True, but for a large scale operation you are going to want to have a bioreactor for both efficiency and scale, not to mention reducing the dead giveaway large quantity of people to tend the more manual methods.

No, you don't.

I never applied for any aid, and never receive any either

That is an obvious lie, unless you're asserting that you hunted your own food as a newborn baby. The problems start when people forget such ego-inflating bullshit is a lie and start voting like it was true.

We all know Western Civilization has fallen to Fascism, so why not just come out and announce it?

Because compulsive lying is one of the classic symptoms of sociopathy. Every oppressive regime lies. They don't believe their own lies, and they know nobody else does either. They do so anyway, because getting people to repeat lies makes them their own jailers. The system can't jail or kill everyone, and in fact can't do anything on its own; it must convince someone else - a police, a soldier, whatevever - to deal with threats on its behalf. As soon as those agents lose their loyalty - as soon as they admit to themselves they're only putting up a show to keep from getting killed themselves - the system has already fallen. It has no power anymore, just an empty shell of it.

The scond reason is that fascism is basically reactionary. It originated as an attempt to stop the spread of communism at a time when liberal capitalism seemed to have failed. For any Western nation to openly embrace fascism again would mean admitting the economic policy of the last few decades has been an utter failure. But that policy was not just a pragmatic project but a matter of ideology to a lot of people. And ideology is just secularized religion for the materialistic era. To admit its failure would be apostacy. Just look at McCarthy's witch hunts; anyone can see they're exactly that, even if conducted in the name of a secular ideology and state.

And of course the third is that Western Civilization is not currently fascist. We wouldn't be talking about this openly on a public forum if it was. Increased surveillance by various intelligence agencies is worrisome and could potentially lead us to an unpleasant place once again, but we're nowhere near it yet. Not every political decision you don't like is a sign of fascism any more than every shoulder ache is a sign of a heart attack.

Modern materials like carbon fiber should be able to handle the motion.

As do trees and flagpoles. I think AC's engineering credits might be a bit suspect.

If we believe in survival of the fit over the weak then what we are seeing is that socialism is fit to survive under conditions that capitalism can not.

We've already seen it. The age of crisis lasting from the start of first to the end of second world war basically brought an end to laissez-faire capitalism. Things we have now - from social security to 40-hour workweek - were all reforms demanded by the labour movement. And attempts to return to the good old Gilded Age are backfiring quite spectacularly upon the economy right now. As they deserve to, since even in the best case they would make most people glorified indentured servants.

All of these problems could be solved quite easily by unconditional citizen pay, since that would guarantee a certain demand and stop the economic downward spiral, as well as kill industries that can't survive without de facto slave labour, but ideology prevents it. I suspect reforms will be impossible until the situation deteriorates to another wave of revolutions. But who knows, maybe our leaders will surprise me and acknowledge reality before it drags them to the guillotine. But, probably not.

Somebody will have to drive it in city traffic and park it at the freight terminal, and take over when the autonomous system doesn't know how to handle a situation. The difference is that in a plane you usually have seconds or minutes to take over the system, whereas on a road with cars mere feet away, a trucker will have fractions of a second to respond and take over to a situation.

Which is why it's an absurd notion. Human beings can't "take over" in a fraction of a second, especially since they're out of practice from not driving the car and daydreaming (at best). An automated car has to handle every situation it encounters on its own, otherwise it's worse than useless.

What makes you think that the autonomous truck will hit the car just like a manned truck? I'd think that with the sensors on the truck tied directly into the autonomous control systems the autotruck could react thousands of times faster and more effectively than a human being truck driver.

That won't help. The problem with trucks isn't human reaction speed, it's the sheer amount of kinetic energy that needs to be dissipated for one to stop. A 60-ton truck going at 50 mph has 29 MJ of kinetic energy. For it to stop, every single joule needs to go somewhere, and with current technology that means they'll turn to heat. And that means it's going to take a while as that heat dissipates - the brakes will literally melt if you try to brute-force a shorter braking distance, for example by increasing braking system pressure.

Alternatively, just consider how much damage is caused by a truck crash. Physics don't care if it's another car's rear or the truck's own brakes it's pushing against; any object that tries to stop its motion in a hurry is going to be hit by those same forces.

Not only that... but when I read stories in the media of a tyranical state executing those who they allege have committed crimes against their culture or religion I usually think ISIS and some guy with a sword, gun or flamethrower -- yet once again, this time, it is the good old US of A who plans to engage in such an act of barbarism.

To be fair, Tsarnaev isn't being executed for committing crimes against culture or religion, he's being executed for committing murder.

We'd want him flayed alive on national television, absolutely as an act of revenge, but bleeding heart cunts like you wouldn't let us.

I guess the bleeding heart cunts are the only thing keeping the US from being yet another theocratic hellhole, then.

Yes, the US is not a civilized country, and it's not like Europe or Russia. We like it that way. Congratulations for realizing that.

No, US is not a civilized country, or rather it's a country where one group after another embraces barbarism. And that is slowly but surely tearing it apart. From various attempts to enforce religious dogma in science class to racially motivated police brutality, the fracture lines of society are getting wider. Your post marks yet anothe phase in this process of disintegration, where the shame of failure is dealt with by reinterpreting said failures as badges of pride. As such attitudes spread, damage becomes chronic and impossible to revert, since that would require admitting it is indeed damage rather than a reasonable choice.

Oh well, Enlightenment will find more clients, and the US will go the way every country that rejects it must, to irrelevance and ruin. World history too has its phases, and it the current one, it's no longer possible to be a major power without. And US is nowhere near stable enough to survive the loss of that status.

Democracy is just a sham anyway. It only really works to your advantage if you happen to be one of the dumbest people in the country.

...I think someone needs to read up on world history and the relative performance of various political systems.

If you are of average or higher intelligence then enjoy the fact that your leaders will always be picked by people stupider than you, since you will be in the "minority".

Which is far preferable to leaders who are picked by birth, rule by divine authority and are answerable to no one. Or to violent chaos. Which are the only known alternatives to democracy.

If a country devalues its currency, it's no different from a massive tax on savings and a massive cut in wages.

Except it won't affect the price of domestic products, which typically includes everyday necessities like staple foods and rent. In fact, since imports go up in price, domestic production gets de facto protective tolls to help boost it across the board. And of course exports also become more profitable, giving economy a further boost. So it's almost completely different.

"Austerity" is just an attempt to simulate what would normally happen to a currency when a country goes as badly into debt as they did (average income exceeds average productivity, so the economy has to contract until these two are in balance again).

Austerity fails at that because when a currency devaluates, it makes imports more expensive which increases exports and boosts domestic production. Austerity, on the other hand, decreases all three. It's the exact wrong policy in pretty much every imaginable situation.

Had Greece still been on the Drachma when they went into debt, the value of the Drachma would have fallen against other currencies (much like the Argentine Peso has been doing), and the Greek economy would have shrunk until the artificial "growth" due to their previous (and current) overspending had been erased.

Had Greece still been on the Drachma when they went into debt, the value of Drachma would have fallen against other currencies, making Greek exporters more profitable, making Greece a better destination for tourists, and shielding domestic manufacture from foreign competition, thus quickly and efficiently rebalancing the economy. And of course they wouldn't had gone into debt but simply printed more Drachma's and let inflation deal with tax evasion.

It doesn't really matter anymore, Euro won't survive this crisis since it's its direct cause. The important question is: will the EU survive? If not, then Europe will return to its historical state of constant warfare.

It will be interesting to see how Greece gets out of their mess, when they run out of Euros.

They'll get another bailout, of course. The alternative is to let them leave the Euro, which would likely start a landslide and cause the whole project to collapse. At it's heart, the Euro is an attempt to institutionalize neoliberal economic ideas; as such, it lacks any way to deal with trade imbalances (since those should be automatically dealt with by the free market, according to the theory). And they are being dealt with, however this in practice means destroying the countries which can't compete and starving their population.

Of course no nation will simply stand by and watch this happen, thus the attempts to mitigate the problem with one-off fixes, which basically amount to bailouts. But since the ideology underlaying the Euro forbids admitting the problems are inherent to the system (since every set of countries will always have a weakest link), it also prevents creating any mechanisms to handle the problem long-term. So Greek gets just enough bailouts to keep it afloat, but not enough to pull it to the water, everyone else gets bill after bill, European economy continues spiraling downward, and everyone is getting fed up with being told they must tighten their belts for a project and ideology that's not beneftting them in any way.

Uncontrolled free markets had their day in the 1800's. That world has long since gone, and won't return, since universal suffrage makes it impossible to simply ignore everyone but the richest. Even in their heyday they never brought a golden age, just gilded. And now they can't bring even that.

Liberty has been working very well for Americans, compared to Europe and the rest of the world.

US has the second highest incarceration rate in the world. So please explain exactly what liberty are you talking about?