pc2g4d
Joined 12 years ago
Joined 12 years ago
My ISP is routing public internet traffic to my IPs these days. What keeps me from running my blog from home? Fear of exposing a TCP port, that's what. What do we do about that?
The error in estimation of foods eaten out I treat as a constant factor baked into the daily caloric budget. If I'm gaining weight, the budget just needs to be tightened, i.e. rescaled to account for an error factor that was larger than anticipated. The problem basically becomes estimating one's own estimation error, then adjusting.
As it is, this is a dumb law, and prejudiced against decisions made in silico rather than in vivo.
So the idea of a highly advanced civilization requiring so little resource extraction, or even being able to entirely synthesize all its resource needs from energy, and manage global resources in a non-destructive way, while letting the natural ecology revert to as close as possible to a pre-civilizational state.
So you see small hubs of super-high-density cities, and vast expanses of "nature". Harder to detect from space that way, thus it could resolve the paradox?
You can see our own time moving that direction with urbanization and re-greening happening simultaneously, population growth falling, and a huge effort to abolish the use of one particular variety of extracted resource.
So by maximizing profit at each step along the path, the company destroys itself. Which ultimately sends profit to zero.
So... there's a break in logic somewhere. A link in the chain where responsibility isn't taken.
I don't think it's accurate to say that it is simply us wanting cheaper things. There has been a deliberate trade and even monetary policy that has led to this outcome. It is a matter of policy that the expertise to manufacture such things no longer exists in the United States.
For example, the WTO trade rules the U.S. engineered and China's entry into the WTO facilitated the outsourcing by which managers of U.S. companies sold core industrial competencies out.
Another policy has been the maintenance of a strong dollar, bolstered by the petro dollar system. This makes U.S. exports on the whole uncompetitive.
The abandonment of vocational training in favor of a college-for-all approach has also undercut the skillbase that would be necessary to maintain a domestic electronics and devices industry.
In essence, you could see it as an abandonment of the working class in favor of college graduates, whose stock portfolios benefitted from the cheaper costs accessed in the Chinese labor market.
The America you are familiar with perhaps doesn't care. But many Americans understand that the trade and monetary policies have undercut their own earning potential, and they buy those cheaper Chinese goods with great resentment, simply because _there are no longer alternatives_ in a huge number of categories.
Eventually the dollar will lose its "reserve currency" status; eventually enough of the rest of the world will be developed enough, or trade relationships fraught enough, or free trade discredited enough, that the pendulum will swing the other direction. I suspect the swing has already begun. Part of my motivation for writing the original post---to test the waters.
Anyway, I wasn't aware of Bruce Bastian specifically but the Mormon/LGBT angle stands out. It must have taken a lot of character to be out so publicly in that community.
(The LDS church's response to legalization of gay marriage was to excommunicate anyone who got married to someone of the same sex, and to bar their children from baptism and advancement unless they disavowed their parents' relationship. The policy was rescinded in 2019. In earlier times one could get excommunicated simply for _being_ gay.)
It looks like Bruce and his husband made some appearances on Mormon Stories podcast if you want some inside baseball: https://www.mormonstories.org/?s=bruce+bastian