Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

“If It Saves One Life”

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Some thoughts on the economic irrationality and political demagoguery of the phrase:

The problem with the “if it saves just one life” standard, other than being outlandishly stupid, is that it fails to take into account scarcity, which is fundamental to the human condition. Are 200 lives worth $2 billion? Of course they are; life is priceless. But scarcity is real. There are very good reasons that we do not require, for example, that all of the safety features found on the $100,000 Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan be made mandatory on all vehicles. Would doing save even one life? Yes, it probably would save many lives: While President Obama attempts to derive political benefit from fear-mongering about violent crime, which has been in a long and steady decline, automotive deaths are a much more significant problem. Reducing automotive deaths by one-third would save as many lives as eliminating all murders involving firearms.

If you want to follow that line of thought a little farther down the rabbit hole, consider that the number of children killed in back-over accidents annually is less than the number of people struck by subway cars in New York City in a typical year. Should we retrofit the nation’s metros with barriers? It would save lives.

Someone should write a book about this sort of trade off.

In addition to the other critique, it’s also worth pointing out the ever-present hypocrisy of the Left. Banning abortion would save not just a single life, but millions of lives per year. What’s stopping them?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Spartacus Project

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So, now that we know that they’re watching our web visits, web sites, social networks and email, and having seen what the IRS (and other agencies) have been willing to do against what they perceive to be enemies of the state, it might be time to start monkey wrenching them. While it was only a movie, I think we might take a page from the example of the Roman slave revolt.

Imagine if we were to flood the Internet with terms like “Tea Party,” “Benghazi,” “IRS abuse,” etc., to the point at which they’d have so many false leads that it would make it harder for them to track the people who are actually discussing such things? It can’t just be a standard list of the keywords/phrases — that would be easy to spot as a pattern. One could randomly shuffle them around, but that would still be easily detectable. Even generating random subsets of them wouldn’t do the job. What we need is an “enemy of the state” pattern generator, that would throw in a subset of the keywords/phrases, interspersed with a bunch of random English words to make it look to a machine as though they are being discussed in some kind of context, and no two messages alike. I’m imagining a perl (or python, or whatever) script, or whatever. The output might be spammed (OK, that’s the part I don’t like, but I’m not sure how to spread it to enough IPs otherwise — I’m open to alternative suggestions) to the world, and flood the zone to the point that they won’t be able to tell wheat from chaff. We can all be Spartacus, even those of us who had no intention to.

Thoughts?

[Update a couple minutes later]

It’s worth reading the comments at that old blog post, if you haven’t. Particularly this one on how to recognize the end of a Republic.

Business, Economics, Philosophy, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Gardening The Universe

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A few weeks ago, I was invited to a gathering to hear the latest from Howard Bloom in downtown LA, but I had a conflict. But David Swindle attended, and has a report. (I did talk to Howard briefly a few days later, in San Diego.)

This –>

It became apparent again that I was the odd man out in the room. Most of the questions were phrased in explicitly secular terms.

Afterwards as Howard and a group of us sat around discussing, I raised my objection to the soulless, materialist focus. I drew a parallel between the groups who had sought to explore and settle the North American continent in the 1600s and those who should now seek to place their mark on the Moon, Mars, and the earth’s orbit.

I reminded Howard and the others that people came to the New World for varying reasons — capitalists eager to make money, the Crown eager to maintain power (primordial corporatists), science-minded explorers eager to discover what was out there, and one group unrepresented at the talk tonight, save for yours truly: the fanatical religious radicals wanting to live free of persecution as they built a godly, happy, counterculture community. It was this mix together that enabled the American experiment to begin and succeed.

People of faith — whether they interpret the Bible through Jewish, Christian, or mystic lenses — are called by God to transcend nature and rise upwards. The earth is not holy; it’s not our mother. As I’ve blogged about before, inspired by Glenn Reynolds’s An Army of Davids, the earth is just a rocky death trap. We can grow a better one ourselves.

To the degree that I have a religion, that’s pretty much it.

Business, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

An Internet War

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Has the US started one?

More than passively eavesdropping, we’re penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We’re creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be “fired” against some piece of another country’s electronic infrastructure on a moment’s notice.

This is much worse than what we’re accusing China of doing to us. We’re pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren’t making the Internet any safer. We’re reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We’re ignoring resilience in favor of offense.

This may end badly.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Data Disaster

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OK, it’s not a total data disaster, but basically, it potentially means the loss of almost all my outgoing email for the past three years or so.

When I migrated to Fedora 19 over the weekend, I did it on a new disk, retaining the old installation on the old one. After I did so, I copied my old files over to the new disk from it. Unfortunately, rather than doing it from the shell with a ‘cp -r *’ I just used the GUI tool to drag’n’drop. Which means that I didn’t get the hidden files. Which contain all of my Thunderbird folders. I still have all incoming mail, because I’m using IMAP, but the outgoing was in those folders.

It shouldn’t have been a problem, but when I went back to grab the rest, I’m getting an error message that the drive can’t be mounted, and warnings that the drive is failing. Is the data still recoverable? And if so, by me, or do I have to take it to a specialist?

Business, Social Commentary, Technology and Society, Weird

The President’s Auto Insurance

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One of the most amusingly stupid categories of spam I get is emails about how “Congress passed a bill” or “The president signed a law” resulting in lower auto insurance or (as they often idiotically say) “driving” rates. They sometimes try to tie it into current events. Here are two nutty subject lines today:

“President’s G8 Summit Meeting Yields Lower Auto Ins. For All,”

and

“Following meet with Putin, President announces lower auto ins. for all.”

Sadly, there are enough idiots out there that this probably does work. Until we come up with some cost for emailing, spam will persist.

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

Molecular Manufacturing And Space

22 Comments

There’s a review of Eric Drexler’s new book over at The Space Review today.

I don’t agree with this (I assume that it’s his own opinion, not Eric’s):

APM will also make space colonization imperative, but for different reasons than for Eric Drexler’s original quest to find a solution to the impending global crisis posed by The Limits to Growth. What will the millions of people now involved in mining, manufacturing, distribution, retailing, transportation, and other services do if much less of these services will be required and most of them could be performed by robots? How will people earn a living if they can buy a desktop factory—something like a super 3D printer—and can produce most of what they need at home and no longer need to shop at Wal-Mart or Amazon? If people aren’t working and earning a good income they will no longer be able to buy stuff. Henry Ford recognized the problem and chose to pay his people well so that they could afford to buy his cars. By choosing to industrialize the Moon and colonize space, thousands and ultimately millions can be put to work earning a good income.

I think that this technology will enable space settlement, but I don’t see how in itself space settlement creates jobs, particularly for those who are becoming unemployable because they’re on the wrong side of the bell curve. That’s a big problem coming down the pike, and space isn’t a solution to it.