So what WOULD be "real change"?

[unixronin]

Well, let's see.

• Congress could start actually representing us, instead of lining their pockets and their friends' pockets and then handing us the bill.  At least acting like they think the law applies to them as well as to us would be a good start, too.
• Maybe when they get over that difficult and painful obstacle, they could start obeying the Constitutional limits on their own authority again.
• We could stop rewarding the financial sector for behavior that would get us, as individuals, thrown in jail or homeless with our future wages garnished for the rest of our lives.
• We could even make economic plans that aren't based on pretending that infinite economic growth forever is a good idea, or even possible in a finite world.
• We could get serious about trying to make the US independent of foreign oil, instead of fighting wars to ensure our continued future access to it, and stop funding foreign governments that hate us but love our money.
• For that matter, we could get serious about renewable, non-polluting energy sources, and stop winking and talking about "clean coal" as though it's not an oxymoron.
• We could stop coming up with movie-plot threat after movie-plot threat to justify taking away our own freedom in order to stop terrorists from taking it away.
• How's this for a really wild idea:  We could, like, actually respect each other's rights and work together to defend everyone's, instead of dividing into opposing camps that each fight to restrict or destroy the other's (but how dare you even think of touching ours!).
• While we're at it, maybe we could even toss out the absurd idea that it's even possible (let alone a good idea) to eliminate all possible risks and hazards from life from the cradle to the grave.  And hey, perhaps we could even ditch the equally stupid idea that there exists some kind of natural right never to be offended (but it's OK to offend other people in the pursuit thereof, because, well, we're Good People, so if anything we do offends them, they must be Bad People, right?).
• On yeah, and that retarded "zero tolerance" shit?  Right OUT, buddy.  Zero tolerance is an excuse not to have to think or accept responsibility for anything — you can just point at the rulebook and say "Don't blame me, the policy did it!"
• You know ... this is a radical concept, but maybe we could, y'know, like, work on the idea of personal responsibility in general, instead of trying to make everything somebody else's fault or somebody else's responsibility?
• In a related vein, we could perhaps work on internalizing the idea that just because we choose to live by a particular ideology doesn't mean everyone else has to, and that we can't expect them to respect ours if we don't respect theirs.

There's a few suggestions to toss out.  Anyone else have more?

Comments

[koyote.livejournal.com]

your second point is interesting. There's a huge variety of opinio0n on what those limits are, but that's okay. The system was designed to have the three branches balance each other out.

Personally I think the "my way or the higway" attitude of the executive branch has been much more damaging in recent history than the any actions of the legislative branch.

Many of the issues with the financial sector- I'd expand that to what Fuller termed LAWCAP (the lawyer capitalist zeitgeist) come from the government publically stating that corporations have some sort of moral behaviour because of the "holiness" of the "free market" while occultly handing out a LOT of our money and excessive legal protectionism to them.

And while Congress has a huge hand in this, the excutive and escpecially judicial branches are at least as bad.

We've had some very good and serious proposals for energy independence in the past 30 years. They've received very short shrift from single issue "conservatives" in most cases- many of the well thought out plans being voiced by socially minded democrats.

Ifinite economic growth is a tough one. Barring a really workable population control system enacted GLOBALLY, reducing to a very great extent some personal liberties, it's not plausible. On the positive side, we've managed to beat Malthus through technology several times now, and there's no reason we can't cotinue to do so.

Of course, the best answer is to open up frontiers. We've got one major terrestrial frontier to open and a raft of extra-planetary ones.

also of course, we need a more "species social" idea behind how we treat our resources. Which goes against the grain a bit from a libertarian point of view. It's a tough one.

I'm a bit... up in the air about the personal responsibility issue. Not because I think its a bad idea, but because I think it tends towards a very limited "every man is an island" viewpoint. Another tough one. I agree, but I also think that personal responsiblity needs to evolve into global responsibility.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I[n]finite economic growth is a tough one. Barring a really workable population control system enacted GLOBALLY, reducing to a very great extent some personal liberties, it's not plausible.

With or without global population control, the economist's fiction of economic growth forever is not remotely plausible. You cannot have infinite growth of anything within a finite, closed system, but all currently-used economic theories operate on the implicit assumption that there is an infinite supply of resources and infinite places to put the trash.

I just read an interesting print article talking about someone trying to get the World Bank to acknowledge this, in a diagram that started out with a box labeled "Economy", an arrow going into it labeled "Inputs", and an arrow coming out labeled "Outputs". The writer was trying to get them to put the whole thing inside a circle labeled "Environment", indicating that the inputs came from somewhere that had limits and the outputs went somewhere that had limits. Rather than accept that reality, the World Bank eventually just deleted the diagram altogether.

Of course, the best answer is to open up frontiers. We've got one major terrestrial frontier to open and a raft of extra-planetary ones.

Which terrestrial frontier are you referring to?

Realistically, we don't have the technology to access the planetary frontiers yet, and — realistically — probably won't have the technology in my lifetime to do any more than some preliminary exploration, barring several truly revolutionary scientific and technological breakthroughs in the next, say, ten years. And much though I regret it, for at least the next ten years we're going to have bigger and more urgent problems to solve.

I'm a bit... up in the air about the personal responsibility issue. Not because I think its a bad idea, but because I think it tends towards a very limited "every man is an island" viewpoint.

I don't see that necessarily following. You can live without the expectation of someone else always being on hand to wipe your nose for you, protect your property and family for you, make all your tough decisions for you, without having to live in every-man-an-island mode. All you have to do is step up to the plate and take your share of the responsibilities, and admit when you fail at something due to your own error or shortfall, instead of looking around for somebody else to pin the blame on.

This ties back into something amazingly dysfunctional I've noticed in American society ever since coming to the US — it's as though there's an unwritten commandment, "Thou shalt never admit fault for anything, nor admit thou knowest not an answer, even though thou must just make shit up in order to avoid the admission."

I agree, but I also think that personal responsiblity needs to evolve into global responsibility.

What's that saying — "Think globally, act locally"?

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

You're working on the assumption that a pound of copper is of the same utility clumped together as a doorstop and refined/manufactured into semiconductor parts.

The pound of copper - yes, is finite, there are only so many billions of tons of copper (or iron, or whatever) on the planet, and I doubt we'll be getting more from space within the next half-century. (Although we *will* be able to do that eventually, and to simply throw the trash into the sun.)

But information more or less *is* infinite. My 22" high-def flatscreen monitor weighs substantially less than my old 15" CRT, which implies that it used fewer bulk resources than the CRT. But in terms of actual value (and economic value, for that matter), my 22" flatscreen is *far* higher. That's the work of engineers and software developers.

Moore's Law is probably going to run into hard physical constraints at some point. We've been good at avoiding those so far, but I doubt that'll go on forever. That's the point where we look at other aspects of growth... remember, we're not three-year-olds and bigger is *not* inherently better.

(I'm a single guy living in the city. I don't need to heft loads of stuff around or carry more than one passenger, so one of those huge pickup-SUVs would be worse than useless to me because it would be hell to park and cost a fortune to run. A motorcycle weighing a twentieth as much, though... is something that I'd pay *more* for, given the option. It's of higher practical value to me given my needs/surroundings.)

Economic growth? I see it happening indefinitely. Not in terms of "bigger", but in terms of "better and worth paying more money for."

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

But information more or less *is* infinite.

Well, for some values of "more or less". It is possible to store all the information that exists about the entire universe and every elementary particle (or larger collection thereof) within it. The catch is, you need the entire universe to do it. You can only map anything in complete, perfect detail if the map is either the territory, or a perfect replica thereof. While the quantity of information available is very nearly limitless, the actual information storage capacity of any given storage resource is finite.

My 22" high-def flatscreen monitor weighs substantially less than my old 15" CRT, which implies that it used fewer bulk resources than the CRT. But in terms of actual value (and economic value, for that matter), my 22" flatscreen is *far* higher.

It may use less bulk resources, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're cheaper resources or cost less energy to extract. The major resource in a CRT that's not in an LCD is glass, which is cheap — made from sand, silicon dioxide, one of the most common materials on the planet — and more or less indefinitely reusable. But the cold-cathode fluorescent lamps usually used to backlight LCDs contain toxic material (mercury) not present in a CRT. Also consider that as a general rule, the way you get more functionality out of less materials is by doing more processing on it, and that takes energy.

Economic growth? I see it happening indefinitely. Not in terms of "bigger", but in terms of "better and worth paying more money for."

That's more on the right track. We can improve the equation by trying to build smarter, better stuff instead of just more stuff. But even then, you cannot have indefinite continuous growth within a closed system. Sooner or later you run into the limits of the system. In any case, conventional economics doesn't even think that far ahead — conventional thinking would rather sell you a car this year and another one in five years, than sell you a car this year that'll last you twenty years, and sell you something else in two years.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

we agree on a lot of points, though we often express some very odd dissimilatiries. SO I'm just gonna hit up the few points:

we have done little to no real development of the oceanic frontier on earth. And it's huge. Really huge.

Regarding infinite growth, the most basic answer is that we can learn new stuff. that always opens up new inputs. and so on- could become a very long and involved discussion.

I strongly disagree with the idea that we have more important things to think about than opening up the solar system. At it's MOST expensive, NASA cost something like a nickel a day per capita. We have the population to pay attention to more than one thing at a time (I could argue that some of our crises are created by this idea that we have to bend all our efforts to one problem at a time).

We are .. probably 5 or 6 years away from a good dent in resource creation from LEO, 20 from a really expansive etra-terrestrial colonization. But we've been about that level since the 70s. Someday we have to start DOING it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

we have done little to no real development of the oceanic frontier on earth. And it's huge. Really huge.

I figured that's what you were referring to. We're polluting the hell out of it,though, and sweeping it clean of life, and now discussing various ways to pollute it even more out of some idea that we can use it as a dumping-ground for excess carbon dioxide. In the nineteenth century, we treated the sea as infinite, able to be exploited without limit. In the twentieth century, virtually every major oceanic fishery crashed due to overfishing.

I strongly disagree with the idea that we have more important things to think about than opening up the solar system. At it's MOST expensive, NASA cost something like a nickel a day per capita.

OK, I worded that poorly. Any serious exploitation of the solar system is going to take a long time to even get started, and it's going to cost a lot of money; and the way things are looking right now, a lot of shit is going to hit the fan before it's even really getting started — beginning with a real possibility of the entire economic structure of our society coming crashing down around our ears as it becomes more and more apparent how much of it we built on sand. Add to that the fact that most people have, frankly, lost interest in space after Apollo, and the outlook isn't good.

We are .. probably 5 or 6 years away from a good dent in resource creation from LEO, 20 from a really expansive etra-terrestrial colonization.

I disagree. Most crucially because we're still tied into the resource economics of chemical rockets. We will never accomplish any substantive large-scale ventures in space until we break free of that. Right now, it still costs thousands of dollars per pound to put payload into orbit, millions of dollars per ton, and to do any resource creation in LEO we're going to have to put thousands of tons of industrial plant up there, unless we first make serious progress on nanotechnology.

I wish it was true, but it isn't. We'd be closer if we'd finish developing NERVA, but it's politically impossible, at the very least until we repudiate some treaties.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

on the oceans- we've got a case of reinformcement in potential. Expanding into and growing ourselves in a frontier like that an easily be done hand in hand with restoring the oceans resource production. It's a case of recognizing that all input IS output and all output IS input.

i still disagree on the space expansion. It would be expensive, yes, but I think it's very doable. I really don't think I'm pointlessly optomistic, either. As with most 'expensive' things at our technological level, it's more a matter of will than actual scarcity of resources.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Here's an angle you may not have considered on the expense: Look at the carbon footprint per pound of putting payload into orbit via chemical rockets. It's staggering. I found it quoted in New Scientist a few weeks back, and at first I thought they had to have misplaced the decimal point. It was tons per pound.

If we want to get serious about doing more in space than science, we have to finish NERVA. Chemical boosters simply aren't an option on that scale.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

chemical boosters aren't a good permanent solution, no. But... oh, to use a REALLY crappy analogy, ships don't get better if no one sails.

There are also a multitude of chemical reaction possibilities. including hydro-oxy.

and there's TANSTAAFL considerations- a carbon footprint can be managed, but not ignored forever.

I don't disagree about NERVA, but i do think we need to push and push hard to start doing, or we won't ever get there.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

I strongly suspect attutle and I will be recruiting you as a speechwriter for our new Anarchist Party...

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

The real question is personal responsibility to who, and to do what? I see the problem as two general groups of people that value different things in society. (Call it opportunity and security.) I honestly believe that everyone wants to make/keep this the greatest country on Earth. The problem comes down to what we mean by greatest.

I have great difficulty talking about rights. I don't believe in them, or really, understand what they are. To me, there are only opportunities. When we define legal "rights", we have endless problems deciding what happens when they rub up against each other. That all comes back to what is valued most.

My main point of agreement is your reaction to the unstated expectation that the government should protect us from encountering different opinions. We have an education system that is designed to make people into cogs in the industrial society. Why are we surprised that so many can no longer reason?