“Once again I say: any planet whose ecosystem can be wrecked by burping sheep deserves it. Darwin on a galactic scale. Man up, Mother Earth.”
[Late afternoon update]
Here’s the correct link, for those who were scratching their heads.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Nirvana
I have found a rare confluence at this conference — simultaneous power and connectivity. I hadn’t realized until today just how much my laptop battery sucks (HP Pavilion dv5, less than a year old, if anyone’s wondering). I started using it this morning, and checked the battery after about fifteen minutes, and it told me I had about fifty minutes left…
I don’t know if it’s the design, or if there’s a memory problem because I don’t use it off the grid much, and rarely deplete it, or what. But I might have to start carrying a spare, or get one of those things that plugs in externally as a backup.
And of course, I don’t have the ultimate, unachievable combination — power, connectivity, at a comfortable table, with something interesting to listen to. I’m sitting in a chair in the hotel lobby. Fortunately, there’s nothing I’m really hot to hear going on right now.
Immersive Simulation
Tami Griffith of the Army Simulation Tech and Training Center is describing the use of current technology for training. Shows a video of interfacing a Wii and balance board with Second Life. Apparently a lot of people are hacking the Wii for things like this. She says that whole-body training is much more effective and memorable than joysticks or cockpit simulators.
Cool.
Autophagy And Cellular Senescence
Some encouraging thoughts.
The Problem With Soaking The Rich
They can vote with their feet:
We believe there are three unintended consequences from states raising tax rates on the rich. First, some rich residents sell their homes and leave the state; second, those who stay in the state report less taxable income on their tax returns; and third, some rich people choose not to locate in a high-tax state. Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place. This is why high income-tax states have such a tough time creating net new jobs for low-income residents and college graduates.
One has to be particularly pig headed not to understand this.
[Thursday morning update]
Adios, New York:
Last week I spent 90 minutes doing a couple of simple things — registering to vote, changing my driver’s license, filling out a domicile certificate and signing a homestead certificate — in Florida. Combined with spending 184 days a year outside New York, these simple procedures will save me over $5 million in New York taxes annually.
By moving to Florida, I can spend that $5 million on worthy causes, like better hospitals, improving education or the Clinton Global Initiative. Or maybe I’ll continue to invest it in fighting the status quo in Albany. One thing’s certain: That money won’t continue to fund Albany’s bloated bureaucracy, corrupt politicians and regular special-interest handouts.
I thought it was stupidly amusing the other week when “Governor” Paterson expressed such glee that he was chasing Rush Limbaugh away with his policies. Well, there are a lot of other people who won’t be any more happy than Rush is to continue to fund these parasites.
[Bumped]
[Evening update]
A disgusting but apt metaphor from Mark Steyn:
As Miss McArdle notes, whether you bail out states “too big to fail” or let them go bankrupt, it will cause pain to taxpayers. But the pain of the latter is relatively short-term. Passing Sacramento’s buck to Washington will accelerate the centralizing pull in American politics and eventually eliminate any advantage to voting with your feet.
Not to be too gloomy, but the country feels like it’s seizing up. It’s as if California and New York have burst their bodices like two corpulent gin-soaked trollops and rolled over the fruited plain to rub bellies at the Mississippi. If you’re underneath, it’s not going to be fun.
I hope that a bailout of California and New York will have huge electoral blowback (including from many Californians, like the ones who voted down the continued state tax and spending on Tuesday, and New Yorkers).
Where’s My Flying Car?
And what happened to my space colonies?
Yes, it was never a mass movement, and even with the merger of NSI and L-5, I don’t think that NSS has ever had more than a hundred thousand members. I do think, though, that it is sufficiently appealing to a sufficient number of people that when we break out of the NASA paradigm, and the supply actually responds to demand, some people will live in space in the future.
[Evening update]
Clark Lindsey responds to Dwayne Day’s dyspeptic space colony post:
In the 1970s space had become a niche topic little noticed by the general public. Within that niche area one could search around and find a tiny sub-niche dealing with in-space orbital space colonies. Sure, there were the occasional articles and a handful of books about O’Neill space colonies and a small group of people had a high interest in them. However, you could say the same thing about a million other topics as well. Orbital space colonies never came close to being a topic that most people were aware of, much less considered in any thoughtful way.
If in 1980 you asked a randomly selected group of a thousand people what they thought about space, a thousand would say, probably in the first sentence, that space was wildly expensive. If you asked them if they had read an article about space colonies in the past decade, I doubt even fifty would say yes. And most of those fifty would say such colonies might be a great idea but are impractical while space travel is so wildly expensive.
Yes, as is the case of much of space policy, it’s all about information and perspective. (I’ve added “Media Criticism” to the categories for this post, and bumped it…)
Long Overdue
Iain Murray says that there’s never been a better time to reform Air Traffic Control. Though, actually, doing it in the past would have been better. As he notes, though, the politics probably still won’t allow it.
Insightful
Here’s a car reviewer who is less than impressed with the new Honda Hybrid:
Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.
So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.
So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.
It gets better.
What If The Singularity Doesn’t Happen?
The Age of Failed Dreams. By (who else?) Vernor Vinge.
Parasites
Here’s another guest post, from “Douglas,” on the subject of carlessness.
Most of my oh-so-enlightened (all of them college drop outs like me) liberal-minded freaks of friends (no, they are freaks, social deviants) are in fact smart people, but they assume an intelligence that isn’t theirs based upon their defiance of social norms.
Most of them live in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago, and don’t own cars any more; they only update their driver’s licences so that they can defer portions of their taxes to Indiana rules rather than Illinois.
One of them, since he got rid of his car, hasn’t visited his mother once in almost ten years. Since then, he’s gotten married, had two kids, filed for bankruptcy, taken “loans” from his mother, who was there to visit her boy, but he has never found his way across the border for any reason other than pretending he’s an Indiana resident.
Same for some of the other friends, but to a lesser degree.
There is a selfishness to this “I don’t need to go anywhere I can’t walk” attitude. I lived in other countries, and was technically poor, but I still visited my mother, I still made my brother’s wedding, and if I was somewhere that there were roads that got me somewhere, I would get in my car and I would make it to important moments for my friends.
I drove from Chicago to Vegas for a one-night trip three times, so that I could be a part of my friends’ getting married. I got in my car and drove to Florida for the same reason, I made it to Kentucky twice for a cousin’s christening, and again for another cousin’s divorce. (the divorce one is a complicated story)
I drove from Chicago to Hammond, Louisiana four times, because I was the only one who could be counted on to help a friend move back to my area, in an escort, since my friend was so possessive of certain possessions, that he didn’t trust the mover.
It took four trips.
If I didn’t have a car, my friend in Louisiana would have been assed out, if I didn’t have a car, I wouldn’t have been able to be a part of those other very cherished (other than the divorce one, though there is a degree of satisfaction that I felt) events. If I hadn’t had a car.
If you don’t have a car, if you don’t have freedom of independent movement, you are a parasite, and must depend on people who DO have cars, or on people who are taxed to pay for inefficient buses and trains to get you where you need to go.
This “walking” society is a lie. They will walk a few blocks, they won’t walk the miles that the working class did at the turn of the century to get to where they needed to go, instead, they parasitically demand that they have a right to go from one place to another, and everyone else that is not them pay for it.