http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/07/a-bad-dream.html

government

TRX
July 8, 2013
112:
Aha! I finally found that Dickson quote I mentioned a few months ago.

It's from "The Last Master."

"Not necessarily," broke in Rico. "Bureaucrats in a working system don't need to conspire. They're like spiders sitting at points on a community web. If one of them starts doing something for the good of the web, it's because conditions seem to call for it - and those same conditions will also move other bureaucrats, whether they know the whole story or not. It's as if the vibrations travel along the strands of the web, and the rest of them, following their nature, start doing what must be done-all without any direct spider-to-spider communication whatsoever."

The character is talking about political conspiracy, but also applies to the appearance of a virtual "Ruling Party." As Charlie noted, it's their behavior that defines them as a group, not their appearance. Once the group is defined, people will tend to align themselves for or against their interpretation of it.


TRX
July 8, 2013
114:
@13:
I don't think that smart weapons are going to be a major advance over hand weapons, you can still do everything with hand weapons that you can with smart weapons.
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There's no political benefit to smart (or even inexpensive) weapons. Political power is based on money and manpower; annoying someone with a $100 drone gets you no personal benefit; laying down a 50-man SWAT team with armored ground support and a couple of helicopters shows that you have clout.


TRX
July 8, 2013
115:
@26:
They're also making the same mistake that the STASI, the KGB, and many others have made, which is believing that enough secret information will help them stop problems. It never does.
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The Soviet Union gathered an immense amount of technical data from the USA and Britain via the KGB, from nuclear weapon technology to agricultural fertilizers. However, very little of that information made it to the industries this information was theoretically collected for. Infamously, Beria's KGB held on to critical pieces of nuclear material that could have greatly helped their own military projects. This was because they didn't trust their own people, and the information was therefore used to check their work against outside work, instead of assisting them. In other cases, the KGB simply sat on important data; [secret] information was power; once they passed it on, it was of no further value to them.

In the case of the Datapocalypse, I see a lot of government departments and ministries being more concerned with spying on potential competitors than the populace in general.

During the Cold War, the US CIA and FBI's primary enemies weren't "crime" or "foreign interests", it was each other, as they maneuvered to protect and expand their slices of the budgetary pie.


TRX
July 8, 2013
116:
@46:
"I don't think that smart weapons are going to be a major advance over hand weapons, you can still do everything with hand weapons that you can with smart weapons."

Kill the people you want killed (by name, face or activity 'profile') in a crowd, without killing or injuring others?
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I'd like to point out that drone-based "smart weapons" are within hobbyist range already, depending on what you expect of the guidance software. Fully autonomous drones aren't quite there yet, but if you're willing to do the piloting yourself, you can buy the basic hardware now. Add the explosive of your choice and you're ready to go.

The "miracle of cheap electronics" has lowered the price of the hardware down to what many individuals will pay for toys, entertainment devices, or sporting equipment. And the price is still going down.

Consider when an individual politician or bureaucrat can be targeted by a smart weapon, sent by some disgruntled citizen with some room left on a minor credit card. Who can launch an attack from a distance, anonymously. Weeks or months ago, with the weapon left sleeping nearby, awakening by signal or timer.

"If the enemy is in range, so are you" doesn't *always* apply, but the balance of power isn't as asymmetrical as the mainstream media likes to assume, either.


TRX
July 8, 2013
117:
@80:
Actually, machine learning will not solve the problem of false pattern recognition.
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...because the data that would identify a pattern as false is not contained within the dataset being examined.

I once worked with a man who did his Ph.D. thesis on the generation of random numbers. He would go off on the subject at intervals. In retrospect, I probably should have paid more attention to what he was saying...


TRX
July 8, 2013
119:
@111:
re 104, on the government coding your credit card so you have to pay higher prices for everything, thereby defunding you.

We have an example in America where online companies will charge you a higher price if your phone number comes from a higher income zip code/postal code.
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The Auto Zone auto parts chain is a good example of that.

Also, (at least last year when I discovered it) eBay "buy it now" prices would sometimes be different between Konqueror, which is my preferred browser, and Fireflop, which I had to use to actually make a purchase, since eBay's HTML is not W3C compliant. Things were often a few dollars cheaper in Fireflop, at the same exact cut-and-pasted URL.

I don't own a smartphone, so I don't know if there are different prices for mobile vs. desktop browsers too.


TRX
July 9, 2013
175:
@156:
If the USA is superficially different, it's probably due to the fact that registering as a donkey or an elephant gives you a say in the presidential candidate selection process.
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It's rather more different than that. In 50 states and various territories, all election laws are local. In the state I live in, each of the 75 counties has its own election commission, methods of voting, and voter qualifications. City or county offices may be sought by anyone; at the state level, you have to be nominated by a "recognized political party" as defined by the State Election Commission. That's basically the idiots, the other idiots, and two barely-existing no-hopers.

Ten miles away, voting laws may be entirely different...

I'd guess there are at least a thousand electoral entities in the USA, each one jealously protected by its own local power structure.

Broken as the various political institutions are, at least we made it out of the power-to-the-strongest tribal system all other primates are limited to.


TRX
July 12, 2013
238:
222:
The US may be in crisis
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The USA is *always* in crisis.

In 1775, it was the war, and collaborators, and traitors, and finances. Then there were more financial crises, a mass exodus of people who said "bugger this" and decamped for Canada, a few rebellions against the revolutionary government, the furor over the Constutitional Conventions, Indian wars, military encounters with England, Spain, France, Mexico, and various Indian tribes, more financial crises, war with Mexico, war with England, war with Spain, more Indian wars, a nasty civil war and decades of "Reconstruction", another war with Mexico, World War I, trade unions, Communism and the first sedition acts, stock market collapse, more Communists, World War II, HUAC...