war and subcultures

TRX
January 8, 2012
86:
> What's the point of going to war -
> well, aside from justifying all those
> defence jobs and the military budget
> - when you're going to be destroying
> assets 'your' companies have paid for?

Countries traditionally went to war for loot and/or ransom. Conquest and incorporation was less common than conquest and subjugation; you could squeeze more revenue from subjugation.

A war was good for the treasury, a good way to get rid of excess nobles, peasants, and potential troublemakers, and a strike against "them" - whoever they were at the moment - was always a fine way to help unite the populace behind the current monarch or government.

Though you might view war through the filter of logic, your attacker might simply need to have had a leader tell him God said you needed to be killed.

TRX
January 8, 2012
88:
> With the expected increase in data
> sharing, will these generally merge
> and a more universal culture emerge?

Probably not, depending on your definition of culture. Even the small American town I live in has several distinct cultures with minimal social overlap. For labels, you could call them Native Southern, Redneck Southern, Liberal, Mexican Immigrant, Korean Immigrant, hip-hop, gangbanger, and Damnyankee.

The Koreans are a strong ethnic group here, stuck in the Old South. Mostly spouses and descendants of airmen from the local air base, still maintaining a separate cultural identity. There are several Korean Baptist churches within a few miles of my house, and hangul signs here and there about town.

TRX
January 10, 2012
320:
@124:
> How about a blog talk on guaranteed
> Basic income.

A staple of Mack Reynolds' SF output.

Interestingly, it was part of Richard Nixon's "Federal 2.0" initiative after his re-election. Among other reasons, his advisors told him it would be cheaper than the Welfare system and the various similar programs.

TRX
January 10, 2012
324:
[Aside - war is such a huge waste. What might the prosperity of Europe have been like had we avoided the Great War of 1914 to whenever?]

The British, German, Russian, and Japanese empires would still be world powers, France would be a power under whatever government it had that week, the USA would be an insular backwater, and the general level of world technology would probably be around late-1930s by our standards.

Practically everything we think of as "modern" is a development of WWII or the Cold War. Some of it would have happened anyway, but without those big piles of government money and cost-plus contracts, it would have taken a lot longer.

"Peace. n. Maintenance of a state of tension short of actual conflict."
- dictionary of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne

TRX
January 10, 2012
328:
> but perhaps most of the lower 48
> states having some Amish presence.

There are sizeable groups of Mennonites in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, that I know of. They're just not tourist attractions like the Amish in Pennsylvania.

I once worked in a production machine shop in a company that made agricultural leveling lasers. The company claimed they had filed the first patent for a practical application of laser technology. I don't know, but they'd been building lasers for a long time.

Their main product was a simple laser unit that sent a beam across a field; you used the beam while plowing to set the drainage grade of the field. You can buy a nearly-identical product at Harbor Freight for under $100 now, but they cost as much as a small car then.

On night shift one week, I turned around from setting up a CNC lathe to find a whole group of people in black staring at me. The guy in front looked like the Tall Man from "Phantasm." It turned out they were a group of Mennonites who'd bought one of the first lasers in 1964 or so, and it had broken. They'd come up to get it repaired, and were getting a tour of the plant.

At that time even the big agricorps weren't entirely sold on laser grading, but the Mennonites had been using it for 20 years... adjusting the grade by hand, with horse-drawn plows.

It seems they're not against technology as much as they only embrace technology that they feel is appropriate for their lifestyle. I have some understanding of that, as I have chosen not to include television, answering machines, voicemail, text messaging, Facebook, or Tweeter in my life...

TRX
January 10, 2012
337:
> In the wargame case, it's
> "coordinating launch times between
> almost a _hundred_ sites, on the fly,
> over a couple of hundred square miles
> of territory, when a fleet of ships
> gets to a specific spot in the ocean,
> while using no radar and without
> accurate pre-targeting information."
> While, of course, maintaining
> complete radio and communications silence,

[apologies for the big quote]

Simple enough problem. You've given that I know where the target is; I'll assume I know where all my launch sites are. And since I have around a hundred sites, I'll assume at least that many missiles. I'll pass on the question of how many hits it would take to sink a carrier.

First, I wouldn't bother with the US GPS system for tracking. I'd use the Russian GLONASS system, or even derive something from the Iridium satellite array. All I have to do is guide my flock close enough to pick up the heat and radar signature of the carrier group, or even a WWII-tech magnetometer.

As far as communications between my launch sites, I don't even need couriers. I can use steganographic means to embed information in radio or television broadcasts or telephone conversations, or shrouded network traffic, or even send my data over power lines.

Once the flock is launched, it only needs to look up to the satellite array(s). Or I could use off-the-shelf inertial guidance bits in one or two of each volley, communicating optically or via spread-spectrum to the others, to save money and maximize payload.

All it takes is that I be able to overrun the carrier group's defenses. They're working at a severe disadvantage in target identification and intercept trajectories, and their interceptors probably cost orders of magnitude more than my cheap missiles. Gunnery would doubtless take out more than antimissile missiles, but again, the number of available turrets, target acquisition time, and other information are all matters of public record.

I'm not talking about the kind of attack it takes a government to mount; like the point I tried to make about taking down UAVs in another thread, this is all off-the-shelf stuff, available to anyone with some money and a bad attitude.

TRX
January 11, 2012
388:
> Unless you're truly paranoid and see
> American spies everywhere

Which reminds me of a very bad novel I read a few months ago, with one unforgettable line:

"Most people think the Government makes it its business to spy on its citizens. In reality, it's more of a hobby than anything else."

TRX
January 11, 2012
393:
> Mossad never publicly accepts
> responsibility for its covert acts.

Sure they do, and their top brass grant interviews to writers to brag about how they did it. I have a couple of those books on my espionage shelf.

Of course, some of those acts were ones where they got caught and publicized, and others were probably revealed to support foreign policy at the time, or simply to boost the mystique of the Mossad.

TRX
January 11, 2012
397:
...and something for Charles:

A repeated background feature of Greg Bear's novels is how labor is treated. There, you do your best in school in order to get in with a good temp agency, since the workplace consists mostly of temporary jobs and temps. Quite depressing, and I've seen a strong trend in that direction in my own working lifetime.

Anyway, I found this article to be interesting: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=4094

<quote>
But how does one organize a workforce that is, by definition, unaffiliated? Where do you find members, if not in assembly lines or hiring halls? How do you hold your employers accountable and make yourself visible to government when you cannot strike? And isn't a freelancers' union, in all its individualistic self-organization, the ultimate oxymoron?
</quote>

They're calling it a "union", but it's not a traditional type of union. It's more like a type of service organization. Such organizations have existed for a long time; auto clubs or travel clubs are good examples. For a small fee, you got customized route maps, towing or emergency service, and bail money and/or legal representation in various circumstances.

For some reason this seems to slot neatly into the Halting State / Rule 34 universe, at least in my mind. Instead of distributed crime, distributed service.

What happens when anyone at all can pick a "union" or service organization that suits their own needs? Any needs, not just workplace or healthcare. Send your dues to "Charlie's Lads" and get one set of benefits, send dues to "Arsenal" and get something entirely different.

Say, you're part of your Neighborhood Watch service organization. Mrs. Kravitz across the street is watching all the time anyway. But instead of calling the police when she sees someone jimmying your door, she calls the Manchster United service organization, who'll respond for free, just for the chance of dancing on someone's kidneys in good cause. No need for those annoying Robocops to come swooping in with their interminable questions and forms...

TRX
January 13, 2012
481:
> As long as people want (and get)
> extraordinary care rather than just
> going out on the ice floe, healthcare
> costs are going to keep going up
> dramatically.

The American system requires that the physician do anything he can to prolong the life of his patient. If the patient doesn't particularly want this ("for the love of God, let me go!"), he's obviously no longer competent to manage his own affairs, so he's stripped of his rights and ministered to anyway. The cycle continues until the money runs out, at which point the patient usually dies soon after. I'm assured this is a complete coincidence.