Wow, quite a distortion you came up with there. Granted, Marx did say some interesting things but the question should be why communism would allow companies to build machines that remove income from humans? For that matter, why is a "capitalist Republic" allowing it now?

Because a system, once build, is more than just a sum of its parts. It has independent existence and motives. What that means is that neither communism, nor capitalism, nor USA nor China, are under human control, so why would they serve human interests, except incidentally? Yes, these systems have human actors making decisions, but these humans can only make decisions within parameters given by the system itself - a Foxconn CEO must do whatever it takes to keep Foxconn "competitive", and if he won't, he'll be replaced by someone who will, and likely severely punished. An American politician must accept a system-approved role - a set of political positions - if he wants to be elected. A dictator, while seemingly free, faces the same situation, except the punishment for disobedience is death rather than merely dropping out. Human beings, even those seemingly in control, are little more than agent-slaves of the Lovecraftian monstrosity they've conjured.

No one wanted World War I, yet it still happened. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted the world to end, yet they came within hair's width of blowing it all up during the Cuban crisis. Chinese don't want to breath a poisonous fume, yet Peking's air is just that. People regularly refer to "the market" like it was a living thing that needs to be appeased and soothed and definitely not something anyone can control - because, in some ways, it is.

Human beings aren't in control of their own nor the destiny of the world, and haven't been since civilization began. I suspect this is the real reason religions keep popping up: beneath the bizarre cruft all traditions tend to accumulate, they present a perfectly accurate picture of the everyday experience of living in a world ruled by utterly inhuman and mostly invisible forces. For example, "Free Market" is, for all intents and purposes, the god of capitalism, gets treated that way by everyone, has sacrifices performed to it, has temples and priests trying to predict its capricious whims, is the object of fundamentalist faith - I've had people define a human's very right to live in terms of body ownership - and doctrinal conflicts, etc. Someone who wasn't indoctrinated to the system from birth could hardly avoid classifying this all as a typical religion.

Nice put down if we were not speculating about something nobody has observed. Of course we are using examples from the land of make-believe.

I once read a story about an alien who didn't have to eat because it was powered by a perpetual motion engine. Does such an alien make a good example of something we might actually encounter? No, because it's at odds with reality as we know it.

Just because we are using imaginary examples doesn't mean all such examples are equally credible.

As I said elsewhere, there's no such thing as scalping. Only stupid vendors.

Just like there are no muggers, only unarmed people?

The cops get bolder every year, and people just go along.

All aspects of US keep getting worse. The only thing everyone in the country seem to agree with is that the system itself is their enemy. Add normalization of corruption, the complete dysfunction of the political system, and an economy that's increasingly unable to provide security, comfort or even hope for the better to most citizens, and this starts looking a lot like a collapse in process.

Nations live and die by their perceived legitimacy amongst their citizens, and US is losing its. Just look at the +5 Insightful you got. The story where the representative of national authority is the villain is overcoming the story where they're the hero, despite all the propaganda being pushed out by the Hollywood, tv, etc. The main thing keeping the whole mess still together is the national cult - flag-waving patriotism - but even that's being overcome by tribalism.

Oh well. It'll be "interesting" to see whether China or Russia will assert itself as the new superpower after US is gone.

The panels collect dust, pollen, bird crap, snow, younameit, and either someone has to go there physically and spend time cleaning them up or you have to have some sort of a robotic system for that.

Isn't one of the main problems we're facing right now that we're running out of jobs that are both low-skill yet necessary enough to keep our economy going to be worth paying a decent wage for?

I think it would be wiser to spend the big money on improving solar panel and battery tech.

If you're serious about solar, you don't necessarily need better tech, you just need enough investment money to build massive solar-thermal plants in the desert. These produce energy through heat-driven turbines, thus they don't require solar panels, can be as efficient as material science lets them (the hot end is the surface of the Sun, so theoretical efficiency is a bit over 94%), and can store energy in the form of molten salt (or stone, or steel, if you want to be extreme), allowing them to produce electricity all night long.

It's a weird paradox: renewables suffer from their reputation of being small-scale, down to people installing solar panels in their rooftops, when in reality most of their problems could be easily solved through massive-scale planning (because then you can rely on the law of averages to overcome individual variance). We could cut our economies free from the limits of fossils, we just lack the will.

Lem's lone planet sized alien in Solaris seems to avoid at least a few of those and for the rest nobody can work it out at the time of the story.

Lem's planet and its inhabitant exist in the land of make-believe, and doesn't have any actual history, but actual planets existing in actual spacetime are still subject to be guided by actual archetypes over actual time.

Irrelevant since easily comprehensible and incomprehensible are not the only choices. Lem's example is a century+ of almost no progress but that doesn't mean forever. In reality we've had that long since Einstein trying to work out non-Newtonian gravity.

I presume you mean quantum mechanical gravity, since General Relativity already describes non-Newtonian gravity.

The difference, of course, is that we don't have a century's worth of observational data - or, really, any observational data - on objects that are both very small and very massive, for which it would apply.

Phrenology has no scientific basis, but Eugenics certainly does. If you take all the people with traits you don't like, and murder them, you will have fewer of those traits in the next generation. That is a scientific fact.

Assuming the trait is genetically inherited and dependent on genotype in a simple way, possibly. If it's memetic, your attempts to stamp it out could well end up spreading it further by drawing attention to it. But even if it's genetic, evolution has failed to weed out things that will outright kill people, such as Fatal familial insomnia or hemophilia.

This is all ignoring the fact that actual eugenics programs don't typically target specific genes or even traits, but such "traits" as "being poor" or "not staying in kitchen and making sandwiches". They aren't scientific, they're political.

Just because you don't like the political act of mass murder, doesn't make it scientifically invalid.

No, because it was not scientifically valid in the first place. The only reason we're still hearing about eugenics - or ever heard about it in the first place - is that some people get off on cruelty yet don't have the guts to simply admit that, so they make excuses and public policy rather than joining appropriate clubs and dealing with their tastes in the private.

Mind you, the same goes for a lot of stupider policies...

One thing that we all need to realize is that ALL of us have this same issue, not just the people who disagree with you.

The problem is that admitting it puts you at a significant disadvantage at debates. If you can no longer summon the (self-)righteous fury your opponent can, not only are you more likely to give in from sheer exhaustion, but people viewing the debate are likely to consider your opponent as dominant and confuse that as being right. This, in turn, can have unfortunate consequences if the topic is something actually important, rather than just a means to establishing pack hierarchy.

I don't know if it's possible to tame your inner alpha male to the point where you can let it handle poo-flinging contests with other monkeys while still keeping your human intelligence in control of what you believe in or do, but if it is we'd better learn how fast, because we're running out of time. Or perhaps the problem is precisely the idea that it needs to be "tamed", rather than recruited as a member of the internal team. Perhaps we should simply accept that humans tend to establish pecking order, and practice how to do so without slipping into abuse or idiocy.

Then again, that would require admitting that people who think mainly in terms of pack hierarchy and territory aren't necessarily any less intelligent than people who think mainly in terms of logic and science, they just interpret the same message through a different lens. And that might be an unbearable blow to quite a few egos.

Spend a century+ studying an alien and end up with just a vast amount of paper listing weird shit it's done with still no idea why.

But that's not really credible. The basic motivations for all living things on Earth are reasonable simple to understand, once you know their environment and evolutionary/personal history. And while an alien planet is alien, it still exist in the same universe under the same basic principles of existence. Thus, an alien would still experience the same archetypes - conflict, birth, death, success, failure, discovery, hunger, etc. - and need to respond to them. And getting those responses wrong means you won't be around for long, so they're filtered by the requirement to be at least somewhat rational rather than completely random.

Evolution works within constraints given by the rest of reality, so while it might produce weird-looking aliens, it can't produce incomprehensible ones.

Java is what a lazy developer uses to get free security and free memory protection, a child could write a business application in Java and have it secure. To me that doesn't sounds like a good language as much as it does a language for lazy programmers, which should loose it a few points.

Java should lose points because you think it's not challenging enough? Seriously?

My mates and I had to wire the core logic for each operation using barbed wire and hand tooled relays that we had to build in metal shop.

From metal you crushed with your bare hands from primordial hydrogen, I presume? No? Thought so.

For fun, I still get the biggest kick out of pure functional languages. It's nice to see that job advertisements for them seem to be on the uptick.

Haskell's fun, but the second you actually want to do something with it, you run headfirst into the lack of an UI. You either settle for standard input and standard output (which, unbelievably, contain nasty bugs on WIndows) or pick one of a dozen or so wrappers around C libraries, and deal with the resulting issues (and hope the damn thing'll be maintained). It's an unfortunate situation which I think does a lot to keep the language from picking up usage.

Just goes to show that UI design should be part of language design from the start, rather than be left for the third parties. Otherwise you just get a mess.

I'm not sure Javascript is literally Turing complete, because it can't simulate an infinite tape.

Can't it? Since we're being technical, we must differentiate between Javascript specification and any particular Javascript implementation. Does the specification have anything in it that enforces finite pointer size, or could you, in theory, use BigInts? For that matter, can BigInts be implemented in a way that doesn't run into trouble when memory space gets exhausted, at least for the purposes of acting as pointers?

For example, is it possible to communicate using only HTML tags and nothing else?

Sure. You're limited to communicating the logical structure of a page, which is meaningless without the actual contents, but then again, all communication is meaningless without the context.