson between now and January 2025, unless somehow they go back to Johnson (which is not impossible). Starmer is utterly meh, but he's not obviously worse than anyone on the Tory front bench (which isn't saying much).
I don't know why my thought keep drifting to Lachlan or James Murdoch. Must be something I ate, because obviously I know nothing about transpondian politics.
Spoiled rich people might have done coke at a party? In other news, the sun came up this morning.
Spoiled rich people might have done coke at a party? In other news, the sun came up this morning.
Well the obvious solution* is to ban cleaning crews from using any sampling or detection gear, because it's obviously slowing them down at doing their jobs. Oh, and if they're concerned about their working environment, their employers should be gracious and allow them to bring in their own hazmat gear and PPE.
*My personal solution would be to surreptitiously replace nose candy with a mix of fine-ground white pepper and salt. Must be the populist in me or something.
If the pundits who say that Sunak won't last beyond next spring are right, the Conservative party will get its chance to elect someone worse than Johnson - who wasn't all that bad, mainly because he didn't actually do anything, The Brexit decision was already made, and the only question was when. I doubt they will find anyone less sane than Truss, but I don't see it as impossible.
I am not sure that there WILL be a next Labour government, still less that one would admit that Brexit was a stupid idea and needs even partial reversal. Starmer's uber-Blairites are doing their best to antagonise the membership, and there is a significant chance of a schism. If he DOES manage to hold things together, his statements (and purges) strongly indicate that he will merely put pink lipstick on the pig.
At first I misread it as "Traces of suspected cocaine found in Liz Truss' panties"
Ooh, I dare you to repeat that in a Glasgow (or Swansea) pub :)
The French team beat the English team; Wales were eliminated in the group stage and neither Scotland nor Northern Ireland qualified for the finals.
The 4 separate teams date back to the beginnings of international soccer and there is no chance of them ever merging (and giving up 3 votes at soccer admin levels).
Rocketpjs @ 597:
More to the point, it was outside the homeless shelter in a small town. There are about 6 police officers in total in that community, and I'd just spoken with some of them, on site, about 3 hours previous.
Every single police officer in that town knows exactly where the shelter is, they are at or near it daily. To refuse to dispatch without that bit of technical information was and remains infuriating to this day.
The operators at 911 are human just like the rest of us. There's good ones and not so good ones. They screw up sometimes.
I see it in the news every so often where one of those screw-ups is especially egregious & the operator gets fired (and sometimes the 911 call center gets sued).
IIRC, earlier in the thread you said you hung up and called back getting a different operator. Maybe that's the appropriate answer for when you get an operator who is more obtuse than is necessary?
PS: (Hindsight is 20/20 so don't take this as criticism ... more of a half-witticism 😕) In the U.S. (and Canada?) street addresses usually alternate with all the even numbers on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other, so if you remember the street address for the business across the street, just add or subtract 1 to/from that number and you've got a 50% chance of hitting on the right address.
Robert Prior @ 599:
Would it be faster to call the police directly?
Do the police have a direct number for dispatch that bypasses the 911 call center? If so, do you know what it is?
> Trump trading cards.
Apparently they aren't getting a good reception from Trump-adjacent folks:
https://nypost.com/2022/12/16/steve-bannon-calls-for-firings-after-trumps-latest-stunt/
But also apparently they've raised $4.5e6 in a day.
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3777969-trumps-digital-cards-sell-out-within-a-day/
Not as such; Les Bleus only beat Ingurlundshire, which isn't even a real nation, not being a member of the UN in its own right.
I suspect many people in England wish they could vote for the Scottish Nationalists. Have they thought about running for seats in England?
Pigeon @ 601:
Argh. I can live somewhere for years and know everything about the layout of the place and how to get round it, but still have no idea what names most of the streets have. And as for building numbers, it tends to be a case of hunting along the street until you've found two buildings that actually have the numbers displayed (a) at all and (b) visibly, and then counting up or down while hoping the numbering actually corresponds to the number of buildings, which quite often it doesn't.
Still, at least the question can be answered, unlike "what's the postcode?" which would almost certainly get "how the fuck am I supposed to know?" if I wasn't calling from my own house.
There's always looking down the street to see if you can find a street sign and give that to the operator and tell them to have the police look down the block for a person frantically waving his arms once they get there.
EC @ 641
Cruella de ville? "Frostie" is a non-starter, 'cos he's in the Lords.
Who's a really barking loonie brexshiteer, even madder than the Trusstercluck, but superficially acceptable - there are a couple, but the names escape me at the moment. ( Cleverley? Shapps? )
Mikko Parviainen (he/him) @ 606:
Here we have an app, too. It knows from the phone's location where you are and can be used to connect to the operators, and passes that info directly to them. Somehow, not sure what it really does, but this is how I understand it works as I've used it a couple of times.
Brilliant, and kind of the thing where even a vague location can help a lot. I mostly spend my time in urbanish environments, but I can imagine it could also be useful in the wilderness with no streets nearby.
Mainly they triangulate off the signal strength from different cell phone towers. Cell phones have gotten better at doing that over the years.
When I first got a cell phone they couldn't do it at all (unless you were the FBI and could get a warrant for the provider to give you that data).
NOW (I saw this in the news yesterday)
Couple Rescued from Remote Calif. Canyon After Car Careens Over Cliff: 'Nothing Short of a Miracle'
Apparently the iPhone detected the crash, figured out there was no cell phone signal and switched to a sat-phone mode to send the SOS.
Emergency SOS via satellite available today on the iPhone 14 lineup in the US and Canada
I'm definitely upgrading my iPhone if I ever get to make my trip out west. Don't need it in Raleigh 'cause we have GOOD cell coverage and no 300 ft cliffs that I'm aware of, but the whole point of the western trip is to photograph stuff like mountains & canyons, etc ... so YEAH BUDDY!
David L @ 609:
Money is fungible.
We've had the North Carolina Educational Lottery for 15+ years. It was sold as a way to increase the state allocation to education without a tax increase. (Not going go to the debate about is a state run lottery a very regressive tax or not.) Of course just as with all such "allocated" things over time the base line budget of the allocation gradually goes down over where it would have gone without the special allocation. So now we have a state run lottery extracting money from mostly the poorer folks and education is getting about the same money it would have gotten anyway.
Oh, yeah. This was a Dem party thing when done.
A couple of things -
• The lottery is a steeply regressive tax, but it's a tax ONLY on those who aren't very good at math, i.e. poor people (I finally broke down and bought a lottery ticket when that power ball thing went over $1.5 Billion a month or so back ... I'll buy another one if it goes over $1 Billion again)
• That was the Democratic Party when it was controlled by triangulating corporate types trying to woo Reagan Democrats (Republicans in all but name - RiabN?) under the mistaken assumption that Republican LITE was a desirable thing.
The Democrats used to be the conservative party and I don't think they've moved leftward all that much. It's just that Republicans have moved so damn far RIGHT since FDR ...
Johnny Cash ... "and the guy in the rear burned his driver's license"
Greg: what will it take to get Stammers to admit it?"
If Starmer admits Brexit has failed before the government -- of whichever party -- admits Brexit has failed, the right-wing press will crucify him. It could conceivably cost him the election unless he waits until there's near-unanimity on the matter (except among die-hard Tory voters).
If Starmer becomes PM, then he may be able to say it aloud and ride out the storm, a necessary precondition to staunching the bleeding. But before he's PM it would be political suicide.
This should be obvious, to my mind.
(Less obvious is whether Starmer will ever openly denounce Brexit, even if these preconditions are met. More likely he'll announce a "Labour Brexit" and quietly erase Theresa May's red lines while swearing up and down that it's still Brexit even though he's on board with the Three Freedoms the EU requires for a trade deal.)
David L @ 610:
In the US I've never heard of 911 asking for a zip code (your postcode?). I call 911 about twice a year. All but twice in the 30+ years living in this area it was to report something hazardous on the road. A nearly meter diameter truck tire in a 70mph lane on the road or some such. As others have mentioned I'm on I-99 going west bound past the xxx exit.
Something helpful to know about North Carolina is when traveling the interstate (or other highways for that matter) dialing ﹡47 (﹡HP) gets you directly to the Highway Patrol dispatcher
I beg your pardon - I didn't remember if it was the "UK" or the English team. I sit, and type, corrected.
I'm a tad confused by your last sentence - FDR was a Democrat.
I think he means "Republicans have moved so far right since FDR's day."
There is the RCMP non-emergency line, which is not always staffed. The first thing the answering machine says is 'if this is an emergency, hang up and call 911'.
Last time I called that number the message told me that due to staffing issues the police would look at my message sometime tomorrow. Which is a long time in the context of a melee.
I am not great with addresses in general, though in the specific instance I was referring to it was just a brain blank. I'm actually good in crises, but for some stupid synaptic reason could not remember the specific address of the place I was calling from (I use said address in correspondence all the time). Given that every first responder within 50 km knows exactly where the place is, I stuck on 'send them to this place' rather than running back inside to dig for the address. It is often a dynamic situation. That was not good enough for the dispatcher for whatever reason.
After the next Labour government, though, all bets are off, because that Labour government will have to bite the bullet and admit Brexit failed, and the Brexiteer wing of the Tory party will be livid.
Umair Haque wrote about this issue yesterday: (How) Britain’s Collapse is a Warning to the World: The Moral of Brexit Britain’s Descent into the Underworld of Modernity
TL;DR In my last essay about Britain, I catalogued the shocking privations that Brits are going through — it’s descent into neo Dickensian poverty. This is what becoming a failed state is. This time, though, I want to discuss the moral of the story: modern day Britain is a warning to the world. Of just how severely, swiftly, and shockingly a society can fail — how fast and hard it can all come crashing down.
Long live Brexit... :-/
https://eand.co/how-britains-collapse-is-a-warning-to-the-world-85960c3eb59f
The state of Kansas went almost full Libertarian for about four-plus years. Then their GOP legislature gave it up, and raised taxes. Meanwhile, there's as much or more socialism-pushing in the US than I've seen since the early seventies... and the wrong wing, when they try to use that as a curse word, finds that plays like "oh, fudge" as an exclamation.
Charlie Stross @ 611:
A postcode is much more geographically precise than a zip code -- it identifies a block of about 20 addresses, a postal walk within which the postie can deliver all the letters/parcels they can carry in a messenger bag.
So the post code allows the ambulance (or police) response to get to within about 20 metres of the location of the accident.
(Zip codes in contrast cover a vastly greater area.)
They could do that in the U.S. IF the Zip+4 had been universally adopted. Zip+4 can get you down to a single building.
Mail Carriers don't really go by the Zip Code (or the Zip+4) nowadays. The USPS uses an "Intelligent Mail Barcode" that incorporates the Zip+4 plus a 2 digit extension that allows identification of an individual room within a building.
Mail is automatically sorted into bundles of sequential addresses for a block or so (120, 118, 116 ... 100; 101, 103 ... 119) at the post office branch. Then the bundles are grouped according to the carrier's route.
I know my Zip+4, but I'd be hard pressed to know it for anywhere else.
I once had a problem with receiving another guy's mail (credit card statements). I live "123 Steve street ... Zip+1234" and he lived at "123 Stevens street ... Zip+4321". I talked to the carrier and I talked to him about it, but it wasn't until I finally figured out THE BANK was printing the Intelligent Mail Barcode for my address on his statements (found an IMB translator on the internet).
I suggested he contact the bank & inform them about the problem. I guess he did, because I haven't gotten any of his credit card statements since.
I think you might be more correct to say that the Republicans have moved right since Johnson and Nixon.
The usual problem here is that US politics isn't about two political parties, one on the left, one on the right, with the Overton Window shifting between them. Instead, the US is like the UK. Rather than each bloc having its own party and those parties forming coalition governments, each of our two parties is a big coalition in and of itself, and functions as a giant
money-launderingfundraising machine for the members of the coalition.The blocs are generally white racists, businesspeople, BIPOC (Black, american Indian, People of Color), technocratic progressives, wealthy landowners/welfare ranchers, extreme religionists (Mormons, Quakers, Mennonites and similar), poor whites, and a few others.
In Teddy Roosevelt's time, Republicans were businessmen, technocrats, and BIPOC to the extent they were allowed to vote. He instituted a bunch of socialist-like reforms as a way of keeping communism from gaining a toehold in the US. FDR did similarly, with the added bonus that the Republican Businessmen had just crashed the economy, so he could do it as a democrat, but at the same time, the New Deal was not for people of color. Johnson started the current reorganization by signing the Great Society legislation, and that (plus the Vietnam quagmire) allowed Nixon to abandon the BIPOC bloc and court the white racists.
Now the Democrats are almost exactly where Teddy Roosevelt's Republicans were 115 years ago (with many of the same weaknesses!), while the Republicans are primarily the party of wealth and racism. And welfare ranchers.
Politics make odd bedfellows.
I will note that, living in a majority democrat area, the bloc politics haven't gone away. Instead of playing out in general elections though, they play out in primaries, and the struggle is usually among BIPOC, progressives, and business over who gets to choose the candidates.
I had issues several times, when I was arranging a pickup where I used to work. The idiots from FedEx kept looking for "S Dr".... Funny, for deliveries, they didn't seem to have any issues finding South Dr.
Troutwaxer @ 657:
I think he means "Republicans have moved so far right since FDR's day."
Correct. The Democratic Party in FDR's day (1932 election) was a fairly conservative centrist party and the Republicans were a conventionally "conservative party" somewhat to the right of the Democrats.
FDR's original proposals for dealing with the depression were hardly radical **, but he was forced somewhat to the "left" - towards the welfare state - when his original, more centrist plans didn't produce a recovery.
SINCE THEN, mainly beginning after WW2 the Republicans moved to the extreme far right (and that's not even including Tea Party idiots, QAnon & MAGAts who are even MORE extreme rightists to the point of being outright fascists).
When you look at the history of American Politics, the Progressive Movement (what is today considered leftist) started with Republicans. The Democrats moved left toward the center to remain competitive with voters during the first third of the 20th century and that's where they were when FDR was elected for his first term.
** Mostly consisted of continuing the things Hoover had already proposed along with some slight constraints on Wall Street banksters so they couldn't continue making things worse.
I think I'd say just the opposite. Republicans want it to be 1928 (the year before the Great Depression started) forever. Black, Hispanic, and Asians as legal inferiors, the good little wife keeping a man's home oh-so-nice, no abortions, homosexuals in hiding, the common person knowing their place, finishing their education with high-school, and working in White, Male-Owned factories for a pittance.
Democrats have moved forward with the times, and Republicans have not.
I think you might be more correct to say that the Republicans have moved right since Johnson and Nixon.
It's also correct to say that the Democrats have moved right since Johnson and Nixon.
For example, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is rather more conservative than the health care reform proposed by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1972 (which was killed by Democratic Senator Teddy Kennedy, who wanted a single payer system).
Heteromeles @ 662:
I think you might be more correct to say that the Republicans have moved right since Johnson and Nixon.
I would agree that the GOP's rightward shift has accelerated exponentially since then.
But they were already on that path in the late 40s & early 50s.
Nixon got his start in politics red baiting Jerry Voorhis in the 1946 Congressional (mid-term) Elections. He pulled the same shit against Helen Gahagan Douglas in his 1950 Senate campaign and was one of Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy's sycophants in the Senate.
Stunning 'ice pancakes' swirl on the surface of Scottish river
Perhaps OGH can check out these discs of frozen slush on the River Bladnoch... :-)
https://www.livescience.com/ice-pancakes-scotland
AlanD2
If you think that's bad ...
TRY THIS - abandoning any civilised rules at all, as far as I can see - & hoping the courts won't notice?
By the way, I've previously seen videos of ice circles rotating on rivers, but they've always been much bigger and solitary. See below for an example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSfDQyf-sw8
I think I'd say just the opposite. Republicans want it to be 1928 (the year before the Great Depression started) forever. Black, Hispanic, and Asians as legal inferiors, the good little wife keeping a man's home oh-so-nice, no abortions, homosexuals in hiding, the common person knowing their place, finishing their education with high-school, and working in White, Male-Owned factories for a pittance.
Um, I think you might want to look up what the Roaring Twenties meant for feminism and homosexuality. It wasn't the 1950s or the 2010s, for that matter.
Anyway, we've been through this already once. I guess the reality of coalitions making parties didn't quite take last time? It should.
Why? The examples I saw were on the White Cart Water in Linn Park (G44 5TA), and the West of Scotland is now thawing.
No, I get the idea of coalitions making parties - I'm fine with that. But the Republicans haven't gone right since FDR, it's more a matter of, as GB Trudeau put it, "looking backwards for rose-colored glasses."
It's that time of year again:
Christmas Light Show 2022
context = UK
a rather snarky variant upon "Monopoly" during WW2
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/aug/29/occupation-boardgame-found-in-jersey-attic-pokes-fun-at-nazis
RE: Political spectrum
While I agree on Nixon, I'll point towards Eisenhower. Republicans weren't a bunch of unified creeps until well into the 1990s. For example, many environmentalists were Roosevelt Republicans until Movement Conservatism forced them out.
Still, I think the bigger problem is the idea that there's an absolute political scale that runs right to left, that ideas are more-or-less fixed on the scale, and that parties migrate along it like trains in a subway tunnel.
My reasonably informed guess is that the unidimensional political scale is a pretty messy metaphor at best. Ideas are placed on it in a fairly ad hoc and shifting way (remember, for example, when conservative meant fiscally conservative? Now liberals pay down debts run up by conservatives.). New issues come along all the time (who predicted social media?), and probably it as a fractional dimension closer to 2.0 than 1.0, if we were honest about it.
https://eand.co/how-britains-collapse-is-a-warning-to-the-world-85960c3eb59f?gi=2ae2894096a5
Points out that a combination of the government not talking about problems and the media accepting that means that even things that would normally be regarded as disasters are {shrug} and move on.
That Umair Haque article is just downright depressing, because he's 75% right and 0% wrong.
By which I mean, everything he laid out was right but he missed one key ingredient -- the centralized extreme right wing media ownership situation, by which many of the newspapers are to the right of the Murdoch press, and the one theoretically-left paper with any significant reach (The Guardian) is actually mostly Blairite in editorial stance (i.e. 1990s conservative-equivalent) with some toxic far-right elements creeping in (i.e. it's treatment of trans issues, which tilts the same was as the extreme right).
The reason for the politicians' silence is because if any of them speak out against the Brexit cult they'd be crucified by the press (and the BBC would go along with it).
There will come a Kruschev's Secret Speech moment, but we're not there yet. Sunak won't, can't, bite the bullet (he's one of the oligarch beneficiaries). It'll take a general election to shake things up enough ... or a general strike or a revolution.
context = crazy people on Earth-1
CONTEXT = USA
overt money laundering via NFTs because, why not? Trump's needing lots of cash to maintain his toehold on solvency so he can look billionaire-ish until his death (5Y? 10Y?)
...and in an unhappy future timeline he actually steals the next election, he'll have to actually keep his promises since these bribes are coming from people with bone saws, shoulder launched rockets and Park Avenue lawyers... selling off governmental assets on the cheap plus tax cuts plus easy-easy-peasy American citizenship to the first 10,000 amoral thugs willing to pay him a megabuck
CONTEXT = UK https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/world/europe/uk-brexit-regret.html
“I voted for Brexit, I believe in Brexit,” Mr. Sunak added. “I know that Brexit can deliver, and is already delivering, enormous benefits and opportunities for the country.”
W...? T...? F...? untimely early deaths? frostbite? suicide? gangrene? illiteracy? ...enormous benefits!?
what that economic nerd said about UK as example and warning to the rest of world will sadly be ignored until 2030 possibly 2035
In which context, judge for yourselves on this (UK, Scotland), but I do not habitually buy (including collecting a free sheet here) any daily newspaper.
almost forgot...
for those postponing dental work due to low funds or experiencing sticker shock as toothpaste continues to spike in price... salt
four time daily rinses with warm salt water will reduce most (not all) gum irritation and slow (not stop) plaque build up... brushing with a mouthful of salt water is a legit alternative for toothpaste after meals but you still ought use fluoride toothpaste at night before bed
here in NYC a one pound (0.5 Kg) box of salt is USD$0.80 and will last at least two months for one person... there's bigger boxes at better price points but that's so very YMMV and regional retail availability and supply chain-ish
I disagree. He missed two key ingredients, of which that is one.
The other is the way that UK industry, services etc. have been transferred to foreign ownership, so that almost all profits and taxation goes abroad, largely to the USA (*). The result is that the UK remains a rich country as far as monetary throughput goes, but is no longer one as far as 'disposable' income goes. Sunak is right that we can't afford to pay public servants more or invest in public services, but wholly and totally wrong that he can't change that. But doing so would need Corbynite policies ....
Yes, Brexit is the current fetish, but it's really only a minor factor comparing to running down our ability to survive as an independent country. If we hadn't had four decades of running down the country, we could have weathered it. If Brexit had not happened, we would still have had the same economic problems, only 5-10 years down the line and proceeded into them more gradually.
(*) I have a friend who is a fairly well-known (originally USA) economist, who was saying the same thing.
Back to surprising things on the internet, what about a million litre tropical fish tank bursting.
And as for Starmer, the Brexit strategy proposed over on Chris Grey's excellent blog seems like a not terrible idea.
My reasonably informed guess is that the unidimensional political scale is a pretty messy metaphor at best.
I've mentioned the Political Compass before, which uses a two-axis scale:
https://www.politicalcompass.org
They use "left" and "right" in the traditional sense along an economic scale, and "libertarian" and "authoritarian" along an orthogonal social scale.
untimely early deaths? frostbite? suicide? gangrene? illiteracy? ...enormous benefits!?
Eliminating a drain on social services and saving resources for Those Who Matter.
Sadly, I'm not joking. There are those who believe that. They complained about pandemic restrictions to protect vulnerable people "who will die soon anyway".
Just got a letter from my GP explaining why he's less available. He also works at a hospital, and the ward of 35 beds with one nurse-practitioner has become a ward of 120 beds with no nurse-practitioner.
And, unlike the vast majority of Conservative politicians, he hasn't been given a 17% pay increase for "additional responsibilities".
Re: ' ... almost all profits and taxation goes abroad, largely to the USA'
Please elaborate/provide an example for what you mean by 'taxation goes abroad'. (The US corps aren't exactly known for paying a lot in taxes even on home turf.)
Meanwhile historical and landmark UK assets are still being bought up by middle eastern folk - SA, Qatar, etc. To me this looks like the UK is being carved away using both short and long term strategies. Really weird - or I'm missing info - but all that Tory led Brexit ado about leaving the EU in order to maintain British rights and properties while they keep making it easier and cheaper for foreign money to buy up/use the UK.
Amazon, for a start.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58485816
https://www.taxwatchuk.org/amazon_tax/
RE: '... GP explaining why he's less available. He also works at a hospital ... a ward of 120 beds with no nurse-practitioner.'
Some good news - a couple of RSV vaccines may get the green light for clinical testing possibly starting as early as May 2023. For now, social behavior (masking, not congregating in tight spaces with poor ventilation/air flow, not socializing while sick, etc.) has to see us through.
'RSV wave hammers hospitals — but vaccines and treatments are coming
As the respiratory illness helps to fuel a ‘tripledemic’, Pfizer and GSK race to get jabs approved.'
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04434-5
Hopefully you'll not need to see your GP, i.e., any appointments/referrals can be done via phone. I recall during the first year of the pandemic reading how MD students and new grads were being given a lot more work to remove some of the strain off the other docs looking after more seriously ill patients. I'm guessing that this is still happening.
BTW - I saw a headline that Trudeau is trying to get a universal medical program/budget going but is getting a lot of push back from the provincial premiers. Why: Is this a Lib vs. Tory vs. NDP thing or something else? (The other big issue in Canada re: healthcare is the existence of barriers to entry of qualified MDs. No idea whether this is related to the current federal vs. provincial healthcare budget spending authority/power headlines.)
Charlie
Nikita's Secret Speech - Keir Stammers? If not, then who? And WHEN?
Though we have another 2 years to a general election, so actually ... {maybe} plenty of time for it to finally sink in, perhaps.
Howard NYC
what that economic nerd said about UK as example and warning to the rest of world will sadly be ignored until 2030 possibly 2035
NO - when the crash comes it will be very sudden & a lot sooner than that, but - impossibke to predict when: "Gradually, then Suddenly" is the phrase, in economic terms, isn't it?
Also, baking soda works well as toothpaste.
The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (1975)
stop me if any of this sounds familiar
"...to further the interests of the state in a future where quantitative analysis backed by the tacit threat of coercion has replaced overt military and economic power as the deciding factor in international competition. In parallel with this, the government has become a de facto oligarchy whose beneficiaries are members of organised crime..."
"...Communities are either walled enclaves of privilege or largely lawless areas entirely lacking protection from corrupt civil authorities. Infrastructure has been allowed to crumble..."
"...who have access to information which is nominally secret enjoy demonstrable economic advantages over others lacking access to such data... data privacy is reserved for corporate entities and individuals, who then conceal wrongdoing; by contrast, normal citizens do not enjoy significant privacy..."
a couple of RSV vaccines may get the green light for clinical testing possibly starting as early as May 2023.
I’m over a year into an RSV trial in the US.
I’m fairly certain I got the real thing and not the placebo due to me feeling flu like lousy the next day after the shot.
On a somewhat tangential note, and to report back[1]...
Just on the way to some crusties from Bradford growing old.
Concert is in Cologne, and German public broadcasting is recording and streaming it (livestream online till tomorrow, official broadcast some date in January).
Sorry for the intermission, I hope for some "nice"[2] flashbacks from 16 year old me.
[1] Yes, I'm still alive. Given we had a bout of cold weather here lately (-8° Celsius...), that's more than what can be said about some of my plants...
[2] "I'm not suffering from depression, I'm enjoying every minute of the dissociation..."
Re: 'Amazon, for a start.'
Thanks! According to the articles this translates into: entities like BigRiver not only provide sellers a means to evade sales tax, it also results in a loss of UK-local jobs. Nice scam - two blows to the UK economy in one move! Hopefully that bill will pass. The downside is that if it does pass BigRiver might shift its 'operations - tax filings' to Luxembourg where they recently won a court case against the EU re: retail sales tax.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/12/amazon-wins-appeal-over-250m-eu-tax-bill
Howard @ 681:
Re: 'dental work ... toothpaste ... salt'
The types of foods you eat also makes a difference on when/how often you should brush. I usually buy the multipacks of toothpaste at Costco which usually has at least one of the top two brands available and costs much less on a per tube basis.
'The Best and Worst Foods for Your Teeth'
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?contenttypeid=1&contentid=4062
Heteromeles @ 676:
RE: Political spectrum
While I agree on Nixon, I'll point towards Eisenhower. Republicans weren't a bunch of unified creeps until well into the 1990s. For example, many environmentalists were Roosevelt Republicans until Movement Conservatism forced them out.
I'm not sure what you mean about Eisenhower. Eisenhower didn't become a Republican until AFTER he was nominated.
While he doesn't appear to be a part of the Republican lurch to the right, he went a long way to appease the extreme right wing of the party in order to obtain their support. That's why he chose Nixon as his running mate.
Eisenhower could have had the Democratic nomination in 1952 if he'd wanted it. Truman pressed him to run as a Democrat in 1951, but he chose the Republican nomination instead.
Eisenhower wasn't even a registered voter before 1949 (when he first registered as an Independent) and his registration had lapsed in 1951. He was not a registered voter at the time he was nominated in 1952.
It took an opinion by the New York State Attorney General for Eisenhower to be allowed to register in New York again, and this time he DID register as a republican (in October 1952).
Still, I think the bigger problem is the idea that there's an absolute political scale that runs right to left, that ideas are more-or-less fixed on the scale, and that parties migrate along it like trains in a subway tunnel.
Blame the French. They started it.
My reasonably informed guess is that the unidimensional political scale is a pretty messy metaphor at best. Ideas are placed on it in a fairly ad hoc and shifting way (remember, for example, when conservative meant fiscally conservative? Now liberals pay down debts run up by conservatives.). New issues come along all the time (who predicted social media?), and probably it as a fractional dimension closer to 2.0 than 1.0, if we were honest about it.
Things shift around, but how do you represent UP & DOWN, IN & OUT, CLOCKWISE & ANTI-CLOCKWISE? For this, but against that?
... and fit it into a 30 second TV commercial? ... or on a bumper sticker?
In today's politics NUANCE just doesn't apply.
Howard NYC @ 679:
CONTEXT = UK https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/world/europe/uk-brexit-regret.html
W...? T...? F...? untimely early deaths? frostbite? suicide? gangrene? illiteracy? ...enormous benefits!?
Mr Sunak's economic cohort - the billionaire class oligarchs (and the wannabe billionaire oligarchs) - have profited handsomely from Brexit.
Those are the only people who matter to Sunak and his ilk, so yes, enormous benefits.
Hopefully you'll not need to see your GP, i.e., any appointments/referrals can be done via phone.
Kinda hard to do a physical exam over the phone.
I saw a headline that Trudeau is trying to get a universal medical program/budget going but is getting a lot of push back from the provincial premiers. Why: Is this a Lib vs. Tory vs. NDP thing or something else?
That I know something about. The premiers want money with no strings attached, while the feds want to attach strings that say the money must be spent on health care, and that the provinces can't 'redirect' existing health care funding and use new federal funds to make up the shortfall.
Among the reasons for this:
The feds gave a good chunk of tax revenue to the provinces (ie. gave them formerly federal taxes) to use to fund health care. Guess which premiers promptly lowered those taxes and then complained that they weren't getting enough money for health care?
During the pandemic money was given to the provinces for specific health-related purposes. This was often redirected. For example, in Ontario money to improve ventilation was dumped into general revenue and didn't get spent on ventilation. We got a tax cut, though, for people wealthy enough to have a car. And a four-lane highway (soon to be eight lanes) so some Conservative donors (and relatives) can get wealthier.
My reasonably informed guess is that the unidimensional political scale is a pretty messy metaphor at best.
I've mentioned the Political Compass before, which uses a two-axis scale:
https://www.politicalcompass.org
They use "left" and "right" in the traditional sense along an economic scale, and "libertarian" and "authoritarian" along an orthogonal social scale.
The only problem I have with that is so many who claim to be "Libertarians" are outright fascists. Too many Libertarians are not very liberty oriented (or hold that liberty is ONLY suitable for their race, religion, creed, gender identity, socio-economic class ...), IYKWIM.
I don't know what other label they could use since the right have co-opted "liberal" and turned it into a dog-whistle swear word.
Re: '... in Ontario money to improve ventilation was dumped into general revenue and didn't get spent on ventilation'
I'm sure the teachers were just thrilled when they learned this! Did the schools mention this to parents? 'Sorry, but the funds that our school was supposed to get to improve in class ventilation got sent somewhere else, that's why your kid is sick with COVID/flu/RSV.' Not a joke - I've read that SickKids* is at over 120% capacity with various surgeries/therapies cancelled.
*For non-Canadians -- SickKids is the largest Canadian pediatric hospital as well as one of (if not) the largest medical research center.
SFReader @ 695:
Re: 'Amazon, for a start.'
Thanks! According to the articles this translates into: entities like BigRiver not only provide sellers a means to evade sales tax, it also results in a loss of UK-local jobs. Nice scam - two blows to the UK economy in one move! Hopefully that bill will pass. The downside is that if it does pass BigRiver might shift its 'operations - tax filings' to Luxembourg where they recently won a court case against the EU re: retail sales tax.
Here in the U.S. Amazon now collects the estimated state & local sales tax whenever you order from them.
The few times I've had to order something from Amazon.UK they collected VAT, but not the local taxes (which would supposedly be remitted to the U.S.) [also shipping is WAY MORE expensive if I have to order from Amazon.UK, a lot more than just the difference in distance would suggest].
PS: I don't think Amazon won that case so much as the European Commission lost because they couldn't prove Amazon got a "sweetheart" deal from Luxembourg.
John S
Like Elon's absolute libertarianism ... until it comes to criticism of him, eh?
Liberty is indeed something precious, much too precious to waste any of it on Those People.
JHomes
The only problem I have with that is so many who claim to be "Libertarians" are outright fascists. Too many Libertarians are not very liberty oriented (or hold that liberty is ONLY suitable for their race, religion, creed, gender identity, socio-economic class ...), IYKWIM.
A bigger problem is that the case has been made that "moderate" versus "extremist" is a better political axis than one with the extreme left on one end and the extreme right on the other. Extremists flip between extremes a bit more easily than moderates get radicalized.
Unfortunately, if this is true, then it means that the one or two-axis graphs you propose are actually U-shaped in various dimensions, because you've put the moderate pole in the center and arbitrarily split the extremist pole in two based on a more superficial ideology.
The only problem I have with that is so many who claim to be "Libertarians" are outright fascists.
From what I can tell, when rating politicians they look at policies rather than speeches.
I'm sure the teachers were just thrilled when they learned this!
Many were too busy and burned out to notice. Buildings and ops are traditionally separated from teaching, to the extent that tradespeople will come into a room to do maintenance forcing the cancellation of a lab or test because no one bothered to tell the teacher the visit had been scheduled. "Adversarial" is a good description.
Did the schools mention this to parents?
Hah!
JohnS posted on December 14, 2022 at 22:41 in 545:
Things have progressed a bit with newer systems. The SimpliSafe 4G hub draws less than 10ma at idle so my small consumer battery backup unit will run it for days. The sensors run for over a year on one Li cell battery.
Unfortunately, the sensors link to the hub on 433MHz, and 'Flipper' hacking tools can block the signalling, so I am looking for a new system which is equally parsimonious of power that's either hardwired to the hub, or uses a less popular frequency.
I'm sure the teachers were just thrilled when they learned this!
Background for non-Ontarians…
Before Covid teachers were locked in conflict with the provincial government, which had passed a law limiting all pay increases to 1% for public and quasi-public employees. (This was later rules unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.) When Covid hit teacher settled, in the interests of concentrating on the emergency.
During the first months everyone scrambled to switch to online learning during the lockdown, while learning about major policy shifts as tweets from the Minister of Education, or soundbites during a TV interview. (Staff within the Ministry also learned the same way.) Things like declaring that no marks would drop during the online period, then blaming teachers when students massively stopped logging in to online school.
During the next year (still pre-vaccine), they imposed hybrid learning — students in-person and online in the same class, at the same time. Two totally different modes of lesson delivery, thus doubling required prep time. Announced policies on Friday to be implemented Monday. Stuff like that.
Now that classes are supposedly back to 'normal', they are faced with students who are 2-3 years behind, not just in knowledge but also in social development. So a class of 14-year-olds behave like the 11-year-olds they were when they were last in school. Throw in a new curriculum, the end of levels-streaming*…
Lots more examples, but I've whinged too much already.
In summary, teachers now don't trust the government, or the school board, or the school administration. They don't trust them to set good policies. They don't trust them to enforce what policies do exist in a meaningful and consistent manner. When the government announces new resources for something, they assume that either it was money already being spent, or that it will be diverted.
But by-and-large, they aren't angry. They're too tired to be angry. Not caring is a survival strategy.
So many teachers no longer care.
I am so very very glad I'm no longer in the system.
*Actually something I agree with, but it needs time and resources to implement and those haven't been provided.
THE CONTENT OF THE PROPOSITIONS
#1: That this is a rich planet. Therefore poverty and hunger are unworthy of it, and since we can abolish them, we must.
#2: That we are a civilized species. Therefore none shall henceforth gain illicit advantage by reason of the fact that we together know more than one of us can know.
THE OUTCOME OF THE PLEBISCITE Well—how did you vote?
Well, we know how people voted, don't we?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2022/dec/17/rishi-sunak-and-the-ghosts-of-christmas-past-present-and-future-cartoon
Also, as it happens, from the Grauniad - “Lord Cruddas” (no more appropriate name was ever seen) complaining that the Tories have become a left wing party. I guess you won’t have much difficulty working out where his politics lie.
I occasionally think that the best use of 3M pounds (or whatever they charge today) would be to seat Lord Bragg of Barking in the chamber. The pope won't make him officially Saint Bragg of Barking, a lordship would be the next best thing.
especially if you could get the Con party to do it.
On R4 this morning ....
In the last review of the week's news & papers & one of the people in the studio was
{ Quote from wiki } Sir Paul Maxime Nurse OM CH FRS FMedSci HonFREng HonFBA MAE & Nobel Prize .... { Endquote }
He sharply contrasted the lying slime BoZo's promise in the Brexit vote: - you know ... £350 m a week for the NHS ...
With the fact that the NHS is at least as £1billion ( I assume £10^9 ) down as a result of Brexit. Which says it all.
Might one suggest that "Lord Bragg of Upminster Bridge" would be more appropriate?
especially if you could get the Con party to do it.
Never happen. He's too outspokenly anti-Tory and he's not a politician so the Labour whip's office don't have the usual dirt on him.
(Parenthetically: I'd love it if the National Crime Agency would raid the whips' offices in the House of Commons, confiscate their Little Black Books, and charge all the party whips with blackmail -- which is what their job entails, when you get down to it. Suddenly Proportional Representation might start to look like the lesser evil to the Westminster elite ...)
BTW, today's British political scandal which hasn't make the newspapers yet but is already blowing up on Reddit and twitter, is that someone leaked a photo of a letter to the LGB Alliance, the campaigning anti-trans pressure group, sent by Ofcom, the Office of Communications (a media regulator, so very official).
The letter itself is boring -- except for the address.
It turns out that LGBA operates out of 55 Tufton Street.
As wikipedia explains,
Your takeaway is that the LGB Alliance, a leading anti-trans hate group, is funded by the same lobbyists as brexit, climate change denial, and the barking lunatics who fed Liz Truss her policy platform. Transphobia is thus not just an expression of "public concern", it's an active political agitprop campaign being fought with right wing billionaire money.
(Don't expect The Guardian to cover this.)
Charlie
It turns out that LGBA operates out of 55 Tufton Street.
So, the "LGBA" is a simple fascist front organisation, yes?
At the same time ... This from the Grauniad ...
From the article: He calls the Conservatives “Consocialists” and says the two main parties are indistinguishable in the bland left-of-centre ground. - YOU WHAT?
Cruddas & others are AGAIN cosying up to Farrago & shifting fascitward - "Evil immigrants" - without whom the country will grind to a halt, yeah ...
It's even worse than that. Truss actually worked at Tufton Street prior to becoming an MP.
She actually believes all this libertarian crap. Note her youngest daughter is named Liberty.
Re:'... [UK] right wing billionaire money.'
Who are these people? I'm assuming that any agency/group/corp that does business on a regular basis with the Gov't (including the 'Party' forming the gov't) must be vetted, i.e., finances and senior staff identified.
This is where I'd like some AI dev work done:
a)clearly identify and then track money to, from, and between various people, political parties, internal gov't departments, suppliers, etc.
b)run various political campaign/PR promise scenarios and see which gov't depts get shafted and which pols' bank accounts/assets increased.
c)run scenarios showing which demo/voting groups benefit/hurt. Make it so voters can participate in this and track their progress over time, in real time.
If AI is supposedly being developed to run sophisticated stock market/EFT trades then this type of exercise should be easy.
I'm assuming that any agency/group/corp that does business on a regular basis with the Gov't (including the 'Party' forming the gov't) must be vetted, i.e., finances and senior staff identified.
Oh you sweet summer child.
Who do you think is in charge of appointing the officials who would oversea this hypothetical vetting process?
Charlie
The same people who appoint the "independent" bodies that make pay reviews/recommendations, like, say the Nurses, Police etc - perchance?
Kick it up a level or two and it gets to government ministers.
Prior to 2010 there was a limit on corruption -- that's how we got regulatory bodies like the Parliamentary Privileges Committee.
Unfortunately since 2015 there's been a mad dash to legitimize corrupt practices that would be seen as shameful anywhere in the developing world. You remember the dog days of the Major government, and the brown paper envelopes stuffed with £20 notes, but we've graduated from there to PPE contracts handed out to shell companies owned by ministerial spouses, with eight digit kickbacks. It's jaw-droppingly corrupt. We also have members of the House of Lords who clearly got there by making donations to the Conservative Party, much as their 16th-17th century antecedents did by making donations to the Monarch.
I strongly suspect the billionaires bankrolling 55 Tufton Street are a mix of home-grown oligarchs and the usual American families -- the Kochs and Mercers. But who the hell knows? All I can say for sure is that the Ruling Party will not allow them to be subjected to embarrassing scrutiny, because the Tory party is a bought-and-paid-for subsidiary.
"I'm assuming that any agency/group/corp that does business on a regular basis with the Gov't (including the 'Party' forming the gov't) must be vetted, i.e., finances and senior staff identified. "
Speaking from an USian context, that assumption does not correspond to reality. Not at all.
Perhaps individual employees who need security clearances.
On tracking Musk's jet:
Just did that today on adsbexchange.com as he flew into Qatar from San Jose. I wonder if he's catching on about this.
Someone gave him a World Cup final ticket?
All that carbon dumped in the atmosphere for one dumb man.
Who do you think is in charge of appointing the officials who would oversea this hypothetical vetting process?
That was a truly excellent Freudian slip. Well done, sir!
On a hope-punkish note, An Idea: imagine, if you will, a replay of the English Civil Wars, with Oliver Cromwell updated to be a Progressive who brings England to net zero carbon emissions through hell and high water.
Of course, this being Cromwell 2.0, the Decarbonized Commonwealth will be No Fun At All. Football will be banned (too many emissions), as will the Right Wing "News" Media. Veganism will be Strongly Encouraged, as will the Wearing Of Sweaters?
Horror story? Farce? Hopepunk? I dunno, that's as far as I'm taking it.
If you don't like that one, imagine if Greta Thunberg or some of her followers create a modern Viking fleet to pillage the British Isles (focusing on who has the resources, of course) and install Scandanavian-style democracies in their wake...
"Someone gave him a World Cup final ticket?"
One can speculate. He was reportedly seen there with Jared Kushner.
And all you need to know is the type and that his registration is, say, N-EMUSK1.
I have already taken up the Wearing of Sweaters. It's not warm enough to avoid, without turning heating on. (Which to be honest I'd taken to doing some years ago, mostly for carbon-footprint reasons. It's harder now I'm at home most days.)
The Wearing of Sweaters tale is probably pretty close in its starting point to Gwyneth Jones' 'Bold As Love' sequence, IIRC.
Damn good stories, those. Zoom (etc) are pretty good bilocation equivalents to my mind. And I really thought it was going to be Dissolution Summer this year.
Up here in The Great White North I wear insulated trousers most of the winter and sweaters almost all year round. We keep the heat pump at 20C but sitting fairly still in the office doesn’t exactly make the blood pump hard.
That type of ego plate always makes me wonder whether their underpants still have name tags in them too.
But then for a while I was quite keen to own a plane just so I could have ZK-MOZ. I grew out of that once I realised that planes are money pits that make sailboats seem cheap.
They use "left" and "right" in the traditional sense along an economic scale, and "libertarian" and "authoritarian" along an orthogonal social scale.
I've been a fan of The Political Compass for a long time. The underlying premise is a great idea that draws out something that I think many people had unformed thoughts rolling around their heads about, myself included. And I think it shows those thoughts both have some merit but don't (on examination out in the open, so to speak) are not a great model of reality.
My observation is that results typically cluster on the diagonal, which in most situations usually means the variables are not really independent. Nearly all neo-liberal political parties are sorted into the top-right (authoritarian right) quadrant, with usually Green parties and fellow-travellers in the bottom-left (libertarian left). IMHO actual Libertarians sort themselves into the top-right when measured by actual actions and policy alignments, but the bottom right only when you base the assessment on what they say, which is a sort of opposite to what you hear from them... and in any case they usually just seem to line up as more authoritarian than left groups (and often more than right groups... they make up the extreme of the diagonal).
They will say that the distinction is flawed because economic left is inherently authoritarian, but I think the results give a lie to that and that's where I see some of the merit. Another area or merit is understanding the differences between figures in the top-right quadrant only. The 2008 USA presidential election is a great example. In Australia, the National Party, which is the rural arm of the conservative coalition, is often referred to as "agrarian socialist", which is to say they believe in subsidised everything for "farmers" (meaning "farm owners", which often does not include small farms, but does include mines) and hard dealing for everyone else. I do see this pattern reflected in the differences between say, Palin and McCain, and that makes a lot of sense, really showing what the model is good for.
I think in the past they have made a sort of token of putting Stalin and Pol Pot in the top left quadrant, but I remain unconvinced the top left quadrant is a real thing (similarly I'm not really convinced about the people who are sorted into the bottom right). I think Altemeyer hit on this question when he contemplated what the equivalent to his RWAs would have been in the Soviet Union, because for sure there was an equivalent. The answer isn't political in the sense we usually think of it, and it's also illustrative.
I've always felt that the political compass needed a third dimension, Environment, ranging from eco-fascists to coal rollers.
I have known authoritarian environmentalists, in fact it is quite common along that axis. 'People are too stupid and must be forced to save the planet'. It has its appeal.
Photographic proof. From the all new Elon jet tracker sub.
"I'd rather be taxed half my wealth so the poor and workers are calm and happy than lose it all to revolution."
--Joseph Kennedy
context = USA & UK & elsewhere
it is getting to the point where the choices for the 1%ers (and the 0.1%ers above them) narrowing to either: (a) stockpiling ammo 'n tear gas to fend off millions of whimpering hungry children (b) massive public works project to soak up idle labor and justify dole funding (c) outright food handouts ("PeopleKibble™") (d) delay till mass starvation and minor rioting prior to leveraging sudden supply of available protein ("Soylent Green™") (e) fly off to bunkers in NZ to wait out the storm (f) ignore it all and be surprised nobody loves 'em enough to save 'em from lynch mobs and barbeque pits ("eat the rich™" being the next big food-related reality weekly series on @netflix)
PLEASE DELETE PRIOR VERSION... BADLY SPACED
"I'd rather be taxed half my wealth so the poor and workers are calm and happy than lose it all to revolution."
--Joseph Kennedy
context = USA & UK & elsewhere
it is getting to the point where the choices for the 1%ers (and the 0.1%ers above them) narrowing to either:
(a) stockpiling ammo 'n tear gas to fend off millions of whimpering hungry children
(b) massive public works project to soak up idle labor and justify dole funding without actually admitting their lousy policymaking wrecked the economy
(c) outright food handouts ("PeopleKibble™")
(d) delay till mass starvation and minor rioting prior to leveraging sudden supply of available protein ("Soylent Green™") to feed the survivors
(e) fly off to bunkers in NZ to wait out the storm (YEARS not months)
(f) ignore it all and be surprised nobody loves 'em enough to save 'em from lynch mobs and barbeque pits ("eat the rich™" being the next big food-related reality weekly series on @netflix)
Another issue with the Compass is that for most people there isn't a single libertarian/authoritarian axis, rather that where they fall depends on what we are talking about. For each of us, there are issues where we see a need for people to do as they are told whether they like it or not, and others where we are happy to accept that what other people do is none of our business.
Allied to this, there is the point that economics is to some extent innately authoritarian. Economics is about what to do when there is not enough for everybody to have what they want, and not everybody will meekly accept that no, they can't have it. So if we are not to descend into Hobbesian warfare, some people will have to be made to accept decisions they do not like.
JHomes
Howard NYC
Well, we KNOW that option (b) works - well it did in the 1930's anyway. But ... now? Is anyone even thinking of trying - maybe Biden, if he's allowed to by the insane "R's"
Economics is about what to do when there is not enough for everybody to have what they want, and not everybody will meekly accept that no, they can't have it.
To be fair, I would regard this as "resource allocation/rationing" and think of it as a topic or even branch in economics, but think of economics in a more general sense that is a superset of that. There's a relationship with scarcity implied in that mode of thinking, and the possibility that certain sorts of scarcity are not real. The concept of Pareto efficiency where where to improve the situation you need to make someone worse off, but perhaps that is objectively no hardship for them... is a society enforcing such a process intrinsically authoritarian? That's what the Libertarians would argue, and for me personally I most vehemently disagree. I suppose what you are saying is more along the lines that a system which produces inequality structurally is inherently authoritarian, and I probably agree with that.
context = Pentagon's military procurement process based in Washington DC (only vaguely a part of the USA)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/17/b21-raider-air-force-bomber-manned-last/
USD$700M per aircraft and already hints it will balloon to 2X or 3X
but worst yet, it lacks anything better than the B1 or B2 in terms of survivablity, which in turn asks an unwelcome question of why put pilots inside an airframe which might not return to base with less than 90% certainty? especially given unmanned RPVs are already cheaper to build-operate-maintain-hide-train and much, much more flexible in terms of missions performable at long reaches?
»which in turn asks an unwelcome question of why put pilots inside an airframe which might not return to base with less than 90% certainty?«
Because of the use-controls on nuclear weapons.
Current presidental orders do not allow PAL codes to be transmitted via radio ever.
Providing the intent-signal before take-off is also strictly banned.
So they cannot deliver nuclear weapons from drones.
The reason they can do it with SLBM and ICBM, is that "once the rockets are up..." there is no way to (significantly) pervert their trajectory.
Lovely, cos hanging out with a prick like Kushner really says "I'm a nice guy. Trust me.".
Lovely, cos hanging out with a prick like Kushner really says "I'm a nice guy. Trust me.".
I am quite certain that projecting a "nice guy" image is not something Musk ever cared about. In fact I was certain of it even back when I liked him.
but worst yet, it lacks anything better than the B1 or B2 in terms of survivablity, which in turn asks an unwelcome question of why put pilots inside an airframe which might not return to base with less than 90% certainty?
First off I'm not a fan of crazy costs of huge military projects. But I understand where about 1/2 of the crazy comes from. Plus they way they talk about costing is to take all the upfront R&D and average across the projected build. So it sounds like a future cost instead of a sunk cost. The R&D of the B-21 is 80% or more spent and should not be discussed in terms of ongoing plane costs. (For the F-35 they actually talk about the cost per unit for each year or two's orders. Well now at least.)
But the B-21 is seriously planed to replaced the hugely expensive to maintain B1 and B2 planes. Both cost way more to maintain than publicly projected for various reasons. From stealth coatings to variable sweep wings. And I think something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the B1s are parked so they can be used to supply spare parts to the ones flying. As many critical part are decades of out production.
Oh, one point of the B-21 is extra space and a more flexible design for avionics to it CAN go pilot-less in the future.
But the way they are huge expensive things makes competitive bidding on them only possible before the first prototype is ever built. Which is a problem.
»Oh, one point of the B-21 is extra space and a more flexible design for avionics to it CAN go pilot-less in the future.«
I thought that was space for Tom Cruise's film-crew ?
Well that too.
At least the B2 pilots will no longer be taking those K-Mart lawn couches and coolers on board for all those round the world flights that were not a part of the original plans.
Up here in The Great White North I wear insulated trousers most of the winter and sweaters almost all year round. We keep the heat pump at 20C
I keep my house at 15-16 in the winter (unless I'm ill, in which case I'll warm it up to 18-20). Summer I have the air-con set to kick in at 27-28. Sweaters and thermal underwear in winter, shorts in summer.
Lovely, cos hanging out with a prick like Kushner really says "I'm a nice guy. Trust me."
I keep imagining one of those James Bond-style scenes, where Creep One holds an auction of The Great Secrets to the highest bidders from Creepy Authoritarian Countries Two through Ten, in order to raise money to avoid going bankrupt or something. All tuxedos and expensive women. And Henry Cavill or whoever it is now asking for a martini shaken, not stirred, because someone thought he'd be comedy relief.
Probably nothing so gauche. More like gifts among friends than deals with the devil.
But yeah. If I was involved in activism in any number of countries, and used a twitter account to organize, I'd be pretty concerned at the moment. And not just about the Musk-Kushner Axis.
CONTEXT = uk
okay for those too jaded to flinch...
halfway down this article, a handy-dandy scheduling tool ("Upcoming strikes") for those looking to find when best (worst?) to initiate their own labor action in the UK
I'm making a note of it since the US seems to be lagging about three years behind UK in self-destructive misaligned policies and by 2025 the #WSCN #BSGC in the Republican Party could well be in control and we too shall have need of this sort of scheduling tool
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/19/ambulance-staff-strike-pay-union
Re: '... oversea this hypothetical vetting process?'
Erm... Qatar? As for the mechanics/how - via social prods. Their per capita social media consumption (presence) is second to the UAE. My guess is the Elon didn't travel there for the soccer but to discuss financing with some major creditors/shareholders. (His travel buddy/minder is probably there for the same reason plus maybe an extended stay visa for a couple of in-laws who might want a quick get-away.)
Chances are that something like this (AI studying human behavior and outcomes) is already being worked on - all I'm suggesting is a slight change in variables used and focus (who gets advantaged - don't kill off all your workers!).
Besides - it's Xmas and I want something SFish/fantastical and upbeat to look forward to in the New Year! :)
JHomes @738:
Re: 'Economics is about what to do when there is not enough for everybody to have what they want, ...'
The above comment suggests that you're assuming that there's only a one-to-one unidirectional swap/trade ever going on in economics. If so, I disagree - there's a branch of economics looking at 'circular economies' sorta like ecological/environmental recycling but applied to economies recognizing that there are in fact many users and commodities co-existing.
Interesting what you get when you ask an old-school economist to analyze and respond to the 'trolley problem'.
I have known authoritarian environmentalists, in fact it is quite common along that axis. 'People are too stupid and must be forced to save the planet'. It has its appeal.
So have I. Heck, just the desire to get something done can drive someone to authoritarian extremes.
With regard to environmentalists, I think the better way to think about it is that maybe 5-10% of people get why it's important, and this cuts across all class lines (remember, farmers are currently 1-2% of the US population...). So there are a few billionaires who are ardent environmentalists, a bunch of poor American Indians who are traditionalists, and even a few dictators (like the former leader of the Dominican Republic) who are also environmentalist.
With regard to the moral compass, I prefer something I saw in 1491, the idea that all civilizations are made up of some combination of Top Down, Bottom Up, Great Beast, and Big Lie. Top down and bottom up aren't quite opposites on a single spectrum, because (per Pikkety) accumulation of wealth and/or good farmland/big herds through luck and skill will promote inequality out of a bottom-up egalitarian system. I interpret Great Beast as coercive authoritarians, and Big Lie not just as religion, but as all systems that say My Way Is The Best, be it macroeconomics, planned economies, Universal Christianity/Islam, Communism, Capitalism, or whatever. There always comes the point when the original ideas don't quite work, and those in power start borrowing random stuff from random pundits to try to make it work, and...
Anyway, this is a four-dimensional graph (one for each of the four), each axis going from 0-1. Plotting governments in such a hyperspace is hard to do on a two-dimensional screen, but it may be more realistic. The fun part is that probably 80% of any given population is near the origin on all four axes--they just want to live, ideally with someone else doing all the heavy lifting.
My wife and I have different temp set points. Today outside it MIGHT get to 10C. Which is 5C or more lower than typical. Inside around 18C. I keep my office (old bedroom) about a degree or so above that. I'm in short sleeves with a T-shirt under it. My wife keeps her office (old bed room) at about 24C or a bit higher. She has on 3 layers and the top one isn't thin.
And unrelated to anything else a rabbit got splatted in front of my house a few hours ago. I didn't notice it until the big vulture showed up for a late breakfast. Of course the car driving by ever few minutes kept interrupting the meal and he'd jump back to the curb on one side or the other.
Wingspan of about 2M.
"Once they go up Who care where they come down? "That's not my department" "Says Werner von Braun."
I'll note that Tom Lehrer announced recently that he's putting all his songs in the public domain.
Re: Tom Lehrer
His name sounded familiar but I wasn't sure who he was and had to look him up. Yep - the 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park' and 'Elements' guy.
Anyways, his songs are already in the public domain and earlier this month he announced that he's shutting down his web site soon. Hopefully someone will copy/download all his work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer#Musical_career
"This website will be shut down at some date in the not too distant future, so if you want to download anything, don’t wait too long."
https://tomlehrersongs.com/
I took a copy of what's on there some time ago (I'm assuming the content of the site hasn't changed since he put it up). If anyone wants them then I could put them somewhere visible, but doing that while his site is still up feels rather cheeky.
Going on what he says on the front page of that site, doing that would be legal, but it doesn't feel right while it's still available from his own site. I reckon sending an archive to individuals would be alright though, as long as great hordes don't start asking for it.
In which context, More of Tom Lehrer contains those 2, The Masochism Tango and We Will All Go Together When We Go.
I believe Jason Scott at archive.org is on the case.
I've been pointing people in the direction of the site for a couple of years and always found they are surprised and greatful. It's fascinating to see it suddenly get legs.
Oh for the days of FTP. it would be so much easier.
Lovely, cos hanging out with a prick like Kushner really says "I'm a nice guy. Trust me."
Given the results of Musk's latest poll ("Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll." (18-Dec)), what if he's seriously shopping Twitter around to the highest global bidder? Twitter would be a jewel in the crown of the House of Saud, if they care to part with one-third their known wealth. Or maybe China helps TikTok acquire it?
Or heck, maybe Bezos snaps it up...
I logged in to archive.org to request tomlehrersongs.com be saved. It replied that a snapshot had been taken 43 minutes before. Thank goodness for a public good preserving another public good.
"Because of the use-controls on nuclear weapons."
I was recently surprised to learn that the B61-12 precision air-dropped nuke lacks on-board GPS and the strake pseudo-wings that conventional JDAMs have. It gets its coordinates from the carrying aircraft at the time of drop, and after that its inertial navigation system operates the tail fins. That very considerably constrains the carrier's options for dropping it, so why do it that way?
On asking around about that, the consensus was that omission was done precisely to limit the possibilities that the bomb, after drop, might go off and land somewhere unexpected and unwanted. And its 30 m inertial-only accuracy is deemed "good enough for nukes."
Various bits of Saudi Arabia already own a chunk of Twitter, they're the second biggest shareholder after Musk himself. Qatar's sovereign fund also owns a chunk.
»I was recently surprised to learn that the B61-12 precision air-dropped nuke lacks on-board GPS«
The people who are responsible for the security (in all senses) of the nukes are very serious, and very smart people, and there are a LOT of technologies which are simply ruled out for nuclear weapons, amongst these "radio receivers and transmitters".
There used to be an exception for altitude fuses, but that may have been withdrawn.
USA have conducted experiments with ICBM warheads which had radio-based remote control/fine-steering, but presumably only for the conventional payloads which were being proposed during the Bush years to make ICBMs and SLBMs "more versatile". (Conventional explosives would need much better CEP to be usable)
I can highly recommend Sandia reports SAND2002-1306 "Mathematical Aspects of Unique Signal Assessment" and SAND91-1269 "The Unique Signal Concept for Detonation Safety in Nuclear Weapons", in particular the "Postscript on pitfalls" in the latter, it gives a really good impression how serious these people are.
context = USA
I lack the science expertise to judge the content of these embedded links but deem it all has credibility given editorial quality…
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1595751639314481152.html
of the chunks I’ve read -- 50/50 grokked the details -- what looks to finally bubbling up is that, yeah a million Americans died, but ooooopsie 10 million (20? 30?) have lingering after effects at long last acknowledged as “long covid”… but next to nobody is seriously gaming out the impact… not just cost of treatment but smackdown on national productivity given widespread ‘brain fog’…
I still cannot find anyone seriously examining behavioral shifts post-covid, given ‘air rage’ & ‘road rage’ being shrugged off as WSCN-originated anti-mask-anti-vax paranoia… I’ve been seeing more (not less) people who are struggling to speak coherently in shoppes and folks who are not so much drunk-stoned-high as having behaviors associate with drugging but do not smell boozy or weedy… if indeed long covid includes successive brain damage, we are looking at millions experiencing early onset dementia and potentially ‘ahead of schedule’ loss of self-care… imagine what it does to economy if we suddenly need another 5M slots in longer-term care for adults in ‘second childhood’…?
Life expectancy is precious. Take a day away from each American (331.9m) and you’ve “killed” 909,315 years of living. As if you’d killed 10,000+ people outright. (hattip to Terry Pratchett's "Fractional Murder")
Given how #Longcovid after treatment is being denied by insurance companies, loss of life expectancy has robbed each victim of months. So. Do. The. Math.
Various bits of Saudi Arabia already own a chunk of Twitter, they're the second biggest shareholder after Musk himself. Qatar's sovereign fund also owns a chunk.
Here's a thought: NEOM is projected to cost $500 billion. Perhaps Musk is angling to trade Twitter to the Saudis for an 8% stake in the project, or something.
You know, so he can then build NEOMars. Or supply batteries and tunnel boring to NEOM. Or something.
I've done a number of telemeds. Of course, it's easier if you've demonstrated to your doctor that you're not stupid, and don't bother them for nothing. My partner and I have both had scrips written after a telemed.
Comments?
It works for some things, but not others. Appendicitis is diagnosed either by palpation or a CT scan.
Tom Lehrer's songs
Would the Wayback Machine also be useful, here?
EC
Appendicitis ...
Or by detecting poisons in the blood-stream, because the damn thing is almost ready to go "pop" ... Happened to The Boss, as they initially thought she had gall-bladder going bad, until they realised that she is one of the 1:700 (approx) who have their Appendix in the "wrong" place .....
Acute abdominal pain can be almost anything, only some of which are serious, and few of which can be distinguished over the telephone.
In my case, it was put down to constipation caused by my cancer until I got manually checked out. Gall bladder duct obstruction was the second string theory, as the cancer is in that area. My 75th birthday present from Fate was a diagnosis of appendicitis, which put a damper on the planned party, but it was a hell of a relief compared to what it could have been :-) And the antibiotics worked, at least for now.
You know, so he can then build NEOMars. Or supply batteries and tunnel boring to NEOM. Or something.
Avatar the movie was on one of the cable channels last night. In looking at the facility they built, which I imagine is what a Mars colony would need, I can see it taking the industrial output of Germany to put it together. Before you talk about the armed forces in the movie.
Of course, "for some things". When I had what turned out to be a gall bladder attack, we went in to the urgent care. But for arthritis again, I could get a doc's advice.
Para2 - Why!? It took me ~1 minute to find out that the B61 was originally designed in 1963 and was in production in 1968. That's the same period as the original laser-guided Paveway I.
kiloseven @ 707:
Things have progressed a bit with newer systems. The SimpliSafe 4G hub draws less than 10ma at idle so my small consumer battery backup unit will run it for days. The sensors run for over a year on one Li cell battery.
Unfortunately, the sensors link to the hub on 433MHz, and 'Flipper' hacking tools can block the signalling, so I am looking for a new system which is equally parsimonious of power that's either hardwired to the hub, or uses a less popular frequency.
Wireless systems weren't used much in commercial alarms. I won't say never, but I don't remember any other than the cell phone communicators. But again my experience is almost 30 years out of date by now.
Charlie Stross @ 722:
I strongly suspect the billionaires bankrolling 55 Tufton Street are a mix of home-grown oligarchs and the usual American families -- the Kochs and Mercers. But who the hell knows?
With the FSB & GRU acting as prime contractors remodeling the building?
Anyway, this is a four-dimensional graph (one for each of the four), each axis going from 0-1. Plotting governments in such a hyperspace is hard to do on a two-dimensional screen, but it may be more realistic.
This sounds like a job for a radar chart, but you might want to add a fifth variable to help ensure it doesn't make it look like some of them are complementary. People will try to impose some sort of excluded middle logic on them anyway, it seems to be just too tempting a part of how our brains work, but if the visualisation avoids making it look like binary continua that's a better start :). I suspect this is how we ended up with a Big Five in psychology.
Kardashev @ 727:
One can speculate. He was reportedly seen there with Jared Kushner.
As the kids say nowadays - "Pics or it didn't happen!"
See Also: Google Images - Musk at World Cup
He was hobnobbing with some OTHER interesting people there as well.
THAT photo: "Football brings fascists together"
On a totally unrelated note (we are past 300 comments), I would love to read a fanfic of "1632", except instead of transporting Grantville, WV from year 2000 to 1632, it transports Grantville, WV from year 2022 to 1632.
That is after opioid crisis, after social media, MAGA, Trump, coal jobs not brought back, well after everything that happened in the intervening 22 years. I suspect Grantville population will have rather different outlook than in the original series.
Even better if the fanfic uses original characters, now aged 22 years, and their grown or nearly grown children.
Howard NYC @ 741:
context = Pentagon's military procurement process based in Washington DC (only vaguely a part of the USA)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/17/b21-raider-air-force-bomber-manned-last/
USD$700M per aircraft and already hints it will balloon to 2X or 3X
but worst yet, it lacks anything better than the B1 or B2 in terms of survivablity, which in turn asks an unwelcome question of why put pilots inside an airframe which might not return to base with less than 90% certainty? especially given unmanned RPVs are already cheaper to build-operate-maintain-hide-train and much, much more flexible in terms of missions performable at long reaches?
OTOH, the B-52 is now expected to remain in service beyond 2050 ...
With new radar and engines in sight, the B-52 gets ready for ‘largest modification in its history’
Archive Today link that bypasses Washington Post's paywall for the B21 article:
Opinion Meet America’s new manned bomber. It might be the last.
random thought #1 of the day:
Do you think anybody has told Trump that he maybe could really have won the election if he hadn't killed one million of his voters in 2020?
(Yes, I know, obviously not all of the Covid victims were Trumpists, and by the 2020 election date it probably wasn't a million deaths yet; but given the Trumpists' attitude towards masking and social distancing (and later towards vaccination) I would expect a comparably higher death toll among them.)
Re: 'Appendicitis ... Or by detecting poisons in the blood-stream, because the damn thing is almost ready to go "pop" ...'
The appendix can also leak ... very slowly. Found this out the hard way. Mind you losing the appendix vs. having half the intestines removed or confirmed Ca (the two likeliest diagnoses before undergoing surgery) was a great relief. This was pre MRI-for-everything days. Now folks are much likelier to get an accurate diagnosis including for low-probability conditions before going into surgery.
paws4thot @ 774:
Para2 - Why!? It took me ~1 minute to find out that the B61 was originally designed in 1963 and was in production in 1968. That's the same period as the original laser-guided Paveway I.
With inertial guidance it's "fire & forget" - drop it and haul ass over the horizon before it goes bang. Close enough for horse-shoes & hand-grenades.
With laser guidance, someone has to stick around to lase the target. Works well enough for conventional weapons, but ...
random thought #2 of the day:
Given Elon Musk's recent tweet proclaiming his pronouns to be (prosecute/Fauci), are there already comedy routines based on this? I'm thinking of a question-and-answer routine where the answer would always be "He, Musk", but replacing the pronoun (and of course the comma wouldn't be pronounced):
"Who is turning Twitter into a fascist cesspool?" - "Prosecute, Musk!"
"Who is getting booed off stage at his home turf?" - "Prosecute, Musk!"
and so forth…
I could see that becoming a meme. Or a battlecry.
Yeah, but my point was that the B61 is old tech, and the JDAM isn't.
Not a WTF, but I think this is cool:
As the Bidens mark Hanukkah, the White House gets its own menorah for the first time
The Menorah was made by the White House carpentry shop with wood removed from the White House during a 1950 Truman-era renovation.
I assume he only deals with people who want something from him or are dependent on him, so that's not a problem.
But in person I'd be going with Fauci, as in "Fauci wants another coffee" or "Fauci is ready to leave now". Just keep calling prosecute "Fauci" until he's completely sick of it. "Fauci is sick of people calling prosecute Fauci". Then switch to prosecute "Prosecute parked illegally again so prosecute got a ticket" 😂
Do you think anybody has told Trump that he maybe could really have won the election if he hadn't killed one million of his voters in 2020?
I doubt it. First, few people with access to Trump have that much awareness. And those who do, are also aware that nothing useful would come out of them telling him this, and they might get fired for their trouble.
"I can highly recommend Sandia reports SAND2002-1306 "Mathematical Aspects of Unique Signal Assessment" and SAND91-1269 "The Unique Signal Concept for Detonation Safety in Nuclear Weapons", in particular the "Postscript on pitfalls" in the latter, it gives a really good impression how serious these people are."
Thanks for those references. I'm somewhat morbidly interested in such topics -- after all, if things went really wrong, they would matter.
Dunno. I had a flirtation with libertarianism in my youth. That said, it was mostly based on the notion that reducing government power would tend to improve efficiency. (Often comes of visiting the 'unsuitable teachers facility' as a high school student.). (Y'know, the school with no students where teachers too problematic for principals to allow in contact with students make training videos while drawing full pay.) This was also where I derived a bit of an anti-union bent. Bearing in mind that teachers who just targeted one or two students per year until they transferred classes didn't qualify...
But, yah, there are some aspects towards maybe better systems design where libertarianism could attract decent people. Issue is, there is such a large racially motivated faction in the US that most libertarians end up being unpleasant hypocrites.lookong for a fig leaf.
Y'know, stuff like replacing welfare with a basic income. And yah, math doesn't work out, but it does solve some eligibility issues.
I grew up though and noticed that (a) most bureaucracy is written in blood and (b) most libertarians are really driven more by hatred of the antidiscrimation laws than a principaled support of freedom. (An amazing amount of apologists towards prosecuting Snowden.). And yes, unions are often good for workers.
"With the FSB & GRU acting as prime contractors remodeling the building?"
Which reminds me of a question: What is the SVR, formerly the KGB 1st Main Directorate and Putin's alma mater doing these days? It's still in business, judging by expansion at its HQ in Yasenevo, but most of the skulduggery you'd expect of it has been ascribed to the FSB and especially the GRU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Service_(Russia)
most libertarians are really driven more by hatred
I'm going to selectively quote you because it sums up my experience. I haven't needed to scratch the selfishness much to reveal hatred.
It's been fun in anarchist circles seeing people who took libertarianism seriously, thought about it, and realised the split where libertarians looked at anarchism and said "but we need a violent state to stop people stealing my stuff" is a very flawed argument. Some of them become anarchists at that point, many wander off into other redistributional politics, and others double down.
Possibly affected by my experience being in countries with violent colonial histories where "strong property rights only start after violent dispossession" is incoherent. But "always was, always will be aboriginal land" is entirely compatible with libertarianism. Viz, strong property rights including the right not to be forced to hand over your property to the government is something many libertarians support. Just not when it's the traditional owners of the Australian continent who don't want to hand it over.
Possibly affected by my experience being in countries with violent colonial histories where "strong property rights only start after violent dispossession" is incoherent. But "always was, always will be aboriginal land" is entirely compatible with libertarianism. Viz, strong property rights including the right not to be forced to hand over your property to the government is something many libertarians support. Just not when it's the traditional owners of the Australian continent who don't want to hand it over.
While I agree with the point you're making about violence in defense of Country being justifiable...I'm not sure I'd consider Aborigines libertarians. So far as I can tell (and oversimplifying), the Aborigines (prefer to) live outside of states, see themselves as necessarily tied to the land, and consider a lawful life to basically be lived caring for the land (nothing mystical here: anyone whose living comes from a patch of land for generations has the same relationship). Libertarians live within a state and seek to maximize autonomy and personal freedom, but also to have a state that enforces their rights and freedoms. Land to a Libertarian is property, and alienated at that. The restrictions imposed by living in Country under traditional Law render many categories of liberty unattainable.
Following on to nothing in particular (other than my own comments cross thread), Kevin Rudd has been named as Australia's next Ambassador to the USA. I've no insight into what will happen in the UK to arrange a new PM, but if that new PM does not end up being The Boris, then I'm sort of imagining he might end up in Washington too. Depending, of course, there is so much... spray in the wind at the moment, there's no telling where it will come down and on whom.
I'm not sure I'd consider Aborigines libertarians
I wasn't trying to say that, but at least the more anarchist end of libertarianism is fairly comfortable with voluntary obligations.
What I meant was that the existing libertarian opposition to specifically aboriginal land rights is incoherent and unnecessary. Phrased as "the government both murdered some of them and stole their stuff, but also said members of that group don't have the same rights as everyone else"... that is right up libertarian alley.
Instead they seem to see aboriginal land rights as those people unjustly getting special favours from the government. "aboriginal land" in Australia is like the famous Clayton's brand of nonalcoholic drinks... look a bit like the real thing, but they're inferior in almost every way. Ask me how I feel about the proposed "voice to parliament", go on.
Ask me how I feel about the proposed "voice to parliament", go on.
I'm relatively receptive to it on the condition that it means a door being opened rather than an end state, "this is the best you're going to get" concession. And any constitutional change that might come along the way has to be enormously more far-reaching. I've expressed an opinion about that here before, I want an entity determined by Aboriginal people themselves (via a method they themselves determine) to replace the monarch, and to insure against corruption I want all Aboriginal people lifted so far out of poverty that corruption might seen quaint, along with the full resources of the state devoted to their self-determination as they would now be equivalent to royalty. I've no idea how to guarantee an arrangement like that will lead to beneficent outcomes, such guarantees are probably not available, but I'm sure it's possible to avoid most of the negative outcomes. Post-apartheid South Africa may not be a perfect example, but it does provide some exemplar pathways to accept or reject. The ethical mission for Aus has a similar trajectory that the voice might simply enable to begin...
My concern is the presentation of constitutional change as a huge effort, a once-in-a-lifetime thing that we will be very lucky to get through. That appears to be accurate, but it still means that this proposed change is likely it for a generation or more. 1968: aborigines are Australians. 2025: they can talk... 2080: they have a say? We risk cementing a fluffy feelgood bullshit thing in place knowing it's going to be hard to advance past it for a long time.
One hope is that the republic people have another go, and succeed, thus changing the narrative to "constitutional change is hard, but if we get it wrong we can have another go after 10 years".
The obvious problem with the proposed voice is that it has no power and no budget. The far right can, when elected, just say "thanks for coming" and efficiency away any formal stuff that exists, then treat the voice as just another part of the conslutation process (which, as charitable as I can be about it, is true).
We risk cementing a fluffy feelgood bullshit thing in place knowing it's going to be hard to advance past it for a long time.
I totally agree, but I guess I question whether it would be hard to advance past it anyway even if it doesn't happen. I do agree about not giving it much effort or legitimacy.
The obvious problem with the proposed voice is that it has no power and no budget. The far right can, when elected, just say "thanks for coming" and efficiency away any formal stuff that exists....
I'd argue this already happened: ATSIC and Howard.
then treat the voice as just another part of the conslutation process (which, as charitable as I can be about it, is true)
Definitely the risk, but the question is whether it's worse than it not being there. Perhaps it would be. I note that this topic is divided among Aboriginal people too, and I don't claim to have answers.
An interesting note & update:
The National Police Chiefs’ Council has decided to effectively decriminalise cannabis and cocaine in England .... officers will recommend addiction services (dealers, and those who refuse to cooperate, will still be prosecuted).
This is from the Grauniad ... I assume the politicians will have to take notice of this, eventually?
I'd argue this already happened: ATSIC and Howard.
Yes, but this is a very public, high effort way to get to where we are now, but ... more ceremonially? Very expensive lipstick on a pig, in many ways.
I think there's a lot of reaction to the Uluru Statement happening, and many thinking quietly "it's better than a kick in the teeth" (see also: formal response to the Uluru Statement). But is it really better than nothing... I think over time we're going to see more people asking that.
The strategic question then becomes: if black voices oppose this, what happens? That's where the ugly politics really comes into play. I'm thinking of Tuhoe* here, for example.
OTOH many will, as I did with the gay marriage plebeshite, suck it up and vote yes despite being offended by many voices in that discussion. The "it's marriage equality" lie was particularly painful, and I think hurts us in the long term (of course many who called it that won't be hurt, and don't consider those hurt by it "us". Ahem).
(* https://www.ngaituhoe.iwi.nz/1987-treaty-of-waitangi-claim and annoying mess of a web page means you have to click around to get to the start of their history. "We were not affected by the arrival of the Crown at first. We did not sign the Treaty of Waitangi, did not have contact with the Crown, nor did the Crown seek us out.")
With the FSB & GRU acting as prime contractors remodeling the building?
Unclear - but someone's noticed the place. Out of curiosity I called up Tufton Street on Google Maps and discovered that moving around on street view you'll jump forward an unusual distance - it's not possible to look around from directly in front of #55. That's not unique, sometimes a particular datum is unusable and the system works around it, but street view lets users call up historical versions. Going back to the earliest version (July 2008), they've all been quietly edited out.
Number 55 is not a particularly large building; these organizations can't take up much more than a small office or two, and many may well be just a drawer full of papers in some lawyer's filing cabinet.
Re: 'All I can say for sure is that the Ruling Party will not allow them to be subjected to embarrassing scrutiny, ...'
And here's the latest US installment ...
Freshly elected GOP Rep who campaigned on how his life is proof/ manifestation of the 'American dream'. Turns out that different sets of journalists looking into his CV showed that his bio is all made-uppy*.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/19/politics/george-santos-resume/index.html
*Term coined by Stephen Fry original host of the British comedy panel show 'QI'. Folks here might enjoy this Quite Interesting show.
What century are these people living in? - Anything said/posted after the world went online is probably going to outlast the sun.
Ah, yes, the great unplanned experiment in do we really need to opperate for appendicitis?
I had 8 days of IV antibiotics and another 7 days of tablets. I was told that about 30% need surgery in the next 12 months, but that they didn't know long term because no one had ever tried it. I decided to risk it rather than booking surgery (going on the waiting list) at the time.
15 months for me. Do not turn up at A&E and say to triage that you had appendicitis last year but it's come back. Luckily my daughter was with me and got it sorted.
Good luck.
I've done a number of telemeds. Of course, it's easier if you've demonstrated to your doctor that you're not stupid, and don't bother them for nothing.
Telemed works well enough when discussing test results. Rather hard to diagnose "my knee hurts here when I do this but not that" without seeing where "here" is. Also hard to manipulate one's own leg without using the leg muscles (at least, hard for someone with my flexibility).
I would love to read a fanfic of "1632", except instead of transporting Grantville, WV from year 2000 to 1632, it transports Grantville, WV from year 2022 to 1632.
That would be interesting.
The whole "use 'pronouns' to troll the libs" seems to be a Republican thing now, so my guess is Musk is dogwhistling/trolling.
I do wonder what they think pronouns are, given examples like this one:
https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/12/19/lavern-spicer-mocked-jesus-christ-pronouns/
Or heck, maybe Bezos snaps it up...
Bezos has too much sense. Also, before he stepped down as Amazon CEO, he had 25 years' experience of AMZN dabbling in social media. (What do you think their acquisition of Goodreads was, if not a socmedia adjacent play targeting one of their business areas for synergy?).
Anyway, my impression was that JB stepped down so he could focus more on getting Blue Origin to fly (the motors for the Vulcan launcher are finally showing up, years late, but New Glenn is slipping by about 12 months/year). And he's smart enough to draw the right lessons from Musk's failures.
Yeah, but my point was that the B61 is old tech, and the JDAM isn't.
JDAM relies on GPS plus inertial backup (laser ring gyros, IIRC).
Both of which are 1980s technologies.
LGBs like Paveway date to the late 1960s.
So: a B61 with JDAM kit would definitely be a retrofit. Although IIRC a lot of JDAM bombs are WW2 stockpiled 500lb bombs with seekers and guidance vanes bolted on. (The warheads are still effective, and the guidance upgrade is a massive effectiveness multiplier.)
Although IIRC a lot of JDAM bombs are WW2 stockpiled 500lb bombs with seekers and guidance vanes bolted on. (The warheads are still effective, and the guidance upgrade is a massive effectiveness multiplier.)
Totally. Someone who knows told me the JDAM package costs about $25K per bomb. All in. This was in the 2000s and they were developed and built in the 1990s. Which seems an expensive thing to attached to a dumb bomb but...
Without a JDAM a single bombing run MIGHT hit a target after dropping 4, 8, or 20 dumb bombs. A single JDAM would hit ON the target 90% to 95% of the time. And get close for most misses. So a B-52 would fly a big figure 8 way up and wait for orders. For hours. And release one JDAM equipped bomb when told. The savings in flight time transactional costs made the JDAMs basically free.
"Someone who knows told me the JDAM package costs about $25K per bomb"
Someone is right. I've been following JDAM costs for a number of years and the unit cost of the tail kit and strakes has hung in around that. The iron bomb and smart fuse cost a few more k$, but the entire thing costs about $30k as it drops from the airplane. As engines of death go, JDAM has been an amazing success story both technically and financially.
context = US (maybe UK & EU)
legalizing a specific item previously outlawed, be it behavior or luxury or necessity is less about justice and more about taxes...
for US to legalize weed it all too likely came down to a PowerPoint slide deck which ran the numbers for amoral politicians and their closest circle of advisors and patrons... less expenditure for police doing arrests of weed smokers and street level dealers, lessened backlog in courts... but... big big plus being taxes -- 'sin taxes' -- upon legit sales much as with booze and tobacco...
done properly, weed has the potential to generate giga-bucks of additional revenue without need to annoy voters by raising 'conventional ' taxes... any savings from reducing workload on police, a decided plus... and all of it being wrapped in bullshit prose about "justice for street level dealers"
Re: '... police doing arrests of weed smokers'
Wonder what the stats are along political party lines and pot usage.
If 'smoking' pot in public becomes okay this would be the excuse tobacco companies would jump on to get all restrictions lifted off their products. Not sure, but recall reading that nicotine is more addictive than weed. If so, then 'smoking' a joint that's a combination of two addictive substances sounds very risky/unhealthy.
for US to legalize weed it all too likely came down to a PowerPoint slide deck which ran the numbers for amoral politicians and their closest circle of advisors and patrons.
I wish it were that straightforward. If it were, weed would be legal everywhere in US long time ago.
for US to legalize weed it all too likely came down to a PowerPoint slide deck which ran the numbers for amoral politicians and their closest circle of advisors and patrons...
Harm reduction and saving money seems an unlikely basis for that kind of decision. If it was, homeless drug addicts would get better treatment and somewhere to stay, crack wouldn't be treated more harshly than cocaine, etc.
There seems to be a deep-rooted puritanical impulse to punish those people behind a lot of laws and policies. And not much attention to money from the puritans, except when it's a convenient fig leaf to justify blocking a measure that might help the wrong people.
I mean, if they were concerned about money the GOP would have trimmed the defense budget and not blocked measures to end child poverty. And they'd take decent care of veterans. And wouldn't use public money to prop up private insurance companies in disaster-prone areas. And done something about the source of the opioid epidemic. Et bloody cetera.
Well... what Eric's point was - and I heard this from him, and from other writers in that universe (ObDisclosure: my first published story, a short (8k+ words novelette), and two shorts, were published in the Grantville Gazette, so I've written in it) - was that what they brought to 1632 wasn't "rate of fire", it was the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
One of the things I love the most is when a downtimer has the lightbulb go off over their head, "wait, this business about equality... they actually mean it!".
But you're talking about fanfic that's dystopian, and bringing back then when it's on the verge of falling apart, which was not the point.
Nope. For one, he lost by something like 8M votes.
Define "efficiency". Please include homelessness, racism[1], and working hours. Oh, and healthcare.[2]
Sorry, all I see is "I don't want to pay taxes, oh, but I want a strong police/military to protect my personal property.
1. In the US South, pre-Civil Rights movement, explain why money from blacks at a restaurant did not get rid of "whites only".
2. Include a discussion as to why "self-regulation", when applied to corporations and business sectors, like pharmaceuticals or food, doesn't ever work.
Howard NYC
People, here, have been going on for YEARS about "legalising weed" being a tax raiser, whilst at the same time lowering costs ( policing + jails ) ... yet the fuckwit politicians don't even want to notice.
Given most public attitudes, I simply don't understand this.
Christianity ( in public at any rate ) ?
... Rbt Prior: - There seems to be a deep-rooted puritanical impulse to punish those people behind a lot of laws and policies. - yes.
Clarification: I do telemed via phone (like, my land line), because K-P's video chat telemed is using some proprietary video software, not zoom, not Cisco GoToMeeting, etc, but something that when I try to test, only shows a blank page in my browser.
If I really need it, I'll use my partner's Windows box, and get video.
Here's a hint: Most of the arguments about making marijuana illegal in the U.S. were racial in nature.
Fun, fun, fun ... my internet just stopped working last night. Called support & they diagnosed a failed modem. Took the modem in this morning, got a new one and the internet was still down.
Traced the cable through the basement & up to the interface box and then from the interface out to the junction box on the cable itself out at the telephone pole. I could see that the cable was broken there at the junction box.
Called support again and convinced them I needed someone out TODAY to fix the broken connection. They asked if tomorrow afternoon was Ok, and I told them no, I have a video appointment with my doctor this afternoon and I NEED the internet.
Tech left a couple of minutes ago. Had to register the new modem with Spectrum and then had to convince my router to talk to the modem and ask it for the IP address, but I'm back on-line.
My appointment is in about 45 minutes & it looks like I will make it, which is good because the VA does not like last minute cancellations.
One of the things I love the most is when a downtimer has the lightbulb go off over their head, "wait, this business about equality... they actually mean it!".
That's precisely my point -- Grantvillers circa 2022 no longer do mean it. They are disillusioned, exhausted, many of them feel betrayed, and in some (not all) cases justifiably so. And yes, the results are likely to be relatively dystopian, although still an improvement on how Thirty Year War actually went.
But you're talking about fanfic that's dystopian, and bringing back then when it's on the verge of falling apart, which was not the point.
Of course it was not. "1632" was at its basis a "sunny book" -- that's what Flint actually said when asked why no hanging of Johann Tilly and such. Honestly written today, it would be far less sunny.
TBH, I think it was far too sunny to begin with. A town gets transported into fucking 17th century, and everyone takes it in stride? No suicides, nobody goes into denial, nobody starts a weird new religion? I think "Island in the Sea of Time" which kicked off the whole genre, was much more realistic in these regards.
Getting back to the original topic for a moment, I give you a living smartwatch "powered" by a slime mold. It's actually more like a living tamagotchi, run as a psych experiment with controls (think this through). In some ways it left me feeling sorry for the slime mold.
Stop right there. Isn't there enough dystopian fiction (including OGH's)? Are you demanding that ALL fiction be dystopian?
Actually, that, IMO, is what "real litrachur" is. Around the Fitzgerald fest that I went to, so I could talk to/cover KSR, I finally read a Great Novel, The Great Gatsby.
No. The guilty party doesn't get punished, there's no happy ending, and I don't like anyone, including the narrator.
Have you read my one published novel? If not, I'll sell you a copy. No, it does NOT have an unhappy ending... and I do deal with the impact of jumping 11,000 Years. But I suppose you won't like it, because they do end well.
One thing the article does not mention: Does the slime mold produce any waste that has to be removed?
Oh, and your apparent argument that all should be dystopian fiction, when writing in a dystopian world - that is how what you posted comes across to me - let me put it this way: Rep. Liz Cheney, whose politics I despise... did one thing that I don't: she proved that she did, in fact, consider "honor" not something on par with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, she upheld her Oath of Office, to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.
For that, I give her respect, and there's a happy ending.
Or heck, maybe Bezos snaps it up Twitter
Bezos has too much sense. Also, before he stepped down as Amazon CEO, he had 25 years' experience of AMZN dabbling in social media. (What do you think their acquisition of Goodreads was, if not a socmedia adjacent play targeting one of their business areas for synergy?).
Agreed, actually. I pitched Bezos out as one of the few people who might conceivably have enough cash to buy it. Not that he's that stupid.
Anyway, the more interesting question is "why would someone want to buy Twitter?" It's a money loser, and you'd come close to being able to buy and outfit a carrier battle group for $44 billion.
So my next question is, "is it worth tens of billion parted out?" How much is the user database worth? How about the poorly documented code? That's what I'm thinking the Saudis might be after. But the more I think about it, the more I doubt this is worth a carrier battle group-equivalent.
Perhaps the people supporting Musk think that, like Trump, he's a useful idiot. They're paying to get him to:
--dive down the Rabbit hQle (he's now in the running for Q++, after Trump (Q+) failed to deliver),
--trash a system that their opposition was using to communicate (he has),
--rev up people who want to dismantle the US government in particular and democracies in general (he is),
--and do it mostly with his own money (oh baby).
And if he manages to soil and delay the whole transition away from petroleum as he falls...well some people might think that was a bonus.
I do not dislike "fiction that ends well". I dislike fiction where "everything goes right for the protagonists". Mike Stearns never makes any mistakes, Harry Lefferts never makes any mistakes, Gretchen Richter never makes any mistakes. At least not mistakes that are in any way consequential -- Darryl McCarthy is very wrong about Oliver Cromwell, but learns better before he could do any real damage. There are not even romances that went bad -- every romance in the series works out happily ever after.
My favorite fiction is one which is neither utopian nor dystopian. "Island in the Sea of Time" ends well -- but with a lot more loss, grief, bad luck and just plain stupidity along the way than "1632". So does "Weapons of Choice" series; it also has a few romances between uptimers and downtimers, which took an unexpected dive.
As an example from outside Seas of Time genre, "Pandora's Star"/"Judas Unchained" series is among my favorite science fiction. A future society where there are no incurable diseases, nobody starves and people routinely live to be 200, yet still has inequality, crime, terrorism and airheaded heiresses. It is hardly a utopia, yet is still much better than what we have now. And the most interesting recent SF stories, in my opinion, are set in futures like that.
In real life, yes, slime molds produce waste. I'm not sure how long the system they described would actually function. Weeks would be my guess.
your apparent argument that all should be dystopian fiction, when writing in a dystopian world - that is how what you posted comes across to me
Sorry if this is how my post came across, because I most certainly do not argue THAT.
Shudder
I grew up in a house like that. Truly, utterly, miserable experience during winter. I have no objection to wearing a vest and a jersey; and a second pair of trousers and socks if needed. It's annoying, and it reduces your mobility and makes you clumsy, and itchy, but it's workable. On the other ahand, regularly needing to wear a wooly hat and gloves in my bedroom was (in my opinion), pushing the demands too far. That goes beyond "clumsy and awkward" and into "you have to choose between using your computer/doing homework/reading a book and having feeling in your fingers" territory.
Granted, as an adult I am now much less sensitive to the cold than I was as a teenager; and as an adult who has to pay electricity bills, I can certainly understand the desire to spend less money on them. When electricity shot up in price by a factor of 10 overnight (thanks Britain and Sweden, stop buying our damn power!), I did spend the entire weekend seeing just how little electricity I could realistically use (daily use dropped from ~65kWh to a little under 23, fwiw), as a game as much as anything.
It was the superior attitude of "you are a child and therfore your opinion and your discomfort are weighted as zero" that pissed me off - and still does. So... I hope you're not inflicting those conditions on someone whose opinion you might care about in later life. If you're not, and you and anyone else in the house are fine with that, more power to you and enjoy not spending that money on your electricity bills! If you are, then, conditionally and on their behalf, fuck you.
For efficiency, it becomes a value judgement. Bear in mind that remembering the thoughts of a hazy minded high schooler is hard. Even that kid had enough common sense to walk away after lurking a while on libertarian forums. Also, bear in mind that I ended up judging that, eg, having Microsoft running the local police department was insane. My long-term goals relate to making the encoding length of the universe longer. Yes, insane and not clear the consequences are human. But, um, when attending public schools, it isn't hard to notice 1 out of about 6 schools in the area is devoted to giving unsuitable teachers make work away from children. The conclusion that government can be inefficient is easy. The conclusion that business is, if anything, more inefficient, took longer.
For homelessness, I'm not sure of the impact of libertarianism. It seems more of a self-assembled agency problem wherein homeowners collaborate to hike up costs by restricting development. Personally, I suspect that land use shouldn't be regulated on the local level. Arguments that zoning is evil are maybe merited, but you end up with too many toxic waste jumps adjacent to playgrounds.
For racism, support for libertarianism tends to be based on racism. My guess is that there are or would be some decent libertarians, but that the vast cesspit of USain racists looking for a fig leaf to complain about antidiscrimation amendments outnumbers the rest by a significant margin. Libertarians tend to dislike those laws, but, um, no. History begs to differ regarding their necessity.
That said, there still remains some merit in the thesis that, in a racist society, making things illegal (eg, guns) is dangerous to minorities. Controlling laws are typically not enforced even handedly.
Also true that regulatory capture and exclusion of competition can be problematic.
For welfare, any sort of government support is reliant on a functional government. This can be problematic if your government is not competently run and ends up with funding issues. And, it is possible to give support to some sort of unproductive underclass. Now, in practice, seems that people tend to invest excess income in, eg, child development, so that argument is problematic. Other issues include limitations on wealth for disability and income for welfare. Beyond that, the infrastructure used to restrict access to deserving people.is expensive. So, meh, a basic income might not be terrible. Problem is supporting a basic income that allows a decent lifestyle.
Libertarianism, never seemed to have much say over working hours. Albeit, there is probably some argument that hiring fewer people for more hours is efficient. I'm not wild about make work projects or regulations. Likely that it is better to just give people money. (Knew some Germans who argued that letting the useless people stay home with money was lots better that trying to make them work.)
My issue with libertarianism (besides the racists) was more that unfettered capitalism with capitalists shaping the regulatory environment tends towards slavery. So, my guess at a better future would be a largely free market society with moderately redistributionist wealth and income taxes towards 'excessive' wealth concentrations, a basic dividend to given people a stake in the nation, reduction of licensure burden, and state level zoning. Also, just a bit of deregulation for big pharma. Some testing is probably excessive for smaller drugs. And, yes, a carbon tax. Dunno. Could be wrong. Hopefully, reductions in costing of medecine and housing would allow for survival on a basic income. That could tend to dismantle the economics of forced labor and shift bargaining power from capital to labor. Coupled with a disincentive towards income inequality would tend to lower the fraction of pay going to management. Also, yes, public universities. Albeit, some courses can be online. Besides, the existence of a safety net will tend to encourage business creation, again boosting labor.
Though, one issue of progressive taxes is that governments are incentivised to create wealthy people. Erm.
SFReader @ 813:
Re: '... police doing arrests of weed smokers'
Wonder what the stats are along political party lines and pot usage.
If 'smoking' pot in public becomes okay this would be the excuse tobacco companies would jump on to get all restrictions lifted off their products. Not sure, but recall reading that nicotine is more addictive than weed. If so, then 'smoking' a joint that's a combination of two addictive substances sounds very risky/unhealthy.
The way I understood it "smoking pot in public" would simply no longer be charged as a DRUG OFFENSE.
Smoking pot in public would be allowed anywhere it's permissible to smoke tobacco and would be restricted wherever tobacco is restricted. The penalties for smoking pot would be no different that those for smoking tobacco ... so the tobacco companies have no basis for complaint.
Erwin @ 833:
[...]
Libertarianism, never seemed to have much say over working hours. Albeit, there is probably some argument that hiring fewer people for more hours is efficient. I'm not wild about make work projects or regulations. Likely that it is better to just give people money. (Knew some Germans who argued that letting the useless people stay home with money was lots better that trying to make them work.)
The basic attitude of Libertarians towards work seems to be if you don't like what I'm willing to pay, go find a job that pays better, has better benefits or better working conditions.
If all the employers collude to suppress wages, TOUGH SHIT! Start your own company and you can pay your employees whatever you want to.
context = USA
Someone got clever. Call it the "RICOing For Puerto Rico Case".
Back in 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was aimed at the (Italian) Mafia and in later years, motorcycle gangs, corporate executives of various degrees of criminality, etc.
Now? It is going to be aimed at Big Oil. Conspiring to deceive about climate change, to so wreck the environment resulting in 2017's Hurricane Maria which wrecked Puerto Rico and their ruination, their deaths, their despair.
Huh.
Trump is being held accountable for nearly turning the USA into a dictatorship (and oh yeah his decades of prior felonies). Big Oil is at long last going to be dragged into court to face accusations of massive fraud and deliberate coverups and ecological wrecking. And there's been a lot of less obvious bits of positive news including heavy snowfalls easing western North America's brutal drought.
I ought refuse to say anything along the lines of "things are looking up" because that's what goads the vampire (or divorce lawyer or Bond villain or flesh eating virus) into clawing its way out of the grave to resume destroying humankind.
So anyone at Netflix looking to lay out a 16 episode HopePunk(tm) drama here's some link to feed your muse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/20/big-oil-is-behind-conspiracy-to-deceive-public-first-climate-racketeering-lawsuit-says
The basic attitude of Libertarians towards work seems to be if you don't like what I'm willing to pay
What gets me confused is hearing that from people who are unlikely to ever be employers. They're earning minimum wage or near enough, and don't seem to have any idea of how they'd get from where they are to owning anything of substance. But they still politic around saying "fuck me if I can't get off my arse and make something of myself, I deserve to get shafted".
Which is classic abused child behaviour. But the step from that to "...therefore no-one else deserves nice things either" is beyond me.
Mike loses a Presidential election.
Harry gets some of the Wrecking crew, and of the Leffertai, killed.
Tell me in what World that is "never making a mistake".
Atropos said: daily use dropped from ~65kWh
Jesus Mary and Joseph.
I just got my winter bill, for an all electric 3 bedroom house with a pool (and the pool draws about 5 kWh per day) my partner working from home (3 monitors and two computers), 4 air filters running 24/7, and an electric vehicle.
10.4 kWh/d
There's no insulation in the house, and when it's windy outside the dog hair blows around the house like tumbleweed weeds even with all the doors and windows shut.
My only clothing concession to keeping warm was to put on tracksuit pants some nights. Other than that it was tee-shirt and shorts.
Yep, what I was going to point out. Eric and others were aware of this, and dealt with it - the downtime professionals started out trying to understand what the uptimers could do. Then, they got back into play... and the uptimers are mostly amateurs.
I don't think I ever got to the book where Mike loses an election. The last one I read was "The Kremlin Games".
I'm almost afraid to ask, but, ... you have met some humans, yes?
Pathological Spite and Selfishness are reasonably common. Sadly.
There's even a Yale study showing the same thing in some apes.
David L noted on December 20, 2022 at 14:31 in #810:
Given the service ceiling (45,000 ft' / 13,700 m) of the A-10C, it now makes sense why they're being retained in service to serve as bomb trucks. It's much cheaper (siz kilobucks/hr) to have an A-10C loiter up high to wait to drop that one JDAM from one of its 11 hardpoints, than to send a B-52 (70 kilobucks/hr) for that same mission, when a target is within Warthog range, and the A-10C could certainly respond quicker to a local threat.
Fucking Queenslanders.
I'm pretty sure you live in Queensland. Regardless, living in a temperate climate really changes your climate control requirements. But a shitty house in a nearly-temperate climate can be worse than most things since you can nearly get away with it. Whereas people in the frozen wastelands of Canukstan will rightly look at gaping holes in the floor or walls and say the shack isn't habitable. In Dunedin they just say "student housing" and useful things like "at least there's no condensation on the windows" ... because there's no temperature difference between inside and outside.
Howard NYC
Big Oil is at long last going to be dragged into court to face accusations of massive fraud and deliberate coverups and ecological wrecking - REALLY? Sure about that? { NOT about the fact that an attempt is being made, but on the likelihood of it succeeding, of course. }
Pathological spite is more accurate, it's not "I want mine", it's "I will make an effort to stop you getting yours". And I'm not so much questioning its existence as I have a failure of empathy on the "why are they like that" question.
... crack wouldn't be treated more harshly than cocaine, etc.
Garland moves to end disparities in crack cocaine sentencing
"Attorney General Merrick Garland has taken action to end sentencing disparities that have imposed harsher penalties for different forms of cocaine and worsened racial inequity in the U.S. justice system."
A little bit of progress in the U.S. judicial system, perhaps...
https://news.yahoo.com/garland-moves-end-disparities-crack-011744244.html
On the subject of Libertarians, I'll start with my usual joke: There are two kinds of Libertarians; those who don't know the Any Rand was writing fiction and those those who don't know that Heinlein was writing fiction.
I'll also observe that Libertarians are like cats, convinced of their own toughness and independence, but actually wholly dependent on a gigantic social system they neither appreciate or understand.
I also don't understand why Liberatarians imagine that it's fine for a business owner to underpay his workers - that's his/her freedom - but if a bunch of workers band together to demand higher wages, well by Jebus that's comma-nism and we've got to stomp on those hippies!
All this being said, I do think the Libertarians get one thing almost completely right, and that is their analysis of "victimless" crime, which by the way, ties in neatly with the progressive analysis of how selective enforcement of things like drug and prostitution laws does immense damage to black, brown, yellow and queer people.
But they're garbage on the economic issues - anytime you hear a Libertarian economic analysis, introduce a couple realistic bad-actors and watch how quickly the analysis fails.
I'll also observe that Libertarians are like cats, convinced of their own toughness and independence, but actually wholly dependent on a gigantic social system they neither appreciate or understand.
In a somewhat different way, this also describes the Amish. They make a big deal out of being "separate from the World", but actually depend on "the World" for their safety more than most people.
what they brought to 1632 wasn't "rate of fire", it was the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
Those look like they are a lot less universally respected now than two decades ago. Opioid epidemic, militarized policing, assassination as foreign policy, government-sanctioned torture, government saying that non-Americans have no rights, BLM dragging institutional racism into the open… hell, the American president saying that a neo-Nazi demonstration in support of slavery has good people…
Would it be somewhat dystopian? Possibly. Or possibly less like a Boys Own Adventure where a small band of civilized heroes save the savages from themselves*.
As to things like a constitution with checks and balances, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth (1632 was during its golden age) had that, with things like religious freedom baked in.
* I wanted to like the 1632 series, but I bounced off it because that's the feel it gave me, with heroic Americans instead of heroic Englishmen.
Whitroth Para 1 - Not just rate of fire, but range and some sort of accuracy with it. If you can do 1 shot every 5 seconds and can open fire at ~300m, then you get 6 shots at Usain Bolt before he reaches your position.
I have no objection to wearing a vest and a jersey; and a second pair of trousers and socks if needed. It's annoying, and it reduces your mobility and makes you clumsy, and itchy, but it's workable.
I wear a pair of 100 weight thermal leggings under my trousers, and have wool-lined slippers (actually synthetic wool, but warm). And a fleece sweater. No itching, no problem. My house has central heating, so every room is about the same temperature (even the unused bedroom). At night I have a lovely silk duvet I bought in China that is too hot unless I turn the heat down.
No children here. No need to fuck me :-)
Smoking pot in public would be allowed anywhere it's permissible to smoke tobacco and would be restricted wherever tobacco is restricted.
That's the way it works up here. Personally I'd have preferred restrictions more akin to alcohol, but it wasn't my choice.
their analysis of "victimless" crime
I think many of those crimes have become a lot more obviously problematic lately. The generic "damaging social cohesion" type of crimes have had blatantly damaging effects and "both sides"{cough} of US politics have noticed that it's hurting them. Even sedition and treason which for a while were regarded as quaintly historical and perhaps best discard have become hot topics (albeit for some "an attempted coup isn't treason").
More generally places like the UK have had demonstrations that wile a little bit of fraud, corruption etc is tolerable, defining the exact point where it makes your country/ies into failed states is tricky. It's almost a slippery slope situation - by the time it's obvious it's very hard to clamp down on.
Makes me keen to improve the anti-corruption stuff in Australia, and the federal ICAC is a "not before time" thing. But obviously whatever we have needs to be stronger because we still have obvious problems.
But that kinda falls under the generic "libertarianism only works superficially" heading.
If all the employers collude to suppress wages, TOUGH SHIT! Start your own company and you can pay your employees whatever you want to.
And if all the employees collude to raise wages, that is socialism and must be stopped by vigorous government action (or at least the government mustn't interfere with employers hiring private forces to take that action)…
All of the libertarians I've met (who described themselves that way) gave off an "I'm all right, Jack" vibe. Utterly convinced that they had the right to their personal property, and whatever public property they wanted to use as well. Not at all shy about invoking the need for police to enforce property rights. Not at all willing to consider that what they 'owned' might be stolen goods. And totally ignoring all the public goods necessary for them to enjoy their libertarian lives… (Things like product and food safety, for example.)
A lot like little Musks, actually. Without the space obsession.
Most of the libertarians that I met were kind, decent people who would be generous with a neighbor in any given moment. But in the abstract, when they’re at a town meeting, they will vote to hurt that neighbor by cutting off, say, support for road plowing.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
Port Macquarie.
I guess it's technically a bit warmer than Sydney, but there's not a great deal in it.
Overnight in winter I hold the house about 10C (+-5) warmer than the outside air temperature. Basically for the dogs. We get westerly winds in winter and so that's basically desert temperatures overnight.
During that winter billing period we didn't hit the minimum indoor air temperature given in this thread at all.
Minimum temperature was 0.4 C.
You're 'way up norf' :) Yeah, I consider Australia as a whole to be temperate, especially the inhabited bits. A zero-to-40 annual temperature range outside is bearable to most people if they're inside.
I struggle a bit here from living with a tropical flower/lizard person for so long, who thought 10 degrees was basically freezing and sleeping at 40 was just fine. Down here I use the aircon occasionally, the heater for a few minutes a day in winter to get my office warm enough for comfortable typing, and that's it. La Nina years like this the aircon only gets turned on for the annual "does it still work" check.
https://www.uradmonitor.com/tools/dashboard-04/?open=82000117 that's at my back door. Back online after my wifi AP died and got replaced. Faces west so warmer than the actual weather, but I'm not building a proper box and clearfelling my back yard to place it properly :)
In a somewhat different way, this also describes the Amish. They make a big deal out of being "separate from the World", but actually depend on "the World" for their safety more than most people.
That's not wrong, but while being technically correct I think the observation misses the points of awareness and intentionality.
The Amish approach appears to be more like that of those who have taken religious orders, living "in the world but not of the world." (Context: Catholic religious orders, particularly as of some decades past; the analogy may not work if applied to other religions.) Amish, and the Plain people in general, are off to one side doing their own things and living in their own social circles; Libertarians like to pretend that they are untouched autonomous individuals who have no obligations to anyone.
I'll acknowledge a difference between living in an intentional community and making a pretense of no community.
(Wiki link added for anyone outside the US who's wondering what we're talking about.)
Right. We live on an uninsulated aluminium boat on a liquid hydrogen lake with Mach 6 hyper-freezing winds tearing through the open windows. In the summer we turn on the coolers to stop from getting above 1kelvin. And it’s uphill both ways to school for the kids.
The Libertarians I've heard discussing "victimless" crime are usually talking about drugs or prostitution. Corruption is definitely a crime with victims - just ask the injured parties - though if the Libertarians don't agree it would be one more weakness in their philosophy.
Yeah, both fall under the "people should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery if they want to" problem at least in my mind. Asking libertarians questions about addictive drugs is often rewarding in the "but that's not what I meant" sense.
Simple example: my sister adopted a kid who was born addicted to something, likely a psuedo-amphetimine. He's developmentally delayed etc. As a proud and free libertarian, was what his mother did to her own body, of her own free will, acceptable in libertarian terms? Would it have been acceptable if she'd become addicted to the drug without a full disclosure statement and MSDS? Blah blah etc.
I assume you're actually replying to the "icy wastelands" comment?
My point here, aside from teasing Canadians, was that Australia is a clothing-optional country at least as far as climate goes. Traditionally clothing is as much decorative as anything, with paint being common. Housing much the same. Tents were common and open-sided caves were popular.
Canada... my loose understanding is that there's relatively limited parts of the country where running round naked and sleeping in the open just with a fur to soften the ground would be practical year-round. You need clothes and shelter to stay alive even in the nominally temperate bits.
The problem here is that the mother did all this horrible stuff despite it being illegal. Nobody thinks the kind of drug abuse which results in a damaged child is acceptable or good or the result of some enlightened legal philosophy regardless of whether that kind of bodily self-abuse is legal or not.
All Libertarian (or some progressives') thought on the matter says is that making those kinds of drugs illegal makes the situation of a person who needs help even worse, (by bringing cops, prosecutors, etc., with racial/authoritarian/judgemental agendas into a situation which could be resolved without cops.)
Nobody thinks it's good. And read up on the Iron Law of Prohibition.
Moz: My point here, aside from teasing Canadians, was that Australia is a clothing-optional country at least as far as climate goes. Traditionally clothing is as much decorative as anything, with paint being common. Housing much the same. Tents were common and open-sided caves were popular.
Though when I visited even if the temperature was not a problem, I gladly wore clothing as I don't want to get skin cancer. Of course that's kind of a long term compared to some other climate issues one can have.
Moz: Canada... my loose understanding is that there's relatively limited parts of the country where running round naked and sleeping in the open just with a fur to soften the ground would be practical year-round. You need clothes and shelter to stay alive even in the nominally temperate bits.
Yeah, same here. During the summer it's fine to sleep in the open, usually, though people who do it for fun usually have at least a tarp or a tent, and some blankets or a sleeping bag. Now, during our winter... it was -10 C for maybe a week, and now it's +2 C and rain. Both not very good for surviving without clothing or even heated residences. (Well, a proper tent and a sleeping bag might cut it, too.)
The argument that making addictive drugs legal and widely available will lead to less use of them seems odd to me. Albeit where I am cigarettes are legislated out the wazoo despite being legal but I haven't seen a lot of libertarian support for that approach. I think it's working, especially the latest stunt in Aotearoa: they're removing the age limit for buying tobacco in favour of a "born before date X" limit. Date X won't change, so eventually that drug will largely age out of society.
Can you see the "social harm" argument at all? If not, maybe look at people slipping (other) drugs into people's alcoholic drinks in order to commit further crimes against them. That behaviour doesn't necessarily involve illegal drugs, but it's illegal and I can't imagine it would disappear in a libertarian paradise (a libertine one, on the other hand).
That's not what eco-fascism means though. Eco-fascism is basically thinking that environmental problems are caused by there being too many (brown) people in the world, and they would be solved if we only got rid of enough (brown) people.
To be fair, there are also eco-fascists who will explain earnestly that the problem is the 2 billion poor people who use the same resources as 200 billionaires who are the problem. The brown thing is strictly a fash...ion statement, and a way of managing a constituency so to speak. The fact that many proponents believe the cover story isn't incompatible with it being convenient.
In a somewhat different way, this also describes the Amish. They make a big deal out of being "separate from the World", but actually depend on "the World" for their safety more than most people.
I have similar feelings about the uber pacifists.
The argument that making addictive drugs legal and widely available will lead to less use of them seems odd to me.
thought it was more that it would make most of the harms resulting from them more manageable
i have come across some who think that it would enable those with insufficient moral fiber to resist the siren call of the substances to quietly remove themselves from the gene pool
»The argument that making addictive drugs legal and widely available will lead to less use of them seems odd to me.«
Most people find it very hard to admit to doing something illegal.
If you ask car-drivers, they were not "driving faster than the law permitted", they were merely "following the traffic".
By legalizing and regulating addictive substances, the aspect of being a criminal, and of dealing with criminals, is no longer part of the equation, and it becomes much easier for people to get help and support to manage or eliminate their addiction.
Also, the element of "danger" disappears, which often changes the perception amongst youth from "cool" to "pathetic".
Talking of drugs & therefore medical care Do others, apart from Charlie, natch ... get the impression that the tories are deliberately trying to crash the NHS? The extra straws in the wind are the Murdoch/Rothermere press saying that "The NHS is broken & needs drastic reform" - & we know what that means. The greed & corruption & cruelty are only just below the surface, given the lead in the same by Cruella B.
Even if true & I'm afraid it is, what do we do about it? { All part of the deliberate Brexit disaster, or a separate-but-parallel one? }
Do others, apart from Charlie, natch ... get the impression that the tories are deliberately trying to crash the NHS?
Seems obvious that they are 'creating a crisis' to force change, which will likely involve American-style privatization. Same thing is happening over here in Ontario and Alberta (and maybe other provinces).
I recognize it from the Harris years when that was explicitly government policy.
You live on a boat? Luxury! We have to huddle together on the ground to keep warm! Also, we get to put on skates so we can move around on our lakes of solid hydrogen!
Our lakes are liquid helium, and we have to wear lead boots and hover.
But the opportunities for emmfozing round here are amazing.
Lensman reference FTW.
and u try telling the young people that
"By legalizing and regulating addictive substances, the aspect of being a criminal, and of dealing with criminals, is no longer part of the equation, and it becomes much easier for people to get help and support to manage or eliminate their addiction."
Exactly.
Also, the drug laws are VERY unfairly enforced, to the advantage of White Supremacists and liquor companies.
"The argument that making addictive drugs legal and widely available will lead to less use of them seems odd to me. "
Because it isn't the argument.
The Libertarian Argument is that people have the right to do what they want to themselves, and the circumstances under which the social cost outweights that right is high, and drugs do not pass that bar.
The other argument is that a lot of the bad social effects of drugs are because they're illegal. These arguments are not mutually exclusive.
The latter is true, in the US. Being an opioid addict is bad for you. But the real societal cost comes from the fact that they're illegal, because of the compounding effects of our legal system.
You can see this with alcoholism fairly easily. The consequences of being an alcohol addict are bad. But they're not exacerbated by alcohol itself or using it being illegal*, so the social costs of being an alcoholic aren't as high as they would be IF they were. You won't get arrested, have to get illegal alcohol, end up in jail for being an alcoholic, have a criminal record that prevents you from getting a good job, ending up with legal fees.
You can incur those for the stuff you do while drunk, but since alcohol is legal, you don't get them JUST because you're an addict.
*Except for The Youths and specific places. Even with the age thing, you can actually see the difference in social costs.
These are arguments interact, because smarter Libertarians will use the second one to reinforce the first.
Here's a hint: Most of the arguments about making marijuana illegal in the U.S. were racial in nature.
Yes. No. Sort of. In the past 1920s into the 1940s it was tied to dark skinned folks and their music. Especially Jazz. Then we got rock and roll in the 50s. And Jazz became more mainstream. (Define as you wish.)
Then the US got the 60s. With Viet Nam and those freaking hippies. Suddenly length of hair (for guys) became an indicator of law obeying (and alcohol being OK) vs law breaking (and drugs being OK) became a HUGE fault line in US society. Some of use remember how the boys would be send home from school if their hair touch the tops of their ears or their shirt collar.
Now we have weird situations where tokers (or ex-tokers) who are over the age of 60s keep their mouths shut about drugs while attending church but at home are listening to the Greatful Dead. And totally confused about their 20-30 year old children's attitudes about life and such. And don't even try and have a rational conversation about such things. You'll either get ignored or tossed from the room. No one wants to go there. Cognitive Dissonance is big with this topic.
Now toss in the way various drugs being illegal in the US has somewhat destroyed the civil Mexican government due to the vast amounts of money flowing into the Mexican (and further south) drug cartels.
So we have a mess. And fixing the mess requires a lot of politicians to tell their voters they are just flat out wrong about drugs, addiction, law and order, etc...
As Pogo said once. "We have met the enemy and it is us."
https://www.azquotes.com/author/23159-Harry_J_Anslinger
Nope. For one, he lost by something like 8M votes.
As to Trump's policies leading to 1 million deaths which cost him the election.
Yes, Trump lost the popular vote by 8 million.
But a swing of under 40K votes across Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin would have swung the election to him. (Welcome to our Presidential election system.)
And stats have shown that those states are amongst those with higher Covid death rates, especially amongst likely Trump voters.
Harry J Anslinger
And he last served in 1962 and died in 1975.
As I said, things changed.
Living the history of the 60s and 70s in small town Kentucky was strange to say the least. (I was born in 1954.)
You couldn't be a fan of country music of any kind AND rock and roll. The lines were drawn and not to be crossed without great peril. And race relations were in a separate bucket. With lots of racist rock and rollers and desegregation supporters in the country music camp.
By the end of the 60s anti-weed was more about politics than race. And now it has morphed into a totally strange 8th axis of politics which has only a loose correlation to political party.
The Libertarian Argument is that people have the right to do what they want to themselves
I'd point out the problem with this one: humans are not free individuals. We owe our daily existence to others, starting with our parents, and extending to all those who didn't kill us because they followed any number of arbitrary rules. Until we pay off our blood-debts to all these people, we're not free.
But it gets worse than that for the libertarians, because on a second-by-second basis, we all owe our continued existence to the life supporting processes of our planet, many of which are outside any human economy, so money won't pay back that debt. Only constant action to support those processes even makes a dent.
Therefore, if any libertarian honestly believes that they must pay their debts, they are therefore never free individuals, because everyone's existence is indebted to others, both human and nonhuman, who act in many ways to sustain everyone else's existence.
A philosophy that asserts that humans are free to do what they want in the face of this reality is one that is well-suited to grifters and thieves. This, of course, does not imply that all libertarians are grifters and thieves. But honest libertarians have to realize that there's no way to be free and to exist on this planet without spending every waking moment caring for others who benefit them.
The link gives me a malware warning
Yep. Looks like it to me.
They have bought into the Randian/libertarian small government bollocks and perceive the NHS as both big gov and also the creation of evil commie socialist wakefolk. So, about as popular as an anthrax sandwich. They fear they may be stuck on the back benches for 10 years and never again have the opportunity to bring it down so are really trying to break it.
To me the game plan should be adopt PR for the new Lords chamber and the HoC. Yes, the Labour Party may never get a whacking majority again, but at least we could hope to have have fewer people like Rees-Mogg and Braverman on the front benches.
Re: 'The penalties for smoking pot would be no different that those for smoking tobacco ...'
How well did that work for vape? Over here, not so well - lots of (underage) teenagers managed to get vape products easily and often enough to get hooked. I understand how the 'legal' aspect magnifies the social problems and -- IMO, more importantly -- makes it much harder to seek/obtain treatment.
Hadn't read anything on cannabis and developing minds* for a while so decided to check out who's doing any research in this area and found the below. Short version: Dr Staci Gruber is a neuroscientist at Mclean Hosp/Harvard Medical School and this newish (c2014) initiative is specifically studying the impact of the various 200 or so cannabis components on the human brain. One of their objectives is to better inform pols/health care in the development of scientifically informed legal/social/health policy. Also has a link to sign up for clinical studies. They're partnered with a couple of West coast labs. And since it's Harvard - they probably have some sort of partnership/working relationship with neuro labs in most countries around the globe.
https://www.drstacigruber.com/mind
*This - 'developing minds' - is why I really want cannabis access very strictly controlled.
Go here for the long version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger
The money quote that Troutwaxer was referencing is:
There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.
I guess Ghostery is blocking the scripts that want to load Malware for me. :)
Speaking as a pacifist myself, I had no idea that a company that is trying to kill the (halfway) decently paying taxi companies by aggressively exploiting its own workers would be considered to be in the same boat as me. [/sarcasm]
Ain't Merican English grand.
We keep changing the meaning of words.
uber gay
I'm sure there's a list somewhere of 100s of them.
881 - I do get that (sort of; I'm not too clear on how many Electoral College votes each state has). I do get that some (mostly Republican) states swing their entire EC block vote to who wins the mass vote in that state.
885 Para 3 - Also, I'm fairly sure that the Lib Dems would "enjoy" a perpetual balance of power in Ingurlundshire.
I do get that (sort of; I'm not too clear on how many Electoral College votes each state has). I do get that some (mostly Republican) states swing their entire EC block vote to who wins the mass vote in that state.
Welcome to eye roll territory. All but one or few states give the state winner all the votes from that states. Nebraska doesn't. But I'm not sure of any others.
Check out this wiki article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election
And this table is useful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Electoral_results
Then sort it by one of the "Margin" columns.
All but one or few states give the state winner all the votes from that states. Nebraska doesn't. But I'm not sure of any others.
Also Maine: https://www.270towin.com/content/split-electoral-votes-maine-and-nebraska/
The way the system is set up, it is mathematically impossible for Maine to have a 2-2 split, but 3-1 split is possible and happened once, in 2016.
mostly Republican
I have to wonder why this "fact" is in your mind. I.E. what is the bread crumb trail to got you to thinking that.
JJ & others on ... drugs
The OTHER problem with "illegal" drugs is purity & quality-control.
I have a strong suspicion that a lot of "drug death" & related illnesses are caused by things other than the specified drugs being in the mix.
The moment you legalise, regulate & tax drugs, this problem doesn't completely evaporate, but diminishes to tiny proportions.
I'm not seeing the problem in either Firefox or Chrome under Linux.
Yeah. I love Ghostery!
tokers (or ex-tokers) who are over the age of 60s keep their mouths shut about drugs while attending church but at home are listening to the Greatful Dead.
The real problem is attending church. The opiate of the masses! Bring on the drug war.
Yes! This! (A particular problem these days is people mixing fentynel and heroin without telling the customers.)
I think it is more trusting people with your health who likely never took a chemistry class and maybe didn't really get an education past what most of us got by the age of 13.
May one ask how?
From basic physics, taking a 5 minute shower each day consumes a minmum of 2.5kWh (12L/min, 5 min, 2C input water and 40C output water). Simply owning and operating a fridge and freezer add another 2kWh a day; and my modem, router and switch consume another 0.8kWh per day. (10W here and 10W there adds up - 42W steady state is 1kWh/day
That, plus 5kWh per day on the pool, bring us to your 10kWh/day budget already. It doesn't include any obvious usage like, say:
Even if I've misunderstood you, and it's 10kWh/day excluding the pool, basically no artificial heating - of either the building or of food/drink - fits in!
All that said, yeah, 65kWh absolutely is excessive. Even accounting for the extreme temperatures (which, in the coastal parts of middle Norway, means "-20C", not the "-2C" that it would mean where I have lived in the past in north east England and central Denmark), if I were living alone, I could use significantly less. But I don't live alone - I live with my SO who I am fairly sure is part viking, and part tropical snake. And after having been miserable due to cold for much of my formative years, I've come to the reasoned opinion that this is the right compromise between making (and living with!) my SO miserable, and making my wallet sad. I can go and hide in my office at a temperature I find comfortable; she can do the same, and when we meet in the living room, a combination of my taking jumpers off and her hiding under multiple blankets - and, of course, hemorrhaging money to the electricity company - keep both of us from being too uncomfortable.
The homorrhaging can be improved over time with additional work that I didn't get done this summer - and I don't want to do during the winter (e.g. laying out fibreglass insulation is miserable at the best of times. I'm not even going to try in attic temperatures that go beyond "beard freezing up inside dust mask" and right on to "it's dry enough that my nose started bleeding, but then it stopped because the blood froze solid"
Further in, there's more downtimers - Eric was pushing that before he died. And, for that matter, my second and third published stories in the Gazette were about a very young French woman downtimer in Paris, no Americans about.
oh, and the Irish Wild Geese play big roles - will that work for you?
I see, so you're a gun nut.
If not, why on earth did you post this, utterly ignoring the point I made, quite clearly?
RE: '... legalise, regulate & tax drugs, this problem doesn't completely evaporate, but diminishes to tiny proportions.'
Not necessarily - I think this is likelier to blur some issues.
As a gardener you're well aware that plants can be hybridized/cultivated for enhanced performance on almost any specific parameter. This also applies to cannabis: some growers have been deliberately maximizing specific psychoactive components in cannabis.
The below review (coauthored by Gruber) mentions this along with vaping vs. smoking.
'Marijuana Matters: Reviewing the Impact of Marijuana on Cognition, Brain Structure and Function, & Exploring Policy Implications and Barriers to Research'
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6455965/
This is, of course, for those Christians. How does smokin' dope, and dancing around a huge fire naked relate, speaking for us Pagans?
The moment you legalise, regulate & tax drugs, this problem doesn't completely evaporate, but diminishes to tiny proportions.
Unfortunately, this last bit isn't true.
California's been trying to clean up/legalize its cannabis industry for years now, and there have been any number of problems.
One annoying one is well-heeled and loud-screaming NIMBYs adding years to the process of setting legal standards. If you want an example, tune in to any San Diego County Supervisor meeting and listen to the non-agenda public comments as long as you can stand them. Typically, "cannabis is evil, ban drugs" shows up at least once, sung by Karen of some gender. And that's the background noise. Whenever they do take up the issue, it's pretty much the only thing on the agenda that day. Not that I like all our supervisors, but I do respect even the creeps for putting up with hours of that stuff for not a lot of money.
The much worse problem is that the illegal growers looked at the costs for going legal, and many said "nah, why bother, illegal's cheaper" and kept doing what they were doing. Worse, it's proving hard to separate the legally grown stuff from the illegally grown stuff, and the expenses of proving legality are falling on those trying to play by the rules, making it hard for them to stay in business.
Worse still, legalization has purportedly crippled the ability of law enforcement to prosecute the illegal growers, so it's hard to drive up their costs to where it makes financial sense for them to go legal.
And worst of all, the effects of all the shit they're externalizing--drying up streams that water towns, dumping blatantly illegal pesticides into the remaining waters, seriously exploiting illegal migrants forced to man the grows, and so forth--are getting worse, not better, with legalization.
Note that I'm not a fan of illegal pot (given what they may be spraying it with, oh hell no). The point I'm making is that anyone who thinks it's inevitably easy needs to watch what's happening in California. The process of legalization isn't necessarily straightforward, even with the best of intentions.
Anyway, the environmental group I'm with is having serious problems with cannabis legalization, because the system for permitting legal growing operations is so broken and politicized against interfering with legalization that a bunch of conservation plans are getting tossed in favor of clearing the land and growing cannabis on it, without much regulation of how it's grown, either. Again, we're not against people partaking, but we really feel strongly that the cultivation of inebriants* shouldn't cause extinctions. We fight badly-sited wineries on the same basis.
*A couple of years ago, I talked with an NGO person whose job in Mendocino County was to teach those who wanted to learn how to grow food. Mendocino is a very rural county with a lot of agriculture, but said agriculture has tilted so strongly towards inebriants (wine and cannabis) that the place is becoming a food desert, and locals and local farm workers want to learn how to grow food instead of drugs for export, so that they can eat locally grown vegetables. Legalization has broad-reaching consequences, and so do industrialized addictions.
I go to several farmer's markets around here, and there are always Amish vendors (not on Sunday, of course). So I think they understand the need to interact with the rest of the world. Weird note, Amish country is also Trump country. Go Figure.
I "camped out" in a not-adequate tent (Boy Scout standard issue. No floor) in below freezing weather in Michigan in the winter when I was a kid. My sleeping bag was rated down to 40F, so ended up wearing two sets of everything trying to stay warm. Not pleasant, but I lived through it for a couple nights. (I suspect the temp was below 20F, but it was a long time ago, lets just say the snow did not melt in the sunlight the next day).
I would be surprised if there was anywhere in Canada where you could be clothing optional in the winter (or even coat optional, for that matter).
BTW, Heteromeles I take it you were not affected by the earthquake?
Way way way north of San Diego. Up near where the Redwoods are. Way way north of San Francisco.
California is a "tall" state.
I suspect there will be a few closed chunks of the old PCH.
He's in San Diego. North of San Diego is LA. LA to San Francisco is half again as far as Paris to Amsterdam, and the earthquake, in "northern California" would be north of there.
Please note, btw, I'm not being rude. My late ex had a couple of friends from the UK, who went to a con in LA, and asked if they could go out for an afternoon to the Grand Canyon (which is close to 500 mi).
BTW, Heteromeles I take it you were not affected by the earthquake?
As the others have noted, I'm about 1200 km away from the earthquake zone. And it's on a different fault system. So I didn't feel it.
Just for reference, the California-Oregon border (42o N) is actually at a slightly higher latitude than the southernmost part of Canada, while our southernmost border is the northernmost part of Mexico. We're a bit over twice the length and width of Portugal, although our northern borders appear to be more-or-less on the same latitude.
Just found on the internet by following bread crumbs from an Ars Technica article.
Excellent article written by a an AT&T insider back in 1997. About how the AT&T system of a smart network used to sell specific services to customers was about to implode and become a dumb network carrying bits. And how they and most other telcos would not like it.
And boy have I dealt with this in various ways over the years.
This in so many ways destroyed the old IBM. And others.
An intro:
https://www.isen.com/stupid.html
I read the article at:
http://www.rageboy.com/stupidnet.html
»10kWh/day«
That is quite precisely what our 5yr old top-insulated Danish house used for the heat-pump (heat+water) last year: 3700 kWh from august to august.
Another serious Brexit fuck-up - making EU residents "illegal immigrants" - possibly.
W. T. F? Again
I read that as Mercian, and was expecting a broad Brummie accent from you.
First off, general thanks for the background info.
The trail wanders though some US politics sites that I stopped reading due to disagreements with the owners and/or moderators.
10kWh/day May one ask how?
Minimal heating and cooling. The "fucking Queenslanders" comment was referencing the slice of Australia where it's warm and mild year round, so it's a real target for retired people. Note that much of Queensland is not like that, but the bit round Brisbane very much is. The north end of NSW likewise (Tweed Heads is kind of "gold coast south").
FWIW I have a resistive water heater that runs about 3-4kWh/day if I leave it on. Water comes in at about 20°C and is heated to about 65°C, then mixed down at exit. But a heat pump version will use less than 1kWh/day for the same result. My work desktop with 3 monitors runs about 100W, so 1kWh/day is reasonable. Likewise my fridge and freezer between them use another 1kWh/day if that. They're not especially efficient, but they are smallish and the most efficient cheap models (viz, I paid $400 for the freezer rather than $2000, so it uses nearly twice as much electricity as the expensive one. OTOH it uses much less than half as much as the shitty old one I found on the side of the road). Increasing my consumption to 10kWh/day by running everything else is possible, but that would mean running a fan heater and an air conditioner...
It's also slightly possible that gasdive's 10kWh is net after solar, since he's likely in the 35%+ of Australians that have PV on their home. But that seems unlikely, even 2kW of PV would be giving him 10kWh/day at the moment and using 20kWh/day for two people would take a bit of effort.
The problem with illegal drugs is that a lot are illegal because of harm, rather than racism. Yes, there are stupid issues with differentiating "crack cocaine" from "powder cocaine" and so on, but at there are also really important differences between "more addictive and destructive variant" and "mild stimulant".
For example kava seems to be less of a problem than alcohol, even for people with drug problems. Both are now industrially available in the Pacific. At the other end of the scale people have worked really hard to make more addictive nictotinoids, opoids and amphetamines, specifically so they can create addicts more easily.
Saying "legalise them all, make them all readily available, let people choose" which is, as I understand it, the Libertarian position, seems like a recipe for the Opium Wars at best.
And that's assuming people don't use them to commit other crimes. Even with complete legalisation I would hope that drugging people non-consensually would still be a crime, hence the comment about drink spiking. Making the drugs commonly used for that readily available seems unwise, especially the ones that damage memory formation. I'm sure that if those drugs were more available they'd be used even more often.
I'm also looking at the Aotearoa experiment with synthetic cannabinoids where people put a lot of effort into making new ones with desirable properties... mostly they wanted addictive but not too destructive, so they came up with new formulations and tested them on their customers. Balancing regulation of novel drugs against freedom to use untested drugs would be a challenge even for Libertarians (unless they just say "no regulation, anyone can sell you anything and lie about what it is and does" which would be a disaster "this is milk powder" not so long ago, for example)
Ain't Merican English grand.
We keep changing the meaning of words.
It's a common feature of languages. I've had occasion to see how that's worked in New World Spanish. My Puertorican and North-Mexican acquaintances can talk, but have to do a bit of "what do you mean by that?"
And, anyway, that's how languages change from regionalisms to dialects and eventually become different languages. Latin turned into French and Portuguese and Spanish.
I'm interested in how modern communications -- universal, instantaneous and cheap -- will affect that. That started with broadcast radio, but it's way more prevalent and personal now.
Um, yeah. My late ex told me about the time when I think she was still in the Navy, and they were in, I think, Puerto Rico, and one of her friends spoke Spanish... as spoken in Baja California, and they nearly got into a fight, because an ordinary word in Baja was an insult in PR.
The one that drives me nuts is when did "one tenth" become 10 times less?
Atropos asks, May one ask how?
Err, I dunno.
I've got 4 kW of solar on the roof. That gets me about 4-6 kWh/d during winter and the pool is on a timer to coincide with the solar.
The water coming into the house is at about the average temperature for the area, so it doesn't take much warming up. You can feel that the first few seconds of running the tap, the water is really cold and then warms up. (and the opposite in summer). Hot water is probably the biggest draw, we pulled 5.43 kWh/d. It's metered separately and the solar doesn't contribute, so that figure is real.
The fridge is new and according to the sticker draws 1.5 kWh/d. The lighting is all LED and we run about 20W for about 6 hours a day, so that's about 0.2 kWh/d.
I don't know how much we use for cooking, but we're not big bakers. The oven is also new, and well insulated. It doesn't heat up the kitchen the way I remember ovens used to, though it's warm to the touch. So a lot of energy to heat up, but not much to stay hot. The cooktop is induction and only heats the pan. It's super accurate so when I simmer pasta or curry it's just a bubble now and then.
Heating is an mostly an electric throw rug. As I write this the indoor temperature is 13 (midsummer) but I'm in shorts and tee shirt with bare feet, and toasty warm. It's hard to tell how much power it's drawing, but watching the power meter it seems to be 120W on a 10% duty cycle. So about 12W. Lynne has one too, so that's another 12W. If it gets really cold inside I put on a battery heated hoodie (it didn't get that cold last winter) and long pants. The dogs are both stretched out, and the real heater doesn't go on until they curl up. That's a reverse cycle airconditioner (air to air heat pump). I think it draws 2 kW flat out, but it's an inverter motor so it runs slow once it gets near the target temperature, and then cycles. I guess it draws about 250W to keep the house at about 12C all night. The guess is based on it running slow and cycling on and off, but it's metered along with everything else other than the hot water so I'm not sure. So that's in the region of 2 kWh. But not every night. It's warmer if it's raining, and we had a lot of rain this year.
Moz said: It's also slightly possible that gasdive's 10kWh is net after solar, since he's likely in the 35%+ of Australians that have PV on their home.
I've got solar. My net is negative 0.67 kWh/d over that winter bill.
I did consider a heat pump hot water system, but I'm spending about 180 dollars a year for hot water, and it's on Controlled Load so it actually helps the network balance. A heat pump one would cost me about 4000 dollars installed and last about 10 years. So about double what I pay now and save about 4 kWh/d. For 4000 I could upgrade my solar and generate 20 kWh/day. Add another 1000 and I could put a solar controller on the hot water system so it only drew power while the solar was exporting, so the resistive heater wouldn't draw anything from the grid. That would last 30 years instead of 10.
I lived in Darwin for a decade, and had a few culture shock moments when I arrived. One of them was seeing an address on an ambulance sheet that said "Longgrass Bagot Road". There's a sizable if usually transient population in Darwin who are called longgrassers because they quite literally live pretty much anywhere that's not built on year round. Welcome to the tropics. Explaining to a new doctor than an address of "Kmart" meant they lived out the back of the Kmart building got someone who needed it an extra night in hospital.
Moz @ 837:
Doesn't make any sense to me either, but it happens. I can't explain why.
SFReader @ 886:
How well did that work for vape? Over here, not so well - lots of (underage) teenagers managed to get vape products easily and often enough to get hooked. I understand how the 'legal' aspect magnifies the social problems and -- IMO, more importantly -- makes it much harder to seek/obtain treatment.
Don't really know. I haven't researched it (even on the interwebbies).
I was just pointing out that the change in enforcement policies reported on the news for marijuana use WOULD NOT RESULT in a cannabis smoking free-for-all.
Nor will it provide an opening for the tobacco companies to seek to overturn current laws & regulations restricting tobacco, because the new enforcement policies do not favor cannabis more than it does tobacco.
You're not allowed to smoke either one where your second hand smoke would harm others, but now pot won't send you to prison while tobacco just results in a citation.
I did consider a heat pump hot water system, but
Same here. In summer I turn the thing off most of the time because it's a big tank for just me and the odd visitor and it'll stay warm enough for several days (having a dishwasher means I on;y need hot water for showers, and when it's hot the "solar water heating" from running the cold water pipe on the outside of the north wall means I get free hot water for a 30s shower). So it's 3kWh once or twice a week, at ~10c/kWh. Meanwhile Nectr are paying me 14c/kWh to feed the grid from my solar. My bill is entirely "how much of the connection charge can you chip away by feeding in"... $50/mo for that resulting in a bill of ~$20.
I expect the connection charge will increase over time as more PV goes up, use becomes more efficient but the grid just keeps getting more expensive. Eventually it'll be like the water bill... $200/quarter of which $15 is for consumption (~70 litres/day, ranging from 50-80).
I spent a while riding my bike around the tropical bits and while I had a tarp I only started using it once I got into the wheat belt in WA (a few hundred km from Perth) because that's where you get actual dew or even rain. Inland, especially higher up, cold nights meant a sleeping bag or sleeping close to the fire. Or in a pile of bodies :)
Flip side is longrassers are also common in Alice, which is about as non-coastal as it gets (despite the Alice Springs Regatta).
I remain impressed at the bicyclists I saw riding during the heat of the day in the hot part of the tropics. I'd be lying under a tree with my tarp up to provide shade, sweating and thinking "this no fun". Then a cyclist would appear on the horizon, grinding along the road baking in the sun and the heat from the tarmac. If nothing else that means carrying a lot of extra water. I preferred to ride from first light to hot, then occasionally from late afternoon until dusk. Most of that area is dead flat so cruising along at 20-25kph is easy and even if you only do 4-5 hours on the bike you're hitting 100km/day which is about all most people can handle 5-6 days a week for several months (I did a 170km day into Newman because I was impatient, but even that had a ~3 hour lie down in the middle). Why ride from 10am-3pm if you only need 5 hours?
paws4thot @ 890:
881 - I do get that (sort of; I'm not too clear on how many Electoral College votes each state has). I do get that some (mostly Republican) states swing their entire EC block vote to who wins the mass vote in that state.
There are a total of 538.
Each state gets a number of Electors equal to their representation in Congress - 2 for Senators + some variable number based on the number of House seats they hold. PLUS 3 Electors for the District of Columbia (equal to the representation for the least populous state). Two states, Maine & Nebraska give one Elector to the winner of each of their House districts & the two Senatorial Electors to the overall winner of the state.
The number of Electors remains constant at 538, but the apportioning between the states changes with each decennial census. North Carolina gained one House seat after the 2020 Census (14 Representatives in the House).
That's why there's this on-going fight over redrawing the district maps. Although the state is divided fairly evenly (~ 50.5% to 49.5%), the GOP held a majority in the state legislature and drew maps that heavily favored GOP candidates (10R-4D) [because they couldn't figure out how to draw them 14R-0D - a statement actually made during the debate in the legislature] ... plus the GOP majority Gerrymandered legislative districts for the purpose of obtaining a SUPER-majority (60% needed to override a Governor's VETO)
But the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled the maps UN-Constitutional under the STATE Constitution because they did not guarantee "the right to free elections, freedom of speech and equal protections of citizens."
Which in turn sparked the lawsuit Moore v. Harper whose oral arguments were recently heard in the U.S. Supreme Court.
the change in enforcement policies reported on the news for marijuana use WOULD NOT RESULT in a cannabis smoking free-for-all.
It doesn't have to, to cause real problems. H has pointed out the supply side issues in his area. Aotearoa had huge problems with legal synthetic cannaboids, and is having them again now with unregulated vaping. Turns out you need something between children and addictive drugs, who knew? Even just basic regulation of advertising claims and purchasing ages helps a lot, but without a regulated drug testing regime that's not possible (you get things sold as sweets that 'everyone knows' are really drugs, just no-one knows what the drugs do...)
"not allowed to", is, as you say, extremely dependent on enforcement and that takes us straight back into "the police are the problem" territory. Viz, I don't think you can fix the police just by legalising a few things. You definitely can't fix the whole legal system just by removing any law that gets used unjustly.
"Dietary supplements" is another thing to consider when thinking about legalising drugs. A lot of those already ride the line between unregulated medicine and illegal recreational drugs. And we see frequent blow-ups when those are found to have ingredient lists no more accurate than the claims of their effects. I expect that if more recreational drugs were shoved into that category we'd see them using the same techniques with the same results... and the same level of consumer protection would result in worse problems "new formulation CBD oil (actually used transmission oil)"... in Australia our very active consumer protection people really struggle to keep up with the supplement shenanigans because it's so trivial to form a new brand and vomit out dozens of new products, so by the time they've investigated the company responsible is gone and 20 new ones have appeared.
Re: '... change in enforcement policies reported on the news for marijuana use WOULD NOT RESULT in a cannabis smoking free-for-all.'
Okay - thanks for the clarification!
Further in, there's more downtimers - Eric was pushing that before he died.
It wasn't the downtimers per se. It was the same feeling I got from Dances with Wolves and Avatar, that the natives needed a civilized hero to teach them the right way to do things. A colonialist mentality.
Maybe I'm tarring an entire series with an impression based on the first book, but I've got fussier with media as I get older — I'm less willing to 'invest' time reading/watching a series with the assurance that 'it gets better after book/episode xxx'. Life's too short. So if a book doesn't grab me within a couple of chapters, I'll stop reading. (The Nantucket series nearly lost me, but I loved the descriptions of ancient places enough to skip the rather tedious fights.)
The issues with marijuana legalization and arable land sound serious in California. I'm happy to report that a few years after full legalization here in Canada, the issue has effectively disappeared.
By 'disappeared' I mean nobody gives a damn. The people who smoked weed before likely smoke it now. Those who didn't, don't. I suppose I smell it a bit more often, but given where I live it's hard to be sure.
My community had a large number of illegal growers, mostly indoors at various sites. A large percentage of them went legit with legalization, while some shut their doors because they didn't like the new rules. It really has become a non-issue.
By completely random coincidence I actually walked into one of the licensed marijuana stores today for the first time since legalization. I don't like marijuana personally (at this point in my life) but I was thinking about some as a gift for a friend (I decided not).
Here in BC we are a few days away from a province-wide pilot project of 'decriminalizing' a list of 'hard drugs', including opiates and stimulants. Our NDP (Dem-Soc) government negotiated an exemption to the criminal code with the federal government. There has been much arguing on the topic, but working as I do with street users on a daily basis, I personally think it can only help.
And just a note: I live in what is arguably the most temperate part of Canada. Today it was -13C and we have some snow on the ground. It doesn't happen every year, but there is no place in Canada where survival without clothing or a shelter of some kind would be compatible for an entire year.
context = re-writing history; Nantucket; Grantville; Destroyermen; et al
whether or not you like the "ceaseless victories" of uptimers against downtimers there is a rational bit of justification for it... after too many generations of moderate success, an aristocracy tends towards repeating their policies since those seemed to work ("good enough for my grandfather therefore good enough for my grandson"); while there might well be some genuine genetic in-breeding (cough-cough-Hapsburgs) what wrecks the 'nobleborn' is inbred patterns of thought; refusal to heed advice from men of lower caste & ignoring women (unless you had an erection);
then factor in the sheer chaos of the 1630s after a dozen years of warfare and ever shifting alliances, not much of a technology edge necessary to achieve battlefield victory;
utter mess, eh?
then the skies open up and uptimers drop in... radio... aircraft based observers... improved wagon wheels... better gunpowder via purification & corning... distribution of daily rations of pickled veggies to troops to fend off scurvy...
that and a dozen other plausible tweaks lead to better intel + healthier troops + better range + better organization + better logistics ==> bigger-faster-cheap victories as well as smaller defeats with lessened losses
these improvements would be tactically effective and strategically significant in tilting towards more victories and less defeats, but utterly devastating to status quo ante as folks realize there's wealth-power-safety for themselves from leveraging this "future tech"
just try to stop people from saving their own life, their children's lives by preventing vaccination (yes that was a deliberate dig at here-n-now #WSCN anti-vaxxers) when the ruling elite was likely to be secretly exploiting whilst outlawing it for the masses
(one memory I will cherish forever was Noah Trevor mocking Fox executives & on air talking heads at a gala where policy of no-vax-no-admission was vigorously enforced and camera was pre-positioned to catch their enraged flinching at such overt hypocrisy revealed in realtime)
but... but? but in both variants, Nantucket & Grantville, it all happens too fast... not just a bit too easy... too fast... ought to have taken a decade after Grantville arrived to get to point where the guilds would unwillingly tolerate innovations along with kick-starting of an industrial revolution based upon better-cheaper-faster iron refining & steel alloys & steam engines
moreover, not nearly as many uptimers die as might be expected given nobleborn taking any social slight as deliberate insult from a lowborn uppity peasant and stabbing 'em into silence (recognized as cliche but based on historical record)
frankly, I would have expected Grantville's residents to end up in a walled village as well pampered prisoners with children held as hostages thereby obliged to live out their days as captive wizards
the enduring popularity of such re-writes of history based upon all of us having 20/20 hindsight and now realizing what we could have done better if only we tried in our 20s-30s-40s...
and now reading about #CCSS which is going to be an utter horror for those alive in 2040... never mind 2080 or 2090... I am glad I will be dead by 2030
we (any not yet dead) will all be hoping the skies will open up in 2061 and watch as Grantville from circa 2400 drops down to save the remnants of civilization as disjointed & brutalized humanity squabbles over water-land-medication-food-electricity
so...?
so there's the next set of "Assiti Shard" novels... another 'hopepunk' alternative history series to be launched based upon a time displacement from our future into our here-n-now and we are the wretched savages being saved from follies of our elite... huh... like the #BSGC (batshit gonzo crazy) horrors I am reading about in the UK... and knowing as I am reading the US and parts of the EU are too likely to replicate those horrors in another decade or so...
hmmm... anyone want to recommend which town in Scotland gets tossed back to 2034 from 2237 due to a malfunctioning physics experiment at University of Glasgow involving an actual chunk of an "Assiti Shard" being poked 'n prodded?
hmmmm... tentatively titled... 2034: The Glasgow Whooooopsie
then the skies open up and uptimers drop in... radio... aircraft based observers... improved wagon wheels... better gunpowder via purification & corning... distribution of daily rations of pickled veggies to troops to fend off scurvy...
The problem Eric missed out on, due to writing circa 2000, is that the 30 Years' War wasn't solely a politico-religious clusterfuck: it coincided with decades of bad climate and harvest failures, attributed by more recent researchers to a drop in atmospheric CO2 caused by the horrendous plague/genocide death toll in the Americas.
(It continued thereafter: it can be considered that King Charles I's fiscal problems and the onset of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the 1630s/40s were aggravated by the exact same climatological instability.)
Anyway, better gunpowder corning will get you bupkis if you land in the middle of a protracted multi-year famine. The problem with the whole Grantville AH is that the protags arrive in the middle of a war zone but even if they can defeat the more violent locals they then run up against starvation within 12 months. They're not a farming community, they probably can't research and deploy better agricultural techniques that fast. So they're doomed.
context = 1632: Grantville
hmmm... famine... Little Ice Age... okay some backpedaling by me and deep-thought by characters...
Samuel Johnson had a point when he wrote, "When a man knows he is to be hanged...it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
Ditto, for 3000 Americans looking around at 1631 and freaking out at the (now obvious) famine and icy winters and wrecked farms... so... what to do, oh, what to do? die quietly?
hmmmm... greenhouses to force-start seedlings... that adds at least a month to growing season... they definitely had coal and puzzle out how to mass produce a few thousand Franklin stoves allowing for in-home heating with otherwise toxic coal... they accept thousands of refugees as unskilled laborers into their homes and businesses... and everyone works 12H/D 6D/W until things ease up enough to allow a less frantic pace
they offer to establish 'Pax Grantville' over chaos out to a radius of 30 miles (50 km)... first three years, nobody is fat but few die of hunger... not much time for abstractions of democracy but a less brutal version of dictatorship, a quasi 'military governorship'...
context = 2034: The Glasgow Whooooopsie
any thoughts?
A Scottish town arriving from 2237 might be able to advise on how to survive in a permafrost environment.
On the general subject of domestic heating, has anyone looked into using "radiating wallpaper" ?
( essentially passing an electric current through a thin graphite film )
- for example, https://nexgenheating.com (the first one I came across)
Nice try, but no banana.
Panes of glass were neither easy nor cheap to make in the 17th century, and glasshouses of that era were completely unlike modern greenhouses (look up Versailles, for example) and more like modern institutional buildings, with large windows but only about half the wall area and few if any roof lights. And no way could Grantville have afforded a Versailles-scale budget. It's not the heating, which has been feasible since at least Roman times, but the light - I can assure you that starting seedlings in low light and adequate temperature does not work.
Turns out you need something between children and addictive drugs, who knew?
Anecdotally, the local teenagers seem to be smoking weed more than they were when it was still illegal. Whether that is easier supply, a reaction to the pandemic, or more social openness I don't know.
Someone is, hopefully, collecting data so in a few years we'll have some hard numbers on whether legalizing it increases teenage use or not. (My gut reaction is that it will, by a combination of easier availability and more social acceptance, but I have no evidence for this.)
So, back to our original question, posed by OGH:
A few weeks ago, New Scientist had a splash about using LIGO to detect hypothetical alien warp drives. (An accessible article is here: https://phys.org/news/2022-12-team-physicists-ligo-giant-alien.html )
Now, the NS article mentioned something about the mass of the alien craft, but it is the combination of mass and acceleration that causes gravitational waves. After all a solitary neutron star doesn't emit gravitational waves, but as the acceleration increases during inspiral, it becomes increasingly obvious.
hmmmm... greenhouses to force-start seedlings... that adds at least a month to growing season...
Congratulations, now you need to either work out how to synthesize polyeththylene film (using available 17th century resources) or float glass -- the latter is probably easier (it's an 18th/19th century tech) but is still nothing like trivial, and glass available in the 17th century was ... well, blown plate glass was available as early as 1620, but it took hand-polishing and grinding, so was a luxury product (for stuff like carriage windows for the nobs): rolled plate glass dates to the late 19th century and took industrial machinery that the Grantville folks would have known about but taken too long to replicate -- not just the machinery, but the process for producing glass of high enough quality to work with.
942:
sigh
is it so wrong of me to want to re-write history and get it right?
oh sure... every notion can be kicked apart but there comes the moment when * something * proposed actually will work
942:
got it!
here in 2022 we extract those nasty, nasty greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) and after compression pump the liquefied gases back to 1632 thereby saving both timelines
hah
and I still have 57 minutes to fry me some onions for my breakfast cream cheese sandwich
»On the general subject of domestic heating, has anyone looked into using "radiating wallpaper" ? «
Floor-heating is also radiation based heating, which is why you can make do with inlet water temperatures below 30°C: That T⁴ term does real work.
I think electrified wall-paper is one of those "Really neat solution to a problem nobody has, with side-effects you wouldn't want to live with."
For instance imaging hanging anything on the wall with a screw, nail or other metallic fasterner...
Charlie ....
Um, errr ....
The float glass process is also known as the Pilkington process, named after the British glass manufacturer Pilkington, which pioneered the technique in the 1950s at their production site in St Helens, Merseyside.
anyone want to recommend which town in Scotland gets tossed back to 2034 from 2237 due to a malfunctioning physics experiment
Brigadoon hits some kind of temporal barrier and bounces?
the Ukraine
The use of the article "the" has been
discussedbeaten to death a few times around here.Last night Nancy Pelosi introduced "... the president of THE UKRAINE" to a joint session of the US Congress.
Decade long habits die hard.
How about "Every uptimer with south-facing glass windows puts a table full of seedlings under every window." It's inconvenient, but it gets the job done.
You probably don't need to polish and grind it to put it in a greenhouse window.
How about "Every uptimer with south-facing glass windows puts a table full of seedlings under every window." It's inconvenient, but it gets the job done.
One medieval trick, as I understand it, is to use stone walls as passive heat sources: basically, you plant on the south side of the wall. The wall provides a bit of wind protection and retains heat, so the microsite is warmer. Since most plants are ectothermic, they therefore grow faster.
On Rapa Nui (Easter Island), they even planted under rocks (plant a sweet potato, put a rock on it), for much the same reason.
Not as good as a greenhouse, but when you can't make greenhouse windows, you've gotta do what you gotta do.
On the subject of 1632, I enjoyed the novel despite its weaknesses and have read it multiple times. A bunch of Americans, led by the coalminer's union, go back in time and kick the nobility in the teeth. What's not to like?
Yes, the book has some weaknesses, including those mentioned above, but it's also charming and well-written, and I enjoyed the characterization. I should also note that the description of the battle of Breitenfeld is just about perfect.
The issues with marijuana legalization and arable land sound serious in California. I'm happy to report that a few years after full legalization here in Canada, the issue has effectively disappeared.
One correction: they don't set up illegal grows on arable land, but in forests and chaparral. The problem is that these are normally conserved for watersheds and recreation. The normal tactic is to bring in a bunch of undocumented workers from Mexico or points south, park them off in the woods somewhere where they have to clean a site, plant the weed, pump and/or impound water for it, keep the local critters from eating it, and keep people from stealing it. The problems are when they start cutting down rare plants, start using happy things like DDT to poison the insects, dam streams and/or leach the pesticides into the streams, and (potentially) shoot at anyone who comes in. The last is unusual if migrants are being used; normally they just run, because they're little more than slave labor in this.
The problems amplify when small, rural towns that depend on water from streams either lose that water entirely (this has happened) or find that their water is heavily contaminated with stuff that's been banned in the US for decades, and have to find the money somehow to clean it up. Since we're in a serious drought, trashing water supplies is increasingly uncool.
Anyway, the problem is this illegal method is very cheap, because they're not paying for land, using cheap shit smuggled in from Mexico instead of more expensive legal stuff, not paying living wages or any benefits, not paying for licensing or inspection, not bothering to keep their arrest record clean (legal marijuana growers can't have been in the business illegally...), etc. So they're product is cheaper than legal weed, because they've externalized most of their costs and put most of the risks onto people who will just be jailed and/or deported if caught.
The problem Eric missed out on, due to writing circa 2000, is that the 30 Years' War wasn't solely a politico-religious clusterfuck: it coincided with decades of bad climate and harvest failures, attributed by more recent researchers to a drop in atmospheric CO2 caused by the horrendous plague/genocide death toll in the Americas.
There's been some push-back on whether New World reforestation caused the Little Ice Age, but that's to be expected from academia. Anyway...
If any thoughtful person wanted to restart the 1632 project by displacing Grantsville from 2022, I've got a rather different suggestion:
Send them back in time to 1632 in Pernambuco, Brazil.
Then they can get involved in the whole slavery question, by choosing whether to side with the Captaincy of Pernambuco (Portuguese nobility) or with the fabled quilombo of Palmares (wikipedia link). Or with the Dutch West India Company (the Dutch and Portuguese were at war, and the WIC took and held Recife...).
Why Brazil? Rubber, among many other things (sugar, yerba mate, tobacco). Also, it wasn't as badly affected by the Little Ice Age as was Europe. And given the multiracial makeup of Palmares, a bunch of downtime refugees with interesting technology might find a place there. Of course, modern racism might add a bit of conflict.
Also, palmares is the legendary birthplace of capoeira, although better scholarship puts the origin centuries later and in a different part of Brazil.
Fun question: would Baen go for it?
5.There's a whole thread of stories in the Gazette about getting glass from Italy, I think, that has learned some of the uptimers' techniques, to Greenland (or was it Iceland?) for greenhouses.
I could go on, but perhaps you might consider reading a few more years of the storyline.
With 17th century heating and 17th century window technology at 50 degrees north? Come off it!
On the origins of the War on Drugs, this article has the details. Its worth looking through the full transcripts it links to, although the quotes are enough to give the general idea.
Basically, Nixon was convinced that drugs, homosexuality and immorality in general were going to make America weak, and therefore vulnerable to the Commies. So he wanted to ban them. Racism wasn't a factor (not that Nixon wasn't racist, but that didn't enter into his thinking on drugs).
I haven't read it, and fail to see why I should do so, especially given the fact that I have read a few stories and they were as bad as I expected. I have disliked the whole genre ever since I started on "A Connecticut Yankee ..." and didn't finish it (very rare for me, especially for works by a good author). Not merely is it the lack of realism in a supposedly realistic genre, it is the Yankee supremacism, which is as bad as most MilSF. And, no, even the Italians couldn't have started making greenhouse glass at a practical cost in the 17th century.
Mediaeval? That's still done today in the UK, by gardeners with the opportunity. Yes, it works, but not enough to make a significant difference to major food crops. It's mainly used to grow plants that are only marginally hardy.
Nixon also liked the idea that a "war on drugs" was also a "war on Blacks and hippies" (and probably Jews as well, given his well-known prejudices.
Hello! Grantville was full of 20th century houses with 20th century heating systems.
Context: US for the names, globally for the basic ideas.
I've got to disagree, but only because you didn't capitalize "Libertarianism" and instead bad mouthed libertarianism. Without the capital "libertarianism" is rather like Occam's Razor: No laws/restrictions that aren't needed, but yes to those that really are. So set things up to solve the problem, and then remove excessive baggage. The problem with the current systems is that it's so difficult to debug laws. So with the current systems libertarianism doesn't really work, but this isn't a basic problem, it's a system design problem.
(OTOH, Just WHO would you trust to replace the current system with a better one? I don't like the current one, but I'm REALLY against a constitutional convention.)
The series does present downtimers as worthy of respect.
One of the early characters is a woman who was a camp follower of the mercenaries that the Grantville folks defeat in the first book. She and her peers buy in to the whole democracy and equality idea with a zeal that frightens some of the uptimers. They end up running a underground movement that spreads them and creates problems for nobility that resist them.
Then there are the reactions of people that find out what our timeline's history books have to say about them. Some are less than sensible (Charles I, who arrests Cromwell long before he has even considered being a rebel) and some more so (the churchman who in our timeline became Cardinal Mazarin).
Yes, you're tarring the whole 1632 universe on the basis of criticism of the first book (and when did you read it, btw?).
Read it the winter the twin towers came down, so 2001/2002.
Many, many of the criticisms here have been dealt with... in later books.
"Keep watching, it gets better in the third season…" :-)
Like I said, life's too short.
not that Nixon wasn't racist, but that didn't enter into his thinking on drugs
The problem with US (and I suspect other) national politics is that things get simplified down to first order effects only. Prohibition gave us organized crime. Or at least made it much more of an issue. Did no one care to look at the knock on effects of a war on drugs? (I know the answer. Complicated policies don't win elections.)
And all of you missed "people who smoke dope most likely vote for Democrats".
It also gets a lot* more complicated. For example, several years in, there's a climax that is an uptime priest, who's been promoted, arguing against a top Jesuit on the validity of Vatican II.
As far as I am concerned the primary reason to decriminalize drugs is to remove the profits from the criminal gangs. OTOH, I'm also in favor of it being illegal to advertise having them for sale over public channels. I suppose signs on or in the store are quite reasonable, though.
Sorry, that's arguing before the Pope and some Cardinals.
people who smoke dope most likely vote for Democrats
In 1969, likely true.
Weed / alcohol Long hair / crew cut (guys only) tie dye / Sears off the rack Rock and Roll / Country Western
Almost all of these were lines not to be crossed by the two dominant tribes of the times.
"Keep watching, it gets better in the third season…"
Speaking of which, did anyone have mixed feelings about Tim Burton's Wednesday?
Definitely a good reason.
I thought that went without saying.
The problem with US (and I suspect other) national politics is that things get simplified down to first order effects only. Prohibition gave us organized crime. Or at least made it much more of an issue. Did no one care to look at the knock on effects of a war on drugs? (I know the answer. Complicated policies don't win elections.)
It's both more complicated and simpler than this. The struggle with industrialized addictions goes back to the 1800s in the US, arguably earlier.
But it's a Red Queen Race. We don't see this because we chop the process into Opium Wars, Temperance Movements, Wars on Drugs, etc. Addiction, like slavery and the weapons trades, is an ancient industry has always been both profitable and political. The organized peddlers of addictions have either been in power, associated with those in power, or in violent opposition to the established order. For all I know, they got started when the Phoenicians planted grapes and built wineries at every one of their Mediterranean trading colonies, and is still going strong with Fentanyl, Meth, and social media.
Look for the continuity. It's there.
Temperance started with people trying to deal with the effects of alcoholism globally (not just in the US). Alcohol had multiple ties to politics. For example, Russian vodka taxes paid for the army, so serfs were forced to drink, while Gilded Age ward heelers delivered votes by giving out free booze in saloons, then herding the drunks to vote. Pretty quickly, Temperance became as much about shutting down saloons and the cartels that controlled them, as it was about helping alcoholics dry out.
Look at the 18th Amendment: "After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited."
Nothing in there about consumption of alcohol, everything about the industry. Homebrewing was never illegal. Arguably, after the 18th Amendment was repealed, industrial liquor was broken as a political power house. It's still extremely profitable, but brewers no longer buy elections.
Unfortunately, the organized crime rings spawned by industrial alcohol going underground during Prohibition turned to more profitable addictions: gambling, opiates, marijuana, cocaine, and now things like fentanyl and methamphetamine. Meanwhile, new industries, like addictive social media, have popped up.
I completely agree that the old tactics of the Temperance movement no longer work, because the addiction industries have evolved since then. However, the strategy of attempting to financially cripple an addiction industry, so that it can be regulated or eliminated, combined with coming up with cost-effective treatments and public health counters, seems to be the way to go. Since it's a Red Queen race that's been going on for centuries, complete deregulation is probably a really bad idea.
Note that I don't specialize in this stuff, and I'm not one of the people fighting marijuana grows in northern California on environmental grounds. However, I'm still researching and writing that "what if Reconstruction worked" alt-universe. Politics from the 1870s to Prohibition was very definitely soaked in alcohol, generally served at a saloon that also employed prostitutes and pickpockets to increase profits.
Politics from the 1870s to Prohibition was very definitely soaked in alcohol, generally served at a saloon that also employed prostitutes and pickpockets to increase profits.
I saw something not too long ago about the history of housing in the US. It was talking about how New York City was trying to close down all the nuisance salons and created laws about only hotels of 8 rooms or more could serve drink. So all the salons partitioned off 8 closet sized rooms and kept serving. And the rooms also started generating money by the hour.
I'm sure I have a few details off but it is a great example of a simple solution totally failing the objective.
I think this was also thought of as one of the starts of the SRO housing in major cities.
the California-Oregon border (42º N) is actually at a slightly higher latitude than the southernmost part of Canada
That one surprised me enough to send me straight to google maps. I note the Ohio-Michigan border is on the 41st parallel, and the Canadian border dips around Pelee Island in the middle of Lake Erie, which is just a little bit south of that. Must be an interesting place.
I think most people habitually visualise the (contiguous) US West Coast as being roughly evenly divided among the three states, whereas the coastline of California is substantially longer than the other two put together.
"I'm not one of the people fighting marijuana grows in northern California on environmental grounds."
I think this tactic misses the forest for the trees. The problem seems to be the laws around growing marijuana rather than the marijuana farms themselves. If I wanted to legally grow grapes (to turn into wine) I'd just buy a plot of land and plant grapes, then turn them into a beverage which gets people drunk/high/stoned.
But if I want to legally grow pot there's all this paperwork, and maybe other stuff as well...
Catherynne M. Valente has something to say about the Twitter purchase / serial destruction of online communities.
Troutwaxer @ 960: Nixon also liked the idea that a "war on drugs" was also a "war on Blacks and hippies" (and probably Jews as well, given his well-known prejudices.
Evidence?
As far as I know the only "evidence" for this theory is this article in Harper's. It claims that John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, said:
However this article was only published after Ehrlichman died, there is zero other evidence that he said anything of the sort, and AFAIK it isn't consistent with anything Nixon is known to have said. Nixon wasn't shy about what he said in private in the Oval Office, so if he had really planned it like that I'm betting it would have been recorded.
I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but this article isn't enough.
That one surprised me enough to send me straight to google maps.
Then you'll love this map.
https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1600907559216390146?lang=en
Heteromeles @ 974: Unfortunately, the organized crime rings spawned by industrial alcohol going underground during Prohibition turned to more profitable addictions: gambling, opiates, marijuana, cocaine, and now things like fentanyl and methamphetamine.
Don't forget the other side of the drug war.
During Prohibition Harry Anslingerr said that marijuana wasn't a problem, and the real evil was illicit hooch. But once prohibition ended and he was put in charge of the Federal Narcotics Bureau he suddenly got the religion and claimed that it would make white men into insane murders and white women to become sexually voracious and seek sex with black men. The fact that this rhetoric justified a huge wodge of money for his agency was entirely unrelated, of course.
US for the names, globally for the basic ideas. I've got to disagree, but only because you didn't capitalize "Libertarianism"
Can you explain the difference other than "Libertarian Party of les Etats-Unis"? AFAIK there's no formal body who regulates the use of the term and thus no formal definition explaining the difference between capital-L Libertarianism and the cheap generic brand.
Certainly his antisemitism is well-known. As to the Ehrlichman quote, you might be right, but it's probably too late for anyone to check at this point.
Also, why do the USA not mark themselves my calling it Libertarianizm? What happen to Nu Reformed Simplifid Amerikan Spelig?
It's not especially the capacity to hurt - what They really hate about the 'Net, is that it's not like TV - they don't control the content (and they want to advertise everywhere).
Meanwhile
The tories are, quite literally, swimming in SHIT ....
See also:
An explanation of how you run 20th century heating systems without a supply of 20th century fuel would be interesting.
In 1632, the town came with a) a coal mine and b) a power plant.
I still have a friend up there who's an avid cyclist, plus my partner used to train for triathlons in Darwin -- worked out well when we went to Langkawi for an Ironman event. I can't seem to find it now but there was an article some years ago about real questions Tourism NT received from people planning on coming to Australia. The standout was a Japanese gentleman who wanted to ride his bike, alone, ACROSS the middle of Australia and, from memory, assumed it would take a couple of weeks. They gently discouraged him from that insanity, but there are plenty of stories of people assuming that riding the length of the Stuart Highway unprepared is a Good Idea and have no clue as to the conditions.
I love the Japanese peeps on folding bikes. Seeing them out in the middle of nowhere always takes me somewhat aback. A Friday I can accept, something that looks as if it came from ALDI not so much. Many speak almost no English as well.
Riding early in the morning seems to mean I meet lots of roadies who ride out and back on "the road" from wherever they are. Which might not be obvious, seems the keen ones do it from tiny prospecting sites etc.
In New Zealand a large part of the temperance movement was an attempt to counteract the ill-effects of alcohol: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/temperance-movement/beginnings
"It was often said that the main causes of death in colonial New Zealand were 'drink, drowning, and drowning while drunk'."
In particular women were hoping to decrease the alcohol-fuelled domestic violence by supporting temperance. Women could and did vote in NZ from 1893.
I would say that the short stories in the setting that I have read are generally inferior to the full-on novels. I would also say that, as one would expect from the number of different authors involved, the quality of all the stories regardless of length is extremely variable, and is also not straightforwardly predictable from what the cover blurb says they're supposed to be about.
Some faults are more prevalent than others: for instance in some books the gunwank reaches beyond stupid levels, while in others there is very little. USAUSAUSA is more common but less extreme. Utter ignorance of matters like proportion and scale regarding the problems of reimplementing 20th-century technology 4 centuries early is pretty much universal, and even those that do attempt to take note of such things do so poorly. The better ones tend to be those where most of the characters are downtimers probably engaged in some form of political intrigue or plot, and there are only a handful of uptimers and they have travelled well beyond their technological base so apart from the odd spot of knowledge are in the same boat as everyone else.
Even the best authors don't seem to be above what I'd call the good end of pulp-magazine SF quality, and none are, for instance, anywhere near Charlie's level of competence. They are entertaining books if you are in a suitably uncritical mood, but the definition of "suitably" varies wildly from book to book.
Ok, this is completely insane so almost on topic from way back up there somewhere. Sadly also entirely believable, credible, comprehensible, unshocking, ordinary etc.
Australia grants a few "Indigenous Water Reserves" but they are never actual water bodies, or actually reserved. What they are is "irrigation water is over-allocated now, but if there's surplus water you might get some of it (conditions apply)".
https://theconversation.com/the-lie-of-aqua-nullius-nobodys-water-prevails-in-australia-indigenous-water-reserves-are-not-enough-to-deliver-justice-195557
I think this tactic misses the forest for the trees. The problem seems to be the laws around growing marijuana rather than the marijuana farms themselves. If I wanted to legally grow grapes (to turn into wine) I'd just buy a plot of land and plant grapes, then turn them into a beverage which gets people drunk/high/stoned.
If you're clearing land for crops, you still might have to deal with CEQA, same as if you're clearing land for development.
Since wineries tend to be the hobbies and/or tax write-offs of the super-rich, every once in a while, someone whose arrogance is bloated by net worth decides they want a vineyard* in a really problematic spot, just to demonstrate that laws don't apply to them. Then the locals and the enviros have to fight it.
More usually, the CEQA project is a problem development, but a few times it's been a vineyard pointlessly bulldozed across a bunch of rare plants or animals. Usually such land is really suboptimal for grapes, but too many wealthy types mistake "not developed because it sucks for everything except wildlife" as "otherwise perfect land stolen from freedom-loving people by commie enviro bureaucrats."
Some of these ego-driven scenarios (like a certain billionaire who wants to build a mansion/cultural center in the Sepulveda Pass, ignoring the fact that his preferred site is a closed landfill that emits a lot of methane AND is in an area that's burned multiple times) can be pretty spectacular, in their own inimitable ways.
What's happening with cannabis IIUC is rather worse. Local planning and other offices are so inundated with permit applications and political pressure that they're just throwing up their hands and approving permits with minimal or no review. This also leads to problems.
Remember, the point of proper planning is to try to avoid predictable problems. If you ignore plans, predictable problems will likely occur.
*A joke from the 1980s is that the best way to make a million in the wine industry is to start with $10 million. I'm not sure what that is now with inflation and rising water costs.
My point was more that there's actually farmland out there, for sale (or lease) and actually zoned and approved for farming... so why not use it and not lay additional burdens on marijuana growers? (As your post above strongly implies.)
During Prohibition Harry Anslingerr said that marijuana wasn't a problem, and the real evil was illicit hooch. But once prohibition ended and he was put in charge of the Federal Narcotics Bureau he suddenly got the religion and claimed that it would make white men into insane murders and white women to become sexually voracious and seek sex with black men. The fact that this rhetoric justified a huge wodge of money for his agency was entirely unrelated, of course.
And one of Canada's top cops who cracked down on marijuana as a 'gateway drug' became one of the bigger players post-legalization, having just the right skills and connections to get the necessary licenses…
That's very on brand.
A week or so ago the local news...
Aside, not really local, but loss of profits in conventional media means I get "local" news from about 200 km south of me to about 300 km north. (London to Skye)
...carried a story with much fanfare about the handing back of huge tracts of aboriginal land. They showed a map and I would have called it "tiny pockets" of land.
Then after the story ended the news reader came on and reassured everyone that no freehold, farming or park land was affected (not sure what this leaves) and that land use is limited to camping.
So rest assured they won't be farming their farmland, or building structures on their land, or having visitors as they would have traditionally, and no area will be closed to the public.
Given that anybody could have gone camping there before, it's not clear what the actual fuck the white fella have handed over, except possibly the costs of weed control.
In 1632, the town came with a) a coal mine and b) a power plant.
I wonder how long they would be able to stay running without spare parts.
And gas/diesel — all the mines I've been in relied on internal combustion engines for a lot of the work. Granted that could be worked around, but that's one more thing for a stressed/overloaded technical staff to do.
Yeah, entirely credible inanity.
That's why I call it Claytons Title... like the real thing, but not much like the real thing.
Like so many things, it's intended to be entirely symbolic forever, until sadly the last aboriginal passes away and we can move on into the great white future*.
* future may be less white than some people imagine. Actually... I wonder if we'll get an influx of cork asian refugees from the current not-a-war?
The 1632 series was fun to read, but not at all serious. Very "Hardy Boys" or "Famous Five" level of not-quite-superheros. I suppose MacGuyver and Indiana Jones are the TV equivalents - people who never panic and always have a sensible response to unimaginable situations. Plus, like Explosions and Fire on youtube, can conjure amazing things out of household chemicals (guess what E&F makes...). Albeit E&F is not that lucky, not at the "every single thing goes better than anyone could imagine" level.
The supply chain wasn't so much any one thing, it's that by sheer coincidence the town just happened to have exactly the correct set of a million random tools and parts. And luckily they could always find things just when they were needed, and luckily they always worked. Because luckily they had just the right person, who luckily knew just what to do. And luckily happened to be there at the right time.
Robert Prior said: I wonder how long they would be able to stay running without spare parts.
We're about to find out. Covid has been released in China. When 20% of the people who make all our stuff lose the ability to count, the old "supply chain issues" are going to hit hard.
»Covid has been released in China.«
Can we talk about that for a moment ?
If China spent the "quarantine" period vaccinating as much of the population as they could, this should be a non-event.
But from the exponentials it looks like they did not ?
Covid has been released in China.
or perhaps re-released
the Yankee supremacism
there's no denying that u can occasionally stumble over levels of self-fondling which are unseemly for adults
i enjoyed twain's book, though at an age when my critical faculties may not have been fully developed
Poul-Henning Kamp said: If China spent the "quarantine" period vaccinating as much of the population as they could, this should be a non-event.
Yes. There's a lot they could and should have done to prepare. Indoor air standards, U bends in plumbing systems fitted to multi occupant buildings (so fecal aerosols are not drawn into the ventilation), better masking, medical stockpiles, and vaccination. (though vaccination isn't much protection against long covid, and it's the long covid that's going to hammer production).
947:
okay, it is now tentatively titled either...
2034: The Glasgow Entanglement
2034: The Brigadoon Entanglement
974:
when you got a chapter ready, please let us know if you need lab rats to test read it for you
keep in mind, there was pushback against freeing slaves in Northern states, including (I am ashamed to acknowledge) New York City wherein $20m (or was it $30m?) in loans to southern cotton growers was placed at risk of default (eqv to approx $500m in 2022 dollars)... and there were many offering very low key support in Southern states including rumors of sabotage... if you really want an enriched, complicated story you ought to include such entanglements
954:
you are welcome to grab whichever chunk of the USA you wish to send down the rabbit hole to Pernambuco, Brazil; just not the same timeline as the 1632verse; maybe a rustbelt-wrecked neighborhood from Detroit? a five mile wide patch of Salt Lake City suburbs? a fatcat retirement community from Florida? or how about a Tesla giga-factory whilst Musk was on site speechifying? (oh the look on his face after losing it all!)
as to whether "would Baen go for it" the worst they will do to your elevator pitch is correct the spelling and red circle paragraphs with overt flaws and wait for you to retry... they gain nothing by refusing pitches... just remember they got FAQs and formats for anyone looking to pitch
Well, that last effort didn't work out very well, did it?
Let's try again (without links, and in summary only).
The current issue of New Scientist suggests tracking Alien Spacecraft warp signatures using LIGO, the gravitational wave detector.
A proposed warp drive is the Alcubierre drive. This works by expanding contracting space time in front of/behind the space craft.
Lest that seem a bit incredible, let's note that cosmic inflation involves space-time distortion that's not -- as far as we know -- caused by mass.
Finally, note that there is one LIGO event that currently has no explanation: S200114f. A frequency of tens of Herz for 14 milliseconds? Could it instead be an impulse, as viewed by a frequency limited detector?
And big question: could LIGO have already detected a warp drive signature?
(Answer: almost certainly not, but it's worth asking what such a signature might look like, and what the effect here on earth were such a detection to be made.)
China decided to use a vaccination that they produced inside the country, rather than the Astra-Zenica / Pfizer combinations.
From what I've heard, their vaccination isn't as effective. However, the point is moot. Even if they had been using the better vaccinations, lifting most / all restrictions would have led to a COVID boom. Their curve would be a bit flatter, but still going up like a rocket.
947 - Brigadoon is the title of a Hollywood musical. It is not now, and never was, in any way, shape or form an actual place.
956 - EC, with modern heating and window tech, you can grow tomatoes and chilies at 57.5N; been there, done that... In fact, with unheated greenhouses you can grow tomatoes at 55.9N.
987, 988 - And there's wood, and such things as wood fired HWS.
Very "Hardy Boys" or "Famous Five" level of not-quite-superheros. I suppose MacGuyver and Indiana Jones are the TV equivalents - people who never panic and always have a sensible response to unimaginable situations... The supply chain wasn't so much any one thing, it's that by sheer coincidence the town just happened to have exactly the correct set of a million random tools and parts. And luckily they could always find things just when they were needed, and luckily they always worked. Because luckily they had just the right person, who luckily knew just what to do. And luckily happened to be there at the right time.
Pretty accurate description of "Ring of Fire". And while this kind of story is obviously some people's thing, it is not mine. And time displacements fiction does not HAVE to be "Hardy Boys on The Seas of Time" -- as I said earlier, S.M. Stirling's series is much grittier although still has a happy ending, and so is "The Alexander Inheritance", despite being set in the same universe as "Ring of Fire".
"Destroyermen" OTOH is even worse than "1632" in this regard -- I could not make it past book 1.
Brigadoon is the title of a Hollywood musical. It is not now, and never was, in any way, shape or form an actual place.
Err, yes, and?
Actually the Hollywood film didn't happen for seven years after the Broadway stage version first appeared, I have much of it seared into my brain due to helping with lights for a local production many years ago.
Also, named after...
Broadway musical first. Saw it staged (not on Broadway!) and it is very much a product of its time in its gender roles, etc.
Lest Darkness Fall is perhaps the granddaddy of "Person falls back in time and has to deal with it" (with Connecticut Yankee being the great-granddaddy of the genre). As I recall, LDF's first half was good, with some actual character development. Its second half was "Padway went here, did this. Then he went there, did that" and so on.
Lest Darkness Fall and Related Stories has just been reissued, with another story or two. If ever it's on sale at the Kindle store I might buy it for the related stories. Apparently one of the stories has tangentially to do with dealing with the Plague of Justinian, which would be a challenge, to say the least. How do you reduce the number of rats in cities with little to no working sewers? How to enforce quarantines? And all this in the sixth century...
Now I'm wondering what the love child of Brigadoon and Anathem would look like.
Let's see, multiple-worlds physics, a set of (multi-version) realms that get bigger, older, and harder to visit the further you go into them, and...a love story in there somehow?
Yeah, I know I just reinvented Mythago Wood. Oh well.
Re: '... the real evil was illicit hooch.'
Maybe - some years ago there was a story about some teenagers who drank some mixture of methanol and ethanol. They had no idea that 'alcohol' was a chemistry term. (I've been wondering whether there's any relationship between susceptibility to alcoholism and susceptibility to diabetes. Doesn't seem to be much bio/physiological research in this area despite the known social consequences.)
Dangerous stuff that seemed like a good idea at the time ...
-Arsenic in personal care products - make-up and powdered wigs.
-High lead crystal - the really pricey crystal (32%) leeches lead into alcohol so fast that you can get a toxic/fatal lead dose within hours.
-Radium - to treat erectile dysfunction
-Heroin - the 'safe' alternative to morphine
-Leaded gas to reduce car engine knocking
-Mercury to treat STDs (Oscar Wilde era)
Folks here can probably add to the list.
If we're doing one-way forward time travel, I give you...The Schadenfreude Express.
The theme of this shared world is that someone invents a stasis field projector that can be used to fairly accurately target anywhere in the world, englobing the target in a field of arbitrary size that will last anywhere from a few hours to a billion years or more.
The inventor decides to make the world a better place by bobbling people who scare or annoy them.
The stories are about what happens to those people. For example, a meeting of the most noxious Tories can come out the door 1,000 years after they went in, with no time having passed for them. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin rekindle their relationship on a dying Earth. That sort of thing.
I-131 to treat thyroid cancer. Then again most chemotherapy treatments are a race to poison the cancer or melanoma faster than it takes for the dose to kill the patient.
1015:
you've hijacked the theme of "Marooned in Realtime", 1986 novel by Vernor Vinge
still 'n all a lovely bit of kit, if only bobbling was feasible we could fob off our toxic crud onto future generations (10^2 years), another eon (10^6 years), or best of all, onto the next version of the Big Bang (10^18 years)...
wherein "toxic" could be defined as one or more amongst convicted felons, nuclear byproducts, unwanted political prisoners, excess population, impoverished population, et al...
Re: '... chemotherapy ... poison the cancer or melanoma faster than ... the patient.'
Yep - in the chemo scenario though there's usually a dedicated nurse/medic monitoring the infusion plus lots of follow-up tests. And that's also why CRISPr-Cas9 was/is such a big deal - much better targeting.
And in case the storm takes down the power lines ...
Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah/Saturnalia to all!
Stay safe everyone!
If we're doing one-way forward time travel, I give you...The Schadenfreude Express.
Is this an extant book, or something you just made up?
SFReader @ 1014: Folks here can probably add to the list.
Asbestos everywhere, including homes.
Mercury as a component of domestic central heating systems.
Hmm. I wonder if this was the same house
Is this an extant book, or something you just made up?
Something I just made up, and (googling) it doesn't look like the title is taken.
Anyway, it's simply a way of blowing off steam, by lovingly designing a future Earth, dumping people you don't like into it, and using your
deathworld to metaphorically give them their just desserts (or even deserts).Likely future trends that might be useful: --A true afrofuture, and a bunch of white bigots get their bobble popped.
--A future not just without petroleum but without plastics. Suitable for various petro-tyrannts.
----assuming humans survive, we're the great, untapped frontier so far as the world's pests, pathogens, parasites, and predators are concerned. Cycle this forward 100,000 years, and your focal character can experience the "joys" of going native, while the hospitable natives wonder what the fussing and writhing is about.
--Probably more things will become eusocial, so the future is swarmed. Instead of outrunning a Tyrannosaur, you target characters have to outrun a hunting swarm of wasps the mass of a tyrannosaur. And they have to hide in places infested with eusocial fleas and frequented by eusocial mosquitoes. A suitable destination for 'phobes of various ilks.
--Or you can copy The Princess Bride and introduce Tyrannorattus grandidentatus.
--And of course the sun's getting hotter, not colder, so the Dying Earth will actually look more like Dune than Eyes of the Overworld. If there are humans still around then (possibly the descendants of bobble-heads?), they may come in two races: black and shiny. Another scenario suitable for pale white racists.
It's all about the schadenfreude after all. And there's perhaps there's a final girl, who adapts to the world regardless, just to prove it can be done.
You're speaking of 1632? Yeah, I get real tired of the gunwank... and I get even more tired of the every-little-bitty-religious-sect-from-uptime internal politics.
On the other hand, none of the three stories that I had published in the Grantville Gazette had a single firearm, much less any fired. If you're interested, contact me privately, and I'd be happy to send you a copy of any of the three shorts. Oh, and the first one contains one of Eric's special characters, Red, the socialist/union organizer. The other two, no uptimers at all.
Mercury to treat STDs (Oscar Wilde era)
Mercury was used to treat a dozen or maybe a gross of symptoms over a period of just a few 100 years until about 100 years ago. Even into the 60s it was treated a bit cavalierly. Says he who played with it as a pre-teen when visiting a local college chem lab. And a friend once said it felt really strange to roll a ball around in your mouth.
We have changed our approach to such things since then.
paws @ 1009
I had a couple of "f1" excellent tomato plants on my plot. Being "f1" they cannot breed true ... so:
I cloned two, using side-shoots - both rooted {The second ... only just} ...
The larger clone now has an almost-ripe large tomato on it, in my frost-free { Min temp 3.5 °C } home greenhouse - and - two more small clones which seem to have taken.
Illicit hooch has been a medical problem for a very long time. At least one historian argues that post-Prohibition, it's harder to get doctored drinks than it was in the nineteenth century. Whichever.
Speaking of Red Queen races, patent medicines have now become poorly regulated supplements. We could go on about this whole side of medicine for a very long time.
I will note one real problem with real medicine: like the biotech industry, they use a ludicrous and unsustainably huge amount of single-use plastics. Solving that while maintaining some notion of sterility will not be all that easy, especially since hospitals are getting rid of their autoclaves in favor of single-use supplies purchased in bulk and discarded after use. This includes everything from pills in bubble-packs to single-use steel surgical tools bought from a company that sterilizes them via irradiation.
Getting out of this particular hole will be expensive, unfortunately. At least locally, the executives who could make the relevant decisions are not the sorts who see such problems until they get clubbed by them repeatedly, at least so far as I can tell.
Y'know, I think I'm going to stop here. ALL of this was dealt with in later books. Really.
One more thing - for any criticism of what the uptimers and downtimers could do, let me note that EVERYTHING (ok, not full scale dirigibles) has been literally tested... including the wood block ICE that someone built, and it ran.
I got to the fifth or sixth book of Destroyermen, and it wore out its welcome. Haven't bought any since.
One of the reasons that the novels I'm working on are in one universe... but each is stand-alone, with no characters from another novel (except for the one I'm slowly working on, that's the pre-sequel to the 2000 years before chapter in 11,000 Years.
Oh, and speaking of my novels... I'm again looking for beta readers. My #1 has had Life fall on them, and the others... I'm lucky if they respond a month later, if it all, and even that with me bugging them.
And in case the storm takes down the power lines
I'm very south of you (North Carolina) but the cold front hit us hard. 15+ C drop over 24 hours. And today as it came through things got, well, a bit windy. Gusts up to 40-50mph. And the power did go out.
And I discovered my muscle memory to modern times is strong. As I got ready to go out of the house and pre-position battery lights in case it didn't come back before dark, EVERY SINGLE TIME I entered a room my arm went to the light switch. And I actually flipped it 2/3s of the time.
As to why was I concerned that it might be off for hours? Due to some accident in history going back 60 years (30 years before me) my transformer is directly connected to the substation feed. When I loose power at the pole it can mean a few 1000 homes/business are dark. Which implies something big might have happened. Turned out to only be off for a couple of hours.
Like I said, "Boys Own" with Americans instead of Englishmen.
Solving that while maintaining some notion of sterility will not be all that easy, especially since hospitals are getting rid of their autoclaves in favor of single-use supplies purchased in bulk and discarded after use.
Plus farming out the actual sterilizations that are needed.
Blame their liability insurance companies' reactions to the scandal at Duke Medical Center a few years back.
ALL of this was dealt with in later books. Really.
And that's one of my points: I don't want to slog through several books I don't like to eventually get to a bit I might like. As a teenager when I had lots of time and read 100 pages an hour, sure. But not now.
Especially when they're lots of books by newer authors I haven't read yet (like Station Eleven) sitting on the shelf staring at me reproachfully…
"I'm very south of you (North Carolina) but the cold front hit us hard. 15+ C drop over 24 hours. And today as it came through things got, well, a bit windy. Gusts up to 40-50mph."
More or less by the way, in the USosphere the weather service makes available a three-day hourly summary of the weather at its major stations, which are located at airports. So to get the summary of temperature, wind, rain, barometric pressure at Raleigh-Durham airport, ICAO code KRDU, use
https://w1.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KRDU.html
Substitute other codes for other other airports. I'd guess similar things are available elsewhere.
"A frequency of tens of Herz for 14 milliseconds?"
Uh?
And in case the storm takes down the power lines ...
Just got the sideways snow here in the GTA, so far. My plan for the next couple of days is to stay inside, splitting my time between doing my exercises* and curling up under a warm blanket with a cup of hot tea and finishing a good book or two.
Got a Robinson Jeffers poetry collection I've been saving, and a couple of Drew Hayden Taylor's books, and Emily St. John Mandel's novels…
*Had my first physio this week, and have a list of gentle exercises to strengthen around what is likely a torn ligament.
Thanks, but I'd rather reread one of them then finish "A Desolation Called Peace", which I'm still reading, very, very slowly. And that won the Hugo.
I disagree.
Vulch, are you trying to claim that a bridge is a type of settlement!? The "Auld Brig o' Doon" being a bridge is even helpfully illustrated by Google maps at your link.
I enjoyed some of the 1632 stories well enough but my favourite time slip tales would have to be John Birmingham’s stories of the carrier battle-group that dropped into the battle at Midway.
And re: 1037 I hope to never read anything by Kratman again.
witroth
As in:
Ubi Solitudinem faciunt, Pacem apellant ??
by lovingly designing a future Earth, dumping people you don't like into it, and using your death world to metaphorically give them their just desserts (or even deserts).
You're talking about Australia? Not so lovingly.
He's an outright fascist. I had a run-in with him once on faceplant, in a thread following a post by Eric. The upshot was his third or so post responding to me was deleted by FB moderators.
Oh, and one more thing: his response to one of my responses was so out there... and the exact words he used, were identical to the words my late ex would use against others. When she was seriously drunk. So my take is that, in fact, whatever else he is, he's an alcoholic.
Antimony and lead were also popular make-up ingredients. If you find yourself sent back in time, do not paint your face with anything. On the same lines, there is the origin of the term "belladonna".
Arsenic in bloody well everything, to the point of seeming that the more loudly you'd say "wtf would they put arsenic in that for?", the more likely they were to do it. As I've said before, all the examples in Feet of Clay were real, including all the ones the Watch dismissed in one sentence on such grounds as not even being possible.
In the area of medicines, morphine in bloody well everything, since it was one of the handful of ingredients they knew about that really did something. There was some morphine cocktail which wasn't called Mother Carey's Syrup but was called something like that, which was sold as a means of making crying babies shut up. They sold a lot of it, too.
Of course that one still happens, but you can't just womble into a chemist and buy a bottle of the stuff for that indication as if it was aspirin. I remember that kaomorph used to be a standard, but it's not any more - at least I'm pretty sure it's not, in the places any of our regular commenters live.
Indeed pretty much any substance with a genuine strong effect on the human body got used as a medicine, even if the genuine strong effect was more toxic than anything else - as, for instance, with hydrogen cyanide. Strychnine, or "nux vomica" as the raw vegetable source was known, is another notable example, albeit one that makes a bit more sense. Not that this was always a totally bad idea; mercury as a cure for syphilis did actually work, which meant they had a cure for a particularly nasty disease in a time when they had next to no effective treatments for nearly all diseases. IIRC also one of the 1632 series has a plot segment which is all about the downtimers' knowledge of the good and bad effects of digitalis in a fairly medically realistic way.
Mercury as a laxative also worked, and was still a standard after WW2, even if "calomel" does sound more like a kind of sweet than like mercurous chloride. The thing about mercury is there's an awful lot of crap talked about it, and the sensationalist tendency to paint it in the same colours as novichok regardless of circumstance produces a grossly inaccurate picture. Actually its toxicity varies from horrendous to negligible depending on what form it's in. Organomercury compounds like dimethylmercury are indeed something you don't want to be in the same room with, but ionic compounds are much less nasty, and as related above the uncombined metal is something you can play with in your mouth without untoward result.
In the 20s or thereabouts, radium was treated as a magical substance that would produce whatever amazing effect you cared to claim for it, and got put in - or at least was claimed to be put in - all sorts of fucking stupid quack products for absolutely no sound reason whatsoever. Radium toothpaste, for instance. I don't know what that was supposed to do for you, or even whether it really did have any radium in it, but it said it did and it said it did something amazing enough to be worth paying for.
Silver nitrate was also used PO as a cure for something - I forget exactly what, but probably some form of VD - which mostly did work, but was a bit uncertain, and while it wasn't as unpleasant as most things of its era in terms of side effects, if you took too much of it you would go blue. Permanently. Proper blue, like whatshername, the opera singer out of The Fifth Element. That one still happens; a few months back in one of the old newspapers I use for bog roll I found a picture of a bloke who had been eating colloidal silver as a quack remedy for some skin disease, and turned himself into a Smurf.
If we're doing one-way forward time travel, I give you...The Schadenfreude Express.
Exactly that book was published in 1986: Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge. It was his first unqualified good SF novel, and it's the one that introduced the idea of the technological singularity to SF.
Elemental mercury in frozen (solid) or liquid phases has relatively low bioavailability. Mercury vapour is somewhat less safe. And organic mercury compounds are lethal neurotoxins.
Mercury as a treatment for syphilis made a kind of sense, when there was nothing better available: sure it was toxic, but syphilis kills, slowly and horribly. (People even deliberately infected themselves with malaria to cure syphilis -- malarial fevers might kill you, but they killed the spirochetae faster.)
while it wasn't as unpleasant as most things of its era in terms of side effects, if you took too much of it you would go blue. Permanently. Proper blue, like whatshername, the opera singer out of The Fifth Element.
Don't tell our Home Secretary, but if you're worried about prisoners serving life sentences escaping from prison, you could do worse than feed them silver nitrate. I mean, they can ditch the orange jumpsuits or broad arrow shirt, but they can't ditch their skin ...
whitroth:
here within one lab rat ready as beta reader...
Troutwaxer wrote on December 22, 2022 at 19:47 in #977:
When grapes get moldy, it alters the taste of the product, and no one will buy it. When cannabis gets moldy, illegal grows can sell it, and the consumers get a dose of aerosolized mold straight into their lungs; it's far more dangerous to inhale a toxin than to drink that same toxin.
Inhaling pesticides and heavy metals are likewise a health risk, which is why my state (Oregon) requires tracking and testing of cannabis products before they can be sold. It's a genuine public health issue.
By comparison, the alcohol industry has been effective at avoiding some regulation. When was the last time you saw a calorie count or nutritions label on your bottle of Old Overcoat, or whatever your swill of choice is?
Yep, that's what it says here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitational_wave_observations
As I say the event is: S200114f
All I can assume is that it corresponds to a half cycle or so. As I said, its this sort of thing that I find really interesting.
Mercury vapour is somewhat less safe.
To put it mildly.
"Vulch, are you trying to claim that a bridge is a type of settlement!? "
In Scotland, sometimes it can be. E.g. Bridge of Allan, just north of Stirling.
I'm sure OGH, living as he is that much closer than I am, can give you a more comprehensive list.
JHomes
Grapes getting moldy, sorry, there's the "noble rot" for some wines.
That would be vastly appreciated. Please drop me an email via my website https://mrw.5-cent.us
Charlie Stross @ 935:
Anyway, better gunpowder corning will get you bupkis if you land in the middle of a protracted multi-year famine. The problem with the whole Grantville AH is that the protags arrive in the middle of a war zone but even if they can defeat the more violent locals they then run up against starvation within 12 months. They're not a farming community, they probably can't research and deploy better agricultural techniques that fast. So they're doomed.
The 17th century locals are doomed too, but somehow manage to survive.
And even if the citizens of Grantville don't have a modern fertilizer plant, they have books in the public library that tell them how the 17th century locals managed to overcome the famine ... so they actually have an advantage of 20/20 hindsight and can begin to apply the lessons learned right away - lessons the locals learned the hard way.
So maybe that gives them a little time to adapt to becoming a farming community. If they're successful, and smart enough to SHARE their knowledge & success, that should win them local allies ... and in that case, maybe the famine ends a bit sooner than it otherwise did the first time around?
"all the mines I've been in relied on internal combustion engines for a lot of the work."
Really? Internal combustion engines are something you generally do not use underground, because there's all that exhaust to get rid of. Also, in coal mines, they're another potential explosion risk. The usual sources of motive power in a mine are compressed air ("blast") or electric motors.
Bloody big electric motors, too. You can easily have the equivalent of several locomotives running down there. Even if the power does have to come from diesel engines in the first place, it's obviously much better to have them on top driving generators and pipe the juice down than to take the engines down and pipe the exhaust up.
I'd expect there to be a step function in the output from the Grantville mine; if it fell below whatever was needed to keep the power station going, all of a sudden the mine would become massively more difficult to work and they'd be horribly stuck trying to get the output up again. Especially since the winding engines wouldn't work. The one thing they wouldn't be stuck for is skilled labour, though; plenty of downtimer knowledge of mining, even if their technology was less advanced.
The 17th century locals are doomed too, but somehow manage to survive.
Thank you for playing, but during the 30 years' war the overall death toll was about 20% of Europe's population, some regions lost 60% of their lives, and a few towns in Germany (including IIRC one where Eric set his story) took a 90% death toll.
To give that a modern perspective, the Europe-wide death toll was comparable to what Greece or Poland experienced under the Third Reich, Europe as a whole had an experience not unlike Cambodia's Year Zero genocide, and the worst-hit towns got a low-tech equivalent of a cattle train to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
For perspective, the US Civil War killed maybe 2% of the population. So this is, at minimum, an order of magnitude worse than the worst war on North American soil in the past 250 years, and realistically 2-3x worse than that.
As for your adapt to becoming a farming community, that's not going to happen without expertise, tools, land, and seed. For expertise all they've got is book learning (which usually presupposes some prior experience), for tools they've only got whatever they can make, but the killers are land and seed: the land is already occupied and not producing crops, the seed for the next sowing has been eaten (and in any case is 17th century strains, not modern high-productivity hybrids), that's why there's a famine.
Given supplies of modern agricultural equipment, modern seeds and fertilizer, and some folks who know how to use it, they might get something going within a couple of years. But that's not the premise of the story (hint: coal mining and factory community, not farmers).
To give that a modern perspective, the Europe-wide death toll was comparable to what Greece or Poland experienced under the Third Reich, Europe as a whole had an experience not unlike Cambodia's Year Zero genocide
Did you mean to say "Germany as a whole"?
Did you mean to say "Germany as a whole"?
No, Europe. There were wars going on everywhere in Europe for the first 4-5 decades of the 17th century. (Did you forget Ireland losing 20% of its population? Or England losting 10% -- they got off lightly?)
I'm struggling for a metaphor us moderns can use for what happened back then.
The second world war doesn't cut it, except at the margins -- the Holocaust gets close but was applied to specific groups, not the entire population.
Perhaps the easiest reference is the current ongoing war in Ukraine.
Ukraine's population before the war was roughly 41 million. After 10 months, 7.9 million Ukrainians are now in exile.
(Actual deaths/injuries are much lower but still running into six digits at this point, per US government estimates.)
So. If every exile from the Ukraine war is replaced by a death, that gets us into the low end of the deaths in the 30 years war (albeit in a shorter time period). The actual death toll in the Ukraine (est. 250,000 dead on both sides so far) would, if sustained for 30 years, match the 30 years' war.
So: imagine the Ukraine war, for 30 years. That's what Eric's happy little alt-hist yarn was playing games with. Not a great environment to bootstrap modern agriculture in, eh?
Eric Flint's theme was that blue collar Americans - and Germans - are smarter and more competent than they're given credit for. In the 1632 series both the Americans and the locals were freed from a system that had been holding them back. A lot of the story was local artisans taking the new technology and running with it.
There are a lot of parallels with the early days of European settlement in Aotearoa. Every Maori tribe wanted their own European, to help with the technology transfer. The Maori took the new crops (much better suited to the NZ climate than the tropical crops the Maori had arrived with) and the new technologies and ran with them. Within a few years Maori farmers were not only feeding the new town of Auckland, but chartering ships and supplying food to the California gold rush in San Francisco. It was only later that things went badly for the Maori as an overwhelming number of European settlers arrived and new diseases decimated the Maori population.
I'd rather reread one of them then finish "A Desolation Called Peace", which I'm still reading, very, very slowly. And that won the Hugo.
I've been basically ignoring the Hugo for years, as winning it doesn't correlate with whether I'll enjoy the book or not.
I have a few authors on my 'try everything they write' list. But I'm making a conscious effort to read new stuff by new authors, as recommended by people whose tastes are close enough to my own to be reliable. Or better, who can recommend something I never would have looked at but I actually like. The literary equivalent of trying new cuisines.
I'm also avoiding rereading a lot of books I liked when younger, to avoid spoiling memories of enjoying them. Some can stand rereading, but too many have racist/sexist bits that younger me missed*, that I now notice. So apart from some favourite Poul Anderson tales, some early Turtledove, and Dick Francis I'm not rereading much.
So more exploration, less comfort reading :-)
*At 100 pages an hour it's easy to miss things.
The Girl with all the Gifts is the title.
Good point. Almost all the mines I've been in have been open-cast mines, which I understand is very common in West Virginia. After two decades I don't remember the mine from the book — I think I just assumed it was open-cast.
Heteromeles @ 951:
How about "Every uptimer with south-facing glass windows puts a table full of seedlings under every window." It's inconvenient, but it gets the job done.
One medieval trick, as I understand it, is to use stone walls as passive heat sources: basically, you plant on the south side of the wall. The wall provides a bit of wind protection and retains heat, so the microsite is warmer. Since most plants are ectothermic, they therefore grow faster.
On Rapa Nui (Easter Island), they even planted under rocks (plant a sweet potato, put a rock on it), for much the same reason.
Not as good as a greenhouse, but when you can't make greenhouse windows, you've gotta do what you gotta do.
Do you really need a full greenhouse? Take that stone wall, insulate it with dirt on the north side & raid the local building supply store for all the storm windows they have in stock to create cold frames for starting seedlings.
But if you really needed greenhouses, you could build them using the same techniques used for stained glass windows (400+ year old tech in 1632), you just don't have to stain the glass.
And again, all you really need to do is buy time to convince the locals your ideas will grow enough food & your modern weapons give you an advantage to keep the predators at bay while you get started.
And if you're transported back from 2022 (instead of 2000), you know something about greenhouse gasses & the "little ice age", so you could maybe help generate enough CO2 to ameliorate it ... and hopefully, someone in town would still have some REAL BOOKS & not be TOO reliant on the internet for the necessary information.
That's the kind of thing I was getting at regarding lack of sense of scale and proportion; there's a deal of difference between doing something to demonstrate that it can be done, and doing it comprehensively enough to be used with a late-twentieth-century lack of concern for the attendant difficulties. It's particularly noticeable with things which are both complex and narratively useful, such as internal-combustion vehicles. There are multiple instances of someone coming up with a temporary/prototype/demo-scale means of providing the input to one of the more obvious supply chains, magic wand, two or three years later people are using the output all over the place as if they were back in the US. So there are all sorts of giant holes in between what we've seen they can do at the input end, and what we then see them doing with the combination of many output ends, usually made worse by the unfeasibly short time given for development and the massive logistics difficulties with everything.
I think some of this is a side effect of the multiple-authors thing; someone does a little story about someone scrounging on mine-tips for goberonium and knocking together a functional berro-gnurbler in their shed, then later on someone else remembers that and thinks "ah, yes, they have got berro-gnurblers", and proceeds to write another story where berro-gnurblers are a normal part of the everyday background, and the quantity of goberite that needs to be processed and refined to keep so many berro-gnurblers running has magically become an ignorable problem.
Hence much of my preference for settings where they have had to leave behind anything more technological than things like pens and trainers.
Many thanks for your offer. I've got your email address somewhere.
random thought of today:
Anyone remember the Roland Emmerich flic '2012' from the same year (you know, the one in which the world actually, really, totally ended…)?
That 'afrofuture' is exactly the end point of that movie, although I don't think the writers were really aware of that. So, the giant arc ships arrive on dry land somewhere in southern Africa. (Don't pay attention to the question just how on Earth a tsunami that flooded Mount Everest would have left lands with 8000m lower elevation untouched.) Focus on the other obvious question: how do you think the surviving population of southern Africa would react to the arrival of a bunch of white royalties and billionaires who carry with them all things from priceless artworks to cliché African(!) wildlife, but have absolutely zero survival skills, neither in the African steppe nor on a devastated planet? A sequel would have to address the issue that the global elite who saved nobody but themselves (and some of The Help, because they're depending on them) would be totally unsuited to survive the aftermath of a global catastrophe of that scale, let alone rebuild society and civilization. It would be an epic popping of bobbles. Maybe that's the reason no sequel was ever made. It probably wouldn't sell well to preppers, white supremacists and related demographics…
ilya187 @ 1019:
Is this an extant book, or something you just made up?
Google doesn't find it, but the plot appears to be an amalgamation of two Verner Vinge novels The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime.
Yeah, they are; I sort of remember that coming up somewhere, in the context of some fortunately significant fact being the result of their having one of the mines in WV that was not open-cast. I don't think I'm falsely remembering that because it seems logical to me.
Charlie Stross @ 1056:
So, do you just give up because there's no hope?
Or do you do your best under the circumstances, use the resources you do have & go down fighting?
Re: '... address the issue that the global elite who saved nobody but themselves (and some of The Help, because they're depending on them) would be totally unsuited to survive the aftermath of a global catastrophe of that scale, let alone rebuild society and civilization. It would be an epic popping of bobbles.'
Nice! The Elites would probably also bring along their bone collections.
Dumb question time:
I haven't read any of that 1632 series ...
But if you've got a ton of money and want to escape to some primitive/undeveloped place wouldn't you bring along as much tech (preferably robots) as possible? Robots wouldn't complain or revolt. This assumes that your get-away rocket has some energy extraction equipment on board to keep the robots fed while they build your Martian Versailles.
The other I wrote a long reply about making ways for lathes and other machine tools then deleted it because it wasn't really relevant. But yes, exactly the berryknurbler problem. Someone can make a set of surface plates using only very fine grinding compound*, ink and time. But the quantity of time is large, and when done you have completed step one of 2000 on the path to a new lathe.
Luckily once you have a surface plate you can make a straightedge and then lap your cast lathe bed flat by hand, you don't need to include "make a surface grinder" in the process (lucky, because one part of the surface grinder is some very flat precision ground ways...)
* which you can make via sedimentation, you just have soft grinding material so it doesn't last very long before it rounds off and is not useful. Again, you're swapping time for technology. Or you "luckily happen to have" a few dozen kilogrammes of 10um tungsten carbide powder.
wouldn't you bring along as much tech (preferably robots) as possible?
My knowledge here is specific to the point of possibly being completely useless, by there's also a support pyramid for robots. Unless you're talking grey goo robots, you just substitute "robot foot repair technician" for "horse shoeing specialist" and so on through your medieval society.
So, just for example, your "automated solar panel plant" takes in finished solar cells and assembles them into panels. There's roughly one receiving-stores person on the input door, one on the output door, and a bloke sitting in a chair somewhere ready to press the STOP button. Cool! Automagicificationalising! BUT... there's the peep who comes in to service the machine that puts plastic wrap on the pallets, who has different skills and tools to the person who comes in to service the conveyor belt that delivers the boxes to the machine that puts the plastic wrap on the pallets, and so on, and on, and on.
This is really fucking annoying if you're someone who thinks "we could build an automated solar panel factory next to our proposed solar farm in the remote desert". You discover that if you don't build that factory in or very near a major city you're going to spend a lot of time waiting for a person to fly our from that city to fix the machine. Then waiting more while the crucial part also flies out... or you build four automated factories on the theory that as long as one of them is actually working you can keep building your solar farm.
RE: 1632.
Since I picked up a bunch of surplused 1970s-era "back to the land" books cheap on Amazon, and they'd all been surplused from libraries, I think the idea that a community library has all the books you need to learn from is a bit problematic.
Thing is, there are always new books, so they surplus the ones that aren't being read regularly to make room. And if they're being read regularly, they get worn out, and then thrown out.
Especially in these days when "everything's on Wikipedia" or elsewhere online (hah!), I'm not sure I'd trust a small-town library to have the information needed to deal with something like a time displacement. Heck, I'm pretty sure most of them don't even have a full set of the Foxfire books, not that they're anywhere near a complete reference.
Now if the town had a bunch of re-enactors and some hobbyist smiths and other artisans, they might be in better shape.
Finally, I agree that dropping Grantsville into 1632 Pernambuco would be kinda disrespectful. My first thought for a substitute was Las Vegas.*
*Don't forget, most of the people who work in Area 51 have homes in Vegas. This isn't as entirely stupid as it sounds. Pretty close, though.
You can make very good straightedges with three bits of wood and a bunch of screws.
You screw in the, err, screws in reasonably closely to the same places for each bit of wood. Then you match a pair by adjusting the corresponding screws until every one touches its partner. Then you repeat the process with the third part, and then match the remaining pairing. And then you go round a few times until any pairing in either orientation matches. It doesn’t actually take much longer to do than to explain; I’ve done it several times to make 6ft-ish straightedges for woodwork machine setup.
No, it won’t make tool room grade edges, at least not really with wood bars. But it gets you a good way towards something useful. The whole matching three parts in multiple orientations can work with grinding metal bars too, it’s just somewhat slower.
Once you have a couple of decent straightedges matching in length you can make a good square quite easily. Or if you have some decent paper sheets it is pretty simple to generate 90, 45 & 30 degree protractors.
When you have some of these sorted you can make a surprisingly good lathe bed. And so on. Not that I’d like to have to do it.
I assumed that was a cultural thing where USA small communities have much more extensive libraries than equivalent villages in Australia or Aotearoa do. I grew up in a town of ~5000 people and to get any useful machinery references I had to go into the city of ~30,000 people. Or the local machine shop, who had the usual machinists library.
Our library had lots of fiction, and a reasonable range of non-fiction but it was heavily slanted towards school assignments and whatever random hobbies were popular in the area. A decent selection of architecture coffee table books, a whole shelf of how to do chemical photography, and one solitary book on machining metal. Plus a Popular Mechanics archive going back a few years after which I could buy them for 10c each in the annual sale. In retrospect I'm shocked at how large and busy it was, compared to similar places I've visited in Australia. Even more so now that "provide online access" takes so much of their budgets.
I've got the complete McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology in my basement. Picked up when the local library (town size of about 10K people) was getting the next edition.
Moz said: I assumed that was a cultural thing where USA small communities have much more extensive libraries than equivalent villages in Australia or Aotearoa do. I grew up in a town of ~5000 people...
That might be a good assumption. I lived in Fort White for 6 months, and it was a size that here in Australia would definitely not have a library. With a population of just 600. The library wasn't huge, and I didn't check out the machinery section but it employed half a percent of the population.
I assumed that was a cultural thing where USA small communities have much more extensive libraries than equivalent villages in Australia or Aotearoa do.
Might depend a lot on the town. When I lived in Vegreville (farming community of 5000) in the 80s the locals were incredibly pissed at the newcomers (scientists working at the new research centre) because they were pressing the library to buy more than farming books, readers digest condensed books, and harlequin romances.
Heh. A 2022 WV town going back to 1632, you'd add COVID to all of the niceness of the 30 years war.
~oOo~
I recently read the book Time Spike, which is a book in the Assanti Shards universe. Its basic moral dishonesty made me shake my head and drop it off at Goodwill immediately after reading it. (Skimmed the last half, really).
Premise: lots of people in downstate Illinois, from across history, from early 21st century to always-chaotic-evil Spanish conquistadors, Mound Builders and so on, are all scooped up, jumbled together and placed onto the Cretaceous period earth.
The 21st century people were mostly connected to a maximum security prison (as guards and inmates). One of the good guys was the warden, who when things were beginning to sink in had the insight that a lot of the inmates would not long survive, since the medicines they needed (from insulin to HIV-mitigating drugs) were no longer going to be coming. What to do?
Well, the main characters leave the prison for a while on a diplomatic mission. There's a takeover by a Bad Inmate and his crew. Who proceeds to kill all of the problematic people. You don't want AIDS in your new world, so the Bad Inmate kills all HIV-positive people. Diabetic? Kill 'em. Elderly? Kill 'em.
The authors constructed a scenario in which the good guys get to have their cake and eat it too. By the time they get back and liberate the prison (with the aid of some Cherokee from the Trail of Tears who were also caught up in the mess), all of the "problematic" people have been taken off the board by the Bad Inmate. No tough decisions to make! Hurray!
That and the two token LGBTQ+ people - the Manly Gay man and the lesbian motorcycle rider get married to. each. other. As a marriage of convenience, of course! So that the good Christian pastor can marry them and let them run the orphanage without offending his own sensibilities.
Made me wonder if they had Orson Scott Card consulting on parts of it. Baen books at their best, folks.
(Also makes me hope that the portion of the Cretaceous they wound up in was climate-stable enough for agriculture. Otherwise, everybody, from Mound Builders to 21st Century people are going to be going hunter-gatherer pretty quickly).
In 1632 there's considerable discussion of the already-existing, uptimer farmers in Grantville and what those farmers know and can do. It's not "city people must learn to farm," it's "uptimer farmers who know modern techniques adapt to the 17th century."
Moz - & others
The Machine Stops. E. M. Forster, 1909 {!}
- later - knowledge: - a copy of "The Rubber Bible" should do the trick. "Retiring's" answer is almost as good.
timrowledge
Assuming you have a reasonably flat surface, like a floor ... You can get right-angles with pins ( nails ) & string - the ancient Egyptians managed it, quite well.
JohhnS @ 1063: But if you really needed greenhouses, you could build them using the same techniques used for stained glass windows (400+ year old tech in 1632), you just don't have to stain the glass.
Glass in pre-industrial times was very expensive.
First you had to cut down enough firewood to heat a kiln to produce molten glass (this, back in the days when firewood was as important to survival as food). Then to produce a pane of glass you got a skilled glassblower to blow a cylindrical bottle, and while it was still hot enough to be flexible you cut off the top and bottom, sliced up the cylinder and unrolled it to produce a flattish square. Rinse and repeat for every square.
Most people couldn't afford glass of any kind. Hardwick Hall "more glass than wall" was an exceptional statement of wealth, not a routine matter. If ordinary people wanted to let light in without a draft they used a sheet of animal horn thin enough to be translucent.
Church stained glass windows were produced precisely because glass was rare and expensive.
Using glass to cover food plants would have been ridiculous: the labour of producing the glass would have been better spent tilling more fields and planting more crops.
If you have a small community of uptimers in a past place and time where regular farming is questionable.. you don't build green houses. You build fishing boats with refrigeration.
You are in a time before over-fishing the seas happened and you don't have that many people to feed. A motorized boat hauling long lines is going to be able to feed a lot of people with very minimal labor investment and you can build them quickly.
context = USA / NYC
so far, so good
despite brutal 18F (-7.5C) with nasty wind gusts very few reports in my home town of electrical outages... yeah... my neighborhood lost data for 5 hours but that's a shrug off when compared to a 100,000,000+ people at risk of frostbite and/or worst things
just how this fits into #CCSS we will not know for at least another dozen winters... as heat is 'fuel' for weather and disruptions of traditional patterns worsen it would really be horrid if for east coast of North America if summers got hotter and winters got colder... only way we'll know is by being there to endure it
Using glass to cover food plants would have been ridiculous: the labour of producing the glass would have been better spent tilling more fields and planting more crops.
Indeed, you'd most likely have had to station armed guards around the greenhouses 24x7 to stop the neighbours from stealing the windows! A cartload of window panes would sell for a small fortune.
Flats and slides for machine tools etc. can be made by hand-scraping with hardened tools. There's a lot of machine-tool restoration videos around demonstrating how it's done. It's a hand-craft that's been mostly superceded by modern technology today but it still works and there are even places where you can sign up for a class in how to do it to at least Victorian levels of precision. It does take time and muscle skill to do well, a bit like flint-knapping.
A granite surface plate can be hand-scraped to very high levels of accuracy using quite simple optical tools that don't in themselves require super high accuracy to manufacture -- interference fringes are your friend in this case. Again you'll find Youtube videos on how surface plates are recalibrated and tested, often using hundred-year-old instruments rather than gosh-whizzy lasers and computers and the like.
context = USA / NYC
ooopsie... context of the context... for NYC, 18F (-7.5C) is brutal we typically have 35F (1.5C) around Christmas/December
and yes, I am being rather focused upon my own misery, my nation's miseries, knowing full well one-third of Pakistan's 225m is facing hunger and potentially outright starvation in 2023...
I'm practicing my survival skills for 2027 when it will be eastern coastline of North America washed away in its first ever monsoon... which actually kinda-sorta already smashed down on NYC... in this decade we've already had people in basement apartments drowning
Consensus here, IIRC, is that password managers are a Good Thing (I don't disagree).
However. Anyone who uses Lastpass as a password manager should probably read this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/22/23523322/lastpass-data-breach-cloud-encrypted-password-vault-hackers
Public (unspecialized) libraries are VERY light on technical materials. I've never found one that even had the Diderot Encyclopedia, and THAT didn't include enough information to actually build the machinery they described. The best you might expect is something like Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia, but that's missing a lot of the basics.
Let me guess: next on your target list of childhood icons for evisceration is Smurfland...
context = 1632
tweaking any point of the original timeline is pushing against the existing status quo ante and if that is human custom-politics-religion there will be hostile push back...
whereas non-human such as brutal weather, sudden changes in food supply, it takes either a lot of brute force or a lot of time to shift things or a subtle mix of both... digging canals to permit irrigation sounds straightforward until you count up the man-hours and measure the volumes of sweat expended...
fine... no greenhouses becuase glass is too valuble... still plenty of tricks which will effectively add to growing season such as aforementioned irrigation and elsewhere mentioned seedlings inside houses prior to seasonal thaw... such as plowing and seeding which are labor intensive, could be improved upon...granted overworked equipment might only last one (or two or three) planting seasons but for those initial years that's a significant gain...
it was suggested to improve fishing yields... so why not dig deep into much of an increase they could achieve?
and in addition Grantville buys what it can not grow... sells items manufactured which no one else can ever equal without their uptime equipment... they might not have been such a breakout success as portrayed in the 1632verse books but they'd have done well for themselves... just not as much nor as fast... they'd survive at least two years with only moderate loss of life, mostly amongst the elderly and chronically ill cut off from uptime pharmaceuticals...
there's thousands of refugees (sadly) willing to work onto exhaustion 14H/D 6D/W in exchange for a safe place to sleep and promise of their daughters not being raped... anything beyond basics of survival deemed a happy bonus...
Let me guess: next on your target list of childhood icons for evisceration is Smurfland...
I am confused. What childhood icon did Charlie eviscerate?
or NYC, 18F (-7.5C) is brutal we typically have 35F (1.5C) around Christmas/December
Drive south 8 hours to Raleigh, North Carolina. 11F (-12C) this morning. I've been here 33 years and not sure it's been this low before especially outside of February. Brings back memories (not fond at all) of living in the Pittsburgh area.
Lots of fun 2 days ago draining the outside hoses on reels so I could bring them into the house. IN THE RAIN.
safe place to sleep and promise of their daughters not being raped...
In emotionally charged statements, why is it always daughters who are threatened with rape? Won't anyone think of the mothers? Or wives in general?
That's a bit of a snark, but actually a semi-serious question.
I assumed that was a cultural thing where USA small communities have much more extensive libraries than equivalent villages in Australia or Aotearoa do. I grew up in a town of ~5000 people and to get any useful machinery references I had to go into the city of ~30,000 people.
Well the town I grew up next to was 32K people with 50K total in the county. We had a decent library. In 1972 some friends and I got the digital bug and found 1/2 dozen or so books on digital circuits. To the flip flops and all that. But the Carnegie library burned about 10 years earlier and I suspect a LOT of older useful things went with it.
We were the biggest town in a 4 hours drive. And had a 2 year college. I suspect most of the surrounding communities had small libraries and drove to us for a more extensive collection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library
Is this a good time to point out that Thurungia, and hence Grantville (1632) is several hundred miles from the sea? As in 2 or 3 days steaming each way assuming more or less current motor fishing boat performance.
Unless you're talking grey goo robots, you just substitute "robot foot repair technician" for "horse shoeing specialist" and so on through your medieval society.
When Katrina hit the southern US after a day or two there was all this local clamoring for more helicopters from any and all sources to be brought into the area to ferry in supplies. Many roads were under water for a week or more.
It surprised me how many people couldn't put 2 and 2 together and realize that helicopters need a ground crew and "stuff" somewhere not too far away. So do trucks bring in fuel for the helicopters or food for the folks in the area? And that most places at the time that were not too soggy were way too far away. The Navy did bring in a collection of assult ships with helicopters which flew off them for a few weeks.
Anyway, it lowered my opinion of politicians another step down my mental ranking ladder.
On a side note NONE of the folks in my STEM classes in school during my teens went into politics. The folks who played sports or were in the debate club or similar are the ones who went into politics. Sigh.
"But if you've got a ton of money and want to escape to some primitive/undeveloped place wouldn't you bring along as much tech (preferably robots) as possible?"
That's not what the 1632 series is about. The starting point is a random and entirely unexpected magical event which picks up a small town in West Virginia and deposits it in the middle of Germany three and a half centuries back in time. The event is never explained, nothing else like it ever happens, and there is no magic whatsoever in the series subsequently - it's a pure one-off to start the scenario going, and the first few pages are about people wondering wtf just happened.
After those first few pages the whole thing is plain down-to-earth tales about what happens to a bunch of 20th century people plonked down in the middle of a 17th century war zone with no more technology or scientific knowledge than is embodied in whatever things, books and people happened to be in the town at the moment of translation. So what we're going on about is basically how plausibly those happenings are described.
But in answer to your question... no, not really; I'd bring along as much stuff as possible that was either sufficiently durable that I could expect it to outlast me, or that I could bring along enough support for to make it outlast me. So knives, axes, picks, shovels, clothing and waterproofing made from something that isn't insect or fungus food, that's all fine. Butane camping stoves, to pick something out of the air, not so much: even if I could manage to cart along a lifetime's supply of butane canisters, I still end up stuck when the rubber sealing washer for the canister perishes due to age, and all the spare ones I've brought along are just as old and just as perished. As for a bunch of robots plus all the supply chains needed to keep them functional, forget it.
Peter Pan, for a start...
Not on this thread, I take it
Didn't Bush's people send a bunch of volunteers with boats away from New Orleans after Katrina?
I think I have been treated with it - certainly I disposed of a bottle of calomel when clearing my mother's junk. However, if you had a resistant tropical fungal skin infection (think Port Harcourt) in 1949, what would YOU use? Maybe that's what made me as mad as a hatter :-)
Sort of an inverse to 1632...
I don't usually link to articles on Aeon, but this one is better than most. It's from a Canadian anthropologist working in Fukushima, and it's about how people are learning to live in a permanently contaminated landscape. They're getting a fair amount of help, less from the government now (who seem to be writing them off), but more from others, including freelance scientists. And they're doing a lot of (apparently thoughtful) DIY science in the process of figuring out what's contaminated, how badly, and what can be done about it.
Probably all of us will have to start doing stuff like this eventually, given how pervasive various contaminants are:
https://aeon.co/essays/life-in-fukushima-is-a-glimpse-into-our-contaminated-future
Didn't Bush's people send a bunch of volunteers with boats away from New Orleans after Katrina?
Don't know the specifics of your question. But in general all kinds of people wanted to DO SOMETHING but the logistical support of many of the desires was a bit lacking to say the least. An amphibious assault ship has it own logistics. Food, fuel, "ground" crews, etc... Someone showing up in a fishing boat with a lot of water bottles and not much else can create more issues than it solved. New Orleans is 100 miles up the river from the Gulf. Then there's the issue of traffic control on the river if nothing else.
About 10 years ago there was a big earthquake in Haiti. After a day or so the local government asked the US military to take control of flight operations at the airport. Basically run the tower and set up a logistical base. Several "independent" aid groups got upset when they were told to turn their planes around after getting over the ocean. The folks running flight ops had a long list of planned flights coming in, what was on them, where the planes would park, where their cargo would go, how they would get re-fueled, when they would depart and with what, etc... Those rouge "helpful" folks threw a hissy fit but they were just not going to help at all. More get in the way than anything else.
As to a group that tends to do it right, there is a group out of the Southern Baptist Convention. (I have a lot of issues with them but not on this.) They have custom build multiple mobile kitchen setups. Multiple large trucks. They get permission to go somewhere. And they show up with their own beds, food, fuel, toilets, etc... And start cooking meals. They can serve around 30,000 meals a day. You want a meal, get in line and they will hand it to you. No questions asked. When the need runs out they pack up and leave.
Thought o' the day from FacePalm:
"I'm glad we got to see Elon Musk run Twitter before anyone followed him to Mars."
I think this was one of the regular disaster-aid groups, and they bring in their own boats (not ships, just little recreational boats fitted for search and rescue.) They were apparently well-known at the time and there was considerable complaint.
As I said, I don't know the specifics of which you are talking about.
Disaster aid is always a mess. It's a one off event that is very hard to train for except to practice getting good a cooperating and making it up on the fly. And too much help can be as bad as too little. I seem to recall that the Bush admin put a coast guard tough guy in charge of the situation and he likely stepped on a few toes.
Bush didn't do a lot of things right. But on this one his following the law made things worse. The feds can't go in legally until the governor of a state requests it. And she didn't want them to go in with relief. She want folks to leave. Of course there was this minor detail that most of the ones stuck after a day or so couldn't leave.
Personally I thought Bush (or any president in a similar situation) should have sent in relief supplies and at the same moment told Congress to open up an impeachment inquiry for his law breaking actions.
I was for a time a member of a local RAENET group (Radio Amateur Emergency NETwork) down in south Wales, providing additional radio comms capabilities in emergencies. We also carried out exercises such as supporting the Brecon Beacons race, tying the various check-in stations together and providing data for the race organisers.
One time I was called out for a weather emergency, very heavy snowfall in the Cardiff area to the point where the Army brought in heavy earthmoving equipment to shift the snow in the city centre as regular snow ploughs couldn't cope. We worked alongside another volunteer group, Rover Rescue, who were all equipped with four-wheel drive off-road vehicles such as Land Rovers and even a couple of Unimogs via a local forestry company owner. We were tasked to get fodder to hill farms, deliver food and fuel to farmhouses, check on isolated families etc. We did nothing without the authorities telling us where to go and what they wanted us to do.
I have thought about this issue a bit, and damn little technology makes a significant difference without a heap of prequisite technology. It wouldn't be hard to teach c. 1900 century science and its corresponding mathematics, but it's not clear how significant, practical use could be made of it.
The exceptions are things like sanitation and disinfectants (including the corresponding theories), and systematic plant and animal breeding (including statistics), but no way would they have a quick effect.
EC
Um, no: Having things like birth survival-rates & the ability to nuke a lot of "bio-contamination" diseases down to virtually zero, along with even very simple antisepsis in injury cases would be noticed very quickly, I would have thought.
With respect to post-hurricane volunteer groups, it might be useful to look up the "Cajun Navy," e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajun_Navy
It appears that some Cajun Navies are more formally organized as non-profits than others are, but basically, they're people with shallow-draft boats who go into flooded areas to provide rescue and relief as they can.
Greg @1025,
I'm curious: which tomatoes were you growing that make cuttings worthwhile?
(At 200 miles north of you and with something of a frost-trap, I may not be quite so well placed, but my "Gardener's Delight" were a very productive delight this summer.)
What is the difference between "flotsam" and "jetsam"?
Dave Lester
"Belladine f1"
I also grow: Striped Red Stuffer / Principe de Borghese / Grushovka / Marglobe / Tigerella
John S
Flotsam & Jetsam
Flotsam is stuff that has washed off a ship due to storms etc, jetsam is stuff that has been thrown overboard intentionally (jettisoned).
Hence the freezers. It's more a security concern than it is a travel time concern as your boat is a lot easier to catch on a river than at sea. Fortunately, riverine piracy was.. uhm.. Frowned Upon does not quite cover it. "Gets you nailed to the nearest barn door".
Really!!? Conventional motor deep sea fishing boats already have freezer holds, so all you've done is reinvent something that already exists, and then extended its sail to the fishing grounds and back by several hundred miles.
re: legal cannabis
I'm not sure how paywalled this is, but the Los Angeles Times is doing a long series on the rather horrific problems surrounding legal cannabis, called "legal weed, broken promises." (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-08/a-series-on-the-fallout-of-legal-weed-in-california)
They're finding not quite modern day slavery, because of course that would be illegal. But if an illegal migrant has to seek legal redress for stolen wages, then wait over a year for the judge to hear the case, what's the difference?
It looks like our legal and regulatory systems are, as usual, grossly underfunded and understaffed, while the people they notionally police have become adept at generating "out of context" situations that mean the few field agents don't feel they can enforce existing regulations, even though they hate what they're seeing.
My sympathy for the cannabis industry as a whole is steadily declining. At this point, I suspect that consuming any of their products, at least in California and Oregon, is about as safe as taking a 19th Century patent medicine.
For the programmers in the audience, what's going on is akin to letting a kid (legislators and their staffers) write a complex program (the regulations, shaped by compromise to pass some legislature, not work optimally), that's going to have to deal with a very messy and unsanitized stream of input data (reality), then running it on unpatched Windows 95 that's permanently connected on to the internet (the regulatory agencies). And if you think the situation is stupid, we can grant you $1000 to fix it, provided you do the paperwork and wait a couple of years until everyone reviews your grant application.
But if an illegal migrant has to seek legal redress for stolen wages, then wait over a year for the judge to hear the case, what's the difference?
In certain other countries they just deport the migrant and the problem goes away.
Rules bind thee and protect me, remember.
I'd love to read this, but it's paywalled. Do you have an alternate/similar source for this one?
Heteromeles @ 1072:
RE: 1632.
Since I picked up a bunch of surplused 1970s-era "back to the land" books cheap on Amazon, and they'd all been surplused from libraries, I think the idea that a community library has all the books you need to learn from is a bit problematic.
Thing is, there are always new books, so they surplus the ones that aren't being read regularly to make room. And if they're being read regularly, they get worn out, and then thrown out.
But WHEN did you acquire them? Could they have still been in the local libraries in April 2000?
Plus you're not the only person who collects books like that. I've got whole shelves of DIY books & "how to survive farming 5 acres or less" and a fairly complete collection of the first ten years of Mother Earth News magazine. I don't think I'm unique in that respect.
Actually I have 40 years of Mother Earth News on DVD, but I'm only counting the actual hard copies in case there wouldn't be enough electricity for me to print them off.
When the community library sells off surplus books somebody buys them and they stay in the community for a while before being flogged off on Amazon - which I don't think was happening yet back in April 2000. I think Amazon hadn't launched their "marketplace" yet at that time.
Especially in these days when "everything's on Wikipedia" or elsewhere online (hah!), I'm not sure I'd trust a small-town library to have the information needed to deal with something like a time displacement. Heck, I'm pretty sure most of them don't even have a full set of the Foxfire books, not that they're anywhere near a complete reference.
Yeah, but remember when referencing the 1632 series we're talking about the state of community knowledge in April 2000. Things ARE different in 2022, more knowledge is stored in digital forms & in "the cloud" where they're not going to be accessible when they get left behind almost 400 years in the future.
OTOH, Doomsday Preppers weren't A THING (or as much of a thing) in April 2000** But we'd still be in a lot deeper doo-doo if the aliens launched us back from 2022.
Now if the town had a bunch of re-enactors and some hobbyist smiths and other artisans, they might be in better shape.
That's a pretty damn ELITIST point of view.
I think "re-enactors and hobbyist smiths and other artisans" could help, but the real town had people who actually still did that stuff for a living every day. They just didn't dress up in funny costumes to do it.
And how do you know "Grantsville" wouldn't have any "re-enactors", hobbyists or artisans?
Finally, I agree that dropping Grantsville into 1632 Pernambuco would be kinda disrespectful. My first thought for a substitute was Las Vegas.*
*Don't forget, most of the people who work in Area 51 have homes in Vegas. This isn't as entirely stupid as it sounds. Pretty close, though.
I expect Flint chose a town from a fairly rural part of West Virginia because the locals would retain more of the "primitive" life-skills that in more metropolitan areas are ONLY still held by re-enactors, hobbyists & artisans ... or doomsday preppers ...
** I keep going back to "April 2000" because that's the reference date Flint used for the Grantville EVENT ...
Within a 3 mile (5km) radius of the center of Mannington, WV I found:
A public high school & a public middle school (I'm guessing those would both have had libraries back in 2000).
In 2022 there's a Machine Shop, Hardware Store, 3 Auto Parts Stores, 2 small greenhouses, Home Center (builder's supply) PLUS quite a few obviously FARMED lands (and it's surrounded by forest, so plenty of timber to get started with).
In street view the Machine Shop has a sign stating it's been there since 1985, so again, I'm guessing the other businesses would be there in 2000 as well. Timber was one of the big industries when Mannington was founded, so I'm guessing they wouldn't have a great deal of trouble resurrecting a sawmill.
And I'd be willing to bet a diligent search of all of the homes in Mannington would turn up more than one copy of an Encyclopedia (Britannica, World Book, Funk & Wagnals, Compton's ...)
What I didn't find with my 2022 map search was a FARM SUPPLY ... and I'd be counting on that for seed given how the area was deep in famine when the up-timers arrive (even if it's mostly gonna' be hybrids that won't breed true).
Eric Flint: Remaking History
But my bottom line is that the people of "Grantville" had resources and had no choice but to do the best they could with those resources ... like the French Foreign Legion of old, MARCH OR DIE!
Moz @ 1074:
I assumed that was a cultural thing where USA small communities have much more extensive libraries than equivalent villages in Australia or Aotearoa do. I grew up in a town of ~5000 people and to get any useful machinery references I had to go into the city of ~30,000 people. Or the local machine shop, who had the usual machinists library.
They used to. A well stocked public library was a point of pride in the community. And the schools had good libraries too (often the school library & the public library were combined).
Heteromeles is right about how local libraries have been dying as a result of the internet ... but that hadn't happened YET at the time of the Grantsville EVENT.
In 2022 it could be a real problem, but two decades ago things hadn't yet gone to shit quite the way they have today.
And I don't think he gives ordinary people enough credit for what they can contribute.
I've read 1632 a long time ago and wasn't thrilled enough to read the sequels so I'm unsure about details, but my take was that 1632 was way too optimistic and naive, and not mainly for technical reasons.
The uptimers seemed to exhibit lots more unity than would be expected without first getting rid of the authoritarians/fascists in their midst.
Their dealings with local downtimers went unrealistically smoothly (17th century German society was much more alien from a 21st century point of view than say ...21st century Irak, and we know how well that went)
"They used to. A well stocked public library was a point of pride in the community."
Some such, I'm happy to say, still exist. I read through ERB and many others here a while back:
https://www.bisbeeaz.gov/2155/Copper-Queen-Library
Bisbee was very much a company town (Phelps-Dodge copper) through much of C20 and my impression is that the company made some effort to establish the city's institutions, including the library. PD pulled out decades ago, but somehow the community has kept the library going.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Queen_Mine
Paul @ 1081:
Glass in pre-industrial times was very expensive.
Yes it was. But query me this ... is it more expensive than starving to death because you didn't use EVERY up-time advantage you could think of?
You're not thinking in terms of what resources do the UP-time transplants have that they can apply to SURVIVAL
Using glass to cover food plants would have been ridiculous: the labour of producing the glass would have been better spent tilling more fields and planting more crops.
Not so ridiculous as starving to death because you wouldn't even try. The UP-timers don't have to source their glass locally. They have a substantial amount when they're transferred back in time.
There's a building supply store which is going to have storm windows & storm doors & pre-hung casement windows ...
There are businesses with plate glass store fronts. You're probably going to want to remove those for security reasons anyway. Might as well use the resource somewhere else when you do.
Try this. Paste 39.53088447155659, -80.34416097725924 into Google Maps. That's the actual West Virginia town Erik Flint used as the model for Grantsville.
Use "Measure Distance" to mark out a 3 mile (5km) radius around that center point and see how many sources of glass you can find inside the bubble of 20th Century America the "aliens" swapped back to 1632.
So you've got the glass to set up cold frames that give you a head start on getting your crops going.
But whether you have enough glass for cold frames is just a minor detail.
You can't do this, you can't do that, it's too expensive to use another is the WRONG attitude. And it's the WRONG ANSWER.
The QUESTION is, you've been transported back into a war-zone 350+ years in the past. What resources DO you have? How can you USE those resources to increase your chances of survival?
Or do you just give up and die?
Maybe if you don't just give up and die the first year, you can buy yourself enough time to set up manufacturing glass and other goods you can trade for resources.
We're all gonna' die sooner or later, but you should be thinking in terms of what can I do to make later into A LOT LATER.
The odds are stacked against you, so what's your EXCUSE for not doing everything you can to survive?
PS: Maximum effective range of an excuse is zero point zero meters.
I'd love to read this, but it's paywalled. Do you have an alternate/similar source for this one?
Not yet. I pay for subscriptions to some papers, because I'd rather pay towards good investigative reporting than let some well-heeled ijit buy the thing for a chew toy. I'll look around, though.
I'd love to read this, but it's paywalled. Do you have an alternate/similar source for this one?
Not yet. I pay for subscriptions to some papers, because I'd rather pay towards good investigative reporting than let some well-heeled ijit buy the thing for a chew toy. I'll look around, though.
I'd love to read this, but it's paywalled. Do you have an alternate/similar source for this one?
Not yet. I pay for subscriptions to some papers, because I'd rather pay towards good investigative reporting than let some well-heeled ijit buy the thing for a chew toy. I'll look around, though.
All important background and the case you make here is a good case. But it's still not the whole story and perhaps the difference between prohibition and ineffective regulation is not so great. But that doesn't mean effective regulation isn't possible.
I suppose the point you are making is around how stuff is grown and how the people who work there are treated is the bigger part of the picture versus how it goes down on the demand side. So the question then is whether it's really the case that a visible, legal, regulated supply industry is worse than what the invisible, illegal unregulated supply looks like. In Oz at the moment supply seems to be mostly about grow-houses run by syndicates, staffed by legal migrants from Vietnam and elsewhere in mainland south-east Asia who might be living and working under slavery-like conditions with the threat of deportation as the main point of coercion wielded over them. Generally police target and eliminate small-scale cottage industry stuff and measure their success on the scarcity of supply in relation to demand, often enough the metric is the price.
I don't go along with the Libertarian argument about this at all, but I do think visible and regulated is preferential, even if it takes a long time to get the regulations right.
That it already exists is the point? Known, reliable solve. Mechanized Fishing vastly beats farming on "Calories per work and resources invested" up until you overfish the seas, which a single small city cannot do. Being up a river is a slight inconvenience, sure, but not an actual obstacle unless you piss of everyone enough to get barred from the river.
context = NYC
we bottomed out at 7F (-13.8C) and have been 'warming up' from there... normally late December is regarded as chilly at 28F (-2.2C)... so this is much, much colder than the norm
what most folks -- general public & governmental officials -- are unaware of is how weather works... moisture and heat and wind mingle in way subtle 'n potent... with heat being the 'fuel' powering the engine driving weather... so pump in more heat and the 'engine' is more powerful with the potential to gain yet more power as ever more heat is pumped into it...
the crazy thing is western North America is experiencing atypically warm winter whilst eastern/central NA gets slammed by temperature decreases... we ought be preparing for yet more such winters as previously consistent weather patterns are being destabilized... there was a lengthy list of locations which experienced below normal temperatures and much in way of nasty/dangerous sudden drops...
given how dependent the British Isles are upon an exceptional flow of atypical warmth -- BI ought be significantly cooler -- there's been a number of climate models suggesting (warning) of possible 10C degree drop in average temperatures in 2040s at the same time Europe roasts in their own juices... worsened winters but survivable summers... but? but there is no certainty of which climate model amongst hundreds (thousands?) will be most likely correct...
and then there's Iceland... the Shetland Islands... Norway... extreme southern Argentina... and oh yeah Russia... all going to be smacked by changes in winter weather patterns throughout the 2030s... might not stabilize for decades...
Ok, on the "must exist" rules, find me either 2 or 3 Volvo Penta engines or manufacturing designs (must include Bill of Materials) for same in Grantville. Then explain how you are going to pass every riverine city who thinks they are entitled to passage fees from river traffic.
John S @ 1121
*A well stocked public library was a point of pride in the community. *
YES, well .... time was, when I was at school { Left to go to Uni in 1964 } Walthamstow had the second-best library service in London - only Westminster was better. I used those libraries A LOT.
I haven't been into a "Waltham Forest" { Walthamstow + Chingford + Leyton } library for over 15 years.
They have been gutted of many books, in favour of "media" - not helped by one prominent total piece of shit - Cllr Clyde Loakes - who stated that we "didn't need" lots of those old books & went on a one-man spree Locally referred to as the "Loakes tour of destruction"
He's still around & hopes that people have forgotten, but some of us have not ... because we have two local museums - both of which he desperately tried to close.
The Water House / William Morris Gallery - about 10 minutes from my front door.
and
The Vestry House Museum - less than 5 minutes from my front door.
He failed after a vicious public campaign, I'm glad to say.
Talking of culture, you may remembere that I have previously mentioned that the weekend editions of the "FT" are often worth reading. Yesterday, they hit the jackpot in their "lunch with the FT" spot: - Olena Zelenska
Why does it have to be a Penta engine? They're just car engines (Volvo for the smaller sizes and Yank V8s for the big ones) with some of the bits that bolt on to it changed, like different external coolant plumbing and simpler carburation. You could do just as well using a car engine with the car carburation and the car water-to-air heat exchanger, or probably better given the amount of trouble people seem to have getting those water-to-water systems to work properly. (Seems like about half the stuff I chance across on the internet about marine engines in that size range is people going on about their cooling system woes.)
Certainly free passage on the river is a problem. They do build a few boats that can make it all the way to the sea and back, but as I remember it either they're military vessels that can cope with various people on the way trying to interfere with them, or they proceed escorted by such, and they don't do it very often.
1133 Para 1 - Volvo Penta engines are specifically created for the hours, even days of constant throttle running that happen to marine engines.
Para 2 - Agreed, with the note that they were working mostly from historical records from the Slaveowners' Second Treasonous Revolt as base designs.
context = covid
which is once again a world wide FUBAR... UK has a health care system teetering upon total collapse... USA's health care was already partially collapsed in 2019 and is now teetering upon total collapse when-not-if next wave of mutations smacks down... China's version of vax is viewed by experts as insufficiently robust but we will never know because, as with all dictatorships and wannabe dictators (cough-cough-GOP-governors of USA states) burying bad news is fastest effective response
"China stops publishing daily Covid figures amid reports of explosion in cases"
so... if you have not yet laid in supplies, do so given eyepopping post-Christmas sales given excess inventory due to consumer caution and/or poverty... toilet paper, jigsaw puzzles, room temperature long storage foodstuffs like pre-cooked turkey chili, canned beans, 5 pound cans of Crisco, metal tubing to improvise heating source upon kitchen table, et al...
"Flotsam" is the junk floating around in the water. "Jetsam" is the stuff you threw overboard to (attempt to) keep from sinking.
Howard NYC
IF the suspected figures from the PRC are as bad as people are expecting, then we are really going to have a world-wide supply chain collapse & therefore recession or even a slump. Putting all your cheap eggs in China's basket was always going to be a mistake as we are going to discover.
Maybe. Most of the un-vaxed are the elderly. And the big problem / reason they went wit Zero Covid was the lack of a health care system that could deal with huge number of respiratory cases. Their medical system, AIUI, was/is mostly geared to dealing with acute care of immediate things like car crashes or heart attacks. Not a month on a vent.
Putting all your cheap eggs in China's basket was always going to be a mistake as we are going to discover.
Have to semi-disagree with you on that one.
This worked just fine for decades. Sure, you lost jobs at home, and hollowed out your own infrastructure, but you got cheap stuff (clothes, electronics).
What we are seeing (or about to see) is the difference between efficiency and resiliency. The powers that be have been moving so far down the road of efficiency, they're going to find out just how very resilient the current system isn't.
"They planned their campaigns just as you might make a splendid set of harnesses. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot and went on."
—Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
context = New York
surviving winter in northern New York
https://twitter.com/i/status/1606483619450683392
The powers that be have been moving so far down the road of efficiency, they're going to find out just how very resilient the current system isn't.
Of course Pogo's comments rule. The population electing the politicians and doing the shopping go for cheaper 99% of the time. Till it doesn't work. Then they want someone else to blame.
Engines generally don't object to being run constantly at their optimal speed. Will a repurposed car engine last the life of the boat? Perhaps not. But it wouldn't be a problem until you put enough hours on it to actually wear it out several years later.
All important background and the case you make here is a good case. But it's still not the whole story and perhaps the difference between prohibition and ineffective regulation is not so great. But that doesn't mean effective regulation isn't possible.
I guess I didn't connect the dots. Controlling an addiction industry like alcohol or cannabis is a red queen race, meaning that the people trying to profit from the industry and the people trying to control its worst excesses are in a constant struggle that requires both resources and regular innovation.
Now I'm not arguing that cannabis and alcohol don't have redeeming qualities, nor am I arguing that locking up end-users, especially in a politically biased way, is a good thing. What I'm arguing about here is society trying to control the the negative impacts of addictions that some people are profiting from encouraging.
What California is demonstrating is that ending such a Red Queen race is harder than it looks. What we've apparently done is stop struggling against the cannabis addiction industry, assuming that they'll suddenly start being law abiding, that they'll be willing to stop cutting corners and exploiting workers, just because law enforcement has mostly stopped going after them. Apparently that was a bad assumption?
What I'm suggesting is that decriminalizing end-use of many drugs is something we agree on. Treating addiction as a public health problem is a good idea (don't jail addicts just for being addicted, and try to help them go clean if it's affordable). However, industries that deliberately promote addiction should be leashed, hard. Laws and law enforcement should be designed and funded to make it relatively cheaper and more profitable for the industry to follow the laws rather than to break them. That, in itself, is not cheap. But California's example suggests it's worth doing.
Oh, and happy celebrations to all who celebrate.
If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, it looks like we're planning to give you back your sunlight in a couple of days. Sorry for the delay.
We have lots of sun. We'll trade it for therms. 33F just now. Which is above predicted. My son had some salad fixings in the fridge he has in his garage. They are frozen. I think last night it got down to 15F.
What I'm arguing about here is society trying to control the the negative impacts of addictions that some people are profiting from encouraging.
When they finally enacted an "eduation" lottery here 10 years or so ago, there was a provision that gambling addiction prevention should get some percentage of the take. So you get these bland ads "if you have a gambing problem dial xxx-xxx-xxxx" or similar. Bracketed by WIN $MILLIONS, it's easy, ads.
And the online sports gambling industry. Oh, my what a way for greed rich folks to extract piles of money from not so rich to poor folks.
1142 - Thomas, before continuing this conversation, try actually investigating the design and engines of some actual blue water pelagic fleet fishing boat. I've been doing this on various levels for the last 55 years, and figure that the owners know what works.
1145 - David, fridges are designed to be used in temperatures above freezing.
I know. I told him to leave the space heater running.
But they will actually hold the temp higher internally than the outside for a decent amount of time due to all the insulation. But it was down to 20F inside his garage last night.
Visiting England
My neighbor regularly visits England/UK as his daughter lives there. (He was born in Scotland, lived in various bits of the world at various times and now lives a couple of blocks from me in North Carolina.)
Last summer he went over for a month or so to greet the birth of his grand child. Got caught up in the travel crazy of Europe and didn't get home till weeks after the original plan. I realized I hadn't checked on his house for a few weeks and stopped in last August. Fridge water line had broken and was running for a few weeks. Fun times for the last few months. Re-construction to start soon.
He went back to England about 10 days ago to swing by and visit friends and relatives in various places before settling in with his daughter for the holidays. 5 minutes after he showed up at his college roommate's flat the ex-roommate had a heart attack. 999 and emergency ride. Will have bypass surgery this week.
I told him maybe he should stop visiting the UK.
Merry F^*%#n' Christmas!!!
I'm headed out to the Chinese Buffet and I AIN'T COUNTING NO DAMN CARBS. I'll worry about blood sugar tomorrow.
“ Then explain how you are going to pass every riverine city who thinks they are entitled to passage fees from river traffic.”
A lot of the “Industrial Revolution” economic boom was transport. And a lot of that was political change not technology.
Turnpikes in the UK, with the turnpike trust doing real road maintenance and charging tolls (instead of every village with a river bridge charging their own toll). And the trust set tolls much higher for narrow wheels that rip up roads, etc.
The UK’s canal system. Bloody huge impacts.
And getting rid of having to pay tolls to pass under every bridge, and to pass every castle and town, on European rivers. And some of those bridges were built as much to enforce river tolls as to get across - the famous bridge in the song Sur Le Pon d’Avignon was primarily built to stop river traffic sneaking past untolled.
Heteromeles wrote on December 24, 2022 at 23:27 in # 1117:
{snip}
https://archive.ph/EU3Z4
https://archive.ph/qi1kM
https://archive.ph/eLlIp
https://archive.ph/F5gaX
https://archive.ph/Nnmyb
https://archive.ph/98QEb
https://archive.ph/Me6es
https://archive.ph/SICEM
https://archive.ph/cKZE8
https://archive.ph/Wjtvl
https://archive.ph/RyQ9u
{snip}
The Oregon Liquor Control Commission is legendarily rigid. When it acquired cannabis regulation, I viewed that with apprehension, but they seem to be doing an acceptable job. If you have evidence to the contrary, I would welcome it.
https://www.oregon.gov/ODA/agriculture/Pages/Cannabis.aspx
Wildcat grows do still exist, and need enforcement. That's in the hands of county law enforcement. I've no doubt that the local equivalents of Jay and Silent Bob are getting their product from unregulated growers. However, anyone with a lick of sense sticks to the licensed stores when they buy, and there are certainly enough of them in the Portland Metro.
Every bushfire season in Australia people discover that cheap petrol engines don't work well when run at full power for extended periods. Sadly some of them discover this when their pump stops working as the fire front passes over. With really cheap pumps "extended periods" can be less than 10 hours. If you want the funny version some dude is current driving a kids motorised toy across Utah... (youtube)
The same applies to generators. Those should in theory be designed for continuous operation, but when you read the manual you often discover service intervals in the low hundreds of hours... you have to shut it down weekly to replace the oil.
Bigger engines are often designed with larger oil systems and way more filtration so they don't have to do that as often. They also have two of many things and can swap between them while one set is serviced. Just as one simple, obvious example.
I assume we're talking about diesel engines, because petrol ones have a whole host of problems starting with "will only run on very specific fuel mixes that also have short shelf lives".
JReynolds
"The Duke of Wellington, inventor of the Sound-Byte"
And - one of my favourite Wellesley quotes, in fact!
Re: 'So you've got the glass to set up cold frames that give you a head start on getting your crops going.'
There's also various broken glass, beer bottles, jars, etc. - all of a sudden they're worth their weight in gold! Dumb question: do you need any special type of glass to make fresnel lenses? I ask because when I first read years ago that they can be used to make a solar powered oven, I thought it was amazing. Yeah - I know usage is limited to bright sun but still a helluva lot better than nothing (or toxic coal).
Some comments sound as though the people making them hadn't lived through the COVID pandemic, i.e., supply chain disruptions, stores running out of basics, pharmacies running out of pediatric meds, etc. Being sent back 300 years would be way worse!
Oh yeah - anyone with wind or solar powered electricity generation would probably be able to access their laptop for any info saved in pdf. Even better if someone had all of the Encyclopedia Britannica on disc.
Key issue of a small town/city being magically transported a few centuries back in time: your clothing will give you away. Zippers and velcro are new tech. A lot of the underwear we take for granted is also fairly recent, esp. bras (women). And since the majority of clothing made/sold in the past couple of decades is a synthetic, once it falls apart it cannot be re-used safely.
Demographic profile - huge difference - from broad pyramid (youngest at bottom) to almost a straight rope distribution for age in some Western countries. Education of youngsters (and everyone else really) would have to be another top priority even if it seems very time and labor intensive. (This is another lesson learned from the pandemic.)
I was sorta thinking that a small town that was whisked back in time could helping civilization avoid costly tech and maybe even economic dead-ends. Was also thinking that deliberately simplifying designs and/or making them multi-purpose re: tools and products could be useful like IKEA - easy to assemble, can be used almost anywhere.
I think resilience in this type of situation means having more than one option for doing something.
1151 - I'm fairly certain that 1632CE was before the Industrial Revolution, and before the Canal Age; in fact I think it may still have been in the Merchantile Age, as well as the Feudal Era.
1153 - Er, that's exactly what I'm arguing about the non-applicability of an auto engine in an application where the unit will be run at peak efficiency revs for something like 300 to 400 hours non-stop, and about 10 men's lives depend on it keeping running like that.
make a solar powered oven
These days solar ovens normally use reflective material with a glass (part) cylinder to contain the cookery. That would actually work better with blown glass than float glass, even hand-blown glass.
Depending on the fine print reflectors might end up being the best use for aliminium foil for the 1632 people. Sorry, aluminim 🙄, caught by the nu spelig thing again.
I've tried to substantiate some of the rumours about the Penta version of an engine having better quality parts than the original car version of the same engine. I have not been able to. The only internal part that I have been able to confirm as being different is the camshaft, sometimes, being one with different timings. Apart from that it's all external bits that bolt on - carburation, manifolds, cooling system plumbing and stuff - and perhaps odd trivial things like a slightly different set of choices for which mounting bolt holes in the block casting have threads tapped into them and which are left raw. And sometimes a different compression ratio, if that even counts since it's done by using a different thickness of head gasket.
Marine duty is comparatively kind to engines precisely because they do run at constant output for days on end; once everything's up to temperature, nothing changes. Also in a working boat such continuous outputs are likely to be well short of the maximum, since as a rule once you get over around half throttle the fuel consumption goes through the roof but the boat goes very little faster, so it's not worth it. Car duty, with all that constant thermal cycling plus things like short runs that don't give it a chance to reach equilibrium at operating temperature, is by no means necessarily a soft option.
Those Volvo engines are not the usual kind of car engine, either; their strength and durability is legendary. In Sweden they like to bolt enormous turbochargers onto them and boost the power output by 400% or thereabouts, and unlike what you'd expect from most car engines they do not explode before they get to the end of the street, nor even the end of the month.
This is why you buy stuff with real Honda engines, and not things that look exactly like Honda engines but don't have anything remotely like Japanese-quality metallurgy and internal finish.
Thomas Jørgensen @ 1082:
If you have a small community of uptimers in a past place and time where regular farming is questionable.. you don't build green houses. You build fishing boats with refrigeration.
You are in a time before over-fishing the seas happened and you don't have that many people to feed. A motorized boat hauling long lines is going to be able to feed a lot of people with very minimal labor investment and you can build them quickly.
That's one way to do it. But how do you get your refrigerated boats from the Bavarian Alps down to the Wattensee? 😕
OTOH, the chunk of West Virginia (28.27 sq mi according to my calculation) that got transported to Thuringia is fairly well wooded, and I expect there might be a surplus of deer (in fact, close to over-population due lack of predation other than man) in those woods, so it's open season and smoked venison for the staple protein in the beginning. Smoked meats will keep without a lot of refrigeration.
Thinking about it overnight I realized the date of APRIL 2000 is significant, because while there are no large commercial farms in the community that forms the basis for "Grantsville" there is local food production - small fields, truck gardens ... and by April, those fields are likely to have been already planted.
Maybe it's just hobby farms & vegetables for the local farmer's market, but they have LOCAL food resources already planted in the ground that arrives with them. Also, backyard chickens, goats & few sheep, some pigs ... perhaps even a milk cow or two ...
And the resource the up-timers have that is being most overlooked is the PEOPLE. Maybe refrigerated boats are not THE answer for this particular instance, but at least it's a step towards thinking about what resources DO the PEOPLE have and how they can use them.
David L @ 1096:
When Katrina hit the southern US after a day or two there was all this local clamoring for more helicopters from any and all sources to be brought into the area to ferry in supplies. Many roads were under water for a week or more.
It surprised me how many people couldn't put 2 and 2 together and realize that helicopters need a ground crew and "stuff" somewhere not too far away. So do trucks bring in fuel for the helicopters or food for the folks in the area? And that most places at the time that were not too soggy were way too far away. The Navy did bring in a collection of assult ships with helicopters which flew off them for a few weeks.
One problem with Katrina was most of the Louisiana National Guard (and their resources) were deployed to Iraq at the time. National Guard units from other states did send personnel & equipment to help out, but IIRC their closest neighbors, the ones who would have been in the best position to assist were also deployed ...
The Louisiana AG & STARC (STate ARea Command) kind of fell down on coordinating out-of-state resources, but I think that may have been because their most experienced personnel were part of the deployment. And the Guard Bureau (Fed level) didn't step in to support the Louisiana National Guard the way they should have (because the Bush administration was relying on FEMA).
I know when Floyd hit North Carolina the UH-60s we had in the North Carolina Guard weren't enough, but Georgia came through with a unit of CH-47s ... and I think those same CH-47s WERE used to assist Louisiana after Katrina.
Heteromeles @ 1117:
re: legal cannabis
I'm not sure how paywalled this is, but the Los Angeles Times is doing a long series on the rather horrific problems surrounding legal cannabis, called "legal weed, broken promises." (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-08/a-series-on-the-fallout-of-legal-weed-in-california)
If you do find it paywalled, it's also been archived here: Legal Weed, Broken Promises: A Times series on the fallout of legal pot in California
First article in the series: The reality of legal weed in California: Huge illegal grows, violence, worker exploitation and deaths
They're finding not quite modern day slavery, because of course that would be illegal. But if an illegal migrant has to seek legal redress for stolen wages, then wait over a year for the judge to hear the case, what's the difference?
Wage theft & exploitation of migrant farm labor is NOT just a problem confined to marijuana growers. It happens ANYWHERE undocumented workers exist; undocumented NON-farm workers as well. Also, I don't like the label "illegal migrant"; for one thing, it's a racist & exploitive dog whistle.
It looks like our legal and regulatory systems are, as usual, grossly underfunded and understaffed, while the people they notionally police have become adept at generating "out of context" situations that mean the few field agents don't feel they can enforce existing regulations, even though they hate what they're seeing.
My sympathy for the cannabis industry as a whole is steadily declining. At this point, I suspect that consuming any of their products, at least in California and Oregon, is about as safe as taking a 19th Century patent medicine.
PS: Wage theft doesn't just happen to undocumented workers. But it's no easier to recover stolen wages if you are a "natural born citizen" ... even a fairly well (self) educated one who can prove the employer has broken the law.
stirner @ 1122:
I've read 1632 a long time ago and wasn't thrilled enough to read the sequels so I'm unsure about details, but my take was that 1632 was way too optimistic and naive, and not mainly for technical reasons.
The uptimers seemed to exhibit lots more unity than would be expected without first getting rid of the authoritarians/fascists in their midst.
That's where I worry it would break down. Too many SELFISH ASSHOLES could doom the whole community. Even one may be too many.
But I also note that in the book, the "community leadership" as such comes from the Mine Workers Union, so they may have somewhat more experience in cooperative endeavors (collective action?)
Their dealings with local downtimers went unrealistically smoothly (17th century German society was much more alien from a 21st century point of view than say ...21st century Irak, and we know how well that went)
IIRC, they were able to communicate because the local High School had a foreign language teacher who could handle enough German to get by.
Ultimately, I think their success boils down to "We all hang together or we hang separately."
"Dumb question: do you need any special type of glass to make fresnel lenses?"
No. In fact, the ones I've been acquainted with since the 1950s have been made of plastic, acrylic I'd suppose. Almost any transparent glass would suffice.
Howard NYC @ 1130:
context = NYC
we bottomed out at 7F (-13.8C) and have been 'warming up' from there... normally late December is regarded as chilly at 28F (-2.2C)... so this is much, much colder than the norm
Got down to 9°F (-12.78°C) here. First time since I moved in to this house that I had a pipe freeze. I have insulating foam wrapping on all of my water pipes.
Fortunately it wasn't a hard enough freeze to burst a pipe and a bit of gentle heat (and blocking up the hole I found where the squirrels ate through the wall) got the water flowing again. I've left that faucet on drip for now.
One thing I did find out that I hadn't considered before is in such a freeze the wood in my woodpile freezes & splitting frozen wood is NO PICNIC. Fortunately I had enough already split to fuel my wood stove and it's slowly getting warmer outside ... plus I brought some of the un-split wood inside to warm up slightly before I take it back out and try to split it.
Sorry, I was agreeing with you.
And as Pigeon points out, the difference between "DGAF about the weight, it has to work" and what goes into cars can be significant. Engines in commercial motorboats are basically the fire pump, all the time. No working engine = probably not a boat for much longer. "those rocks? Oh they're just a decorative fringe around the land"... said no boat driver ever.
Yhea, but if you are in "The harvest is going to suck" mode, that really isn't a show stopper. Put two engines in it. Nobody is going to let the perfect be the enemy of Eating.
SFReader @ 1155:
Re:
There's also various broken glass, beer bottles, jars, etc. - all of a sudden they're worth their weight in gold! Dumb question: do you need any special type of glass to make fresnel lenses? I ask because when I first read years ago that they can be used to make a solar powered oven, I thought it was amazing. Yeah - I know usage is limited to bright sun but still a helluva lot better than nothing (or toxic coal).
I don't know much about glass making other than some stuff in some books I own. I do know a bit more about what you might find inside a building supply store in a small town (from my own life experience). Also it occurs to me that one way to store surplus grain is to make beer & ale, so you probably wouldn't want to be breaking those beer bottles ... and I think you can feed the malted grain to livestock after you've made your beer.
I've never been a farmer, but I married a farmer's daughter - tobacco, corn, soybeans & peanuts - and my father-in-law & my brother-in-law did take some time to explain the facts of life (farm life), so I have some basis to apply what I can learn from books. I'm not starting from complete ignorance there.
Some comments sound as though the people making them hadn't lived through the COVID pandemic, i.e., supply chain disruptions, stores running out of basics, pharmacies running out of pediatric meds, etc. Being sent back 300 years would be way worse!
Oh yeah - anyone with wind or solar powered electricity generation would probably be able to access their laptop for any info saved in pdf. Even better if someone had all of the Encyclopedia Britannica on disc.
Key issue of a small town/city being magically transported a few centuries back in time: your clothing will give you away. Zippers and velcro are new tech. A lot of the underwear we take for granted is also fairly recent, esp. bras (women). And since the majority of clothing made/sold in the past couple of decades is a synthetic, once it falls apart it cannot be re-used safely.
OTOH, right this second I happen to be wearing a 19 year old synthetic undershirt and a likewise polyester-cotton T-shirt. I also still have 30+ year old blue-jeans even if I'm too fat to get into them right now. But in the last year I've slimmed down to where the jeans I couldn't get into 10 years ago fit me again (due primarily to dietary changes brought on by aging & covid & ...
Demographic profile - huge difference - from broad pyramid (youngest at bottom) to almost a straight rope distribution for age in some Western countries. Education of youngsters (and everyone else really) would have to be another top priority even if it seems very time and labor intensive. (This is another lesson learned from the pandemic.)
I was sorta thinking that a small town that was whisked back in time could helping civilization avoid costly tech and maybe even economic dead-ends. Was also thinking that deliberately simplifying designs and/or making them multi-purpose re: tools and products could be useful like IKEA - easy to assemble, can be used almost anywhere.
I think resilience in this type of situation means having more than one option for doing something.
And I think the KEY to survival is using ALL of the available options.
IIRC from reading 1632 lo these many years ago, the high school TEACHERS and the high school students were major contributors to the community's survival.
I expect I might not be among the survivors for very long because I'm now old & sick, but before I went I'd do my best to pass along whatever knowledge I have that might be of use ... back in April 2000, I'd have been much more of an asset to the community.
** ... which come to think of it may have instructions on how to make a Fresnel lens.
Thomas Jørgensen @ 1167:
Yhea, but if you are in "The harvest is going to suck" mode, that really isn't a show stopper. Put two engines in it. Nobody is going to let the perfect be the enemy of Eating.
Don't EVER bet your life on that.
That's actually when I would bet my life on it: certain death, or probable death is exactly the time when I would put an old car engine into a boat, load it up with probably-hopefully-maybe-ok fuel, and head out to sea.
People actually do this a lot, using the worst hack jobs anyone could ever hope to see, and relatively few of them die. Get a small-ish car engine, put a propeller on the end of a long shaft, drop that assembly into a dodgy looking boat, then use the result to travel round (generally calm) waters. The main consideration seems to be a location where the motor not working isn't likely to be fatal.
Some of the shallow waters in SE asia are a bit of a nightmare for navigation because they're covered in a mix of nets, lines and fishing boats. Lights are a "sometimes" thing, especially on anything unmanned. That old soft drink bottle floating in the sea might have 100m of annoying strong fishing line attached... in some places "probably does" because old soft drink bottles are valuable.
Like others have suggested though, if the aim is to fish in the North Sea, it means going through Halle (Hall in Sachsen in the 17th century), Magdeburg and Hamburg. The Saale is about 50m wide at Jena, so I guess it's quite navigable, but I've no idea how much is post-canal-era widening and straightening. Not clear how traffic on the Elbe between Magdeburg and Hamburg was controlled in those days.
"DGAF about the weight, it has to work"
Indeed, which is why the kind of thing I think of as more or less any kind of working boat in a size to fit up their river generally has an entirely different kind of engine from anything we've been discussing so far - a massive and slow-revving chunk of cast iron, chugchugchugchugchug, with proportions somewhat along the lines of less power output than the engine of a 1959 Mini, but about the same size as the whole car and twice the weight. And fuelled by basically anything except petrol as long as it's heavier, which nearly always means diesel these days. After all, you don't need huge amounts of power, you're not trying to get the thing up on the plane, you just need a big fine-pitch prop and enough capability for things like bucking some reasonable amount of current and maintaining at least directional control in bad weather at sea; and having that great big weight in the bottom is useful, anyway, for enhancing the boat's Weeble qualities.
They undoubtedly would have some engines of this nature in Grantville (although I get the impression that in the US they're more likely to use petrol engines for the kind of application that almost always gets a diesel in the UK, but not exclusively so), but I'd have thought they'd have a greater need to carry on using them for their original purposes - construction and agricultural plant, water pumps, electricity generation and the like. In the UK, at least, and even more so at the point in time concerned, though again I'd guess not so much so in the US, there would be any number of small diesel cars - proper diesels, that don't need electricity, and even a significant number without turbochargers - that would be of little use in the new environment and probably more useful with a horse tied to the front, and I'd probably go for using one of those engines (or two) to simplify getting up and down the river, while for propulsion in open water (and favourably-aligned bits of river) I'd be using sails, which everyone seems to have forgotten about.
Funny that what you mean by "fire pump engine" is more or less the opposite of what it makes me think of... I think of something more similar to a racing engine (Coventry Climax) than a long-haul marine plodder. You don't want a great big heavy thing to weigh your fire truck down; you don't much care if it uses stupid amounts of fuel, since (you hope) it's not often used at all; you don't even care all that much if you have to take it to bits after every couple of fires and change the knackered bits, since it's still a heck of a lot cheaper than just letting stuff burn; but you do want something as portable as possible that will put out oodles of power for a few hours and shift torrents of water until the fire goes out. Hence the number of steam fire pump engines that were basically a Roots blower working backwards, when nobody who tried that design for any other application found it any good.
Ah yes, the "longtail", engine plus long shaft mounted at its point of balance on a pivot on the transom. Ideal for crud-laden waters since when it winds a rope around the prop you can just swizzle it round backwards to bring the prop inboard and cut it free again. Also for shoals and shallow rivers since it's easy to lift it clear of the bottom.
Funny that what you mean by "fire pump engine" is more or less the opposite of what it makes me think of
I have this vague idea that the Engs don't get a lot of bushfires? Definitely not the "thousand square kilometres on fire burning everything in its path" that Australia calls "a normal summer"!
The thing that bites the cheapskates is that they buy a pump designed for the task you describe, then use it as a generic water-moving device and wonder why it stops working. Or they buy from Bunnings "as cheap as it can be, possibly cheaper" and have all the predictable problems right from day one.
Where you can I am a fan of gravity on account of it being fairly reliable. Put a big tank up the hill, build an earth rampart around it to keep Mr Burney Scary Thing away, dig a trench and bury a couple of pipes down to the thing you want the fire to avoid. When Mr Burney appears, turn on tap and hide in your shelter until Mr Burney goes away. If at all possible have a long, long distance between the tap and the button that turns it on, then watch Mr Burney on the TV from a safe distance.
Today it's only about 30°C outside. And the UV index is "white people should avoid direct sunlight" which is better than normal summer where it'd be 40°C (560R for the US folk) and "white people must stay inside and wear sunscreen at all times". We expect an overnight low of 17°C :)
Moz @ 1170:
You'd bet your life that "Nobody is going to let the perfect be the enemy of Eating."
"will only run on very specific fuel mixes that also have short shelf lives"
Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone who writes apocalyptic fiction just skips over the fact that petrol and diesel both go off?
That and the idea that plasticisers don't degrade. Everyone complains that rubber bands turn into sticky goo in the drawer but somehow 20 year old tyres will be fine.
Primitive diesel engines have the advantage that they're not too fussy about the molecular weight of the fuel, so they'll run one a variety of things. Modern ones sulk if you don't supply urea(?) to help control emissions and expect exactly the right sort of fuel to make the computer happy. Plus increasingly these days cars enforce service intervals and proper replacement parts using the computer so god help you if you don't have access to the right private key to sign the software in the oil filter... the car will stop after 12 calendar months and never run again.
I can just imagine some deep geek in a cyberpunk future making a living out of hacking engine management computers so they're happy with fake parts.
Primitive diesel engines have the advantage that they're not too fussy...
And before that were hot bulb engines, which have been discussed here before and which were made obsolete by diesel engines.
They had several disadvantages, such as having a small range of operational speeds and notoriously taking a while to get started. However, once going they required little or no attention and would happily run indefinitely unattended (and if they ran out of fuel would just stop). They would also burn pretty much any flammable liquid - diesel fuel is nice but they've been run just as well on vegetable oil or kerosene.
I seem to remember that Greg's commented on firsthand experience with them; is that right?
Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone who writes apocalyptic fiction just skips over the fact that petrol and diesel both go off?
It's not just you. I don't recall the said fact being mentioned, let alone addressed, even once.
1166 - :-) Engine is also at least possibly the electric generator and the source for the hydraulic systems too. So we're clearly in agreement here.
1172 - In particular the [Coventry Climax FWM] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Climax#FWM), which was notoriously oil thirsty exactly because if was designed to be revved flat out from a cold start.
1174 - Not "bush" fires in an Australian sense. but we do get heath and heather fires that cover substantial areas.
1177 - 2000CE predates most of this "engine ECU" nonsense.
Some people have already started, particularly with mapping out the urea (aka "adblue") system and/or exhaust particulate filters.
Primitive diesel engines have the advantage that they're not too fussy about the molecular weight of the fuel, so they'll run one a variety of things.
As will some gas turbines, notably the Honeywell AGT1500 power pack in the M1 Abrams tank, which is designed to run on jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, or marine diesel fuel -- specifically to make it easier to fuel the (thirsty) tanks on deployment. There have been at various times (I'm unclear if they're still in production) an aviation version (the PLT27, a flight-weight turboshaft for use in helicopters) and a commercial marine derivative, the TF15.
However I wouldn't expect AGT1500s to be in copious supply in a 1632-type scenario ...
petrol ones have a whole host of problems starting with "will only run on very specific fuel mixes that also have short shelf lives"
Something that is usually ignored in survivalist stories. IIRC gas has a shelf life of less than half a year, and yet I've read many stories where the hero finds an old vehicle, finds gas, and goes racing off like in the stories he heard from his grandfather…
I think most people don't know that, so the authors don't realize what they're doing. Or maybe they just don't care.
IIRC diesel engines are a lot more forgiving, and can run on vegetable oils (if tuned appropriately). I'd certainly double-check that before using it in a story, though!
I have used petrol that was MUCH older than that without problems. Of course, that was with 1950-technology engines.
Dumb question: do you need any special type of glass to make fresnel lenses? I ask because when I first read years ago that they can be used to make a solar powered oven, I thought it was amazing. Yeah - I know usage is limited to bright sun
Save those old tube TVs!
I used to do a spring project with my 15-year-olds (grade 10) to design and use a solar cooker out of scavenged materials. (Tied in with a lot of objectives for the science course.)
Usually the results were disappointing — the ovens warmed the food but didn't do much cooking unless the sub was really bright (and it usually wasn't, because late May in Toronto is like that). But one year a boy brought in a device incorporating a fresnel lens from an old TV, and even on a cool hazy day* it was burning food. Like, black and crunchy.
*The absolute last day I could do this, by the calendar, after a week of clouds and rain.
Noticeable != significant. There is the time for education, making the pipes, laying the pipes, but the real delay is physiological. In the short term, it would merely increase the proportion of surviving unproductive people, and wouldn't increase the workforce significantly for 10-20 years.
Wage theft & exploitation of migrant farm labor is NOT just a problem confined to marijuana growers.
I was under the rather cynical impression that those were considered features of the agricultural system, rather than a problem, by those that run it.
context = USA
under the category of "why not repeatedly inflict misery upon poor and/or minorities"
there's this gem of horrid mismanagement...
"In Jackson, Mississippi, city officials on Christmas Day announced residents must boil their drinking water due to water lines freezing and bursting."
https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_c101f1dffb49500b17c1b597b0ef54e3
already (in)famous for so many other abuses, now this (again)
for those looking for raw feed into a dystopian post-CCSS here is a doozy piece of reality to leverage, given how Jackson, Mississippi is in net effect as corrupt-abused-neglected as much of Pakistan
likely a forerunner of what the USA will look like in the (optimistically) 2050s though my cynical hunch it will 2040s if not sooner when long overdue maintenance & overly stressed infrastructure begins collapsing... so... all you authors be sure to research in-ground storage for rainfall... 400 liters will keep a family of 4 alive for a month (assuming one toilet flush per day)
IIRC, they were able to communicate because the local High School had a foreign language teacher who could handle enough German to get by.
The german language had not be unified in 1632, every area had its own germanic dialect which distant neighbors had difficulties with. The population at the time was 95+% peasants who rarely ventured beyond the nearest town, if that.
German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire, Until the mid-19th century it was essentially the language of some townspeople throughout most of the Empire. It indicated that the speaker was a merchant.
Until about 1800, standard German was almost solely a written language. At this time, people in urban northern Germany, who spoke dialects very different from Standard German, learnt it almost as a foreign language and tried to pronounce it as close to the spelling as possible.
I remember, working in Saarland in the 70's, that the local newspaper's week-end edition had a paper in the local dialect. I could not understand any of it in written form, and hearing it spoken would have been worse. The young germans of the time fared only slightly better than me.
An american language teacher would hardly have been able to communicate with the locals.
Flint did his homework as far as technical stuff and official history (battles, dates, ..etc) were concerned, but peopled his 17th century Germany with modern imaginary germans
"I can just imagine some deep geek in a cyberpunk future making a living out of hacking engine management computers so they're happy with fake parts."
That's already happening with tractors and its' been on my radar for awhile.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/farmers-using-hacked-firmware-to-bypass-john-deeres-software-stranglehold/
1182 - Some diesels will run happily on vegetable oil, to the extent that they will run on used cooking oil. Whether or not this applies to a specific design depends mostly on what sort of lubricity the injection pump needs.
1188 - Aside from unification (or not) there's also High and Low German to play with...
I have just checked, and my car has done 419 miles since January 31st, which is two fill-ups. It certainly ran without trouble on Christmas Eve.
Coo. I'm vaguely aware that TVs like that used to exist, but I've never seen one even as a museum piece. All the ones I've seen, even really ancient ones, have addressed the matter of screen size first with "it's a screen isn't it, yes I know it's tiny, what do you want, blood?" and later just by using a bigger CRT.
About how big was this device? And how big did the things the other kids made tend to be? (Did you specify a size, eg. "big enough to cook a sausage roll", or did you just give them a free choice?)
Well, quite!
To me -- coming to this without reading the novels -- what I'd assume to be the most difficult problem is to survive the political/religious situation our West Virginians have been dropped into.
Question 1: Are they Lutheran, Calvinist, or Catholic?
Question 2: How do they hold off ravening hoards of mercenaries? The Holy Roman Emperor had authorised his soldiers to scavenge from friend and foe to support themselves.
Question 3: All sides were deeply (small "C") conservative, and all were uncomfortable with over-turning duly installed leaders, no matter which party they supported. The idea of democracy was completely alien to everyone in that age.
Now, of course, if they can just survive to 1660 and get themselves to London then the textbooks they have would be of immense interest to the Fellows of the Royal Society.
In your mouth? Um, no. In high school, when we got to play with liquid mercury, it was fingers, and wash your hands after.
Pause, hit rewind.
It's a series, other than the first book, 1632, which was intended as a standalone. Reading LotR, but stop as book 1, rather than go on to the other 5? How 'bout reading the fifth book of OGH's fantasy, or book 1 of The Family Trade? In a series, you expect some things to be clarified later.
Which, btw, is one of the many reasons that what I'm writing are stand-alone, though set in one universe.
On similar lines, someone once called me out to make their car work again after they'd used the wrong pump by mistake and it wouldn't go. So I siphoned the petrol/diesel mixture out of their tank, and put it in my own tank. Which gave me something over half a tank of free fuel.
A Honda GX140 engine which has been fed such a stiff mixture of diesel with petrol that it won't start any more can still be got to start by squirting butane into the air intake, and once started it will then run. White smoke up the wazoo, but it still goes.
At the other end of the scale, I once ran out of petrol and didn't have a spare can in the back. But I did have a can of cellulose thinners (xylene/toluene mixture), so I put that in the tank. And it worked fine. It was just a shame I couldn't temporarily jack up the compression ratio to take full advantage of the super-high-octane fuel.
After mentioning acrylic in connection with Fresnel lenses, I wondered how feasible it would be for the Grantville folks to make PMMA-based Plexiglass and the like. My ignorance of chemistry is broad and deep, but does anyone here know about such things?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly(methyl_methacrylate)#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly(methyl_methacrylate)#Synthesis
The military also have portable generators powered by gas turbines, the kind of thing you'd expect to find with a diesel engine on a building site. For the same reason: they will run on anything burny you can pour into the tank. They're also a lot lighter and smaller for a given power output.
In 1632, it's an underground mine. The bubble of the year 2000 that got relocated was a 6mi sphere, which included the coal mine.
As others have noted, Everything's Online was nowhere near started then.
Also, I may, perhaps, be able to clarify some stuff... given, early October, there was a writers-and-others get-together IN MANNINGTON, WV.
Lot of houses with large yards, so I'm sure at least some had gardens. Back then, libraries weren't being attacked and shrunk[1]. Historical stuff from the 1800's, and so guides, and some tools, to start with.
They do have trouble with their own racists, who want to wall up and have nothing to do with downtimers (that's a whole thread for years in the series). The majority are more along the line of I DON'T WANT TO DIE, how do we manage that?
Oh, and they have resources that they can sell that make many rich, that none of you have thought of, like, say, the 50 or 100 plastic, sealable containers from takeout or yogurt or whatever?
Another thing - the machine shop, and the one that's part of the mine, one of the things they do is make more lathes, etc. (holy colonize a planet with robots that reproduce!).
And yeah, them, there, with not only their own weapons, but knowledge drags the 30 Years war, not to a stop, but surely to fall face down. And with medicine (including hand-washing, and a basic, 1920 medicine, a lot of people don't die in childbirth, wounded, in cities under siege, etc.
One biggie that he threw in was the local hippie, who inherited a nice place. Oh... and hadn't gotten his degree in organic chemistry, but had done most of it. Dyes? Drugs? Yes, he can synthesize a lot.
But there's a lot of "people trying to stay alive", and dealing with loss of everything and everyone (including family that drove up to Fairmont, the big town, for a few hours....).
Bush, W to be specific, was an incompetent idiot, run by Darth Cheney. He had no clues, and surrounded himself with equals (equally incompetents with their own agendas, such as WE WANT TO INVADE IRAQ).
And most folks thought this way about him. I got nothing but agreeing laughs when I used the Gimp to make a pic of him addressing a joint session of Congress: Grand Moff Rummy, Darth Cheney, ... and Jar Jar Bush.
Oh, ah, yes, that's probably it - because "fire pump" to me means a water-shifter for extinguishing burning buildings. British countryside doesn't catch fire. Well, maybe once in a blue moon it does, but not like that. Usually if it is on fire it's because whoever owns it set fire to it on purpose, to clear the heather back and let sheep food grow in its place. This is called "swaling", and probably other things too. Then you have to do it again after a few years when the heather has out-competed the sheep food again, etc.
sigh, again. Read the first book, at least. The answer to religion is yes. Oh, and let's not forget the Baptists, and at least three or four other subsects. Oh, and I think there are two, count 'em, Mormons.
Getting into an alliance with a real military power helps... stopping here, no more spoilers.
hungry people will eat things you would never believe were edible... starting with basics of rodents... not just rabbits, there's mice, rats, voles, etc... the folk of Grantville have some hunting knowledge, some fieldcraft but would closely heed the locals... there's a doubled up bonus in eating rodents: you get protein and reduce the threat to your crops...
so for certainty if not a full out-n-out 'mongol hunt' there'd be a grimly determined effort to hunt down any critter larger than a grasshopper for sake of filling the pot tonight and grinding up anything 'n everything to hang as sausage in a smokehouse... would that be enough by itself to survive winter?
no...
but combined with possible upgrades to methodically fish the Baltic Sea and air-dry-and-salt the catch...
then there's foodstocks inside the Ringwall, trading for foodstuffs with local aristocracy willing to starve their peasants for other-worldly luxury goods, assembling various trade goods for yet more foodstuffs...
they'd have enough for winter for at least the first year... after that there'd be planning given a winter for deep thought... Samuel Johnson's wisecrack about hanging, eh?
yeah... be grim... much more so than in the 1632verse but endurable given choice being quietly accepting an early death
"Bush, W to be specific, was an incompetent idiot, run by Darth Cheney. He had no clues, "
I'm going to put in a very small defense of GWB by way of agreeing that what you say is absolutely true in the Washington context. In the context of his governorship of Texas, I think he did a bit better. Not great, but not awful.
Then he got elected POTUS and things went downhill rapidly.
Oh, back to the original theme: Gov A*hole, er, Abbott, or Texas, bused a bunch of immigrants and dropped them off in DC, in front of the Vice President's residence. Yesterday. The high temp of the day was 18F.
I think that's reckless endangerment and criminal negligence....
They held off the mercenaries because an uptime rifle is much more accurate and has longer range, not to mention a terrifying rate of fire compared to the muzzle-loaders available in 1632.* Then they become allies with King Gustav Adolphus of Sweden, which means all that firepower is now in the hands of one of history's most brilliant generals.
*Yes, you can expect to find someone who has the necessary tech for reloading shells in a little American town.
Robert Prior @ 1186:
I was under the rather cynical impression that those were considered features of the agricultural system, rather than a problem, by those that run it.
When the U.S. was originally implementing minimum wage laws there were exemptions written for agricultural workers (AFAIK, mainly in the form of sub-minimum wages, piece-rates & no requirement to pay overtime), but outright THEFT of wages - hiring someone and then refusing to pay them ... or more likely paying only part of the agreed upon wages - was a crime then and it's still a crime today. Enforcement is tricky & not always that good.
And employers, not just agricultural employers, do use undocumented status as a club to beat down workers & prevent them from claiming their rights UNDER LAW. It is just as much a crime to rob an undocumented person as it is to rob a natural born citizen.
But I don't think avaricious, conniving, greedy employers cheating or coercing employees to the point of practical enslavment is unique to the U.S. ... although it is perhaps documented better here than in some other places.
Nor is the U.S. the only place where the overwhelming majority turn a blind eye to the conditions under which their food, clothing, gew-gaws & do-dads ... or recreational drugs are produced.
Making the polymer from the monomer is a doddle, but making the monomer in the first place is a fairly involved process, whichever of the numerous possible routes you use. They'd need to have a reasonably significant chemical industry going to start with, both to supply the bits and pieces required and to have people with some experience in making processes like that run on the kind of scale needed to produce actually useful quantities. It probably makes the chemistry easiest and simplest if you start from lemons, but then you need some way to import masses of lemons and if you can do that you can import other kinds of food anyway.
They'd stand more of a chance with making polystyrene, since you can simply distil the monomer out of coal tar or related kinds of biomass-derived pyrolytic goo.
All these transparent plasticy things are degraded by UV, so the chances are they'd need to be recycling them every few years when they fell apart or became too crazed to have the optical properties they were supposed to. Recycling PMMA is a doddle, since you can convert it back to monomer just by heating it, but it's still extra effort and complexity that you could do without.
Proper glass would be a much better bet; the big problem is the energy input, but Grantville could use coal gas or coal-seam methane (which they're already tapping when it happens) to make a furnace that would melt the doings a lot more effectively and more efficiently than anything the locals would be using. Yes, if you want to make big panes it helps to have a big puddle of molten lead, but you've got the second-hand furnace heat and you haven't got any pesky regulations to get in the way.
stirner @ 1188:
The german language had not be unified in 1632, every area had its own germanic dialect which distant neighbors had difficulties with. The population at the time was 95+% peasants who rarely ventured beyond the nearest town, if that.
[...]
An american language teacher would hardly have been able to communicate with the locals.
Flint did his homework as far as technical stuff and official history (battles, dates, ..etc) were concerned, but peopled his 17th century Germany with modern imaginary germans
... "could handle enough German TO GET BY" - a person who has already mastered one foreign language well enough to to teach it to others is likely to be able to pick up at least a little bit of local dialect.
And I think you're selling your German peasants short as well. They weren't stupid.
But again, it comes down to a simple question. Do you just give up and die? Or do you do whatever you can to adapt & survive ... including LEARNING to talk to your new neighbors?
...and of course their contribution meant that Gustav did not get killed in battle just when they were getting to know each other like he was supposed to, so the alliance could flourish.
Reloading - they were OK for powder, but they did have a problem getting primers, which I remember thinking was strange since the chemistry and the quantities are not at all beyond what they could handle. Can't remember what they did about lack of smokeless propellants, but I guess they just had enough guns for which that wasn't critical.
1193 A1 - All 3, oh and some were Jewish too IIRC...
A2 - By shooting them. Well, these are West Virginians after all. Oh and the majority of them have no issues with shooting people who want to kill them whilst said people are way out of range for their matchlocks, never mind for melee weapons.
A3 - As I read the series, Gustavus Adolphus was an early democrat (yes, lower case d, not upper case).
1208 - And, of course, they're actively exploring for sources of stuff they know they want but don't have; add citrus fruits to the list I guess.
Or modern float glass is often made by floating it on mercury .
Pigeon @ 1198:
The military also have portable generators powered by gas turbines, the kind of thing you'd expect to find with a diesel engine on a building site. For the same reason: they will run on anything burny you can pour into the tank. They're also a lot lighter and smaller for a given power output.
When I was in the National Guard we had small generators (3Kw - 5Kw) that could be run on either diesel or petrol. Diesel was the preferred fuel, but if you didn't have diesel, you could mix a quart (liter) of 30W motor oil into a 5 gal (20L) "Jerry" can of petrol (aka gasoline) and the generator would run just fine.
Never had to do that except in training learning how you could do it.
When I first joined up in 1975 the Army still had a few things that ran on gasoline, but they were already phasing them out to go with a single fuel - diesel ... logistically simpler to only have to supply one type of fuel to the front lines (even though "front lines" were already pretty much a thing of the past by then ... although maybe they're making a comeback now).
Yes, I agree. They'd have found everyone talking weird German, and they'd have been further confused by the number of different ways it could be weird, but it would not have been an insuperable barrier, and knowing modern German would definitely have been a help. Same as if you went back in time to when English was weird and people were saying things like "I dyde shyte thre grete toordes" (which sounds a lot worse than it's spelt), it would do your head in, but you'd still be a lot better off than someone who didn't know any kind of English at all.
The trouble is that the books present it as if none of this happened. People who arrive able to speak modern German go right off and speak it to the locals and the locals speak modern German right back. They even write in it for their own consumption. It's only the people who can't speak any German when they arrive who have to learn anything.
Primer is an ongoing issue in the novels.
Nor is the U.S. the only place where the overwhelming majority turn a blind eye to the conditions under which their food, clothing, gew-gaws & do-dads ... or recreational drugs are produced.
You're right. So what?
Again, the argument is about addiction industries, which are designed to hook users on an unnecessary product to profiteer off their induced needs.
If you want to reign in these industries (and from your comments, perhaps you don't? I can't tell), then we've already established a few things:
--Imprisoning the users doesn't work. Of course, there are all sorts of political reasons used to justify imprisonng the users, which is why one might attempt to be mindful of which products one chooses to addicted to (/obvious sarcasm). And note, this applies as much to social media as to fentanyl and meth. Authoritarians imprison people who organize on social media, after all. But that's an aside.
--If you want to engineer a harmless, legal industry, it needs to be competitive with the illegal industry. The way you do this sanely is not to turn a blind eye towards exploitation (which is what California's doing), but crack down on exploitation and other illegalities, while rewarding companies that do not exploit and follow the rules. This is where California apparently face-planted on cannabis, because our laws favor big industry without enforcement. I'll admit that I didn't get it when I voted for decriminalizing cannabis, and I'm now having my ignorance pointed out by a scholar on the temperance movement. So I'm sharing his argument, transposing it from alcohol to cannabis. Looking at what's going on in California, I think his take is far more correct than my naive take on simple decriminalization was.
Will this approach solve all evil and injustice in the world? Of course not. But arguing that an injustice is widespread and therefore not worth dealing with in any situation? I'm not sure why anyone would argue that.
I guess that trick would have worked on pretty well any diesel engine at that time. It's one of those things which is "not widely advertised", except among people who live somewhere cold enough that waxing is a common problem.
whitroth
Isn't that "Illegal Trafficking" or something similar? Apart from anything else, like being accessory-before-the fact to manslaughter?
Troutwaxer
Until "reloading" or not, you are forced to use actual gunpowder - see also H Beam Piper, of course.
John S
Such cruel arseholes here are usually referred to as: "Agricultural gangmasters" - there have been occasional prosecutions, down the years & severe sentences.
In the period about 1960-1980 there was an RR military engine that was deliberately designed to run on almost anything burnable ...
Can't remember it's designation.
JReynolds @1139: "What we are seeing (or about to see) is the difference between efficiency and resiliency. The powers that be have been moving so far down the road of efficiency, they're going to find out just how very resilient the current system isn't. (emphasis added)
"They planned their campaigns just as you might make a splendid set of harnesses. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot and went on."
—Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington"
Well said.
This is one of the most important rules of thumb for us as we face all sorts of global calamities: efficiency and resilience are not only very different, they are in many respects opposed principles.
Also, it's reassuring to see that the Duke was well aware of the concept, and was rhetorically able to adduce an excellent metaphor for it.
I once read an excellent novel (whose name escapes me) where time travel was a one-off thing - do it once, into the past, and the future you are coming from is annihilated because you have changed the past.
The story was that they had a chance to send back one message and/or package, and it had been done once before. The first time was a message back to Columbus which resulted in our current timeline (which was an improvement on the one with the invasion of Eurasia by a rising and sacrifice hungry Olmec Empire).
All very well and I enjoyed the book, but for years now I've been noodling on just what you might send back, knowing what we know now.
You would want to create conditions for success, avoid some of our rapidly-becoming-obvious failure modes, and ideally prevent a lot of the suffering that our current path has involved.
Everyone matters or noone. No slaves. Scientific method with ongoing checks and rigorous peer review. Social position earned by contribution to the general well-being, rather than extraction therefrom. Remember everyone, for better or worse.
Not sure what the mechanisms might be, or where to instil such an ethos. Nor how to make it stick.
I liked the particle physics one where they could message back, probably, but could only know it worked if they vanished. So by definition they could never rescue their past selves, only parallel timelines where they weren't in their current predicament.
It was a bit 1960s Silent Spring ish - the predicament was enthusiastic chemical pollution wrecking everything, but the "pointing weird particle beam at where you think the planet was 2000 years ago" part was entertaining to think about.
Troutwaxer @ 1206:
They held off the mercenaries because an uptime rifle is much more accurate and has longer range, not to mention a terrifying rate of fire compared to the muzzle-loaders available in 1632.* Then they become allies with King Gustav Adolphus of Sweden, which means all that firepower is now in the hands of one of history's most brilliant generals.
*Yes, you can expect to find someone who has the necessary tech for reloading shells in a little American town.
And, again I'm guessing based on what I, myself already know, BUT I expect the local machine shop could probably begin turning out acceptable breech-loading, rifled muskets in short order. The high school chemistry teacher can probably come up with a formula for an improved quality gunpowder ... before the supply of modern ammunition is all used up.
I'm not a fan of automatic weapons fire (as opposed to semi-automatic or auto-loading) in that sort of situation. It just wastes ammunition & modern ammunition would be a precious commodity.
But well ranged, AIMED fire1 is going to be devastatingly deadly - especially if you're gonna' fight dirty and specifically target identifiable officers & non-coms. Target #1 is the guy out front waving the big pig sticker around, #2 is the guy carrying the flag (that everyone is lining up on) and target #3 is the guy pounding on the drum to keep 'em in step ... working your way down to the rankers & flankers.
And don't forget to gather up all of the discarded weapons after the battle. They may not be up to modern standards, but they're a raw material that can be melted down and the steel used for manufacturing more "up to date" weapons.
1 A bolt action 30-06 deer rifle with a good (4-10 x 40) scope fired from a braced & supported position should be good out to about 2,000 yards & the guy sitting up there on his horse on the hill behind the formation so he can see what's going on down on the front lines ain't never gonna know what hit him!
Heteromeles @ 1215:
You're right. So what?
Again, the argument is about addiction industries, which are designed to hook users on an unnecessary product to profiteer off their induced needs.
You may be arguing about "addiction industries", but we were discussing wage theft and worker abuse - a problem widespread to more than just "addiction industries".
If you want to reign in these industries (and from your comments, perhaps you don't? I can't tell), then we've already established a few things:
Elitist snob much? Who appointed you to judge?
From YOUR comments perhaps you don't give a shit about wage theft and worker exploitation? I can't tell.
JohnS wrote on December 26, 2022 at 00:22 in #1162:
{snip}
If you do find it paywalled, it's also been archived here
{snip}
Post 1152 has archive links to each story in the series.
{snip}
If you eat a burger from Wendy's in the US, odds are its tomato garnish was harvested by slave labor in Immokalee, thirty miles from where I grew up in Florida: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/28/us-farm-wendys-fair-food-program
There's even a prosecution every now and then: https://www.flmd.uscourts.gov/modern-day-slavery-collier-county
But, this is an endemic problem. Bernie Sanders has been working on this for over a decade: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/modern-slavery-immokalee/
Other fast food outfits have agreed to pay the extra penny or two in order to make sure those farm workers are getting a fair day's wages. Please consider patronizing those chains instead. https://fairfoodprogram.org/partners/
Damian wrote on December 26, 2022 at 06:41 in #1176:
The deterioration of fuel was the core of John Barnes' excellent Directive 51 trilogy. Highly distilled nightmare fuel, and personally recommended, FWIW.
That's pretty much exactly what they do do. All of it. Just a shame that the description of picking off the plum targets with the scope rifle makes it sound like the rate of fire is something over 60 rounds per minute, and each one successfully aimed at a different target too.
Other fast food outfits have agreed to pay the extra penny or two in order to make sure those farm workers are getting a fair day's wages. Please consider patronizing those chains instead. https://fairfoodprogram.org/partners/
*Other fast food outfits have agreed to pay the extra penny or two in order to make sure those farm workers are getting a fair day's wages. Please consider patronizing those chains instead. https://fairfoodprogram.org/partners/*
Thanks for that!
From YOUR comments perhaps you don't give a shit about wage theft and worker exploitation? I can't tell.
Yeah. Actually, I've pissed off a fair number of family members and coworkers by insisting on paying people fair value for their work when I didn't have to. That's one reason I didn't immediately have a non paywalled link on the LA Times. I'm one of those elitists who think professional writers should be paid a living wage if they're spending long hours doing something I like. And, by sheer luck, I can afford to pay, so I do.
Do I have a clue how to make life easier for farmworkers and other less-than-free people? Not really. I'm glad Sen. Sanders and many others are trying to find solutions to these problems. However, from my cursory reading, immiserating peasants and enslaving outsiders seem to be the foundational sins of what some call the "primary states" from which human civilizations grew. Given that these are 5,000 year-old-plus problems, I'm not embarrassed to say that I personally don't know how to solve them. I do wish I could though.
What I'd ask in return is why this habit of taking what I write out of context and attacking? I mean, we obviously don't agree, but the normal practice on this blog is to ignore people you dislike, not troll them.
Yeah. That's what I'm saying - it shouldn't be. They quite definitely have all the raw materials, and are already doing more difficult chemistry with them on a significant scale. If they can make coal tar dyes they can definitely make picrates more easily, and styphnates are an option too. Chlorates are even easier since they have electricity. They can certainly make all the basic components of modern primers, and I'd expect running out of cartridges in good enough condition to re-use (again) to be much more of a problem than primers.
I'm going to put in a very small defense of GWB by way of agreeing that what you say is absolutely true in the Washington context. In the context of his governorship of Texas, I think he did a bit better. Not great, but not awful. Then he got elected POTUS and things went downhill rapidly.
I said at the time that Bush's winning strategy was to be a domestic president. He was okay, maybe not great but competent, in domestic affairs. He also had a great support staff, having inherited almost all of his father's minions. So he could put in a decent four years just letting the mandarins get on with the international situation, smiling and nodding as appropriate for most things. Meanwhile he could dig into being a governor plus; he's president of Texas and also some other states, so keep doing that.
Then September 11th happened and that was no longer the right strategy.
watched a couple before i was distracted by something shiny, seemed like harmless burton gothic fare for millennials, and the lass is tolerably easy on the eye
did it go off-message somehow after that
No. I barely tolerated the first show, which badly violated Addam's canon, but it rapidly got better after that, then the last episode disappointed me because one of the characters had a perfectly obvious thing, well within both their power and obvious to them to do to in that moment/situation, but didn't do it...
On the other hand, the cast was good and Jenna Ortega is a really amazing actress, so it wasn't a total waste.
I barely tolerated the first show, which badly violated Addam's canon
he did set up the characters for the original tv show, but i think he might have been flexible about canon seeing as this show was focusing on one character, and someone like burton's gonna have his own ideas
Jenna Ortega is a really amazing actress
think we're supposed to call them actors now, but she does seem to know what she's doing
John S
You have just described standard eleite light infantry tactic of Wellington's time, actually.
The real { Not "Sharpe" } 95th rifles knocked off a surprisingly large number of French officers that way.
H
However, from my cursory reading, immiserating peasants and enslaving outsiders seem to be the foundational sins of what some call the "primary states" from which human civilizations grew. - yes, well, refer back to Hobbes?
If I remember correctly, the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1914 expected its ordinary riflemen to place 20-30 aimed shots in 60 seconds at a range of 500 yards, using the bolt-action SMLE Mk 3.
(In case you think I'm exaggerating? "The current world record for aimed bolt-action fire was set in 1914 by a musketry instructor in the British Army—Sergeant Instructor Snoxall—who placed 38 rounds into a 12-inch-wide (300 mm) target at 300 yards (270 m) in one minute." -- Deets in wikipedia.)
Note that the BEF in 1914 was a small, highly-trained, professional army -- not Kitchener's mass army of 1915. You wouldn't expect this level of accuracy of a hastily-trained conscript force.
Flintlocks only really arrived from the 1650s onwards; the thirty years' war was fought with matchlocks; reloading (a single shot) took anything from 20 seconds to a minute, and the 15th century arquebus was considered deadly out to 400 yards -- but inaccurate beyond 100 yards: to achieve effectiveness on the battlefield massed volley fire was required, with ranks leap-frogging each other while the last ones to fire reloaded.
Anyway. One skilled rifleman with a 1914-era British bolt-action rifle could lay down as much fire as a platoon of 1630s arquebusiers, with greater accuracy, while staying out of their range. (I suspect modern assault rifles or PDWs would be less effective, as they're optimized for ranges of up to 300 metres and throwing as much lead downrange as fast as possible -- they're mostly designed for self-defense while crew-served weapons with much greater range do the real damage.)
If you can get your hands on an overhead projector there's a fresnel lens under the glass where you put the transparency. Having salvaged a few after going through the school library storage, I can say that they're not any particularly special glass. Some are actually plastic, but still work well enough.
"However, from my cursory reading, immiserating peasants and enslaving outsiders seem to be the foundational sins of what some call the "primary states" from which human civilizations grew. - yes, well, refer back to Hobbes? "
It goes well beyond "primary states", see also "War in Human Civilization" (2007) by Azar Gat. The book is definitely Hobbesian in its conclusions.
The quick TL;DR : War (and associated enslavement / subjugation) has been somewhat less common in industrial times because looting has become less profitable than industry and commerce, except maybe for primary resources economies (such as Russia for exemple)), this may last or not, depending on tech trends.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/war-in-human-civilization-9780199236633
Part 1: Warfare in the First Two Million Years: Environment, Genes, and Culture 1:Introduction: The Human 'State of Nature' 2:Peaceful or War-like: Did Hunter-Gatherers Fight? 3:Why Fighting? The Evolutionary Perspective 4:Motivation: Food and Sex 5:Motivation: the Web of Desire 6:'Primitive Warfare': How Was It Done? 7:Conclusion: Fighting in the Evolutionary State of Nature Part 2: Agriculture, Civilization, and War 8:Introduction: Evolving Cultural Complexity 9:Tribal Warfare in Agraria and Pastoralia 10:Armed Force in the Emergence of the State 11:The Eurasian Spearhead: East, West, and the Steppe 12:Conclusion: War, the Leviathan, and the Pleasures and Miseries of Civilization Part 3: Modernity: the Dual Face of Janus 13:Introduction: the Explosion of Wealth and Power 14:Guns and Markets: the New European States and a Global World 15:Unbound and Bound Prometheus: Machine Age War 16:Affluent Liberal Democracies, Ultimate Weapons, and the World 17:Conclusion: Unravelling the Riddle of War Endnotes Index
Just to further endorse what OGH says on this subject in post 1235 above.
A4 sized fresnel magnifiers are cheap and plastic, eg this one which isn't quite A4 now I read the details, but. If you've got one you can take a mould from it and make more using stuff like recycled PET drink bottles.
A reference to the last would be fascinating. The melting point of glass is way, Way, WAY above the boiling point of mercury. I believe that it's molten tin ....
You don't even need a huge amount of training to get up to 10 rounds a minute in a 3' circle at 300 yards. What you do need is a precision rifle and especially ammunition; I have deep suspicions about the ability to make those without specialised equipment.
I grew up in Guernsey, which was occupied by Germany in WW2. My secondary school had a mirror from a German searchlight. I remember we took it outside one sunny day and propped it up, and our teacher used it to melt lead.
"All experience is great providing you live through it."
--Alice Neel
The novel you're looking for is Pastwatch, by Orson Scott Card.
There is an ongoing deconstruction of it at the link. OSC's worldbuilding, prejudices and general fuckery are discussed. As well as the bits of the novel that actually work.
One of the many worldbuilding lacunae in the novel: Earth is suffering from catastrophic environmental collapse. So instead of sending people back to (say) the early 20th century with plans on how to get out of the carbon economy ASAP, they send people back to the 15th century to improve things then. Which might have brought forward the environmental collapse in this new timeline because technological development in that world would probably have happened faster.
palate cleanse... something to appeal to the nerd in each of us
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-metals-you-can-buy-with-1000/
Reloading shells, yes, but with what? White powder isn't the same as black powder, and using black powder in a modern rifle would quickly destroy it.
About how big was this device? And how big did the things the other kids made tend to be? (Did you specify a size, eg. "big enough to cook a sausage roll", or did you just give them a free choice?)
His device was big — a metre on the diagonal (if memory serves, which it might not).
Other devices ranged from shoeboxes to contraptions even bigger. No size limit given, just that it had to be able to cook something (not just reheat — I wanted a chemical change from the heat). Most didn't work well, especially in later years, because students tended to skip prototyping* and just build something off the internet (often designed for the tropics) and bring it the day of without testing it. Or even throw something together the night before.
*I had a requirement for testing with data collection, but that was often falsified. Eg. students reported excellent results on a day when the weather was cold and solid rain, not realizing that meteorological data was available (or not thinking that I would check).
For citrus they're going to need to source it from a locale where it doesn't freeze every winter. That's not Germany. Spain, and possibly Italy, is probably their closest source. (Not sure about southern France.)
The idea of democracy was completely alien to everyone in that age.
Not completely alien. There were republics in Italy, and just next door was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which elected kings and had an assembly with real power.
Not "one man one vote", but it wasn't all "divine right of kings".
It's a series, other than the first book, 1632, which was intended as a standalone. Reading LotR, but stop as book 1, rather than go on to the other 5? How 'bout reading the fifth book of OGH's fantasy, or book 1 of The Family Trade? In a series, you expect some things to be clarified later.
I read the first book, which should have stood on its own.
True, in a series you expect some things to be clarified later. But that requires trust that the author has planned them out and will reveal them later, rather than a hope that they will notice the holes and patch them later at some indefinite point in the future.
When I started reading the Family Trade books, I knew that Charlie had planned them out (even if he hadn't written them yet) and that the explanations/revelations would be forthcoming. In Lord of the Rings, I had the complete set of books so read it as one long work with a definite ending.
Most citrus can take some frost, and southern France can grow them; a few (e.g. true limes) are more sensitive. Whether that was true in the 17th century, I can't say. But they aren't essential, anyway, as sources of vitamin C aren't rare; there's no problem in summer and rose hips can be made into syrup.
If I remember correctly, the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1914 expected its ordinary riflemen to place 20-30 aimed shots in 60 seconds at a range of 500 yards, using the bolt-action SMLE Mk 3.
The Mad Minute. According to my grandfather, who was there, the Germans who ran into it thought the British had machineguns.
Lord of the Rings was not written as three books, but as a single one split into three volumes.
Charlie @ 1235
IIRC the Imperial Germans thought they were up against machine-gun fire near Mons in 1914 - the B.E.F. only had to retreat because they were outflanked.
JReynolds
"OSC" is a moron, oops, "Mormon" which, um, "shades" his opinions & writing.
"His device was big — a metre on the diagonal"
My father made a Fresnel firing device for making faienced brass medallions back when -- IIRC the lens was rectangular, maybe 30x40 cm. It did a good job of melting the faience powder into glass, or at least a glassy coating.
On the matter of whether or not a float glass furnace would be practical with old tech. Friend of mine in the business told me that the idea had been around for decades before Pilkington made it work.
The hard parts are keeping the ribbon stable* and maintaining a consistent quality. He cites bubbles from air behind furnace tiles as a particular issue.
So maybe it is doable if you are willing to make compromises on quality.
*If all else fails people dragging on it with hooks on long poles are apparently part of the process.
I have to agree with JohnS here. If you've got more advanced rifles, but don't have the supply chains to keep them fed, then sniping is the way to go.
One big difference from WWI on is that combatants had a lot more nitrogen at their disposal, because the first (inefficient) nitrogen fixation systems were already a decade old. Also, the British Empire still controlled the saltpeter producing mecca that is the Ganges Delta. Therefore, high volume, accurate fire was supportable. Couple that with advances in machining and metals, so that mass producing a high powered, highly accurate rifle was possible, and we have the carnage of industrial wars.
Anyway, ye olde-fashioned line warfare was designed both for poorer weapons, but also around the idea that conscripts couldn't be trusted to think or they'd rationally run away as fast as possible. Hence the lines, with officers commanding. As ACOUP pointed out, ye olde system shouldn't be sneered at, as line warfare is what the colonial powers used to build their empires right up until the 1870s. Properly done it is devastating to opponents fielding equal or lesser arms.
So if you have to count your bullets, sniping the officers of the line (and the horses they rode in on) really is the best way to go.
Going back to 1632-type scenarios, I expect that saving one's brass is the most trivial of the many problems. Deer rifles are more-or-less WW1 guns, and if someone in the crisis is a homeloader, they may have the bullets, brass, primers, and propellant to make some bullets, along with the tools to put them together. How good their product is is one of those interesting and non-trivial questions. Once those supplies run out, what do you do?
If you wanted semi-silly alternatives to modern firearms, there are some quasi-legal hunting air rifles out there that would probably make decent half-decent sniper rifles against matchlocks. This sounds silly, until you realize that casting air rifle bullets isn't as hard as making modern gunpowder, and there might be more parts for compressed air tech lying around than for making bullets.
Now, if you want to get really silly, check out gyrojets. You know, the 1960s-era guns that shot spin-stabilized bullet-sized rockets. Not as accurate as a rifle, but... the thing is that the barrels are unrifled and not high quality steel (they don't need to be), the shells are IIRC machined copper, and the propellant is nitrocellulose (IIRC they also used a primer). One of the many places they had trouble was coming up with an mechanized manufacturing process that made the shells to spec. But the materials in their guns were (if I read it right) actually not very fancy..
Anyway, if I was trying to low-tech it, and I could get my hands on nitric acid (aka aqua fortis), a cellulose source (linen or hemp might do if cotton wasn't available), and had a bunch of detail-oriented artisans who could hand-make the gyrojet shells to spec, that actually might be a way to go. Also, gyrojets are much quieter than ordinary firearms, they're better for sniping, albeit less accurate (a few were carried as sidearms by soldiers in Vietnam, so we have some record of how they performed in that war. Nothing spectacular, either as success or failure)
And finally, I'll point out that American hunters also have deer-hunting seasons for archers and blackpowder hunters, both of whom use sophisticated camouflage and weapons that don't look a lot like their kin from 1632. They do it because archery and blackpowder seasons start before the conventional season, so they get a better choice of deer to kill. Anyway, if a rural town gets 1632'ed and they're not fielding all their hunters as snipers and guerillas, they're wasting resources. Keeping the guns and bows fed is the big problem.
Form square to receive cavalry you mean!
I read about that in Tuchman's The Guns of August. They shot so quickly that their enemies frequently assumed they were using automatic weapons.
If I ever knew how that worked in the book, I've forgotten, it might have gotten passed over. But definitely a concern.
Anyway. One skilled rifleman with a 1914-era British bolt-action rifle could lay down as much fire as a platoon of 1630s arquebusiers, with greater accuracy, while staying out of their range. (I suspect modern assault rifles or PDWs would be less effective, as they're optimized for ranges of up to 300 metres and throwing as much lead downrange as fast as possible -- they're mostly designed for self-defense while crew-served weapons with much greater range do the real damage.)
Though when was trained in the conscript army service to shoot an assault rifle, it was mostly for single shots. I think I used the automatic fire setting once, to see how it feels like. (The RK-62 I was trained with has single-shot and autofire, no short burst setting.) The range part is correct and I think I've never shot it beyond 200 metres anyway.
Using automatic fire, even short bursts, eats up ammo at a good pace. I think an average infantry soldier doesn't usually carry that many magazines and single shots last a bit longer than even three-round bursts. Having somebody run out of ammo is not a good thing on the battlefield. Of course with 5.56 ammunition you can carry more bullets than the 7.62 ones, but it's not a magniture of difference anyway.
Admittely, this was over twenty years ago and I won't be handed one anymore, so things might have changed. Armies also do things in different ways with different equipment and doctrine, so I'm just one data point.
Still, I also think that even if you have all kinds of bigger weapons, at some point to hold the ground you need the infantry soldiers to be there, with rifles. Also they're good for clearing out places without destroying them completely, so some armies might prefer that, especially if defending in their own country.
"The hard parts are keeping the ribbon stable"
"Ribbon" sounds like continuous production, which I imagine is the way it's been done in the modern era. Whaddabout batch production: heat up a container of lead (or tin or whatever), pour glass on it, cool, remove glass plate, repeat? Not what PPG would do, but Grantville?
H & others
Propellants - Black Powder is 'orrible stuff & fouls & corrodes firearms.
But: "Smokeless Powder" - typically Cordite - is made from a mixture of two "high" explosives: Guncotton & Nitroglycerine (!) { 37/58 + 5 petro-jelly}
Can the time-travellers make these with the raw materials at hand?
If they can manufacture Nitric Acid & obtain suitable quantities of cotton, then I think the answer is "yes"
https://jonathanturley.org/2011/01/10/gao-u-s-has-fired-250000-rounds-for-every-insurgent-killed/
Several things about firearms relevant to 1632:
1. I have been told by a number of people who were there that the troops in 'Nam hated the M-16, partly, when trying to clean it in a humid and muddy environment, ahh, no. But also, it had single shot, and full auto. The result was a lot of troops emptied their magazines without getting near hitting anyone. It was modified for a three-shot burst.
2. They built it that way, because most Americans couldn't hit the side of a barn, and so were given a firehose.
3. WWI, Charlie? Allow me to offer the Alamo. 180-some former real hunters (not modern), etc, against Santa Ana's 10,000+. In the 10 days or so they held on, they killed over 1,000 of the Mexican troops. Yes, over 10%.
4. In 1632, there is one, count 'em, actual sniper's rifle. A high school girl was in serious national competitions for distance marksmanship. And no, not a ton of ammo, nor fast shots, but accurate to insane distances.
"Oh, no, not another learning experience" - a button my late wife picked up at a con.
"Ribbon" sounds like continuous production, which I imagine is the way it's been done in the modern era. Whaddabout batch production: heat up a container of lead (or tin or whatever), pour glass on it, cool, remove glass plate, repeat? Not what PPG would do, but Grantville?
Fuel is generally limited too. AIUI, the ribbon works by having a bath of molten metal, then pouring molten glass on one end and letting it spread out across the molten metal bath. Keeping the ribbon taut by pulling it off the other end (presumably onto metal rollers or something?) is where the fun comes in, as is keeping it from shattering as it cools and contracts. Pull that stunt off, and you can cut pieces from the ribbon. Once you run out of fuel, you shut the ribbon down until you get more fuel.
One thing I remember from English medieval forestry is that a glass guild in some city owned an entire woodland nearby. They needed charcoal from that woodland (literally wood-land, like farm-land) to keep their glass kilns hot.
Anyway, this is how a society running off renewable resources works. When there's enough fuel for the furnaces do everything you can until you run out of fuel. If you're a miller with a windmill, you grind grain when the wind's blowing, even if that means you stay up for three days during a patch of windy weather. Because sometimes the wind doesn't blow, and then you can't work. As we get off petroleum, we're likely going to find more factories working this way, saving up orders until they have all the materials and enough power, then doing death marches to fill the orders before they lose power. It's a doable way to live (ask any farmer), but it seems strange to those of us who grew up with sufficient power on demand.
Oh, no! That means the complete and total death of Just-(never)-in-time stocking! And needing warehouses....
I see, thanks. That does pretty well accord with what I had envisaged. Shame, if predictable, that what could have been a rather interesting collection of data on a variety of approaches to the problem ended up mostly spoiled by arsability shortages.
Did anyone have any joy with "less obvious" approaches - such as things that did not use shiny stuff for reflectors? It strikes me that you ought to be able to get something like that to boil a pot of vegetables even on something less than a beautiful sunny day, if you put a bit of thought and experiment into it, but it also sounds like few would have had the gumption.
Its non-trivial making nitrocellulose in a way that generates a stable product.
It has a nasty habit of decomposing and the decomposition products catalysing other nitrocellulose nearby to decompose too.The neutralising washing cycles to purify the product enough for safe uses - without a chemical stabiliser such as carbamite - is very lengthy. If its slightly brown coloured, run away.
And never forget that nitrocellulose is one of the nastiest static hazard materials known when dry. The addition of nitroglycerine does make it a lot safer to handle - you could play football with a 25:75 mixture of NG/NC.
For the record I recommend 60:40 NG:NC for cordite, but you need solvents like acetone, MEK or ethyl acetate to extrude it easily.
Greg, you really should try visiting the Waltham Abbey Gun Powder Mill sometime. Not far from you.
Yes, that's the kind of thing I was thinking of. It scales down better than the continuous ribbon type process, which is more of a "make it huge or don't bother" kind of thing. You'd want to be putting a bit of thought into making it work without the fuel consumption of heating and cooling the whole thing all the way every time, but I don't see that as impossible; I'm getting a few ideas as I type, though I'm disinclined to stretch this post out for a few hours while I think them through.
In which context, I strongly recommend The Wages of Fear (English translation/subtitles) as an illustration of just what can go wrong with gelignite.
Just-(never)-in-time stocking! And needing warehouses....
You might be surprised at how much "just in time" is a product paid for by the people using "just in time", and it amounts to paying someone else to have a warehouse.
Especially with food, where despite many people working very hard to change the situation many crops are still annuals so the best you get is "northern hemisphere harvest" and "southern hemisphere harvest". This can be slightly obscured by crops like "winter wheat" but it's important to know that "winter wheat" is a different crop and while you can make bread or pasta with it, you won't do that if you can get proper wheat instead.
The two real changes there are major technological advances in warehousing crops (no more floury apples) and many square kilometres of greenhouses. IIRC Spain has more area of greenhouses than some countries have area... you have to go some distance up the chart of "smallest countries" to find the smallest one that isn't.
One complication with float glass (and IIRC a major reason why commercial production didn't happen until the 1950s) is the need to keep oxygen away from the Tin bath. Tin Oxide sticks to the glass and gives you a thin opaque layer, and I suspect the same happens with lead (I remember lead melting experiments as a kid always had a skin on top of the liquid metal) and other potential bed metals. The Pilkington Process uses a Nitrogen and Hydrogen mix to avoid oxidation. Any batch process is going to have to deal with manipulating the glass without letting the air in.
Forget gyrojets: for a 17th century setting with modern intrusions you'd do much better with air rifles. The Girardoni air rifle was the first magazine-fed military infantry weapon with a high rate of fire: its key flaws were (a) difficult to mass-produce with 1780s tooling (in particular the valves and bottles were problematic -- high precision devices by late 18th century standards), and (b) it took 1500 pumps with a hand-pump to repressurize the (detachable) air bottle. But it had an effective range of 100-150 yards (which in the era of the black powder musket was fine), didn't obscure the target by emitting clouds of black smoke, and was a rapid-fire weapon 60-80 years before anyone else caught up.
Take Girardoni's design, set up modern tooling with modern design tolerances to produce the valves and compressed air bottles, and provide a wagon-mounted steam engine to repressurize the air bottles in the field in place of the wagon-mounted manual pump (which was very labour-intensive and took forever), and you've got a plausible solution that would have been hell on wheels in battle at any time prior to the Crimean War (or the US Civil War), by which point breech-loading powder rifles that outranged the airgun would be replacing massed musketry.
Only real drawback would be the need to have all significant formations of troops followed around by a wagon with a pump -- and that's just a replacement for the logistics of transporting black powder for the muskets: a different propellant, not a whole new encumbrance.
(And the Girardoni plus steam-powered pumps would certainly be within the engineering capability of the 1632 scenario.)
"One big difference from WWI on is that combatants had a lot more nitrogen at their disposal, because the first (inefficient) nitrogen fixation systems were already a decade old. Also, the British Empire still controlled the saltpeter producing mecca that is the Ganges Delta. Therefore, high volume, accurate fire was supportable."
Germany was severely stuck for fixed nitrogen early in WW1, because of the blockade, until Haber developed his process. They were set to run out of both explosives and fertilisers, and so be forced to drop out, until that got going. (Indeed, there are similar if less strong examples with other chemicals too; basically if they hadn't had Haber they'd have been fucked.)
All combatants had their own version of a supply crisis in artillery ammunition in 1915, all for the same reason - nobody had planned for a war that went on so long, and their stocks of shells ran out before they had set up facilities to make more at anything remotely approaching the rate needed. In Germany's case shortage of fixed nitrogen was an additional difficulty, but plain manufacturing capacity was the main problem, for them and for everyone else.
High-volume accurate small-arms fire was possible because the British army, unlike anyone else's, was a very small all-volunteer force, and had an advantage both in morale and in the tremendous amount of musketry practice they'd put in. (Arguably also the best rifle, and more definitely so for accuracy at long range.) This didn't last beyond the first few months. Most of those guys got killed, and those that were left ended up as a very small minority among the increasing masses of brand new recruits.
(The tales about it are a bit exaggerated; the "Mad Minute" was 15 rounds aimed per minute (which includes two reloads), although some soldiers could manage a fair bit more. The Germans who "thought they were facing machine-gun fire" were members of units composed of raw recruits who had never been shot at before, and got massacred. The German command didn't think that, but they did realise they were facing an enemy who was much better with the rifle than they were.)
Much the same thing happened with gunnery skills. The British army began the war with a pretty advanced knowledge of artillery techniques, but by the time they had enough guns and ammunition to make proper use of such knowledge, they had lost the ability to apply it properly and on so large a scale. Gunnery did develop significantly during the war, but a fair bit of the "development" was in regaining the ability to apply what was already known.
With musketry, though, it was recognised that training all the new recruits up to the level of the pre-war army was both impractical, and not all that useful on a Western Front battlefield. Those skills had been fostered in the context of a war of movement, but the Western Front was basically siege warfare, and engaging individual targets at long range didn't really come into it much. It usually made more sense to do things like using machine guns and Lewis guns for high-volume suppressive or denial fire, and rifles for ranges mostly under about 2-300m where they were most useful and effective.
And now for something completely different, a free-enterprise geoengineering scam. No monitoring, no instrumentation, just let it fly: https://gizmodo.com/make-sunsets-solar-geoengineering-sulfur-climate-change-1849931460
They can make gunpowder, so they can make something better...
If you have gunpowder, you have sulphur, so you can make sulphuric acid; you also have saltpetre, which you can cook with the sulphuric acid and produce nitric. Once you have a mixture of concentrated nitric and sulphuric acids (or plain nitric for more reactive substrates), you can make nitro-more-or-less-anything-you-want.
You do have to be a bit canny with it though. Making nitro-human-face is often fairly easy, but it isn't really the idea. Nitro-interesting-things-cooked-out-of-coal-tar gets you primers, though, and since they're anticipating BASF with their dye plant they obviously are already producing all the necessary ingrediments, hence my comments about it being strange that they don't put them together.
I can't really remember what they do about propellants, but I don't think they do it there either. I've a vague idea that they possibly make nitroglycerine and then use dynamite both for mining and for somewhat dodgy weapons, but I could equally well be making that up.
In 1632, they do have an issue with containers to hold and process nitric acid.
"It took a while to find a vial that didn't burst into flame" - 307 Ale, Tom Smith
Horse-driven pump... thing on a baseplate which you stake to the ground, and a fork sticking out the top which you stick a pole in and have the horse walk the other end round and round. (Or the blokes on field punishment, perhaps.) A steam pump would have more capacity, of course, but for the same engineering effort as a steam engine you could make several horse pumps which are far more portable, can be put closer to where they're needed, don't take anything like as long to set up and get going, and aren't such obvious juicy targets for the enemy artillery.
Only real drawback would be the need to have all significant formations of troops followed around by a wagon with a pump -- and that's just a replacement for the logistics of transporting black powder for the muskets: a different propellant, not a whole new encumbrance.
I did a bit of reading on the Girandoni for Hot Earth Dreams, and obviously I've done a bit of digging on gyrojets. Each has it's own good and bad points.
The good thing with a gyrojet is that only the shell itself has to be high quality. Most of the rest of the gun or carbine could probably be made out of plastic or possibly even wood, if they were heat-tolerant enough. The barrel's for guiding the rocket, not containing the gases, and the real ones actually have quite a few holes in the barrel to let the exhaust out. The only thing that probably needs metal in it is whatever ignites the gyrojet. The manufactured ones used a firing cap to ignite the propellant (nitrocellulose+nitroglycerin), but I suspect some other sparking system would work. One of these days Teh Crazehs will work this out, and we really will have plastic guns, possibly firing plastic mini-rockets if anyone can be arsed to figure out why that would ever make sense. Anyway, it's a solution to a certain set of problems.
The Girandonis by my count actually had multiple problems, the pump wagon being the most obvious one. The wagon, incidentally wasn't necessary. IIRC, Lewis and Clark lugged a girandoni rifle on their expedition, because they needed a good rifle that could fire more than one shot per minute, and it could be repressurized at camp. Military practice was to carry 3 air cylinders and up to 90 balls. And gaskets. Lots of gaskets.
The other problems with the Girandoni design were:
--The air reservoir is a nightmare. It's not a cylinder, but the buttstock of the gun, carefully welded out of multiple pieces of metal and holding air at 800 psi. These had to be built correctly and cared for lovingly, because fully pressurized their resemblance to rifle propelled grenades was more than coincidental. IIRC, one big kink in the supply chain was the limited number of people who could make reliable air reservoirs. --Maintenance and gaskets. Leather gaskets had to be kept moist to work. But what doomed the girandoni as a weapon of war was that they were finicky and it was hard to fix leaks. They were finally abandoned IIRC when the unit had no working rifles to field, because they didn't have enough techs to keep the guns in repair. In general, the repair problem is what kept air rifles as hobby guns until today. A muzzleloader is a lot simpler to make and maintain.
None of this should discourage anyone from looking at modern deer-hunting air rifles (e.g. https://www.fieldandstream.com/story/guns/big-bore-airguns-powerful-enough-to-take-big-game/). Modern guns use tanks that can be pressurized to over 2500 psi. Again, the valves and seals are the problem with the technology, especially in a 1632 scenario. The advantage is that compressed air is a widespread technology, so it might be possible to adapt parts from other bits of equipment to keep airguns in repair. Whether butadiene (or whatever the seals are made out of) can be manufactured in 1632? Um....maybe?
Several years into the series, they send people overseas looking for rubber. Tires as well as gaskets, y'know.
Heteromeles @ 1228:
What I'd ask in return is why this habit of taking what I write out of context and attacking? I mean, we obviously don't agree, but the normal practice on this blog is to ignore people you dislike, not troll them.
From my point of view YOU are taking comments out of context and attacking. Why do you consider any deviation from your opinion to be an attack?
I don't dislike you, but you can be a prick sometimes. For all you know we might even agree some times. But you appear to dismiss anything that is not total sycophancy, so I guess you'll never know.
Oh, one of the big things that the uptimers have in books... they know where the easy-to-mine sources are for coal, iron, oil....
Glass, surely? It was used contemporaneously for the purpose, after all.
They must be handling it somehow, at any rate, since it's such a standard reagent that it's not feasible the dye works wouldn't be using it.
Does this chap show up anywhere? Because if he doesn't he ought to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Rudolf_Glauber
Greg Tingey @ 1234:
John S
You have just described standard eleite light infantry tactic of Wellington's time, actually.
The real { Not "Sharpe" } 95th rifles knocked off a surprisingly large number of French officers that way.
Well ... I didn't sleep through ALL of my history classes. 🙃
Grant
I got my explosives knowledge from a real expert - my father.
Drafted as a "Scientific Civil Servant" - because he had a Chemistry MSc, in mid 1941 to work at HM Nobel Explosives, Ardeer ...
To help manufacture, devise & test their products.
He was almost-certainly involved in the production of "Cordite-N" (?) during WWII that resulted in less flash, less barrel-wear in RN gunnery, as used by HMS Belfast at the battle of the N Cape.
Of course this means that my knowledge of explosives stops at about 1960 ....
Interestingly a lot of gun regulations used to specify explosive propulsion. But they've been changed at least in Australia and Aotearoa to "projectile weapons" and in NSW to "anything" (we have some awesome posters showing the breadth of banned weapons). The NSW commercial arm of the Police have an "etc" list which is lengthy and detailed.
There are a number of mentions of "children" in the exemptions, so for example handcuffs are banned unless they're specifically for children. I assume as toys rather than for the restraint of but the list does not say that...
Let me rephrase that. The list says "children's toy" but does not say 'not designed for the restraint of children' let alone 'cannot be used to...', leaving open the "nice solid metal handcuff with proper key that is sized to fit a child" version of a toy.
Some of you will have noticed that the things sold in sex shops are completely verboten. Which likely causes even more reluctance to get police involved in certain communities.
I had no recollection that it was OSC who wrote that novel. Knowing that, I have little doubt there were many issues with the story.
That said, I think the notion of going back to 1480-ish was that it was seen as a strong leverage point. In the early 20th century you might have some great ideas and tech but very little chance of making the needed changes on a global scale. Whereas immunizing all the residents of the Americas (as in the novel) would have dramatically changed the process of the last 500 years.
European invaders/settlers would have had a very different experience if they hadn't been preceded by a series of devastating plagues. Add in some technological parity and we'd be living in a very, very different world. Not necessarily better.
re:1632 I don't think technological know-how would have been enough to solve their predicament.
The uptimers were hopelessly outnumbered, that usually is an important factor in warfare. They were not soldiers and you don't make a soldier just by giving him/her a rifle.
They all were heretics (even the post-Vatican II catholics) from the locals' point of view with whom they could not communicate without first learning their language
What happened to the downtimers who happened to live where the uptimers were displaced? Maybe they were swapped and ended up in 2000. But from the point of view of the downtimers, the uptimers were strange-speaking invaders who had slaughtered their neighbors/relatives and taken their place. Great way to make friends.
If a local military force had done what was needed and laid siege to their town (and that was a standard tactic at the time), they would not have lasted long. No fortifications, no food reserves, no water supply (unless their displaced sphere magically connected to the local water table at just the right spots). In a defensive siege situation, longer range weapons and faster rate of fire is not much of an advantage, the opponents only need to stay out of range and wait for you to starve or make a sortie.
1632 is a fantasy, a bit akin to gunporn/MilSF but coming from the other end of the american political spectrum.
If I remember correctly, the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1914 expected its ordinary riflemen to place 20-30 aimed shots in 60 seconds at a range of 500 yards, using the bolt-action SMLE Mk 3.
(In case you think I'm exaggerating? "The current world record for aimed bolt-action fire was set in 1914 by a musketry instructor in the British Army—Sergeant Instructor Snoxall—who placed 38 rounds into a 12-inch-wide (300 mm) target at 300 yards (270 m) in one minute." -- Deets in wikipedia.)
I don't doubt it at all since when I went through Basic Training in 1975 Basic Rifle Marksmanship was still based on timed, AIMED fire.
We qualified with pop-up targets on a range and the time the targets remained up depended on distance - the 50m target was only up for 3 seconds, while the 300m target stayed up for 8.
Also the 50m target was a head/shoulders silhouette while the 300m target was a full torso.
Not the 40 rounds into a 12" plate at 300 yards, but still, I think more realistic?
Note that the BEF in 1914 was a small, highly-trained, professional army -- not Kitchener's mass army of 1915. You wouldn't expect this level of accuracy of a hastily-trained conscript force.
The U.S. DID EXPECT to train conscripts to that level of accuracy in both world wars.
The level of marksmanship established by the British Army before WWI was considered the standard, and in some ways is still the standard today (or at least it was still the standard when I retired some 15 years ago)
We just had some technological advantages to make it a bit easier to achieve that level of proficiency by the time I arrived on the scene.
Flintlocks only really arrived from the 1650s onwards; the thirty years' war was fought with matchlocks; reloading (a single shot) took anything from 20 seconds to a minute, and the 15th century arquebus was considered deadly out to 400 yards -- but inaccurate beyond 100 yards: to achieve effectiveness on the battlefield massed volley fire was required, with ranks leap-frogging each other while the last ones to fire reloaded.
That's why I was thinking the "Grantsville" machine shop could manufacture a breach loading rifle to supplement the number of modern rifles they had - flint-lock only because I know how it works & I don't know how to manufacture percussion caps.
With the breach-loading rifle you could use paper cartridges to begin with until you could develop brass works to make modern cartridges. But the rifle would still give a range advantage.
Anyway. One skilled rifleman with a 1914-era British bolt-action rifle could lay down as much fire as a platoon of 1630s arquebusiers, with greater accuracy, while staying out of their range. (I suspect modern assault rifles or PDWs would be less effective, as they're optimized for ranges of up to 300 metres and throwing as much lead downrange as fast as possible -- they're mostly designed for self-defense while crew-served weapons with much greater range do the real damage.)
Pluses & Minuses here.
IIRC, personal ownership of assault style weapons wasn't as much of a thing in 2000 as it has become today and I don't remember whether "Grantsville, WV" had a National Guard Armory in the book.
I didn't find one in the 3-mile radius of Mannington West Virginia, so I'm guessing they might have had some National Guard soldiers, but actual military weapons would have been in short supply.
In April 2000 there would have been a fair number of veterans in an area of rural West Virginia - from WWII, Korea & Vietnam - with a range of training.
And as I note that when I went through training just after the Vietnam war, the Army DID emphasize marksmanship & aimed fire, although their given reason for NOT using "spray & pray" was easing the logistical demand for ammunition rather than tactical effectiveness of fire.
OTOH, I expect most of the available firearms would have been personal hunting rifles in larger calibers (30-06 IS still popular even today), many equipped with light sport optics, so RANGE might not be as much of a problem as you think.
The only real advantage I can see for the 30-06 cartridge over the .303 British cartridge is the U.S. cartridge is more plentiful here in the U.S. ... and that applies to all of the other caliber hunting rifles the denizens of "Grantsville" might have had available after the event.
personal ownership of assault style weapons wasn't as much of a thing in 2000 as it has become today
I occasionally wonder whether this has been accompanied by a growth in "personal ammo dumps" where the people who own more than one assault rifle also have half a million rounds for it?
Per EC's stat above that would enough to allow them to kill at least TWO people!
Howard NYC @ 1245:
palate cleanse... something to appeal to the nerd in each of us
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-metals-you-can-buy-with-1000/
And for slightly over $2,000 you can not only get the metal, but a fine work of art!
... or the slightly more modern version
Greg Tingey @ 1254:
JReynolds
"OSC" is a moron, oops, "Mormon" which, um, "shades" his opinions & writing.
You shouldn't say anything about Mormons you wouldn't say about Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or ...
kiloseven @ 1277:
And now for something completely different, a free-enterprise geoengineering scam. No monitoring, no instrumentation, just let it fly: https://gizmodo.com/make-sunsets-solar-geoengineering-sulfur-climate-change-1849931460
Didn't read all of it, but how do you know this is a SCAM and not just plain vanilla idiocy of the Dunning-Kruger variety?
Cordite N is a triple based propellant with reduced muzzle flash and less barrel erosion.
If memory serves, typically it is something like NQ which had (I think) nitrocellulose, nitroglycerine, nitroguandine, RDX and some odds and ends.
The big problem in the late 80s was making sure NATO tanks had a greater accurate range than the Soviets so there was a lot of work on getting more whoomph for a lower flame temperature. The rationale was that if you could kill them before their guns were in range you could fire and manoeuvre and win despite overwhelming numbers of Soviets.
We were really good at this stuff until Thatcher sold off the ROFS to Trafalgar House asset strippers and BAE. BAE did not believe in doing in depth research and quickly lost their best staff.
Moz @ 1293:
I occasionally wonder whether this has been accompanied by a growth in "personal ammo dumps" where the people who own more than one assault rifle also have half a million rounds for it?
I don't remember modern style ammosexuals being as much of a thing back in April 2000, so I'd guess not so much as today.
Per EC's stat above that would enough to allow them to kill at least TWO people!
EC is full of it, but two people will often be enough if it's the RIGHT two people.
Anyway. One skilled rifleman with a 1914-era British bolt-action rifle could lay down as much fire as a platoon of 1630s arquebusiers, with greater accuracy, while staying out of their range. (I suspect modern assault rifles or PDWs would be less effective, as they're optimized for ranges of up to 300 metres and throwing as much lead downrange as fast as possible -- they're mostly designed for self-defense while crew-served weapons with much greater range do the real damage.)
Not quite... (PDWs are "personal defensive weapons", but assault rifles are very definitely designed for the offense)
The optimisation for 300m was never a deliberate effort to reduce effective range. I was a skilled service weapon user; and I'd be far more effective with a 5.56mm L85 at 500m, than with a 0.303" SMLE (mostly to do with the sighting system). I've taken near-recruits onto Castlelaw ranges with their rifles, and had them train successfully at "suppressing" targets 500m away (i.e. hitting the target every fifth shot or so, and coming uncomfortably close with the rest). Once I got the windage right, I was hitting nearly every shot.
The limiting factors (quite apart from infantry no longer advancing in close order, wearing brightly-coloured uniforms) are:
attacking infantry have effective fire support, obscuring vision with smoke, and keeping the heads of the defenders firmly down with HE; until they're inside splinter distance of supporting artillery/mortars (100m or so) and supporting MGs (rather closer, if properly sited)
defending infantry would be firing at moving targets - a tricky skill, and I'd suggest that the average infantry soldier is going to hit very few crossing targets beyond 100m or so; if that. Leading the target is a sod.
The shift to 5.56 was because it was effective enough, while still allowing the firer to carry twice as many rounds of ammunition for the same weight. Anyone suggesting that it was "designed to wound" is just wrong...
I remember after the 2019 fire at Notre Dame there was discussion here about if they would be able to rebuild and how they could do it.
This appeared on YouTube a week or so ago:
Rebuilding Notre Dame | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS
... sort of an interim progress report. So far they seem to have managed to solve all of the problems they've encountered.
context = USA / last week's mega-storm
nightmare fuel...
"Scientists say Arctic warming could be to blame for blasts of extreme cold Research suggests that climate change is altering the jet stream, pushing frigid air down to southern climes more frequently. But the scientific jury is still out."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/12/23/climate-change-impact-cold-weather/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWJpZCI6IjMxNTU0NjE1IiwicmVhc29uIjoiZ2lmdCIsIm5iZiI6MTY3MjE3MDM5OCwiaXNzIjoic3Vic2NyaXB0aW9ucyIsImV4cCI6MTY3MzM3OTk5OCwiaWF0IjoxNjcyMTcwMzk4LCJqdGkiOiIxOGRmY2Y5NC0wNzdhLTQ0OWItYWUxZi1mNzhmNDQ1MmVjYjYiLCJ1cmwiOiJodHRwczovL3d3dy53YXNoaW5ndG9ucG9zdC5jb20vY2xpbWF0ZS1lbnZpcm9ubWVudC8yMDIyLzEyLzIzL2NsaW1hdGUtY2hhbmdlLWltcGFjdC1jb2xkLXdlYXRoZXIvIn0.V9nAwn9R_h0gEKOsJXYAiI-pcQS4MSUufVySy20fOOQ
"more research is needed", sadly meaning further experiments.
Meanwhile one side of politics in the USA is very happy indeed to see people killed by said experiments even if they have to make an effort to ensure it happens.
https://news.yahoo.com/abbott-defends-dropping-migrants-vice-165627373.html
"who would Jesus bomb" indeed.
1278, 79 - In which general context, I've got a volume on making propellants. In figure 1, there's a beautiful rocket flame cone exiting a test cell. In figure 2, of a failed test in the same location, the test cell has gone away.
1284 - For example, the Trinidadian tar pits. See this volume.
1287 - Greg's father may never have met my grandfather who was peace-time based at Ardeer, but spent WW2 developing lines, lots of lines, around Dumfries and Girvan. Anyway, the number of incidents involving all of said plants was in low single figures as of when Ardeer finally closed in the 1990s after about 100 years operations.
1292 - I remember an SAS weapons instructor describing the fire selector on the AK-47 as:-
1) Safety ON
2) Single Shot
3) 3 Shot Burst
4) Wanker!!
1295 - Name a Buddist, Jew or Muslim who is as prolific an English language (including translations) SF writer as OSC. OSC's proliferation tends to inform opinions of his authorship.
"Name a Buddist, Jew or Muslim who is as prolific an English language (including translations) SF writer as OSC. OSC's proliferation tends to inform opinions of his authorship."
Isaac Asimov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov_bibliography_(chronological)
"The optimisation for 300m was never a deliberate effort to reduce effective range."
True. It came from the observation made in WW1 that it was kind of pointless designing an anti-Boer weapon when for reasons like your two blobs by far the most frequent and the most effective use for it was at ranges below a few hundred metres. And to some extent even from the Franco-Prussian war, where the French rifle had a significant advantage in range over the German (German troops capturing French positions were amazed to find the sights graduated for something like 3 times the maximum range of their own sights), but that didn't give it a useful advantage in the actual fighting, where rate of fire at about 500m was what counted; however like other lessons from that war it took WW1 to really make them stick.
By birth that is true; by his own account OTOH...
What makes OSC special is his disdain for people who disagree with him, and not just on "are Mormons Christian". The disdain is like David Brin. Who I assume doesn't count as Christian, just as Charlie presumably doesn't count as Jewish?
Coz... if you wanna make that last argument I wish you luck.
So many discussions devolve into gun wanking. It's such a strange fetish.
If you were in a position to send a message into the distant past, what would you say and why? Make it the size of a book (50,000 words).
Assume it would be understood, or assume conditions to allow it to be read and put into practice on some level in at least one community.
If you were in a position to send a message into the distant past, what would you say and why? Make it the size of a book (50,000 words).
There's a lot to say, but part of it could easily be a very small book. Yes, this idea has occurred to me earlier.
During the Roman Empire, imagine selling a "how to use an abacus" book. Sure, great, they probably had lots of them (they'd be too boring to preserve). Roman counting trays were all over the place, although rather crap compared to the Chinese suanpan, which is what most people today think of when they read 'abacus.' Into a short document we could slip two clever advances.
One of them would be a few pictures of an actual suanpan or soroban, with beads strung on rods rather than laying about loose. Once the idea was known any bored apprentice could build one.
The bigger innovation would be in the writing, where abacus positions could be described by sequence of letters. For example, using Greek for clarity, we could note the configuration for one with an aleph, for two with a beta, and so on; if no beads are active, an omega. Hence, the number CCCII would be written delta-omega-beta. It makes perfect sense to anyone who's used to using an abacus or counting tray - and invisibly introduces positional notation with zero into Roman accounting.
SS
Bugger that for a lark ...
Get "them" to understand Place-Order numbering & that ZERO IS A NUMBER ....
And - didn't L Sprague de Camp write this exact novella? { "Lest Darkness Fall? }
Oh yes, being rude about OSC - actually I regard all religions with some degree of contempt, but some are much worse than others, especially in their degree(s) of tinfoil lunacy & viciousness.
My sole problem with your horse pump idea is that they didn't do it in 1780. Horse power was a well-understood thing back then, so why did they use gangs of soldiers manning a see-saw driving a piston?
(I suspect something to do with seals, and/or converting rotary motion into pressurization, back before high pressure steam engines were available. It might just have been an oversight. But my suspicion is the soldier-powered pump was derived from 18th century mobile water pumps for fire brigades, which in turn was human-powered because horse-turned pumps require more space than is readily available in towns, and/or horses and fire don't mix.)
Name a Buddist, Jew or Muslim who is as prolific an English language (including translations) SF writer as OSC.
Robert Silverberg (Jewish). Also Isaac Asimov. Probably a whole bunch more.
Can't speak to the other faiths.
I have no idea, but I can ask him what he thinks the practical problems would be next time we speak.
From previous conversations my uneducated guess would be that he'll tell me the furnaces don't really like being heated and cooled, and that you need a lot of energy to melt the metal bath.
In the modern world: A real problem which he has been complaining about since the 1990s is that the entire industry currently assumes that natural gas supplies are eternal. Apparently nobody has even started designing plants to run on anything else. There are a few biogas digester type projects but they are more greenwashing than anything else.
Yeah, because what could possibly go wrong with blasting a lot of sulfur into the atmosphere.
What I don't understand is that you and others describe soldiers being trained to fire targetted shots, as against the actual statistics of rounds fired. Obviously, one expects actual 'battle' to be a lot more confused than a range, but going from a kill rate of (say) 1:25 (from a hit rate a 1:5) to 1:250,000 is a hell of a difference. The most convincing explanation I have seen is that most soldiers forget their training and simply spray lead to suppress any likely counter-fire, but I would have thought the senior officers would have got unhappy about that.
I think the objection is to the gap between "rounds the accountants see being purchased" and "rounds expended". The two measurements are essentially uncorrelated.
You have details like rounds purchased now and expended in the future (in a different financial year!), rounds used in training, rounds donated or given as aid, rounds destroyed as noted above, and so on. There's likely a lot of ammunition in warehouses as well as many countries busily donating it to Ukraine or Russia right now.
Depending on exactly how you define "used in combat" matters too, I suspect great amounts of "military stuff" gets sent into combat areas then used for things other than combat, whether that's feeding locals, bribing people, showing off, training, lost outside of combat, I'm sure there's more. So "fired during active combat" is probably a better measure of usefulness, but much harder to count.
The actual solution in the 1632 series is to provide a couple of technologies to their allies ahead of their time. The flintlock rifle and the minie ball, thus making it possible to load a rifled muzzle loader at the same speed as a smoothbore. There is a debate about breech loaders but the conclusion is that they involve too many machines to make the machines.
The initial fight against part of Tilley's army is won with (IIRC) hunting rifles and an M60 that some local gun nutter has in his possession (much to the annoyance of the sheriff). I could be wrong but I think mining explosives might have played a part as well. It's been a while since I have read the books.
IMNSHO,it would be "Less worse"* if the usual suspects didn't believe "Trash people"** didn't deserve to be treated as human.
*Less worse, because it's a multi-faceted Charlie Foxtrot.
**Many of whom, under more favorable circumstances, would've done alright, as would their children.
Yes, it is likely that the figure is for rounds shipped to Afghanistan, but they DON'T have significant alternative uses, and you have a factor of 10,000 to explain away.
I have noticed that a large number of modern SF authors are Jewish, at least by background, but I have no idea of the (assumed cultural) reasons for that. You may have some clue.
Two titles come to mind concerning SF novels and messages to the past, Greg Benford's "Timescape" and Strieber & Kunetka's "War Day and the Journey Onward". In both novels world saving messages were sent, creating a fork, no saving their future.
The deterioration of fuel was the core of John Barnes' excellent Directive 51 trilogy. Highly distilled nightmare fuel, and personally recommended, FWIW.
You made me curious, but after reading several reviews on Amazon, I will give Directive 51 a pass. I detest "nanotechnology is magic" stories. I also detest stories where misfits/anarchists/terrorists have access to better technology than governments and mega-corporations do. And this series seems to have both in spades.
Germany was severely stuck for fixed nitrogen early in WW1, because of the blockade, until Haber developed his process. They were set to run out of both explosives and fertilisers, and so be forced to drop out, until that got going.
And apparently still had a shortage in WWII, in that there was a tug-of-war between using the nitrogen supply to make ammunition or fertilizer. Apparently at the end of the war they opted for ammunition, which had a significant effect on the harvest that year…
The disdain is like David Brin. Who I assume doesn't count as Christian
Ancestry is Polish Jewish, apparently. Sometimes this is fairly obvious in his stories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brin#Influence_of_Jewish_heritage
Name a Buddist, Jew or Muslim who is as prolific an English language (including translations) SF writer as OSC.
Harry Turtledove. 114 books that I've counted.
accompanied by a growth in "personal ammo dumps" where the people who own more than one assault rifle also have half a million rounds for it?
I have to wonder if there are many of these around anywhere in private hands. You're talking at least $1mil in ammo and storage costs. Assuming you're getting a reasonable quantity discount.
Hey. You're back.
I'd reckon your second guess is probably the one - the problem with seals is much the same whatever you do, but the idea of using a crank to drive a piston from a rotary input was still a bit far out in those days and not yet the kind of dead obvious thing it is now. I guess Girardoni put all the inventive effort into the part of the system that didn't exist at all yet - ie. the gun itself - and took the simple option of adapting some existing design for the pump, probably whatever he was using in his workshop to compress air for his experiments. Also the invention would have been pretty stunning at the time and its flaws less obvious than they are in comparison with all the better things that came afterwards.
The most convincing explanation I have seen is that most soldiers forget their training and simply spray lead to suppress any likely counter-fire, but I would have thought the senior officers would have got unhappy about that.
It is somewhat of a exponential scale thing.
Two folks, one on one, you tend to have limited ammo and unless you're really close a spray of fire doesn't do anything as your target is likely not not get hit.
As the number involved grow then you tend to get logistical support for lots of ammo. And the numbers of attackers and defenders increase. A spray of fire is more likely to hit something. And just keeping the other guys away is a big deal.
Look at WWII allied bombers. How much defensive ammo did they carry and use each mission? 1000s of rounds. And most didn't do any damage to an enemy. Losses to enemy fighters were bad enough but just think of what they would have been without any defensive fire.
WWII 5" AA shells on large US navy ships. They were firing about 5000 shells per downed plane. The RAD LAB proximity fused shells took that down to 500. (And yes, thanks to the UK researchers the work was based on.) But still 500 5" shells is a huge number.
Horses walking in a circle.
Is that a thing anymore? Everyone I know around horses the horses would not put up with such nonsense. Maybe the horse we have today have been bread to be too smart.
From my very limited knowledge of such the best animals to walk in a circle to do some work are oxen. Maybe a mule. (100 years of US old west movies have it all wrong.) But from what I understand a mule not being quite as smart as a horse is many times made up for in stubbornness.
The horse gin was a standard piece of mining technology. They were used with oxen as well, but horses work well enough to name the device.
Glad to see you posting again.
Asimov wrote about 350 books and edited approximately 150.
Horses walking in a circle. Is that a thing anymore? Everyone I know around horses the horses would not put up with such nonsense. Maybe the horse we have today have been bread to be too smart.
Too expensive maybe. Anyway, lots of horses move in loops. They're called race horses.
I happen to know a local rancher who runs a board/care/rent facility for horses next to a really hilly park. She has some choice words about what happens when people buy race horses.
Thing is, race horses are a bit of an investment, because they're supposed to make money for their owners. Normally they don't make money, and apparently if you live near a track, you can get a former race horse fairly cheaply. If you try to ride them on trails, you rapidly get into the problem that all they've been taught to do is run fast and turn left. Something as simple as going down a hill may require a fair amount of training.
If you're talking about using equine-powered mills, I'm pretty sure they still use donkeys in that role in various parts of the world. Going from that race horse crack, it's probably worth considering the idea that animals used as motors are often bred and definitely trained for that role. In a hypothetical low tech scenario, there's some need for the breeding and training infrastructure to produce a supply of animals who are content plodding along (horses, donkeys, turnspit dogs, camels, oxen, mules, etc.). A random horse or dog off the street probably will rebel.
On producing float glass:
I recall part of the media debates around high energy prices here. Pilkington were saying that if they turned off one of their gas-fired furnaces and let it cool down they would have to scrap the whole thing and build a new one. I don't know why that would be, but it suggests that building one to be restartable has serious practical difficulties. Maybe the difference between the thermal coefficients of the furnace and the contents leads to structural cracks?
Having said that, I suspect that the expensive precision bits can be recovered and refitted to the new furnace structure, so not as bad has having to start entirely from scratch.
"Glad to see you posting again."
Agreed.
Moz @ 1302:
"more research is needed", sadly meaning further experiments.
Meanwhile one side of politics in the USA is very happy indeed to see people killed by said experiments even if they have to make an effort to ensure it happens.
https://news.yahoo.com/abbott-defends-dropping-migrants-vice-165627373.html
"who would Jesus bomb" indeed.
Jesus already expressed his opinion on Gov. Abbott's behavior:
IF there IS a hell, Gov Abbott & his ilk will burn there for all eternity.
Military psychologists have actually looked at this quite a bit. There were battles in the US Slavers Rebellion that had so much fire the grass was cut between the two sides, yet casualties measured in hundreds rather than thousands.
The conclusion was that very few humans are comfortable looking down a sight and putting a bullet into another human. My memory is leaky, but I think it was <10% of soldiers in an active firefight. Most of the rest would actually fire over enemy heads (threat display), or default to other roles (bringing ammunition, helping wounded etc).
The more psychological distance between the soldier and the intended target the easier it is to kill. It is very hard to kill with a knife or bayonet, less hard with a gun at range. Firing artillery over the horizon is detached enough that people are able to do it without losing sleep. Easiest of all is sending other people to do the killing for you.
Various militaries adapted their training to make killing 'automatic' and without thought, which meant a lot more soldiers ended up killing people in later wars (i.e. Vietnam). That may also be how we have so many PTSD sufferers, but that's a hard number to measure for past wars.
'On Killing' by Grossman is a good book for this topic. I'm sure it is a bit outdated, but I read it as a text book a couple decades ago and found it fascinating.
That is a long way to say that the number of rounds expended without hitting anything has at least something to do with an aversion to killing humans.
My sole problem with your horse pump idea is that they didn't do it in 1780. Horse power was a well-understood thing back then, so why did they use gangs of soldiers manning a see-saw driving a piston?
(I suspect something to do with seals, and/or converting rotary motion into pressurization, back before high pressure steam engines were available. It might just have been an oversight. But my suspicion is the soldier-powered pump was derived from 18th century mobile water pumps for fire brigades, which in turn was human-powered because horse-turned pumps require more space than is readily available in towns, and/or horses and fire don't mix.)
My guess is that, since the pump had to be near the front line, soldiers were easier to train for the job than horses, and required no more additional supplies. You need specialist horses to run the pump, while any squad of mooks can be taught to operate a see-saw in short order.
Changing the subject slightly, there's a fair amount of information out there about historical airguns. People have tried to make "windarms" (versus firearms) into military weapons since forever, but they've only been fielded as the girandoni (which was prized for its unique multishot capacity) and modern less lethal arms (pepperball guns, tasers, and the like. Yes, I know tasers use nitrogen). In general, they're considerably more expensive than a firearm of the same caliber, and need regular and finicky maintenance to keep the system sealed. As a result, they've tended to be toys (especially for the wealthy), and that has led to a lot of interest among collectors.
Also there's the coolness factor, which should not be denigrated. Apparently some Texas companies have gotten into the business of making deer-hunting air rifles, for those few jurisdictions where such things are legal, so there's currently a small market and a bunch of odd-looking rifles for sale.
So yeah, they're fun to read about and to shoot. Aside from special situations though, windarms generally seem to be the "let them eat brioche" solution to arming soldiers. As such, they've never made the jump to mass production as main weapons. It's interesting to imagine a scenario where they would be adopted though.
paws4thot @ 1303:
1292 - I remember an SAS weapons instructor describing the fire selector on the AK-47 as:-
1) Safety ON
2) Single Shot
3) 3 Shot Burst
4) Wanker!!
Admittedly I'm far from an expert on the AK-47 - I only had a single day of training on it - but I don't remember it having a burst mode - only safe, semi & full wanker. 😕
Maybe the difference between the thermal coefficients of the furnace and the contents leads to structural cracks?
When I moved to Pittsburgh in January 1980 the J&L blast furnaces were still lit. But no steel for a while. The feds were paying them to keep the mill so that it could be started back up "in case of ...". After a year or so they turned off the furnaces and started taking the mill apart.
Apparently the steel furnaces have similar issues with being turned off.
On a side note after 4 or 5 years of taking the mill apart there were two big squares left behind 5+ meters tall, maybe 10-20 meters on a side. (Estimating from a distance.) Apparently the foundations for the rolling mill equipment were so strong they just decided to build up the dirt around them and later built buildings on top of them. Sort of like the discussion here a while back about the WWII German sub bunkers.
Moz @ 1307:
What makes OSC special is his disdain for people who disagree with him, and not just on "are Mormons Christian". The disdain is like David Brin. Who I assume doesn't count as Christian, just as Charlie presumably doesn't count as Jewish?
Coz... if you wanna make that last argument I wish you luck.
Still, I think it's bad form to be characterizing people using their ethnicity or religious affiliation as a swear word.
That is a long way to say that the number of rounds expended without hitting anything has at least something to do with an aversion to killing humans.
I quite agree with this, which is why so much effort goes into dehumanizing the enemy, and helps explain why nonviolence is more often successful than violence (far more people will join a nonviolent struggle than a violent one, basically).
As for history, there's an interesting book out there, Shay's Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, which compares the story of Achilles in the Iliad to the recorded experiences of soldiers in Vietnam and finds a number of parallels. Shay published it in 1995, so it pre-dates a lot of work on PTSD, but he makes a number of good points about how, even in very different societies, warriors suffer similar psychological problems during war.
Rocketpjs @ 1308:
So many discussions devolve into gun wanking. It's such a strange fetish.
If you were in a position to send a message into the distant past, what would you say and why? Make it the size of a book (50,000 words).
Assume it would be understood, or assume conditions to allow it to be read and put into practice on some level in at least one community.
How about a book that has "So long and thanks for all the fish." repeated 6250 times and let them figure out WHAT THAT MEANS!
Looking at a couple of videos on their YouTube channel I get the impression that only one end of the furnace is actively heated, trying to make it so it can be drained would be very difficult, and there are some moving parts near the output end. Most of the movement through the furnace seems to be caused by the sand, soda and dolomite being fed in pushing the melt along. Once that input has melted much of the rest of the furnace part of the process involves cooling in stages from ~1500C to ~1100C to remove bubbles and impurities, then lifting the finished melt from the bottom of the output end of the furnace and pouring it into the float chamber. I'd guess if you did let the whole thing cool down you'd never be able to get the output end molten again and would need a lot of work with a pneumatic drill to chip out a couple of thousand ton(ne)s of glass. Or Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who slowly working his way through it...
Okay, I'll bite. First, I'd send the packet to a point just after WWII, because there's a lot of room there to change the systems we use as industry gets rebuilt.
Second, I'd discuss the history of the upcoming seventy years, with emphasis on the environment and some of the obvious political mistakes, probably on a country-by-country basis.
Third, I'd send tech documents for solar-panels and windmills, and discuss the long-term problems with reactor designs (maybe they can develop something better starting in the 1940s if they follow a different path.)
Fourth, I'd send the information not only in paper form, but also stored, with pictures, on a modern laptop, so it would be obvious to everyone that the message really does come from the future.
Essentially, the advice would be to use coal and other fossil fuels as a quick, cheap source of power to create a green future.
Greg Tingey @ 1310:
SS
Bugger that for a lark ...
Get "them" to understand Place-Order numbering & that ZERO IS A NUMBER ....
And - didn't L Sprague de Camp write this exact novella? { "Lest Darkness Fall? }
Oh yes, being rude about OSC - actually I regard all religions with some degree of contempt, but some are much worse than others, especially in their degree(s) of tinfoil lunacy & viciousness.
I'm not bothered by "being rude about OSC". I lost all respect to him over his racism years ago.
But using his religion as an slur is the same as using any OTHER religion as a slur. Would it be acceptable to write "OSC" is a moron, oops, "....." substituting "Jew" or "Muslim" ... or worse?
I expect it would NOT be acceptable, so it's not acceptable to use "Mormon" that way either?
PS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5zqK6-Th8
Have you read at least the first book?
If memory serves, the first large wind turbine in the United States was built in the forties, but suffered a broken blade and was not repaired...add engineering data to build better blades, as a successful prototype might've led to better things earlier.
I'd guess if you did let the whole thing cool down you'd never be able to get the output end molten again and would need a lot of work with a pneumatic drill to chip out a couple of thousand ton(ne)s of glass.
My son in law spent 5 years as a quality engineer at a drywall plant. 500 foot continuous operation. They didn't have to deal with hardened glass and metal but still an unexpected shutdown of the line created quite a bit of a mess. 500' of paper and slurry into one end with rolling and heating along the way (nat gas of course) and slicing of hardened product off the end. Stacking it continuously without stopping the line.
I note, in the review, that there are parts where there's TMI on ship handling, etc.
Let me note that Chuck Gannon is a friend of mine... and teaches at Annapolis. (US Navy military college).
And at this point, we're into the conversation I used to hear on occasion when I was young: at the end of Well's Time Machine, he returns to the far future, and the people left here see that he's taken three books from his library.
What three? Wells never said. (I'd say my CRC Handbook, for one.)
I will make one point of information: the angel that Joseph Smith allegedly wrestled with was named Moroni, and yes, I"m spelling that as the Mormons do.
Feel free to reread A Study in Scarlet, and assume how I refer to the name of the religion.
Paul @ 1335:
On producing float glass:
I recall part of the media debates around high energy prices here. Pilkington were saying that if they turned off one of their gas-fired furnaces and let it cool down they would have to scrap the whole thing and build a new one. I don't know why that would be, but it suggests that building one to be restartable has serious practical difficulties. Maybe the difference between the thermal coefficients of the furnace and the contents leads to structural cracks?
Having said that, I suspect that the expensive precision bits can be recovered and refitted to the new furnace structure, so not as bad has having to start entirely from scratch.
Without actually knowing anything about the process, I wonder if it would be because when they built the furnace they didn't think about ever needing to shut it down? So they just didn't design it that way?
Could they have built a furnace that they COULD stop & restart if they'd only anticipated wanting to do so?
(snark) Besides, what else do you do with wimpy slave kids... that will turn them into Conan (first movie)?
Right, saw that on slashdot, skimmed an article. He's promising to deliver x ->grams<- of sulfur to the stratosphere. Not keys, not tons, grams.
After I hit enter, I realized a better answer: feel free to fire up more paper mills. Anyone here ever been within 5-10 km of a major paper mill? Want sulfur in the air?
Real numbers time: the US DoD, after WWII - a real, legally, officially declared war, with socially-approved enemies. What they found was in actual firefights, something like 15% or so of the grunts fired randomly in the air, hoping to scare the enemy away, maybe 5% actually tried to shoot the enemy,and the rest kept their heads down and hoped to not get hit.
Stats like that give me hope for human beings, and tell me no, we're not evil, and should be replaced by 'bots.
Fiction and non-fiction, Asimov was working on his 520th book when he died.
context = USA
free downloadable copy of final #J6 report! WOW! a fully documented coup attempt! what a delightful, essential research source for wannabes... authors struggling to write political thrillers as well coup attempters
https://january6th.house.gov/sites/democrats.january6th.house.gov/files/Report_FinalReport_Jan6SelectCommittee.pdf
Well, right after WWII.... Perhaps, instead, you might send it to 1911, right after the five-year-long lawsuit by the US government to break up the monopoly of Standard Oil of NJ (aka Esso, aka Exxon). The US gov't might be interested....
Pilkington were saying that if they turned off one of their gas-fired furnaces and let it cool down they would have to scrap the whole thing and build a new one. I don't know why that would be, but it suggests that building one to be restartable has serious practical difficulties.
The same applies to at least some types of steel foundries. The steel mill in Hamilton was bought by a foreign company on the condition that it remained running, then a few months later they shut it down. Conservative government who OKed the takeover decided not to pursue legal action for breach-of-promise, and I've always wondered who got paid off, or if that was always the plan. (Maybe I'm too cynical, though.)
Yeah. A former schoolmate of mine proposed building gynormous towers to loft smog from places like Beijing into the stratosphere (ca. 100,000 feet up) to help block sunlight with particulates.
Again, I stuck my nose into this in Hot Earth Dreams, when I was trying to figure out whether huge volcanoes or asteroid impacts were a bigger threat (volcanoes win). A big climatic effect from volcanoes happens when they loft a lot of sulfur-containing particulates into the stratosphere. How long they stay up for depends on the size of the particles, with bigger particles falling faster. Still, it takes a big volcano to have even a "modest" (as in "year without a summer") effect on global weather, and most of the particles they blow don't stay up very long.
This then gets complicated by where the volcano is (equatorial volcanoes have different effects than do more temperate volcanoes). What kind of bedrock the volcano is burning matters too. For example, Central American volcanoes punch above their weight climatically because there's a lot of sulfur in rocks there. This same sulfur made the Chicxulub impact that much worse, because it also blew a huge amount of sulfur into the higher layers of the atmosphere.
Possibly, a volcano in the "wrong" time and place would be enough to trigger an ice age, but that would take conditions that we very definitely do not have right now.
So I agree: grams of sulfur delivered by a weather balloon is silliness. Probably they're using it because weather balloons are cheap and so is sulfur. If you're going to do stuff with weather balloons, it's far more fun to invest in high school "edge of space" launches and in the "Airship to orbit" program.
the problem with seals is much the same whatever you do
Which is that without an adequate supply of fish they'll simply ignore you?
(Sorry, been binging nature documentaries since Christmas…)
And now for something completely different, a free-enterprise geoengineering scam. No monitoring, no instrumentation, just let it fly: https://gizmodo.com/make-sunsets-solar-geoengineering-sulfur-climate-change-1849931460 Based on Neal Stepenson's Termination Shock?
If you were in a position to send a message into the distant past, what would you say and why? Make it the size of a book (50,000 words).
If I were Chinese, I'd go back to ancient China and drop off a copy of the Tao Te Ching. I might also want to drop off a copy of the Zhuangzi, and possibly the I Ching.
Why?
These are the three foundational texts of Taoism. All of them have mysterious origins, and all of them talk about concepts that seem oddly advanced for their time, and potentially(!) even foreshadow modern cosmology.
Anyway, no one knows who wrote the I Ching, and it might have had many authors. Probably it was compiled in its present form well before 300 BCE (Warring States Period or before). It's a spiritual and philosophy tract disguised as a divination system, and it's purportedly about manifesting things using the Tao. (What's the Tao? Everything and the origin of everything, basically).
Lao Tzu (literal translation "Old Boy") is another unknown. In oral tradition, he was purportedly a chief librarian for one of the Warring States who decided to bug out, wrote the Tao Te Ching on his way out because someone asked him to leave behind some parting words, and disappeared thereafter. Also according to oral tradition, Taoism wasn't invented in China, but "came from elsewhere," so Lao Tzu was transmitting knowledge, not originating it. Again, the oldest surviving copies are from the Warring States period.
The funky physics part is that emptiness plays a central role in Lao Tzu's Taoism, and now the cosmologists are going on about how they need to better understand all the different kinds of vacuum the universe has on offer. This school of Taoism sees "staring into the abyss" that lurks within us, not as a way to become suicidal*, but as a way to appreciate the source of everything. In Taoism, everything comes from nothing.
No one knows who Zhuangzi (aka "Chuang-tzu" or master Chuang) was either. In the oral tradition he's a disciple of Lao Tzu, except that the oldest surviving test of the Zhuangzi is considerably older than the oldest surviving text of the Daodejing. This book is less well known, which is unfortunate, because it's the most mind-bending of the three. It starts off with a discussion of relativity--not Einsteinian, but a sarcastic parable about the importance of differences in scale--and goes from there. This is where the story of the scholar dreaming he was a butterfly and on awaking not knowing which state was the dream comes from. The Zhuangzi also first showed up during the Warring States period.
If this doesn't sound like time travelers, I don't know what does.
*Note, I DO NOT advocate staring into the abyss if you don't know what you're doing. There's a whole oral tradition for doing this, and very little of it is in print. If you don't have a teacher, be very careful about going there. However, if you've ever been doing something and had a creative solution to some completely unrelated problem "pop up out of nowhere," that "nowhere" it popped out of is what the Taoists are talking about, in part. It's not something you force, it's something you let happen, which is why they talk about cultivating the Tao and letting things happen, rather than using force.
Mules are more intelligent than horses.
If you were in a position to send a message into the distant past, what would you say and why? Make it the size of a book (50,000 words).
Well I've watched Connections, so it would be 1 How to make movable type, 2 Double entry bookkeeping, 3 How to drain mines, 4 The recipe for gunpowder and 5 How to make a telescope.
Don't malign all horses by the standards of modern riding horses, let alone racehorses; those are overbred, delicate and stupid. Before the industrial revolution, most horses were more like our semi-feral ponies, heavy horses etc.; they were and are very different.
whitroth asked stirner on December 28, 2022 @ 18:19 in #1348:
For those who have not, or wish a refresher, it's a free download (now, anyway), from https://www.baen.com/1632.html
"creative solution to some completely unrelated problem "pop up out of nowhere," that "nowhere" it popped out of is what the Taoists are talking about"
So taking a shower or taking a walk? Doing something that was relaxing and undemanding and, in the midst of that, pop! Happened to me one or two times.
stirner replied to this comment from me on December 28, 2022 @ 19:12 in #1365:
Perhaps, though this seems more likely, if not from THE ART OF THE DEAL https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/where-the-money-was-the-memoirs-of-a-bank-robber-library-of-larceny_willie-sutton/370600/
"Well I've watched Connections, so it would be 1 How to make movable type, 2 Double entry bookkeeping, 3 How to drain mines, 4 The recipe for gunpowder and 5 How to make a telescope. "
I'd go with 1 and 5 (plus microscope). IMO, the Singularity started with 1 and got a big boost with 5. We've been falling into it with ever-increasing speed since.
(1 with reference to Europe. China got there first but, for whatever reason, it took hold in Europe to a greater degree.)
paws @ 1303
Wouldn't be surprised ... because, my dad, not being stupid, took up the "extra job" offer of periapetically supervising explosives/ammo dumps & stores, scattered around Ayrshire ... for which task, he was permanently lent a motor-bike & an unlimited petrol allowance ....
Religion & authors
Yes, but, even by the standards of religion, the "church" of JCotLDS is seriously, tinfoil-waving utterly bonkers - only superseded, later, by the "Elrons" { Scientologists } Also, some threads back, Charlie's remark { Re. the Rohinga in Burma } that "When Buddhists go bad, they go really bad"
1374 - Greg, at that rate they could have met, probably later war after the Dumfriesshire plants were more or less all established and grandfather moved to Girvan. They'd have got on too, because post WW2, if you violated safety rules you got your jotters, and the unions were there helping the management get you out the plant.
...maybe. There was
The numbers came from a study by S L A Marshall, which he published in his book "Men Against Fire" (link). His methodology has been challenged, but many former soldiers have said "yeah, sounds about right". Even in Napoleonic times, it was claimed that it took a man's weight in musket balls to kill them (which, given a 2oz musket ball, would be about 1200 shots). Grossman's book makes the point that as the US Army changed how they taught marksmanship (i.e. they changed from bull's-eye targets to people-shaped targets, as an exercise in conditioning), Marshall's assessment of "effective firing against real people" increased. I should point out that the British had been doing this since at least the Boer War.
One of the major problems is that soldiers will fight as they train. If, during training, they get into the habit of firing blank rounds without aiming... guess what? Likewise, if live-firing tactical training is run as "blank firing, but with real bullets" rather than with any true assessment of marksmanship; the wrong lessons are learned by the soldiers doing the training. An interesting ARRSE thread on the subject of pre-deployment training for Afghanistan can be found here, the first post (link) makes a point about camouflage and concealment...
(Don't get me started on the flaws inherent in how the British Army approaches skill-at-arms, we'll be here all night...)
Because most all rounds are fired from light machineguns not rifles.
"The rifleman's job is to carry ammo for the LMG.
The LMG gunners job is to prevent the enemy advancing towards the artillery.
The artillerymen's job is to kill the enemy,"
(Vastly oversimplified, but still partly true).
Massive spoiler for directive 51 and its sequels:
It seems to be about a insane ecological cult trying to destroy civilisation using improbable nanotechnology (that trashes electrical engines) and biotechnology (that eats nitrates and rubber) and has access to non fission based fusion weapons.
But it's actually about an attack on the earth by an alien von-neuman probe that runs a zero-day exploit on the human mind.
So, if you leave out the specific name of the religion and say, for example:
"Members of religious cults, however old the cult, are morons"
is that okay?
Or must you say something even more vanilla like:
"The fundamental basis of all religion is unproven and inconsistent with rational behaviour."
Because, going the other way, its fairly clear that when the religious have the whiphand its time to burn/tax/oppress the heretic/unbeliever/heathen*.
The religious are only too happy to discriminate against atheists and use that word as a slur.
I'm happy to respect peoples right to have a religion, just don't ask me to respect the religion itself.
*delete as applicable.
The Mormon religion is only bizarre if you've been raised around conventional Christianity and the expectation of patriarchal monogamy.
The rifleman's job is to carry ammo for the LMG. The LMG gunners job is to prevent the enemy advancing...
It depends on your infantry doctrine, and associated equipment. There are two schools of thought:
Belt-fed light MG in every section, becAuSE mOAr DaKKA!
Two automatic rifles (heavier barrel, bipod, better sight) in every section, because accuracy and less weight.
There's a cyclic basis to the argument. Army fights a light-role infantry war, in which it discovers that LMGs positively munch through ammunition, and that the section physically can't carry enough ammunition for an extended fight without resupply; decides to focus on reducing the infantry load by switching to automatic rifles; has a war where soldiers demand more firepower in the rifle section; adds back an LMG; and repeat.
The British have now moved away from the L86 Light Support Weapon (although it rarely trained or used it properly) back to the FN MAG; the US Marine Corps are currently moving from the M249 to the M27 automatic rifle. Swings and roundabouts.
Best info to flush through the Wayback Machine would be a map of the world showing coastlines, rivers and deserts, along with strategic passages to get through mountains, and sea lanes to traverse oceans. Knowledge of all the continents and their arrangement on the globe would speed up sharing of diseases among populations earlier and more gradually so as to permit time for building up more equal levels of immunity. A world empire, true global civilization and earlier technological development would be the payoff. Downsides are easy to imagine, but the pluses would outweigh minuses.
context = Canada
1) shows the mainstreaming of drones
2) nasty weather bad enough to force Canadians to forego shorts and wear long pants
3) definitely something to re-watch in July when we are stewing in our bodily juices
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2022/dec/28/canada-drone-footage-shows-row-of-lakefront-houses-frozen-over-video
Nah, the mormon religion is bizarre to a lot of non-religious people for the same reason any religion is bizarre, with an extra dose to many because it's monothestic. Or because they insist they're christians even though they have their own prophet and holy book. Mohammed did much the same but said yeah, ok, we're version N+1 and moved along. Making major changes but only incrementing the minor version number is weird, especially when they're breaking changes.
the underpants are a bit weird too
Apropos of nothing, it might be a reasonably good time to contemplate randomly changing the subject away from religion, since OGH has a finite tolerance for the subject.
As a Gen Xer, one thing I'm finding interesting are these onrushing traces of the end of the boomer and pre-boomer generation. It's not just people in my parent's generation all past three score and ten either, and the way their health needs are shaping medical practices at the moment (had an interesting conversation with my acupuncturist about this recently).
The end of the Boom is having other effects too. Things like environmental groups raking in money on bequests, while simultaneously struggling to fill high-level volunteer spots held for decades by their previous occupants, for example.
This demographic dip, going from Boomers to Xers. is an interesting problem for environmental NGOs generally. Baby Boomers were a large demographic, and a lot of environmentalism (as well as a tera-shit-ton of damage caused by their greed, consumerism, etm.) was done by this large generation. Now they're aging out, Gen X is much smaller, and the younger generations, including Gen Z who are also seriously environmentalist, are so mired in debt they don't have the time and resources their grandparents had with which to get active, although they're seriously trying.
How to handle a) doing the work with fewer volunteers, and b) passing the torch to the kids who need it, is turning out to be a non-trivial exercise.
Anyone seeing similar patterns?
You left off the boomers not willing to let go and wanting to tell everyone under 60 to shut up and just do what they are told.
[sigh]
PS: I'm soon to be 69.
»Anyone seeing similar patterns?«
It sometimes becomes a not so subtle change of focus.
For instance the NGO's critical of nuclear weapons, (BoAS, FAS etc.) are seeing a very clear drift in both contributions, strings attached thereto and researcher interests.
How's this for a Con fancy dress? - { slava Ukraine }
paws
About 5 minutes after WWII ended in Europe - certainly in/by late May, my father effed off to Germany, as a junior part of CivMilGov - which, by the standards of the time, paid well - ennabling him to buy the house which I'm typing from (!)
Hint: "They" were asking for CivMilGov volunteers in March 1944 - think about that.
Grant
You've got it - epsecially when religions are in power ...
Troutwaxer
NO
The origin of the religion itself is completely batshit
- see also Moz' comment?
Downsides are easy to imagine, but the pluses would outweigh minuses.
This is the standard Longtermist attempt to justify genocide.
Please desist.
Hah. I am 58 and was a late child -- my mother was 38 when I was born -- so I'm technically a tail-end boomer. Culturally I identify as Gen-X, which per the arbitrary marks on the calendar began 10 weeks after I was born. (Let's just call me a premature X-er and move on, right?)
The cultural/social gap between those of us born from the mid-sixties on and those born from the mid-forties on is remarkable, although plenty of my generation have turned into reactionary asshats over the past decade or two: either because they were authoritarians to begin with, or because economic stress drives people to hunker down and hang onto whatever they've got.
Charlie
Whereas I'm an peak-boomer, born 1946
And I'm horrified by the ultra-reactionary stance taken by SOME OF my contemporaries & the "Overton drift" in recent years, so that someone like me, who used to identify as a left-wing conservative ( Heath, MacMillan) now find myself near the centre of the Labour party, at least
Oh, really? That is a common canard, but I have never seen any evidence for it.
There IS a tendency for people to get more right-wing and authoritarian as they grow older, but I can assure you that left-wing liberals are at least as common among the boomer generation than they are among generation X, especially among the scientific intelligensia. And my experience is that there are a hell of a lot more of the rational ones, though that is probably biassed by them coming from the scientific intelligensia :-)
Dammit, I have been railing against the education and housing Ponzi schemes (the main ways in which the boomer generation is privileged) since about 1970, and so have many other people I know.
To Greg: actually, Macmillan, Heath etc. would probably be purged from Starmer's party for being too socialist :-(
Disagree.
Firstly, the poor die young -- if you survive into your 60s you're less likely to be disabled or chronically ill (so less likely to be empathic towards people in those categories) and more likely to be sufficiently well-to-do to afford healthcare and/or time off work when sick.
Secondly, people with assets tend to defend them -- which is why Thatcher's privatization of social housing drove the British working/lower-middle class (those who benefited, as opposed to those whose careers and communities she trashed) towards supporting the Tories.
However I think the folks who drift rightwards in such a manner will deny moving rightwards: their ideological position (such as it is) won't have changed, merely their willingness to write in loopholes to defend their own behaviour.
These trends are hard to quantify -- it'd take a multi-generational social survey to get results, and the chances of such a survey surviving conservative governments who don't want any risk of the outcome not being ideologically supportive for their agenda is slim.
Kardashev @ 1373:
[Quoting me] "Well I've watched Connections, so it would be 1 How to make movable type, 2 Double entry bookkeeping, 3 How to drain mines, 4 The recipe for gunpowder and 5 How to make a telescope."
I thought about a microscope, but I figured that a telescope has greater obvious utility, and that once telescopes become a thing, microscopes will follow pretty shortly. That said, maybe the Germ Theory of disease ought to be on the list instead of book keeping. (I'm thinking this has to be kept down to around 5 things of 10,000 words each)
Double entry book-keeping sounds like a really trivial thing, but it gave a huge boost to the merchant class because for the first time they could tell the difference between fraud and error, and fix the errors after the fact. You can also keep the two ledgers in different hands so that fraud requires collusion. Getting trade going was important because a) trade generates wealth and b) merchants became the counterweight to the aristocracy.
Mines were important, partly because more metals, but also because the mechanisms needed to drain mines are only one step away from steam engines.
Gunpowder because the other big step to steam engines was the precision metalwork involved in making cannons.
"Moveable type" is actually only one element of what Gutenberg did. I should have been clearer.
Gutenberg's big innovation was not the concept of moveable type as such, it was making a mould that let him produce lots of identical letters quickly and cheaply. He also found an oil-based ink that would work well on paper. Along with refinements over the next century this reduced the cost of printing by around 3 orders of magnitude over the Chinese system. That made it feasible for Joe Tradesman to buy a textbook to learn how to do something, which caused an explosion in literacy, and everything else is history.
Golden plates?
Charlie @ 1394: Secondly, people with assets tend to defend them -- which is why Thatcher's privatization of social housing drove the British working/lower-middle class (those who benefited, as opposed to those whose careers and communities she trashed) towards supporting the Tories.
I've always wondered how the children of the 1984 miners strike feel about it now, 40 years later. Thanks to Mrs T. they didn't go down the pit, and now their children aren't either. Are they sorry about that? I'm sure that being part of the local colliery workers association and being in and out of each other's houses growing up feels grand, but I can't think its a good exchange for a life spent underground followed by a short retirement and death from lung disease. But I dunno, maybe they'd disagree.
I also wonder about the alternative history in which Mrs T. never got to be PM, and Willie Whitelaw led the Tories from 1975 (Every prime minister needs a Willie - Mrs T). What would the country look like now? I strongly suspect that we would have about the same amount of heavy industry as in this timeline.
Charlie & EC
ALL the prominent politicians in the tories, at any rate ... are a minimum of 15 years younger than me & some considerably more than that.
Heath, certainly has had a dreadful reputational trashing, ever since Thatcher & is routinely called "traitor" by the kippers.
Whereas I, having had a very narrow escape, now regard said kippers as traitors - I really do not appreciate being lied to and conned.
On the subject of a change in generational values, there's that "other thing" - the revolution in "society's" attitude(s) to sex & sexuality - & would that it had come at least 35 years earlier ...
Gold plates?
If I had ye olde time machine, I'd probably make up a few thousand Rosetta disks and leave them, along with a bunch of single lens microscopes, in various parts of the world around 2200 years ago.
Maybe build a couple Clocks of the Long Now to go with the disks?
If I was feeling diplomatic, I'd teach them how to make clear glass for lenses, and how to rewind the clocks. And then I'd leave. What they learn from this exercise is up to them.
More batshit than any other religion? Like "God put his tentacle into a Hebrew virgin and she gave birth to a savior" kind of batshit? I'm not seeing it.
Sure, the whole business with Joseph Smith talking into his hat's a little strange, but no more than "he meditated so hard snails crawled onto him." And at least the Mormons don't handle venomous snakes to prove God's love, and the holy underwear is no weirder than the combination of payos, a yarmulke and tallis, and it's probably less-weird than idea that women need to be purified after their periods in a ritual bath.
And what about the idea that little cookies become God, and that the proper form of worship is "eating God." Or the idea that every family should donate one child to the church, who if male will become a priest, and if female will become a bride of God's son, who is God, and is also a ghost?
I don't think I need to go on. Mormonism is no weirder than any other religion. Period.
And just for the people who might get offended, I'm not attacking any of these theologies - just noting that before you attack Mormonism as strange, maybe you should look at a couple other religions...
I think you haven't compared "The Word" with "The Book of Mormon". "The Word" is quite reasonable, though there are certainly lots of Buddhists that aren't "quite reasonable".
More batshit than any other religion? Like "God put his tentacle into a Hebrew virgin and she gave birth to a savior" kind of batshit? I'm not seeing it.
AIUI they believe that the sequel to the New Testament was written by an angel, on golden tablets, buried in upstate New York, around 600BC to 420AD ... in 17th century English.
Or at least translated by Smith into 17th century English with the cadences of the King James Bible, with which the initial converts would have been familiar.
Does this sound suspicious to you? Because it should.
(My take on it is that it's just more New Testament Fanfic, like the Book of Revelations of St. John -- which was apparently not contemporaneous with the rest of the "New Testament" collection of yarns, either. Cynically, Joe wanted to get his ashes hauled by more than one woman, and if Holy Scripture could be drafted to give him a license to shag multiple wives, then it would be.)
That the weakening jet stream is allowing the polar storms further South isn't new, and IIUC, has been pretty much accepted. Another effect is that the weakening jet stream is allowing weather patterns to just sit over a particular area rather than moving on, when intensifies both heat and cold waves.
I think this has been pretty much accepted for at least the last couple of years (and that's probably just when it started showing up in the popular science press). As I think about it, it seems to probably be (one of) the mechanism(s) behind the polar areas warming faster than areas closer to the equator.
Every religion seems to me to be a power play, not all that distinguishable from the current political shenanigans, older games of thrones, etc. Someone, or some group, that wants to tell other people what to do, devises a rationale as to why they should be able to do that. Sometimes for money, sometimes for sheer power, sometimes for multiple wives (Henry the VIII, repent!). Joe Smith's malarkey is recent enough to be clearly visible; older religions are more cloaked in historical claptrap.
Really not much different from the various authoritarian regimes rising today.
Thrice upon a Time by James Hogan is also "message to the past". I don't remember whether the message wipes out the present, or just creates and alternate. (There's also "The Proteus Operation", but that "message" involves actual time travel, and definitely presumes the multi-world model.)
I think the wrong word is being used here. "batshit" implies pure strangeness, and I think I've cited enough counterexamples that calling Mormonism "batshit" is off the table. However, if you told me that Joseph Smith was a grifter, or that the religion had some grifty roots, or that Joseph Smith had a psychosexual agenda, I'd absolutely agree with you.
That said, I think the Mormon religion is frequently practiced with full sincerity today, and I've got no more objection to Mormon practices than I do to any other religion, some of which also had griftiness and agendas attached, such as the Church of England. And if there was a historical Jesus, I suspect he was trying more for Sam's role in Lord of Light than attempting to be actual messiah. And so on.
But the right word - grift or something like it - should to be used to describe the religion's origin.
More batshit than any other religion?
I'd speculate that the batshittery is a feature, not a bug. Good religious stories are designed to be memorable. For instance, the Tao Te Ching is short enough that some people regularly chant all 81 chapters, and apparently it's quite moving in the original Chinese.
The trick we've lost is linking the memorable story to useful information about how the world works, so now they're just stories.
The opposite is also true: a lot of bureaucratic documents (whether Leviticus or just about any country's regulations) are designed to appear intimidating and impenetrable ipso facto. The reason for this is to protect the legal industry and bureaucratic power base. After all, they're the ones who get to say what's in the laws and how they're interpreted. If everyone has time to read and use that stuff, how do such specialists justify their existence.
So if you take the useful purpose of religion to be less about "paying premiums for afterlife insurance" (as some mainstream churches seem to have it) and more about living a good, long life and passing your world onto the next generation in good repair, then I'd argue that the important information needs to be as memorable as possible. And in this regard, batshit works, although gods are certainly optional.
So, if you leave out the specific name of the religion and say, for example:
"Members of religious cults, however old the cult, are morons"
is that okay?
No. Every religion I've encountered has had some members who were reasonably rational. Many religions have reasonable doctrines, even if they stories they use to justify them are unreasonable.
You've got to judge be specific cases.
Why Europe? Possibly because China was One Big Country, with one bureaucracy, while Europe was a ton of little kingdoms, all competing with each other, and trying to swallow each other, and grabbing any edge they could.
I think there's a difference between a religion and a cult. Note that, as I type this, I'm thinking all evangelical "Christians" are cultists. May I recommend Bonewits' Cult Evaluation: http://www.neopagan.net/ABCDEF.html
a) I'm older.
b) I keep telling people, and they ignore me. Then I see I was right in the first place later, but do I get any credit? Nooooo.
Hey - I'm left wing, not liberal! humph
And the quote I've seen attributed to Churchill, though I can't find it at the moment, is "if you're not a socialist at 18, you have no heart; if you're still a socialist at 40, you have no head".
To which my response is, "if you're 40 and not wealthy, and not a socialist, you have no head".
Speaking of religions...isn't capitalism a religion?
I mean, look at the US Constitution's fourteenth amendment: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
Or Paul Krugman's post in the NY Times on 12/27 (Paywalled version): "Despite years of effort, nobody has yet managed to find any serious use for cryptocurrency other than money laundering. But prices nonetheless soared on the hype, and are still being sustained by a hard-core group of true believers."
The value of money, anything from public debt (e.g. dollars) to cryptocurrency, the very stuff which is used as a metric to evaluate the worth of everything in The Economy, is maintained as an act of faith. Nothing has any intrinsic value in capitalism, until someone is willing to pay money for it and thereby determine its value. And the value of money is determined by true believers as an act of faith.
That sounds a lot like a religion to me.
And, speaking as someone who looks outside the bubble at the effects of capitalism (mass extinctions and all), it looks far more seriously batshit than stories about virgin births and people testifying that angels showed them stories on gold tablets. I mean, Jesus said to feed the poor, not that climate change is only a problem for poor people.
Whaddya think?
My take on Joe Smith as well. But then, on top of that... as I noted earlier, my first view of Mormons, back when I was young and no one talked about them or knew any, was A Study In Scarlet.
My take is that Yeshua was saw himself as a reformer, the same as Gautama. I suspect neither meant to start a new religion.
I’ve concluded that the short version is that religions are political parties that claim divine authority. And then look around at how many political parties appear to be religions...
"paying premiums for afterlife insurance"
This is, in fact, not a feature of all religions. When we were working on the alt.pagan FAQ, one of the things our leads came up with was "tribal" religions, where the emphasis is on how to live your life here and now (and get along with the rest of the tribe), as opposed to theological religions, where the emphasis is on what you believe. Jews, who I am given to understand on good authority, are more of the former, and pay little attention to an afterlife, as opposed to Christians, who are all about the latter (never mind what Yeshua said).
What, you mean that Capitalism wasn't Handed Down From Above, and Ayn Rand wasn't the True Profit?
I don't know that I'd go so far as to call it a religion, but only on technicalities, such as the lack of an afterlife, or the failure to address such issues as the origin of the universe.
But people are certainly religious about it!
Charles H
the weakening jet stream is allowing weather patterns to just sit over a particular area rather than moving on - which describes 2022's British weather, perfectly.
Retiring
Almost every aspect of the christian "god" looks like an early Iron-Age King-Emperor { like Cyrus the Great? } on steroids ...
Um, err ....
whitroth
Jack Chalker had a formal definition-difference between a "religion" & a "cult" - 20% of the population, IIRC
"paying premiums for afterlife insurance"...This is, in fact, not a feature of all religions.
It's actually not a feature of most religions.
Let's back up and talk about atheism, which is the real problem here. It's not that atheists are wrong, it's that most atheists are people who disliked some religion (on this blog, some version of Christianity or Judaism), and who don't want to deal with that part of humanity any more than they have to.
The problem these atheists have is ignorance. So long as they take the experience they disliked to be typical of all religions, they make a substantial number of unforced errors in generalizing from their experience to religions in general.
While I'm not going to proselytize for any religion, I will argue that making such mistakes is wasteful. It's more useful to realize that the JCI branch of human beliefs is actually pretty strange by the standards of most human belief systems.
It may also be useful to realize that religious studies scholars regularly debate about what they can legitimately study as religions, not because they are stupid or ignorant, but because religion is a JCI concept that doesn't fit very well with other systems around the world, and more inclusive definitions of what a religion is are tricky to come up with.*
I'm not going to argue whether the atheists are correct in their beliefs either. I'll just point out that a number of religious Biblical scholars quite agree with them about the factuality of the text, while a number of Buddhists, Taoists, and indeed many tribal people agree with them about the existence of gods. My point about it being more important that stories be memorable than literally true arises from this perspective. For example, the Dreaming stories about various gods are memory palaces to help thee Dreamers live in their landscapes, not literally true descriptions of past events. And AIUI the Dreamers know this, although they'll say otherwise when dealing with Christian missionaries.
Anyway, that's why I raise the question of whether Capitalism is a religion. It lacks an afterlife, but so do some schools of Judaism and Taoism. If you assume that Christianity is not the norm for religion, is Capitalism sufficiently religious to be termed a religion?
*Scholars debating what their field covers is scarcely limited to religious studies. Biologists argue quite a lot about what species are, economists argue about the limits of what economists can study, and so forth.
Now you point it out, that does sound kind of 'ends justifies the means.' I was thinkng more along the lines of world empire itself bringing along its own horrible bag of tricks before the benefits kicked in. I blame it on too much holiday Guiness stout.
whitroth @ 1412 (b)
Welcome to the club!
And - @ 1416:
"Matthew" V.17: Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
18: For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled
- which, of course, completely undermines the "lovey-dovey" christians who go on about the "NT" & tell people that all that nasty OT stuff can be forgotten, oops.
And @ 1418:
It's quite clear that early Judaism was exactly that - a Tribal religion - it even acknowledged that there were other gods, but YHWH was for the Israelites ONLY.
- "Exodus" XX.2: I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
3: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
I don't see how you could say it isn't, if you look at it in behavioural terms rather than trying to apply some definition of "religion" which also excludes things that are commonly accepted as religions. It's even recognised as a competing belief system by those religions which prohibit usury. It's just a shame that (at least in the examples I know about) the nature of those religions tends to encourage the adoption of excessively narrow definitions of what one is, so people miss the point.
Re Jack Chalker - I don't remember him mentioning it (yes, he was a friend of mine). I'll bring it up Sat eve, when we pick up his widow and go up to the BSFS building for NYE.
Unfortunately, now you've headed into "I have the True Religion, YOU have a philosophy, THEY are superstitious."
And you've left out esp the militant agnostics: I don't know, and NEITHER DO YOU!". (g)
Also, is reincarnation the same as an afterlife? And we're speaking here of the western and simplistic version of reincarnation. I understand the Buddha actually gave the example of lighting a candle, lighting a second candle from the flame of the first, a third from the flame of the second, etc... and then asked "is the flame of the seventh candle the same flame as that of the first?"
Joseph Smith was one of the early great American fantasy writers. He had a real talent for it. Unfortunately, the publishing markets for fantasy didn't really exist yet.
It's funny as hell when science fiction fans criticize religions on the grounds that they require believing in fantasy. People love fantasy, always have, and always will. They want their sense of wonder and their superheroes and monsters. Anyone trying to take that away is basically a Calvinist.
"https://jonathanturley.org/2011/01/10/gao-u-s-has-fired-250000-rounds-for-every-insurgent-killed/"
As always, Turley is ... not a reliable source.
There was supposedly a phrase from the Napoleonic Wars, 'It takes a man's weight in lead to kill him.'.
The idea of this being somehow special is in itself special :)
Speaking of religions...isn't capitalism a religion?
As Graydon (who sometimes lurks here) points out, what we've got now isn't strictly capitalism (as in, the phenomenon Adam Smith and Karl Marx analyzed) but Mammonism -- the religiously-mandated pursuit of greed.
We see it in Prosperity Gospel evangelism. We see it pervasively in the press. The entire value system of the west's political establishment has been subverted and perverted by Mammonites to further their objective (to grab as much of everything as they can).
Mammonism is intimately rooted in capitalism, but is distinct from it, much as Leninism is intimately rooted in Marxism (but KM would have been aghast if he'd seen it).
Well, no - the difference between enjoying fantasy and believing it is the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.
Unless you want to argue that, say, Marvel fans actually believe Iron Man exists, for example.
Sits back, stunned. Thanks, Charlie, that's a brilliant analysis. Now I need to consider the implications....
I don't know that I'd go so far as to call it a religion, but only on technicalities, such as the lack of an afterlife
Judaism doesn't posit an afterlife. Plenty of other religions don't believe in an afterlife either. You're projecting your experience of Christianity onto all other religions. Please don't do that.
Grant @ 1379:
So, if you leave out the specific name of the religion and say, for example:
"Members of religious cults, however old the cult, are morons"
is that okay?
That's not the point. I don't care if you name the religion. Critize the cultish aspects directly. If it's whacko, say it's whacko.
Don't use the name of someone's religion as a swear word to dehumanize them. That's what I object to.
[...]
The religious are only too happy to discriminate against atheists and use that word as a slur.
So that makes it all right to stoop to their level?
Also, is reincarnation the same as an afterlife? And we're speaking here of the western and simplistic version of reincarnation. I understand the Buddha actually gave the example of lighting a candle, lighting a second candle from the flame of the first, a third from the flame of the second, etc... and then asked "is the flame of the seventh candle the same flame as that of the first?"
I personally categorize myself as neither a theist nor an atheist. I'm just trying to loosen up some apparently over-tight definitions so people can move more easily.
What's a soul? Is it what makes your body alive? These days we have trouble with that one, since we've seen little scientific evidence for a "vital energy" (aka vitalism) that makes dead material live. That elan vital could be a soul, but oops, there's no evidence for anything like that at the moment.
Is your soul your ego, what makes you "You," whether you're dead or alive? That seems to be the default notion in our society. This is not a universal idea, though, as noted by Buddha's statement above, which is a version of the Grandfather's Axe paradox. Briefly, is the "you" peering out from behind your eyes the same "you" that peered out from your eyes when you were a child? Will it be the same "you" that peers out the eyes of your next incarnation? What changed? What stayed the same? I think that's what Buddha is getting at.
We can dig into this more than most people are comfortable with, so I'll back up and suggest looking at this mechanistically. It seems that people who create and maintain religions are trying to deal with things that don't make a lot of sense, including:
--What makes someone alive versus dead? Is that a soul?
--Who is looking out from behind your eyes? Is that your ego, and is that ego your soul?
--Why do we fall apart when we die? What keeps us together while we live? Is that binding force a soul?
--How do we inherit physical and/or mental traits? Is what makes us unique our soul?
--"When you open your mouth and one of your teachers or parents starts speaking," is this an example of soul transfer, channeling, or what?
--What are ghosts? If you haven't experienced one, if you dream of a dead person talking to you, who's talking? How do you account for reports of people remembering past lives? (i.e. are there real data that support some part of a person surviving after death?)
--Life is generally regarded as unsatisfactory by most humans. So is there a reward after life for doing the right thing? Punishment for doing the wrong thing? In other words, should you care about the fate of your soul after death?
--If there's no after-life judgment, why do the right thing? Is it due to otherworldly judgement? Because you're going to reincarnate and live the consequences? Both?
All of the above have been part of different systems' attempt to define what a soul or souls are (AIUI traditional Chinese religion has ten souls, while AIUI some schools of Judaism don't separate the soul from the body. The existence of an individual soul is by no means a given).
I'm not mocking this, but pointing out two things:
--Life and death don't make a lot of sense, and over the millennia thoughtful people have come up with a lot of ways of making sense of them, often involving the use of something we might call a soul or souls.
--Because there are so many different ideas out there, people can get tripped up comparing, say, the Buddhist concept of a soul to the Christian concept to whatever their personal understanding is. I'd suggest it's important to realize that these concepts are not all congruent or synonymous.
I'll end by pointing out that a big paradox: if you just discard all this as silliness and declare that the point of life is to die with the most toys, or amass as much wealth, power, and/or knowledge as possible, or one of the other versions of modern consumerism, you get stuck in a couple of paradoxes.
--One is that loss and death are inevitable, no matter how wealthy and powerful you are. You're going to have to ad hoc invent a system for dealing with these experiences if no one gave you a way of making sense of them. And this is a lot of hard work, especially at the end of your life...
--The other problem is, now that we've spent most of a couple centuries living this way, we're realizing this is not a sustainable belief system. Is it possible that long-term sustainability of any human society requires some set of beliefs to make sense of all this messy stuff in a way that makes us comfortable keeping things going?
I'm not arguing for a one true religion, but I am suggesting that human life appears more livable in the long term when people believe something. From the evidence, the structure of resilient belief systems can vary widely, and all change over time.
Anyway, my personal meaning and purpose in life is to take care of the world where I live and try to pass it on in good shape. It's hard these days, of course, but I feel it's a fairly reasonable thing to try to live for. Not that I proselytize that anyone else do it, of course.
"is the flame of the seventh candle the same flame as that of the first?"
No, at least not according to the Western argument that "a man can not step into the same river twice".
is the flame of the seventh candle the same flame as that of the first?
No. Moreover, the flame of the SECOND candle is not the same as that of the first. And even more moreover, the flame of the FIRST candle is not the same one after the second candle was lit.
When you touched the first candle to the second one, the flame momentarily encompassed both. When you pulled them apart, the flame split in two. Asking "which one is the original?" is like asking "which amoeba after division is the mother and which one is the daughter?" Both of them are daughters. The mother is no more.
By the same argument I am not the same person I was 5 seconds ago. Every instant I die am reborn.
the flame of the FIRST candle is not the same one after the second candle was lit.
"the flame" is a momentary thing, though. There's no there, there.
It's even more dramatic than the one true axe, in that there's no part of the flame that has a static presence, it's defined by the flow. Like a tide or a wind, it's a process rather than an object. Nailing it down negates it.
Does omnipresent god exist inside black holes? {checks notes} Religious book unclear, please advise.
The idea, that there is a difference between enjoying fantasy and believing it, sounds very Calvinist to me. Enjoyment and belief must be strictly separated. Meanwhile, people go on believing all kinds of things, sometimes because they think it is actually true, but often just because they want to.
If you want some real entertainment, get Teresa Nielsen Hayden talking about Catholic saints. There are strong resemblances to superheroes, as well as to certain local pagan deities. Most of them are obviously fictional. But people believe in their anyway, for a variety of reasons. Saints are cool and have fandoms. They are part of a shared culture. They are useful, even though they probably never really existed.
Meanwhile in science fiction fandom we talk about time travel as if it could be possible. Not a chance. But it is a useful tool for thought experiments about history, and it's a really cool idea. That's good enough for us. Not for religious believers, though. They are supposed to be narrow-minded and no fun allowed.
You wrote: "The idea, that there is a difference between enjoying fantasy and believing it, sounds very Calvinist to me."
Huh? That makes no sense. I can enjoy the fantasy that right this minute, I'm eating a butterscotch ice cream sunday. Unfortunately, it's not true. You think there's no difference?
By the same argument I am not the same person I was 5 seconds ago. Every instant I die am reborn.
I would not go quite that far, but yes, I believe that consciousness is a process, and this process dies every time I go to sleep. When I wake up, I feel like the same person who went to sleep, but it is no different from a program restarting from a saved state. In between, there is no "I".
Incidentally, if we ever manage to get self-aware AI, I do not believe that switching it off is equivalent to murder. More like to knocking someone unconscious. Inasmuch as "self" means anything, they are the same AI when switched back on.
Troutwaxer @ 1400:
More batshit than any other religion? Like "God put his tentacle into a Hebrew virgin and she gave birth to a savior" kind of batshit? I'm not seeing it.
Sure, the whole business with Joseph Smith talking into his hat's a little strange, but no more than "he meditated so hard snails crawled onto him." And at least the Mormons don't handle venomous snakes to prove God's love, and the holy underwear is no weirder than the combination of payos, a yarmulke and tallis, and it's probably less-weird than idea that women need to be purified after their periods in a ritual bath.
There's some evidence that before he founded his religion Joseph Smith was an adherant of "Freemasonry" and borrowed a number of their symbols & rituals when he did found his religion. Freemasonry in turn seems to have drawn symbols & rituals from Jews of the diaspora. Maybe they even got some of it right.
And what about the idea that little cookies become God, and that the proper form of worship is "eating God." Or the idea that every family should donate one child to the church, who if male will become a priest, and if female will become a bride of God's son, who is God, and is also a ghost?
I don't think I need to go on. Mormonism is no weirder than any other religion. Period.
And just for the people who might get offended, I'm not attacking any of these theologies - just noting that before you attack Mormonism as strange, maybe you should look at a couple other religions...
If you mean me, no problem. I think the Mormon religion is kind of weird, but mostly because it's only about 200 years since its founding and some of the rough edges haven't worn off yet. There are other religions, founded more recently, that are much more problematic.
My criticism of the religion I grew up in is more because they don't practice what they preach. (See ME @ 1337)
I consider myself agnostic rather than atheist, but it's effectively the same thing. I just think agnostic conveys less absolute, rigid certainty and some of my early upbringing still clings ...
difference between enjoying fantasy and believing it
Possibly definitional? Fantasy is defined as not real so...
I act as though the road gods are real, we exchange gifts regularly and they protect me from evil. I don't name them because they don't come when I call them.
if we ever manage to get self-aware AI, I do not believe that switching it off is equivalent to murder. More like to knocking someone unconscious. Inasmuch as "self" means anything, they are the same AI when switched back on.
You're assuming it can be switched back on, and possibly that it wouldn't be radically different afterwards.
There's currently discussion about whether Twitter could be restarted if it gets turned off, in the context of The Holy Elon turning random shit off to see if it really is important.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/29/it-took-just-four-days-from-elon-gleefully-admitting-hed-unplugged-a-server-rack-for-twitter-to-have-a-major-outage/
religions are ideologies. That they stem from revelation rather than from reasoning doesn't change that fact. Like all other ideologies, they can be critized, disputed and mocked. Within reason of course, disagreeing with totalitarian ideologies can get you a bullet in the neck whether in China or Saudi arabia or, sadly, in the middle of Paris.
On the other hand, many nice people believe the strangest things, and not pointing that out to them is just politeness, nothing more. It's showing respect to them not to their beliefs.
»but Mammonism -- the religiously-mandated pursuit of greed.«
As a professional designer of negative feedback regulation, I think the world would better place if we made it the law, that anything which walks like a religion and talks like a religion gets taxed progressively harder the more acolytes they manage to gather.
From mammonism via neo-liberalism, professional soccer and to crypto-bros, a lot of very real problems would not have become so, with such a feedback mechanism.
Religious tenets, scientifically proven to be true, are tax-free, all the rest are taxed.
AIUI they believe that the sequel to the New Testament was written by an angel, on golden tablets, buried in upstate New York, around 600BC to 420AD ... in 17th century English.
Or at least translated by Smith into 17th century English with the cadences of the King James Bible, with which the initial converts would have been familiar.
Does this sound suspicious to you? Because it should.
Just sounds like smake-oil salesmen & other itenerant grifters. No different than modern televangelist grifters like Jim & Tammy Fae, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggert or Pat Robertson.
(My take on it is that it's just more New Testament Fanfic, like the Book of Revelations of St. John -- which was apparently not contemporaneous with the rest of the "New Testament" collection of yarns, either. Cynically, Joe wanted to get his ashes hauled by more than one woman, and if Holy Scripture could be drafted to give him a license to shag multiple wives, then it would be.)
Isn't it amazing that almost every time "god" (or "the gods") comes up with a new revelation it turns out to be something the priests have wanted all along? Unless it's the King wants something and the priests come up with scripture to support it lest they go to meet their gods up close & personal, leaving the King with a more amenable new generation of priests ...?
So, no I don't find the Mormon "Book" any more suspicious than older "books" ... they just haven't had as much time to settle in. The founding events are still a bit raw.
Actually, most of Mormonism appears to be plagiarized from older religions. Are gold tablets from upstate New York any more implausible than stone tablets from Mt. Sinai?
Actually, most of Mormonism appears to be plagiarized from older religions. Are gold tablets from upstate New York any more implausible than stone tablets from Mt. Sinai?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgSJDgKgv78
Heteromeles @ 1414:
Speaking of religions...isn't capitalism a religion?
[...]
Whaddya think?
Economic theories are the religion. Capitalism is just ONE of the sectarian branches.
context = Scotland
University of St Andrews seeks to become 'hub' for any potential "first contact" scenario
oh dear lord... this just writes itself as a 12 episode mini-series... members of academia (of any nation) trying to position themselves as 'expert' in something that has not happened yet, with the closest approximation being "first contact" between human cultures during Age of European Exploration (1490s-1700s) which did not end well for inhabitants of four continents previously with zero experience in dealing with Europeans
I cannot decide between comedy and pathos as mode of presentation but for sure it is the entertainment of watching a slow motion crash 'n burn of egos
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/dec/29/if-aliens-contact-humanity-who-decides-what-we-do-next
1402:
"Does this sound suspicious to you? Because it should."
Yep, and I think thats why groups like the Mormons, Moonies, evangelicals and Scientologists sound to many people like loons. They are near enough in time that you hear the back story and context of their Prophets/preachers.
1422:
"Let's back up and talk about atheism, which is the real problem here."
Sorry? People shake off a superstition and indoctrination and they are the problem?
1434:
"Don't use the name of someone's religion as a swear word to dehumanize them."
So, can you not assign the label idiot to someone if they do something else stupid or is it only out of bounds if a "Faith" is involved? The idea that your choice of religion is more important than your choice of Premier League team is hard to justify - both articles of blind faith. The expression "personal is not the same thing as important" springs to mind.
Society is happy enough to refer to "football hooligans".
A bit of a throw back subject, but I've been away.
Seasaw style manual compressors (oxygen booster actually, but to a layman, "compressor" is close enough) using wet leather seals were in active military use as recently as 30 years ago. They output 200 bar/3000 psi, which is a decently high pressure. I don't know if they still use leather seals, as my information is now 30 years out of date, but I know that the compressors that used leather seals are still available new. I just looked up the manufacturer website. They could now use synthetic, but somehow I doubt that they've changed anything in the last 30 years. They're notorious for not bothering to update niche products.
Re: 'religions are ideologies'
I tend to think of religion as the fallback argument/reason when you have no data and you're looked to as the expert (wise man) in everything - and the folks looking to you for an answer want an answer 'now!'.
Also, considering how many religions' founders mentioned hearing voices/a voice (voice of god), my guess is that quite a few were schizophrenics*.
About the 'ideology' part - I'm okay with people having personal aspirations, not okay that such aspirations give people a license to mistreat others. As Poul mentioned @1447, there's a lack in interpersonal/societal negative feedback here, i.e., responsibility. Further - if your aspiration is to get something from your personal fave god, then your contract/argument is with that god and not with another human. This last bit seems to have fallen out of favor/fashion because most earlier civilizations (religions) accepted that civil responsibility was part of life. Basically some of the more modern religionists specifically shaped their religions to supplant 'LAW'. Why religion: because instead of legal arguments with evidence, it's 'because I/god say so'.
The above is about Western/Mideastern religions, I've no idea how Asian religions compare on this although my impression is that for Asians religion is an internal personal thing, i.e., more tolerant.
*About 80% of diagnosed schizophrenics suffer from auditory hallucinations.
PS,
Seals in general. Most static seals can be made such that elastomeric seals aren't needed. Metal to metal seals work absolutely fine. Elastomeric seals are popular because you can make and break connections without tools, and they're a bit more resistant to ham-fisted damage. With an o-ring, "finger tight" gets you a good seal. With metal to metal some force is needed to make the seal. Not much, but enough to encourage the crew that like to tighten until they feel a slight give as the threads are torn out.
"tighten until it strips, then back off half a turn" as AvE memorably puts it.
What gets me is people who buy $5000+ bikes then don't bother with a $50 torque wrench despite most of the fittings saying things like "5.9-6.1Nm" which should tell anyone that they're not going to get that by feel. Aluminium is bad enough for torque range, composites are terrible.
My ex-gf's bike had been serviced by the same little man that tightened the oil filter on her car until it cracked. I had to make a special 5.1mm allen key to get out a non-critical bolt that for some reason was done up so tight that a 5mm key would round it out.
1452 ref 1422 - The problem is any group who's membership initiate conversations with "Can I interest you in The One True Way?". If you can explain how this is not true of Atheists (other than the "don't care" variety) then and only them you may have a point.
ref 1434 - That's just a special case of the above. Well, unless you establish that I support $team because "my great grandfather played for them 120 years ago" and accept that as "a good reason" for supporting that team and not your team...
1456 - Moz, where are you getting a torque wrench that is accurate to +/-1% for Aus$50?
I recently saw someone point out that another explanation for the "people get more conservative as they get older" effect is not that people's views change to be more conservative, but that the conservative parties become more progressive over time, which causes their evolving views to match the older views of these conservative people.
Works the other way to, Jerry Pournelle was not consdidered conservative enough late in his life. Which suggests to me they're making it up as they go.
I initially read the name of what they wanted to set up as a "post detention centre", ie. something like a place where you take the aliens after the Home Office has locked them up.
For that to be a valid explanation requires a steady flow of conservative parties appearing on the right, then moving leftward over time leaving their former adherents' philosophies and hopes behind, to be replaced by further new arrivals on the right to lead new young voters down the same path to abandonment. It's far too easy to find counterexamples to accept such an explanation. Also, it seems to me to be pretty much the opposite of the point the epigram is trying to make.
https://www.pushys.com.au/tools/wrenches/torque.html?p=1&product_list_order=price_asc
Note that the cheap ones are fixed torque (they have one setting), but often bikes only need one or two. I have the Park Tools square drive one because I paid wholesale and regularly work on other people's bikes. I know a couple of people that have exactly one wrench because it does the three things on their bike that need adjusting more than once in a blue moon (typically seat height and two-ish handlebar adjustments). You can often get away with 5Nm on something that wants 6Nm (but not the other way round 😏)
Is it possible that long-term sustainability of any human society requires some set of beliefs to make sense of all this messy stuff in a way that makes us comfortable keeping things going?
I think that's very close. Organized religions, like governments, are systems of control. Why is control necessary? Kornbluth adduced a pretty good reason at the beginning of "The Marching Morons" -- to keep those who can't help, but can gum up the works, from destroying society. The story is a nasty one, IMO, but you can reference "Idiocracy" for another take on this.
Not every religion is for this purpose, of course. Some are just power/money grabs. Some are simply collections of well-meaning ideas about how the world is, or should be.
Beyond not positing an afterlife, Capitalism doesn't posit any form for "soul" or "spirit." It doesn't recommend rituals, designate a priest or priestess-hood, address the creation of the world or an apocalypse. It doesn't believe in immortal beings, or beings with special powers over nature. It doesn't believe in demons or an opposing, divine or antidivine power, nor does it believe in nature spirits or suggest the worship of ancestors. And please don't tell me the "invisible hand of the market" represents some kind of spook or spirit.
The closest I'd come to believing it's a religion might be the presence of prophits, such as Adam Smith, but I don't think any capitalist believes those prophits represent the will of any divine being.
Economic theories are the religion. Capitalism is just ONE of the sectarian branches.
i think faith in progress is the religion
science fiction is presumably part of the support system
“Beyond not positing an afterlife, “ Retirement. Only accessible to True Believers.
“Capitalism doesn't posit any form for "soul" or "spirit." Your credit score...
“It doesn't recommend rituals, designate a priest or priestess-hood, address the creation of the world or an apocalypse. “ Saving for that rainy day. The Holy Bank Manager. The apocalypse is bankruptcy, though I can’t work out the creation.
“It doesn't believe in immortal beings, or beings with special powers over nature.” Ayn Rand. Milton Freidman.
“ It doesn't believe in demons or an opposing, divine or antidivine power, nor does it believe in nature spirits or suggest the worship of ancestors. “ Socialism! Commies! Ronald Raygun! Margaret Thatcher!
“And please don't tell me the "invisible hand of the market" represents some kind of spook or spirit. ”
Well I won’t but I can guarantee a lot of Holy Church of Mammonites will.
You’re trying to apply logic in a field where logic wilts like cheap makeup under stage lighting.
And please don't tell me the "invisible hand of the market" represents some kind of spook or spirit.
If you look at capitalism as an an animist religion it makes a lot more sense. "of course the sun god exists, I can see it".
But obviously the invisible hand is different from the invisible tartan elephant.
The "invisible hand," as you well know, is another way to express the idea that in a rational market* supply and demand reach equilibrium.
Meanwhile, insisting that someone else's ideology is, in fact, religion, and attempting to invalidate it on that basis is the intellectual equivalent of picking your nose and deciding that the resulting muck is delicious! Heteronormales did a much better job of attacking capitalism with his "Mammonism" observation, so take a look there and see how it's done.
maybe ideology and religion are on a spectrum
You're apparently able and willing to read all sorts of things into my comments that I didn't intend to put there.
to infer(r) is human
Howard NYC
Already been done in the 1960's on the Beeb .... A for Andromeda
Tim H
See also our current tory party - who would horrify the aforementioned Ted Heath or Harold MacMillan ....
Religion is an accidental misuse of the human instincts to look after each other.
It's functionally the same as birds feeding fish because they gape at them and look like baby birds, triggering the feeding instinct. (religion being the fish in this metaphor)
Religion looks like a way to care for other humans, by giving, protecting them from harm in an afterlife, helping them to advance on the wheel, and so on. Though it looks like that, it's no more that than a goldfish is a baby bird.
https://youtu.be/FiupEsklQmA
"to infer(r) is human"
Are you sure it's not infernal?
JHomes
"If there is, in fact, a religious aspect to capitalism it's the idea that the markets can ever really be rational."
I incline to the view that "rational market" is a contradiction in terms, that the existence of a market shows that people are making arational (not to be confused with irrational) decisions.
JHomes
Also happens in a lot of volunteer organisations (and especially hobby groups). I see many of the longer standing organisations and groups now starting to fail as the older "boomer" members die off, and there are not the younger members coming in to replace them and/or wanting to take up the (traditional?) leadership roles.
Part of the reason always given is that there are too many other things they can do with their "spare" time, but I feel that is only part of the story.
And going by the few younger ones who are interested in getting involved - going by the example of the few younger ones getting involved in my main hobby - the reasons they have for getting involved are quite different to the reasons (or rationalisations) as to why I took it up. Which is in part why any membership drives organised by the older members fail to attract new members - they seem to be sending out the wrong messages to the wrong people using the wrong media.
And no, I do not know what the answers are...but the best approach I have found to so is just to stand back and let the (few) younger members get involved however they want rather than trying to tell them how it was done previously.
gasdive @ 1473: Religion is an accidental misuse of the human instincts to look after each other.
I'd say that's one part of it, although the human instinct to divide the world into Us and Them, and then only feel a need to look after Us, is the dark mirror aspect of it.
But I think that folk psychology and naïve physics have a lot to do with it as well. These are the terms used for the seemingly built-in abilities of humans to understand both the physical world and other people. Our ability to understand the internal mental states of other people is very strong, but our intuitive understanding of physics is much less so.
When pre-scientific people look at the world they see lots of things that are both important and unpredictable, such as the weather. Their intuitive mental models of the physical universe can't get a handle on why the drought destroyed the harvest this year but not last year. However the folk psychology, being much more sophisticated, finds it easy to explain. Just posit some human-like mind that controls the weather and the answer is obvious; they are angry about something. What could they be angry about? We must figure out what the Weather Person wants and make sure that we do it.
This then feeds in to two other aspects of human psychology: the desire to control things, and a tendency to jump to conclusions on very little evidence. "We can't control the weather, but we might be able to favourably influence the One who does if we do the right things" goes the argument. Powerful people like flattery and gifts, so lets try flattery and gifts. If the following harvest is good, then obviously that worked and must continue.
Of course its not just weather; lots of things behave unpredictably. Prey animals wander into a trap, or not. A tree falls on your house, or not. The same logic applies to all of these things. So you start to imagine that all of these things must be animated by a spirit that makes such things happen in response to what you do, or don't do. And thus animism, which seems to be a pretty universal pattern around the world, along with specialist shamans with the job of mediating between people and the spirit world.
Once the Bronze Age got going we got big cities and wealthy kings instead of small tribes, and animism shifted along with it, and Big Religion happened. Kings needed the support of the spirit world, now envisaged as being like the king and his court only more so. Hence temples and priests, which lead directly to our current religions.
maybe ideology and religion are on a spectrum
I think a more general and less loaded concept, like "belief system", is more appropriate. Mostly people are trying to class things as "a religion" in order to dismiss them and there ends up being a lot of question-begging, composition and genetic fallacies. I disagree that there's any qualitative difference between things like capitalism and tings we call religion. But I don't really believe in the distinction of religion as some special form of behaviour or belief that's unlike any other behaviours and beliefs.
Our modern western secular worldview is riddled with conceptual frameworks we inherit from Enlightenment and Renaissance versions of Cristian theology, it's not credible to say they are not themselves a continuation of such a belief system, in part if not in whole. There are many unexamined assumptions when we treat our concepts (self and others, family, motivation, property, alienated labour) as naturalistic, but as an example the idea of an individual rational economic agent that certain versions of economics assume exist is definitely part of the continuity with theology, and not distinct from it in any way. Even the modern western conception of self is demonstrably historically and culturally specific, per relatively uncontroversial early 20th century understandings (e.g. Marcel Mauss, whom I'm sure I've cited here before too), and that specificity is part of the same continuity. Perfect summary of what that concept is like, from high Modernity, see W.H.Auden 'In memory of W.B.Yeats'.
I disagree that all atheists are the same: I for one am definitely a Lutheran atheist, which means I probably have more in common with Anglican and Catholic atheists than I do with atheists who have emerged from more Calvinist traditions and I still have a lot to learn from Jewish and Muslim atheists. Worldview incorporates perspective, but runs deeper.
I've noticed that many electrical installers are now using torque-indicating screwdrivers to attach wires to screw terminals rather than "tighten the fucker up as hard as you can and then give it another half-twist just to make sure". The DIN rail switchgear modules used in a modern fusebox/consumer unit to set up a house or flat's electrical wiring can cost the thick end of a hundred quid each depending on functionality and ensuring a good solid connection without damaging the module is considered important these days. The screwdrivers aren't cheap - the WERA 1000V 1.4-3.0Nm handle plus 1000V insulated blades set cost about 200 quid but they're a business expense.
RE: 1457
Yeah, I could imagine a born again atheist would be irritating, but I don't recall ever having one turn up on my doorstep trying to convince me their view was right during Sunday lunch (happened twice with Mormons). Unlike religions, atheists do not appear to be effectively guaranteed a place in the House of Lords or inclusion in TV debates whenever morals and ethics are discussed. Door to door atheists have to be pretty rare.
Most atheists I know tend to avoid the subject with anyone they are not certain of. Where I work we had a lady who would leave small printed notes on our desks and send us emails about prayer and carol services. One of my colleagues asked her to remove him from her list as he preferred evidence based reasoning. She reported him to HR she "felt threatened" when he "attacked her beliefs" and he was interviewed by them. The invites still appear.
Why does religion and a willingness to bend at the knee confer such privilege?
Ironically, if instead of confronting her you went to HR yourself and said she is infringing on your beliefs, that would probably have stopped her.
She reported him to HR she "felt threatened" when he "attacked her beliefs" and he was interviewed by them.
loathsome bit of entitlement, that
perhaps supplying a reason was unwise tho
Why does religion and a willingness to bend at the knee confer such privilege?
I'm guessing that you're american (?) I've seen several instances of religious propaganda at work. People trying to organize prayer groups (christian, muslim, and even Krishnan) or leaving religious lit near the coffee machine.
They were all reported to management and were told in no uncertain terms to cease and desist. One was sacked on the spot (Temp worker).
Jerry Pournelle was not considered conservative enough late in his life.
wasn't that mainly by the sad puppies tho
Yeah, I could imagine a born again atheist would be irritating
What about a born again Buddhist?
1462 - Moz, I specifically asked about a calibrated tool. I await a reply from Pushy's as to whether or not it has a calibration certificate.
1480 - Grant, do you actually read this website?
A rational market is perfectly possible, and has been used as the basis of several economic theories - it's just another form of game theory. What ISN'T generally rational is the choice of costs and benefits, once one gets beyond the simple trade level, but there is no theoretical reason it can't be.
Capitalism can (in theory) be perfectly rational. What isn't is Monetarism where, not merely is money the sole measure of value, but money becomes a tradeable entity in itself and need not be based on anything more concrete. Monetarism is at the heart of modern financial instruments and many of our economic woes.
Mammonism is, of course, of necessity irrational. While it does not require Monetarism (older instantiations of it were often based on land or other resources), modern Mammonism is based on Monetarism.
A nice idea, but it falls foul of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Much of modern sub-atomic physics and cosmology can't be proved, using any established definition of scientific proof, not least because the proofs of the subtleties depend on assuming the theory and the proofs of the theories are that they 'predict' the subtleties, and there is a huge and ever-increasing collection of finagle factors necessary to arrange that. That's also true of a great deal of medicine, evolution (in all its aspects), etc.
And I can assure you that challenging the dogmas in front of true believers gets a reaction indistinguishable from doing the same in a religious context. Arguably the most scientific religion is Gaianism :-)
i think faith in progress is the religion
It's worth noting that "faith in progress" is a distinctly protestant heresy -- it came out of "building the kingdom of god on earth", whereas previous religions mostly emphasized that the modern world is a degerate relic of a historic golden age.
Paul
Big Religion happened. Kings needed the support of the spirit world ... Indeed - I'm convinced it is quite deliberate that, certainly the Jewish / christian / muslim "god" looks remarkably like a Bronze/Early Iron age Emperor on steroids.
With specific reference to Judaism & it's children .. Cyrus the Great ...
Also, quote from wiki: Cyrus the Great is said in the Bible, to have liberated the Jews from the Babylonian captivity to resettle and rebuild Jerusalem, earning him an honored place in Judaism.
Damian
As a card-carrying "militant" atheist, I'm not buying it.
For the usual reason, that the religious believers point-blank refuse to face: Complete, utter total 100% lack of any evidence anywhere for any & all claims made by religions, especially as regards the "supernatural".
So far, in all recorded history, every single time that an unknown or "mysterious" problem has been encountered, those which have been answered - i.e. most of them .... the answer has been materialist, based in Physics, Mathematics or the other material sciences.
Grant
Please don't!
I have been grinding my teeth in blind rage over this & the utter grovelling crawling of all the media to religion in this country - I know the Beeb, but I'm given to understand that all the others are at least as bad.
EC
That was certainly the case 40 years ago ... now ... I'm not so sure.
The appalling mismatch between GR & QM is right out in the open { It used to be hushed up } & the realisation that "Sumfink 'as gorn 'orribly worng" - somewhere.
But - where?
Adrian Smith @ 1482
Certainly don't do anything like supply a reason in the UK. In any employment-related situation the 2010 Equality Act applies.
It's worth noting that "faith in progress" is a distinctly protestant heresy -- it came out of "building the kingdom of god on earth", whereas previous religions mostly emphasized that the modern world is a degerate relic of a historic golden age.
I'm going to nuance that, because the failure of progressivism is going to have some really nasty consequences that we're already dealing with.
The American, originally Republican, version of Progressivism came about in large part as a response to slavery, and it was espoused by abolitionists. Lincoln was the one who gave it "legs," with his story of growing up dirt poor on a homestead and "pulling himself up by his bootstraps." The original Republican/Abolitionist progressive ideal was that all men were created equal. Therefore, by giving everyone an equal opportunity, through hard work and technological advance, everyone could be equal. There would be no further need for slaves.
This was in direct opposition to the ideology that some people (stale pale males, in modern parlance) were created better than others, and subjugating everyone who wasn't stale, pale, and/or male was simply following the God-given, natural order of things.
I agree that Progress has so far failed in its original goal of making all humans equal and equally free, just as communism did. The obvious problem is that this failure reopens the door for ideologies that say that some people are innately better than others. I'm pretty sure the cults of the super-rich are following this ideology, and we can expect xenophobia, racism, genderism, and so forth to flood through the holes left by Progressive shortfalls too.
No, largely it was his reward for not agreeing with everything the Bush administrations* did. Such as suggesting our National interest had little to do with Iraq.
*Still waiting to hear of an intimate hair care business with the cheek to name their business "Bush Administration. ;)
An idea for which there is no credible evidence and thus, IMO, a religious belief.
Sad Puppies: Pitiful fanatics who couldn't read the room.
She reported him to HR she "felt threatened" when he "attacked her beliefs" and he was interviewed by them. The invites still appear.
First mover advantage. You got stuck on the defensive even if right.
I learned this in some national (US/Canada) IT standards groups decades ago. First one with a written proposal tends to win or strongly influence the final result. And with personal things the first one to bring an issue up puts everyone else on defense.
I think this has been pretty much accepted for at least the last couple of years (and that's probably just when it started showing up in the popular science press).
It's been predicted for a lot longer. Can't remember when offhand, but I taught climate science to teenagers for decades and the consequences of a reduced temperature gradient between equator and poles (ie. weakened jet stream etc) had been part of my lessons for at least a decade before I retired (at the start of Covid).
conservative parties become more progressive over time
LOL, you nearly scored a keyboard kill with that one!
Consider that Reagan would now be considered too left-wing for the Republican Party…
I see many of the longer standing organisations and groups now starting to fail as the older "boomer" members die off, and there are not the younger members coming in to replace them and/or wanting to take up the (traditional?) leadership roles.
Likely at least partly because they don't have the spare time that we had when we were younger.
Consider, for example, young university lecturers. Their lives are pretty much occupied by stitching together sessional contracts to earn a living, while any spare time is spent doing whatever voluntary activities might give them an edge in the battle for an actually position.
Other young people I know use their 'spare time' for a side hustle, hoping to earn enough that they can get their own place rather than be stuck forever renting (at the mercy of landlords in a mostly-unregulated rental environment).
I would assert that Mammonism predates Capitalism, though that may depend on just how you define "Capitalism". But I rather think that Mammonism may predate humanity, if you allow it to be "the obsessive collection of things considered to be valuable" (i.e. collecting them rather than using them). It seems to be a development of something like the instinct that causes squirrels to collect more nuts than they can eat.
Actually there are forms of time travel that might be possible. Maybe not, too, of course. It's not the simple Wells model, though. And, IIRC, it's not really clear that the information transmitted could, even in theory, be reconstituted. Not unless things that could stabilize a wormhole (negative energy matter?) are possible, and also not unless travel through a wormhole was rather quick. (Some indications are that it might be slow enough that this wouldn't work, even if we could do it.)
But we don't really KNOW that time travel is impossible.
Once the Bronze Age got going we got big cities and wealthy kings instead of small tribes, and animism shifted along with it, and Big Religion happened. Kings needed the support of the spirit world, now envisaged as being like the king and his court only more so. Hence temples and priests, which lead directly to our current religions.
Umm.... Animism's still around. Shinto is literally "the way (tao/to) of the spirits (Shen/Shin)," after all, and Hinduism still has animist aspects. So do some flavors of Taoism, Buddhism, Santeria, Voudon, Candomble...
The Roman concept of genius is animistic too, and propiating the genius of the emperor was literally the basis for taxes in the Imperium. This is the source of "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," in the Bible. Since Roman taxes had a theistic aspect to them (they were literally offerings to the cult of the Genius that safeguarded the empire), this conflicted with the Jewish commandment of not worshiping other gods.
Anyway...
If you want a really good look at how states arise from chiefdoms, I recommend Pat Kirch's A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai'i. Hawai'i shifted from a set of sub-island chiefdoms to a primary state ruled by a god-king from ca. 1500-1800. The end of it (Kamehameha conquering the island chain) was witnessed by Europeans of course. Rather better, thanks to the missionaries, Hawaiians had a higher rate of literacy than Americans did in the 1900s, and one of the first things they did, while Hawai'i was still an independent kingdom, was to write down their oral histories, because these were the history of their nation.
Kirch is an archeologist specializing in Oceania, and one of his long-running gigs has been working archeological sites in Hawai'i, where he grew up. What he's found is consistent with the oral histories. The thesis of his book is that Hawai'i is the best example we have of a state emerging de novo from a chief-level society. Unlike what happened in the Middle East, China, the Andes, etc., we actually know who did what and where, thanks to preservation of the oral histories from the critical period and their corroboration with the archeological record (which isn't subtle, if you've ever visited Hawai'i).
Tl;dr it's not quite what anyone expected from Middle East archeology, but it does make a lot of sense.
=> By the same argument I am not the same person I was 5 seconds ago. Every instant I die am reborn.
I would not go quite that far, but yes, I ...
You should go not only that far, but further. You probably don't need to go as far as nano-seconds, but essentially beingness is a flow state, and if your memories/inputs change at all between two instances (including short-term memories) you aren't in the same state that you were earlier. Additionally, since the machinery that you run on is dynamic, you can't tie "who I am" to the body, since it, also, keeps changing. The present instance is the present instance, it has never been before, and will never be again. But there are connections of various strengths with things we call prior and later "me"s. And weaker connections to those we interact with, stronger when the interaction has been stronger. (This is what the Buddha called Karma...at least in the translation of "The Word" that I read.)
Self is a flow state, Thinking of it as a persistent object is just wrong, and leads to mistakes.
Not sure on that - something's happening while we sleep, both deep and lighter.
Oh, I can name two road gods: Parallela, full of grace, find for us a parking space. And, Her rather cruder mate, "Great Squat, a parking spot!"
I think fantasy has multiple meanings, SOME of which imply that it isn't real. There are, e.g. works of music called fantasies. They are certainly real, in a sense. And it fantasy is the production of fantasizing, then many a scientific theory that has been tested started out as a fantasy. And some fantasies are intentional and explicit metaphors for something. Consider "Animal Farm" or "1984". OTOH, many fantasies are very loose metaphors. And some are just unintelligible. Belief is often a nearly orthogonal concept. And if you determine what people believe by what they do rather than by what they say, it gets even looser.
As others have noted, that seems not to be the case. I've mentioned before having tea at a neighbor's a few years back, and speaking with one guy, and finally looking at him and saying, "Let me guess - you used to be a Republican, but they left you behind", and he nodded.
The US right wing (or wrong wing, as I prefer) has been moving right, pulled by the racists and the ultra-wealthy since the seventies. Along with the money they spend overseas on bribery (there wasn't any US money going into the Brexit campaign, right?), we've been dragging the world with us.
Except for those of us who've been against it forever, and those who were left behind, and have begun working with us.
The idea, that there is a difference between enjoying fantasy and believing it, sounds very Calvinist to me. Enjoyment and belief must be strictly separated. Meanwhile, people go on believing all kinds of things, sometimes because they think it is actually true, but often just because they want to.
I'll be cheerfully contrarian here. Not because I disagree with Calvinism being no fun, but just to point out a little nuance about the doctrine of predestination.
Predestination, of course, is the idea that God, in making our souls, predestined us to go to heaven or hell when we die. This, in its own way, is as toxic as dominionism, which is based on another misreading of the Bible.
Anyway, if you want to mix christianity and Einsteinian Relativity (reversed capitals just to be twee), you can posit that Einstein's notion of the four-dimensional brickverse is consistent with Calvinism. If God created a four-dimensional universe and free will is an illusion, then God necessarily practiced predestination in setting up the whole thing.
This, of course, contradicts the story that God screwed up when he gave humans dominion, regretted what hE did, and caused The Flood to wipe the slate clean and start over with Noah and family, with whom hE established a second, dominion-free, covenant. This is actually in the Bible, and also conveniently ignored by Dominionists.*
*If you ever want to annoy a dominionist, ask them if they are vegan. If they say no, point out that veganism is required by God as part of the dominion covenant (Genesis 1:28-29): "(28)And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (29)And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat." In other words, if they're eating anything but seed-bearing plants, they're not honoring God's covenant of Dominion. So nuts to them.
"The market" is a phrase that assumes it's all one, and that the median will be rational. The problem is that overwhelmingly, "the market" is 90% (at least) about greed.
At that point, my long-held parody comes into play: stock traders are a superstitious and cowardly lot. (For those unfamiliar with US comics, that's the Batman's line about criminals)
About 15 years or so ago, that became an issue in fandom (i.e. "the graying of fandom"). My personal view, and one of the reasons I dislike SMOFs[1], is that when I got into fandom, someone would run the club, and the con, for a couple years, then pass it on. SMOFs became a thing, and they did not pass it on, they held on forever[2], and younger and/or newer folks felt shut out.
Fortunately, that appears to me to be changing over the last five or so years. Unfortunately, there seems to be a reaction of what I can only see as ageism against older fen.
1. Secret Master of Fandom
2. In '85, I had a conversation at a party with the con chair for Philcon, where I was advocating letting someone else in. I said, "what happens if you get a job out of town, or hit by a car, or just tired?", and his literal reaction was "not going to happen". (It did.)
There's also a technique that humans developed early - rather than changing to adapt to the world around them, changing the world around them (consider the use of fire, and clothing).
In the US, everywhere I've worked, it's like the old men's clubs: you do not discuss politics, sex, or religion at work, or HR will come down to talk to you.
Nichirin Shoshu Buddhism. Have I not mentioned here the time the woman I was living with at the time, in the late seventies, allowed a couple of doorbell ringers in, let them talk for 20 min... then spent 20 min talking to them about Buddhism....
I was upstairs, trying not to fall down laughing. She actually got them to come back "after their rounds" to talk to them some more.
Well... not completely. Consider our grandparents, who literally went from walking/ships/horses/trains to landing a man on the Moon.
And from going to the river, or using a washtub to wash clothes, to a washing machine. And iceboxes in your kitchen. And electric lights. Oh, and the maternal death rate drop by orders of magnitude.
They saw their own personal lives improve. And to me, sf is, in a way, the last, best gasp of the 1920s, the idea that the future can be better than the past, that if there's a "Golden Age", it will be made by us, and it's in the future.
Universities are a whole 'nother problem, at least in the US and Canada. I understand that in the seventies, 70% of lecturers were tenure track; now, it's 30%? 20%, and the "adjuncts" have ZERO expectation of a job next school year (and are finally unionizing).
Fully agreement. The GOP are funnymentalist worshipers of Mammon, and Rand and Friedman are the Gods profits (of course I meant to spell it that way).
whitroth
Except for those of us who've been against it forever, and those who were left behind, and have begun working with us. - which is now happening to quite a few of the Brexiteers, of course, as the enormity of the giant confidence-trick becomes ever more apparent.
Fully agreement. The GOP are funnymentalist worshipers of Mammon, and Rand and Friedman are the Gods profits (of course I meant to spell it that way).
Taoism is an even better analog for Mammonism. Replace qi with value/money, and Taoist Immortals with the super-rich, and the parallels are fairly obvious.
It's an imperfect analogy. The weird thing about what we're calling Mammonism is the position of humans within the value system. We're liminal, both outside the system manipulating it as owners, and inside the system, as our time, talents, attention and sometimes bodies are commodified. The super-rich achieve their apparent freedom by making much of their lives financial (they use the "corporations as people" as a surrogate for aspects of their personae), AND they manipulate the impression of what they actually own/control through internaional wealth management. In a weird way, being a billionaire really is magical. Probably none of them owns a vault with a billion in gold in it. Rather, they control corporations, land, etc. and allow others to assign a value to what they can see of the tycoon's holdings.
What's happening with Elon Musk right now is looks like a good example of what happens when one of the super-rich puts their powers to the test of reality, and the part of those powers that is a collective hallucination comes to light.
Anyway, both Taoism and Mammonism are demonstrations that a religion doesn't require gods to have both saints and magic. However, such systems tend to spontaneously generate gods, with Mammonism having Invisible Hands, Black Swans, and animist spirits called Markets.
Yeah, thats fair enough. I have worked with/for people who - as far as I could tell - would consider Marx right wing and Genghis Khan a wishy washy liberal snow flake. Generally, apart from on the day the results of a General Election came out it was hard to tell.
It works.
It was a bit of a shock to find though, that while working at a scientific establishment there was something wrong with proclaiming that evidence based reasoning was a good idea. I got the impression that HR's rationale was that asking atheists to shut up was less likely to cause problems than asking a God botherer to do so.
Consider that Reagan would now be considered too left-wing for the Republican Party…
Reagan, in his own way, thought people were born basically good and wanted to deal with them and convince them to his position. Today's R base wants to win and if you're not on their side then it just SUCKS TO BE YOU. So go starve for all "we" care.
As a card-carrying "militant" atheist, I'm not buying it
Sorry Greg, it probably isn't your fault but I'm completely unable to work out what it is that you are disagreeing with here. You don't grapple with any of the points I was making at all (I probably agree with some of your conclusions although I might nitpick some details in your assumptions). If it's the "there are several types of atheist" thing, I think you're the single most C-of-E person here, atheist notwithstanding, and the perfect exemplar of my point. And to me that's nothing bad about you (at least nothing that we might not have already argued about in the context of general cultural assumptions and background).
Beyond not positing an afterlife, Capitalism doesn't posit any form for "soul" or "spirit." It doesn't recommend rituals, designate a priest or priestess-hood, address the creation of the world or an apocalypse. It doesn't believe in immortal beings, or beings with special powers over nature. It doesn't believe in demons or an opposing, divine or antidivine power, nor does it believe in nature spirits or suggest the worship of ancestors. And please don't tell me the "invisible hand of the market" represents some kind of spook or spirit. The closest I'd come to believing it's a religion might be the presence of prophits, such as Adam Smith, but I don't think any capitalist believes those prophits represent the will of any divine being.
Sorry! Missed this one on the first go round.
Moz addressed some of this, but I'll add a couple of points.
The economic world appears to be divided into two parts, things that have value, and things that do not have value. While as I noted, value is closer to what westerners think qi energy to be than to some sort of soul, value is, literally, supernatural.
Value is determined by a ritual of exchange. Something in nature has no value until someone claims to possess it, AND then exchanges that thing to someone else for something else which does have a value. That thing is no long part of nature, but part of the economy. I'm not joking, this is how the values of everything from ore to wood to wildlands are determined. Something that is within the economy is treated as outside nature.
The exchange ritual is central to Mammonism in many ways. It is manipulated to determine the value of the super-rich. They control assets, but the value of those assets can only be estimated, unless they are subject to an exchange. Musk's power as a billionaire has been subject to this, because his "net worth" is estimated based on things like the stock price of Tesla shares. That's why I suggest that the super-rich have a magic property: we don't know the value of what they control, we can only guess. And they deliberately manipulate the guessing process (cf Trump's tax returns for a manipulation to lower value to the IRS).
Spirits and other supernatural beings are things like estates and corporations, people and entities that don't physically exist, but which own other things regardless. Just as value is magical, so are corporations, trusts, and so forth. They don't physically exist, but they control much of the physical world regardless, because believers choose to enable them to do so.
An afterlife? Look at something like a Cayman Islands STAR trust, or the estate planning of any dynasty. It's commonly looked at as an unwelcome family member that severely warps the lives of those who are entangled in it. The Windsors' comments about "The Firm" (their family fortune) are one example.
This is an example of an atheist religion. It innately has no gods, though people keep making gods to fit it (black swans, invisible hands, markets acting as entities, etc.). It organizes people's lives through magic ritual and supernatural powers. Again, magic here literally means it works because people choose to believe it's all real, act as if it's all real, enable it to act upon the real world, and abide by its outcomes, even when they are hurt by these. It's all supernatural only because it rests on Value, and base nature outside the economy is posited to have no value.
And if The Global Economy all breaks down, well, I'll turn to Greg Tingey for his quote of Hobbes, with post-capitalist life being an utter chaos, with life being nasty, brutish, and short. That's the hell of capitalism--like so many domineering humans, hell is the threat of what happens when it's not around to run people's lives.
Grant @ 1452:
1434:
So, can you not assign the label idiot to someone if they do something else stupid or is it only out of bounds if a "Faith" is involved?
If somebody is an idiot call them an idiot, but don't make an ethnic slurs out of their religious beliefs when you do so
... that's what calling out OSC's religion was & that's what I object to.
Also, don't deliberately be more obtuse than you have to be.
Moz @ 1456:
"tighten until it strips, then back off half a turn" as AvE memorably puts it.
What gets me is people who buy $5000+ bikes then don't bother with a $50 torque wrench despite most of the fittings saying things like "5.9-6.1Nm" which should tell anyone that they're not going to get that by feel. Aluminium is bad enough for torque range, composites are terrible.
My ex-gf's bike had been serviced by the same little man that tightened the oil filter on her car until it cracked. I had to make a special 5.1mm allen key to get out a non-critical bolt that for some reason was done up so tight that a 5mm key would round it out.
Speaking of bicycles ...
I had to make a trip out to the "Wake County Multi-use Solid Waste Facility" this week (modern version of the old city dump). I had a couple of old tires & some metal scrap I had to get rid of.
I was astounded (and much saddened) by the number of new looking bicycles I saw in the scrap metal bin.
If you've got a bicycle you can't or won't use give it to someone who WILL use it. Or take it to one of the charitable organizations that refurbishes bicycles & gives them to kids.
Don't just throw it in a scrap metal bin.
meander112 @ 1458:
I recently saw someone point out that another explanation for the "people get more conservative as they get older" effect is not that people's views change to be more conservative, but that the conservative parties become more progressive over time, which causes their evolving views to match the older views of these conservative people.
For myself, I'm not sure if I've become more conservative as I've gotten older so much as I've mellowed out a bit and am not as stridently leftist as I was when I was younger.
I understand the socio-political forces that shape our society a bit better than I used to, and I still mostly don't agree with them ... because it turns out the revolutionary leaders who propose to solve all our problems are to often selfish assholes just like the "powers that be" they want to overthrow.
Nah. You're simply arguing that there's no difference between a legal abstraction and a mystical entity.
No. Just nope.
CharlesH @ 1501:
But we don't really KNOW that time travel is impossible.
And that's a good thing, because if we DID KNOW that, they'd take Dr. Who off the air again, and there'd be a lot of disappointed fans wanting to have a word with the scientists who proved it.
There is no reason why an atheist should not have a BD, and indeed be a practicing "minister of religion" in the Anglican or Presbyterian communions.
Nah. You're simply arguing that there's no difference between a legal abstraction and a mystical entity.
It looks like we've circled back to a version of the atheists' "I don't believe gods exist."
I'll this argument by pointing out that it's not coherent enough to agree or disagree with.
To help clarify what I'm confused about, which entities are you arguing are "legal abstractions?" Are they abstract within the law, or are they abstracted by law, and if so, from what?
Similarly, what do you consider a mystical entity? This connected to the reason I'm going to the trouble of suggesting that there's this whole menagerie of ideas around what things like spirit, soul, and god mean. I suspect that quite often, people have no idea that some term they're arguing about means very different things to each of them. Sometimes they might even agree without even realizing it.
So I'd ask for the favor of helping me out. What do you mean by mystical being? It's possible we may agree on that point, while disagreeing that it's essential to the definition of religion.
Our family has Steve, the god of parking. He has a name so we can thank him when he does something nice for us.
I specifically asked about a calibrated tool.
Sorry, I was replying to this comment:
"where are you getting a torque wrench that is accurate to +/-1% for Aus$50?"
I have no idea where you'd get a calibration certificate for less than the cost of calibration, maybe AliExpress?
People aren't just reluctant to pay for tools, most actively resent paying labour charges to have their toys serviced and will DIY then rate bike shops on service cost rather than quality. It's fucking mental but that's most cyclists. Which is why I much prefer transport cyclists and tourists, because they are more likely to pay for reliability and want it done properly rather than cheaply.
Precision vs accuracy also matters - if you're not getting useful precision paying for accuracy is money wasted. My experience of the that is with spoke tensiometers, where I managed to get the sales rep for the company that imports a couple of them to bring in all the examples he had available.
Amusingly one of the test samples we played on was a wheel I'd built with the cheap tensiometer and got to within +-0.5 on that tool's scale (+-50N or so). The fun part was that the more accurate tools could not agree on which spokes were overtight and which were undertight. And this was brand new spokes, wiped clean, with numbered tags on to make sure we could reliably identify spokes... it convinced me that getting the tension roughly right with the tensiometer then finishing the wheel by feel was far better than any pedantic approach... and then you need to measure each spoke to make sure it's actually the thickness it's supposed to be, ideally also destructively test a few samples in a calibrated tester to make sure they perform as you expect... and meanwhile $100 for labour is considered a lot to pay for a wheelbuild. That's 30-40 minutes per wheel.
the number of new looking bicycles I saw in the scrap metal bin.
Sadly many are bicycle shaped objects that can't be serviced (and likely were never safe to ride).
Bicycles are cheap enough compared to other guilt purchases that many people buy them for that reason, then never use them. So they're stored until thrown out. But because they're a guilt purchase people are reluctant to try to sell or donate them - that turns a private failing into a public one.
From the recipient point of view there are already a large number of bicycles donated, and often significant effort is required to manage that stream, sometimes even paying to dispose of the unusable bikes. Annoyingly from a recycling point of view bicycles are low density mixed metals... that means expensive to deal with.
I've spent a few afternoons doing the the low skill task "cut bikes up and throw bits into three skips - steel, aluminium and rubbish. Someone has to, but usually we have low skill volunteers who are happy to do that as a trade for being taught how to fix bikes.
This plus the ease of theft also means that second hand bikes aren't worth much, so it's often easy to buy one for nearly nothing and if you know how to spot a decent bike you can buy that for the price of a shit one because most people don't have the requisite knowledge. Sadly this encourages people to dump decent bikes because it's a lot of effort to sell or donate one compared to the return.
Someone not far from here threw out a perfectly good tandem that's ~$2500 new (~$US2000) ... it needed new tyres and probably brake pads, but I left it where it was because I don't have any use for a tandem and the two community bike programmes I am in touch with didn't want it either. Tandems are really useful, but also hard to store and transport.
Done with this. (Coming up next, a sophomoric argument about whether the law exists when Thor, for example, clearly doesn't. Fortunately I won't be participating)
you do not discuss politics, sex, or religion at work, or HR will come down to talk to you.
I've seen that, but often it works as "you do not complain about discrimination based on politics, religion or sex at work" because that creates a hostile work environment for those used to having their prejudices unchallenged.
WFH has the advantage that I no longer care what people in the office talk about, or how they act towards others. Rather than just not having to work with them, I no longer have to deal with them at all.
First mover advantage is generally subject to prejudice. A man complaining about sexual harassment will often find himself the offender in a reciprocal complaint as soon as HR gets involved and is likely to be treated poorly. Etc. And good luck if you're the atheist being harassed by a Christian, because atheism is almost never a protected class.
David L
Yes - from what I can make out, Ronnie Raygun was, personally a "very nice guy" who wanted to get on with people ... the very opposite of IQ45 & R de Santis, for instance .,. yes?
Moz
Accuracy is a LOT more important than precision - trust me on this one ......
1531 - Moz, if you don't have a calibration certificate, how do you know it's accurate rather than simply repeatable? I don't know what the torque numbers for my 35 year old Kamasa (brand name) 1/4" drive socket set are, because I don't have a torque wrench at all, but, as you've proved, torque or tension other than on a certified calibrated tool is meaningless, even if you have torque specifications for the fasteners.
1532 Tandems are really useful, - if you have 2 people who want to go to the same place at the same time and can manage a similar pedal cadence.
I'm not convinced on the accuracy vs precision front. Knowing that something is exactly 1.000000 units, give or take 20 units, is useless. Or alternatively, knowing that in completely different circumstances your tool could measure 1.00000 units, but in practice it's 1-ish, give or take 1, is useless.
The point about having a torque wrench is that you're increasing precision. Rather than "about yea toit" you're getting 5 +-1 every time. Even if the tool you're using could in theory be calibrated and made accurate to 5.00 +-0.01, what matters is that the worst case deviation from 5 is reduced. Calibrating tools like that is more about rejecting the tool that's now biased by 50% from the indicated reading than it is about getting the last 0.1% accuracy.
This is increasingly important everywhere, as noted above with electrical connections, because things are being engineered more precisely. Someone has carefully value enginerded everything to have exactly as much material as required, only where it is required. So rather than a big steel bolt and a big steel clamp you have a wisp of carbon fibre guarded by a 10 micron layer of plastic wrapped around a couple of lengths of aluminium that have holes to accept an aliminium bolt. Which means that rather than "20-100Nm, just yoink until you feel it bite" you now have a clamp that won't be tight enough until the properly lubricated bolt hits 5.8Nm, but will break or strip at 6.5Nm. So the label says "5.9-6.1Nm" and there genuinely is room for a bit of uncertainty or error there. Just... not much room. Definitely not the old school "somewhere in a factor of five".
Is a law real even if no one obeys the words on a page? Is any god who is known from words on a page not real? What makes some words real and other words unreal?
Anyway a few more words: I'm happy to end this. Hope you have a happy new year.
"If you've got a bicycle you can't or won't use give it to someone who WILL use it."
Sadly there are a lot of people who deliberately do the opposite. They not only throw it away, they fuck it up on purpose to make sure nobody else can get any use out of it. They think (and explicitly say) that it's wrong for other people to be able to get things cheap because someone else doesn't want them, they ought to be paying full price for a new one; and that they derive malicious enjoyment from hanging around the tip watching other people finding the item they've put there, thinking they've found a treasure and then discovering it's fucked.
I've repaired quite a lot of TVs and the like that people have retrieved from the tip in the hope that they would work, then brought to me when they found they didn't. Several of them the only fault has turned out to be that some twat has taken the back off, cut every wire they could see, then put it back together so it looks perfectly OK. When I join all the cut ends back together again, it works fine. They just fucked it on purpose to piss off people less fortunate than themselves.
I suspect you may be getting precision and accuracy the wrong way round.
Precision: how many decimal places it gives you.
Accuracy: whether or not they mean anything.
See also man 3 printf.
Clamps: ...and if it was mine what you end up getting is part of a label saying "5.9-6.1Nm" poking out from underneath a bent strip of 2mm aluminium plate secured by a steel M6 nut and bolt and two penny washers. I'm not an open-loop grauncher, I can do head gaskets by feel, but I really can not be arsed with having to measure kitten torques on a low-precision bit of kit that gets bashed around as a matter of course in normal use, nor can I be confident that doing it by the book won't mean I have to do it by the book every couple of miles because what they think is an adequate level of clamping isn't what real road surfaces think.
(For context: my bicycle is a tip-sourced "ladies' frame" one, which after I'd had it for a bit broke exactly where you'd expect it to, ie. where the upper of the two fore-and-aft tubes joins the tube connecting the pedals to the saddle. So I found a bit of steel tube that was a nice fit down inside the frame, dropped it down the tube under the saddle, and then applied a Spanish windlass to maintain the whole thing in compression. It's been like that ever since. As far as I'm concerned a bicycle that you can't do things like that to isn't a bicycle, it's a disintegration waiting to happen.)
Precision vs Accuracy in xkcd.
"High Precision, Low Accuracy: Barrack Obama is 70.128 feet tall."
Yeah, I looked it up but couldn't find the xkcd one and suspect that either I misread, or I read a couple of very plausible wrong answers.
Which is why I tried to explain what I meant rather than just using two words primarily known for people getting them confused... But the definitions persistently talked about "accuracy being how close it is to the real measurement" and I find that a bit mystical. "it has a true name but we can only ever approximate it". Meanwhile chip makers are saying "metal layers are 18 atoms wide, +- 2, depending on how you look at it" (actually they're lying, the nominal feature size is some bullshit thing like the actual size you'd need to make something to perform equivalently using last week's technology, which is defined the same way but relative to the version before)
There are still a lot of steel bikes, or aluminium bikes made like steel bikes, because there's still a huge market for it. There's even decent high-ish end steel bikes because tourists and transport cyclists want an expensive bike that actually works.
But there's also a huge market for twats that want super-light bikes but don't want to pay for them, and generally don't know what they've actually got because they also don't want to learn how to tell. You can guess how likely they are to buy the proper tools to avoid fucking up their silly toy. Which leads to crying when they finally take it to a bike shop and not only get quoted genuine parts to replace whatever they have, but genuine wages for the mechanic that will do the work, plus a markup to cover the legally required in Australia warranty on both. You want AliExpress pricing, kiddo, post it back to China...
I for one am definitely a Lutheran atheist, which means I probably have more in common with Anglican and Catholic atheists...
"I'm not a religious man, right, I don't even believe in God. But still Catholic, obviously." — Irish Comedian Dara O’Brian
Speaking of Atheism:
https://ragingpencils.com/2022/12-31-22-news-years-2023.html
I guess I'm a CoE atheist because that's what I used to write on forms at school back when they asked such things. Greg's ranting certainly strikes a chord with me. My dad couldn't remember what he'd been raised as, my Mum was nominally CoE, but taught acupuncture and was probably more Toaist than anything else.
But this whole thing reminds me of the old joke about a tourist in Belfast being stopped by a masked man and asked if they're Protestant or Catholic? When they reply "I'm Jewish" the man asks, "Are You a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?"
Pigeon
That's really sick. People actually take the time & trouble to do this?
Accuracy is MUCH more important than precision ... At least, once you have got accuracy { Good grouping around the aim point } ... THEN you worry about precision - shrinking the grouping closer & closer to that aim point.
It's the whole aim cough of modern manufacturing processes & increased reliability.
{ Said he with an MSc in Metrology }
gasdive
Well, yes - I escaped, by a very narrow margin, a strongly evangelical supposedly CoE background .....
No, largely it was his reward for not agreeing with everything the Bush administrations* did. Such as suggesting our National interest had little to do with Iraq.
good on him
*Still waiting to hear of an intimate hair care business with the cheek to name their business "Bush Administration. ;)
in my heart the 80s will always be the bush era
1486: Yes.
What was your point?
I am. Yes, it's much safer than it was to espouse heretical notions, but that hasn't stopped the manority of scientists still treating their favoured (unproven) hypotheses as Holy Writ.
Non-point event horizons, Higgs bosons, quarks etc., neutrino mass, the impossibility of FTL communication, the extended Hubble hypothesis, dark matter, etc. etc.
As fas as I can discover, the proofs of ALL of those rely on assuming the theory that predicts them. Except for the impossibility of FTL communication, which isn't even predicted by GR.
I agree that, for single measurements, accuracy is far more important, but it's not that simple. Subject to some (commonly true) assumptions, precision allows you to track changes even when the results are not accurate, and statistics allows you to approach the precision in accuracy.
I have personal experience of your last paragraph.
Yes. A legal abstraction is a kind of mystical entity. So is a computer language. Mystical entities exist because they assist one in organizing their life. If it's not physical, and it assists someone in organizing their life, then it's a mystical entity. And the only real distinction that I can make between a saint and a god is that a saint works for some higher entity (usually another saint or god). Also saints have a story that says they used to be human, though that's often fiction.
Along this line, gods are personified mystical entities...though often the personification will slip.
(Categories of human concepts tend to be quite messy, and not quite fit.)
Not all of the things you reference are the same. For example quarks were theorized to exist, then were observed. And nobody has a testable theory of WTF dark matter is. Dark matter is what we're calling whatever it is that produces the observed results we actually see.
If you can't test it, it isn't science. If you can't falsify it, it isn't science.
If you believe something in the absence of evidence, it's faith.
BSW
EC @ 1549: Except for the impossibility of FTL communication, which isn't even predicted by GR.
This article in Ars Technica says the following:
So its like someone (or some One) went around after the fact plugging all the loopholes which would otherwise have allowed time travel.
Or there is a variation on a Douglas Adams theory: if anyone discovers a method for time travel, the universe will instantly disappear, and be replaced by an almost identical universe where that method won't work.
I think there are some subtle differences involved between software (not sure I buy that one) or a legal abstraction such as a star trust, and a mystical being. One of them is that a god, ghost, or nature spirit is believed to be self-willed, having a personality of its own, while which is not the case with a legal abstraction.
As far as I know, nobody has ever observed a quark directly, and the observations depending on assuming the theory that posits their existence.
Well, more fundamentally, I have posted before that FTL does NOT imply CTCs - there could be exclusion principles preventing that. And GR is about physical objects and their motion; communication requires only the transfer of information, which is not physical.
My objections are that they have turned reasomable (and probably largely correct) hypotheses into dogmas, and denied that they might only be something that mostly fitted the observations. Galileo had some trouble with that ....
Then there is the "Time travel as Fermi Paradox answer".
All civilizations eventually invent time travel. They proceed to keep changing their own history until that results in a history in which time travel can never be invented by them. Because everyone is dead. I think I ran across it first from Niven?
»Or there is a variation on a Douglas Adams theory«
Probably as result of the events in Python's "Time Bandits" :-)
EC @ 1549/50
Lets see: Non-point - don't have an opinion / Higgs boson - exists {probably} / quarks - if not, then what? / neutrino mass - yes, but tiny / FTL comms - mabe & FTL totally impossible - wrong / dark matter - yes, but what is it, if it exists, other than a placeholder for handwavium?
It's much easier & safer to go the accuracy THEN precision route.
Charles H
NO
Computer programmes give actual instructions to physical entities.
Whereas, christian saints seem to have mostly consisted of egotistical bastards ....
Yes. It's not a majority, but it's a minority big enough to notice. I've dealt with the results, and I've also called someone a wanker for boasting about doing it and watching the disappointment.
Yes. What the torque wrench really gives you is repeatability; how close the bolts are to the actual figure in the book may be debatable, but you do have reasonable confidence that they are all the same. Which, in the common case of an assembly where each bolt is making its own contribution to an important if invisible pattern of distortion in the thing being bolted, is probably what really matters.
There are gods that are not self-willed, and many "traditional ghosts" don't seem, and certainly don't require, being self-willed. They are locked in a repetitive pattern. So that's not a basic feature requirement, merely something that people usually ascribe to them. And I have known several people (usually women, but not always) who ascribed self-willed behavior to objects, occasionally as simple as screwdrivers. The "self-willed" screwdriver was clearly not the same as the one I used minutes before that looked the same. A "mystical entity" is the difference between those two screw-drivers given a name.
re: =>> Computer programmes give actual instructions to physical entities. Whereas, christian saints seem to have mostly consisted of egotistical bastards .... There are LOTS of different classes of mystical entity. Mystical entity could be compared to phylum, where something specific, like a computer language, could be compared to a species. And ghosts would be a BUNCH of different species, as there are lots of different kinds of ways that different ghosts act. Some of them have direct effects on physical entities, e.g. ghost is a word for the situations that evoke memories of grief, but it's also used by people who think the ghost can act directly on non-living matter, and there are lots of other meanings (e.g. "the ghost of a chance"). If you go back to the middle ages (or possibly it was the Victorian era) it was a word used to describe nocturnal emissions. I don't know exactly what the meaning was other than that they were violently opposed to it. Then there's the Holy Ghost. Etc.
Your argument is like saying C isn't a computer language because it doesn't have garbage collection. Garbage collection isn't a defining characteristic of a computer language.
MEANTIME
During the various "review of the year" & "reviews of 100 years of the Beeb" programmes & spots recently, I came across one from 9th November 1989.
People singing & dancing in the streets & rejoicing that their shackles had disentegrated.
Definitely NOT * the greatest tragedy of the Twentieth Century.* - whatever fake excuses Vlad the destroyer comes up with nor his fellow (maybe) travellers.
In the middle of all this, people seem to be forgetting another oppressed & tortured & mudered group - the tens of thousands of unwilling Russian conscripts being fed into Putin's meat-grinder, just for his personal vanity. Those who have managed to flee Russia are the fortunate ones.
Thus: - as a polite request for the "New Year": NO MORE EXCUSES, however weasally-worded for Vladimir, OK?
You know that thing where you're trying to work out some mathematical problem and you choose an unproductive path and after an interval of equation wrestling you end up proving that the thing you started with is indeed equal to itself? Sometimes after only a few lines, sometimes after half a page, sometimes after half a tree's worth of wasted paper... High energy particle physics often gives me the feeling that the scale goes up at least as far as "...sometimes after building a particle accelerator 30km across, and you still don't actually notice that that's what you've just done".
Cosmology at similarly exotic levels reminds me more of finding pictures in clouds.
Third generation atheist. When I was young, it was difficult for me to get my head around the fact that intelligent people really believed such outdated fairy tales. I read the bible to be able to understand literary allusions and it was already evident to my teenage self that it was a mix of various unrelated texts.
I went to (catholic) church every Sunday when I was an exchange student in the USA (Michigan), and had to endure lots of bullshit coming from the pulpit. Apart from anti-union and generally right-wing opinions, I was told that 1) atheists don't exist 2) there are no atheists in foxholes, despite my atheist grandfather getting a bullet thru his lungs at Verdun.
"The "self-willed" screwdriver was clearly not the same as the one I used minutes before that looked the same."
Oh, it is. The difference is that it likes you.
CharlesH @ 1500:
But I rather think that Mammonism may predate humanity, if you allow it to be "the obsessive collection of things considered to be valuable" (i.e. collecting them rather than using them). It seems to be a development of something like the instinct that causes squirrels to collect more nuts than they can eat.
As I understand it, excess nuts/squirrel is not really a greed response, but systems-theory symbiosis in action: squirrels bury nuts in the ground. Any uneaten nuts are likely to germinate, promoting tree growth and bolstering the habitat that squirrels are best suited for.
The really charming part of this is that the more forgetful squirrels are favored in evolutionary terms. They can't recall where they stashed all of the nuts, so more trees grow.
Squirrels are selected for daftness.
a) Actually, there are multiple "afterlifes" in Capitalism, though they usually require the intervention of the anointed priesthood and the believer fulfilling certain rituals during his lifetime, similar to some interpretations of Egyptian religion or Annihilationism, Conditionalism, Mortalism and like; estates were already mentioned, generic inheritance would be more akin to some variants of reincarnation.
b) There are quite a few religions that don't posit an afterlife, either. Or at least they don't talk about it that much.
Hardly an universal in religions. May I introduce you to the concept of Anatta?
Please note atman itself is quite removed from "soul" or "spirit" in some interpretations, e.g. more similar to qi.
Also, Roman Catholic doctrine of the soul is partially founded on St. Thomas of Aquinas, who was trying to square Aristotle with Christianity.
Given Aristotle's concepts on the matter, the result can be quite complicated; let's just say a quick reading of Aristotle reminds me more of Jainism than the Catechism...
Come on, nobody can enter the sacred stock exchange without the intermission of the broker...
Also, see anointed priesthood to enter the afterlife, namely notaries and lawyers...
"And Jonathans' created the stock exchange, and they saw it was good; and they said: Be fruitful an multiply, and create financial instruments, futures and commodities upon commodities. And in the eleventh year, the Commitee gave us the First Rule Book, and the faithful rejoiced..."
Also, I have been told The Road to Serfdom can be quite eschatological...
You might what to talk to some billionaires'[1] fanboys...
Never talk about Charlie...
May I introduce you to the Tao?
Sorry, but if some forms of Deep ecology tick all the checkboxes for religion, the market fanboys do so, too.
But since fish likely don't have a world for water...
[1] Funny thing, a billionaire; either, he got there through his accumen, in which case he falsifies the economic calculation problem; or he hasn't any special prowess, which quite demysitifies the concept...
Err, 1989 was before the 90s in Russia.
Whatever, I'm on the record of saying we have (checks clock) 150 minutes for old Waldemar and Henry Kissinger to suffer a brutal, painful and humiliating death.
Come on, 2022, you owe me...
OT, but I hope everybody here has a safe and happy 2023.
Funny thing, a billionaire; either, he got there through his accumen, in which case he falsifies the economic calculation problem; or he hasn't any special prowess, which quite demysitifies the concept...
How exactly does becoming a billionaire through acumen falsify the economic calculation problem?
From the wiki article you linked: Mises and Hayek argued that economic calculation is only possible by information provided through market prices and that bureaucratic or technocratic methods of allocation lack methods to rationally allocate resources.
One can claim that billionaire is simply better (or alternatively, everyone else is worse) at reacting to "information provided through market prices". After all, no matter how good information is, it is of not use if you do not act on it.
Torque wrenches and screwdrivers can be calibrated to pretty good levels of accuracy in the home workshop -- simply set up the wrench/screwdriver in a vice, attach a piece of wood or tube to the drive half-way along the wood/tube's length. Add weights to one end, providing some torque to the drive. When it goes "click" or otherwise indicates a set amount of torque, add up the weights, measure the distance between the centre of the beam and where the weights were attached and that will give you the true torque in ft/lbs or Nm depending on your geographical location.
Using a length of wood or whatever twice the length of the lever arm removes the mass of the shaft from the equation but if you're willing to do more math it can be added into the calculation.
If I have any religious practice it is based almost entirely on the necessity to put the damn drill bit back where it belongs before you move on to the next task or bit.
Thou shalt always place the Robertson #8 bit back in its holder. Should thou fail to do so even one time, the bit will be stolen by tool demons and you shall be returning to the sacred hardware store at an inconvenient time.
In which case, a billionaire is still better at allocating resources than everybody else; the ECP somewhat depends on the wisdom of the crows, which gets falsified by experts.
And if billionaires are better than everybody else at allocating resources, we can
a) establish a technocracy by drafting like individuals, b) implement a bureaucracy emulating their behaviour
or, somewhat sci-fi-ish[1]
c) train a neural network to copy their skills.
(Please note I don't actually think billionaires are necessarily better at allocating resources than everybody else; Steve Jobs was tragedy, Elon Musk is farce, hell, I have no idea what Elizabeth Holmes is, maybe Little Britain?)
[1] No, not science-fiction-ish, or speculative-fiction-ish. Sci-fi-ish, like Sci-Fi, the old name of a TV channel, which was somewhat notorious in (high-brow) German fandom at one point.
Likewise.
A giud new year tae ane an' a',
An' mony mae ye see,
An' during a' th' years tae com, Oh happy mae ye be.
Happy New Year. May God have mercy on our souls, if she exists. ;)
Scott Sanford @ 1543:
"I'm not a religious man, right, I don't even believe in God. But still Catholic, obviously." — Irish Comedian Dara O’Brian
:-)
I was bemused to read that a fair number of Jesuits were/are atheists.
Obviously, the nature of "Catholicism" is not limited to devout belief in the theology.
There are (I think) two significant components of Catholic identity that are secular.
There's a personal commitment to the organization of the Church -- what Charlie might call the "large slow AI" that encapsulates Catholic operations in the world. Tribal/identity politics. Loyalty.
Another secular motivation to support Catholicism (and probably one that matters to those atheist Jesuits) is the belief that the Church is a force for good (for certain debatable values of "good") in the world. More abstractly ethical; still, independent of theological conviction.
This sort of structure probably applies, somewhat, to all systematized religious beliefs. Winston Churchill, when asked if he was in fact Church of England, famously said, "I think of myself as a flying buttress: I support the Church from the outside." If he did in fact say it, he might well have cribbed it from someone else. He had form for appropriating clever remarks that he'd heard somewhere. Still, the remark wouldn't have gained much traction if it didn't make sense in context.
Unprovable, unfalsifiable faith on the one hand; persistent commitment to the corporate, worldly entity of the religion on the other. The combination provides a wretchedly stable state, carrying religious belief systems, with their embedded cruelties and their vulnerabilities to corruption, down the road, for much longer than might be hoped.
Ah - that's a macroscopic quantum effect. A drill bit (or a socket or whatever) which is not in a bound state (either as an item in a complete set, or in the chuck) sees a low barrier to tunnelling, and so is likely to disappear for no apparent reason. Sometimes it's gone for good, sometimes it turns up minutes or years later in some weird place that it can't possibly have got to - sockets, being generally more massive than drill bits, tend not to move so far, and so often display the latter behaviour, for instance when you are lying on your back underneath the car, and you put one down near your left leg and it vanishes out of all ken before rematerialising a while later as an unexpected painful lump underneath your right shoulder blade.
This is related to the filled-shell stability effect displayed by the bit/socket set itself. A complete set of bits with no vacancies is stable, but once one of them goes missing, it destabilises the set and several more bits soon follow it into oblivion.
Well that explains a lot, but... Socks?
Happy New Year from Denmark
And then there is the 10mm socket whose existence is only a fanciful tale told by the Masters of the Artes Mechanical to the junior initiates around the campfire.
Timed at 00.02 / 01/01/2022 with a small glass of Apfelschnapps in hand ... Here's for a better year than the last two or even three!
FUCK
WAS: 00.02 / 01/01/2023
And may Loki take Putin with him to Nifelheim
Accuracy is important but in my speciality of biochemical analysis of blood an body fluids precision is much more important. Without precision accuracy for this sort of work is meaningless. Almost all assays are calibrated regularly. Calibrators are bought from manufacturers and need to be accurate and precise. Many are calibrated with reference to international standards. But once you have this sort of accuracy in the calibrators precision is I’m portent to get a useful result. When an instrument is pipetting 2 micro litre aliquots of serum or plasma neither the absolute accuracy of the pipetting of samples or reagents is paramount. But the precision is. We expect a CV of about 1 percent for the most precise biochemical parameters like sodium or calcium. it the accuracy of the volumes pipettes could probably be plus or minus 10 percent without affecting the accuracy of the result since the assays are calibrated and controlled using the same automated pippettes. For the least precise assay I used routinely, vitamin B12 the cv is more like 13 percent. And some enzyme assays commonly use different substrates or forward versus reverse reactions which give different results. Lactate dehydrogenase, alkaline phosphates and bile acids (all used as live function tests) have different results depending on the method chosen. But the labs all quote their own reference ranges with the results and it’s the comparison of the result and the reference range which is clinically important. So precision of the instruments is more importent than accuracy. And before Greg accuses me of being unprofessional all the labs I managed over my 35 years in the NHS have been amongst the best performers in national and international external quality assurance schemes.
Well, in retrospect, make that:
"Happy New Year, and may God (if they exist) have mercy on our souls (if there is such a thing)."
(for alternatives, there is anatta, and my personal favourite, the idea our individual consciousness ist just the universe suffering from dissociative identity disorder; or being a case of serial metempsychosis involving a lot of time travel...)
Also, I object somewhat on the fate of Putin, but only since Loki seemed like the only somewhat interesting Norse god. Put since he is somewhat also the only somewhat gender-fluid Norse god (Thor in drag doesn't count), it'Äs somewhat appropiate. ;)
so... for those still mired in 2022... is 2023 any better? you UKers have been there long enough to report back(wards)
Happy New Year everyone!
Ditto Howard NYC's question ...
Not quite here yet, but happy New Year, may the celebrant's hangovers be nonexistent, may the WTFs be nontoxic, may the sufferers of rectal-cerebral inversion be cured and may the Mammonites be possessed of a moderate spirit.
there is the 10mm socket whose existence is only a fanciful tale ...
There is a similar tale about 1/2" sockets for those of us stuck in SAE land. Actually we tell tales of both legendary items at times.
This question has already been answered - by H Beam Piper
Year Zero is 2nd Dec 1942 CE - when the first "pile" reached criticality.
{ Alternatively? ... 16th July 1945 CE ?? }
Discuss
1592 -
1) Sputnik 1: First spacecraft to make a steady orbit.
2) Vostok 1 : First spaceship to make multiple orbits with a human on board, and return him safely to Earth.
3) Apollo 8: First manned spaceship to leave Earth orbit, orbit another body and return its crew safely to Earth.
4) Apollo 11: First manned spaceship to leave Earth orbit, land a crew on another body and return its crew safely to Earth.
5) Voyagers 1 and 2: First spacecraft to commence interstellar flights, and leave the Sol system.
Need I go on?
paws
Maybe, but ... None of your events left any traces on the actual Planet. 2/12/42 not so much, but 16/7/45 definitely left marks on the planet ....
It's terrible eurocentric but...
I'd vote for 1492. Just because that one started the biggest exchange in biological species in the last few ten thousand years.
Let's just wonder where Prussia would be without potatoes...
You could make a case for 1959-06-18. The launch of the second Luna impact probe and the first man made object to reach the surface of the moon. Nothing on the surface of the Earth to mark this but the beginning of and era when human influence extended to other worlds.
Surely 1972-01-01... the birth of Scott Manley. That way we have dates BM and AM.
I'd be kind of tempted to go with 1606 on the basis that steam engines were the start of the modern era. We could also go with plastics in 1855, not least because that would make this the Plasticene.
Or because of the fondness for religion, 1930 for the crowning of Salassi and Nation of Islam (conveniently the same year).
But the most obvious and best possible reset date is 18 October 1964. All hail his greatness!
I love the idea of squirrels being selected for daftness. Unfortunately, I vaguely recall hearing that before burying them, many squirrel nibble out the point from which the acorns germinate - but perhaps that was only hearsay.
I know squirrels are only rats with style, but they do seem to cogitate more than I expected. Since we put up a dome to protect one of our bird peanut feeders from its visits, our resident squirrel has spent 5 minutes every day moving round the branches above the dome trying to work out a way to get past it. It is definitely in deep thought mode. You can almost see the cogs turning.
1594 - Visit the Kennedy Space Centre, ask them to show the Apollo Saturn 5 launch sites, and look at the vitrified ground.
1596 - Or that, yes. I just listed some I could remember.
1597 - Your birth date differs from Wikipedia's by almost a year and he open's up a whole other field in visual arts as well...
I am almost certain that is a myth, on several grounds.
4 used by the Qeng Ho in Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness In The Sky". Except they're aware that there is a discrepancy between that event and the zero epoch, and they use more than 32 bits to store time/date.
Moz
Who Scott Manley?
18/10/1964?
On a completely unrelated topic...
Is it just me, or did Heinlein usually (always?) vastly overestimated how many uneducated workers the future will need? The backstory of "Orphans in the Sky" is that only a small portion of the people aboard the generation ship(!) had a clue about science, the rest were barely literate or downright illiterate farmers/laborers, and the situation in the book came to be because Huff's mutiny killed everyone in that small portion. "Time Enough For Love" is not quite that bad, but still it is obvious that vast majority of the myriad human-settled worlds get by with what amounts to high school education if that.
No Golden Age SF writer predicted Information Age accurately, but some were better than others, and Heinlein was among the worst in that regard.
FWIW, religious belief systems don't have to be cruel. E.g. in the US the Unitarian/Universalist belief doesn't appear (to me) to be cruel. Admittedly it's not very powerful. And not being very powerful might be a shield against corruption (not an attractive target).
I've encountered several religions that weren't cruel. There's no guarantee that they couldn't become cruel in the right circumstances, but that's true of a bridge club, too.
re: Is it just me, or did Heinlein usually (always?) vastly overestimated how many uneducated workers the future will need?
Is it "need" or "have"? In a world with computers more intelligent than people, and with really good mechanisms available, it's not clear to me that there is the need for any human workers. It's my pessimistic assumption that this means high status will go entirely to those who are adept at politics. Unless the AI that will really be in charge decides that it wants a different arrangement.
When I consider the years of training that need to be put in in order to understand a narrow segment of any technical field, it's not clear that there will be anyone who achieves current levels of understanding in the next decade, unless something shows up to drastically simplify something. (Not impossible. Consider Copernican mechanics vs. epicycles.)
OTOH, don't overestimate what the current AIs understand. The chat-bots only understand language. The cars only understand traffic patterns (and, to a limited extent, signage). Etc. A true AI won't show up until we learn to have the several AIs that are "expert in the field" coordinate their responses properly, which will probably require an AI to do the coordination. And that cooperative mix is what we will call a "primitive AGI". My guess is that this is still a decade away, but for all I know it could show up this year. (If it shows up this year, it will be full of LOTS of mistakes, but it could be as intelligent as an English speaking rat with a dialect problem. And it probably wouldn't have a body with "brains on board".)
Did I say anything about AI? I was talking about information-based economy, which is what we have now. Also about the fact that every crewman on a naval ship (with which Heinlein was familiar, being a naval officer) must know a great deal about how the ship operates, in order to handle emergencies. Everyone aboard an interstellar generation ship should have at least as much knowledge about the ship as modern enlisted submariner knows about his sub. With or without AI. The idea that killing off all the officers is enough to make everyone else forget within two generations that they are on a ship, is absurd.
I am tempted to post a blog essay (along the lines of Falsehoods programmers believe about names) on the subject of falsehoods Christians believe about religion.
Starting with: "1. There can be only one true religion; if you believe in it, that implies disbelief in all other faiths".
(Makes the fundamental error of conflating "religion" with "faith", and the secondary error of assuming that religions are mutually exclusionary. A Jewish atheist is still a Jew, and their approach to atheism doesn't mirror a Catholic atheist or a Presbyterian atheist or an animist atheist. And then there's the routine colocation of Shinto shrines in the grounds of Buddhist temples, stuff like the Roman cult of the Emperor's genius coexisting with the big-ass bickering family of Jove and Juno they stole from the Greeks, and the Etruscan pantheon they adopted as well.)
CONGRATULATIONS AMERICA!
we made it to 10 hours into newest year without a mass causality event involving guns!
(ignoring reports of multiple independent machete attacks since no bullets involved)
let's try for a full 12 hours, eh?
Since we put up a dome to protect one of our bird peanut feeders from its visits, our resident squirrel has spent 5 minutes every day moving round the branches above the dome trying to work out a way to get past it. It is definitely in deep thought mode. You can almost see the cogs turning.
When I put up my feeders around 5+ years ago I though I had the squirrel issue licked. 5 months later they figured out how to get to the feeders.[1] So I had to change things. So far they've not succeeded with my new setup. But I do have a video of one of them launching on a very long jump trying to get there from a post on my deck.
I have a vision of a weekly meeting in a nearby tree with a white board covered with diagrams.
[1] One of them figured out that they could jump without running. And would tense up on a deck post and launch themselves into the air and just catch the edge of a feeding tube.
No Golden Age SF writer predicted Information Age accurately, but some were better than others, and Heinlein was among the worst in that regard.
The world the industrial nations exist in and most people on this blog depends a lot on vast unskilled laborers to make it all work. Those $4 packages of fruit and veggies we bring home to our $1000 to $4000 fridges depend on a LOT of unskilled labor. It's not as bad as say a WWII battleship compared to a warship today but still. The numbers are huge.
You explicitly mentioned "Time Enough for Love" in which one of the majore sub-plots involves a more-than-human equivalent AGI, Athena by name. But yes, there are other of his stories that don't assume advanced computers. Still, the crew of a ship are distinct from the passengers, and one can't expect the passengers to understand the ship. Or to be less numerous than the crew. (Exceptions exist, or have existed, but it's not a reasonable presumption since the age of steam.)
Topologically, socks are half a wormhole. When they're too far from their mate they try to teleport, but since they're topologically closed (right where your toes go) they get stuck in hyperspace.
Russia without vodka might be a much better place!
To be honest, I completely forgot about Athena. OTOH, nobody aboard a generation ship could be considered "passengers". Among other reasons, passengers are random collection of humans; everyone who leaves Earth on a generation ship will go through a rigorous selection process. Or SHOULD go through a rigorous selection process.
I'm not sure it's fair to judge Heinlein's idea of future technological needs from his assessments of farmers. (They weren't great, IMHO, but let's consider what the high-tech Heinlein heroes used.)
I don't know if it's "Golden Age" (1966) but if you want a real miracle of prediction, look at a flip phone and look at the communicators in the original Star Trek. (Or at a tablet and show in Next Generation.) The thing science-fiction gets wrong as a matter of course is that it assumes we'll improve our methods of power-generation - antimatter, fusion, etc., and for the most part didn't understand where information technology was going until the cyberpunks came along, and even William Gibson had his AI calling Case on pay phones.*
Isn't that the point though? We, here and now, are not there yet. We've got loads of computers, but nearly all of them can't do anything beyond stuff you can do just sitting around, and the ones that do have some physical capability still aren't very impressive. They can manage a few of the better-defined steps in the manufacture of a fridge under highly controlled conditions where lots of things are set up just so by external agencies, but they can't get by without those external agencies, they can't do most of the steps at all, and they are totally useless for growing the vegetables that you put in the fridge.
Asimov was probably the most accurate predictor. In his scenario we have, theoretically, got there, since there are robots readily available that can do all that stuff, and handle the entire process from dirt to a fridge with vegetables in; but in practice, on Earth, we haven't, because of the bloodyminded stupidity that insists on retaining the present system where humans are compelled to do those things instead in order to be permitted to survive. The principal difference between that and what we've actually got now is merely that that same reason accounts for not developing the robots in the first place, rather than having them but not using them.
Er, the original Motorola flip phones were designed to look like ST:TOS communicators.
That's half a good point. The other half is first that the design is a good one, so why wouldn't you copy it, and second, that the technology was good-enough to make that happen.
In relation to the original topic: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64140571 New York approves composting of human bodies (BBC)
First Thought: "Yay! Resyk!" (dates me somewhat)
Second Thought: "Actually, that's a nice idea. Being able to to plant a tree in soil derived from a loved one."
Third Thought: "Crap! How long before a weird semi-cannibalistic cult springs up feasting on veggies grown from the departed" (thanks Stephen King for that one).
And what color is television tuned to a dead channel? That's a very generation-locked question.
Quite a bit narrower than a "generation". When I read "Neuromancer" I had no idea the sky in the opening scene was supposed to be blue -- because I had never seen a blue dead channel. The only "dead channels" I was familiar with was black and white "snow" of the analog TV's, so for years I assumed Gibson meant it was raining.
Well, I was also familiar with the black screen of a cable TV without signal, but I figured that's not what Gibson meant.
"The thing science-fiction gets wrong as a matter of course is that it assumes we'll improve our methods of power-generation - antimatter, fusion, etc., and for the most part didn't understand where information technology was going"
Well, thinking in terms of ground power rather than spaceship drives, the writers in general seem to have assumed that of course we'd have better power sources in the future since what already existed was clearly crap. I'm not sure it's a case of "didn't understand" so much as a belief in progress, which naturally led them to write stories in which things that were already crying out to be fixed did get fixed, and weren't shoved to one side and ignored in favour of unimportant trivia that didn't need fixing. If there was something they "didn't understand" it was probably that "progress" is an illusion resulting from the characteristic of a random walk that it gets further from the origin over time, and the characteristic of people that they see only the straight-line distance and assume it was deliberately achieved.
RE: start of the Anthropocene.
Happy(?!) 2023 everybody. I won't add more for fear of jinxing it.
Anyway, there are three intertwined questions here about putting the "Golden Spike" into a sediment layer for the Anthropocene, and IMHO, the IUGS is screwing up by conflating them. And to be perfectly fair, I'm really shocked that the geologists aren't way ahead of me on this, so I strongly suspect my opinion is based on shallow reporting of what's actually going on in the IUGS, and that whatever they choose will be as much about getting political consensus now as it is about utility for future geologists.
The "Golden Spike" is what geologists use to designate the beginning of a geological period. It's some exposed layer of rock that the geologists agree is what they'll use to calibrate when one period ended and the next period started. What they're arguing about is where to put the "Golden Spike" in for the Anthropocene.
With the start of the Anthropocene, there are three questions, not one: --When did detectable things start? --What is the relationship between what can be detected and the phenomena of interest? --How far in the future are the geologist going be doing their studies? Everything decays, after all.
I'll take these in reverse order. Trottelreiner's suggestion of 1492 is actually really good, because of the Columbian Exchange and the rapid range expansion of crops. Things like pollen and phytoliths (silica microbodies that plants like grasses create inside epidermal cells) can last hundreds of millions of years in the fossil record. Since maize has distinctive pollen and phytoliths, its spread out of the New World is a really good signal, especially since it's unambiguously coevolved with humans and its wild relatives are rare. However, its spread within the New World isn't a very good signal, since people have been living with maize for ca. 9,000 years. However, if someone was looking for evidence of a paleocivilization 200,000,000 years from now (to pick a random number), their radioisotopic dating precision would be +/- 10,000-100,000 years, and they could find the maize pollen and phytoliths pretty easily, so something like the presence of maize is a good signal. But how does the presence of maize pollen relate to human civilization? That's a trickier question. And pulling pollen out of rock IIRC requires using hydrofluoric acid to dissolve the rock, which in turn requires its own industrial base...
Human garbage, things like metallic aluminum, plastics, lead, radioisotopes, and so forth, seem like good markers for industrial civilization. The question is, basically, how long they last. Aluminum is a widespread element, but metallic aluminum is an artifact of the industrial age, and we've littered the planet with it. That might make a good marker, but I don't know how aluminum corrodes in sediments or rocks. Iron's a really bad marker because it corrodes so fast, which is why we've got a lot of bronze swords lying around, but few early iron swords. There's a similar problem with plastics. "Plastic" is ubiquitous, but polymers vary tremendously in how fast they degrade, and furthermore bacteria and fungi are cheerfully evolving to degrade them faster. A bunch of polymer chemists might be able to tell us which of the ubiquitous plastics are the most durable and how long they last, but the IUGS, for whatever reason, didn't go there. Anyway, they only get common post-1930.
Radioisotopes and radioactive elements are sometimes useful, but only if you can do isotopic analysis. Maybe plutonium (long-lasting) would be useful, but not Carbon-14. Carbon dating only works for IIRC around 50,000 years after the sample was laid down, so C-14 dating of the start of human civilization could only be done by geologists in the next 40,000 years or so. This is cool, because it implies a future industrial civilization, but unfortunately, we've already wiped the 20th Century out of the C-14 record. Part of this is the Seuss effect, that fossil fuel carbon is depleted in C-14 relative to the air, so if you pump a huge amount of fossil carbon into the air, the plants taking it up get read in C-14 terms as centuries older than they actually are (right now, our plants carbon date IIRC around the 1600s). Rather worse, the atmospheric nuke testing of the 50s and 60s dumped a large amount of C-14 into the atmosphere, making plant material from that era look anomalously young (like it was laid down ca. 2300 AD). We know about all this at the moment, but someone trying to radiocarbon date the ruins of our civilization will get very lost, because the dates swing from anomalously old to anomalously young and back, and these don't track any sedimentary layering.
Something like lead in sediments is a bit easier to pick up in theory, but it's a signal for regional metallurgy more than the "start of civilization."
So when did the Anthropocene begin? I don't think it was a moment, but rather a span of time lasting around 10,000 years. In a few million years this will be within the margin of precision. If we're working from now and trying to nail it to a particular year? It depends on why "start of the Anthropocene" is a useful answer to the whatever subject we're trying to study. Personally, I think it's within the last 10,000 years, and that 1492 is a good candidate date because that's when the really big, irreversible changes began. At the same time, I'll acknowledge that other people have really good arguments for later or earlier dates.
FTL thread: There has just been a paper that has come out, which looks at what it would be like if an observer could go fast than light.
Here's the Space Daily summary of it:
https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Three_time_dimensions_one_space_dimension_999.html
which has a link to the paper.
The gist of it is that Tachyons are possible, but that space at those speeds has 3 time dimensions and one space dimension. (Also, already known, is that the lower the energy of a particle, the faster it goes in an asymptotic curve from the speed of light to infinity.) Something to think about.
I thought he wrote it before the stupid blank blue idea had got going anyway, and what he meant was the kind of sky you get in somewhere like Barnsley or Magnitogorsk, where the whole place is so dirty and mucky that it seems like even the sky is full of grit and crud.
Likewise; I'd associate a blue screen with a BSOD, rather than being off (black or olive green) or "snow" (which you still get on an analogue channel).
Looks like what Pigeon and I imagined was actually more or less what Gibson intended: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28382590
"It took at least a decade for me to realize that many of my readers, even in 1984, could never have experienced Neuromancer’s opening line as I’d intended them to. I’d actually composed that first image with the black-and-white video-static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful—a whopping anachronism, right at the very start of my career in the imaginary future.
But an invisible one, interestingly; one that reveals a peculiar grace enjoyed by all imaginary futures as they make their way up the timeline and into the real future, where we all must go. The reader never stopped to think that I might have been thinking, however unconsciously, of the texture and color of a signal-free channel on a wooden-cabinet Motorola with fabric-covered speakers. Readers compensated for me, shouldering an additional share of the imaginative burden, and allowed whatever they assumed was the color of static to take on the melancholy of the phrase “dead channel”."
"That might make a good marker, but I don't know how aluminum corrodes in sediments or rocks.
It depends a lot. It can be pretty fast (e.g. cans disappearing in a decade or two). I don't know the relevant circumstances, but the biologically active soil layer is one, and anaerobic sediments probably another.
»So when did the Anthropocene begin?«
Having some people in my circuit who are very invested in that question I can reveal that the question is not the real question: The question is what reveals the trouble with asking that kind of question in the first place.
First all the previous epochs have been "blame-free", but almost by definition this one cannot be chosen such, so a lot of the sub rosae discussions are about who to blame, what to blame them for, and if that will look really silly in 75 years.
Take Plutonium as the marker, physically a no-brainer. But what if nuclear power then becomes the magic solution to reverse climate-change, enable space colonisation &c ?
That could give future 5-graders a really good laugh.
The second issue is that this is real-time history writing, and there are a lot of people who think that is just PR departments spinning, and that we should never try to nail anything, golden or otherwise, until there is a solid amount of history on top of it, putting it's significance in proper perspective.
And third there is if the entire with "death by a thousand cuts", what sense does it make to one of them the "chosen one" ?
So to a large extent, the only reason this is a story is because it is a good story, where "science-journalists" and have fun trying to translate "coca-cola epoch" into latin etc.
Charlie
If you make it: Falsehoods $_Religious_Believers believe about religion(s) ...
Then you are probably on to a "winner" - for certain valus of winning.
Squirrels & "intelligence"
HERE is a whole YouTube page - of squirrels trying/succeeding/failing to beat the obstacles put in their way to (Bird)food ......
There was a sequence in Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth where some of the protagonists were transported (IIRC) 10 million years into the future. One of them was a paleontologist by trade, and she figured out that this very thin black line close to the surface was the Anthropocene marker. Very much "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
The time travel bits in that book were interesting, but its take on evolution was... wrong, as I was able to see even the first time I read it.
Take Plutonium as the marker, physically a no-brainer. But what if nuclear power then becomes the magic solution to reverse climate-change, enable space colonisation &c ? That could give future 5-graders a really good laugh.
All isotopes of plutonium have quite short half-lifes in terms of historical epochs, that's why all the Pu we have is man-made by breeding up from U-238. A million years from now whatever Pu we've made will have decayed away to almost nothing. Saying that I've seen claims that "natural" Pu-239 has been detected in some geological core samples but that's more a triumph of modern analytical techniques rather than anything odd in the physical sense. It's possible for natural fission in uranium ores to create Pu-239 but the production rate is very very low.
What's more likely to be detectable is the mismatched ratios of U-235 and U-238 in uranium samples measured a million years from now. There will be noticeably less U-235 than can be ascribed to radioactive decay since we will have refined and fissioned a significant amount of that U-235 by then. Of course we only use U-235 for ritual purposes.
That ratio mismatch has already been detected in the wild, in the so-called Oklo reactor where a small amount of the U-235 in a natural uranium ore body was fissioned by neutrons moderated by ground water over a period of hundreds of thousands of years about 1.8 billion years ago. Back then of course the ratio of U-235 to U-238 would have been a lot higher hence making it easier for fission to occur.
So to a large extent, the only reason this is a story is because it is a good story, where "science-journalists" and have fun trying to translate "coca-cola epoch" into latin etc.
Thanks Poul. I figured as much.
For anyone who gets especially dispirited at the idea of humans being the most destructive species in Earth's history, it's worth contemplating the idea that the Archaeopteris clade caused the end-Devonian mass extinction.
They were the first really successful clade of trees in Earth's history, and over a few million years, right at the end of the Devonian, they took over riparian areas apparently around the world. There's reasonable evidence that this had literal "major downstream effects," including on the sediments washing out of rivers and into the ocean.
During the Archaeopteris period, Earth went from hothouse to icehouse, possibly because of a fall in atmospheric CO2 (caused by...?). Sea levels fell, and reefs of the time "went extinct" (the classic signature of a mass extinction. It's in quotes because reefs are ecosystems, not organisms). Somewhere around that time all the Archaeopteris disappeared, to be replaced eventually by other, completely unrelated, trees in the Carboniferous, which was a major icehouse phase for our planet.
A few intrepid paleontologists tried to pin the blame for the end-Devonian on Archaeopteris over a decade ago. When I was writing Hot Earth Dreams this was a fringe theory I championed to try to get readers to contemplate the idea that as a species we're less special than we fear we are. Reading subsequent iterations of the End-Devonian extinction article in Wikipedia, it looks like more people are contemplating the idea that humans might be the second clade to induce a mass extinction in the last few hundred million years, not the first.
And if anyone knows where I can find a small Archaeopteris fossil specimen, I think it would be kind of fun to have one on my desk, as a memento. Most of the local fossil wood* is from much later periods.
The wood's called *Callixylon, which takes an essay about paleobotany to explain.
Re: '... a billionaire is still better at allocating resources than everybody else'
Nope - a billionaire is better at EXtracting resources usually by offering parts of his/her domain on the altar of one of the Stock Exchange pantheon gods.
BTW - because I first learned about Tim Blais (A Capella Science) from folks on this site, I thought that these folks might be interested to learn that he's beta testing a new science musical parody video 'Leukocyte'. Anyways, he's asking his supporters who have expertise in this area (immune system, etc.) to vet the info. From my non-sci/techie perspective this video looks pretty densely packed with info. Only hitch is that access to the video might be restricted to his Patreon supporters for now. (However, he might be reachable via his website.)
Concerning FTL....
Here is an episode of an old SF show called "Future Fantastic" hosted by the X-Files Gillian Anderson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAnq_oTQWGQ&list=PLuJ-NME-r2jJeGg62W07a2VNgWKQ7xkvm&index=4 (BBC Future Fantastic - "Starman")
With a discussion on using wormholes as both FTL transport and as a time machine (start at 20:40) by Michao Kaku. FTL can also create a practical functioning time machine.
Take two pairs of massively large parallel plates and charge them with massive amounts of energy. The Casmir Effect creates a wormhole between the two pairs of plates.
Put one pair of plates on a rocket ship to Proxima Centauri (about 4 light years away) while leaving the other home on Earth.
Once the traveling pair of plates arrives a person on Earth could step into his pair of plates and be instantaneously transported to Proxima.
If one set of plates is kept orbiting at near light speed (again requiring massive amounts of energy), time dilation slows down time at the fast opening. If the system is set up on January 1, 3001 then it will basically always be that date at the moving end of the wormhole.
Note: you can't go back in time prior to January 1, 3001 since the time machine wormhole did not exist prior to this date.
So we have the following mission profile:
Once the charged plates create a Casmir wormhole, the first pair of plates travels to Proxima on a starship at near light speed. leaving on January 1, 3001. Due to time dilation, the crew only experiences a few weeks/months of travel time instead of 4+ years. Meanwhile, the second set of plates is set in orbit around Sol at near lights speed, making it always January 1, 3001 at this opening. The exploratory crew sets up their end of the wormhole and begin exploring and colonizing for a year or so. They then return via the worm hole back in time to January 1, 3001 only a few minutes after they originally left.
The problem? The system requires the energy equivalent of an exploding star.
Where to get such energy? By harvesting super massive binary Black Holes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxa0IrZCNzg (Isaac Arthur. "Colonizing Black Holes")
By dropping matter into the event horizon massive amounts of energy are created. The same effect can be achieved by shining a small laser near the event horizon, picking up massive amount of energy from the black hole as the light bends around the black hole (like a space probe getting a gravity assist from a Jupiter flyby). This is the basis of the Halo drive by astronomer David Kipping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFqL9CkNxXw (Halo Drive, David Kipping, Cool Worlds)
Laser light can't go faster than light speed so it massively blue shifts gaining billions x more energy as it circles around to the other side. By itself the Halo Drive could push a laser sail spacecraft to a significant fraction of light speed.
Furthermore, by orbiting the stay behind pair of plates near the event horizon you can achieve the same time slowing effect as traveling near light speed.
So imagine a galactic civilization built on FTL wormholes allowing real time travel and communication across the galaxy via a network centered on a billion or so binary black holes scattered across the Milky Way with "local" travel (once you exit the wormhole near the black hole) via laser Halo drives.
FTL thread: There has just been a paper that has come out, which looks at what it would be like if an observer could go fast than light...The gist of it is that Tachyons are possible, but that space at those speeds has 3 time dimensions and one space dimension. (Also, already known, is that the lower the energy of a particle, the faster it goes in an asymptotic curve from the speed of light to infinity.) Something to think about.
Cool! What follows is strictly tongue in cheek.
I like reading the physics articles in Quanta Magazine, because they cover the gamut of theoretical physics. With what I propose below, I'm going to kit-bash a couple of ideas, from researchers who shall remain nameless because I doubt they'd enjoy what I'm going to propose (my apologies in advance to them and their supporters).
Some of the articles have dealt with the notion of entropic time, that time gets it's unidimensional arrow from entropy. Apparently there's some theoretical and even experimental work suggesting that entropic time can appear on a quantum scale. We all know that quantum mechanics is in theory reversible with respect to time, but this new work suggests that when many particles get entangled (as happens routinely in decoherence), it is not possible to completely reverse the entanglement, because information gets lost in the interactions. This is cool, if true, because it might provide a quantum-level arrow of entropic time.
Still, the notion of the universe having three spatial dimensions and one entropic dimension is nuts, even for me. If tachyons exist in a universe of three dimensions of time and one of space, I will stick my tongue very firmly in my cheek and suggest the following:
Imagine, if you will, that the universe has four dimensions: three of spacetime, one of quantum entropy. The key to both FTL and time travel involves manipulation of the entropic dimension. This is possible, because as we all know, entropy can be locally reversed through use of sufficient energy.
Therefore, the gate to all possible alternative spacetime lines is the Quantum Incoherency System. When a body becomes incoherent, they can theoretically go anywhere, although closing the quantum loop and re-entangling themselves in their original spacetime is more difficult. Navigating through multiple worlds, as reality shifts between being spacelike and causality becomes incoherent, is as challenging as one might imagine.
I'll show myself out...
David L @ 1591:
There is a similar tale about 1/2" sockets for those of us stuck in SAE land. Actually we tell tales of both legendary items at times.
What is even the point of a 1/2" socket - every nut or bolt I encounter is either 7/16" or 9/16" (unless it's metric and then the one socket that doesn't fit anything is 12mm.
The new year has started off just as weird as the old year.
Woke up around 4:00am and lay there for a while wondering what had woke me up? Decided that since I couldn't get back to sleep, I'd read a little bit ... but the light wouldn't turn on. That's what woke me up, it was too damn quiet without the noise of the little timer that turns on a light at 7:00am. But I can see light spilling out into the hall from other rooms, so it's NOT a power outage.
Make a trip down to the basement to reset the breaker, but it won't reset. Back upstairs to unplug EVERYTHING in the bedroom (which means moving furniture so I can get to the outlets) and then back down to the basement to reset the breaker.
Then start plugging stuff back in to see what tripped the breaker? Turned out to be a power strip with a surge protector built in. Not any of the things plugged into the power strip, but the strip itself. Fortunately I have a spare power strip because that's where all my camera battery chargers plug in.
Anyway, HAPPY FUCKIN' NEW YEAR if you celebrate it according to the Gregorian calendar.
Charlie Stross @ 1607:
I am tempted to post a blog essay (along the lines of Falsehoods programmers believe about names) on the subject of falsehoods Christians believe about religion.
Starting with: "1. There can be only one true religion; if you believe in it, that implies disbelief in all other faiths".
(Makes the fundamental error of conflating "religion" with "faith", and the secondary error of assuming that religions are mutually exclusionary. A Jewish atheist is still a Jew, and their approach to atheism doesn't mirror a Catholic atheist or a Presbyterian atheist or an animist atheist. And then there's the routine colocation of Shinto shrines in the grounds of Buddhist temples, stuff like the Roman cult of the Emperor's genius coexisting with the big-ass bickering family of Jove and Juno they stole from the Greeks, and the Etruscan pantheon they adopted as well.)
What if there is no TRUE religion? ... Lots of religions, but none of them are TRUTH. And even that depends on if we can ever come to an agreement about what a "religion" IS.
Troutwaxer @ 1613:
Russia without vodka might be a much better place!
Better than vodka without Russia?
»What is even the point of a 1/2" socket - every nut or bolt I encounter is either 7/16" or 9/16" (unless it's metric and then the one socket that doesn't fit anything is 12mm.«
Some years ago we repaired a Datamation M200 punch-card reader in datamuseum.dk and discovered allan screws in sizes like 9/64", 13/64" and 17/64".
We have a number of ideas how that mighthave come to be, none of them kind.
The start of the Anthropocene?
Well, how about when Arrhenhius first realized we had the power to extinct our race?
But, no physical record of that exists. So, let's go with a date which could be determined by any FTL ship with an adequately sensitive receiver, when we invented the new opiate of the masses.
Sigh. Links don't work.
Which is one reason I much prefer 'naked' links where the URL is just cut-and-pasted. Far less chance for something to go wrong…
We have a number of ideas how that mighthave come to be, none of them kind.
Maybe these were the early days before the mechanical engineers started designing the bicycle nuts, bolts, and screws that Moz is so fond of.
I also prefer naked urls. I won't click on urls that I don't know where they're going. You can pay them here by giving them their own paragraph. (2 carriage returns)
https://www.repco.com.au/en/tools-equipment/tool-kits-sets/socket-sets/mechpro-blue-10mm-socket-rail-set-mpbsk141k/p/A5440551
Note, this is a link to a socket set composed entirely of various sorts of 10mm sockets.
18/10/1964?
Things got a little Strossful on that day.
1602: Scott Manley?
Does quite intelligent YouTube stuff on space missions. Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2jU5W4ehPE
"Sigh. Links don't work."
Preview is your friend. I always preview any post that has anything more than just plain text.
You can check where a URL goes just by hovering over it. Again, I do.
JHomes
CORRECTION
only got to 4 hours & 28 minutes
two dead, four injured
https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_05429a4f04a131801ce22107d642d105
CONGRATULATIONS AMERICA!
we made it to 10 hours into newest year without a mass causality event involving guns!
(ignoring reports of multiple independent machete attacks since no bullets involved)
let's try for a full 12 hours, eh?
Ten 10mm spockets for $9 seems very useful. I might have to visit the local-ish Repco and see if they have the stock their website claims :) The only 10mm socket I could find the other day is a T handle extra-deep one that was swag at a bike show.
Damn, their "check that it fits your vehicle" doesn't have Trisled as a vehicle manufacturer, let alone Moz. I'll just have to hope for the best.
Socks & wormholes ...
THAT explains why I have THREE half-pairs of socks on my bathroom loft-ladder, then!
kiloseven @ 1640/1
BROKEN LINKS - neither/none activates
gasdive
I misread that as: "I prefer naked gurls" - oh dear, never mind. ...
Makes sense!
I think the naked vs embedded is perhaps a mobile thing? On desktop trying to click the link shows the actual URL in the status bar of the browser or as a tooltip. I use that all the time because the antiseagull plugin breaks the reply links so I end up chasing comment numbers.
JHomes @ 1647:
Preview is your friend. I always preview any post that has anything more than just plain text.
You can check where a URL goes just by hovering over it. Again, I do.
JHomes
I preview EVERYTHING, whether it's got a link or not ... still doesn't allow me to catch ALL of my mistakes. But it's better than nothing.
On Android, Long press gets you a menu, and at the top of the menu there's the url.
And I do prefer naked girls, but it's been a few years since I've been around a plural.
But that's exactly what he meant. Neuromancer was written on a typewriter - and that's not the only thing that's anachronistic; consider that Wintermute tries to communicate to Case through a row of cell-phones in a very nice hotel. So yes, a gray sky.
Not as good as Vodka without Russia.
1/2" (SAE) fasteners were very common in the U. S. before they were replaced by 13mm (Which looks close enough to 1/2", but isn't.). The bastard size socket head fasteners would've made sense at the time, because metric hex keys were a specialty item.
LINKS FIXED
Here's the original text with links working. I happen to disagree with Arrhenius having thought we'd wipe out, because I've read the paper, but 1896 is a good political date, because his 1896 equation is at the center of most climate models...
The start of the Anthropocene?
Well, how about when Arrhenhius first realized we had the power to extinct our race?
But, no physical record of that exists. So, let's go with a date which could be determined by any FTL ship with an adequately sensitive receiver, when we invented the new opiate of the masses.
Not as good as Vodka without Russia.
Hopefully if I'm wrong, Ilya will correct me...
Russia as I understand it does have a vodka problem. Specifically, the tax on vodka consumption is a major revenue stream, which has incentivized Russia to strongly encourage its citizens to drink for well over a century.
Apparently under the Tsars, officially licensed saloons came into being, and it was quickly found that vodka was the most profitable beverage. Collecting taxes from these saloons strained the abilities of the Russian government, so they decided to sell contracts to farm these taxes. Since tax farming is always highly profitable to the collectors (less so to the government), a lot of corruption quickly built up around obtaining and keeping these permits. Rather worse, the Imperial Russian Army purportedly was mostly/entirely funded off the vodka tax, which made it even harder for the Tsars to clean up the operation, although a few apparently thought about it before abandoning the idea.
I don't know if this is all true. If it is, it's a fairly devastating lesson in how "tax and legalize" can backfire rather horribly, resulting in the state and the entities collecting the taxes being incentivized to maximize addiction within their population and to maximize income per addict.
Probably not the best thing to do, although I'm sure the people who purportedly invented the system acted with the best of intentions...
And then there's the routine colocation of Shinto shrines in the grounds of Buddhist temples
afaict this was true during the edo period but at the beginning of the meiji era the buddhists (who had been supporting the shoguns) took a bit of a beating for it (haibutsu kishaku) and the shrines and temples were formally separated (shinbutsu bunri), which law is apparently still in force. Then of course it was state shinto's turn to back a questionable horse.
how "tax and legalize" can backfire rather horribly
NSW and some other Australian states have a gambling problem. For stupid reasons state governments can't raise much tax revenue, and gambling taxes are one of the few options. Which means we have gambling machines all over the place in ridiculous numbers leading to both destructive gambling addictions and significant money laundering.
The latest trick is a campaign by the money launderers against a proposal to require a "cashless gambling card" which would enable electronic tracking of the money. Right now people apparently just dump a sack of cash into the system, wait 10 seconds, then withdraw their "winnings" which get paid directly to their bank account. Oh, and in Australia gambling winnings are not taxed (makes me wonder whether legitimate cash-heavy businesses do the same).
There are multiple possible scenarios for the Anthropocene. The worst case is if current trends continue, the Anthropocene is just the name for the end-Holocene extinction, if any new intelligent species or alien visitors manage to find our records. The best case is we clean up our mess and the Holocene continues. The weird case would be if humanity avoids extinction and continues to radically change the planet. If that happens, we would truly be in an Anthropocene, but how to delineate it geologically depends on what we do. Maybe the key marker will be when all the rocks are transformed into computronium.
What if there is no TRUE religion?
You missed the point. Re-read the question? And the subject of the proposed blog essay ...
he shrines and temples were formally separated (shinbutsu bunri), which law is apparently still in force
Nevertheless, as of 2010 (last time I visited a Buddhist temple with attached Shinto shrine in Kyoto), there were indeed Buddhist temples with attached Shinto shrines. I have photos, too.
For socks, The Eater of Socks is the culprit. Hogswatch just gone past and noone remembered that?
Clearly Limpang-Tung :-)
For those unfamiliar with Dunsany, see the Gods of Pegana.
in Australia gambling winnings are not taxed
This is true in the UK too. However there's a tax on gambling STAKES here, ten percent I think. If you lose the bet the Government gets that stake tax money. If you win the bet then the Government still gets that stake tax money.
They could just tax the winnings only but people lose money more than they win, it's why casinos, lotteries and bookmakers are profitable businesses. Those businesses are easier to get tax money out of than five million randos who happen to win a few bucks at the horsies on Grand National day or whatever.
I've sometimes wondered just how I could launder a large amount of cash money if I somehow came into possession of it, turn it from "Oh shit, I'm in deep doodoo if I'm found with this" to "Oh yes, my other Bugatti is due for a service next week". Gambling winnings is one way to do it but it would take time to convert, say, a million quid in used twenties into half a million in the bank clean as a whistle assuming I visited several betting shops in different towns on a regular basis. Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies might work but Britain still has Unexplained Wealth Orders to worry about.
When you see "shops" advertising loudly that their gambling machines has a guaranteed 80% payout, what you are really looking at is a money laundrumat.
What the signs really promises is, that if you fill 10000 illicit/black/drug money into their machines, you will walk out a bit later with 8000 and a legally valid receipt, that you won 8000 in certified, registered machine gambling.
there were indeed Buddhist temples with attached Shinto shrines. I have photos, too.
were they staffed? i think u can put a small unattended shrine anywhere u like (there was one in my old house) but staffing it is a no-no
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinbutsu-sh%C5%ABg%C5%8D#Buddhism_and_Shinto_after_the_Separation_Order
Likewise. Even if the link appears to be a raw link rather than a masked one hovering over it to check the tool tip seems sensible.
Jewish atheist is still a Jew, and their approach to atheism doesn't mirror a Catholic atheist or a Presbyterian atheist
Definitely. In my experience Christians who go atheist tend to be much more militantly anti-religion than Jewish Atheists (speaking as one), who generally have no problem with the ethics of Judaism. Jewish ethical teachings are less based in the idea of divine punishment, and more on fair treatment of others, as Hillel said: “What you find hateful, do not do to another. That is the essence of Torah, the rest is commentary.” Whereas in Christianity (at least my understanding of American Protestantism) if you don’t have faith in Jebus as your Lord and Savior you’re gonna burn in hell no matter your good deeds. Then there’s the conservative Evangelicals, particularly the Mega-Church Prosperity Gospel types, who afaict, are in no way actually followers of the teachings of their supposed religion. I also assume that abuse in church plays a major role in former christians anti-religion feelings.
About the Buddhist/Shinto shrines, it’s my understanding that many Japanese consider themselves followers of both religions and see no need to separate them.
That is not even remotely true of all Christianity, though it is true of the fanatics you are referring to. Matthew 22:36-40 echoes Hillel closely.
Well Matthew is paraphrasing from Torah, Deuteronomy 6:5, and Leviticus 19:18. Some say that Hillel was a teacher of Jesus, so any echoing is not a surprise. I have my doubts, since I don’t particularly believe in the existence of the Jesus of the gospels.
No, it isn't a surprise. Whether the Jesus of the gospels was a complete fiction or not, there is no doubt that the originators of those were Jews.
On your previous post, it is probably true that the fanatical atheism of some ex-Christians is due to real, imagined or historical abuse (and I don't mean just sexual). It would be interesting to know whether the same is true of Jews who have suffered abuse under extreme Judaism and rejected it in favour of atheism.
I also assume that abuse in church plays a major role in former christians anti-religion feelings.
I believe the growing awareness of the cognitive dissonance of their parents and others is a lot of it. Which is why so many evangelicals try and keep their kids inside the system through college.
Seen it so many times.
But yes abuse of some and denial of it by most all is also a part.
Yes, it happens among Jews, most often coming from the Hassidic communities, not necessarily becoming atheists, but less orthodox. Abuses happen in the other Jewish movements, but apparently less often than the so-called Ultra-Orthodox, or churches. I’ve heard a couple times of people who say “I had a bad experience once with a Rabbi, and it turned me off of the whole thing.” and become anti-religious, but that seems like an extreme reaction to me.
On your previous post, it is probably true that the fanatical atheism of some ex-Christians is due to real, imagined or historical abuse (and I don't mean just sexual). It would be interesting to know whether the same is true of Jews who have suffered abuse under extreme Judaism and rejected it in favour of atheism.
I'd point to a couple of problems with born-again Churchianity. This is partly from Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, partly from personal experience.
The born-agains grew their congregations by baptizing people who were caught up in the fervor of the moment, then gave them Bible and told them to read it sometime. No other Bible education, just show up on Sundays, tithe 10% of income, and go to heaven. This is the approach I derided as "Post-life insurance."
Of course, most converts don't read the Bible, except in out-of-context verses. At best, they read part of Genesis, maybe Exodus, and Revelations, and figure that's what the Bible is about. It's easy to play on this, and the dominionists do so by focusing on the first page (Genesis 1:28, the dominion covenant) and telling them that's what Christianity is all about.
Leaving all the real abuse problems many churches have, the functional problem with this approach comes in when the kids of the born-agains get the message "Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" in Sunday school. So they actually read the Bible. They read the gospels (if not the whole thing) and find out fairly quickly that it looks very little like what their family and church espouse. When they bring this up, they get a lot of pressure to ignore what's in the book that's allegedly literally true and do as they're told, and a lot of them end up leaving Christianity at this point. Apparently it's one big reason why the number of church-going Christians is dropping in the US.
This is a good way to cultivate militant atheism, because it leads to people who have been disillusioned, but who haven't necessarily done any of the work of changing the values they learned in Church (to be perfectly fair, they may have no clue how to do this even if they want to). So instead of being intolerant born-agains, they may become intolerant followers of science, MAGAtry, capitalism, or whatever.
The above is why I tend to separate out the born-again "Xtians" from Christians, people who have not only read the Bible, have been taught how to read it, realize it's not the literal Word of God, but who nonetheless think that it's worth trying to espouse Jesus' teachings. This is really, really hard to do, so I'll give real respect to them for trying to do it, whether or not I agree with the details of their beliefs.
and find out fairly quickly that it looks very little like what their family and church espouse.
Totally.
Can someone do what I call critical thinking?
What I think it comes down to is: Are you willing to admit you're wrong about something?
Some people can't do this without serious emotional issues. Especially if they have made it a central point of their life. Personally I try and live every day assuming I will learn something new that causes me to throw away some incorrect thoughts. Or at least out dated ones.
I’ve met a number of people thinking of converting to Judaism who say one reason they left their church is that they weren’t allowed to ask questions of anything, their versions of bible study consisted of there minister reading a selected text and telling what it means form their sects point of view, no other interpretations allowed.
It's not just gambling. I have long subscribed to the theory that a whole lot of the very strange pricing on used books on amazon and similar is just people who want to pay taxes on illegal earnings so they can have them in bank accounts instead of in pillow cases. Eve delivers heroin to Bob's party. Bob uses his phone to pay Eve a highly inflated value for a used paperback from the sixties. Bob looks like a collector and Eve like a book seller of the sort that buys estate sales and has no store front. Perfectly legit looking on both ends for anyone not actually in the antique book trade..
I've been in those. The rules tend to be implied. And so those of us who DO say things off script create lots of uncomfortable moments. And many times get asked (outside of the situation) to please not come back. And later if you do keep coming back to "go away".
The basic problem is this kind of indoctrination (and that's what it is) leads to abusive situations since you can never question the people "above" you. Doing so is just not allowed.
I meant to add that when telling their ministers that they were reading the OT and having trouble with it, they were told not to bother with it and stick to the gospels.
I can only speculate about the experiences of most atheists, but I can certainly describe my own path.
Our house was not particularly religious, as with most homes. There was a winter where, for some reason, my parents decided we should go to church. That went on for awhile, but fizzled out fairly quickly. I'm not sure if it was a social thing amongst the adults, or just the snow melting and my father's lifelong passion for golf exceeding any passion he may have had for jebus.
Nonetheless we always 'sort of' identified as Christian, or at least Christian adjacent (i.e. not not Christian). There were certainly plenty of evangelicals in our town, including some of my friends.
At some point in my adulthood I took the time to read the Bible, the Koran, the Tao Te Ching and a few other religious texts. Somewhere in there I realized that I didn't really believe any of them (Taoism comes closest). At which point I had to accept that I'm actually an atheist, or at most skeptical agnostic (something is happening but it isn't what these guys are saying).
I strongly suspect that a lot of people who have similar, largely secular upbringings end up in that liminal space of not really caring. Unless something comes up that makes them uncomfortable and they end up shifting into more extreme positions. See the last decade where many churches have hung transphobia on the flagpole as a way to attract the ignorant.
iyla187 @ 1603: No Golden Age SF writer predicted Information Age accurately, but some were better than others, and Heinlein was among the worst in that regard.
He did pretty well in Friday, published in 1982. That featured ubiquitous pocket-sized mobile phones, something closely resembling the Internet and artificial not-quite intelligence. This is in a balkanised America where the real powers are megacorps. Proto-cyberpunk 2 years before Neuromancer, and a better projection of the Information Age reality than Gibson, because it didn't get stuck on hackers with brain-computer interfaces.
Interesting confluence between the history of magic and the history of religion.
In the Mediterranean, prior to Jesus, prayers and rituals were supposed to work if done properly. Belief was irrelevant, and the Classical world had its debates about the reality of the old gods, as well as invention of new ones (Tyche, Serapis).
Old-school Judaism came up in this world, and I'd speculate this is why living a righteous Jewish life is more important than faith in Yahweh to making one Jewish.
The problem with ritual is, of course, that perfect performance is no guarantee that magic is going to work. While I'd argue that teaching things like recipes as rituals is actually a really good way to learn them, this doesn't mean that a ritual properly done will accomplish magic.
Christianity's innovation was the introduction of faith. Jesus argued that it wasn't just about about ritual, but that faith alone could accomplish miracles. This, coupled with the fact that Christians would accept anyone, from female slave to male emperor, was the hot newness that made it so potent in the Roman empire.
And I'd agree that, where faith helps with single-minded focus, it can pull off seemingly "miraculous" successes. As with ritual, faith by itself cannot accomplish magic.
Both Catholicism and the Orthodox sects AIUI focus on both faith and ritual, after dealing with various heresies over the importance of faith versus works.
Post-Reformation Christianity complained about the empty, sometimes corrupt, ritual of Catholicism, and put the stress on faith and various other things. We're now seeing the blow-back from that.
There's been a similar evolution in magic. Old school magic has is that perfection of ritual is all that matters, belief is irrelevant. Christian-era magic makes it about faith and ritual. "Scientism" magic introduces things like elan vital, animal magnetism, chi, and whatever (as creative over-extensions of everything from electricity to Chinese medicine). Now we're getting "information age" magic, as magic is rephrased in the idiom of computer science and cosmology. In all cases it's creative over-extensions of things that work pretty well within their particular contexts.
One of the problems we have now is that we don't have "information age religions," aside from capitalism. This might be termed a global folk religion, sort of like a shinto that replaces chi with money and kami with corporations. And not to trip people up, I'm emphatically not saying that money and corporations are objectively mystical, but that ardent practitioners treat them as if they are, and work with them religiously.
The bigger, legitimate problem we have is that there's not really anyone out there who's helping ordinary people figure out how to live good, righteous, or even fulfilling lives in the 21st Century. Even heroic capitalism (e.g. getting filthy rich) seems to be unfulfilling to those who succeed. There's no clear alternative to help people deal with both the explosion of science and capitalism and all the problems both have wrought. Wonder who or what will try to fill those particular gulfs? If people need meaning in their lives, and it's not from ritual, faith, science, or computers, then what do they do now?
Back to the Jewish atheist subject, I wasn’t brought up with any particular religion, my mother is Jewish, my father isn’t, we had christmas trees and presents, menorahs, and that was pretty much it. After they divorced my mother was an Army chaplains’s assistant to an orthodox Rabbi for a few years (before going into Health Physics), so that’s when I learned some Judaism, but the god stuff didn’t sink in. I didn’t really get into my Jewishness until just after high school; while I was at a friend’s home who is half Japanese, I was looking at all the things his mother had around and thinking it was cool that he had all this cultural heritage, and that I was just another boring white guy (no offense to boring white guys), when it hit me that No, I’m Jewish and there’s a lot that goes along with that. It’s not like I denied it or anything, it just never figured into anything other than I didn’t pay attention to a certain December holiday. That was 30 years ago, and since have gotten involved with the local Jewish community, but still an atheist.
Unrelated bit; In the past year I’ve come out of denial about being autistic, and learning one trait of it is a tendency to overshare, so here I am doing it after not commenting for more than 2 years.
Um. Just how much do we know about 2000 year old Mediterranean religions that is not either Judaism or has been through a Graeco-Roman filter? That's a nitpick in context, I agree.
There's a problem with HR refusing to deal with evangelism - you can talk to lawyers (in the US, at least) about the company "officially" promoting religion.
Clarke did fairly well with essays in the 60s and 70s, describing computer networks with every home having a terminal connected to local mainframes, he didn’t quite get to personal computers. And of course HAL, and the story Dial F for Frankenstein. Maybe one of the few writers then who saw the potential of computers? And fwiw, Gibson’s story Burning Chrome came out the same year as Friday, maybe something in the air in the early 80s?
This is where I have real issues with economists, and the denial of Marx's theory of value. See 1532... go ahead, tell me that labor does not create value.
I argued for a bit with the author of ACOUP about that - I mean, how much is grain, or silk fabric, over there worth, without the caravan bringing it here? How about the value of the farmworkers, turning seed, or whatever, into food?[1]
1. FB meme: pic 1: "thank you, Jesus, for this food..." pic 2: a Hispanic farmworker in the field in California: "De nada".
Re Christian "saints" - back in the early nineties, on alt.pagan, we decided that our #1 Pagan saint was Hypatia, a librarian of Alexandria, who was brutally murdered by a mob incited by "St." Cyril.
A tiny, tiny fraction of billionaires got that way through luck and/or skill. ALL the rest started rich, and used their credit to manipulate/buy their way up. Bill the Gates, for example, whose parents were millionaires (quick, who here, in the late seventies, had parents who could loan them $20k US? Certainly not mine.)
Sorry, but the reason we don't have SF robots now is that the things are extremely difficult to design/program/make. Progress towards them is happening fairly rapidly, but the gadgets that are cheap, durable, and useful are very specialized.
OTOH, oceanographers have been using simple robots for nearly a decade, with increasing amounts of sophistication. (Think of them as long term drones without much weight limit.) The Mars landers are another set of robots, under different constraints. So, for that matter, are all the space probes. They aren't artificial people, and they probably never will be, but they're devices designed to operate independent of human supervision making decisions and taking actions. We won't get "I Robot" style robots until after we get the same level of thought processes in a sessile machine. Currently we've got ChatGPT and StableDiffusion. And, of course, the Alpha series that started with Alpha-go. Each one has smarts in a particular area, but none are general purpose enough to serve a traditional robot.
My prediction is still 2035 for an AGI, and (SF) robots pretty closely around that same time.
Sci-Fy, the old name of the network. Which many fen besides me referred to as the skiffy channel (pronounced like the brand-name peanut butter, Skippy), with the implication of bad monster movies.
That explains a hell of a lot, macroscopic quantum effects. May I steal, er, post it to faceplant? With, or without credit?
What was not realised (even up to the 1970s, and by experts in the area) was that the problem with robots was NOT going to be in the logic, but in the control and feedback. We did not realise just how much of human physical skill and activity is in the reflexes.
How about the age of the oldest bronze? That's when things really started to change. Unless you'd prefer the oldest city (about 11,000 years ago... gee, that couldn't possibly have anything to do with the title of my novel, no, no, nor of the shards I saw in the British Museum....)
"Gambling winnings is one way to do it but it would take time to convert, say, a million quid in used twenties into half a million in the bank clean as a whistle assuming I visited several betting shops in different towns on a regular basis."
(note - IANAL and I have not bested any IRS auditors in single accounting, so get out your salt)
As I understand it, the trick is those initial wagers. If somebody investigating can pull together a hundred thousand quid in bets made by you, you would be in trouble (assuming that you don't have enough legal income to cover that).
The arguments you make for 1492 sound good to me, though I'm no expert in that area. WRT plastics I'd presume that Teflon would continue to be resistant to bacteria, and if it gets buried, then it won't photo-degrade. You could probably make the same claim for any plastic that's high in fluorine. But fluorine based plastics will probably be a very thin layer with sparse coverage.
OTOH, the boundary is going to be hideously garbaged by the amount of digging that people do, not to mention land-fills. (Think of that as an on-going process as long as power shovels are around.) So probably the real "golden spike" will be "This is when the record totally stops making sense.".
Everybody in the field knew that personal computers were inevitable as soon as memory on silicon chips became mainstream (1960s), because of the effect of Moore's law and not-Moore's law. Mobile telephones had been predicted for ages. What nobody I saw predicted was the smartphone, not least because it was so obviously ergonomically stupid, though some authors (I forget which) predicted 'intelligent' voice-operated handsets.
Let's consider this: in my future history, we've got manufactories, that basically print everything from the appropriate feedstock. This includes food printers.
Consider the vastly fewer assembly line workers on, say, automobiles.
We're already seeing fewer people needed for a lot of production. What about folks who really don't want/are not suited to what we call "higher education"?
Then, in fiction, there's the passengers... and at that point, I refer you to the Hugo winning novel by Zelazny, Lord of Light
Blue? I see from other posts, many saw it the way I did: gray, lots of varying shades and shapes of a cloud-filled sky, with crap blown by the wind... what you see on an unused channel on a black and white tv.
That's so last decade for money laundering. Now it's NFTs, and, oh, yes, trading cards for a former failed US President.
And... well, happy New Year, and may the new one be better than the old.
I had not known, but read that Wales has been governed by Labour for 20 years, and that the leader of the Welsh Labour party appears to be a bit more... progressive than Starmer, and expects a national election this year, when the Tories collapse. Best of luck, there.
"Every home having a terminal connected to a mainframe"... and if the big companies get their way (they won't), the difference between that, and SaaS, and everything being in "the cloud" is?
Perhaps I should say that I didn't until the early-mid 1970s (I wasn't in the right field) - the key knowledge was the way that costs, size and power consumption were dropping (especially of semi-conductor memory). The fact that that was possible and cheaper than core took me by surprise, but those with more knowledge of that area were expecting it.
Value isn't created by labor, but by use. Cost is created by labor + resources needed + transport + ..., but that's not what the things value is. Cost and value are two separate things, only somewhat related.
If you can't program, then a computer without programs other than a compiler and an editor doesn't have any value. I've got an Android tablet that I find without value, because it only accepts wireless connections...so I have no use for it. But it still cost me money to purchase it and find out that it was valueless.
Or pronounce the new name "SyFy" as " 's iffy", with the obvious implication about the quality of their output.
Um, I have a wireless-only tablet. It works fine... for email, browsing, and occasionally writing, while I'm away from home at cons.
Value... so, which is more valuable, rice, or cooked rice? Did the labor of someone cooking it add value?
Whitroth @ 1689: This is where I have real issues with economists, and the denial of Marx's theory of value. See 1532... go ahead, tell me that labor does not create value.
Bit of a straw man there, I think.
I've never heard anyone claim that labour doesn't create value. In fact if I recall correctly the three inputs to anything are land (to do it on/in) raw materials and labour.
Could the issue really be whether value is an objective or subjective thing? Marx's theory, AIUI, is that the value of something is an objective fact determined by the labour that went into it.
I recall one refutation of this theory, which went: a skilled cook can spend an hour turning ingredients into a delicious meal. An incompetent cook meanwhile will spend the same time turning those ingredients into an inedible mess. Are we to believe that both have the same value merely because the same time went into each?
Capitalism, OTOH, regards value as subjective: I may value something more or less than you do. When two people make a bargain to sell an item, that exposes an agreement between them as to what the value is, but even then all we really know is that the buyer's opinion is that the value is at least that price, while the seller's opinion is that the value is at most that price. But the idea that there exists a "real" value independently of the players in the market is bogus. The nearest you can get in a large market for some uniform good is a consensus view on the going rate.
The key step was the Intel 4004. Until there was large scale integration, personal computers were unreasonable. And it wasn't certain that the defects could be economically reduced to where it was feasible. Probable, yes. Predicted, yes. But not certain.
My wife liked to use dried rice to make tiny maracas. Value depends on purpose. It isn't a constant. That you fine an android table valuable, doesn't mean that it's valuable to me.
JPR @ 1681
Which immediately runs up against Yeshua's statement that he was NOT there to overthrow "the law" but to enforce it ....
whitroth @ 1690
!! - yeah - * Exactly*
EC
We did not realise just how much of human physical skill and activity is in the reflexes. - tell me about it.
I've just had a partial nerve-failure in my right hand/arm & its a royal pain - can't write, can't hold a pen, can't wipe my bum, right-handed ....
Um. Just how much do we know about 2000 year old Mediterranean religions that is not either Judaism or has been through a Graeco-Roman filter? That's a nitpick in context, I agree.
Ummm, By 2000 years ago, the Mediterranean was owned by Rome, so perhaps it's a somewhat nonsensical question? AFAIK, everything we know about the Mediterranean 2000 years ago comes through a Greco-Roman filter, including Christianity.
If you mean in the Hellenic age prior to that, IIRC we have a fair amount, although it's a tiny fraction of what once existed.
Similarly, Rome never controlled the Middle East, so while I'm quite sure there was cultural continuity east of Rome 2000 years ago, I'm only familiar with the bits and bobs (like Buddhism or Mithraism) that made it into our part of the Classical world.
The point isn't about the quality of the robots, it's about their application. They don't need human-level intelligence. Your examples are all about robots being used for things that humans can't do because they can't survive in the places the things are being done. Asimov portrayed that kind of application as uncontroversial; even if his stories did tend to be about instances of it failing, that was because most of the time it just worked and nobody gave it any thought, and there's no story in that. But he also wrote quite a few stories in which the widespread use of robots in the new societies of human colonies on other planets is contrasted with the distinct lack of robots on Earth, which has the familiar stale old society where people will fight to get to clean toilets themselves rather than revise the social framework so that people are still allowed to survive if they don't spend all day cleaning toilets.
It doesn't take human-level intelligence to clean toilets. You could train a monkey to do it, or a dog if dogs had hands, or a squirrel if they were a bit bigger, etc. The only mental quality that fits humans better for the task is that their capacity for abstract reasoning makes it possible to compel them to keep on doing it day in day out no matter how bored they get by means of a negligible amount of mental effort, instead of having to physically follow them around all day giving them doggie treats and/or shouting at them to keep them from constantly goofing off. Indeed, they will provide that effort themselves, and this is what Asimov depicts as continuing even given perfectly obedient monkeys, with what I consider to be depressingly realistic accuracy.
Of course, and preferably without credit.
When I read Neuromancer, I hadn't seen a BSOD. The idea of a sky showing random pixels like a no-signal CRT made no sense. What did make sense was Los Angeles on a smoggy, overcast day. The sky's this sort of pearlescent off-white that looked to me like a dead CRT screen. Not quite what he described, of course, but that's what I went with:
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2015/10/15/how-angelenos-beat-back-smog/chronicles/who-we-were/
Yeah, and the cashless gambling card thing is an attempt to remove the bags'o'cash->legitimate winnings path. Hence why the money laundering industry is so upset.
An excitable American has wandered round Tasmania looking at genitals. He's kind of amusing when he does that in California or wherever, but somehow "that's a really fucking big tree" sounds different when he's in a forest I've actually experienced. "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't" on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=attbhh83U4E
(with some subtitles, mostly in Latin thanks to Linneaus)
JamesPadraicR @ 1672:
Well Matthew is paraphrasing from Torah, Deuteronomy 6:5, and Leviticus 19:18. Some say that Hillel was a teacher of Jesus, so any echoing is not a surprise. I have my doubts, since I don’t particularly believe in the existence of the Jesus of the gospels.
I tend to believe there WAS an itenerant preacher back in Roman Judea some 2000 years ago, simply because that's the simplist explanation for his "followers". Whether the teachings that appear in the New Testament are an accurate reflection of his teachings I don't know.
I grew up in a mid-line American Protestant "non-denominational" denomination. I broke with them after an incident that demonstrated their belief in what they taught me was non-existent. The didn't live according to the principles they claimed to believe in.
I do still try to live by those principles I learned in church as a child .
I consider myself to be an agnostic, because I believe "atheist" is too inflexible. "Human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist."
I'm not anti-religion, I'm anti-STATE imposed religion. You can believe whatever you want to believe, but don't try to force your beliefs on me.
"even up to the 1970s, and by experts in the area"
This is the bit that I find weird, because it seems so obvious as soon as you actually try and design something to do the kind of thing animals do. You can make a reasonable simulation of the behaviour of something like an insect using only a single "neuron", BUT only in an environment which is artificially constructed to make sure that all its sensors give only perfect outputs, etc. I think someone built one using a single valve long before transistors were about. As soon as you start adding even the mildest of complications to the environment the complexity of the problem explodes, and as for making it cope with the actual natural world it just gets bleeding ridiculous.
The Romans had only JUST conquered the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago - they hadn't even 2,100 years ago. More importantly, they did not suppress local religions, which would have still been active. And, no, I mean Phoenicia, Egypt, and whatever the religions were in Spain and the rest of north Africa. The Hellenes never really got to the western Mediterranean. We simply don't know what the religions of the western Mediterranean were, and have a very biassed and incomplete view of what even the Phoenician and Egyption ones were.
I tend to separate out the born-again "Xtians" from Christians, people who have not only read the Bible, have been taught how to read it, realize it's not the literal Word of God, but who nonetheless think that it's worth trying to espouse Jesus' teachings.
I'll just point out that my experience in Anglican churches is that almost no one is taught to "read the bible" in anything more than a Sunday school, text-proofing way unless they are studying theology.
Certainly my priest (who later became a bishop) despaired of holding an actual bible study, because it would be hijacked by people who wanted to talk about their feelings and how god spoke to them, and how they knew their interpretation of each verse was right because of this. Basically, unless he hand-picked the participants and excluded people it was impossible to actually discuss theology. (This wasn't an evangelical church, BTW. Just an aging mainstream one.)
Spong termed these churchgoers "naive Christians", and they appear to be in the majority.
The rules tend to be implied. And so those of us who DO say things off script create lots of uncomfortable moments.
Same thing with "spontaneous" prayer. I attended a Baptist church when I was younger* and they frequently told me how their prayer was superior to catholic prayers because they weren't just repeating words from a prayerbook but praying from the spirit… but it was really obvious that all those 'spontaneous' prayers followed an unwritten script, and were graded by how closely they matched it. (Literally graded. The church elders would critique younger people's prayers and 'gently' advise them on how to pray better.)
It was also a place where people were proud of being humble. They would take turns bragging about how simple and humble they were.
All in all, a very surreal experience.
*I was young, stupid, and in love with someone in the congregation.
which is more valuable, rice, or cooked rice?
Depends on how many days you want to eat. If it's just today, cooked rice. If it's for the next year, uncooked.
A lot of assumptions are embedded in the concept of 'value'.
Something I've always wanted to study in more detail is why the paganisms of the Roman Empire collapsed so quickly1 once Christianity became the state religion.
I mean, in a couple of generations things went from 'big temples to gods in Egypt, Greece, etc', to 'there's a bunch of ruins / repurposed buildings there'. Judaism survived (obviously), but not the cult of Isis.
I suspect that things are a bit more complex. Apparently some historians think that the Basques that wiped out the Frankish army at The Battle of Roncevaux Pass in the eighth century were mostly pagan. So this is a subject of unknown unknowns for me.
1 Or at least I got the impression, mistaken or not, that they collapsed quickly.
Heteromeles @ 1713:
Ummm, By 2000 years ago, the Mediterranean was owned by Rome, so perhaps it's a somewhat nonsensical question? AFAIK, everything we know about the Mediterranean 2000 years ago comes through a Greco-Roman filter, including Christianity.
I could be wrong, but what I learned about Roman "religion" was they tended to absorb religious practices from the territories of the people they "conquered" ... as long as the local "gods" weren't anti-Roman they got adopted into the Roman pantheon and the locals were expected to tolerate (and venerate?) the Roman gods along with their own.
This is why they ran into so much trouble in Judea, because the Jews did not accept those Roman rules of religious toleration ...
But after Christianity became the OFFICIAL state religion of Rome, Roman toleration of other people's gods became a part of "Christianity" ... those other gods became "saints" under the Roman Catholic Church.
It was a two way exchange - The Roman Empire became "Christian" and christianity became Romanized.
This is why they ran into so much trouble in Judea, because the Jews did not accept those Roman rules of religious toleration ...
You might find these articles interesting.
A scholarly look at the status of Jews in Rome: https://www.yorku.ca/pswarney/4102/Articles/trajano.pdf
An article questioning whether Mary's status has been mistranslated from the Greek: https://www.thedailybeast.com/was-the-virgin-mary-actually-a-slave
they tended to absorb religious practices from...
I prefer the "god in a fur suit" version, where your god X is really our god Y because they both do much the same thing. Monotheists hate this one weird trick :) "your god is really the junior VP in charge of parades, just in a wig and glasses".
And then there are "local dialects" where eventually people decide, yeah this isn't your grandad's religion any more. Somewhere along the line from Unitarians to Rastafari, from Mormons to Muslims, they stop being Christians at all (or whatever the root religion is).
Aotearoa has its own Christianity++ movements, Ratana being probably the best known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C4%81tana
JReynolds @ 1724:
Something I've always wanted to study in more detail is why the paganisms of the Roman Empire collapsed so quickly1 once Christianity became the state religion.
I mean, in a couple of generations things went from 'big temples to gods in Egypt, Greece, etc', to 'there's a bunch of ruins / repurposed buildings there'. Judaism survived (obviously), but not the cult of Isis.
Only those parts of the pagan religions that refused to be absorbed into the Roman state christianity collapsed.
Some aspects of pagan cults got absorbed into the "christian" state religion of Rome ... the "Mysteries of Isis" seem to have influenced "christian" beliefs in being "born again", resurrection of the dead and I think the "cult of the Virgin Mary".
That's not really what happened to Hypatia. https://historyforatheists.com/2020/07/the-great-myths-9-hypatia-of-alexandria/
It's Tim O'Neill so it's long but accurate.
1708 para 2 - A portion of plain boiled rice from my favourite local Chinese (mostly Cantonese, some Peking and Szechuan dishes) costs GP£2-50: that's about the price of a kilo of long grain in the local supermarkets.
Y'know, if Mary were a slave, that would make it far more understandable when you read how it was a religion that early in Rome allowed slaves as members.
Consider how today, I understand that you really have to convince the rabbi that you're serious if you want to convert to Judaism.
"I recall one refutation of this theory, which went: a skilled cook can spend an hour turning ingredients into a delicious meal. An incompetent cook meanwhile will spend the same time turning those ingredients into an inedible mess. Are we to believe that both have the same value merely because the same time went into each?"
The problem is that you can't sell the inedible mess, except maybe at a loss, as dog food.
In reality I can buy $20 dollars worth of ingredients at a market and take them to the chef at a local diner, and maybe his labor will add an extra $20 in value. Or I can take the same $20 worth of ingredients to the chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant, and that chef's labor will add $100 in value.
So... poorly trained labor reduces value. Indifferently trained labor adds some value, and exquisitely trained labor adds lots of value. Could Marx be right?
For a slave, Marry had remarkable freedom of movement and could go where she wanted - like visiting her cousin Elizabeth. Being free to marry Joseph without asking permission of her master (who is mentioned nowhere)....
Yeah this is bull.
The Mote in God's Eye, 1974 Niven & Pournelle described a smart phone-ish hand held communicator device. Jerry Pournelle writing a column for BYTE suggests a better idea of what might be possible, though he misguessed the date by 2 or 3 millenia.
I understand that you really have to convince the rabbi that you're serious if you want to convert to Judaism.
It’s traditional that a Rabbi turn away potential converts three times, to be sure they are committed to it. If they come back after the third time they are accepted to start the process. Not all Rabbis do this nowadays.
Several years ago I was on my synagogue’s Beit Din, a group of three adult Jews who interview the prospective candidate and either accept or reject them. At the time we had a fairly large number of people wanting to convert, we had a few from out of town who claimed to have studied with other Rabbis but it turned out they were actually ‘Messianic Jews’—Evangelical/Southern Baptists who think pretending to be Jewish makes them closer to jesus, who had been coached by their faux Rabbi on how to answer our questions. Once we found them out we put a brake on accepting conversions for a while.
RE: Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't
Yeah, Tony Santore's been a rock star in the California botanic world for years, and now he's getting a bigger audience, which is mostly good. I think your "excitable" and other people's "ADHD" are near neighbors.
His shtick and accent aside (yeah, that's a Chicago accent), he knows his botany really, really well. While I joked for years that the only tattoo I'd ever consider was a millimeter ruler on a finger, he's actually got one, very appropriately on his third finger. And yes, botanists really do swear that much. Just rarely in mixed company (e.g. with non-botanists).
Hypatia, a librarian of Alexandria
More often described as The Librarian of the Great Library, I would imagine. But as noted the story is quite muddled (I think everyone read the Carl Sagan version of it, which is probably more about the social issues of its own time). The article in Uncle Stinky's list @1729 is probably better material (I skimmed it, it looks informative). All I wanted to add is a bit of context some folks might find interesting.
The early 400s is the time of Augustine of Hippo, one of the main shapers of the Western intellectual tradition and whose doctrine of original sin is more-or-less ubiquitous in the way Westerners make assumptions about people's behaviour and probably forms part of a null hypothesis in the minds of many even here. Another figure with an opposing viewpoint, named Pelagius which is thought to be a greco-romanisation of the Welsh name Morgan, was moving about the Mediterranean in the early 410s after Rome was sacked in 410. He spent time in Carthage, some time in Palestine and despite being friendly with the bishop there was ejected from Jerusalem in 415, finding refuge in Alexandria... under Cyril's protection, more or less, till Pelagianism was condemned in 418 (and later denounced as heresy in the 430s. Pelagius disputed original sin and held that humans are innately capable of attaining salvation, infant baptism is just silly and the idea that a newborn child is a sinner is preposterous.
Anyhoo, I'm not specialist in the topic, but I gather that wasn't all that was going on in Alexandria at the time either: it was a busy and interesting place.
Damian
Yeah
Couldn't possibly allow Pelagianism to flourish, as it removes the essential element of moral & fearful blackmail from christianity, which gives it such power over superstitious & ignorant people.
As someone who, over the years, been threatened with hellfire & eternal damnation if I don't get down & grovel - why throw away a useful weapon?
1732 - As I read it, Karl Marx is wrong, because he only considers "hours worked" and not "quality of product" as "added value".
For example, and noting that I have had 2 recipes for butter chicken, the Gordon Ramsay (yes, that one) recipe and the Marks and Spencer one. I therefore know from experience that the GR recipe tastes better, even prepared by an amateur journeyman cook like myself, than the M&S one. Oh and the GR recipe costs less for a nominal 400g portion than the retail cost of the M&S recipe.
I'm not familiar enough with the work of Marx to know whether he considered quality or not, but this sounds like exactly the same curse of metrics and perverse incentives that that also plagues capitalistic organisations.
In Heinlein's "Space Cadet" written in the 1950s there was a throwaway bit at the beginning of the book where the main character has deliberately put his phone in his luggage so he didn't have to deal with his family's tele-nagging while he was on his way to the cadet entry exam.
I read a "World of the Future" book written in the 1930s which was mostly a discussion of "futuristic" technologies such as radio and aircraft, but the last chapter looked ahead from that time, extrapolating wildly. In the future, the author said, we would all carry phones around with us. We would be able to plug them in to convenient points on trains and cars to make and receive calls...
Do Marx hours include training hours? Though it's debunked, 10,000 hours to become an expert is often bandied about.
Is food prepped by a 10,000 hour expert more "hours" than food prepped by a 30 minute trainee, when they both spend 20 minutes making your dish?
Heinlein was less clueless than most people in this respect. Walky-talkies were already a thing. Portable long-distance radio communicators were also a thing. Both wer shrinking in size and cost, even before transistors. And so was the replacement of miniature valves by transistors (a bit later). It wasn't hard to put that lot together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_Army_radio_sets
Das Kapital is generally considered to make Pilgrim's Progress seem a thriller. I have read the latter, but gave up after 10 pages of the former (and, at that age, I very rarely did so). Most economists have a similar reaction. I take statements about what Karl Marx to be said with a pinch of salt.
The reason is that it's not weird is that ordinary academics could experiment with the software, but actually building functional limbs was outside their budgets. Even the ones that were built (in huge budge projects) were really crude, and the failures were put down to that. It wasn't until it became feasible to build potentially functional limbs that they discovered the problems weren't where they thought they were. Yes, some people probably DID realise that, and were ignored as pessimists.
I don't know if Marx included training time or not. As for the 10,000 hours training thing, taking 40 hours per week that comes out at 5 years after allowing 2 weeks a year leave. That might be plausible, at least if you reset the training time when the person starts a "different skill". Considering programming, as being something I know a bit about, that makes some kind of sense if you move from, say, Visual BASIC to Ada '95.
Is food prepped by a 10,000 hour expert more "hours" than food prepped by a 30 minute trainee? - I'd suggest that this is partly subjective for a specific individual dish. It's likely to be effectively very true across a range like the Abbotsford Hotel menu where you get a range of 9 starters, 2 lunch snacks, 5 vegetarian and vegan mains, 22 pescatorian and omnivore mains (some will be varied further on request) and 10 desserts.
Learning to cook a "good" meal is more than just the actual cooking. It is looking at ingredients which have all kinds of subtle variations in look, feel, smell, etc... and realizing which will make a great meal and which need to be used for the dog's dinner later in the day.
And that takes time to learn. And I'm hopeless at it. I don't smell subtleties very well and have issues with color patterns. So a few 1000 hours of me at it will not move the needle very far for me. If at all.
Exactly.
I'd gently suggest that value can't exist without context, and the problem with both capitalism and communism is that they alienate value from context.
To pick a silly example, if we send a mob of 10,000 laborers armed with hand tools to turn the Kremlin into rubble, then send in 10,000 laborers using hand tools to reconstruct the Kremlin as best they can, in both theories we've added value, so destroying and rebuilding the Kremlin on an annual basis enriches everyone involved.
This sounds silly until you realize this is precisely the way the fossil fuel industry is treating global warming: make money extracting all the fuel, then make money shoving it back underground, then make money keeping it underground. Not extracting it in the first place is valueless.
One of the "religious" parts of capitalism is the axiom that alienating value from context is a good thing. Other systems actually have a goal--getting everyone to heaven, perhaps, against which value can be assessed. In some ways this is better, but it also runs into the problem that only limited evaluation is possible. After all, there are physical limits to how much work can be done, and assessments are work too.
So far as I can tell, the simplest reasonable goals seem to be some variation of "keep as many players in the infinite game of life as possible" or "take care of your part of the world and pass it on in good shape." It's fairly possible to assess the value of work and things against goals like these, at least.
Note that neither capitalism, communism, nor Christianity or Islam espouse this? The first two espouse some form of progress or growth towards a utopian future, while the latter to assume the world will end some day and that nonmaterial goals are therefore paramount. So again we have alienation, that the present is unsatisfactory and can therefore be trashed in favor of a future goal. This is certainly too simplistic, but perhaps there's a grain of truth in it?
This Marxist economist recommends starting at chapter 10 - https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2021/07/not-reading-marx.html
I'm sure I remember the phrase "tapping at her wrist terminal" from some book(s?) written long before such things, but I can't remember who by. However, it's not described beyond what is implied by that bare phrase, so the ergonomic outrage is swept under the carpet.
Nojay replied on January 3, 2023 11:04 in #1741:
And, in the first chapter of 1951's BETWEEN PLANETS, the hero gets interrupted by his saddlephone ringing.
I'd go with a system of value based on choice. Choose a path that maximizes choice for the most possible people, now and in the future. I am largely stealing that from Graydon Saunders, but I like the way he frames it.
It's all but impossible to know the long-term consequences of a particular choice. The Green Revolution of the mid 20th century dramatically increased food production and reduced starvation. The mass use of pesticides and fertilizers has consequences which are both happening now and may take centuries to fully grasp and understand.
That means choice and options, rooted in resiliency. 1000 laborers spending all their working time to build bombs are not making the future a better place. However, if they are doing it to prevent a loss of future choice (i.e. invasion by a conquering power) they are potentially adding value.
Those same workers making the wrong agricultural implements may also create profit (if they can be sold) but aren't creating value. That's where the Soviet and other command economies ran into trouble, not having the level of detail available to allocate resources optimally. Also humans were involved at every level, which ruins most economic hypotheses.
Not easy, and not at all measured in current economic theory, though systems theory is a good start.
That's where the Soviet and other command economies ran into trouble, not having the level of detail available to allocate resources optimally.
Personally it doesn't matter how much information the command at the top has. They (people or AI) will always insert biases into the situation which may or may not cause the result to work at the end of the line.
I see this all the time in working with various situations. I'm in the middle of it now with a new office being outfitted. 6 people can (AND DO) have 12 opinions on how EVERYONE will want to work. And guess what. EVERYONE does not agree.
Context: U.S.
For the first time in the last 100 years, the Republican-majority U.S. House of Representatives has failed to elect a Speaker of the House on the first vote.
Long live Republican disunity! :-)
AlanD2
I assume that the US "R's" will spend the entire next 2 years ...
Both fighting amongst themselves & making 100% futile "legal" attacks on Biden J & Biden H without getting anywhere ... And, of course acting treasonously, by even indirectly, assisting Putin. { ?? }
Which reminds me: Assange.
I think he should be turned loose, as soon as all of the damage to climate change research & other little jobs he did for Putin are well-listed, in public & in full.
No criminal penalties, no extradition to the USA - a free man & 150% discredited as a "useful idiot".
Cheaper & easier, too.
I assume that the US "R's" will spend the entire next 2 years ... Both fighting amongst themselves & making 100% futile "legal" attacks on Biden J & Biden H without getting anywhere ...
Unfortunately, House Republicans will have the power to do a lot of damage to the U.S. this year, no matter who winds up as Speaker of the House.
For one thing, the House GOP can refuse to raise the Federal Government's debt ceiling, which will have to happen sometime this year. Such a refusal would result in a shutdown of the United States federal government (the last one happened four years ago). Not pleasant to contemplate...
By the way, the longest and most contentious Speaker election in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives took place in 1856. It took 133 votes over nearly two months to elect a Speaker.
Republican Kevin McCarthy has already lost the second round of voting as I write this. Can we break the 1856 record? Never a dull moment... :-)
I have memories of thinking how can a modern country like Italy be so dysfunctional?
IIRC this was part of the framing context for the Slaveholders' Rebellion, just a few years later. I'm hoping it's a bit duller this time.
Oy, as they say, vey. The late woman that I lived with for several years in the mid/late seventies - her parents were Jews for Jesus, so I know too much about them.
sigh
Let's see, Marx starts studying, then working to invent a science (which is what he thought of it as). When he finished, of course, he was Divinely Inspired, and his work is Perfect, needing no updates or modifications.
Just like Newton's Laws.
In my late teens, working in a college library, I read a 300 page abridgement of Capital, and it certainly made sense to me. And what he was studying, the way the wealthy abused the workers (that is, the rest of us), is what the wrong wing is working night and day to bring back.
You wrote: That's where the Soviet and other command economies ran into trouble, not having the level of detail available to allocate resources "
Which has not been the case for many decades. I mean, unless you want to say that Walmart, a larger economy than many countries, and 100% a command economy, fails the same way.... And this has been brought up many times on this blog by others.
In my late teens, working in a college library, I read a 300 page abridgement of Capital, and it certainly made sense to me. And what he was studying, the way the wealthy abused the workers (that is, the rest of us), is what the wrong wing is working night and day to bring back.
Diagnosing the problem isn't hard. After all, it underpins a good chunk of the Bible, and prompted traditions such as the jubilee (when all debts are destroyed, property is reallocated more equitably, and the games start again--about once in a lifetime). AFAIK, the problems were realized in the Middle East in the pre-Biblical Bronze Age.
It's fairly unclear whether Marx's proposed solution actually works, though. I'll also point out that the progressive solution may not work either, at least in the long term. It's a nasty problem.
Personally, and just to keep from resurrecting Marx yet again as the solution for capitalism's woes, why not explore others.
For example: Wiccan political economics. "An it harm none, do as thou wilt," is the fundamental law, and institutions exist to detect, quantify, and deal with harm. What would a non-harming economics look like? What about coercive forces (military, paramilitary, police, etc.) whose mission is to minimize harm? What would justice look like?
Not that I think this has a snowball's chance of going anywhere in reality, but if you want a thought experiment, maybe try this one?
I'll point out that this is the inverse of libertarianism. The stress isn't on "the law helps me do what I want," but rather "the law helps me not harm others."
So Capitalism is a paper-clip maximizer?
Robert Prior @ 1726:
You might find these articles interesting.
A scholarly look at the status of Jews in Rome: https://www.yorku.ca/pswarney/4102/Articles/trajano.pdf
That's the first century CE, but Rome conquered Palestine in the first century BCE (approximately 100 years before the First Jewish-Roman War. Plus Jews were traveling in the Roman Empire BEFORE Judea became a Roman province.
I haven't found much about how Jews were treated in Rome BEFORE the revolts in the later half of the first Century CE.
An article questioning whether Mary's status has been mistranslated from the Greek: https://www.thedailybeast.com/was-the-virgin-mary-actually-a-slave
I figured out a long time ago (or maybe someone explained it to me in simple words) that Mary was the "virgin Mary" because she and Joseph were NOT MARRIED when she got pregnant, they were "betrothed". If you want to see some REAL mental gymnastics, just Google "Mary & Joseph were betrothed" ...
Whether you believe Yahweh planted the seed, Joseph & Mary were fooling around before the wedding or Mary was playing the field & Gabriel's supposed announcement was just an excuse, the bottom line according to the (Roman) laws of the time is Jesus was born a bastard.
Republican Kevin McCarthy has lost the third round of voting as I write this. And by an increasing margin too.
1767
OR
"Joseph" was a willing front-man for the real father, who could not be "publicly" identified for fear of Roman reprisals & pogroms.
Who was it?
Many hypotheses - a potential Pharaoh? Another legitimate Line-of-David male? A descendant of Cyrus the Great?
IIRC Robert Graves tended to the first idea - but note - all of them postulate a normal pysical-sexual encounter & that the "mystical origin" was, quite simply a plot-device to keep actual persecutors off the scent & trail.
A "Simple" physical explanation for a physical problem, no mystical handwavium required
Please tell me he's losing to "none of the above" (or "the Nun of the Above" if you want to cross the streams)
The kiwi greens had that problem for a while: https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/26-07-2022/the-greens-leadership-tumult-was-50-years-in-the-making
Please tell me he's losing to "none of the above" (or "the Nun of the Above" if you want to cross the streams)
Sadly no. The third vote was:
Jeffries (Democrat): 212
McCarthy (aka "Big K", Republican): 202
Jordan ("Republican" MAGAt. Tossed in by the further right): 20
The winning number is 218.
Unfortunately, the potential number of Republicans who will vote for Jeffries currently is under 6. But the year is young...
Heh. Any guesses for eventual outcome? First guess is that this will go on for a while.
Second guess is that eventual Speaker will not be a Democrat.
Most likely is that someone other than McCarthy, but a near clone ends up as speaker.
(Gaetz and company get 'victory', but no real policy change.)
Second probability is that McCarthy offers enough concessions to Democrats to get votes. Looks like political suicide long term...
More from Umair Haque: Britain’s Finally Figuring Out Brexit (Really) Was the Biggest Mistake in Modern History
https://eand.co/britains-finally-figuring-out-brexit-really-was-the-biggest-mistake-in-modern-history-8419a8b940c6
Looks like political suicide long term...
That's where the Republican Party is headed, regardless of what happens in the House. I saw an article earlier today (couldn't find it again) showing that young Americans are abandoning the GOP. (Smart kids!) And the GOP's most reliable voters are dying off (Covid and old age).
It's only a matter of time until GOP gerrymandering of districts at the state level - the only thing currently keeping them afloat - can no longer make up for their lost voters.
Yup. I've never gotten how people in the U.K. don't understand that Brexit was the Worst Idea Ever. Like seriously, the very fucking worst ever!
There are much worse ideas than Brexit. Liz Truss springs to mind.
If they wanted to really go batshit they could abandon NATO as well and do a deal with Russia or China to supply their nukes in exchange for bases.
"Another legitimate Line-of-David male?"
So David was ca. 1000-ish BCE and Jesus was 4-ish BCE. I wonder how they kept track of the lineage. Lotta ancestors there.
Exactly. The Soviet command economy was Taylorist corporate practice, and assumed perfectly rational humans while operating with actual humans. Even well intentioned people would get bound up in the disconnect between top and bottom.
I took a graduate level class on internal Chinese politics over 20 years ago. There are tens of millions of bureaucrats operating within multiple parallel power structures. There are entire schools of study trying to figure out how inputs result in outputs in a system that wickedly complex.
There exists a mindblowing combination of merit, patronage structures, Party structures, goals, policies, ambitions and systems that are interacting with each other at thousands of different points, constantly. The definitional term was 'Matrix Muddle' as a way to encompass the whole mess.
And yet things happen. Their country progresses toward various goals at various paces. Paths of advancement exist for the ambitious.
Context: USA
George Santos is going to be the next Speaker of the House. 🙂 😏 🙃 😕
Even well intentioned people would get bound up in the disconnect between top and bottom.
And that doesn't even consider the corruption which this system enabled.
Erwin @ 1772:
Heh. Any guesses for eventual outcome? First guess is that this will go on for a while.
Second guess is that eventual Speaker will not be a Democrat.
Most likely is that someone other than McCarthy, but a near clone ends up as speaker.
(Gaetz and company get 'victory', but no real policy change.)
Second probability is that McCarthy offers enough concessions to Democrats to get votes. Looks like political suicide long term...
McCarthy will not get ANY Democratic Party votes no matter how many promises he makes.
He burned too many bridges across the aisle during his tenure as minority leader. Democrats will not trust him to keep promises.
"McCarthy will not get ANY Democratic Party votes no matter how many promises he makes.
He burned too many bridges across the aisle during his tenure as minority leader. Democrats will not trust him to keep promises."
Agreed completely!
If they wanted to really go batshit they could abandon NATO as well and do a deal with Russia or China to supply their nukes in exchange for bases.
Wasn't that what happens in Whoops, Apocalypse?
AlanD2, Troutwaxer and Moz - The number of Britons who actively voted for Remain (and hence also against WrecksIt) was some 48 times the number who voted for La Trusstercluck.
People seemed to have voted for Brexit just like they voted for Trump. Fantasy promises of a return to a better time. Plus gold at the end of some rainbows.
As I believe Charlie has pointed out, capitalism is all about paperclip counting. Just ask Bob Howard.
George Santos is going to be the next Speaker of the House.
While on trial for check fraud in Brazil. Oh the optics.
If you want the nihilistic view, it's that the 18 election deniers who are holding keeping Kevin "Special K" McCarthy from the speakership have secretly decided to burn the place down by denying anyone the speakership, forcing Biden to rule by decree and destroying the budget process entirely.
Not sure how such a suicide pact gets broken, but if this speculation is at all accurate, I'll bet the democrats are already trying to figure a way clear of it.
Heh. Any guesses for eventual outcome? First guess is that this will go on for a while.
McCarthy promises so much he becomes a political eunuch and lasts only a week to a few months. Then we lather rinse and repeat.
Scalise is the next most likely but by no means any where near a sure thing. Most likely to be rational of all the R candidates.
Jordon maybe. The crazies like him because he seems to want to firebomb the federal government. (Cue lyrics to "It was a very good year" and think of 1823 or so.) And isn't stupid in other ways. Peter Thiel is a likely fan. He says he doesn't want it and may be speaking the truth.
Then we get to where maybe some D's support someone who isn't a Trump fan and managed to stay in the House on the R side. Maybe political suicide. Or not. Lots of behind the scene issues going on.
Even less likely is for 5 or so Liz Cheney types to vote for a D. Political suicide for sure. And a 3 ring circus would like simple compared to the next 2 years.
Then there is the comment made by Clair McCaskill. (Ex-Senator from Missouri.) The rules they are operating under is a majority of the members PRESENT. And Clair's point is some of these older gentlemen and ladies get grumpy when the hours run long. Will one side or the other try and keep things going all night seeing who will fall out. Dangerous ploy for either side.
The rules for this a fuzzy to say the least. Basically until a new speaker is elected the House runs on inertia unider the previous decided House rules under control of the un-elected (by citizens voting) clerk. The current clerk was selected by the previous House and is the clerk until a new speaker is elected and a new clerk then chosen.
Until then the clerk calls for nominations then a role call vote. With bathroom and food breaks as needed. And recesses till the next day if a majority agree.
Not sure how such a suicide pact gets broken,
If it really gets that far I'd bet that 5 or more R's would jump ship, pull a Liz Cheney, to the D side to at least get a speaker. Not that I'd call this a lock. And the craziness would just continue only differently. If this happened we'd next get to see the serious sassage making of the House Rules.
For those in other countries or who just don't know. The choice of speaker, committee assignments, etc... and hashing out the rules of the House for the next 2 years is almost always a done deal that happens between the obviousness of the election results and Jan 3. And pretty much behind closed doors.
But we now live in different times.
"Even less likely is for 5 or so Liz Cheney types to vote for a D. Political suicide for sure. And a 3 ring circus would like simple compared to the next 2 years."
I think the one way this could work would be if all the Republicans who voted for a Democrat came from the same state, and they also voted in a speaker from the same state. Then they're not traitors, they're brilliant politicians who've brought home the pork. That said, this is highly unlikely at best - not many states have enough representatives to pull this off - and the Republicans could also run a similar ploy against the Democrats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWoMk7D_lxQ Stephen Colbert really, really likes Goerge Santos (if that's his real name)
The rules for this a fuzzy to say the least. Basically until a new speaker is elected the House runs on inertia unider the previous decided House rules under control of the un-elected (by citizens voting) clerk. The current clerk was selected by the previous House and is the clerk until a new speaker is elected and a new clerk then chosen.
Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC reported that new members of the House have not yet been sworn in, as this is done by the new Speaker of the House.
My question is this: are these new representatives allowed to vote for the Speaker before being sworn in? If not, do the former representatives being replaced by them vote instead? Interesting times...
My question is this: are these new representatives allowed to vote for the Speaker before being sworn in? If not, do the former representatives being replaced by them vote instead? Interesting times...
I suspect the mess is because the media aren't bothering to parse the rules in shows any of us are watching?
Anyway, after I published that nihilistic thing I found it mirrored in Heather Cox Richardson's nightly post. Apparently some Republican MoC called in anonymously to CNN to complain that the 19 or 20 are a bunch of useless narcissists who want to destroy government. Interesting not-on-the-record comment from an invertebrate.
RE: Jeffries getting the speakership. If more than six Republicans do a "frack it" and vote with the dems so that they can deal with hurricane season or whatever, Jeffries will be the speaker. They may either be ready to retire or just sick of Trumping. I rate this as dubious currently but more possible with each frozen ballot. The democrats are always willing to try bipartisanship, but holding a narrow bipartisan coalition will be very tricky.
Jeffries is from Brooklyn, but it likely won't be the NY GOP because (checking) all the experienced MoCs from New York are dems, and almost all the GOP members are new this year. Like George Santos. Since it's probably political suicide in 2024, do they do it now? Other problem is, they're novices. What do they have to offer other than a vote?
More from Umair Haque: Britain’s Finally Figuring Out Brexit (Really) Was the Biggest Mistake in Modern History
dude is given to hyperventilation, my family are in the uk and they're not visibly sidling up to the question of whether they can come and live with me in japan (no)
i know the nhs is in a bad state but are things really that bad for other uk folks?
If more than six Republicans do a "frack it" and vote with the dems so that they can deal with hurricane season or whatever, Jeffries will be the speaker.
I think it is safe to say that any House Republican voting for a Democrat would have almost a zero chance of being reelected in 2024.
»I think it is safe to say that any House Republican voting for a Democrat «
They would not, they would just have to stay away, since the threshold is half of those /present.
This means both that a very small number of D's can stay away and let McCarthy cross the threshold, but it also leaves the option for a small number of R's to stay away and hand the job to Jeffries.
And everybody know how easy it is to get stuck in traffic in WDC...
Re. US "House" ...
AIUI, until a "speaker" is elected, the US house can do no business? If so, isn't this what the
fascistsMAGAT's want? As they did some years ago, refusing to either pass a budget or refusing to up the "debt" ceiling? It was a disaster, IIRC, but that won't stop them being stupid again, will it?.... Um, err ....
Re. H @ 1788 -
I fear you are correct, though I doubt Biden is going to be caught out by that trick?
Troutwaxer
Easy
Years & years & years of concentrated lies & propaganda - & even then, the majority was (?) 1.5% with a rigged electorate ....
- plus what David L said, as well.
Bugger
THIS ... An actual leftish USA-view of the current US "House" chaos.
V interesting.
BTW - I can recommend "The American Prospect" - usually referred to as "TAP"
»refusing to up the "debt" ceiling?«
Which is precisely why the previous house, with bipartisan support, as one of the last acts, raised the debt ceiling preemptively
»I think it is safe to say that any House Republican voting for a Democrat «
They would not, they would just have to stay away, since the threshold is half of those /present.
I doubt Republican voters would be stupid enough to not see through this obfuscation.
"For citrus they're going to need to source it from a locale where it doesn't freeze every winter. That's not Germany. Spain, and possibly Italy, is probably their closest source. (Not sure about southern France.)"
they grow lemons in Genoa. So I suspect they could in Southern France
Which is precisely why the previous house, with bipartisan support, as one of the last acts, raised the debt ceiling preemptively
As best as I can tell, the $1.7 trillion appropriations bill Congress passed just before Christmas did not raise the debt ceiling. Unfortunately...
If there a competent and moderate Republican in the House of Representatives, maybe the Democrats could use their votes to break the stalemate and get that person elected as Speaker?
If there were six competent and moderate Republicans in the house they could vote a Democrat in as speaker.
Sadly I think the answer to your hypothetical is "there ain't, so they cain't". And to mine, even more obviously, the answer is 🤣🤣🤣🤣
[i]It's fairly unclear whether Marx's proposed solution actually works, though. I'll also point out that the progressive solution may not work either, at least in the long term. It's a nasty problem.[/i] The problem is (at least) two fold: "Where do we want to go?" and "How do we get there from here?" Both are extremely hard problems, and solving the first without solving the second is basically a waste of time.
There's evidence that progressives and regressives also differ on which question comes first. Progressives tend to "where do we want to go" and regressives prefer "how do we want to get there".
Luckily it seems that the generation who grew up being told "fuck you. Fuck you all" are not voting for the people who say that, and their votes aren't swinging that way even as those kids get older. It's weird in a way, because my generation have definitely swung that that way despite having exactly that done to them too. Maybe because it took time to really get the fucking underway?
While I was at university fees were introduced, the first IPCC report came out, the French carried out a terrorist attack on my country to widespread international acclaim, the US invaded Iraq, the sharemarket collapsed and was bailed out, inequality got a huge kick from the government... and somehow many of my generation thought "this is good".
Administrative notice
There's a new blog entry ... introducing a new guest blogger (the first in years)!
Once he's on board you can use that intro as a chew-toy for the permanent floating climate change/economics/transport/DIY washing machine repair thread.
Absolutely David.
So Capitalism is a paper-clip maximizer?
(Blinks in Charlie)
What, you didn't already know that?
My question is this: are these new representatives allowed to vote for the Speaker before being sworn in? If not, do the former representatives being replaced by them vote instead? Interesting times...
As of just this moment the US House has no members. Even the past members who got re-elected are not currently members of the House. As I said the House runs for a day or part of a day via inertia and tradition with the previous clerk running things. And their only remit is to call the elected reps into session and hold a vote or votes for Speaker. Once a speaker is elected the clerk turns the gavel over to them and the new House session starts. Not sure who swears in who but I'm sure one of the many Wiki articles on how the House works will tell you that if you wish to dig.
And up until yesterday all of this sort of happened without much of anyone watching. Not many TV or radio reporters around in 1923 or prior.
One interesting side note, there's a lot of smart phone picture taking going on. Which is against the House rules for a long time. But until a speaker is elected, members sworn in, and a rules package adpoted, there are no official rules.
An amusing thing I saw last night: Apparently Kevin moved his stuff into the Speaker's offices on the weekend. Schadenfreude if he has to move his shit out and let someone else in.
In theory, it isn't, but I cannot think of an instance where it wasn't. It was even true when wealth was based more on land and/or vassal count than money. It seems that acquisitiveness and greed are very deep in the human psyche.
I haven't found much about how Jews were treated in Rome BEFORE the revolts in the later half of the first Century CE.
IIRC, basically like anyone else (who wasn't Roman). Just another foreign religion practiced by foreigners…
(Based on memories from decades-ago Classics courses, so could easily be wrong or refuted by more recent scholarship.)
There exists a mindblowing combination of merit, patronage structures, Party structures, goals, policies, ambitions and systems that are interacting with each other at thousands of different points, constantly. The definitional term was 'Matrix Muddle' as a way to encompass the whole mess.
Sounds a lot like any large bureaucracy (absent the Party structure). Certainly it describes my experience in both private industry and public service.
There's evidence that progressives and regressives also differ on which question comes first. Progressives tend to "where do we want to go" and regressives prefer "how do we want to get there".
But the two questions are closely coupled. Solving the first without considering the other tends towards wishful thinking without achieving anything, in reality an inconsequential plea to the people in power. Solving the second without considering the first too easily end in dictatorship with a lot of blood getting spilled.
"As best as I can tell, the $1.7 trillion appropriations bill Congress passed just before Christmas did not raise the debt ceiling. Unfortunately..."
I believe you are right. Well, there's still the trillion dollar coin trick.
It's unclear. There were lots of local newspapers and the telegraph in 1923, so there could technically have been a media circus. If there wasn't, the reasons were social.
George Santos is going to be the next Speaker of the House.
It's already on his resume.
People seemed to have voted for Brexit just like they voted for Trump. Fantasy promises of a return to a better time. Plus gold at the end of some rainbows.
Nope.
While about 25% of the electorate -- the crazies -- wanted a return to the golden age, most of the Brexit vote was a pure protest vote. After five years of austerity and government cuts to social services, then another election which the Tories won and continued those policies, the ordinarily-don't-vote crowd got totally narked off and voted against the Prime Minister, David Cameron (who was pro-Remain).
It was a screech of rage directed against the establishment, not a movement with a well-articulated goal. (Although the rabid wing of the Tory party who had forced the referendum onto the party's agenda certainly had a goal in mind, and it peaked with Liz Truss's internal election.)
I'd known it was ugly and deliberately left unchecked, but I'd never considered that there wasn't really a point to it before. If you're not spending the money on something useful, why be capitalistic?
The short answer is "Because they can". Not the only reason, there's also a social need to see a lot of distance between their selves and average people and to prove they have the favor of Mammon. There are still old fashioned capitalists who do well by doing good, may their numbers increase.
I'd known it was ugly and deliberately left unchecked, but I'd never considered that there wasn't really a point to it before. If you're not spending the money on something useful, why be capitalistic?
That's why I referred to it as a religion. If you take religion as being a system that helps you live a good life--and defines what "good" means--then the churn of capitalism looks more than a little like a religion. The parallels strengthen somewhat when you consider that things like economic "goods" and "value" are created by collective, community belief.
Of course, many people will strenuously object that capitalism is not a religion, it's just the way they live. And oddly enough, this is the same objection that indigenous groups have raised to outside ethnographers, anthropologists, missionaries, etc. classifying parts of their beliefs and practices as "primitive religions..."
Once again, religions and ideologies are not the same thing. They're certainly similar, but not identical.
As for Speaker George Santos, he had an interesting day on January 3. Mos of the good stuff is likely paywalled (Washington Post, etc.), but Daily Beast had this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/heres-how-liar-george-santos-first-day-in-congress-is-going
Here's the WaPo story if you want to try it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/01/03/george-santos-first-day-in-congress/
Let's just say that he's become the sort of wheeler and dealer who will do quite well as Speaker... (/sarcasm for those for whom English is not a first language. Check out the picture on Daily Beast).
There were lots of local newspapers and the telegraph in 1923, so there could technically have been a media circus. If there wasn't, the reasons were social.
No. Telegraph was not real time to all but a very small group. And to pass things one required lots of folks doing relay typing, maybe feeding tapes into teletype and similar. Media today is real time to millions. And has been since radio took over.
Social issues were a part of it but I suspect most of the changes there have taken place due to the changes in the media landscape.
It was a screech of rage directed against the establishment, not a movement with a well-articulated goal.
That was also a lot of the vote for Trump. And against Hillary. And government in general.
But Trump was in so many ways a product of the Tea Party movement. Which is where the current chaos in the US House comes from. Burn it down so WE can start it over and do it right. Majority be damned.
A final bit of trivia for those who care about the US Congress: I did a google, and found this (https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R41545.pdf), which is a little study on how long Congressfolk and Senators stay in office, and how it has varied over time. I won't vouch for its accuracy, although I have no reason to think it's slanted.
The data I was looking for was how much the House turns over every term. Turns out it has varied enormously over the last 200 years, but in 2019-2020 the paper says it was 10.9%.
The reason this might matter is that McCarthy needs 20-ish votes (ca. 5%), Jeffries need 6 (ca. 1.5%). Are there potentially Congressfolk who might say "screw it" and vote for one or the other regardless of consequences? Certainly looks like they'd be well within the margin of ordinary churn at the place if they did so.
That doesn't match the pre-2016 polls. Yes, there were only about 25% crazies, but there were something like another 15% who genuinely believed the tripe they were being peddled. Only a bit over 10% used it as a protest vote.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/UK_EU_referendum_polling.svg/1200px-UK_EU_referendum_polling.svg.png
David L @ 1789:
Jordon maybe. The crazies like him because he seems to want to firebomb the federal government. (Cue lyrics to "It was a very good year" and think of 1823 or so.) And isn't stupid in other ways. Peter Thiel is a likely fan. He says he doesn't want it and may be speaking the truth.
I saw on some news that the Speaker of the House doesn't actually have to be an elected member of the House of Representatives - some of the crazies on the right want to draft Donald Trump for the job.
I was thinking if they're considering Jordan, maybe the "Rs" (pronounced "arse" so strangely appropriate ...) could invite former Speaker Dennis Hastert back to be Speaker again. He'd fit right in with the grifters, MAGAats & QAnon crazies.
I think HL Mencken might have disagreed about the circus-like atmosphere of the US Congress in the 1920s. See Greg's link at 1799, first two paragraphs. Quote:
"Never have I felt the absence of H.L. Mencken more keenly. Mencken, who had the most brilliantly dyspeptic voice in American journalism of the 1920s, could savage the idiots who then populated American politics with more verve and disdain than any of his contemporaries. The ’20s were a time when such idiots were in abundance—more representatives of what Mencken termed “the booboisie” littered the landscape then than before or since. Until, so it seems, today."
(https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-01-03-on-tap-congress-republicans-speaker-mccarthy/)
Also, don't forget the telephone was invented in 1876, so it wasn't all telegraphs in 1923...
ME @ 1830:
PS: Two other tidbits from the current "Rs" House fight ... Marjorie Taylor Green (QAnon Crazy-Georgia) is REALLY PISSED OFF at Matt Gaetz right now
THEY took the metal detectors out of the Capitol yesterday (at least on the house side).
Also, don't forget the telephone was invented in 1876, so it wasn't all telegraphs in 1923...
My point is that it wasn't 1 to a million or more instantly as it is today. Broadcast radio was just getting started in January 1923 in the US. 10 years later it was almost ubiquitous.
There was a filtering.
Living 30+ years in the state capital has let me watch the changes. We've always elected a few or more crazies. But most news/media ignored them. So mostly no one noticed absent the live boy dead woman events. Now with social media and the decimation of local newspapers the crazies have as loud or louder voice than the "adults in the room". Similar but a bit different at the national level. But in general the crazies ignore the major media and stick to dedicated crazy media or their social feeds.
The standard method for reporters to send news to their papers by 1900 was the telegraph (read anything, including fiction, by reporters of that era), and I suspect that was still true in 1923. I don't understand why not being real time prevents something being a circus, because even I remember when media circuses referred to the newspapers. The USA might have had a network of long-distance telephones by 1923, but I doubt it (and Wikipedia supports that).
Charlie @ 1820
......most of the Brexit vote was a pure protest vote..
Oh dear, YES!
Someone I know quite well did exactly this as pure revenge, she said so, without directly admitting it.
SHIT.
But, of course, this is exactly what the ERG & Tufton St & the fascists wanted, isn't it?
H
A "Dem" as your House speaker with a razor-thin { divided & both mad & rancid } supposed "R" majority ... could be very "Interesting".
EC
You are missing the point, even with your numbers - remember that the Brexshit vote was very narrow in the end, wasn't it?
I don't understand why not being real time prevents something being a circus, because even I remember when media circuses referred to the newspapers.
Because there was a filtering. The vast majority of the population here (and I suspect in most of Europe) only heard what was "reported". Now days many politicians engage in performance theater. Back in the day they would mostly be ignored outside of the "club".
The USA might have had a network of long-distance telephones by 1923, but I doubt it (and Wikipedia supports that).
Yes it did. Wiki states such. Good grief.
Now it was a bit harder to do than in the UK due to the distances involved.
A "Dem" as your House speaker with a razor-thin { divided & both mad & rancid } supposed "R" majority ... could be very "Interesting".
Ummm.
Jeffries isn't Pelosi, but from 2021-2022 we had razor thin margins with the Senatorial filibuster, and we got more done than we had since the 1960s Great Society. A lot of this was trying to deal with a huge backlog of unrepaired infrastructure and climate change problems.
My (admittedly rationalist and therefore silly) thinking is that any Republican who has a spine (problem #1 with my logic) might want to run on getting stuff done for their district. For example, they might want to do a quid pro quo with Biden and the dems to keep their districts from being completely screwed over in the Colorado River negotiations (looking at Arizona especially, also Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. Or eastern Californira). Being the swing votes to let the democrats pass stuff therefore helps them, and (again, if they're vertebrates) they can run on "protecting you from the urban elites by forcing them to account" in 2024. Note the outsized influence of Manchin and Sinema in 2021 and 2022.
Again, this presumes they have notochords, and if they do, they've done a really good job hiding that fact. But if Kevin McCarthy keeps deliquescing on his way to the podium, something like this might conceivably happen.
AlanD2 @ 1793:
Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC reported that new members of the House have not yet been sworn in, as this is done by the new Speaker of the House.
My question is this: are these new representatives allowed to vote for the Speaker before being sworn in? If not, do the former representatives being replaced by them vote instead? Interesting times...
It IS the new members, although the law is not so much "fuzzy" in this respect as it is NON-EXISTENT.
The 117th Congress officially ceased to exist at noon on Jan 3, 2023.
The 118th Congress officially began at noon on Jan 3, 2023.
It's not just the "new members" - returning incumbents, those who won re-election to the House for the current Congress have not been sworn in either. Congress - House & Senate - get sworn in "en masse". (On the Senate side, new Senators & Senators starting a new term - "Senators Elect" - have already been sworn in and they're getting down to business.)
In the House, election of the Speaker is the first order of business and swearing in the members comes after, followed by adoption of the "House Rules" for the new Congress.
As (I think) someone else pointed out, it's the Clerk of the House from the 117th Congress who's currently running the show, but the ONLY business that can be conducted is election of the Speaker.
Nothing else can be done in the House until the members are sworn in by the Speaker.
In a very US comment.
House staffers (there are 1000s) have a problem with January 15th and the 30th. Without the House in session they don't get paid and/or actually start loosing their jobs. And a non trivial number of these folks got student loan waivers that require them to be gainfully employed (some by government) or the back loans might come due. Or heath care lapses (no NHS). Or ...
Anyway if this keeps going lots of people on both sides are going to get very very pissed. And screwed.
As the rest of the world looks on in bemusement or terror.
Looking at "CNN" right now. Assuming all "Dems" vote for Jeffries, McCarthy cannot win, as the live count presently shows 19 votes for someone called "Donalds" ...
Lots more fun to follow - I trust people have got the popcorn out?
Two things: one, if they want to get re-elected in two years... they can always change parties.
And the other - the current Clerk of Congress was, as I read, fmr Speaker Pelosi's last zinger - it's a black woman.
I trust people have got the popcorn out?
You're watching the 5TH VOTE. My popcorn butter is getting a bit stale and the bottom of the bowl is a bit soggy.
But the nominating speeches are interesting in a weird way.
I disagree. If they're voting GOP now, they are too stupid to see through the obfuscation, and they'll believe whatever Faux Noise tells them.
Let me tie it all together: "he who dies with the most toys wins", and "I'm rich because God (tm) wanted me to be".
So, the richer you are, the more assured you are of your place in the afterlife, if there is one... according to them.
Please note that I saw a pic last night of a Dem Rep walking onto the floor... with a large container of popcorn, in reality.
I like the story about the reporters asking questions of the PR flack or family spokesman announcing the death of Rockefeller. At one time the richest man in the US or maybe the world.
Q: "How much did he leave behind?" A: (maybe from the crowd) "All of it!"
religions and ideologies are not the same thing. They're certainly similar, but not identical
I think this distinction is a category error. They are not the same thing because they are talking about different topics: your sense of what ideology is doesn't encompass the "this is how we live" aspect that Frank was talking about as religion, merely the ideas involved in supporting it. As far as the distinction I think you are making between them, as I've said I'm not convinced it's real and I don't think evidence supports it... if anything it's that we call it religion if we think the people who do it are "primitive", so you most likely don't get that distinction without colonialism. You might be able to say that ideology and religion are continuous with each other, and that there are parts of the continuum which are one and not the other, but most of it involves a thorough blend of both. That leaves a question about what that continuum actually is... it certainly isn't a scale as such, it might be called culture? But you can see why I think that makes the original distinction just seem silly, because it doesn't add anything useful to understanding how things work.
I'd known it was ugly and deliberately left unchecked, but I'd never considered that there wasn't really a point to it before. If you're not spending the money on something useful, why be capitalistic?
Old mate Max Weber has your back on this question. Capitalism is continuous with and represents the modern* expression of religious concerns regarding moral value. Money, by symbolising value, is intrinsically good, not merely good for what you can use it to buy or to achieve, it is an end in itself.
The person who accumulates more wealth is seen as morally superior not because it has been acquired through work, but because wealth is the same thing as moral value. And it follows that people who inherit wealth are given if anything even higher regard than their progenitors who accumulated. The fella who has your back there is Thorstein Veblen.
Re: 'Are there potentially Congressfolk who might say "screw it" and vote for one or the other regardless of consequences?'
Only if the vote was by secret ballot. My guess is that the largest party funders are watching how their bought pols are voting on this. Pelosi had announced that she'd be stepping down so this might have been part of the this-is-what-you're-going-to-do-if-$I$-donate-to-your-campaign deal.
On another note - West Coast storm system ...
After looking at the wind forecast for my area I expanded the view to see which parts of the planet are getting interesting wind weather - the US West Coast wins this one! There's one helluva massive wind storm all along the West Coast and it's gonna be followed by another large system over the next few days. Stay safe!
https://www.windfinder.com/#3/42.6178/-117.7734
As the rest of the world looks on in bemusement or terror.
Question for Americans…
As I understand it, the vote only counts those present, so if members are absent the total needed for a majority changes.
Suppose that something like that happens, significant enough numbers to get a speaker elected, and it turns out that the absences were engineered (chemical sedation, crowds blocking their path, whatever). Would the vote still be considered legally valid (even if the missing members were involuntarily absent)? Who would decide the validity? Would the answer depend on which party benefitted from the absences?
I strongly suspect that the Supreme Court would weigh in, and favour the Republicans as they seem intent on doing, but I don't like the current Supreme Court and I may be letting that dislike influence me.
They are already down 2. Which means 217 COLD win. Not sure why. But vote 6 is going to come up with no winner even with just 217 needed. So we'll all be back tomorrow.
There have been commentators discussing this somewhat. Many former members say that the older folks get very grumpy when things run into the wee hours. I'm 68 and have trouble staying up 20 hours these days. And no one is sure who would break first. Which is why the votes to adjourn to the next day are going smoothly so far.
I suspect that if your 007 situation occurred the losing side would invoke a motion to vacate the chair and likely get some support from the other side to make it happen. And then we would be back to ground hog day.
• The "Rs" in the House have a 4.5 seat majority (essentially 5 seats since you can't have "point five"). One of the concessions McCarthy made to the MAGAat QAnonners was that any 5 members of the "Rs" majority could force a "no confidence" vote requiring a new election for Speaker (essentially giving the MAGAat QAnonners an UNLIMITED VETO over legislation - an extreme filibuster)
The twenty or so "Rs" rebelling against McCarthy's bid to become Speaker don't want to govern, they just want to abolish the Federal Government. Causing the house to crash & burn is good enough.
• Comment seen on-line: "At this point JENNY MCCARTHY has a better chance of being Speaker than Kevin McCarthy."
• Mega Millions jackpot is up to $940M ... only $60M more and I'm gonna' buy another lottery ticket.
• CBS morning news (via YouTube) had two talking heads - one from the Democrats and one from the "Rs".
The talking heads speculated that some NON-MAGA Republican might get Democratic votes if he made enough concessions ... essentially promising the "Rs" will give up asshole partisan investigations & extreme anti-abortion/anti-gay marriage legislation and Fred Upton from Michigan (who got Gerrymandered out of his district by the MAGAats & is NOT currently a member of the house) becomes Speaker - taking advantage of the idea the Speaker doesn't have to actually be a member of Congress.
Robert Prior @ 1851:
Question for Americans…
As I understand it, the vote only counts those present, so if members are absent the total needed for a majority changes.
Suppose that something like that happens, significant enough numbers to get a speaker elected, and it turns out that the absences were engineered (chemical sedation, crowds blocking their path, whatever). Would the vote still be considered legally valid (even if the missing members were involuntarily absent)? Who would decide the validity? Would the answer depend on which party benefitted from the absences?
I strongly suspect that the Supreme Court would weigh in, and favour the Republicans as they seem intent on doing, but I don't like the current Supreme Court and I may be letting that dislike influence me.
Any attempt to waylay a member of the House or impede that member from making it to the House chamber to vote would be a Federal Crime.
I'm not sure I have the math correct, so take this with a grain of salt ...
IF McCarthy does not convince any of the 20 "Rs" to vote for him, he could still be elected with the votes he does have IF he could convince 39 Democrats not to show up. But, why would the Democrats want to to do that?
What concessions is he going to offer Democrats to win their favor? And if he DID offer concessions and the Democrats DID help him get elected Speaker, what guarantee do they have he'd keep his promises?
Ideology and religion both get into "This is how we live," but come at it from different directions. Ideology generally disdains the mystical, while religion welcomes it. Obviously there are ideas/systems which sit in the middle ground between the two, and ideology and religions are certainly siblings, or maybe cousins, but they are not the same.
I think what ideology might be is the "new and improved" religion; what a society gets when they've got some history, scholarship, philosophy, rationality/math and decent records. Now you can look at history and see what worked and what didn't and attempt to draw conclusions from what's happened, so your attempt to figure out what's going on is no longer dependent on "stories from the shaman."
"Stories from the shaman" work too, of course, but may not be suitable for gigantic industrial societies, if that's how you'd like to live.
What could happen is that several unvaccinated Republicans get COVID and wind up in the hospital. That would be interesting.
Any attempt to waylay a member of the House or impede that member from making it to the House chamber to vote would be a Federal Crime.
But would it change the results, or would it just lead to some convictions but leave the speaker unchanged?
There seems to be precedent that elections can be changed by extra-legal actions, and the results aren't overturned.
Maybe I'm asking a political question?
And if he [McCarthy] DID offer concessions and the Democrats DID help him get elected Speaker, what guarantee do they have he'd keep his promises?
None. And given that McCarthy's fellow Republicans don't trust his promises, I see no reason why any Democrat would either.
HINT: Buy popcorn stock. The House Speaker vote continues tomorrow and every day for the foreseeable future...
By the way, if the GOP can't elect a Speaker, how in h--- do they expect to help run this country? [/sarcasm] :-)
Ideology and religion both get into "This is how we live," but come at it from different directions. Ideology generally disdains the mystical, while religion welcomes it. Obviously there are ideas/systems which sit in the middle ground between the two, and ideology and religions are certainly siblings, or maybe cousins, but they are not the same.
Mystical Presbyterianism? I suppose it must be out there somewhere. I'll point out, though, that a century ago the dividing line between advanced, rational religion (as practiced by colonials, most of whom hadn't been to any seminary) and primitive, superstitious and/or mystical religion.
Anyway, I was going to joke that an ideology either has nukes and/or a market capitalization of at least $1 trillion, while a religion does not. Then I realized what the problem is.
In the US, the Constitution forbids the establishment of an official state religion, while in the UK, the official religion is Church of England but others are cool if they don't break laws too obviously. In both cases, calling capitalism a religion get everyone into a whole heap of trouble. If it is classified as a religion, the US government has to stay out of it, and I think the UK Exchequer would squirm a bit, maybe? Similarly, communist China couldn't call communism or capitalism a religion, because religion is the opiate of the masses, unlike, say, Fentanyl.
Worse, governments not interfering in markets and so forth leads to the emergence of plutocrats, probably worse than we have already, just as unfettered religion leads to the emergence of theocrats. So keeping Mammonism away from modern-day governments is likely as bad or worse than making it an official religion.
So anyway, instead of calling various forms of Mammonism religions, even though they have the traits of them, perhaps we call them ideologies? That way, all the problematic memes and laws that have grown up to regulate religion don't apply. This is analogous to the laws saying involuntary servitude as criminal punishment not being slavery in the US, because slavery is illegal, and we fought a war over that and everything.
Is that a workable split between ideology and religion?
The 117th U.S. Congress (which just ended), Democrats had a knife-edge margin in the Senate, which allowed Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema to wreak havoc.
In the new 118th Congress, the Republican's knife-edge margin in the House will allow the Republican extremists (M. Greene, et al.) to do the same. I can almost feel sorry for whomever winds up in the Speaker's chair.
By the way, if the GOP can't elect a Speaker, how in h--- do they expect to help run this country? [/sarcasm] :-)
That may be one of those bug/feature paradoxes. After all, the Freedom Caucus (the Orcs to Trump's Sauron), seem to have boiled "Move fast, break things, and build back better" down to the part they could remember: "break things." So what they're doing by opposing McCarthy is idiologically rectitudinal or something like that (see https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/01/the-gop-is-a-failed-state-donald-trump-is-its-warlord.html )
idiologically ... is that ideology for idiots?
Heteromeles,
Your link is broken. You have managed to include the closing parenthesis in it.
JHomes
Fixed
idiologically ... is that ideology for idiots?
If you believe Urban Dictionary.
perhaps we call them ideologies?
I prefer "belief systems", just because it avoids taking positions on certain things that might be difficult to resolve in ways that most people are comfortable. The common feature seems to be people believing things where they have no way of resolving any truth claims about them. In both cases believers hold their beliefs without any basis that we would call rational (although that's a loaded term that has weird relativisms in a colonial context) and in some cases will resist evidence-based refutations. So far I think that holds for various versions of our shared Western intellectual tradition, although as I've commented previously it makes no sense at all to separate that from religion as such, because nearly all the world-view is directly inherited from the 1500 years or so of Christianisation in Europe that preceded the emergence of that tradition. It's really hard to overstate how bounded the cultural context for this very type of discussion is. But perhaps if you wanted to permit a more positivist bent, something that I'm not totally averse or scared to do, perhaps it would help to talk about a contrast between belief systems and reasoning systems? That way maybe no-one would object to categorising capitalism with the belief systems, and economics as a realm of inquiry (rather than an activity as such) as a reasoning system? Actually that really could be too much positivism, meh.
Actually, uptimers with some experience in Modern german being able to understand neighbouring German downtimers might be a case of fridge logic.
Modern High German developed from certain administrative standard languages, with Luther's translation of the bible being another factor. Thuringian is quite close to the dialects involved in the development of those. Imagine the Ring of Fire happened in Swabia, shudder...
Also note we're dealing with the Thirty Year War, and your run of the mill tercio likely has Western Germanic speakers from all over the place, so the downtimers are likely used to dialectical variation...
As for lemons, some parts of Germany are USDA hardiness 8b to 9a.
Jenny McCarthy is "not a politician", right? So what's the issue with her being Speaker?
Jenny McCarthy is "not a politician", right? So what's the issue with her being Speaker?
Presumably this is tongue-in-cheek, right? She's a fervent anti-vaxxer who doesn't let facts or expertise get in the way.
RE: Speaker of the US house.
I nominate the Econlockhatchee River in Florida, who was granted legal rights in 2020...( https://aldf.org/article/legal-rights-recognized-for-rivers-in-florida-and-quebec/ ). At least they'll always go with the flow. Presumably the Americans with Disabilities Act will provide accommodations for the river in chamber?*
*Yes, I realize no river has yet been granted legal or corporate personhood. Yet...
Umair Haque's take on things like America's House Speaker debacle and the breakdown of Britain's National Health Service: Why Democracy’s Broken in America (and Britain)
TL;DR "America’s GOP and Britain’s Tories have made their societies ungovernable."
https://eand.co/why-democracys-broken-in-america-and-britain-5582ab57afd5
Another interesting opinion: Kevin McCarthy is only proving what Josh Hawley said: The Republican Party is dead
TL;DR What happened in the House on Tuesday is exactly what you would expect from a party that has no platform. For a party populated by people whose idea of loyalty extends no further than their own flaking skin. A party where ideas like “greater good” and “diversity” are treated with the enthusiasm of vampires sitting down to garlic toast.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/4/2145305/-Kevin-McCarthy-is-only-proving-what-Josh-Hawley-said-The-Republican-Party-is-dead
No American river perhaps. The Whanganui river in New Zealand was granted legal personhood in 2017, and India did the same for the Ganges a few days later.
It is unclear whether either is notably left or right wing.
John S
The twenty or so "Rs" rebelling against McCarthy's bid to become Speaker don't want to govern, they just want to abolish the Federal Government. - Um, err ... Is that not TREASON? - Difficult to prove, though.
* concessions ... essentially promising the "Rs" will give up asshole partisan investigations & extreme anti-abortion/anti-gay marriage legislation* ... Oh yeah, really? Somehow, I think not, the fascists have got the bit between their teeth. See also, the next line ...
And if he DID offer concessions and the Democrats DID help him get elected Speaker, what guarantee do they have he'd keep his promises? - ZERO, as AlanD2 has noted.
Another take on this:
The fascists want to destroy the US Federal guvmint, right?
Didn't they try this about 2012(ish)? by refusing to vote a budget/credit limit?
And, after about 2 months didn't they give up, after crowing about how they'd shown that they "Didn't need the Fed's teat & money-shower" ... but it turned out they, & more importantly, their voters, did need it?
And now they want to repeat this grim farce - it failed totally, last time, so we're going to do it again ....
A good point that I suspect is becoming less true over time. Hopefully, I won't be around to see the Mammonites "Blossom" into a religion.
JohnS:
Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it. Have $10M? You have the money. Have $1B? The money has you.
Granted, you could underwrite a great TV series of the Laundry Files. Get OGH on as a creative consultant for some absurd salary.
JohnS:
None whatsoever. KM has demonstrated by multiple actions that he holds his sworn oath1 to uphold the constitution as meaningless. We can safely assume that any promises he makes are similarly without value.
1 Note that this oath was made in the name of the God that KM pretends to believe in.
context = various chunks of world
after noodling through various online newspapers & opinion sites, here's the phrase for 2023 when it will trash many, many lives...
"politics of destruction"
not just UK & US but chunks of EU and Asia... and BTW also South America...
kind of a collective mode of #WSCN #BSGC (batshit crazy gonzo crazy) favoring 'burn civilization down and dance whilst pissing on the ashes'
OMG
another of those days when I'm glad to be 60-something and ailing... glad will not be here in late 2020s to live through further collapse and possibility of mass graves due to a simultaneous combo of pandemic and low grade (dis)civil war and casual police violence and accidental drug overdosing and ... and ...
anyone 20-something should start figuring where to go for not just 'duck & cover' (3 months) but 'huddle quietly & hunker down' (3 years)
Re: 'By the way, if the GOP can't elect a Speaker, how in h--- do they expect to help run this country? [/sarcasm] :-'
Since religious/ideological/economic/political, etc. are on the table for discussion and it looks as though the US gov't (therefore economy and social order) are on the edge of taking a nose dive into oblivion, what actors (internal/external) are most likely to benefit?
Quite seriously - DT's tenure torpedoed the USofA's reputation worldwide and even though Biden has improved trust/relations somewhat the likelihood of a permanently stalled US federal gov't (therefore military/economy) is approaching unity.
A few questions - mostly to reframe ideological/political posturing into real-world effects/outcomes:
1-who pays the soldier's/sailor's/air force enlisted's/national guard's/FEMA worker's, various federal gov't branch aide's/worker's salary? How many families/households does this represent? How much of the total US economy does this represent? (Rough est. for a first pass approx. 20%, second pass - approx. 30%, - since this is mostly/usually a positive feedback loop collapse likely after about 4 passes.)
2-which countries are most likely to benefit from a collapsed US economy - on which products/services, how quickly?
3-how well are political donations identified? First: nominal donor/donor of record; Second: donor's affiliates; Third: affiliates' affiliates; etc. We have seen how some gov'ts/interest groups have set up pressure systems in other countries: China had several 'police' departments set up in Canada to target and apply social/emotional pressure on family members. It worked, was discovered eventually and now there's some specific remedying coming into effect to shut such operations down. To be clear: I'm not saying that China is the culprit in this, i.e., funding/supporting/helping elect radical destroy-the-gov't right-wingers, it could be any number of players for any number of immediate or long term goals.
Yeah - this is conspiracy theory but conspiracies can exist and be exploited.
Is that not TREASON?
There's a difference between wanting to totally redo the government vs tearing down the country. They want the former. Thinking it will not be hard to do and not result in the later.
At least they'll always go with the flow.
Where's the rim shot?
People are far more willing to follow an already failed idea than a new one!
Where's the rim shot?
Who mentioned drumming?
SFR & others
And taking account of your comments, too. OK - so "KM" is totally untrustworthy, even to MAGAT's (!) AND - the aforementioned want to trash the US Federal guvmint ...
What happens, in the middle of all this that something really serious occurs, or more than one thing?
Such as a major "natural" disaster in the USA, requiring Federal money &/or the war/crisi in Ukraine getting 'orribly worse &/or Taiwan half kicking off?
And the is NOT a functioning US government?
This covers point (1) in your list.
Point (2) - Putin's RuSSia - so the Dems first accusation should be "How much of Putin's money are these people taking, maybe?
How far can Biden legally go & how much can these utter idiots fuck it all up?
Toby
Unfortunately, yes - see all religions, of course.
Um, err ... Is that not TREASON?
Nope. In the US (this is NOT the universal definition), treason is specified in the US Constitution as: "Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason..." So it has to be during wartime, and enemies are those we've declared war against.
In the US, SEDITION is "Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto..."
So you're talking about sedition, not treason. I'm not a lawyer, but by my count there are basically two ways to get to treason right now.
One is for an American to attack the US on North Korea's behalf, or at least support North Korean spying. The Korean War ended in an armistice, so we're technically still at war with them. Until a few years ago I would have said no one in the US is stupid enough to go there. Now...well I still think it's true. Heck, BTS is going in for their mandatory military service in South Korea (think "bigger than the Beatles"). Any American traitor would likely get flayed by their teenage daughters (and quite possibly their wives) for putting BTS in harm's way.
The real US war is, of course, against the Islamic State and other Al Qaeda successors, because the AUMF is still in force. Idiots still self-radicalize and attack cops on this cause (most recently four days ago, apparently). But the MAGAtry? The only way I could see that crowd committing treason is if an irrefutable paper trail demonstrates that a) ruling members of the House of Saud are major backers of Al Qaeda-spawned groups, and b) those same Saudis are also giving money to American politicians to disrupt American politics. I hope this isn't happening, because the US being forced to declare war on Saudi Arabia would be an effing mess.
So bottom line? What we're seeing with the GOP at this moment is in the seditious part of the political landfill, not the treasonous hazmat side. However, I'm pretty sure that right now it's all covered by free speech and Congress doing the opposite of progress. That doesn't make it less of a mess, but they almost certainly won't be locked up for it.
Is that not TREASON?
Only if it doesn't prosper… and currently it seems to be prospering quite well (at least for those committing it).
The executive branch, which, um, executes, is still functioning. And the judicial branch is doing all too well. We can do without new laws from the legislative branch for a week or two, perhaps.
Retiring
Isn't there a US equivalent of The Parliament Act, here?
Where "congress" must pass a "budget" to allow for yearly Federal spending & - of course the "Welfare Queen" spending to all the "red" states that hate the Feds?
/snark
Context = US
I suppose one could be optimistic about the current flustercluck, and hope that the GOP takes the opportunity to kick the fringe maniacs out of the party. Most of them would fizzle out quickly without party support, and those that did not would become marginal at best.
If the frothing media started to ignore them it would help as well.
I am not optimistic however, so instead I think they will bow to whatever their idiotic demands might be, and the world will suffer.
The executive branch, which, um, executes, is still functioning. And the judicial branch is doing all too well. We can do without new laws from the legislative branch for a week or two, perhaps.
They've got the ol' power of the purse thing, and that's what they're hoping to disrupt.
Anyway, If Kevin "Special K" McCarthy keeps doing his limbo dance ("how low will he go?"), my guess is that the media circus aspect of this will pall completely. I mean, how many ways can one consume flounder for every meal? Sautéed, steamed, roasted, and then what?
The only other utility for this fiasco--for some Republicans and many democrats--is that apparently someone named Donald Trump is working the phone lines to sell Special K to the holdouts, who he counts among his closest followers. If he continues to fail with them...then Agent Orange racks up yet another, and important, political loss. If even his Nazgul won't knuckle under when he tells them to, how much power does he really have?
If all this happens (and I'm betting it doesn't?) I'm guessing that Jeffries may get enough votes just to end the mess. Say by next Tuesday.
Ceviche, soup, stew, grilled, raw, ....
context = bizarrely off topic in USA
nobody hurt so it is safe to snark about... a molten river (riverlet?) of butter... if this does not get added to every SF novel about AI-gone-amok as a side plot (or red herring), then you writers are all humorless gray sticks
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/05/butter-wisconsin-dairy-plant-canal-melted
levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States
that's an "or" in there, so comforting any official enemies - *not in a war - makes it treason.
flounder:
...poached, pouched (as distinct from "poached"), sushi, salted, air-dried, smoked, pickled, salted 'n smoked, breaded & lightly sauteed, breaded & deeply fried, minced 'n sausage cased (prior to smoke house hanged), added to barrels of long aged Vietnamese fish sauce...
and then there's fish head soup... slow cooked and the bones then pulverized and/or overcooked into liquefaction...
levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States...that's an "or" in there, so comforting any official enemies - *not in a war - makes it treason.
Feel free to check me on this, but the definition of enemy with respect to treason seems pretty well linked with a declaration of war. For example, aiding China is not treason. Probably aiding Russia isn't either. There are other laws (sedition, advocating overthrow of the US) which seem to be better fits in these cases than treason.
See: https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/federal-treason
On a grimly amusing note, conviction on treason requires proving intent. Are the 20 MoC's who are causing this trouble aware enough to realize that the damage they're causing helps American enemies?
MMMM Raw Flounder. Almost as delicious as Republican politics...
Wimp. Try channeling your internal hunter-gatherer. What's wrong with a few worms? They aren't parasitic in us. Now, raw pork I will give you.
And K McK has just lost vote number seven.
Ohe noe!
Quote: Could we hear a Republican nominate Donald Trump for speaker on Wednesday?
Would this be "amusing" or would they actually do this?
And would he win, if nominated?
Re: 'Where "congress" must pass a "budget" to allow for yearly Federal spending & ...'
I'm not clear on this either. From the bits I've read, it seems 'sorta'. 'Sorta' because not all departments get shut down - although the military* definitely is. A gov't shutdown has a huge spillover impact in terms of people/households affected (bills/mortgages going unpaid, groceries unbought, etc.) but I haven't so far found data showing numbers of people/households, total salaries unpaid**, total interest on unpaid debt accrued, etc.
The longer this drags out, the longer it will take to pass any budget - and the GOP/anti-gov't right-wingers will conveniently 'forget' that they contributed to the delay and blame Biden/the DEMs. Many ordinary people will be adversely affected and no one is talking about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_United_States
*Will the VA be affected? I've not searched cuz there are some regulars here who probably know how the VA is funded as well as the likely impact on the many, many people who rely on it for health/medical services and lots more.
**In the private sector it's possible to sue an employer for unpaid salary/commissions. My question: Is a class-action suit of US employees vs. House of Representatives/Senate legally possible? The military can't go this route but maybe they can use historical precedent as in: even in ancient Rome soldiers' pay always came first - money was always found. Louis 15th even melted down his Versailles silver/gold to pay his soldiers.
https://en.chateauversailles.fr/news/life-estate/acquisition-silver-jug#the-jug
Could we hear a Republican nominate Donald Trump for speaker on Wednesday?
Trump's influence seems to be fading fast. He served his purpose now his former fans seem to be running away.
'Sorta' because not all departments get shut down - although the military* definitely is.
There is a priority list. Things were the laws says things like "money shall be sent to..." are at the top. Social Security and such. National parks get closed in a hurry except for the absolutely minimum needed to keep things from falling down. With all kinds of things in the middle of the list. If you have a contract to mow the grass around a federal building, plan to not mow for a while.
The military gets odd. They don't send the troops home. But any discretionary spending goes away. Now define the term.
Where "congress" must pass a "budget" to allow for yearly Federal spending & - of course the "Welfare Queen" spending to all the "red" states that hate the Feds?
Congress passed a bill just before Christmas that funds the Federal Government through September 30th, 2023.
I wonder if smoked flounder would make a base for a variation on Cullen Skink?
People did die, but it's interesting.
Another food flood.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
Wimp. Try channeling your internal hunter-gatherer. What's wrong with a few worms? They aren't parasitic in us. Now, raw pork I will give you.
It does occur to me that, in chasing a bad joke about poor politics, I inadvertently insulted a noble group of fishes, and not even for the halibut. My apologies to them.
Swiped from Talking Points Memo. Posting this to help non-Americans figure out what's going on:
"As we noted earlier, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) almost missed his vote in the seventh round. He didn’t respond when the clerk called his name in the first round or during the second-chance round at the end. I was telling my colleague Emine Yücel that maybe, just maybe, this was a sign that there was some movement happening on the hardliner side of things. Or that at the very least the stonewalling charade had grown stale.
"But alas, when the clerk gave the tardy/absent guys one last chance to submit a vote, Perry power walked up to the well and submitted his voted for Donalds.
"As Emine just noted, Perry was actually late because he was doing a Fox News interview. Art imitates life or whatever, but the bare-faced intentions embedded in that moment are too good not to hammer home. As Matt Gaetz illustrated with his unserious vote for Donald Trump, it’s been clear for some time that this dumpster fire is not about any one person, it’s all about the MAGA wing of the party flexing its power over the establishment. And doing it loud enough to rake in the Fox News hits."
Thanks!
Just read this article via a news summary email I get.
My main take-aways:
There have been eight previous instances where it took longer to elect a speaker.
The more 'elections' the more divided the parties, i.e., emergence of brainless/mindless blocs usu. ultra pro-slavery.
The secret ballot has been used in the past!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kevin-mccarthy-house-speaker-multiple-ballots-history/
Could we hear a Republican nominate Donald Trump for speaker on Wednesday?
Doesn't the English parliament have some ritual of dragging someone in and forcing them to serve? Speaker?
It would be kind of amusing to see the US do their equivalent, involving secret police kidnapping the newly elected speaker and physically dragging them in and locking them to the chair.
The speaker position is almost exactly the opposite of what Trump does, though. It's all about reading the room and committing the minimum intervention to keep things on track.
A US leftish take on this lunacy - yes it's "TAP" again.
Worth the read - The revolution eats its own - as it did in July 1934, of course.
The budget was passed the end of the year, before Congress recessed.
Robert Prior @ 1857:
But would it change the results, or would it just lead to some convictions but leave the speaker unchanged?
There seems to be precedent that elections can be changed by extra-legal actions, and the results aren't overturned.
Maybe I'm asking a political question?
If 39 Democrats were waylaid to keep them out of the House Chamber it would change the balance (or a certain 20 "Rs" - but it wouldn't be them because Democrat Hakeem Jeffries would then have a majority) - and I think the vote could stand IF the vote was taken under those circumstances ... however, I don't think the vote would be taken if it were known members of Congress were kidnapped to prevent them attending to cast their votes.
There does seem to be a precedent for some people taking extra-legal action ATTEMPTING to overturn elections, but I'm not aware of any successful "overturning".
THEY only managed to delay Congress doing its formal duty on Jan 6, 2021, but Congress came back the same day and certified the election results.
AlanD2 @ 1859:
HINT: Buy popcorn stock. The House Speaker vote continues tomorrow and every day for the foreseeable future...
By the way, if the GOP can't elect a Speaker, how in h--- do they expect to help run this country? [/sarcasm] :-)
The twenty shithead "Rs" don't want to RUN the country, they want to RUIN it ... or at least RUIN the part of it that is the Federal Government. Even shrinking it down to where it can be "drowned in a bathtub" will not be enough to satisfy them.
They are power grabbing, money grubbing, ANARCHIC SHITHEAD NIHILISTS
AlanD2 @ 1861:
The 117th U.S. Congress (which just ended), Democrats had a knife-edge margin in the Senate, which allowed Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema to wreak havoc.
In the new 118th Congress, the Republican's knife-edge margin in the House will allow the Republican extremists (M. Greene, et al.) to do the same. I can almost feel sorry for whomever winds up in the Speaker's chair
It's gonna be an "Rs", so if he, she, it wants sympathy they can look in the Dictionary between Shit & Syphilis.
There does seem to be a precedent for some people taking extra-legal action ATTEMPTING to overturn elections
Brooks Brothers Riot?
Heteromeles @ 1870:
RE: Speaker of the US house.
I nominate the Econlockhatchee River in Florida, who was granted legal rights in 2020...( https://aldf.org/article/legal-rights-recognized-for-rivers-in-florida-and-quebec/ ). At least they'll always go with the flow. Presumably the Americans with Disabilities Act will provide accommodations for the river in chamber?*
*Yes, I realize no river has yet been granted legal or corporate personhood. Yet...
Speaking of "personhooditude", where was newly elected, but not yet sworn in Congress-Critter George Santos BORN? Has anyone seen his OFFICIAL long-form birth certificate yet?
Greg Tingey @ 1874:
John S
The twenty or so "Rs" rebelling against McCarthy's bid to become Speaker don't want to govern, they just want to abolish the Federal Government. - Um, err ... Is that not TREASON? - Difficult to prove, though.
* concessions ... essentially promising the "Rs" will give up asshole partisan investigations & extreme anti-abortion/anti-gay marriage legislation* ... Oh yeah, really? Somehow, I think not, the fascists have got the bit between their teeth. See also, the next line ...
And if he DID offer concessions and the Democrats DID help him get elected Speaker, what guarantee do they have he'd keep his promises? - ZERO, as AlanD2 has noted.
It's not treason under U.S. law. The narrow definition included in the Constitution was further narrowed by an early Supreme Court decision. That's why the January 6 Proud Bois ass-clowns were not charged with Treason, only with Seditious Conspiracy.
Another take on this:
The fascists want to destroy the US Federal guvmint, right?
Didn't they try this about 2012(ish)? by refusing to vote a budget/credit limit?
And, after about 2 months didn't they give up, after crowing about how they'd shown that they "Didn't need the Fed's teat & money-shower" ... but it turned out they, & more importantly, their voters, did need it?
And now they want to repeat this grim farce - it failed totally, last time, so we're going to do it again ....
SS,DD - Same Shitheads, Different Day.
I don't believe they've learned anything from their prior failures.
JReynolds @ 1876:
JohnS:
Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it. Have $10M? You have the money. Have $1B? The money has you.
When the payout goes that high EVERYONE buys a lottery ticket. So my ODDS of winning actually decrease.
But, should the most absurd outcome actually happen ... well, I have a plan.
1. Don't tell anyone - take the payout as an annuity
2. Hire a really good tax accountant to keep an eye on the money
3. Hire a really good lawyer to keep an eye on the tax accountant
4. Hire another really good accountant to keep an eye on the lawyer
5. Get a new roof put on my house
6. Make some large anonymouse donations to several charities (Habitat, Nature Conservancy, Foodbanks ...) to bring the amount I have left over down into the "You have the money" range.
Granted, you could underwrite a great TV series of the Laundry Files. Get OGH on as a creative consultant for some absurd salary.
Probably not because I don't know shit about underwriting TV series & I believe OGH already has a deal going forward and I wouldn't want to get in the way.
"Congress passed a bill just before Christmas that funds the Federal Government through September 30th, 2023."
Yes, but there is a separate law that sets a limit on how much the government can "borrow". When that limit is reached the government cannot "borrow" to fund its expenditures and must therefore stop almost all spending because almost all of it's spending is in "borrowed" money.
"Borrowed" in quotes because the government creates the money it borrows out of nothing, just like all its spending. It is not debt that ever has to be paid back and so is not really the kind of "borrowing" that you and I do.
Hence the "trillion dollar coin" trick.
Alas, the President and Congress do not understand what is actually going on, or if they do they really don't want the rest of their citizens to find out.
Would be a shame if there was no money to pay the salaries of elected members. A real shame.
Actually, that would mostly punish the ones who depend on said salaries, the corrupt ones likely wouldn't even notice.
SFReader @ 1878:
A few questions - mostly to reframe ideological/political posturing into real-world effects/outcomes:
1-who pays the soldier's/sailor's/air force enlisted's/national guard's/FEMA worker's, various federal gov't branch aide's/worker's salary? How many families/households does this represent? How much of the total US economy does this represent? (Rough est. for a first pass approx. 20%, second pass - approx. 30%, - since this is mostly/usually a positive feedback loop collapse likely after about 4 passes.)
The little bit I do know something about:
If the Federal Government defaults/shuts down, all Military pay STOPS. Taking ALL the service members AND their immediate families (Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, Brothers, CHILDREN) amounts to approximately 1.5% of the U.S. population.
Knock-on effects will be food not bought, rent not paid, mortgage payments not made, automobiles ...
Also Social Security, Railroad retirement, Military Retired Pay & Medicare will stop.
National Parks close ... the FAA shuts down the national airways system ... Federal Reserve & FDIC will shut down. I expect it to precipitate a run on the banks if it's prolonged.
It's going to be worse than the stock market crash of 1929 and there will probably be a prolonged DEPRESSION to follow.
Plus international trade will likely grind to a hault, so the DEPRESSION will probably be world-wide.
Probably won't hurt Putin or Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-un all that much.
Greg Tingey @ 1887:
Isn't there a US equivalent of The Parliament Act, here?
No.
Rocketpjs @ 1888:
Context = US
I suppose one could be optimistic about the current flustercluck, and hope that the GOP takes the opportunity to kick the fringe maniacs out of the party. Most of them would fizzle out quickly without party support, and those that did not would become marginal at best.
If the frothing media started to ignore them it would help as well.
I am not optimistic however, so instead I think they will bow to whatever their idiotic demands might be, and the world will suffer.
According to the latest reports I've read in the frothing media, McCarthy HAS acceded to ALL of their idiotic demands and it wasn't enough to satisfy them.
I thought their demand was "we don't want a government"? Or is it "we don't want this government?"
(Shades of Marx "we don't want any government that expects us to be a part of it")
According to the latest reports I've read in the frothing media, McCarthy HAS acceded to ALL of their idiotic demands and it wasn't enough to satisfy them.
Possibly unjustly, I get vibes of the Queen and Lord Melchett in the Elizabethan Blackadder series, giggling to themselves as they dream up ever more ridiculous hoops for Blackadder to jump through…
Don't tell anyone
A condition of wining the lottery once the amount gets to where the seller can't pay you is that they can publicize you accepting the big check.
Would be a shame if there was no money to pay the salaries of elected members. A real shame.
Actually staff can't be paid on if this goes past January 14th. And some may be out of work after that. Which leads to all kinds of headaches due to the way the US health care system, retirement benefits, etc... And the Reps themselves are not yet Congress critters so they don't yet have a paycheck to miss. There are a few of the ones without a big bank account who were talking about couch surfing until they got their first paycheck.
Oops.
Also, apparently, security clearances are going to be revoked (by statute) as folks "loose" their job and the Reps are not sworn in.
There are going to be some bitter memories for a long time.
Speaking of "personhooditude", where was newly elected, but not yet sworn in Congress-Critter George Santos BORN? Has anyone seen his OFFICIAL long-form birth certificate yet?
Interesting you should bring that up. Last night I saw an article (NY Times???) wherein reporters had tried to figure out who determines whether candidates are eligible per the Constitution for whatever office they're running for. They got a circular referral, so basically no one officially checks and a dog could run for Speaker--or Congresscritter--at the moment.
I've a sneaking suspicion that will change, no matter who the speaker is this time.
Speaking of the conversation around treason and sedition, it will be quite interesting if that $700k he allegedly loaned his campaign committee came from someone like Putin.
If anyone cares about what the democratic Congressional coalition is officially doing and thinking, check out: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/05/democrats-speaker-house-00076643
tl;dr: They're eating schadenfreude pie (perhaps this recipe), but not negotiating a bipartisan coalition yet. Officially, many of them are saying that the Republicans have to figure out who they are as a party and do the jobs they're going to be paid to do, before they can start working together. Given what's causing the split, I kind of agree that inviting the wererats to swim over from the flooded bilge they're currently floundering in, so that they can be rescued in the democrats' boat, might not be very wise.
John S
National Parks close ... the FAA shuts down the national airways system ... Federal Reserve & FDIC will shut down. I expect it to precipitate a run on the banks if it's prolonged.
- Last time ... didn't the FAA keep going, with donations from friends & helpers to the staff so they could eat? No guarantee that will happen this time, though. And, no airlines flying in or over the USA - I believe the phrase: "monumental fuck-up" applies - as it does to all of this, of course.
... and ...
David L
apparently, security clearances are going to be revoked (by statute) as folks "loose" their job and the Reps are not sworn in. - which will REALLY screw things over, because, last time, there was a "house" - just no budget. This is worse, yes?
Groan. If you were referring to the holdouts by the worm, I think that you were maligning nematodes ....
Mostly true. In a USAian context, seven states allow winners to maintain their anonymity. A quick Google search suggests that nowhere in Canada can you be anonymous.
Before you claim your winnings, change all of your contact information. Assemble your financial team. Collect. Then go on a vacation - don't make any hasty decisions.
You're probably going to have to move. Depending on the quality of your friends and relations, you might have to go LC / NC1 with a lot of them, because all-too-many of them will perpetually have their hands out.
The bad comes with the good.
~oOo~
1 Low Contact / No Contact
"When the payout goes that high EVERYONE buys a lottery ticket. So my ODDS of winning actually decrease."
They don't - since there's no guarantee of a winner and the length of number you need to match remains the same, the odds don't change.
Vote 11, and counting... ;-)
Troutwaxer @1855:
Ideology and religion both get into "This is how we live," but come at it from different directions. Ideology generally disdains the mystical, while religion welcomes it.
I propose a fairly simple heuristic for considering & discussing religion:
Spirituality is to religion as sex is to marriage.
I find that this analogy holds up in many respects. I'll enumerate some of those if somebody wants, but it's probably more helpful, and more rhetorically impactful, to leave it as an exercise. :-)
Spirituality is to religion as sex is to marriage. I find that this analogy holds up in many respects. I'll enumerate some of those if somebody wants, but it's probably more helpful, and more rhetorically impactful, to leave it as an exercise.
Speaking as one who'd currently be classified as "spiritual but not religious," that doesn't hold up usefully.
A potentially more useful analogy is that if religion is about which computer system(s) you use, spirituality is about computer programming.
When you say "spirituality" do you mean spiritual or mystical experiences, or are you talking about something else?
"Spirtuality" = 99% empty woo. "Religion" = 100% empty woo + other drawbacks ....
Ms Boebert has argued that the chaos is actually good news for the American taxpayer because it means the House cannot approve the award of additional military aid to Ukraine. - thus giving aid & comfort to the USA's enemies?
Groan. If you were referring to the holdouts by the worm, I think that you were maligning nematodes ....
Oh, that's a good point. Thanks for catching that.
I must apologize to the nematodes too.
Also, prostitutes are upset at being compared to Marjorie Taylor Green.
Y'know, from comments here, I think there's be a way to resolve all this: 14 Jan comes... and all US airports shut down as air traffic control, not paid, walks out.
Wanna see how fast the psychos get told where the door it?
Isn't it only the House staffers that won't get paid on Jan 14th? I think the rest of the government will continue to function till the end of September, due to the existing (passed & signed) budget bill.
David L @ 1923:
A condition of wining the lottery once the amount gets to where the seller can't pay you is that they can publicize you accepting the big check.
True to an extent about the original lottery rules, but there have been some incidents where winners were publicized & subsequently attacked, so there have been some changes to disclosure rules to PROTECT winners. Not great publicity for the lottery if the winners inevitably get robbed & murdered.
Plus, since "MegaMillions" and "Power Ball" are both multi-state lotteries, who says I have to redeem a winning ticket here in North Carolina?
AND since AFAIK, the jackpot has not yet crossed my $1Billion minimum threshold for buying a ticket it's not something I need to worry about today ... and probably won't need to worry about even if it does get to the level where I do buy a ticket, the odds being what they are.
IF by some miraculous stroke of fate I DID win, I could let the government take their taxes and give ALL the rest of it away (after getting my roof repaired) and I'd still have my retired pay from the Army & Social Security and still be better off 'cause the roof wouldn't leak any more.
Heteromeles @ 1925:
Interesting you should bring that up. Last night I saw an article (NY Times???) wherein reporters had tried to figure out who determines whether candidates are eligible per the Constitution for whatever office they're running for. They got a circular referral, so basically no one officially checks and a dog could run for Speaker--or Congresscritter--at the moment.
I've a sneaking suspicion that will change, no matter who the speaker is this time.
Speaking of the conversation around treason and sedition, it will be quite interesting if that $700k he allegedly loaned his campaign committee came from someone like Putin.
Considering all the other lies on his resume AND he was defrauding merchants in Brazil as recently as two year ago (?) using a stolen checkbook, I was just wondering if he actually met the "been seven Years a Citizen of the United States" requirement? Did he lie about that too?
Plus the schadenfreude if it turns out HE not only committed voter fraud, but election fraud on top of all the other frauds ...
Considering all the other lies on his resume AND he was defrauding merchants in Brazil as recently as two year ago (?) using a stolen checkbook, I was just wondering if he actually met the "been seven Years a Citizen of the United States" requirement? Did he lie about that too? Plus the schadenfreude if it turns out HE not only committed voter fraud, but election fraud on top of all the other frauds ...
Possibly he's demonstrating the pathology in being a pathological liar? He's scarcely the first politician to lie his way to the top. His problem is, he made it far enough to be visible, while not making it far enough to be untouchable. I suspect he's too much of a lightweight to make a crater when he falls, but I could be wrong.
One good thing Santos did for the Democrats (hopefully!) is it showed that they've got a broken campaign funds allocation system. Okay, this isn't news to anyone who's watched most of their presidential campaigns in the last 40 years. But the democrat running against Santos should have had enough money to do the opposition research on him (or even read the local paper that was screaming about Santos for months...) and used the mess of Santos' life to win the race. Not doing that was a totally preventable failure by the people handling campaign financing. Whether they realize this for 2024? Hard call. They didn't learn enough from Gore's failure to prevent Clinton from failing in 2016, after all.
Greg Tingey @ 1927:
John S
Last time ... didn't the FAA keep going, with donations from friends & helpers to the staff so they could eat? No guarantee that will happen this time, though. And, no airlines flying in or over the USA - I believe the phrase: "monumental fuck-up" applies - as it does to all of this, of course.
"Last time"(IIRC) the government shut down was because the House (under Gingrinch?) wouldn't pass the appropriations bills to keep the government operating in a new fiscal year - shutdown happened at the beginning of October.
The government had some unspent money left from the previous fiscal year (which technically should have reverted to the Treasury Dept at the end of September) that they were able to shift around to keep things like the FAA operating - but they were already beginning furloughs.
The military generally gets paid twice a month - 15th & last day of the month. So mil pay was not affected. They got paid 30 Sep and the shutdown ended before 15 Oct.
Social Security is paid out on "Wednesday" - depending on factors I don't remember, it's either the 1st, 2nd or 3rd Wednesday. I THINK 1st & 2nd Wednesday retirees had their payments delayed (don't know for sure because I wasn't drawing Social Security at the time).
My Army Retired Pay used to come on the 1st of the Month, but it was changed to the last day of the month (with that 1 Oct payment moved up to 30 Sep that year). Come to think of it, when I was on Active Duty we were paid 1st & 15th and I think the change to 15th and Last came that same year. The administration made sure to pay the military one last time before the shutdown began.
I don't know if they did the same thing for Civil Service employees or if they're still paid on 1st & 15th.
Although Congress flirted with the debt ceiling thingy a couple of times recently they always came through at the last minute with some kind of continuing resolution (SHORT short-term fix).
That debt ceiling thingy is CRAP, a fuckin LIE anyway. It's an artificial limit the "Rs" enacted1 to hamper Democratic administrations that has come back and bit them on the "arse" several times during "Rs" administrations.
Congress should just do away with it.
1 ... during the Truman administration IIRC, and the first time it bit them on the "arse" was during Eisenhower's term.
Troutwaxer @ 1934:
When you say "spirituality" do you mean spiritual or mystical experiences, or are you talking about something else?
This is of course the key question. I didn't clarify the purpose or context of the analogy, and the concepts are slippery. My apologies.
The key purpose of this analogy is to make religion somewhat less inscrutable, and to argue against the casual conflation of religion, as a social construct, with primary spiritual or mystical experience. Sex and marriage are, I think, more easily grasped concepts. Describing common patterns and behaviors in spirituality vs. religion might be helpful.
For this analogy, I'm sticking with the externally observable aspects of spirituality, and avoiding inquiry into possible causes (medical, psychological, pharmacological, etc). I make no assertions about the possible objective reality of the spiritual. So, "spirituality" here is:
Definitely spiritual or mystical experiences. Primal and personal. Often ecstatic.
Not everybody has these experiences. However, spiritual & mystical visions recur consistently in reported human history.
To some extent they can be induced by intent or circumstance, but sometimes they seem to be spontaneous.
When the spiritual experience is impressive enough, to enough people, and is boosted by effective rhetoric, then religions tend to develop.
A religion often gets its impetus from the revelatory experience of a single prophetic figure, or a few such. Sometimes, it apparently gets that force from a more general climate of belief in the sacred (e.g. Bronze Age beliefs). Either way, religion is a collective response that systematizes the spiritual, and that channels that systematic thought and reason into a common set of stories about the universe.
It's also important to acknowledge that spirituality, in raw personal form, is often veridical -- the experience carries an inherent conviction of truth. It can be disruptive to religious consensus and social order. Religions don't just systematize the spiritual; they tame the spiritual by hedging it about with preconceptions, interpretations, and codified scriptural authority.
Religions also, more or less inevitably, seem to converge on prescriptions for individual behavior. These behavioral dicta are assigned a supernatural authority that people fear to challenge. Religion often supports secular authority, and is often granted secular status, secular powers, in return.
This makes for a reasonably stable system. It's certainly a recurring pattern in history.
In this analogy, the parallels with sex and marriage are not too hard to see.
Sex, like spirituality as narrowly defined above, is personal, primal, and sometimes ecstatic.
Sex, like spirituality, tends to trigger a threat response in society. This seems to be irreducible in human communities: there will always be a (pardon the expression) fuckload of people who want to control the sexual behavior of others. It's probably partly instinctual, and partly an emergent aspect of social organization (and likely grounded in spiteful envy); but it almost always manifests as some form of socially approved marriage.
Like religion taming spiritual experience, marriage tames sex. It provides a sanctioned channel for sexual expression, while characteristically discouraging other sexual behavior. Even more than religion, marriage falls under secular authority.
The analogy can be extended in practical directions.
Just as there are sexless marriages and sex outside of marriage, there are plenty of religions that don't seem to traffic in the spiritual, and spiritual experiences that occur outside the boundaries of established religion.
Sex and spirituality are both disruptive, and neither of them seems to be going away. They are imperfectly controlled by the social mechanisms that emerge to govern them.
Also, Heteromeles @ 1933:
Speaking as one who'd currently be classified as "spiritual but not religious," that doesn't hold up usefully.
I think I agree with you that this isn't helpful for what I'd infer your purpose to be. After all, "spiritual but not religious" is, in terms of the analogy, pretty much equivalent to "unmarried but still having an active sex life", which is not exactly an obscure concept.
The fault is mine. I hope the explanation of purpose and context in this reply helps amend that.
The key purpose of this analogy is to make religion somewhat less inscrutable, and to argue against the casual conflation of religion, as a social construct, with primary spiritual or mystical experience. Sex and marriage are, I think, more easily grasped concepts. Describing common patterns and behaviors in spirituality vs. religion might be helpful.
Yeah...A few points.
One is that religion as a word works best when it covers a system that teaches people how to live a good and proper life. For example, one can be Jewish without believing in the physical existence of Yahweh, and without preparing for an afterlife.
More generally, religion is a really problematic word, because it's rooted primarily in a Christian worldview that says the only reason to be a Christian is so that after Armageddon you can be immortal (retconned to your soul going to heaven after you die). That's not the norm for most of the world's religions, so far as I can tell.*
Spirituality literally isn't for everybody, any more than gymnastics is. In theory, anyone can be a gymnast, but in practice most people can't do much beyond a somersault and (hopefully) learn to fall properly as they age. Some people need to practice spirituality to be whole (I'm one of them) and many people do not. That's just part of human diversity. Most great religions have a place for spiritual practice, but at the same time, most religious people won't become spiritually advanced, and many (most?) won't do any more than attempt the basics, if that.
That's where the metaphor of sex and marriage breaks down. Far more people are sexual than are spiritual. While companionate, non-sexual marriages certainly exist, the idea that religion legitimates spirituality the same way that marriage legitimates sexuality, doesn't really describe how most religions treat truly spiritual people, or how many people practice spirituality.
My experience is that spirituality is more like computer programming, in that you spend an inordinate amount of time debugging, and some of your time having experiences and doing things that ordinary people don't want to deal with. That's why I compared spirituality to computer programming. In my view, religion is more akin to whether you're a strong partisan of Apple, Windows, Linux, or whatever the chosen information-processing ecosystem happens to be.
*I'm counting religion as systems studied by scholars of religion, and there are thousands of these. By numbers of people who say they follow a religion, Christianity and Islam are the biggest.
JReynolds @ 1929:
Mostly true. In a USAian context, seven states allow winners to maintain their anonymity. A quick Google search suggests that nowhere in Canada can you be anonymous.
Before you claim your winnings, change all of your contact information. Assemble your financial team. Collect. Then go on a vacation - don't make any hasty decisions.
You're probably going to have to move. Depending on the quality of your friends and relations, you might have to go LC / NC1 with a lot of them, because all-too-many of them will perpetually have their hands out.
The bad comes with the good.
~oOo~
1 Low Contact / No Contact
I'm pretty sure I can do that if I have to, but buying a ticket if the jackpot goes over a Billion Dollars is just to amuse myself. I don't expect to win. If I had any delusions I was going to win the lottery I'd be buying tickets every week ...
IF I do win, I'll deal with it, but I don't really expect it to become a problem. But think of this as entertainment ... a week's amusement for the cost of a movie ticket ... and the lottery ticket stub is bigger than the movie ticket stub, plus THEY don't tear it in half before you can play.
Justin Jordan @ 1930:
They don't - since there's no guarantee of a winner and the length of number you need to match remains the same, the odds don't change.
I'm pretty sure they do. IF you guess the winning combination of numbers, your chances of winning is 1 out of X number of lottery tickets sold ... if X increases, your chance of winning goes down. If they sell additional millions of tickets, your chance of having the winning ticket goes down; e.g. 1/1,000,000 is less than 1/1,000
But bottom line, I don't care if the odds go up, down or sideways ... I'm buying a ticket to amuse myself.
Hell, look at all the entertainment I've gotten from it so far & the jackpot hasn't even reached the threshold where I'd actually buy a ticket yet.
Winning is a problem I'll deal with if I have to ... but I don't expect to have to do that.
Greg Tingey @ 1936:
Ms Boebert has argued that the chaos is actually good news for the American taxpayer because it means the House cannot approve the award of additional military aid to Ukraine. - thus giving aid & comfort to the USA's enemies?
Still doesn't count.
This was decided by the Supreme Court of the U.S. (henceforth SCOTUS) back while Thomas Jefferson was President.
"Enemies" only applies to countries we are actually in a declared war against. Selling the U.S. out to the Russians will only be treason IF it happens after Congress declares war on Russia.
That also applies to "Levying War against these United States". You have to actually fight against the U.S. Army (Navy, Marines, Air Farce, ...) in a military confrontation (which does not require a DECLARED war).
Fewer than 50 people have been prosecuted for treason by the U.S. and fewer still were convicted and most of those served prison sentences and were later pardoned or had their sentences commuted.
Some prior research I did on the subject - WHY Treason is such a rare crime in the U.S.:
Researching the subject, I can only come up with thirty-one instances in which someone has been charged with Treason against the United States in the two and a quarter centuries since the ratification of the Constitution. In the case of the eight "conspirators" convicted in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, I'm not sure if they were charged with Treason or not even though their trials are frequently cited examples. The specification includes "traitorously conspiring", but never explicitly states a charge of Treason.
Of those thirty-one cases where persons were charged with Treason - one person was acquitted, four persons had their charges dropped, two persons charged in absentia during WWII died before they could be taken into custody & stand trial and one person was committed to a mental institution as unfit to stand trial. The charges against that person just faded away before he could be determined to be fit to stand trial & he was eventually released from institutionalization.
That leaves twenty-three persons convicted of Treason (including the eight "conspirators" in the Lincoln assassination that I'm not absolutely sure were charged with Treason). Three of those convicted had their charges and/or convictions overturned by the U.S. Supreme court - two on the basis that "levying war" does not mean "conspiracy to levy war", there must be an actual overt act of war and one on the basis that "adhering to ... enemies, giving them aid and Comfort" must have two witnesses to an OVERT act, just talking to an enemy of the United States is not enough, the court must prove that you knew they were an enemy, that you talked to them about providing "aid and comfort" and there have to be two witnesses to that overt act1.
Eight of the persons who were convicted of Treason were pardoned by U.S. Presidents - two by George Washington, four by Andrew Johnson (Lincoln "conspirators"), one by John F. Kennedy and one by Gerald R. Ford. Seven persons served out their sentences (including one person whose death sentence was commuted to life in prison), three of that seven were subsequently deported.
Only five persons have been "convicted" of Treason and executed. All during the War of the Rebellion (aka American Civil War), and all were "convicted" by military tribunals. The U.S. has not executed anyone for Treason since 1865. Since those tribunals, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision, Ex parte Milligan, declaring the trial of civilians before military tribunals to be unconstitutional if civilian courts are still open.
1 In that case, the accused confessed to treason, but his conviction was overturned by SCOTUS because the prosecution could not produce two witnesses against him. His confession was the only evidence & was not sufficient for the Constitutional requirement.
Looks like the "Illegitimi" might "carborundum" THEM after all, IYKWIM
Only seven "Rs" never kevins voted against him on the 13th ballot. I wonder if this might go the whole 15 rounds & ends with a "split decision"
OTOH ...
Washington Post (via Webpage Archive): How Democrats could exploit the McCarthy situation
US Government Spending.
Without getting too deep in the weeds Congress passes a budget. But this doesn't have a lot of deatils. To actually spend money they have to pass appropriations bills. These appropriations actually tell specific agencies where to spend specific amounts of money.
This passed as a messy (seems normal now) process at the end of last year. It covered spending through September of 2023. (Fiscal years and all that.)
Where the problem comes in is we (the US) spends more than we take in in
revenuetaxes. So the government borrows. Due to a clause in the Constitution Congress must approve the max limit on the credit card. (This used to work differently but this is how it works now.) These limits bumps are a great way for people who believe we spend to much to throw hissy fits and try and attach all kinds of trinkets on the bill to raise the limit. And typically with things the way they are the R's will need the help of the D's to pass this bump. And when it looks like the limit might run out the Treasury in coordination with various federal other agencies starts cutting back and playing accounting tricks to delay the day they will hit the limit.THIS is what must be done soon. Bump the limit on the credit card.
And why electing a speaker is such a big deal. The hold outs want the ability to call for a motion to vacate the chair by only 1 person. Which ties things up with time and could require D's to vote for the current at the time R speaker just to keep us from going to to where we are now.
Simple? Right?
Can the Democrats un-elect a speaker later on?
If not, what's stopping yet another round of Republicans taking the concessions up front then doing whatever they want?
At the very least, making any kind of deal with them now when the payoff comes later would require some kind of commitment now. Which is where I keep thinking... it doesn't have to be a republican. Does it even have to be a US citizen? Could they draft someone like a former UN chief or ... I dunno, I was going to ask "is there anyone outside the US that moderate republicans respect" and then I thought "
outside the US" and ???Can the Democrats un-elect a speaker later on?
Sure. Well not by themselves. A D can call for a motion to vacate the chair then everyone gets to vote. But an unwritten rule in the US House is don't call a vote you can't win unless you're making a statement. And D's want to look like they can govern so such theater from them is not likely.
So there's no confidence vote where the speaker needs to demonstrate that they have the support of a majority? Instead of needing a majority to install the speaker, they'd need a majority to eject it?
Context: U.S. House
McCarthy lost the 14th vote for House Speaker by one vote during the 10 pm ET session of the House. But it looks like he cut a deal on the House floor to switch one Republican vote, so I guess - barring a surprise - we will finally have a Speaker after the 15th vote. Sigh...
So there's no confidence vote where the speaker needs to demonstrate that they have the support of a majority? Instead of needing a majority to install the speaker, they'd need a majority to eject it?
Same result. If some calls for a motion to vacate, they hold a vote and he either holds the chair or not. Typically the "other" party all votes to vacate or just doesn't vote. It basically is a confidence vote. Boehner and Ryan stepped down based on the threat of a motion.
Admin Question
I bounce around various ISPs as I visit customers and friends. I've noticed that it seems that this blog page loading goes into molasses mode when I'm on an AT&T Fiber connection. All other ISP speeds seem fine.
Anyone else in the US see this?
Admin Question
Is it just for this page or the whole site? When pages on this site get close to 2000, they generally get slower.
RE: US Congress.
Well, Kevin "Special K" McCarthy is now the speaker of the House
yay.Purportedly, he got the job by basically letting the Freedom Caucus run the place while agreeing to be their sock puppet, so we'll get debt shenanigans, show trials, and probably a Biden impeachment for extra noise.
Hopefully, the Secret Service will protect Biden and Harris.
On the "bright" side, some, perhaps a bunch, of the people causing trouble were quite active on Trump's side in 2021. Thus, it's theoretically possible that they'll become people of conviction, unable to vote before 2024. And there's George Santos.
Anyway, the Republicans currently have an eight-seat majority in the House. So far I count Perry, Gohmert, Gaetz, Biggs, Greene, Brooks, and Jordan as potentially in legal peril with respect to January 6, while Santos has his own problems. That's seven right there.
What I do expect is for these slimers to try cause as much distraction as possible, especially if they get into legal trouble. If they stop being present to vote due to legal troubles...well, they've set it up so that a vote to change speakers can be arranged by a single Congresscritter. Shame if any democrat happened to pull that on them.
Happy weekend regardless.
what's stopping yet another round of Republicans taking the concessions up front then doing whatever they want?
In other words, behaving like Republicans? :-/
I saw a commentary (can't remember where) that pointed out that the so-called "Freedom Caucus" is treating the Republican Party like the Republican Party has been treating the government since the days of Gingrich. In other words shifting the goalposts and being willing to burn everything down rather than negotiate.
AlanD2
As already noted { #1958 } - we have a result, but:
Quoting from the "Grauniad" on the Israeli election & aftermath ....
Netanyahu had made too many concessions to his far-right and ultra-Orthodox allies. But, he wrote: “That ship, voters and lovers of Israel, has sailed.
As above, so below ...
One assumes, per AlanD2 again, that K McC has - effectively - conceded all control to the fascist crazies, which means no actual government will get done between now & 2024?
Rbt Prior @ 1959
{Edited} The way the Republican Party has been treating the government, & now the rest of the Republicans, since the days of Gingrich. In other words shifting the goalposts and being willing to burn everything down rather than negotiate.
There's a horrible, really nasty previous example of this, actually.
Berlin late Jan early Feb 1933. Adolf's lot were, IIRC, the largest party, but could not govern on their own ...
So, Adolf held out for the Chancellor's post ... & got it. It then took him another 16-17 months to actually consolidate power, after which { Night of the Long Knives" } it was game over & the crazies had won.
Um.
JReynolds @ 1929: [On winning the lottery] Depending on the quality of your friends and relations, you might have to [drop] a lot of them, because all-too-many of them will perpetually have their hands out.
A recent article in The Guardian discussed this:
I'm fond of saying that money is like Vitamin A: everyone needs some, but too much can be as toxic as too little.
The debt limit is not derived from the constitution in any way, shape or form. It's simply a law. It is in fact pretty blatantly unconstitutional given that it questions the validity of US debts.. which is expressly forbidden.
So, Kevin McCarthy has effectively given the far right a veto over everything to pass through the US House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the Democrats have been laughing their butts off, while pointing at the disarray of the Republicans.
My question is this: Why didn't the Democrats step in and make a deal with Kevin McCarthy to give them influence rather than the far right?
Is it just for this page or the whole site? When pages on this site get close to 2000, they generally get slower.
Everything. I'm used to the big threads getting slower. But this is like switching back to DSL at 3Mbps or slower.
This particular thread can take 5, maybe 10, seconds to load after a comment on Spectrum (coax cable 400/20) or Google Fiber (1000/1000) or even on an enterprise 200/200 setup. When I'm on an AT&T Fiber connection it can take 20 to 30 seconds. Maybe more. I just walk away and do something else.
I've seen this site get slow like this before but I never connected it to AT&T Fiber until the last few days.
Why didn't the Democrats step in and make a deal with Kevin McCarthy to give them influence rather than the far right?
I'm guessing because they didn't trust him to keep to the terms of a deal.
The debt limit is not derived from the constitution in any way, shape or form. It's simply a law.
The constitution says Congress must approve all debts. Up till 1917 they actually wrote individual bond issuance into laws. With the borrowing needed for WWI that was getting messy so, YES THEY WROTE A LAW. That said the Treasury could issue bonds up to $x amount. And periodically they bump that $x amount. But that law and it's descendants, is required by the constitution. Now they could write a law that says the Treasury can borrow "as needed without limit" but that's just not going to happen.
"My question is this: Why didn't the Democrats step in and make a deal with Kevin McCarthy to give them influence rather than the far right?"
Because Kevin McCarthy isn't "not crazy" he's "a little less crazy" and also isn't someone who will (or can, due to the farthest-right crazies) keep his promises.
I've noticed the slowness too, but I'm not moving around. While I'm a moderator, I'm not technically sophisticated. My diagnosis was VPN problems (mine generally ports out of the Bay Area, which just got something like 7" of rain, so I bet on technical difficulties), plus a bunch of snow storms and stuff between here and the UK, plus Brexit sequelae.
Hopefully we'll hear from others who have a better notion of what's going on.
David L
IIRC, what they could do { And has been suggested } is to set a "limit" that is several orders of magnitude { Say 1010 or 10100 } larger than whatever the current limit is - which should make the problem go away for at least the next 50 years (?)
One assumes, per AlanD2 again, that K McC has - effectively - conceded all control to the fascist crazies, which means no actual government will get done between now & 2024?
Pretty good assumption, Greg. We'll likely find out on Monday, when the House votes on its rules for the 188th Congress and McCarthy comes out with Committee assignments.
The major policy disaster now looming is raising the debt ceiling, which will be necessary this summer. If the House refuses to do this, we could face a global recession.
Non Moderator, UK based about 70 miles from OGH's server (based on using the Scott Monument as a repeatable reference in central Edinburgh). Sole user on local wireless network, Virgin (ex Telewest) fibre backbone, and still getting a download time of about 10s for this page at current comment -1.
I'm guessing because they didn't trust him to keep to the terms of a deal.
I'd parse it slightly differently. What I see as the bigger question is "what could never-speaker McCarthy do for the democrats?" Given that he's already demonstrated that he's an authoritarian lickspittle and enabler who's addicted to power and apparently has few qualms about how he gets it... If you're trying to get something done, what is his price and how many votes can he line up to help? Given who he is, can he deliver anything?
Ideally, you want to work with someone who can reliably deliver. As I suspect a lot of us know, being an intermediary between groups that are negotiating is a real pain when you can negotiate but have little power to make decisions. If the Republicans had stayed in disarray, the democrats would have needed to form a coalition with someone who could be trusted to deliver votes when needed.
Anyway, the Republicans in Congress have decided, yet again, that they're the party for enabling authoritarian takeover of the US, so now the rest of us have to deal with that. We're fortunate indeed that our first wannabe emperor was a Trump instead of an Ataturk or Octavian. He was a useful reminder that most authoritarian leaders really aren't very good at running things. We've needed that, just as we need Musk and Zuckerberg to keep up their hemorrhaging as long as possible.
Now they could write a law that says the Treasury can borrow "as needed without limit" but that's just not going to happen.
A little too much freedom, in my opinion. A better fix is Congress passing a law that says the Treasury can borrow just enough to cover the bills coming due from legislation passed by Congress. But as you say, that's just not going to happen, especially with Republicans in charge of the House.
The first thing to consider is whether the House rules will be negotiated with the Republican crazies or the Democrats. A decent set of House rules will do a lot to restrain the crazies.
The second thing to consider is whether McCarthy will betray the crazies. This is not unlikely in one form or another, but the more extreme forms, such as denying any of the crazies a committee assignment, involves considerable political cost to McCarthy. (If I were McCarthy and was using a sane set of House rules I'd fuck the crazies so hard...)
At this point I don't think the Democrats care much, because nobody sane gives a fuck about Hunter Biden's laptop, and half-a-dozen crazy political committees holding crazy hearings about craycray conspiracy theories is likely to give the Democrats political ammunition for years to come.
IIRC, what they could do
They COULD do lots of things. But not enough of THEY want the issue to go away. Too much bleeding red meat to waive on the stump.
The first thing to consider is whether the House rules will be negotiated with the Republican crazies or the Democrats. A decent set of House rules will do a lot to restrain the crazies.
I doubt Democrats will be consulted. McCarthy has sold his soul to the crazies, and the House rules will be his first payment. Weird committee assignments should be his second payment...
Your scenario is definitely most likely, but not by so much that the others are impossible. I suggest this for two reasons: First, that the "sane" Republicans might well dislike the House rules McCarthy has agreed to, and second because if I were McCarthy, I'd be sooooo angry right now...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/how-kevin-mccarthy-got-votes-speaker-haunt-rcna64720
[Right Wing Representatives] Perry and Roy declined to divulge details [of the Speakership deal], but two sources with knowledge of the situation told NBC News that the Freedom Caucus was demanding three seats on the powerful Rules Committee, which controls the bills that make it to the House floor.
“It’s critically important that the Rules Committee reflect the body and reflect the will of the people. And that is a part of this framework,” Roy told reporters Friday. “What we’ve agreed to in framework will need to have accountability. We need to be able to continue to trust that we’re going to be able to execute on what we’ve agreed to in framework.”
David L @ 1950:
[...]
Where the problem comes in is we (the US) spends more than we take in in revenue taxes. So the government borrows. Due to a clause in the Constitution Congress must approve the max limit on the credit card. (This used to work differently but this is how it works now.) These limits bumps are a great way for people who believe we spend to much to throw hissy fits and try and attach all kinds of trinkets on the bill to raise the limit. And typically with things the way they are the R's will need the help of the D's to pass this bump. And when it looks like the limit might run out the Treasury in coordination with various federal other agencies starts cutting back and playing accounting tricks to delay the day they will hit the limit.
It's NOT in the Constitution. In fact, the Constitution gives Congress the power to borrow ONLY so that it can avoid defaulting on the U.S. debt [Federalist #30].
One of the main drivers behind the new Constitution was fear that the U.S. Congress under the Articles of Confederation could default on the government's debts. (Under the Articles the Congress didn't have the power to tax or borrow.)
I thought it had originated in the 1940s as a way for "Rs" to hamper a Democratic administration (Truman's), but looking it up, it appears to have been passed in 1917 in conjunction with issuing War Bonds to finance U.S. involvement in WWI (hampering Wilson instead).
An argument can be made that the debt ceiling itself is UN-Constitutional because it could force a default:
The Constitutional Case for Disarming the Debt Ceiling [The New Republic via Archive.today]
Moz @ 1951:
Can the Democrats un-elect a speaker later on?
If the House adopts a rule that any single House Member can invoke
It's called a "Motion to Vacate" and would depend on how the House Rules are written. What the shitheads are demanding is to make the "Motion to Vacate" a privileged motion; i.e. all other House business would come to a halt and the motion would be debated & voted on right then and there. It takes a simple majority to pass (same as it takes a simple majority to select a Speaker). And the House would then have to elect another speaker before continuing other business.
IF the motion failed, nothing would prevent another shithead from standing up and making another "Motion to Vacate" [rinse & repeat ad infinitum] ... they could tie the House in knots and prevent any legislation they disagreed with by obstructing with repeated motions - a SUPER Tyrrany of the Minority
I expect the "Rs" would TRY to write the rules so only THEY could make such a motion.
If not, what's stopping yet another round of Republicans taking the concessions up front then doing whatever they want?
At the very least, making any kind of deal with them now when the payoff comes later would require some kind of commitment now. Which is where I keep thinking... it doesn't have to be a republican. Does it even have to be a US citizen? Could they draft someone like a former UN chief or ... I dunno, I was going to ask "is there anyone outside the US that moderate republicans respect" and and then I thought "
outside the US" and ???Same thing that stops them from currently sowing chaos in the House, i.e. NOTHING. They LIE and they break promises with impunity. On that level, McCarthy is no better than his opponents.
These guys are even worse than the Tories in the U.K.
Moot now, because the "illegitimi" apparently finally managed to "carborundum" the shitheads in the 15th round.
zumbs @ 1963:
So, Kevin McCarthy has effectively given the far right a veto over everything to pass through the US House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the Democrats have been laughing their butts off, while pointing at the disarray of the Republicans.
My question is this: Why didn't the Democrats step in and make a deal with Kevin McCarthy to give them influence rather than the far right?
Decades of experience with the "Rs" bad faith dealings. No promise McCarthy made to Democrats would be worth the toilet paper it was written on.
We need to be able to continue to trust that we’re going to be able to execute on what we’ve agreed to in framework.”
Viz, 'no-one can or should trust us, but we need assurance that we can trust you'... is this a variation on 'you respect me and I'll respect you'?
(FWIW page loads in~7 seconds for me, on a technically-broadband shitty laptop in Australia (25/4 with ~20ms ping on the Nearly Broadband Network))
For some reason, the song 16 Tons popped up in my mind today. Its lyrics seem to be highly relevant to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's situation with regard to his crazy caucus.
You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
Kevin McCarthy's sold his soul, and he's going to be spending a lot of days over the next two years (assuming, of course, that he lasts that long) loading sixteen tons...
AlanD2 @ 1970:
Pretty good assumption, Greg. We'll likely find out on Monday, when the House votes on its rules for the 188th Congress and McCarthy comes out with Committee assignments.
To the best of my knowledge they're only allowed to write the rules for the 118th Congress ... they'll have to wait until 2163 to write the rules for the 188th ... 🙃
The major policy disaster now looming is raising the debt ceiling, which will be necessary this summer. If the House refuses to do this, we could face a global recession.
You're being unduly optimistic.
To the best of my knowledge they're only allowed to write the rules for the 118th Congress ... they'll have to wait until 2163 to write the rules for the 188th ... 🙃
I always try to take the long view... 😂
Troutwaxer @ 1974:
The first thing to consider is whether the House rules will be negotiated with the Republican crazies or the Democrats. A decent set of House rules will do a lot to restrain the crazies.
Proposed changes to the House Rules for the 118th Congress:
H. Res. __ ADOPTING THE RULES FOR THE 118TH CONGRESS
The "Motion to Vacate" is in Section 2 on page 4. I haven't had time to track down the rest of the gators in that swamp.
One I've spotted already is The Holman Rule which allows "amendments to appropriations legislation that would reduce the salary of or fire specific federal employees, or cut a specific program" ... essentially mini-Bills of Attainder; aka the Fauci Rule.
The second thing to consider is whether McCarthy will betray the crazies. This is not unlikely in one form or another, but the more extreme forms, such as denying any of the crazies a committee assignment, involves considerable political cost to McCarthy. (If I were McCarthy and was using a sane set of House rules I'd fuck the crazies so hard...)
I'm not so sure McCarthy will betray the crazies - since he's one of the crazies himself - as I am sure the falling out amongst theives that's already going on within the "Rs" will continue and probably get even more destructive.
At this point I don't think the Democrats care much, because nobody sane gives a fuck about Hunter Biden's laptop, and half-a-dozen crazy political committees holding crazy hearings about craycray conspiracy theories is likely to give the Democrats political ammunition for years to come.
They care. Revanchist "Rs" in the House intend to ride roughshod over the Senate & the Administration and there's not much House Democrats can do to stop it.
Moz @ 1982:
Viz, 'no-one can or should trust us, but we need assurance that we can trust you'... is this a variation on 'you respect me and I'll respect you'?
More like a variation on "Of course I'll respect you in the morning ..."
I think in terms of passing the rules, Democrats have nothing to lose - if a group of "sane" Republicans come to them with a proposal, then screw them over, they end up with the same bad rules they were going to end up with anyway. Cooperating on electing McCarthy as speaker, however, gave them plenty to lose.
You mean that guff was actually composed with the intention of conveying a meaning? Without looking back at where it's quoted from I thought it was composed randomly by a Markovian assembler of bullshit words.
Page loads in about 1.5-2 secs for me. Very rural location in the rainforest on a pacific island, but with 1.5Gb fibre.
"I ran out of things I could even imagine to ask for."
--Matt Gaetz
this is just so... so... mind boggling crazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzy
and there's 726 days till he can be replaced by some other (hopefully lesser loonie) GOP
intention of conveying a meaning?
Subtext, Pigeon, it's all meaningless verbiage with a few keywords to hint at the subtext.
Dog whistles, neologisms, double meanings, and great deal of pretend idiocy that has successfully recruited a cadre of real honest to bob idiots. The point is that it's hard to tell which ones are genuine and what they're genuine about. Look, over there, an airship. I mean a great big bag of hot air. Whatever. Do not look here where we just declared that pregnant women are property of the government. Oh, ooops, people noticed after all. Hush, child, it's for your own good.
Part of the schadenfreud is that the genuine idiots have enough power to cause real damage to the people who recruited them. It's long since past the point where people are upset that the idiots are hurting the country (Boris Johnson, for example), that's just background noise right now (hopefully loud enough to drown out the cries of the dying)
Context: U.S. House
Umair Haque's take on Kevin McCarthy's concessions to the Freedom Caucus extremists: What Just Happened to American Democracy? Another Insurrection, Only This One Was Successful
TL;DR January 6th wasn’t successful. The attempts leading up to it weren’t either. But this one [the House takeover] was.
This insurrection differs from the prior attempt, in other words, from Jan 6th’s violent storming of the Capitol, to the astonishing plans to overthrow the election with fake electors, declare the results null and void, and call a “new” one, rigged for Trump.
This one was successful.
https://eand.co/what-just-happened-to-american-democracy-another-insurrection-only-this-one-was-successful-bb40e1a413aa
AlanD2
My take on Unmair Haque's piece ....
Is this the so-called "Republican's" { "Freedom Caucus" } version of The March on Rome ? ? ? ?
I agree, though, that is is an internal coup, but the possibility is that they will, fortunately, throw it all away, by both fighting amongst themselves &/or timewasting with sure-to-fail "Impeachment" or "Hunter Biden" irrelevancies.
The article is mostly bullshit. Democrats have a majority in the Senate and run the White House, so any stupidity the Repukes get up to will be confined to the House, for which we may all think "Bob," (and several other deities, to taste.)
"...the possibility is that they will, fortunately, throw it all away, by both fighting amongst themselves &/or timewasting with sure-to-fail "Impeachment" or "Hunter Biden" irrelevancies."
I think what the Republicans will do with Hunter Biden's Laptop and other craziness is successfully convince everyone that they're useless. The only thing "holding hearings on Dr. Fauci" will do is give the man a huge platform for attacking the Trump Administration. This is, in a roundabout way, the best thing that could happen to the Democrats, because excepting extraordinary circumstance, the nation is not in danger, and the Repukes will be putting their disunity and craziness on display, then doing their best to crank the volume to eleven.
(As to "internal coup" see my post above.)
RE: American politics.
Some might find the following Wikipedia article comforting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_politicians_convicted_of_crimes
Troutwaxer @ 1988:
I think in terms of passing the rules, Democrats have nothing to lose - if a group of "sane" Republicans come to them with a proposal, then screw them over, they end up with the same bad rules they were going to end up with anyway. Cooperating on electing McCarthy as speaker, however, gave them plenty to lose.
The "Rs" aren't going to come to the Democrats with a proposal. They can adopt their rules without any Democratic votes.
Troutwaxer @ 1995:
The article is mostly bullshit. Democrats have a majority in the Senate and run the White House, so any stupidity the Repukes get up to will be confined to the House, for which we may all think "Bob," (and several other deities, to taste.)
It's not entirely "confined to the House" - for the government to function the House & Senate BOTH have to function. Obstruction in the House can spill over. The "Rs" have already stated they intend to use their control of the House and threat of forcing default on the national debt to extort massive changes to government programs - SLASHING Social Security & Medicare (as a prelude to "privatization"); DE-FUNDING the U.S. participation in NATO & support for Ukraine; POLITICIZING the DoJ & FBI as revenge for enforcing the law against "Trump & the Jan 6 insurrection"
... and going so far as to implement a new Jim Crow in Federal Policy, if not a new Apartheid.
If they get their way, they will institute perpetual, single-party, white supremacy, patriarchal male privilege RULE (not governance, RULE).
And if they can't get their way, they intend to ring down Götterdämmerung - burn the whole damn country down ... what Hitler tried to do from the Führerbunker.
That's the mentality you're confronting here. These ass-clowns aren't even smart enough to be SHITHEADS! Orwell just got the date wrong.
Yup, I dropped off for a while because I changed jobs early this spring - and now spend a lot less time in front of an internet-capable PC
I've also moved from "individual contributor" (for almost all of the last twenty years) to leading and mentoring a small team of young engineers, and I'm having a whale of a time. Huge fun, and a real boost to be enjoying myself professionally, within a decade of retirement. They're also getting used to my near-ADHD ways :)
I think what the Republicans will do with Hunter Biden's Laptop and other craziness is successfully convince everyone that they're useless.
Neither hard core side will see anything like a complete or similar story about all of this. The news / emails / podcasts aimed at the hard core (reliable small donors) will tell two very different tales. And neither will be all that complete or accurate.
Yup, I dropped off for a while because I changed jobs early this spring - and now spend a lot less time in front of an internet-capable PC
That sounds(?)(!) like good news. Glad that you're back in touch when you can be.
Talking of "W T F"?
What about this? - Excess deaths in 2022 - not "just" C-19, either. Deliberate neglect of the NHS / Long Covid / what else?
Going back to the original idea ...
"W T F ?"
What about this? - large number of "Excess Deaths" in 2022 - what a surprise - not ....
Long Covid / neglect & ongoing collapse of NHS etc.
One thing - lots more people dying at home.
Nasty.
Comments?
Stressed health care system, Brexit-induced poverty, unidentified Covid sequela…
Spoiled for choice, aren't we?
But wait, there's more: https://www.statnews.com/2023/01/11/air-pollution-neurology-alzheimers-parkinsons-environmental-health/ Yet more in the ongoing Compound Failure*.
8or something else that begins with those letters...
The State of Louisiana now requires a government issued ID (with two factor authentication) to access online pornography
But only if the site has less than 2/3rd cat pics.
That sounds(?)(!) like good news.
Yup, I'm once again a member of the Defence-Industrial Complex (OGH probably knows where). I was working for a fintech firm, but they end-of-lifed our point of sale product; and we were pretty much the only C++ dev team in a multinational firm, so it was a choice between "retrain as a Java zek" or leaving for pastures old. I must have souped up my CV quite well, because I was beating inquiries off with a stick - it's rather surreal to do an initial phone screening from a cafe in the shadow of the Eiger, while on holiday with parents and sister, one pint into lunch...
It's back to working on shiny new technology; with the advantage that I can make wild, new, mistakes instead of boring, old, predictable ones - while passing on my biases, sorry, "experience-informed opinions" to a new generation of engineers ;)
Do not torture the statistics for it makes them soggy and hard to light.
One chain-of-logic I can envision for the reported excess deaths increase is that the average age of the UK population has spiked upwards due to Brexit, with a lot of younger Europeans going back to where they came from and leaving us old crusties still in place and dying off at the normal (or thereabouts) rate without the tranche of young foreigners to bend the needle in the other direction.
Yup, I'm once again a member of the Defence-Industrial Complex (OGH probably knows where).
If it's the company I'm thinking of, they were desperate enough to recruit engineers that they had job adverts on the side of the Edinburgh trams for a while recently. It did confuse me for a while since they share their name with a hotel chain.
You know, somewhere out there, there is a market for 'parts'. Imagine being an unintentional buyer from a very intentional seller. You think you're buying a very realistic Halloween decoration and the seller is 'down sizing his collection' (at least enough to avoid being able to compare dental records).
A Curiosities Shop I follow on Facebook that deals in macabre. Mostly old surgical implements (lobotomy and blood letting sets, bone saws, embalming kits). A customer wanted a refund because the purchase -- a vial of crushed uranium -- came with a a couple freebies. Namely dental x-rays and a used toe-tag.
Meanwhile, you can get custom rpg dice made from nearly anything from ancient bog wood to mammoth tusk/gator bone to a human femur, too.
All "from retired medical specimens" of course. Just lemme pull the corpsefax on that one.