Wow. The stupidity and anger is strong in that one.
Last night I was watching a new installment of The Ushanka Show, which are little video blogs about growing up in the Soviet Union, made by a guy who grew up in Kiev but ended up moving to Michigan. I highly recommend them all because they are both down-to-earth and often quite surprising.
Anyway, in the previous short installment he related his shock at discovering that the Amish he was having dinner with in Indiana had indoor plumbing, even though they didn’t use technology. He was struck by the epiphany that even the Amish are more advanced that most Soviets were.
That leads into the episode I linked, where he estimates that in his grandparent’s village (where he stayed every summer), which was probably 3,000 people, nobody had indoor plumbing. Nobody.
He says the Soviets had beaten the US with Sputnik, put the first man in space, but except for people in big cities, nobody had toilets because it wasn’t a socialist priority.
So many years later (probably very recently) he visited home because his much younger brother was marrying into a very well-to-do family (thanks to capitalism). His brother’s new father in-law was something like vice president of marketing for a big distillery, and the factory had built him a modern “stick house” based on Canadian designs. (Most locals still live in log cabins).
So he’s drinking with his new family and needs to go to the bathroom, and he’s seen that they have indoor plumbing. So, being used to American life, he heads that way and they tell him the toilet is disconnected, and dumped into a bucket because the septic tank costs too much to pump out, and the bucket was full. He said that was so typically Soviet. You buy a car but gas costs too much so you pull it around with a horse.
So he wandered into their garden with a flashlight and had quite an adventure, which I won’t get into.
And that was post-Soviet life, a giant leap forward from true socialism where people didn’t even have non-working toilets. 🙂
He has tons of entertaining stories like that. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became a bit more market oriented and encouraged business loans. For a while everybody was starting up yogurt companies, and being ex-Soviets, figured out how to package and sell yogurt that was 100% vodka. It was wildly popular because those little yogurt cups meant you didn’t have to find two friends or two strangers to drink with, which was a requirement for having a good time with the traditional large vodka bottles.
Four points need to be made about this sub-animal piece of illogic.
1. This site is called Jacobin. As some people my know, the Jacobins were the most radical element of the French Revolution, and they had a passionate love affair with Madame Guillotine, which ended badly for one Maximillian Robespierre.
2. The person, “Paris Marx,” who wrote this fossilized piece of dinosaur poo, prefers the pronoun “they” to “I” or “me.” It is obviously a big fan of the society described in Ayn Rand’s Anthem, where they burned people at the stake for saying I or me.
3. It should look at a picture of Earth taken from high orbit or from the Moon and note there is only one planet in the photograph.
4. This is the part of the article I like best: “We don’t need space colonies; we need to get rid of billionaires and let the future be decided collectively, instead of letting a few powerful men rule the world.” Yes, we’ll replace them with another group of powerful men who will grind their fellow humans into the economic dust in the name of “Social Justice.”
Wow. You waded a lot further in than I did. For the first several paragraphs I was tempted to Fisk it, but then I thought that would be too much like cow tipping. Cognition is obviously not his strong suit.
If we took away Bezos’s billions and put him to work in one of Amazon’s warehouses tomorrow, he would experience the same cognitive impact from scarcity as other workers whose minds are forced to focus mostly on how to make their paycheck last until the next pay period. Bezos would have the same bandwidth tax as anyone else, limiting the mental capacity he could expend on other ideas, personal projects, or improving his position.
I might start with “Well, where would Amazon’s warehouses have come from if Jeff Bezos was reduced to working in one?”, but I’m lacking the mental energy to fisk this too.
What exactly do they think Bezos was doing when Amazon was getting its start? Just sitting around not doing anything while Amazon magically survived the dot com bubble burst and everyone panning their business strategy and stock price?
Put Bezos in the fulfillment center packing boxes and he would be dropping notes in the suggestion box on how they could make improvements, working in his off time to create a data analytics program to sell to Amazon, or working on a line of robots to help manage the warehouses. Or he would be thinking, “I don’t like this job but it has taught me skills I can apply to my next one. ” or “I don’t like this job but it has given me the kick in the pants to learn what it takes to get a job in a different field.” Or Or, “I can do a better job than these idiots. I’m going to start my own company.”
They would be surprised when billions of Third World Christians and Muslims vote to ban abortion, legalize assault rifles and mandate normal pronouns.
Yeah, they always imply collectively means that the people get to decide but the people don’t get to decide.
I like to use this example on universal healthcare. It really isn’t single payer, its single customer and the customer isn’t the patient. The customer is the small group of people in congress that mandate what the health industry does. Do you want the health care industry trying to meet the desires of a few corrupt government officials or do you want it to meet the desires of hundreds of millions of customers?
I read the article yesterday, or the day before. Not sure when. I will comment some more tomorrow. Going to bed.
–Maybe that’s an inspiring vision to a billionaire and the coterie of people in thrall of his every utterance, but think about it for a second: the richest man in the world is saying that the only way for humanity to thrive is to embrace his vision of open pit mines in space and moving the vast majority of the human population off Earth.–
What’s wrong about open pit mines in space.
Who said anything about “moving vast majority of the human population off Earth”
“Yet there’s absolutely nothing stopping humanity from thriving right here, right now. What we need is a system that values everyone’s skills and wants to see everyone flourish. ”
Things are going better, and got system, namely, freedom, and markets
–But that’s the very thing that billionaires like Bezos, whose companies do everything they can to avoid paying taxes and profit from the privatization of public services, don’t see any value in. Why should they get to make that decision?–
The people who buy Amazon products are making that decision.
It seems this guy wants Trump to make all the decisions.
Nothing wrong with Paris Marx and the others at that site that a nice helicopter ride wouldn’t fix.
Or at least half of one.
It’s not worth the cost of the bits needed to rebut.
That was my opinion a paragraph or so after the I first felt the urge to rebut. Later I pulled up the author’s photo and was surprised to find that “Paris” was a he, or probably a he. Anyway, he is struggling to sprout some scraggly facial fuzz, which I suppose is expected for a socialist of either sex.
Ok, now my two cents. Back in 1607, just about everything that the English ate, wore, or used, was grown, or made in England. The population of England was around 6 million people. Today, it is different. A lot of the food that the British eat, is now imported from Canada, America, Australia, and other countries. Most of the clothes in Britain is made in other countries. Britain today has a much higher standard of living. There are things that poor people in Britain today enjoy, that wealthy people living in 1607, could only dream about. Britain’s population today is around 64 million people.
Without colonies in the new world, this would not be possible.
Now, what about settlements off Earth? The riches that we can get from the NEA, will make all the gold that the Spaniards got from the new world look like chump change. There is one small asteroid that is worth about $20 trillion. And that is just one asteroid. There are a few thousand of those near Earth. There’s also craters on the Moon. Some of those may have rare Earth metals.
Then there is energy. Solar energy from SPS, or LSP. And fusion energy using helium 3.
Then there is space tourism. I have read in several articles, that only the rich will be able to go into space, or travel to the Moon. They are wrong. With the BFR, I think it might be possible to sell seats for about $2,500, to $4,000. That’s if the BFR is carrying 850 passengers, and crew. Say 800 passengers, and 50 crew members.
A trip to the Moon, should be around $10,000, to $16,000. Hotel stay, and meals will cost more. If the ticket price is $16,000, then the entire cost would be $25,000.
Using a nuclear thermal rocket, the cost of a trip would be less. Say $10,000. And that includes hotel stay.
Now if you build a ring around the Earth, then you can lower the cost of a trip to space to around $90.00. Under the ring, you would have tethers. This would be a space elevator. The ring will weigh about 2.4 million tons.
Now, what about settlements off Earth? The riches that we can get from the NEA, will make all the gold that the Spaniards got from the new world look like chump change.
The problem is that not only is the future unknown but this specific aspect of the future is especially unknown and without any useful reference* for the human brain to use to mitigate dealing with the unknown. Evolutionary constructs relating to uncertainty, risk, control, and even creativity are all at play.
A lot of space nerds think of themselves as rational but at the heart of this isn’t rationality so much as irrationality to one degree or another. There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with it. You can’t stop being human.
A lot of being human is about navigating the limitations of our corporal form and the search for an objective truth. It is a bit of a paradox where rational thought leads one to embrace irrationality and/or irrational thought leads to rational outcomes.
I have faith that what you want from the future, or something close to it, can be realized.
* There are endless flawed comparisons and analogies.
I meant to post about this, but forgot. It’s worth looking up who Paris Marx really is: a Newfoundland lad who was going to Memorial University majoring in Political Science. Decided to take time off to travel. Figured out he could make money while at it by writing the sort of “chitty-chat” that passes for journalism among the young. Came back and finished his degree and went on to McGill where he is majoring in Geography. And now has the journalistic street cred to sell hogwash to the MSM (especially the Canadian version of same). I blame Paul Theroux for showing idiots like these they could make a living writing about what they did while screwing around doing nothing.
Jacobins gonna Jacobin, after all.
Wow. The stupidity and anger is strong in that one.
Last night I was watching a new installment of The Ushanka Show, which are little video blogs about growing up in the Soviet Union, made by a guy who grew up in Kiev but ended up moving to Michigan. I highly recommend them all because they are both down-to-earth and often quite surprising.
Anyway, in the previous short installment he related his shock at discovering that the Amish he was having dinner with in Indiana had indoor plumbing, even though they didn’t use technology. He was struck by the epiphany that even the Amish are more advanced that most Soviets were.
That leads into the episode I linked, where he estimates that in his grandparent’s village (where he stayed every summer), which was probably 3,000 people, nobody had indoor plumbing. Nobody.
He says the Soviets had beaten the US with Sputnik, put the first man in space, but except for people in big cities, nobody had toilets because it wasn’t a socialist priority.
So many years later (probably very recently) he visited home because his much younger brother was marrying into a very well-to-do family (thanks to capitalism). His brother’s new father in-law was something like vice president of marketing for a big distillery, and the factory had built him a modern “stick house” based on Canadian designs. (Most locals still live in log cabins).
So he’s drinking with his new family and needs to go to the bathroom, and he’s seen that they have indoor plumbing. So, being used to American life, he heads that way and they tell him the toilet is disconnected, and dumped into a bucket because the septic tank costs too much to pump out, and the bucket was full. He said that was so typically Soviet. You buy a car but gas costs too much so you pull it around with a horse.
So he wandered into their garden with a flashlight and had quite an adventure, which I won’t get into.
And that was post-Soviet life, a giant leap forward from true socialism where people didn’t even have non-working toilets. 🙂
He has tons of entertaining stories like that. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became a bit more market oriented and encouraged business loans. For a while everybody was starting up yogurt companies, and being ex-Soviets, figured out how to package and sell yogurt that was 100% vodka. It was wildly popular because those little yogurt cups meant you didn’t have to find two friends or two strangers to drink with, which was a requirement for having a good time with the traditional large vodka bottles.
Four points need to be made about this sub-animal piece of illogic.
1. This site is called Jacobin. As some people my know, the Jacobins were the most radical element of the French Revolution, and they had a passionate love affair with Madame Guillotine, which ended badly for one Maximillian Robespierre.
2. The person, “Paris Marx,” who wrote this fossilized piece of dinosaur poo, prefers the pronoun “they” to “I” or “me.” It is obviously a big fan of the society described in Ayn Rand’s Anthem, where they burned people at the stake for saying I or me.
3. It should look at a picture of Earth taken from high orbit or from the Moon and note there is only one planet in the photograph.
4. This is the part of the article I like best: “We don’t need space colonies; we need to get rid of billionaires and let the future be decided collectively, instead of letting a few powerful men rule the world.” Yes, we’ll replace them with another group of powerful men who will grind their fellow humans into the economic dust in the name of “Social Justice.”
Wow. You waded a lot further in than I did. For the first several paragraphs I was tempted to Fisk it, but then I thought that would be too much like cow tipping. Cognition is obviously not his strong suit.
If we took away Bezos’s billions and put him to work in one of Amazon’s warehouses tomorrow, he would experience the same cognitive impact from scarcity as other workers whose minds are forced to focus mostly on how to make their paycheck last until the next pay period. Bezos would have the same bandwidth tax as anyone else, limiting the mental capacity he could expend on other ideas, personal projects, or improving his position.
I might start with “Well, where would Amazon’s warehouses have come from if Jeff Bezos was reduced to working in one?”, but I’m lacking the mental energy to fisk this too.
What exactly do they think Bezos was doing when Amazon was getting its start? Just sitting around not doing anything while Amazon magically survived the dot com bubble burst and everyone panning their business strategy and stock price?
Put Bezos in the fulfillment center packing boxes and he would be dropping notes in the suggestion box on how they could make improvements, working in his off time to create a data analytics program to sell to Amazon, or working on a line of robots to help manage the warehouses. Or he would be thinking, “I don’t like this job but it has taught me skills I can apply to my next one. ” or “I don’t like this job but it has given me the kick in the pants to learn what it takes to get a job in a different field.” Or Or, “I can do a better job than these idiots. I’m going to start my own company.”
They would be surprised when billions of Third World Christians and Muslims vote to ban abortion, legalize assault rifles and mandate normal pronouns.
Yeah, they always imply collectively means that the people get to decide but the people don’t get to decide.
I like to use this example on universal healthcare. It really isn’t single payer, its single customer and the customer isn’t the patient. The customer is the small group of people in congress that mandate what the health industry does. Do you want the health care industry trying to meet the desires of a few corrupt government officials or do you want it to meet the desires of hundreds of millions of customers?
I read the article yesterday, or the day before. Not sure when. I will comment some more tomorrow. Going to bed.
–Maybe that’s an inspiring vision to a billionaire and the coterie of people in thrall of his every utterance, but think about it for a second: the richest man in the world is saying that the only way for humanity to thrive is to embrace his vision of open pit mines in space and moving the vast majority of the human population off Earth.–
What’s wrong about open pit mines in space.
Who said anything about “moving vast majority of the human population off Earth”
“Yet there’s absolutely nothing stopping humanity from thriving right here, right now. What we need is a system that values everyone’s skills and wants to see everyone flourish. ”
Things are going better, and got system, namely, freedom, and markets
–But that’s the very thing that billionaires like Bezos, whose companies do everything they can to avoid paying taxes and profit from the privatization of public services, don’t see any value in. Why should they get to make that decision?–
The people who buy Amazon products are making that decision.
It seems this guy wants Trump to make all the decisions.
Nothing wrong with Paris Marx and the others at that site that a nice helicopter ride wouldn’t fix.
Or at least half of one.
It’s not worth the cost of the bits needed to rebut.
That was my opinion a paragraph or so after the I first felt the urge to rebut. Later I pulled up the author’s photo and was surprised to find that “Paris” was a he, or probably a he. Anyway, he is struggling to sprout some scraggly facial fuzz, which I suppose is expected for a socialist of either sex.
Ok, now my two cents. Back in 1607, just about everything that the English ate, wore, or used, was grown, or made in England. The population of England was around 6 million people. Today, it is different. A lot of the food that the British eat, is now imported from Canada, America, Australia, and other countries. Most of the clothes in Britain is made in other countries. Britain today has a much higher standard of living. There are things that poor people in Britain today enjoy, that wealthy people living in 1607, could only dream about. Britain’s population today is around 64 million people.
Without colonies in the new world, this would not be possible.
Now, what about settlements off Earth? The riches that we can get from the NEA, will make all the gold that the Spaniards got from the new world look like chump change. There is one small asteroid that is worth about $20 trillion. And that is just one asteroid. There are a few thousand of those near Earth. There’s also craters on the Moon. Some of those may have rare Earth metals.
Then there is energy. Solar energy from SPS, or LSP. And fusion energy using helium 3.
Then there is space tourism. I have read in several articles, that only the rich will be able to go into space, or travel to the Moon. They are wrong. With the BFR, I think it might be possible to sell seats for about $2,500, to $4,000. That’s if the BFR is carrying 850 passengers, and crew. Say 800 passengers, and 50 crew members.
A trip to the Moon, should be around $10,000, to $16,000. Hotel stay, and meals will cost more. If the ticket price is $16,000, then the entire cost would be $25,000.
Using a nuclear thermal rocket, the cost of a trip would be less. Say $10,000. And that includes hotel stay.
Now if you build a ring around the Earth, then you can lower the cost of a trip to space to around $90.00. Under the ring, you would have tethers. This would be a space elevator. The ring will weigh about 2.4 million tons.
The problem is that not only is the future unknown but this specific aspect of the future is especially unknown and without any useful reference* for the human brain to use to mitigate dealing with the unknown. Evolutionary constructs relating to uncertainty, risk, control, and even creativity are all at play.
A lot of space nerds think of themselves as rational but at the heart of this isn’t rationality so much as irrationality to one degree or another. There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with it. You can’t stop being human.
A lot of being human is about navigating the limitations of our corporal form and the search for an objective truth. It is a bit of a paradox where rational thought leads one to embrace irrationality and/or irrational thought leads to rational outcomes.
I have faith that what you want from the future, or something close to it, can be realized.
* There are endless flawed comparisons and analogies.
I meant to post about this, but forgot. It’s worth looking up who Paris Marx really is: a Newfoundland lad who was going to Memorial University majoring in Political Science. Decided to take time off to travel. Figured out he could make money while at it by writing the sort of “chitty-chat” that passes for journalism among the young. Came back and finished his degree and went on to McGill where he is majoring in Geography. And now has the journalistic street cred to sell hogwash to the MSM (especially the Canadian version of same). I blame Paul Theroux for showing idiots like these they could make a living writing about what they did while screwing around doing nothing.