I'm not sure that there is a two class system by design. That is certainly true for desert societies, but come cultures are MUCH more complex than two. Even Marx's comrades were three classes, also in Brave New World.

I'm for distributed sustainable energy budgets for high tech cultures. That means your energy budget depends on the climate you find yourself in, and is somewhat outside of your control. Cheap fossil fuels are nice for a time, but their regeneration cycle is too long to be sustainable over the long term.

However, every inch of this planet has plenty of ambient energy lying around, just not necessarily in a usable form. Getting it into a usable form is NOT a one-size-fits-all mass produced solution, and can't be. Anybody who says, just end the use of fossil fuels tomorrow, has not looked at the cost. I'm blessed in the Pacific Northwest with four major sustainable sources of energy at different times of the year, and with the new batteries, we can do even better.

As for climate change- there really are only two sustainable strategies- adapt and use the changes in weather to generate usable electricity, grow more food, store excess carbon in our graves. Or try to fight with outlandish ideas like eliminating fossil fuels, putting powdered aluminum in orbit to throw energy away, or the stupid carbon tax that will never work anyway.

My money is that cultures and species that adapt instead of trying to fight, will win out in the long run. I place that bet due to the history of this planet- when conditions change, species that adapt to the new conditions live, everybody else goes extinct.

My error in conflating that and utilities, so apologies. But my impression is that's what's been behind Net Neutrality, to effectively turn the pipes to the Internet into a regulated utility. And to make broadband a basic human right.

Yes, but a closer analogy would be ATT or other phone companies, or Western Union. Different type of utility, still as necessary to business. But what if say, the electric company could say "You are small fry, the local aluminum mill pays us more for electricity, so you get no service at your house today"?
 
 

How can govt. second-guess a business's motives when a business charges more for carrying something that costs them more to carry. Without degrading into govt. effectively dictating their pricing structure.

 
You know as much about TCP/IP as I do. Exactly how does a bit from one source "cost more to carry" than a bit from another source? All bits coming in from the backbone are the same. The only question is the size of the pipe coming in from the backbone, not the content of the bits. So that explanation simply doesn't hold.
 
 

They don't go far enough, regulation-wise, for you?

 
Or with freedom. The regulation should be towards maximum freedom of association- a company *should* be free to block traffic from a source they don't want to do business with, or slow down any packets for content they don't like. Discrimination and bigotry *should* be legal, be it baking a cake for gays, allowing black people at the lunch counter, or restricting netflix from eating up the common internet pipe.

Common carrier laws don't determine either how much you'll charge nor how much you'll make, they merely dictate that you can't discriminate in what you carry.

As in, you can't choose customer A over customer B just for the hell of it.

Now, personally, I'm against common carrier laws because I'm against freedom of communication and against dictating required associations, but that is an entirely different matter than money as well.

Yes we should. We should adapt our lifestyles to *local* conditions, where possible. That means diversifying our culture by geographical regions, and gasp, paying attention to natural weather sources and barriers.

RepRap comes close, but I was more referring to a full on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine. RepRap can print something like 90% of its parts, but there are still parts within itself that it cannot manufacture as of yet.

Especially once the tech matures to the point where 3d printers can make 3d printers.....

There's still quite a bit of difference between public access to 3d printer files and public access to 3d printers.

I don't know that anymore.

The Macintosh I had no lid.

No Lace Cards? I had Apple IIe's to work with, loads of fun to be had there.

So a free market is bad when everybody is able to invest, but is good when a chosen few are able to invest?

True enough- IF you can prove it was a murder and not an accident.
 
Can you prove intent with global climate change? If you ignore the utterly non-scientific process of "scientific consensus", do you even have enough data left to prove the murder weapon?
 
And in the long run, does it matter? We're still left with the decision to either adapt or die; we're far too late for any mitigation attempt to work. Blame the culprit is a waste of time in this case.

In what way is insuring a fair and free market collectivism?

Species that are unable to adapt have been going extinct without mankind's help for 9/10ths of the planet's history. For the remaining 1/10th, we've been a major motivator of evolution, that's true- Dodos and wooly mammoths and the like. But we are also to the point with GMO research that we can be a major cause of increased adaptation- we can speed up evolution, and likely will, because beef is tasty (among many other species that are directly useful to us, such as bees). Speaking of that last, just saw a report on OPB about a pair of beekeepers with a unique solution to colony collapse disorder- they're breeding stronger queen bees that can live through Oregon winters.

If mankind wants to survive, food needs to be our top priority. Luckily, as I mentioned someplace above I think, food production is also an answer to excess atmospheric carbon. Especially if we keep locking our own carbon up in airtight containers buried in concrete when we die.

California has been in drought for 9000 of the last 12000 years. It's the normal state there. Switch from avacado to chia, and you'll be fine.

The Midwest is another story. We've been planting our favorite foods there so long that we've destroyed the ecology of the place. Thus the "Dust Bowl" phenomenon.

But there is one way to deal with this- bunch grass grazing. It's working well in the Eastern Oregon Desert; but it's hard to manage.

Adapt, work with the ecology, not against it, with climate change, not against it. The earth will survive, human beings are not guaranteed to; but we do have one advantage- invention.