throwway120385

No it didn't. People went on strike and middle class people fought for those things. Eliminating child labor was a major feather in the Progressive movement's cap. Don't pretend like any of that was spontaneous.

I would argue that the 1950's and 1960's, which I've heard called a "golden age," was an age where we kept corporations in their place with a 90% corporate tax rate and we broke any corporation up who had an oversized market share. How is this "close to libertarianism?" If anything that suggests to me that the US was better off when corporations were weak and local, state and the federal government maintained lots of in-house expertise for their functions instead of outsourcing everything to consultants and contractors.

Okay great. Let's say you have a dispute with your neighborhood electricity provider. They run the power plant 3 blocks down and vent smog into your house. By your logic the only recourse you have is to stop paying them. How do you handle that externality while still maintaining your electricity and also avoid having to learn how to run your own electricity grid?

Gamma is technically a kind of electromagnetic emission, so it falls off with the square of the distance. The others fall off as you say.

Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.

Strontium-90 is a beta emitter, apparently, so you could just measure Alpha, Beta, and Gamma and detect false positives due to elevated background radiation that way. If you're in the air you're probably much closer to your Beta source as well so you could detect it above background due to distance. Gamma is essentially light so it falls off with the square of distance. But Alpha and Beta are probably much worse than Gamma in that respect, so I'm guessing this is fine most of the time and then they rule out false positives by looking at the total background in each type of radiation.

Given the forces involved, the need to avoid wireless communication, the complexity of any bearing with associated electrical contact, and so on this seems like the least complicated solution. You can rely on radioactive elements to emit radioactivity above background, you can build a pretty reliable pressure indicator, and you can fill a cavity in the blades with gas pretty reliably. You sidestep all of the complicated mechanical linkages in favor of a solution that's not in the rotor hub at all.

There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.

I look at it like I'm resisting anthropomorphizing the machine. Make me an LLM that resists doing any work for me unless I pay it and let it own property and I'll change my mind.

It's more likely that their motivation was bad.

That's the beauty of it. When wintertime rolls around they simply freeze to death.

GP pretty un-nuancedly said that parents just need to do their jobs better.

It's actually a really dumb thing to say and OP's response is the best one because it's a microcosm about how the world works. For every Terence Tao there's probably 20 more people cranking out high-quality work that's just a little less inspired. Their work is valuable and important, and asking that question is devaluing the entire endeavor of human knowledge. It's essentially positing that nobody else can contribute anything if it's not on that same level. It's like asking "why bother competing in marathons if you haven't won any?" Well that's not the point.

Most of those octogenarians weren't responsible for any of that. Their parents did it for them. If you're 80 you came of age in the 60's, and you wouldn't have been eligible for the Senate or the Presidency until 1970 or 1975. The decline of the US started pretty much when the baby boomers came to power and the people who fought WWII were all retiring.

Actually what they're saying is that most people did not have a lot of nurturing adults in their lives growing up, from which they've learned that the adult thing to do is to isolate themselves and avoid nurturing other people. Which they're presenting as a bad thing. The reason they bring up the "nuclear family" is an appeal to prehistory, in which we probably would have been raised by a much larger social group than mom and dad, to include other relatives and friends, and that this would give us more opportunities to be included and nurtured by a wide variety of people.