xthnru posted:

So much for ever sleeping again.

Volcott posted:

Good, maybe they'll find a less ethically inflexible buyer. I want killbots fighting our oil wars, drat it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-P1x0oDb8o

Filthy Hans posted:

The worst thing about the Cold War ending was that we were denied a future in which giant robot fights determined international negotiations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUxDmKFCD2o

trapped mouse posted:

I actually like FiveThirtyEight, but this poo poo is how I used to pad essays back in middle school. Jesus loving christ.

Hot Karl Marx posted:

yeah the mongolians were so nice, they only sacked your city and killed/raped everyone if you disobeyed and maybe if you looked at them wrong

or maybe they just wipe out your entire way of life because you had a lovely king

real cool dudes

Guavanaut posted:

US nuclear weapon platforms.

Kopijeger posted:

And that's a pretty ridiculous assumption about the Space Shuttle.

Kopijeger posted:

And that's a pretty ridiculous assumption about the Space Shuttle.

quote:

Future archaeologists trying to understand what the Shuttle was for are going to have a mess on their hands. Why was such a powerful rocket used only to reach very low orbits, where air resistance and debris would limit the useful lifetime of a satellite to a few years? Why was there both a big cargo bay and a big crew compartment? What kind of missions would require people to assist in deploying a large payload? Why was the Shuttle intentionally crippled so that it could not land on autopilot? Why go through all the trouble to give the Shuttle large wings if it has no jet engines and the glide characteristics of a brick? Why build such complex, adjustable main engines and then rely on the equivalent of two giant firecrackers to provide most of the takeoff thrust? Why use a glass thermal protection system, rather than a low-tech ablative shield? And having chosen such a fragile method of heat protection, why on earth mount the orbiter on the side of the rocket, where things will fall on it during launch?

... That so much about the vehicle design is bizarre and confused is the direct result of the Shuttle's little-remembered role as a military vehicle during the Cold War.

By the time Shuttle development began, it was clear that the original vision of a Shuttle as part of a larger space transportation system was far too costly and ambitious to receive Congressional support. So NASA concentrated on building only the first component of its vision, a reusable manned spacecraft that could reach low earth orbit. Since NASA assumed it would be able to fly Shuttle missions with a turnaround time as low as two weeks, this left the vexing question of what to do with all that spare launch capacity. The tiny commercial launch market was in no shape to supply such a wealth of satellites, so NASA turned to the one agency that had an abundance of things requiring shooting into space - the Air Force - and asked it to abandon its unmanned rocket programs, instead committing all future satellite launches to the Shuttle.

The Air Force was only too happy to agree, but at a crippling price. What the Air Force wanted to launch was spy satellites - lots of them, bulky telescopes with heavy mirrors, the bigger the better - and it wanted to launch them in an orbit over the Earth's poles, so they could snoop over the maximum amount of Red territory. This meant NASA had to go back to the drawing board, since polar orbits would require a heavier orbiter than the Shuttle design had anticipated , which in turn meant using a bigger rocket at launch, and dissipating more heat during re-entry.

Moreover, there was no way to launch a polar mission safely from Kennedy Space Center — it would mean overflying either heavily populated areas in the Carolinas or risking capture of a fuel tank by the wily Cubans. So the Air Force also demanded, and got, billions in funding to build a new Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg Air Force base in California. And because some of the Air Force's military missions involved capturing a Soviet satellite on the sly and landing after one orbit, the Air Force demanded that the Shuttle be capable of gliding over a thousand miles cross-range during re-entry, so that it could catch up with the rapidly eastbound Air Force base underneath it. This meant bigger wings, which in turn meant more weight, an even more powerful rocket, and again a more complicated heat shield.

quote:

The Soviet Shuttle, the Buran (snowstorm) was an aerodynamic clone of the American orbiter, but incorporated many original features that had been considered and rejected for the American program, such as all-liquid rocket boosters, jet engines, ejection seats and an unmanned flight capability. You know you're in trouble when the Russians are adding safety features to your design.

vyelkin posted:

That's exactly the point. Mongols were bad dudes, and American Prosperity Gospel has adopted the Mongol attitude towards the poor (before Kublai converted to Buddhism, called "idolatry" in Polo's text).

gently caress SNEEP posted:

Only quoting because I took as a class on Fuzzy Logic last semester from a prominent...fuzzy logic professor... and it was dope as hell.

nerdz posted:

I created some systems with fuzzy logic that made some job positions obsolete.

Hot Karl Marx posted:

WLMortis posted:

Don't blame nerdz because our society is hosed up. In a sane society replacing unnecessary work with technology would be a good thing.

Baronjutter posted:

I don't even know what this means or who the guy in the background is or what this meme is but I figured it related to this thread???

WLMortis posted:

Don't blame nerdz because our society is hosed up. In a sane society replacing unnecessary work with technology would be a good thing.

Hubis posted:

"one in ten thousand" can make a "technological breakthrough" capable of "supporting all the rest".

Sorry, techno-utopianism is just as facile, magical, and worthless of a philosophy as anarcho-capitalism

e: Seriously, it just substitutes "the invisible hand of the market!" with "science!"
ee: of course your original point is quite fine, but I would argue that the problem is exactly the philosophy that image conveys. "Breakthroughs" applied without societal and humanitarian context can be wholly disfunctional and malignant. "More Science", in and of itself, is not always the answer.

shrike82 posted:

Jesus Christ

In 2010, the Cuyahoga County Recorder's Office in Ohio was sued when it decided to charge $2 per page for photocopies of public documents. The following scene is a deposition from that court case. The dialogue is presented verbatim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbqAMEwtOE

Volcott posted:

The joke is that roads are the ancient evil libertarians fear above all else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oiWPNYr30I

Guavanaut posted:

Isn't the philosophy that image conveys is that technological progress already is providing increases in productivity but the bad part is that people as a whole are not reaping the rewards of that?

It's not just calling for 'more science!', it's calling for an end to poo poo like this:


Possibly by radical or utopian means like the abolishment of the wage system altogether, but it seems like a root cause of the problem has been identified or proposed and it isn't just 'insufficient breakthroughs'.

Hubis posted:

Except that the quote doesn't deride income inequality or the fact that Capital tends to concentrate wealth unfairly. Instead, it rails against "inspectors of inspectors, and people who make insturments for inspectors of inspectors". It's a grumpy academic bristling at the inconvenience of bureaucracy, and indirectly arguing that government only exists as a type of patronage program full of people doing jobs that only serve to justify their own existence. If only we got rid of all this wastefulness and let true innovators, those special "one in ten thousand" get back to doing great things to push society forward, we'd all be better off. Sound familiar?

Don't confuse this:
~Rand~

for this:
~Sagan~

e: to put it another way, what Fuller is advocating is that innovative minds should be freer from the requirements of society to create things which would increase GDP/resources. What your graph indicates is that is not at all the problem, but rather it's the allocation thereof. Fuller's position is at best naiive in assuming that overall abundance would eliminate local scarcity.

Wikipedia posted:

He was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of major recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had attained a critical level, such that competition for necessities was not necessary anymore. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness," he declared, "is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.... War is obsolete." He criticized previous utopian schemes as too exclusive, and thought this was a major source of their failure. To work, he thought that a utopia needed to include everyone.

Volcott posted:

The joke is that roads are the ancient evil libertarians fear above all else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oiWPNYr30I

WLMortis posted:

Don't blame nerdz because our society is hosed up. In a sane society replacing unnecessary work with technology would be a good thing.

WLMortis posted:

I think you can call Fuller naive and overly Utopian, but it seems unfair to lump him in with the Objectivists (although maybe the previous quote doesn't do the best job of separating them). I can't see Ayn ever holding these views:




(For the record, I don't think science is the silver bullet that's going to fix all the world's problems by itself; I just don't think we should hold off on inventing an automatic sewer-cleaning machine just because there are currently people employed in cleaning the sewer manually)

nerdz posted:

If you allow me to defend myself, the jobs I made obsolete were exactly of the higher level "assistant inspector" sort, and probably would be obsolete even without my systems if the owner of the company cared enough to know more about his own company trade. Most of the time, they actually only alleviated the workload of workers that were being made to do the jobs of 3 people or more and still had to keep tabs on a lot of metrics. Even without automation, the companies under employ and overwork people. I don't even remember one case where they caused employee downsizing, only increased employee productivity (which of course was not properly rewarded).

shrike82 posted:

Jesus Christ

In 2010, the Cuyahoga County Recorder's Office in Ohio was sued when it decided to charge $2 per page for photocopies of public documents. The following scene is a deposition from that court case. The dialogue is presented verbatim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbqAMEwtOE

The Puppet Master posted: