Comment Re:Nonstop action? Whattabore. (Score 1) 332
TL;DR
TL;DR
The neat thing about the freighter crews as they were depicted in the shows, was that the crews were often families that would live and reproduce on the ship, spending their entire lives in space on a fairly small and poorly-armed vessel. They would occasionally take on new blood from outside their family unit (this helps combat the immediate idea of gene pool degeneration), but the majority of the crew would be biological relatives.
These crews were much less idealistic than Starfleet personnel, and were very much loyal to their families above and beyond any set of ideals. No doubt they'd encounter all kinds of sticky situations in space with pirates, Klingons, and even Starfleet, and have to defend their family, defend their ship, make ends meet, and survive.
They were Moties !
Um, OK, but in the ORIGINAL Star Trek, the Captain, First Officer, Medical Officer and perhaps some hot looking Ensign would beam down to unspeakable horrors on some random planet in T-shirts and yoga pants.
How sensible was that?
Or not. The Chinese leadership isn't as all powerful as some make it out to be. They are skating a very fine line between their own interests and the goals and aspirations of an enormous population. Right now, they are keeping the population relatively comfortable and happy by reasonable economic growth. That llows them to continue their current attempts at World Domination. If that falters, then so does most of the goodwill and support the Chinese population gives to the government.
In that sense, it may be more representative that the situation in the US.
My Cell transcribes all voicemail to text
let's set so double the killer delete select all
...and if he did have standing, so would all other US citizens. Which would be terribly amusing.
oh, does bridging work finally? I spent well over an hour with nmcli docs and on Google trying to setup bridges for each vlan I was using on an el7 machine and got nowhere close to working. Spent 5 min setting up redhat ifcfg- files and was done after yum uninstalling nm. It says that nmcli got some love in 1.0, and boy that's a good thing.
Twilight on Android.
Also, points to Soulskill for posting this after midnight.
Price "gouging" is a good thing. It sends information signals to the market to divert goods to where they are needed. Hurricane approaching Florida? That load of plywood headed to Michigan should be diverted to boarding up windows in Dade County instead of to building a dog house in Lansing. But if the price of plywood is kept artificially low (only possible by the guns of government), there's no incentive to send the truck towards a hurricane, so the Michigan contract is fulfilled.
During Hurricane Sandy some friends and I looked at renting a truck and getting some generators from our local stores to NJ - about 300 miles. It would obviously have to be worth our effort but both we and the people without power who could not find generators would benefit. But then Chris Christie got on TV threatening anybody who would charge above big-box store non-emergency prices with National Guard action. "Screw that", we said, "they can sit in the dark and enjoy their fairness".
The important information theory piece to learn is that prices are the information signals that are sent through markets. The important economic piece to learn is that scarcity is real. The important political piece to learn is that politicians ignore both, to the detriment of their people but to their own personal gain.
But exactly why do all these systems start breaking down? I agree we're not getting particularly close to 120 year lifespans with our current approach, which is tinkering with treatments for the ailments of old age. But I suspect there actually is a simple magic bullet somewhere - something to stop us getting old.
I doubt it. Nature doesn't work that way. Getting to 120 is going to take a LOT of engineering. You are going to have to manipulate the immune system in a fundementally more complex way than we're doing know. You will need to have better organ transplantation and you're going to have understand the brain. You're going to have to understand human biology at a much deeper level that we currently do. And you will be swamped with details.
Aging isn't just one thing. It's the pileup of a lifetime of little things going wrong until the bridge collapses.
You may be able to DELAY aging with some sort of magic bullet but that is likely to have a whole raft of unintended consequences. Not to mention, you're going have to start on it when you're about 20 years old.
Or many of the other old age related diseases of which there is no treatment. Wishful thinking.
He's 47. He's got more than two decades before those are likely to affect him. I'll bet that in 2034 we have effective treatments for most all of them, with genomic analysis and gene therapy being available at the shopping mall, next to the place that does nails. OK, probably not FDA-approved (possibly even banned in the US due to costs of welfare if people don't die off) but that's what medical tourism is for. You might need to fly to Theil's boat to get it.
"no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons"
How could this possibly go wrong?
It's just nonsense - to build on a sea platform would require tremendously strong buildings and no owner of such a platform would permit shacks to be built there as crumbling buildings would threaten the platform and its other occupants. The notable difference between a seastead and local building codes is that such agreements on a seastead would be entered into voluntarily, not by fiat backed by violence.
The people who would live and work there would need to be attracted to live on a sea platform, so low-paid workers and destitute beggars aren't even an issue. This isn't a model for society, it's more of a Galt's Gulch.
I still think it's silly to get all the anarchists on a platform that can be sunk by a torpedo (see the Free State Project for a more sensible option) but TFS is written as if by a seventh grader who's heard something about libertarians.
Read up on the anthropology, especially about the value of grandparents. Also be careful to avoid means as averages in such cases.
Hint: healthy humans don't undergo menarche until they're about twelve, and human children do not survive well if their parents die off before they're eight.
There's evidence that life expectancy went down with agriculture, though housing heralds an improvement for infant mortality so the means go up, though tempered by increased disease.
No man is an island if he's on at least one mailing list.