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Zirantun
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Feb 14 2013, 11:11 PM
Post #16
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May I first comment that there is something about your internet that drives me insane. It says that you're posting several times before I actually see a post. So I'll be sitting at the computer desk thinking, "Has he posted yet, has he posted yet?" and nothing will turn up for hours...
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Simply because languages evolve does not mandate them to speciate. I did not try to claim, nor do I believe, that the presence of social media has prevented the development of dialects in the US. I'm simply saying that a geographical connection combined with modern technology is an impetus for a population to maintain a mutually intelligle language.
Alright. Mind you that languages can still be mutually intelligible yet be different. Icelandic for example is mutually intelligible with Old Norse, and we Icelanders can read Old Norse without much trouble once you memorize the runes (which are pretty easy). It's also mutually intelligible with Faroese, which shares a common ancestor, but they're still different. Likewise, Danish and Norwegian are supposed to be mutually intelligible 80-90% of the time, and both of them are about 50-60% of the time with Swedish (I speak Swedish, but not the other two). I don't know if you speak any other languages, I would imagine you speak Afrikaans, but if you don't, it can get easy to confuse being classified as another language with mutual intelligibility, which is understandable. English is a very isolated language, and most of its close relatives are extinct or integrating into English very fast. Yola became extinct in the 1900s, and Scots is rapidly assimilating into Scottish English as is Cumbric English (which I would consider to be a different language). Because English doesn't have any mainstream close relatives, there's no real frame of reference for monoglot English speakers. If you DO speak Afrikaans though, you should have a good frame of reference in that Dutch and Afrikaans are usually mutually intelligible from what I've been told. I've also been told that Dutch people rudely laugh at Afrikaans speakers because they think their language sounds like Dutch baby-talk...
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I do not know, nor do I claim to know, whether the US will balkanise by 3500 CE. I simply consider it highly unlikely. I find that contrast with your claim to know what will occur to be highly odd. You've stated that there are geographically aligned divisive issues in the United States- where? What are they? Even in the bluest and reddest states, a considerable fraction of the population voted for the other guy. In the states with the highest proportions of specific ethnic groups, there are significant numbers of people from other ethnic groups. America has railways, it has highways, it has air travel. It's considerably more difficult for people to be disconnected from those in the next state over, or on the other side of the country, than it was 200 years ago.
I do have to ask, have you ever even been here? Your cultural observations between East and West are pretty rash... no offense. I mean if you've been here at all, you must not have been here for very long. If you had, and you'd been around the country, you'd know that states form cultural clumps of about 4-5 states at a time in many areas. It's true that it's a lot harder to be disconnected from people in the next state over, but we're not talking about driving some piss ant distance like the distance between Marseilles and the Loire. The distance between Los Angeles and Texas is almost the entire European continent from East to West! It's also true that people can fly, but another thing that tells me that you've either never been here, or didn't much time here when you were here is that you make the assumption that a significant amount of the population flies at all. On the contrary, only about 20% of the population (and that's pushing if you ask me) will ever set foot on a plane, and that's the biggest reason that the ABSURD and INVASIVE and OFFENSIVE and UNCONSTITUTIONAL Airport Security procedures installed in 2010 have been allowed to get swept under the rug. Most people just don't fly, so they just don't care. Because most people don't fly, most people also don't do a lot of traveling between East and West. More people out West visit the East more than people back East visit the West, and even those visits are just vacations. Most of the families in the West have been here long enough that they're mostly disconnected from familial ties back East, so there's not as much mixing between the two as you seem to think. The cultural difference between the two is also quite shocking, especially if you're from the West heading East. Out West we have a very open lifestyle. We'll talk to anybody anytime about pretty much anything, and a lot of close friendships are made through random conversations struck up between strangers. I was really shocked at the closed mentality of people on the East coast. Nobody seems to talk unless they know each other, which begs the question how do they know each other at all? I don't get it, really. If you're striking up conversations with strangers at the gym or in line or something, how do you meet new people?
Political opinions are also very different, and so are opinions about a plethora of social issues. In a lot of places out West, the kind of racism that you see back East is strictly taboo. You would never hear of the entire black male population being stopped and frisked three times over in ANY city out here (not even the worst ones, like LA) if we adopted a stop and frisk law like NYC has (absolutely disgusting), and yet, that's what's happened there since the passing of that law.
To explain what I meant by cultural clumps though. It's kind of odd, and I'm not sure why it's this way, but certain states have a lot more exchange of people with one another than others. I'm not sure how it works outside of the West, but to give a Western example:
Washington, Oregon, Northern Idaho, and British Columbia form one exchange group, while Utah, Southern Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona form another. I'm not sure why, but from my understanding from friends from Utah and having been there, there's not a lot of interaction over the border with Colorado. Colorado forms a Wyoming, Colorado Montana clump. Not to say that there is NO interaction between people, but it's considerably less so than Utahans, Arizonans, New Mexicans, Southern Idahoans, and Nevadans. People move around A LOT between those five areas for some reason, but to a lesser extent to Colorado. I couldn't tell you why, nor could I tell you why Washingtonians, Oregonians, British Columbians, and Northern Idahoans move around a lot more between each other than they do with California... it's just the way it is.
Yes, people get around more today than they did a century, and that has helped to unite them a little more, but people don't get around as much as I think that you're thinking they do. And these artificial borders could darken as the country continues to descend into economic/political mayhem.
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Yes, the political climate 1500 years ago was radically different to the one today- but it wasn't just a matter of who had a border where. Much of the world 1500 years ago was inhabited by nomadic, tribal people who didn't form nation states at all. If anything the level of organisation in political entities has increased throughout history, and that level of organisation should confer durability to a nation's existence. Even far later than 500 AD, monarchy, feudalism and soforth were the basis of nations, whereas today democracy is widespread. Industry is totally different today (industrial revolution), agriculture is totally different today (commercial vs. subsistence). Transport is much faster and much more available- a personally owned vehicle can travel across a distance in a day that would take weeks to traverse through much of human history. Communication is vastly more advanced- one can hold a real-time conversation with someone on the other side of the planet, and entire books can be transmitted over the internet (compare with most of history when books needed to be copied by hand). News travels faster. The average person in a developed nation today knows far more than their equivalent in 500 AD. Many simple scientific facts today were unknown back then even to the pinnacle of science. Population densities are much higher, dependance on infrastructure is much higher, etc. The same goes for the differences in conflict, which I explained elsewhere. Modern war is nothing like war in AD 500. It's considerably different from war in AD 1900.
Do the differences between the modern and ancient world make our nations immune to catastrophe? Do they make our world unchanging and solid? No. But they do heavily effect how things progress.
I'm not disagreeing that the world will change. I'm disagreeing that it will change in the manners you believe it will.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion. You seem to view society as being a lot more stable than I do. 1500 years is a very long time, even in our age of communication.
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One wonders who would be in shape to take Hawaii by force at that point, if this tsunami has heavily affected the entire Pacific region. Though such a disaster would punch the first, second and third (as well as the 11th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th) current largest economies in the face. I'd imagine that'd be pretty... painful to the global economy.
Indeed. lol.
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It may be somewhat of a stretch, but maybe you can do something similar to what China did in the past- steering away from interstellar colonisation and focusing on terrestrial or solar exploits, just as they did oceanic exploration for a land-based empire in their history?
I'm not sure what you mean... would you care to elaborate?
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Why should it be a different metal? If India and Brazil hold a monopoly on space mining (which is rather unlikely possibility), and deep-crust resource extraction becomes possible, then theoretically, everyone can do it, everyone has access to deposits, and their monopoly- and thus power- is considerably reduced. Heck, it may not be an issue of monopoly, but how much of an economy is based around space mining. Perhaps India and Brazil's economies are, for whatever reason, heavily based in space mining, and they're just hardest hit by the development of new technology.
First of all, I had initially played a thousand different scenarios in my head and I couldn't find one that adequately (or at least in my mind) explains why two countries who are so far away from superpower status become superpowers. That would be why I came here. lol. The reason that they were picked is because my friend liked them as a shift away from the West, and it also seemed fun to mix Portuguese with Hindi (or Sarraipense with Bochani, as it has become). Mixed languages, unlike creole languages, don't simplify grammar. So you get to play around with the different complicated features of both and new ones, instead of breaking down the grammar like you do for a creole. So it's a bit of fun... if linguistics is fun to you. I'm not sure if it is.
I wasn't exactly thinking an economy based entirely on space mining. The main idea I had for the space mining in the first place was that they'd be able to back their currencies 100% with gold the way Switzerland has backed theirs. That both currencies become global reserve currencies. Perhaps Brazil in the Western Hemisphere and India in the East... the staples of the economies I had thought would be something like robotics manufacturing and the like. Idk. Perhaps they catch onto aquaponics first and aquaponics farming make up huge sections of their economies as well. The robotics would probably be fed by the rare earth metals that would be brought back from space mining though.
Perhaps the development of that new technology is deep-crust extraction?
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That's a gross misunderstanding of the scale of the solar system though. To claim every known asteroid, India would have to claim nearly four asteroids a week for the next 1500 years, starting today.
That would be why I used the term "good ones". In order to adequately mine an asteroid I would imagine it would have to be kind of large. It also has to have what you're looking for on it. I'm sure there are thousands upon thousands of economically worthless asteroids in the belt. So if you're able to claim the good ones, which are big, and have precious materials for mining, then you're in shape. Is that still misunderstanding?
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From what I can gather, they're talking about some sort of cheap FTL jump? That may make interstellar mining feasible, but in that case you'd likely have a whole bunch of other locations beyond Sol available and you wouldn't need to bother mining planets.
At that point you might well be colonising planets simply because you can. If a habitable world were in 'easy' reach of Earth, our interests in space colonisation would probably look considerably different.
Wouldn't it be fair that they'd start out with what's nearby though? I mean, why would you go to the Rockies to mine gold if there was gold in your backyard?
I had also brought that up. Kurys STARTS OUT as a place for miners to live in corporate housing. The only reason Sarraipense, and its descendant, Zuchechor are prominent languages is because they are the oldest languages on the planet. I can imagine a lot of groups on Earth would want to leave for a number of reasons. Economic of course, but also ideological. I'm sure there would be tons of "space hippies" leaving the planet to start society over. We had also talked about linguistic/religious/ethnic minorities leaving, as well as groups of people trying to revive dead languages/religions or ways of life.
Edited by Zirantun, Feb 14 2013, 11:13 PM.
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whachamacallit2
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Feb 14 2013, 11:57 PM
Post #17
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Guy who yells at squirrels
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- Zirantun
- Feb 14 2013, 11:11 PM
Out West we have a very open lifestyle. We'll talk to anybody anytime about pretty much anything, and a lot of close friendships are made through random conversations struck up between strangers. I was really shocked at the closed mentality of people on the East coast. Nobody seems to talk unless they know each other, which begs the question how do they know each other at all? I don't get it, really. If you're striking up conversations with strangers at the gym or in line or something, how do you meet new people? Where did you get that idea? Living in this country with you, I must say I've never seen this much separation between the East and West. Cities in the West are very similar to cities in the East. Some cities may be a little more finicky about some things and other cities less finicky about others, but there's no clear line of separation between the East and West. The smaller towns on both sides of the country are equally mixed up. I really can't say that there is any mannerism that the West has but the East doesn't, or vis versa.
Now I'll admit that there is a huge amount of divergence between Bible Belters and, let's say, New Englanders, and your examples of how those Western Mountain states tend to clump together are pretty solid, but I really fail to see how these could lead to the great divergence between the East and West. I guess that the West tends to have more paranoid anarchists outside of cities, but that hardly seems enough to lead to balkanization between those two places. They really wouldn't be able to mount up a successful rebellion without the support of industrial areas, and since industrial areas tend to have a lot fewer anarchists, well... so much for that. Oh yeah, and how does the fact that East Coasters prefer to keep to themselves show that there's enough of a difference between the East and West to lead to balkanization? Seems pretty minor to me.
Also, 42% of Americans fly, according to a survey in 2009... Then again, those 42% probably come from high population areas, so that may just support you in a different way.
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Zirantun
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Feb 15 2013, 01:47 AM
Post #18
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Where did you get that idea? Living in this country with you, I must say I've never seen this much separation between the East and West. Cities in the West are very similar to cities in the East. Some cities may be a little more finicky about some things and other cities less finicky about others, but there's no clear line of separation between the East and West. The smaller towns on both sides of the country are equally mixed up. I really can't say that there is any mannerism that the West has but the East doesn't, or vis versa.
Where do you NOT get the idea? Cities back east and cities out West are totally different. Not only demographically, or in how they're laid out, but in the very behavior and value sets of the people. Yes we all live generally industrialized lifestyles, but the very manner of the people differs widely from coast to coast, not to mention the lay out of cities which affects the lifetsyle.
Plus, I think you underestimate the ability of crisis to make cause finger pointing. Especially concerning how the current election system works, with the Electoral College, many states out West don't have much of a say in the elections. The design of the Electoral College defeats its own purpose by according more members to states with higher populations. It was designed to make sure that each geographic state was represented equally, so that people in different regions of the country had equal representation. I have no idea how or why it came to be set up the way it is now, but the way it works can be VERY divisive. This whole concept of "battle ground states" is frankly just absurd, and stops president's from campaigning across the majority of the country, instead catering to a few areas. Those areas might hold the majority of the population, but their concerns differ from other areas who are not considered to be important in the elections. Not representing people tends to make them angry. Not-so-populated states are full of angry people all the time. And the only solution they have is to magically grow their populations? That's just silly. Big amounts of people in a few big cities that hold most of the country's population vote on very different issues than people in less populated areas. There is already a lot of talk amongst both the people and the local governments in Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho, and Eastern Oregon of forming a new state in and of itself because the populations of the area are very tired of elections being stolen by the populations centers.
The electoral college system, with its lack of representation of large sections of the country, in and of itself has the potential to break the country apart if people across 70% of the country keep getting told to stuff it while people back East or in California decide their lives for them. If that's 50 years away, or a hundred years away, I don't know, I'm not an oracle. But when people are under-represented, they seek out representation. The system is broken right now, and the only way that ANYONE is even discussing modifying it is in such away that would only accentuate the problem.
Imagine if America loses its status as a superpower because of the blunders of an administration, or continues to diverge into a long, slow depression while the government just strangles the economy and shuffles out benefits that people outside of population centers don't see. People that aren't in the "battle ground states" are going to start (oh wait, they've already started) pointing fingers back East and blaming them for the economic hardships that they now face because of elections that were largely out of their control. So, not only are there deep cultural differences, but blame already exists, and the potential for that to be a divisive factor I think is more powerful than a lot of people give it credit.
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Now I'll admit that there is a huge amount of divergence between Bible Belters and, let's say, New Englanders, and your examples of how those Western Mountain states tend to clump together are pretty solid, but I really fail to see how these could lead to the great divergence between the East and West. I guess that the West tends to have more paranoid anarchists outside of cities, but that hardly seems enough to lead to balkanization between those two places. They really wouldn't be able to mount up a successful rebellion without the support of industrial areas, and since industrial areas tend to have a lot fewer anarchists, well... so much for that. Oh yeah, and how does the fact that East Coasters prefer to keep to themselves show that there's enough of a difference between the East and West to lead to balkanization? Seems pretty minor to me.
What does this mean, "paranoid anarchists"? Do you mean people who think that our entire system from how we get our food to our foreign policy is one giant ass joke? Yeah, I guess those are a lot more common out West than they are back East. But they're also very present in the cities as well. It's just getting them to act on their beliefs that's presently nigh impossible. As to the openness and general politeness of people out West, it's just an example of how the people already don't interact very much, and probably would be comfortable not living in the same country.
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Also, 42% of Americans fly, according to a survey in 2009... Then again, those 42% probably come from high population areas, so that may just support you in a different way.
By fly, do we mean more than once a year? And yes, about 30-40% of the population is actually concentrated back East, where driving from New York to Florida would violate some sort of a social taboo (really, it just probably has to do with the fact that traffic is a lot worse over there).
Let me rephrase then. Most Americans in the WEST prefer to drive. Flying is still more expensive than driving out here, and if Americans out West had to put up with the absurd security regulations that accomplish almost NOTHING (my friend just flew in from Rapid City the other day with a sheathed knife in his carry on? Good job TSA!) to the same extent that people back East do, there would be a greater outcry. Because we still drive everywhere though, it hasn't been as big of an issue.
Edit: In the question of flight, it is also important to ask where people are flying? 42% of people in the US flying is a very high statistic and I would like to see how they came to that number, but it also does nothing to speak to the level of commuting between East and West unless 42% of the population is flying regularly from coast to coast. I would assume that this disproportionately high number in question isn't talking about flights between the coasts, but flights up and down them, and probably flights that are occurring primarily on the East coast. A simple map of airports across the United States will show you that the density of airports is rather different from East to West. Similarly, a map of the world at night will show you that the light thins as you go out West. While it may not seem like it sometimes, population density has a drastic effect on lifestyle. It means we don't get out as much, because to go anywhere is a lot farther away, and not just because it's a couple hours in traffic, but because there are real geographic barriers. Someone visiting someone else in the West from the East may also have to plan around inconvenient differences between where their friends/family live and where the airport is. I have had to more than commute to some parts of Utah and California after my flights.
It would be interesting to see some statistics on the matter and furthermore how they were gathered. But, from personal experience, the vast majority of people I know (and I know a lot of people) don't go back east, and if they ever did, it was for their 8th Grade Field Trip or some other form of tourism. No family connections, no long term stays... nada. A lot of them have also never been and express no interest in going at all.
Also neighborhood businesses are not as common in cities in the West because the cities are mostly much newer, and anything that comes close is usually part of a chain. In fact, family and neighborhood businesses in both Western cities and the more rural have been largely taken over by chains, with a few exceptions (San Francisco is a city of neighborhoods and local businesses, a lot like a Western New York). This alters the work environment in favor of a more corporate lay out, inhibiting the development of tightly knit neighborhood communities, hence making it easier for people to move and never look back. You can live in the same neighborhood your entire life in Seattle and not have enough connections to get a job. This is because things like the neighborhood bakery, that in a city like New York would've been run by the same family your entire life, would be a chain, and have shifted management several times in your life. No nice old lady to greet you at the counter who watched you order cannoli since before you could see over said counter, but instead a college kid who works the front who is probably from another city and has no idea who you are and is only in town to go to school. A lot of people that I have spoken to East of the Mississippi are very ground into their communities, and it can be very difficult convincing them to leave, even if it's just for a visit.
Of course I think Dick Morris hit it on the nose when he described the new voting dynamics within the country. There are social expectations as to what race, age, gender, and social class vote a certain way today that are far more pronounced than ever before. Once upon a time, candidates had to present articulate campaigns and incumbents had to have performed well to be eligible for reelection. That's not necessarily the case these days, as both Bush's and Obama's reelections have demonstrated. How you vote, like Morris said, is becoming more and more decided by your demographics long before the campaigns ever start. And that doesn't bode well for a "United States".
Edited by Zirantun, Feb 15 2013, 06:18 AM.
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T.Neo
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Feb 15 2013, 07:04 AM
Post #19
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Translunar injection: TLI
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May I first comment that there is something about your internet that drives me insane. It says that you're posting several times before I actually see a post. So I'll be sitting at the computer desk thinking, "Has he posted yet, has he posted yet?" and nothing will turn up for hours...
That seems considerably annoying.
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Alright. Mind you that languages can still be mutually intelligible yet be different. Icelandic for example is mutually intelligible with Old Norse, and we Icelanders can read Old Norse without much trouble once you memorize the runes (which are pretty easy). It's also mutually intelligible with Faroese, which shares a common ancestor, but they're still different. Likewise, Danish and Norwegian are supposed to be mutually intelligible 80-90% of the time, and both of them are about 50-60% of the time with Swedish (I speak Swedish, but not the other two). I don't know if you speak any other languages, I would imagine you speak Afrikaans, but if you don't, it can get easy to confuse being classified as another language with mutual intelligibility, which is understandable. English is a very isolated language, and most of its close relatives are extinct or integrating into English very fast. Yola became extinct in the 1900s, and Scots is rapidly assimilating into Scottish English as is Cumbric English (which I would consider to be a different language). Because English doesn't have any mainstream close relatives, there's no real frame of reference for monoglot English speakers. If you DO speak Afrikaans though, you should have a good frame of reference in that Dutch and Afrikaans are usually mutually intelligible from what I've been told. I've also been told that Dutch people rudely laugh at Afrikaans speakers because they think their language sounds like Dutch baby-talk...
I don't speak Afrikaans, but I am aware that it is mutually intelligible to some degree with Dutch, and also that it sounds rather like baby-talk to Dutch people (with examples such as "us supports us rugby team", etc). In retrospect that statement was really stupid.
Still, Afrikaans for example, arose because a speaking population was separated from another.
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I do have to ask, have you ever even been here? Your cultural observations between East and West are pretty rash... no offense. I mean if you've been here at all, you must not have been here for very long. If you had, and you'd been around the country, you'd know that states form cultural clumps of about 4-5 states at a time in many areas. It's true that it's a lot harder to be disconnected from people in the next state over, but we're not talking about driving some piss ant distance like the distance between Marseilles and the Loire. The distance between Los Angeles and Texas is almost the entire European continent from East to West! It's also true that people can fly, but another thing that tells me that you've either never been here, or didn't much time here when you were here is that you make the assumption that a significant amount of the population flies at all. On the contrary, only about 20% of the population (and that's pushing if you ask me) will ever set foot on a plane, and that's the biggest reason that the ABSURD and INVASIVE and OFFENSIVE and UNCONSTITUTIONAL Airport Security procedures installed in 2010 have been allowed to get swept under the rug. Most people just don't fly, so they just don't care. Because most people don't fly, most people also don't do a lot of traveling between East and West. More people out West visit the East more than people back East visit the West, and even those visits are just vacations. Most of the families in the West have been here long enough that they're mostly disconnected from familial ties back East, so there's not as much mixing between the two as you seem to think. The cultural difference between the two is also quite shocking, especially if you're from the West heading East. Out West we have a very open lifestyle. We'll talk to anybody anytime about pretty much anything, and a lot of close friendships are made through random conversations struck up between strangers. I was really shocked at the closed mentality of people on the East coast. Nobody seems to talk unless they know each other, which begs the question how do they know each other at all? I don't get it, really. If you're striking up conversations with strangers at the gym or in line or something, how do you meet new people?
Political opinions are also very different, and so are opinions about a plethora of social issues. In a lot of places out West, the kind of racism that you see back East is strictly taboo. You would never hear of the entire black male population being stopped and frisked three times over in ANY city out here (not even the worst ones, like LA) if we adopted a stop and frisk law like NYC has (absolutely disgusting), and yet, that's what's happened there since the passing of that law.
To explain what I meant by cultural clumps though. It's kind of odd, and I'm not sure why it's this way, but certain states have a lot more exchange of people with one another than others. I'm not sure how it works outside of the West, but to give a Western example:
Washington, Oregon, Northern Idaho, and British Columbia form one exchange group, while Utah, Southern Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona form another. I'm not sure why, but from my understanding from friends from Utah and having been there, there's not a lot of interaction over the border with Colorado. Colorado forms a Wyoming, Colorado Montana clump. Not to say that there is NO interaction between people, but it's considerably less so than Utahans, Arizonans, New Mexicans, Southern Idahoans, and Nevadans. People move around A LOT between those five areas for some reason, but to a lesser extent to Colorado. I couldn't tell you why, nor could I tell you why Washingtonians, Oregonians, British Columbians, and Northern Idahoans move around a lot more between each other than they do with California... it's just the way it is.
Yes, people get around more today than they did a century, and that has helped to unite them a little more, but people don't get around as much as I think that you're thinking they do. And these artificial borders could darken as the country continues to descend into economic/political mayhem.
I have been to the US, but not recently, not for very long and not over a wide region, so I concede my experience there doesn't give an extensive sense of the country. My biggest impression of the US that I got from being there is that there's more fast food chains there and that the houses are made of wood.
I'm aware that only a fraction of Americans fly- I am inclined to believe whachamacallit's 40% figure more than your 20%, but both are meaningless without context- is that within the last year? Last five years? Last decade? In their whole life? The figures in thread indicate that a much higher percentage of Americans have been on a plane in their life. Even if the percentage who have flown recently was something like 20%, it'd still have a considerable effect. I mean, sure the distance between California and Texas may be similar to that between the ends of Europe, but in this era one can personally own a vehicle that can transport them that distance in a matter of days. And that isn't considering telecommunications, which can link each coast instantaneously. It's easy to take these things for granted, but for much of history- much of American history- such things did not exist.
I agree that there are cultural 'clumps' in the US, but such clumping is not necessarily anything near a reason for war. The problem I have with your assertions is that they're incredibly subjective. "But the culture is different here" and "but we'd never pass X law" and "but people talk with eachother far more often here" isn't demonstratable, falsifiable or quantifiable. There's no way in this case to seperate a real phenomenon from your subjective opinion, and given the lack of any supporting evidence, it might as well be. For example, you claim there are "deep cultural divisions" in the USA- where are they? I have never heard of western USAians and eastern USAians, for instance, being considered seperate ethnic groups.
That's why I'm using actual figures- like the actual demographics in the US, or the results from the last election- to try to prove my point. I know the Democratic-Republican divide isn't a total indicator of divisive political issues in the US, but it does encompass various important issues.
If the electoral college system is broken, then people will fix it. Not immediately and not perfectly, no- but it is a far more likely possibility than a state seceding and deciding to go to war. And even if a state did secede, and didn't have all sorts of conflict within it's own population on the matter, and managed to put together some vaguely decent military, they'd lose because they wouldn't be a match for the much larger domain under control of the federal government- not even a coalition of several states would be. But such a war won't happen, because if tensions get close enough to states seriously considering- and I mean seriously considering secession, things will start to change far sooner than people go to war. There's simply too much of a motivation to prevent unrest and maintain the union on the part of the federal government and pretty much everyone.
And you're also assuming that current problems in the US will play hundreds or even tens of years into the future. In just 100 years the social and political situation in the US could be considerably different to what it is today.
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Well, you're entitled to your opinion. You seem to view society as being a lot more stable than I do. 1500 years is a very long time, even in our age of communication.
At least I have demonstrated what I base my opinions on. One cannot expect a world in which the basis of the economy, the occupation of the workforce, the nature of government, and the nature of military power are considerably different to 500 AD to act like the world did in 500 AD.
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I'm not sure what you mean... would you care to elaborate?
The Hai Jin, which apparently ended China's naval superiority over Europe's capabilities at the time.
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First of all, I had initially played a thousand different scenarios in my head and I couldn't find one that adequately (or at least in my mind) explains why two countries who are so far away from superpower status become superpowers. That would be why I came here. lol. The reason that they were picked is because my friend liked them as a shift away from the West, and it also seemed fun to mix Portuguese with Hindi (or Sarraipense with Bochani, as it has become). Mixed languages, unlike creole languages, don't simplify grammar. So you get to play around with the different complicated features of both and new ones, instead of breaking down the grammar like you do for a creole. So it's a bit of fun... if linguistics is fun to you. I'm not sure if it is.
I wasn't exactly thinking an economy based entirely on space mining. The main idea I had for the space mining in the first place was that they'd be able to back their currencies 100% with gold the way Switzerland has backed theirs. That both currencies become global reserve currencies. Perhaps Brazil in the Western Hemisphere and India in the East... the staples of the economies I had thought would be something like robotics manufacturing and the like. Idk. Perhaps they catch onto aquaponics first and aquaponics farming make up huge sections of their economies as well. The robotics would probably be fed by the rare earth metals that would be brought back from space mining though.
Perhaps the development of that new technology is deep-crust extraction?
By the development of new technology I meant deep-crust resource extraction; I should have made this more clear.
I don't really think it's difficult to imagine Indian dominance, providing that India becomes wealthy enough. Brazil is trickier because it's much smaller than India, and indeed it has a smaller population than various other nations. Still, it does show up on this list of GDP estimates as the fourth largest economy in 2050. It has potential to be influential, but given a suitable amount of economic development for India (and other nations), it'll be outshadowed simply because it's smaller.
Perhaps portuguese could become influential on Kurys by Brazil sending a disproportionate number of colonists/Brazilian colonists being in an area of the planet that later becomes highly influential and/or populous.
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That would be why I used the term "good ones". In order to adequately mine an asteroid I would imagine it would have to be kind of large. It also has to have what you're looking for on it. I'm sure there are thousands upon thousands of economically worthless asteroids in the belt. So if you're able to claim the good ones, which are big, and have precious materials for mining, then you're in shape. Is that still misunderstanding?
With asteroids, you may have somewhat different abundances of elements, and there are different types of objects (M-type, which are metal rich, C-type, which are carbonaceous, S-type and soforth), but you're less dependant on finding say, a vein of ore, than you are on Earth. You don't really have veins of ore like you do in metal-bearing rocks on Earth, so "good ones" are less relevant. Obviously you have more attractive targets and less attractive targets, but even if the most attractive asteroids for mining are taken, there would be a plethora of other asteroids available.
You don't need a big asteroid. Obviously big asteroids have large amounts of materials, which means a mine will last longer, but it won't make the mined material more valuable or getting to or from the asteroid any easier (as far as we know; it isn't like mining in a milligravity environment is a mature science).
Consider for example a 1 km wide asteroid; we can model it as a sphere for simplicity's sake. A C-type With a density of 2000 kg/m^3, it should have a mass of roughly a trillion metric tons. Using the data here, we see that such an asteroid has something like 1 ppm concentration of platinum, which works out to 1 million tons of platinum for this 1km asteroid. Based on current consumption, that'd last the entire planet something like 4000-5000 years. And that's probably one of the 'less good' asteroids- one would imagine an M-type would have a higher concentration of metallic elements.
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Wouldn't it be fair that they'd start out with what's nearby though? I mean, why would you go to the Rockies to mine gold if there was gold in your backyard?
Well yes, but depending on the capabilities of your jump drive, you suddenly have a huge array of possible targets. There are something like 43 stars within 15 light years of Sol. The problem is that now you've got an even more gigantic array of possible asteroids to mine than you did back home, there's no reason whatsoever to mine planets. Taking off from a habitable planet is going to require several kilometers/second of dV being applied at considerable acceleration. It's costly and unecessary.
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Of course I think Dick Morris hit it on the nose when he described the new voting dynamics within the country. There are social expectations as to what race, age, gender, and social class vote a certain way today that are far more pronounced than ever before. Once upon a time, candidates had to present articulate campaigns and incumbents had to have performed well to be eligible for reelection. That's not necessarily the case these days, as both Bush's and Obama's reelections have demonstrated. How you vote, like Morris said, is becoming more and more decided by your demographics long before the campaigns ever start. And that doesn't bode well for a "United States".
No, it just doesn't bode well for the parties who are based on platforms that are increasingly unappealing to a wide swath of Americans. I mean, seriously- how does the fact that moderately wealthy middle aged white men are most likely to vote Republican going to balkanise the US? I see no states made up solely of moderately wealthy middle aged white men...
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 15 2013, 07:21 AM.
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A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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whachamacallit2
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Feb 15 2013, 12:00 PM
Post #20
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Guy who yells at squirrels
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You know, I realized I actually totally misunderstood you right when I turned off my computer. The entire time, I was thinking that by West, you meant predominantly California, where the divergence between them and anywhere in the East is fairly small. From my knowledge from sources and friends, California is not that different from the East Coast. Sure, someone could use their connection to get a job in the East, but it's also within reason. For example, my mom and dad won't be able to help me get a job in Geology, I'll have to rely on either myself or more likely the professors at my college. Likewise, having a family businesss won't help someone become a lawyer if that family business is a restaurant or something. Also, most of the people who I know from California just complain about the whether and how there's less Asians on the East. Overall, I feel like the West Coast is just not that different from the East.
Honestly, I feel that the North and the South have many greater differences between each other than the East and West. You probably don't get much of it from where you live, but the animosity between the North and South is still sort of there, and If you ask any Easterner North of the Dixie line where a civil war will take place they'll say Texas or some other nearby Southern state. Most people wouldn't really consider the Great Plains region the most likely place for a rebellion. I would guess that's due to the fact that it is overall empty and we're all a bunch of snotty assholes.
But I'll admit that I completely ignored the fact that the Plains region is pretty unhappy due to the lack of representation, which is my mistake. I really should've translated "East and West" to "Low population states and high population areas", but alas I totally missed that point. But this actually leads to a whole new set of problems for your story. Let's say that this rebellion takes place and the area you spoke of decided to go for it on their lonesome. For whatever reason, I don't feel like the rest of the country would support that (See reaction to American Civil War), and this may pose a large problem for these states seeking to be a new nation. How do you plan to explain how they managed to put up enough of a fight to completely push back the US's forces when the entirety of the South was incapable of doing so way back when? The Plains regions doesn't really have much in the way when it comes to infrastructure in comparison to the West Coast and the East, so it won't be able to go to war as long as The rest of the nation. You and I both know how ridiculously large the military is nowadays. Insurgency is a problem for the US military, but it doesn't lead to the US giving up. Do you have some sort of trick up your sleeve to explain the successful insurrection from the US instead of just another Civil War?
Oh yea, one more thing. I'm a little confused how the current electoral college system not represent the majority of the country if the majority of the populace is represented? Do you mean that the majority of the land area is not represented? Because there is the problem that there aren't that many people that live in these areas, so giving a state with few people in it equal power as a state with a lot of people could cause a different sort of gross misrepresentation.How do you think it should be solve (genuinely curious btw)
Oh, and totally off topic, but how are you going to handle the Israel and Palestine situation for your story? (Sorry for the tangent, it's just that the thought of a small part of a population dangerously controlling a country made me think of Israel and their apartheid-y ways)
Oh yes, and T.Neo the 40% flight came from a survey done for the year 2009 by travelshorizons. It didn't say where these Americans flew from and to though, hence why I suspect that Zir is quite correct on the issue of what flies more then what.
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T.Neo
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Feb 15 2013, 02:13 PM
Post #21
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Translunar injection: TLI
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Oh yes, and T.Neo the 40% flight came from a survey done for the year 2009 by travelshorizons. It didn't say where these Americans flew from and to though, hence why I suspect that Zir is quite correct on the issue of what flies more then what.
Could you clarify on what you mean by "what flies more than what"? You mean which destinations people fly from and to? It's irrelevant if the figure is 40% or 20%, even if it were smaller than 10% the fact remains that travel technology of today makes the US an effectively far smaller place than it was 200 or even 100 years ago. It extends beyond people taking personal trips, it's important to industry, etc as well. Someone may have suppliers in several different states, for instance.
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 15 2013, 02:20 PM.
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A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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Zirantun
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Feb 15 2013, 04:38 PM
Post #22
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That seems considerably annoying.
Oh it is, believe me. But at least you're keeping me at the edge of my seat.
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I have been to the US, but not recently, not for very long and not over a wide region, so I concede my experience there doesn't give an extensive sense of the country. My biggest impression of the US that I got from being there is that there's more fast food chains there and that the houses are made of wood.
Yes, that last part is especially problematic in states that are hit by tornadoes, like Oklahoma, where banks would go bankrupt before they financed underground housing.
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I don't speak Afrikaans, but I am aware that it is mutually intelligible to some degree with Dutch, and also that it sounds rather like baby-talk to Dutch people (with examples such as "us supports us rugby team", etc). In retrospect that statement was really stupid.
Still, Afrikaans for example, arose because a speaking population was separated from another.
The example I'm normally told is that Afrikaans has broken down the "to be verb" to "is" in every conjugation. So you say "ik is" instead of whatever they would say in Dutch. While that seems a little odd, as linguistics is my hobby, I don't see anything wrong with it. It's a linguistic innovation.
And the last part is true, but consider Scots vs. English, which were historically only separated by a border yet have developed enough grammatical, vocabulary, and phonological differences to be considered separate from English. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cENbkHS3mnY
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I have been to the US, but not recently, not for very long and not over a wide region, so I concede my experience there doesn't give an extensive sense of the country. My biggest impression of the US that I got from being there is that there's more fast food chains there and that the houses are made of wood.
I'm aware that only a fraction of Americans fly- I am inclined to believe whachamacallit's 40% figure more than your 20%, but both are meaningless without context- is that within the last year? Last five years? Last decade? In their whole life? The figures in thread indicate that a much higher percentage of Americans have been on a plane in their life. Even if the percentage who have flown recently was something like 20%, it'd still have a considerable effect. I mean, sure the distance between California and Texas may be similar to that between the ends of Europe, but in this era one can personally own a vehicle that can transport them that distance in a matter of days. And that isn't considering telecommunications, which can link each coast instantaneously. It's easy to take these things for granted, but for much of history- much of American history- such things did not exist.
I agree that there are cultural 'clumps' in the US, but such clumping is not necessarily anything near a reason for war. The problem I have with your assertions is that they're incredibly subjective. "But the culture is different here" and "but we'd never pass X law" and "but people talk with eachother far more often here" isn't demonstratable, falsifiable or quantifiable. There's no way in this case to seperate a real phenomenon from your subjective opinion, and given the lack of any supporting evidence, it might as well be. For example, you claim there are "deep cultural divisions" in the USA- where are they? I have never heard of western USAians and eastern USAians, for instance, being considered seperate ethnic groups.
That's why I'm using actual figures- like the actual demographics in the US, or the results from the last election- to try to prove my point. I know the Democratic-Republican divide isn't a total indicator of divisive political issues in the US, but it does encompass various important issues.
Well, you're right. My opinion is mine, and also very subjective. I tried looking up examples online and only turned up varied results, and I even asked my roommates friend last night who's from New England, and he vehemently denied that East and West were different beyond the lay out of cities and some accent differences. Yet I have also known people from back East who describe an extreme "culture shock" when they come out West, and I experienced something similar when going back East. True, this doesn't make two separate ethnic groups, but it also means that the cultures are different enough and families are separated enough that the only reason the two being separate countries would upset anyone is because of the common history that we share as part of one sovereign country. So culturally, it is my belief that even now, culturally speaking, a split wouldn't serious alter anyone's lifestyle and could be achieved comfortably.
What panic the media would try to stir up and how successful they'd be in doing so is anyone's guess. I imagine the idea of a split would cause a lot of panic and civil unrest, but again, NOT because people out West feel like they have anything in common with people back East. I imagine people would be far more worried about the economics of the issue, and a severe change in allegiance. We're very used to pledging allegiance to the American flag, even though that custom is only 60 or so years old. Having to get used to a new flag, new borders, a new economy, and maybe a new political system would be the reasons that people would panic.
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If the electoral college system is broken, then people will fix it. Not immediately and not perfectly, no- but it is a far more likely possibility than a state seceding and deciding to go to war. And even if a state did secede, and didn't have all sorts of conflict within it's own population on the matter, and managed to put together some vaguely decent military, they'd lose because they wouldn't be a match for the much larger domain under control of the federal government- not even a coalition of several states would be. But such a war won't happen, because if tensions get close enough to states seriously considering- and I mean seriously considering secession, things will start to change far sooner than people go to war. There's simply too much of a motivation to prevent unrest and maintain the union on the part of the federal government and pretty much everyone.
And you're also assuming that current problems in the US will play hundreds or even tens of years into the future. In just 100 years the social and political situation in the US could be considerably different to what it is today.
Yes, but nobody's discussing fixing the problem. When I said that the only option on the table was one that accentuates the problem, what I meant was that everyone is talking about dissolving the electoral college in favor of the popular vote, and that's seriously under consideration. I even see TV ads for it when I go home. If you dissolve the electoral college altogether, that means that pretty much every state West of the Mississippi river with exclusion of Colorado, California, and Western Washington have NO say at all in the national elections. The idea of Federalism (in the modern context of that word, don't ask me how it came to mean state sovereignty) will largely be dead (it is dead in many ways as we knew it), and mob rule will take precedence. Population centers will have even more say, and states with smaller populations (even though many US states rival a number of countries in their total populations) will have less say. If something else were on the table anywhere at all beyond my keyboard and my isolated circle of friends who think the way I do, and my ideas for the future of the Electoral College seem to be mine, as I haven't encountered them anywhere else, then we could talk about the system fixing itself. But right now, as things are, the system shows no signs of fixing itself, and only further dividing the country into states "battle ground states" and "everybody else that doesn't matter".
Also, I question the future of both parties, honestly. We'll have to see how the next election pans out, but it is my prediction that in our lifetimes, the two traditional parties will have become defunct. The reason I say that is because as much as candidates from either party campaign on how wrong the other side of the aisle has been in their years of dominance, they either make problems worse that they campaigned against, or don't change any of the things they called them out on, or some combination of the two. Bush complained about Democratic views on immigration and then all but opened our borders to as many illegal immigrants as wanted to come into the country. The Democrats campaigned against Bush Era spending and just 6 years ago were calling for Washington to cut government spending. Obama gave a very moving speech on the Senate floor about the dire need to cut spending in 2007. The Democrats also campaigned and won on the need to defend American liberties and repeal massive government power grabs that posed significant threats to them like the Patriot Act. Obama's Administration had 3 years of a Democratic House of Representatives, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic Presidency, and yet not one of those issues was looked at in any kind of seriousness. Now, we are deeper in debt than there are American dollars in circulation to pay that debt, ant we have a president who wants unlimited rights to kill people with drone strikes all over the world, American or not.
And no, that's not just the right-wing media talking. Even the Rachel Maddow show, which at times seems radically dedicated to the Obama Administration no matter what they do, was heavily criticizing the president over this issue.
So Americans while they may still look to some heartwarming traditional Republican candidate in 2016, are only a few administrations away from realizing that it doesn't matter which party you vote for, neither of them are going to approach the real problems the US faces. Should current trends continue anyways, and the next few presidents act like their predecessors.
And you're absolutely right that it could be very different. Just look at us 100 years ago today. People were screaming about the idea of the 16th Amendment, which was never properly ratified by the states. Now, nobody remembers a time when there was no income tax, neither do they remember a time where the people actually had the right to withhold their taxes from the government if they felt the government wasn't representing them, and the latter only changed during WWII! People today view the insane amount of taxation as an integral part of our society, not realizing the inane ways in which our tax dollars are spent, and that income tax only pays off the interest on the government spending money that it doesn't really have. Not only do they view it as integral to our way of life, even though we see far less of that money than we think we do, but the majority of the population is actually calling for MORE taxes!
The political scene as well as the sentiments of the people have changed incredibly in just 70 years. Imagine what they could be in another 100...
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By the development of new technology I meant deep-crust resource extraction; I should have made this more clear.
I don't really think it's difficult to imagine Indian dominance, providing that India becomes wealthy enough. Brazil is trickier because it's much smaller than India, and indeed it has a smaller population than various other nations. Still, it does show up on this list of GDP estimates as the fourth largest economy in 2050. It has potential to be influential, but given a suitable amount of economic development for India (and other nations), it'll be outshadowed simply because it's smaller.
Perhaps portuguese could become influential on Kurys by Brazil sending a disproportionate number of colonists/Brazilian colonists being in an area of the planet that later becomes highly influential and/or populous.
Ah ok. I hadn't thought about it that way. The original plan was for the Portuguese to be the "natives" so to speak, and the Indian company employees to be the "maroons". I'll look at another scenario and run it by my friend.
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With asteroids, you may have somewhat different abundances of elements, and there are different types of objects (M-type, which are metal rich, C-type, which are carbonaceous, S-type and soforth), but you're less dependant on finding say, a vein of ore, than you are on Earth. You don't really have veins of ore like you do in metal-bearing rocks on Earth, so "good ones" are less relevant. Obviously you have more attractive targets and less attractive targets, but even if the most attractive asteroids for mining are taken, there would be a plethora of other asteroids available.
You don't need a big asteroid. Obviously big asteroids have large amounts of materials, which means a mine will last longer, but it won't make the mined material more valuable or getting to or from the asteroid any easier (as far as we know; it isn't like mining in a milligravity environment is a mature science).
Consider for example a 1 km wide asteroid; we can model it as a sphere for simplicity's sake. A C-type With a density of 2000 kg/m^3, it should have a mass of roughly a trillion metric tons. Using the data here, we see that such an asteroid has something like 1 ppm concentration of platinum, which works out to 1 million tons of platinum for this 1km asteroid. Based on current consumption, that'd last the entire planet something like 4000-5000 years. And that's probably one of the 'less good' asteroids- one would imagine an M-type would have a higher concentration of metallic elements.
If it's not obvious, I'm reading these comments piece by piece and replying to each piece before I've read the next. So... I had no idea that asteroids were projected to be that mineral rich. Perhaps the entire scenario needs to be totally reconsidered. I'll get back to you on that.
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Well yes, but depending on the capabilities of your jump drive, you suddenly have a huge array of possible targets. There are something like 43 stars within 15 light years of Sol. The problem is that now you've got an even more gigantic array of possible asteroids to mine than you did back home, there's no reason whatsoever to mine planets. Taking off from a habitable planet is going to require several kilometers/second of dV being applied at considerable acceleration. It's costly and unecessary.
Ok so maybe we need to ask the question of whether asteroid mining is as feasible as we're assuming it is. My friend told me he wouldn't be online today, so I can't extract his ideas for details of mining stations on asteroids, but I remember that they seemed plausible to my largely non-mathematical mind. His original scenario was a desecrated Earth, new planet for farming one that I found to be incredibly cliche, which is why I convinced him to change it. Also, aquaponics kind of knocks out the need for soil, so you're not going to say: "Oh, the Earth is too desecrated to farm, let's go to another planet and farm its soil!" Not once it's become the mainstream method of farming anyways.
So what other scenarios might we consider for settling another planet for anything beyond ideological reasons? If asteroid mining isn't all that feasible, then do we colonize other planets to mine them of their natural resources, or do we colonize them because we just want to get the hell away from Earth and start over?
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No, it just doesn't bode well for the parties who are based on platforms that are increasingly unappealing to a wide swath of Americans. I mean, seriously- how does the fact that moderately wealthy middle aged white men are most likely to vote Republican going to balkanise the US? I see no states made up solely of moderately wealthy middle aged white men...
It might not be the best example for balkanization at present, but I was using it more of an example of how politicians are adopting much more of a divide-and-conquer sort of strategy. That could evolve later into something else more sinister, but right now, the only potential it has to divide the country is based on ethnicity (which is so deliciously ironic considering whose coined the new strategy ). If race bating politics is to be the issue that tears the country apart, then it has to wait another 50 or so years until Blacks and Hispanics outnumber Whites in many areas of the country. By that time, dividing the country along ethnic and geographic lines would be much easier. All people in majority White states like Utah, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Minnesota, etc. would have to say is, "All those damn Mexicans in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and all those blacks in the South and back East are fucking up the whole country!" And they'd be able to plausibly make that argument based on the fact that whatever administration the feel is "fucking up the country" will have been elected by races and ethnicities who form the majority in several geographic areas.
Of course I'm not sure that that's the most likely scenario anyways...
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Oh, and totally off topic, but how are you going to handle the Israel and Palestine situation for your story? (Sorry for the tangent, it's just that the thought of a small part of a population dangerously controlling a country made me think of Israel and their apartheid-y ways)
I have no idea...
I am totally anti-Israel as it is a modern-day apartheid state, so Israel will not exist as a distinctly Jewish nation in 1500 years, but how to resolve the problem I'm not sure. Although I am anti-Israel, and find the majority of Jews living there to be some of the most morally despicable people on Earth, I also don't believe they all deserve to die because they're dicks, which makes me seriously fear for their future. Israel already recognizes a problem that it calls the "time bomb", which addresses the fact that the Palestinian population is growing far faster than the Jewish population, and that this could swallow up the Jewish state. What happens in terms of "swallowing up" could be very frightening. The Palestinians have every reason in the world to HATE the Jews. Way more than crazy people like Hitler or Stalin ever did in the past. This could mean that we will bear witness to a second Holocaust in our lifetimes, which would truly be a tragedy. An alternative possibility is that the Palestinians peacefully take over the country and a new nation based on the model presented by Iran and India in 1948 comes into being.
Palestinians in my experience of having met a few and read a lot about their plight are a lot more peaceful than the Western (ESPECIALLY the American) media likes to paint them out to be. Historically, Palestinians don't seem to act unless provoked. The present conflict with Palestinians shooting their Qassam missiles over Gazan border started when IDF soldiers killed a kid playing soccer and then shot up his funeral, and then assassinated Ahmed Jabari, the current commander of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in his car while he was reading a peace agreement that had been faxed to him. The Western media has reported that the conflict started when Gazans randomly started firing missiles over the border into a nation with one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world...
So how does it end? I don't know. I can see Palestinians coming to a peaceful resolution, but I can also see them giving into the bait and killing massive amounts of Jews either deliberately or inadvertently. What I see as the most likely scenario is some sort of a war post-US foreign aid to Israel in which Israel exhausts its financial and military resources and is finally bombed into oblivion by someone else. The region will very likely collapse into some sort of a civil war afterward as the Jews still make up a significant amount of the population and are surrounded by Arabs who hate them.
I don't know though, I honestly hadn't given it much thought. What I do know, is that after the US stops shoveling out foreign aid to Israel like it's going out of style, Israel is in for some really hard times. They have no real economy to speak of, and their already having trouble feeding their population even with the billions of dollars a year they get from the US...
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Oh yea, one more thing. I'm a little confused how the current electoral college system not represent the majority of the country if the majority of the populace is represented? Do you mean that the majority of the land area is not represented? Because there is the problem that there aren't that many people that live in these areas, so giving a state with few people in it equal power as a state with a lot of people could cause a different sort of gross misrepresentation.How do you think it should be solve (genuinely curious btw)
Yes, precisely. But I also think that as you said you're a Chicagoan, you're view of what constitutes "a lot of people" is a little bit contaminated. Your state has double the population of states like Washington and Utah, but that's because there are nearly 13 million people in your state where Utah and Washington are 6 and nearly 7 million respectively. It's very easy for people back East to look out West and say, "Well, there's not that many people." 6 million people is the population of some countries, and that's a lot of people who have very different voting concerns that have virtually no voice. After all, we're talking about national elections, so these elections concern EVERYBODY in ALL regions of the country, not just the majority of people in a few areas who have no idea what the concerns are of people somewhere else.
If you rule the country by majority, then the majority gets to dictate policies in areas where they have no idea what they're talking about, and then the people in those areas are upset because someone from somewhere else with an unrealistic idea of what's going on then is telling them what to do and how to live.
The Electoral College exists to give everyone in the United States, no matter how populated your state is an equal voice, for the reasons mentioned above. It's about regions, not about how many people you have. Yet, that's not possible as long as a state like California has 55 votes while a state like Washington only has 12.
So, I propose an equal number for every single state. Whatever that number is, it needs to be at least 5 or up, but it has to be equal. That way, EVERYBODY can have an equal say. The way the system works right now pretty much just tells 70% of the regions in the country to deal with whatever people in big cities or otherwise heavily populated states say they have to deal with. And then those people get upset, and then they feel further and further and further polarized from the people who are making the decisions for them.
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But I'll admit that I completely ignored the fact that the Plains region is pretty unhappy due to the lack of representation, which is my mistake. I really should've translated "East and West" to "Low population states and high population areas", but alas I totally missed that point. But this actually leads to a whole new set of problems for your story. Let's say that this rebellion takes place and the area you spoke of decided to go for it on their lonesome. For whatever reason, I don't feel like the rest of the country would support that (See reaction to American Civil War), and this may pose a large problem for these states seeking to be a new nation. How do you plan to explain how they managed to put up enough of a fight to completely push back the US's forces when the entirety of the South was incapable of doing so way back when? The Plains regions doesn't really have much in the way when it comes to infrastructure in comparison to the West Coast and the East, so it won't be able to go to war as long as The rest of the nation. You and I both know how ridiculously large the military is nowadays. Insurgency is a problem for the US military, but it doesn't lead to the US giving up. Do you have some sort of trick up your sleeve to explain the successful insurrection from the US instead of just another Civil War?
Well I don't know. I had kind of imagined a long guerilla war in certain regions before anything came to fruit, honestly.
However, I'd like to bring something interesting up concerning the US military. In my experience with military personnel, which is probably 65% of my friend base in our desperate economy, the military has one of two effects on people.
1. People either come out of the military hating the government altogether, and recognizing the sheer inefficiency, or continue their military careers with a sense of disloyalty only because it is a good career opportunity.
2. They buy it hook line and sinker and decide that they love everything about government structure and think that that structure is applicable to civilian life. That can manifest itself in parenting, or it can manifest itself in how they vote.
A lot of officers fall under the second category. A lot of enlisted people and reserves seem to fall under the first. Officers like big government because they're so deeply intertwined with the government it's their entire lifestyle. Enlisted personnel and reserves get more of the double lifestyle. They're more in touch with civilians needs and concerns, and also don't get treated as fancifully as officers often times do, and the fact that officers get nice transfers and better benefits often times sews the seeds for more of an identification with the common population.
Now of course that's really generalizing, and there's no clear officer/enlisted boundary between their views on politics and how they would react in a situation of rebellion, but the military is a deeply divided place. I know that soldiers follow orders, but when those orders mean killing your own people to maintain "order", there will certainly be a percentage of soldiers that refuse and join the resistance. Syria's chairman of the Free Syrian Army was a decorated officer of the Syrian Army and had boasted a 37 year career.
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Honestly, I feel that the North and the South have many greater differences between each other than the East and West. You probably don't get much of it from where you live, but the animosity between the North and South is still sort of there, and If you ask any Easterner North of the Dixie line where a civil war will take place they'll say Texas or some other nearby Southern state. Most people wouldn't really consider the Great Plains region the most likely place for a rebellion. I would guess that's due to the fact that it is overall empty and we're all a bunch of snotty assholes.
I really feel the same way, I was honestly trying to be politically correct and avoid some futuristic cliches. I honestly feel like the South should be its own country right now, or at least enjoy the amount of autonomy that say Scotland does from the UK. It's sooooooo different. And so many people there are still upset about the first Civil War!
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You know, I realized I actually totally misunderstood you right when I turned off my computer. The entire time, I was thinking that by West, you meant predominantly California, where the divergence between them and anywhere in the East is fairly small. From my knowledge from sources and friends, California is not that different from the East Coast. Sure, someone could use their connection to get a job in the East, but it's also within reason. For example, my mom and dad won't be able to help me get a job in Geology, I'll have to rely on either myself or more likely the professors at my college. Likewise, having a family businesss won't help someone become a lawyer if that family business is a restaurant or something. Also, most of the people who I know from California just complain about the whether and how there's less Asians on the East. Overall, I feel like the West Coast is just not that different from the East.
I tend to group California, Texas, Florida, and Hawaii into distinct cultural areas. California isn't really anything like the rest of the West, and Texas isn't quite Southern, and neither is Florida. Hawaii is just an occupied kingdom...
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T.Neo
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Feb 15 2013, 06:48 PM
Post #23
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Translunar injection: TLI
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Well, you're right. My opinion is mine, and also very subjective. I tried looking up examples online and only turned up varied results, and I even asked my roommates friend last night who's from New England, and he vehemently denied that East and West were different beyond the lay out of cities and some accent differences. Yet I have also known people from back East who describe an extreme "culture shock" when they come out West, and I experienced something similar when going back East. True, this doesn't make two separate ethnic groups, but it also means that the cultures are different enough and families are separated enough that the only reason the two being separate countries would upset anyone is because of the common history that we share as part of one sovereign country. So culturally, it is my belief that even now, culturally speaking, a split wouldn't serious alter anyone's lifestyle and could be achieved comfortably.
I'm afraid I can't base an opinion solely on your word, or that of your friend. I'm trying to base my opinions on objective facts. Perhaps I'm not doing a very good job of it, but I think that difference is why we're having difficulty getting on the same page here. I find the notion of "extreme culture shock" between the East and West coasts to be difficult to believe when all the knowledge I've gathered about culture in America seems to indicate to me that I wouldn't feel too uncomfortable there myself, and I'm from a totally different country with a totally different demographic background and a totally different history. - Quote:
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Yes, but nobody's discussing fixing the problem. When I said that the only option on the table was one that accentuates the problem, what I meant was that everyone is talking about dissolving the electoral college in favor of the popular vote, and that's seriously under consideration. I even see TV ads for it when I go home. If you dissolve the electoral college altogether, that means that pretty much every state West of the Mississippi river with exclusion of Colorado, California, and Western Washington have NO say at all in the national elections. The idea of Federalism (in the modern context of that word, don't ask me how it came to mean state sovereignty) will largely be dead (it is dead in many ways as we knew it), and mob rule will take precedence. Population centers will have even more say, and states with smaller populations (even though many US states rival a number of countries in their total populations) will have less say. If something else were on the table anywhere at all beyond my keyboard and my isolated circle of friends who think the way I do, and my ideas for the future of the Electoral College seem to be mine, as I haven't encountered them anywhere else, then we could talk about the system fixing itself. But right now, as things are, the system shows no signs of fixing itself, and only further dividing the country into states "battle ground states" and "everybody else that doesn't matter".
Forgive my lack of tact here, but that's rubbish. The people there would have just as much influence on the country as anyone else. Their states would not, but I am unsure of why that is such a bad thing. I would have figured that catering for people is more important than catering for states. Your alliegance to the notion of federalism seems based more in ideology than concern for how the government can serve the people, and I can't quite wrap my head around that. If you gave each state an equal electoral college vote, the degree of misrepresentation of people may well be higher than the degree of misrepresentation of states. But states are merely organisational entities, while people are the very things a state- be it an actual nation-state or a subnational divison thereof, should aim to serve. I agree that federalism in the sense of a federal collection of states is largely dead in the US, but I don't think it ought to be anything worth distressing over. Simply having the population equivalent to various nations isn't a reason for a small fraction of a nation to have disproportionate representation in the national government. If people have specific problems that wide-ranging solutions can't fix adequately, then you create a distinction between local and national law, not disproportionate influence in elections. - Quote:
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Also, I question the future of both parties, honestly. We'll have to see how the next election pans out, but it is my prediction that in our lifetimes, the two traditional parties will have become defunct. The reason I say that is because as much as candidates from either party campaign on how wrong the other side of the aisle has been in their years of dominance, they either make problems worse that they campaigned against, or don't change any of the things they called them out on, or some combination of the two. Bush complained about Democratic views on immigration and then all but opened our borders to as many illegal immigrants as wanted to come into the country. The Democrats campaigned against Bush Era spending and just 6 years ago were calling for Washington to cut government spending. Obama gave a very moving speech on the Senate floor about the dire need to cut spending in 2007. The Democrats also campaigned and won on the need to defend American liberties and repeal massive government power grabs that posed significant threats to them like the Patriot Act. Obama's Administration had 3 years of a Democratic House of Representatives, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic Presidency, and yet not one of those issues was looked at in any kind of seriousness. Now, we are deeper in debt than there are American dollars in circulation to pay that debt, ant we have a president who wants unlimited rights to kill people with drone strikes all over the world, American or not.
And no, that's not just the right-wing media talking. Even the Rachel Maddow show, which at times seems radically dedicated to the Obama Administration no matter what they do, was heavily criticizing the president over this issue.
So Americans while they may still look to some heartwarming traditional Republican candidate in 2016, are only a few administrations away from realizing that it doesn't matter which party you vote for, neither of them are going to approach the real problems the US faces. Should current trends continue anyways, and the next few presidents act like their predecessors.
I'm well aware of dissatisfaction with the Obama administration, particularly from within the political left. But the fact of the matter is that the party divides are still relevant, even if politics are an iffy business and the best impetus to vote for a particular candidate is that they're a lesser evil. The fact of the matter is you can't rely, in any circumstance, for politicians to be infallible, their rhetoric to be concrete in its execution, and the reality of the situation they're working in (be it political opponents, organisational difficulties, etc) to leave them unaffected. Political frustration is not going to automatically lead to balkanisation/civil war. People may have realised the folly in their 2008-era infatuation with Obama, but he held an average approval rating of 49% in his first term and currently holds an approval rating of ~52%. That's quite low for a US president, but a considerable amount of Americans appear to approve of him to some degree, and I would bet that a good deal who do not are not willing to go to war due to their disapproval. There are several obvious problems with politics in America, but they aren't as precipitant to violence as you make them out to be. - Quote:
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And you're absolutely right that it could be very different. Just look at us 100 years ago today. People were screaming about the idea of the 16th Amendment, which was never properly ratified by the states. Now, nobody remembers a time when there was no income tax, neither do they remember a time where the people actually had the right to withhold their taxes from the government if they felt the government wasn't representing them, and the latter only changed during WWII! People today view the insane amount of taxation as an integral part of our society, not realizing the inane ways in which our tax dollars are spent, and that income tax only pays off the interest on the government spending money that it doesn't really have. Not only do they view it as integral to our way of life, even though we see far less of that money than we think we do, but the majority of the population is actually calling for MORE taxes!
So you're complaining about the US having a mandatory income tax? Like pretty much every other developed nation on the planet? Colour me a skeptic. How exactly is a system allowing people to withold their taxes from the government if they feel like they're not being represented feasible in any manner? Just imagine how many political far-enders would claim that the government "isn't representing them" because it won't reinstate sodomy laws or nationalise every business in the country... or how many people would claim that the government "isn't representing them" so they could just plain get out of paying taxes. - Quote:
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It might not be the best example for balkanization at present, but I was using it more of an example of how politicians are adopting much more of a divide-and-conquer sort of strategy. That could evolve later into something else more sinister, but right now, the only potential it has to divide the country is based on ethnicity (which is so deliciously ironic considering whose coined the new strategy ). If race bating politics is to be the issue that tears the country apart, then it has to wait another 50 or so years until Blacks and Hispanics outnumber Whites in many areas of the country. By that time, dividing the country along ethnic and geographic lines would be much easier. All people in majority White states like Utah, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Minnesota, etc. would have to say is, "All those damn Mexicans in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and all those blacks in the South and back East are fucking up the whole country!" And they'd be able to plausibly make that argument based on the fact that whatever administration the feel is "fucking up the country" will have been elected by races and ethnicities who form the majority in several geographic areas.
The problem with that is that while some states have higher proportions of specific ethnicities than others, there are no ethnically homogenous states. If people in white-majority Minnesota, say, are complaining about black people in the southeast or hispanic people in the southwest, they'll have to deal with black and hispanic people in their own state, and non-racists in their own state, and political opponents in their own state. They'd also have to deal with the fact that the states they're placing their blame upon wouldn't be ethnically homogenous either, though I suppose logic never really appealed to extremists. - Quote:
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I am totally anti-Israel as it is a modern-day apartheid state, so Israel will not exist as a distinctly Jewish nation in 1500 years, but how to resolve the problem I'm not sure.
So... the future of a nation will be defined by your personal dislike of it? I get disliking things (I'm no fan of morally indefensible actions either), but history is hardly defined by what we like and do not like. - Quote:
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Palestinians in my experience of having met a few and read a lot about their plight are a lot more peaceful than the Western (ESPECIALLY the American) media likes to paint them out to be. Historically, Palestinians don't seem to act unless provoked. The present conflict with Palestinians shooting their Qassam missiles over Gazan border started when IDF soldiers killed a kid playing soccer and then shot up his funeral, and then assassinated Ahmed Jabari, the current commander of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in his car while he was reading a peace agreement that had been faxed to him. The Western media has reported that the conflict started when Gazans randomly started firing missiles over the border into a nation with one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world...
IDF soldiers killed a kid playing soccer (no reason, presumably because they're teh evulz), then they shot up his funeral to make things even worse (the only logical reason is evulz, once again), then they killed the commander of the military wing of a political entity regarded as a terrorist group by several nations, but it's obviously morally indefensible because he happened to be reading a fax. Personally I'm having difficulty buying this stuff because the only instance of ever hearing it is you, and you provide no evidence for it other than personal fiat. It's like me saying that it rained live fish over Pretoria today, and the only reason it didn't make the news is because the Media Does Not Want You To Know. How likely would you be to believe my claim? - Quote:
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Well I don't know. I had kind of imagined a long guerilla war in certain regions before anything came to fruit, honestly.
However, I'd like to bring something interesting up concerning the US military. In my experience with military personnel, which is probably 65% of my friend base in our desperate economy, the military has one of two effects on people.
1. People either come out of the military hating the government altogether, and recognizing the sheer inefficiency, or continue their military careers with a sense of disloyalty only because it is a good career opportunity.
2. They buy it hook line and sinker and decide that they love everything about government structure and think that that structure is applicable to civilian life. That can manifest itself in parenting, or it can manifest itself in how they vote.
A lot of officers fall under the second category. A lot of enlisted people and reserves seem to fall under the first. Officers like big government because they're so deeply intertwined with the government it's their entire lifestyle. Enlisted personnel and reserves get more of the double lifestyle. They're more in touch with civilians needs and concerns, and also don't get treated as fancifully as officers often times do, and the fact that officers get nice transfers and better benefits often times sews the seeds for more of an identification with the common population.
Now of course that's really generalizing, and there's no clear officer/enlisted boundary between their views on politics and how they would react in a situation of rebellion, but the military is a deeply divided place. I know that soldiers follow orders, but when those orders mean killing your own people to maintain "order", there will certainly be a percentage of soldiers that refuse and join the resistance. Syria's chairman of the Free Syrian Army was a decorated officer of the Syrian Army and had boasted a 37 year career
Noone in the US is set up for a proper guerilla war. The insurgents in Afghanistan for instance have machine guns, they have mortars, they have rocket launchers. The best a "militia movement" or something of that sort in the US might be able to muster would be assault rifles. They're no match for serious law enforcement, let alone military intervention. Sure, in Libya and Syria military personnel defected and equipment was also captured by the rebels, but the USA is no Syria. When someone enters the white house, institutes a dictatorship and rules for several decades, I'll concede that your scenario will be far more likely... but any such president would be impeached long before things came to civil war or even dictatorship. And division in the US military is exactly why it won't align itself in the manner you suggest. If political views are divided within a group, they'll significantly hinder the ability of that group to decide to defect or support a certain group. If issues are so divisive that people are willing to kill eachother over them, they won't assign themselves to a specific seceded state, they'll massacre eachother in their own barracks.
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And the last part is true, but consider Scots vs. English, which were historically only separated by a border yet have developed enough grammatical, vocabulary, and phonological differences to be considered separate from English. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cENbkHS3mnY
Separated by a border in a specific circumstance, yes.
Unfortunately I can't view the youtube video at the moment, my internet connection seems to hate me...
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Ok so maybe we need to ask the question of whether asteroid mining is as feasible as we're assuming it is. My friend told me he wouldn't be online today, so I can't extract his ideas for details of mining stations on asteroids, but I remember that they seemed plausible to my largely non-mathematical mind. His original scenario was a desecrated Earth, new planet for farming one that I found to be incredibly cliche, which is why I convinced him to change it. Also, aquaponics kind of knocks out the need for soil, so you're not going to say: "Oh, the Earth is too desecrated to farm, let's go to another planet and farm its soil!" Not once it's become the mainstream method of farming anyways.
So what other scenarios might we consider for settling another planet for anything beyond ideological reasons? If asteroid mining isn't all that feasible, then do we colonize other planets to mine them of their natural resources, or do we colonize them because we just want to get the hell away from Earth and start over?
Farming makes even less sense than resource extraction of rare elements. Food simply isn't valuable enough to justify the cost of shipping it from one planet to another. I also suspect that asteroid mining is far more feasible than negating the fact that it's considerably cheaper to get mass off of an asteroid than to get it off a planet.
I'm not really sure if there's any practical reason why people would consider settling another planet beyond "it's there, let's do it". Perhaps it could be a matter of ideology in certain cases; that may lead to some interesting outcomes.
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 15 2013, 07:17 PM.
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A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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Zirantun
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Feb 15 2013, 10:28 PM
Post #24
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I deleted my initial comment... even though it took like 3 hours to write. But, I realized I was repeating myself a lot, and wasn't really getting the points in that I wanted because right now I can't think of a lot of catch phrases that I usually can that are good at getting my points across.
So let's start over.
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I find the notion of "extreme culture shock" between the East and West coasts to be difficult to believe when all the knowledge I've gathered about culture in America seems to indicate to me that I wouldn't feel too uncomfortable there myself, and I'm from a totally different country with a totally different demographic background and a totally different history.
To condense 3 paragraphs worth of explaining that didn't give very many good examples, just alluding to those already given, the "extreme culture shock" to which I was referring isn't supposed to mean the kind of differences one might experience in crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. It's just a culture shock in terms of different ways of approaching employment, community, the workplace, and manners. People from back East normally describe a "relieving sense of relaxation" when they come out West. A point that I do believe was important was that there is a lot less mixing of social classes back East than there is out West though. Another one was that people back East tend to associates states' rights and the concept of federalism and state sovereignty with ugly subjects like slavery, which is a stigma that has held over from the Civil War that exhibits an example of drastically different opinions about government that come from different histories. - Quote:
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Forgive my lack of tact here, but that's rubbish. The people there would have just as much influence on the country as anyone else. Their states would not, but I am unsure of why that is such a bad thing. I would have figured that catering for people is more important than catering for states. Your alliegance to the notion of federalism seems based more in ideology than concern for how the government can serve the people, and I can't quite wrap my head around that. If you gave each state an equal electoral college vote, the degree of misrepresentation of people may well be higher than the degree of misrepresentation of states. But states are merely organisational entities, while people are the very things a state- be it an actual nation-state or a subnational divison thereof, should aim to serve. I agree that federalism in the sense of a federal collection of states is largely dead in the US, but I don't think it ought to be anything worth distressing over.
Simply having the population equivalent to various nations isn't a reason for a small fraction of a nation to have disproportionate representation in the national government. If people have specific problems that wide-ranging solutions can't fix adequately, then you create a distinction between local and national law, not disproportionate influence in elections.
Now this is where I really went off on a tangent. Not angry tangent, but a tangent all the same. I would still like an explanation as to how allowing equal regional representation would misrepresent people. But, let me just say, what you said is total rubbish. No offense. Federalism is totally central to how Western Americans perceive the United States. So if you want to talk in terms of the break up of the USA being unlikely, you're going to have to first show that the federal government is rapidly trying to gobble up the states' rights to handle their own affairs, and you're also going to have to concede that this is integral to the states remaining together. Because we have a different history on this matter, this matter, like several matters, has the potential to polarize the country with some more time. My dedication to the concept of federalism is not ideological, it is rooted in the fact that one-size-fits-all politics has a extensive history of failure. It is precisely because of the uniquely American approach to dealing with regional issues that the country has been such a success and been able to remain as homogenous as it has (although it still isn't as homogenous as it may look). Other countries have regional problems in large part because of the one-size-fits-all approach. Take for example Norway and Sweden, and their arbitrary claim over Lapland and the lack of a federalist approach to include the Saami people in the national system that has resulted in their polarization, and the want for Saamis to operate on the same terms as Native Americans in the USA- autonomous, and separate, as opposed to distinct, but included. The Norwegians have been a lot better about it than Sweden, or say, Russia, but even they didn't recognize Saami autonomy until the 1990s. The fact that the Norwegian system did not give the Saami people a fair opportunity to participate and effect change at a national level has led the Saamis to not want to play. That, and the fact that Saamis are a different people, with a different language, with totally different values. Still, you cannot escape regionalism. It exists if for no other reason than the geographic location of a community and the problems they face there. That is why it is important for people to be recognized regionally, not demographically, and not in terms of how many of them there are. People in Buffalo, New York, aren't familiar with the needs/concerns of people in Spokane, Washington. It is important for every state to be represented equally, so that scores of people go unheard. When people go unheard, then regional differences are more likely to develop, and those differences can eventually split a nation up. - Quote:
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I'm well aware of dissatisfaction with the Obama administration, particularly from within the political left. But the fact of the matter is that the party divides are still relevant, even if politics are an iffy business and the best impetus to vote for a particular candidate is that they're a lesser evil. The fact of the matter is you can't rely, in any circumstance, for politicians to be infallible, their rhetoric to be concrete in its execution, and the reality of the situation they're working in (be it political opponents, organisational difficulties, etc) to leave them unaffected.
Political frustration is not going to automatically lead to balkanisation/civil war. People may have realised the folly in their 2008-era infatuation with Obama, but he held an average approval rating of 49% in his first term and currently holds an approval rating of ~52%. That's quite low for a US president, but a considerable amount of Americans appear to approve of him to some degree, and I would bet that a good deal who do not are not willing to go to war due to their disapproval. There are several obvious problems with politics in America, but they aren't as precipitant to violence as you make them out to be.
That would be why I use terms like "if current trends continue" or "in the future". I am aware that Republican and Democrat lines are still relevant, but that relevancy is diminishing and will only continue to diminish... if current trends continue. If they do, and I think they're more likely to than not, then within a few more administrations, Republican and Democrat are going to be synonymous with status quo. - Quote:
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So you're complaining about the US having a mandatory income tax? Like pretty much every other developed nation on the planet? Colour me a skeptic. How exactly is a system allowing people to withold their taxes from the government if they feel like they're not being represented feasible in any manner? Just imagine how many political far-enders would claim that the government "isn't representing them" because it won't reinstate sodomy laws or nationalise every business in the country... or how many people would claim that the government "isn't representing them" so they could just plain get out of paying taxes.
I'll keep my original post here... long as it may be. Here's what I said: Uuuuhh... yes. I am. It was illegally ratified, and I would like to see it go through its proper due process instead of being rammed through by a racist administration (Woodrow Wilson's), but I also don't understand what right the government has to my personal income, especially when I understand how they're using the money they forcefully extract from me. Income tax, like other failed programs such as social security, have only become licenses for the government to spend more money on more stupid things, often times their own pensions and hourly wages. I already detailed the absurd amount that I would be getting paid to start out translating cartoons and magazine articles for the State Department (why is anyone being paid by the government to translate that kind of crap anyways?), and that's just a single example of a starting job. Using income tax to pay off the interest, people in government are at least able to feel mildly secure wasting taxpayers' dollars because the payments that they have to make to whom ever they borrowed the money from aren't accumulating any interest. Then they get to raid funds like Social Security, which is extracted from my income whether I like it or not, to pay for... God knows what. So yeah, considering how it's come to be used, I'm complaining. It is a key incentive for government waste. Just because it's something that "every nation in the developed world" is doing, doesn't mean it's a good thing and there aren't other ways to fund a country. That's the whole "jump off a bridge" doctrine in its purest. I have no idea how other countries spend the money, but I like giving the government what they need instead of billions of dollars in excess for them to waste. And they've proved that they're very good at doing just that... wasting. I also take moral issue with it. It seemed to be feasible until WWII... the culture was different then. People paid more attention to politics and had a stronger sense of civic duty than they do today. Compare Nixon's Watergate to Obama's Benghazi or Fast & Furious. Nobody ever conclusively proved that Nixon or anyone in his administration tampered with the Watergate tapes, and yet he was forced to resign because he looked guilty, and almost assuredly was. Today, the president's administration fumbles the ball and a US Ambassador is murdered for the first time in 30 years and the administration blatant lies and dodges questions for months on the matter, and people call the issue "almost nothing" or a "witch-hunt". Similarly, the president uses executive privilege to cover for his buddy Eric Holder on a ridiculous operation like Fast and Furious that is garnering a very high civilian body count in another country and not only does nobody care, but Bill Maher says that all of the civilians dead "would've been dead anyway" on his TV show, and his audience, as well as MSNBC news anchors laugh out loud. As if a bunch of dead Mexican women children is funny... People today are not paying attention in the same way and holding themselves and their government accountable in the same way. But once upon a time, when they did, this idea was very feasible, and in fact central to the vision the Founding Fathers had for this country. It gave the people a formerly unknown bargaining chip with their government. If the government didn't keep the people happy, the government didn't get paid. That was also during a time when people relied considerably less on the government in their daily lives, and so was much more feasible back then. With how we've allowed government to grow today... if large sections of the country decided to withhold federal tax dollars then huge sections of society could shutdown instantly. That was the way it was though, when the government was much smaller and the people were much more accountable. It's very different today, and not nearly as feasible without some kind of a revolution, in the true meaning of the word. - Quote:
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The problem with that is that while some states have higher proportions of specific ethnicities than others, there are no ethnically homogenous states. If people in white-majority Minnesota, say, are complaining about black people in the southeast or hispanic people in the southwest, they'll have to deal with black and hispanic people in their own state, and non-racists in their own state, and political opponents in their own state. They'd also have to deal with the fact that the states they're placing their blame upon wouldn't be ethnically homogenous either, though I suppose logic never really appealed to extremists.
Original post: The north was not an ethnically homogenous place at the time of the Civil War either. There were Scots, Irish, Italians, and Blacks on either side of the Dixie line and that made part of the composition of both sides of the army. In fact, in high school we learned specifically about how both the Union and the Confederate armies had to employ translators for all 3 European minorities specified above and how families from all 3 countries who had immigrated to different areas of the United States but had once come from the same village/province/region in Europe were pitted against each other after having been drafted. It's hard to imagine a Scottish or Irish person who doesn't speak English, but at the time they were somewhat more common I guess, even in the US. Also, the Draft Riots in New York saw a number of lynchings and burnings and other murders of Blacks, as Blacks were considered to be by those who couldn't escape the draft by payment of $300 the center of the problem. So yes, no area will be homogenous, but under that scenario areas will still have majorities, and if the majority is upset enough, people act... stupidly. Now of course I can also see how the one post on Israel came across as I think my opinion is the only one that mattes. To a certain extent though, since I am writing this within the guidelines appropriated by my friend (which were very generalized), it is... But, I also don't think that Israel will last much longer after it stops receiving federal aid. The entire country is one USA subsidized nightmare. And as far the story of what happened before the Palestinians started firing their pussy Qassam rockets over the Gazan border. That story, like I said before, is all over the internet. However, I also mentioned before that that is the story that I heard from Anna Baltzer, the author of Witness in Palestine when I was talking to her via email about where I might be able to purchase her book. She's not very hard to get a hold of either. Check out the book website and shoot her an email on the subject if you would like to get her take. She's a very credible source of information, and her book is a very good read. Concerning a guerilla war within the US, I do partially agree. I think you are in part underestimating what a guerilla war could entail though. It could be something as simple as insurgents running around the Cascade/Rocky mountains with automatic weapons. However, for something a little larger, I would imagine that an insurgent group would have to get involved with organized crime to get the kind of weaponry that they need to compete with the US military. Still, if the military were to to start pursing any group of American citizens on American soil right now, the people out West at least would start crapping bricks. Although Posse Cometatus was officially suspended in 2012, nobody is used to the idea of the National Guard patrolling US soil yet. If a state held an emergency referendum and declared its independence, the American people would be far more interested in a peaceful resolution of the problem than a violent one. And a violent response by government, as likely as it is, would only upset the populace even more. I do get your point about military bases tearing each other to pieces though. I imagine that would happen in several locations. But I also imagine that the occurrence of these kinds of rebellions within the military would not result in the total annihilation of a military base, and that someone would come out on top.
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Farming makes even less sense than resource extraction of rare elements. Food simply isn't valuable enough to justify the cost of shipping it from one planet to another. I also suspect that asteroid mining is far more feasible than negating the fact that it's considerably cheaper to get mass off of an asteroid than to get it off a planet.
I'm not really sure if there's any practical reason why people would consider settling another planet beyond "it's there, let's do it". Perhaps it could be a matter of ideology in certain cases; that may lead to some interesting outcomes.
I didn't think farming made any sense either, and like I said, it's cliche... the whole Earth destroyed thing. If the reasons are totally ideological though, I would imagine then that the first settlers are people who can afford to buy the ticket. So they'll definitely come out of first world countries and the dominant superpowers.
That would require me to alter the linguistic makeup of Zuchechor I would think, if not at least by a little bit. So how might we make the India and Brazil space mining thing work?
If it has to go, it has to go. I just wanna know if it's salvageable.
Edited by Zirantun, Feb 15 2013, 10:29 PM.
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seascorpion
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Feb 16 2013, 08:29 AM
Post #25
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Why Can't I Hold All These Mongols?
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I don't think the danger is that the US will balkanise. It is obviously the most dramatic possible decline of the US, but it isn't how the US will actually go down. My personal opinion is that the US will decline in a similar way to the Venetians, or even Argentina in the 20th century. Put simply, there is a growing economic inequality in America, and it is translating into political inequality. If one person can finance your entire campaign, do you think you'll give them priority over a majority? Unless that type of corruption of the democratic process is curbed, it is going to get worse under present circumstances. You only have to look at a lot of the developing world and realise, that, when a government serves the interests of a political and economical elite , it is not going to be able to maintain long term economic strength, power and presence when in competition with nations that provide economic and political incentives to the majority of its population. If the US continues as it is now, and no serious attempt at reform is made, it will not be able to compete in the long run with a reformed China or India. Obviously its a whole other debate on whether or not India or China can become politically and economically inclusive to maintain a long-term superpower status, but the US could easily become worse than it is now. Of course, it takes time for a prosperous nation to stagnate. Its just how I view the US going downhill, as opposed to Balkanisation or somehow thinking that social networking prevents a country going to shit.
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T.Neo
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Feb 16 2013, 09:04 AM
Post #26
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Translunar injection: TLI
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To condense 3 paragraphs worth of explaining that didn't give very many good examples, just alluding to those already given, the "extreme culture shock" to which I was referring isn't supposed to mean the kind of differences one might experience in crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. It's just a culture shock in terms of different ways of approaching employment, community, the workplace, and manners. People from back East normally describe a "relieving sense of relaxation" when they come out West. A point that I do believe was important was that there is a lot less mixing of social classes back East than there is out West though. Another one was that people back East tend to associates states' rights and the concept of federalism and state sovereignty with ugly subjects like slavery, which is a stigma that has held over from the Civil War that exhibits an example of drastically different opinions about government that come from different histories.
In other words, it isn't culture shock at all. I suspect you're just blowing things out of proportion because your ideological beliefs support the idea of cultural differences in the US leading to balkanisation and/or a the establishment of strong independance for states. What bothers me is I've never heard of these supposed differences in western US culture anywhere, ever, from anyone other than yourself, while for instance cultural differences or animosity over the Civil War in the South are fairly well-known phenomena. There's a rather famous phrase, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. All of my research, including first-hand accounts from various Americans, paints a very different picture from what you're depicting here. I suspect that picture is far closer to the reality than yours. - Quote:
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But, let me just say, what you said is total rubbish. No offense. Federalism is totally central to how Western Americans perceive the United States. So if you want to talk in terms of the break up of the USA being unlikely, you're going to have to first show that the federal government is rapidly trying to gobble up the states' rights to handle their own affairs, and you're also going to have to concede that this is integral to the states remaining together. Because we have a different history on this matter, this matter, like several matters, has the potential to polarize the country with some more time. My dedication to the concept of federalism is not ideological, it is rooted in the fact that one-size-fits-all politics has a extensive history of failure. It is precisely because of the uniquely American approach to dealing with regional issues that the country has been such a success and been able to remain as homogenous as it has (although it still isn't as homogenous as it may look). Other countries have regional problems in large part because of the one-size-fits-all approach. Take for example Norway and Sweden, and their arbitrary claim over Lapland and the lack of a federalist approach to include the Saami people in the national system that has resulted in their polarization, and the want for Saamis to operate on the same terms as Native Americans in the USA- autonomous, and separate, as opposed to distinct, but included.
It seems to me though that a one-size-fits-all solution is what you're advocating. If every state had equal representation, a voter in Vermont would have something like 40 times the influence of a voter in Texas. I find that level of inequality so horrendous as to be antithetical to the very notion of democracy. And it won't fix the issue of battleground states in any case, because candidates will still focus their attention on states that polls show are mostly undecided. It seems a far better option to me to have a national and a sub-national legislature, which is, if I understand correctly, already the case in the USA. That way everyone can have an equal (per person basis) influence on the nation as a whole, and people within a state can have an equal influence on issues that face their particular region. - Quote:
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Uuuuhh... yes. I am. It was illegally ratified, and I would like to see it go through its proper due process instead of being rammed through by a racist administration (Woodrow Wilson's), but I also don't understand what right the government has to my personal income, especially when I understand how they're using the money they forcefully extract from me. Income tax, like other failed programs such as social security, have only become licenses for the government to spend more money on more stupid things, often times their own pensions and hourly wages. I already detailed the absurd amount that I would be getting paid to start out translating cartoons and magazine articles for the State Department (why is anyone being paid by the government to translate that kind of crap anyways?), and that's just a single example of a starting job. Using income tax to pay off the interest, people in government are at least able to feel mildly secure wasting taxpayers' dollars because the payments that they have to make to whom ever they borrowed the money from aren't accumulating any interest. Then they get to raid funds like Social Security, which is extracted from my income whether I like it or not, to pay for... God knows what. So yeah, considering how it's come to be used, I'm complaining. It is a key incentive for government waste.
Just because it's something that "every nation in the developed world" is doing, doesn't mean it's a good thing and there aren't other ways to fund a country. That's the whole "jump off a bridge" doctrine in its purest. I have no idea how other countries spend the money, but I like giving the government what they need instead of billions of dollars in excess for them to waste. And they've proved that they're very good at doing just that... wasting. I also take moral issue with it.
It seemed to be feasible until WWII... the culture was different then. People paid more attention to politics and had a stronger sense of civic duty than they do today. Compare Nixon's Watergate to Obama's Benghazi or Fast & Furious. Nobody ever conclusively proved that Nixon or anyone in his administration tampered with the Watergate tapes, and yet he was forced to resign because he looked guilty, and almost assuredly was. Today, the president's administration fumbles the ball and a US Ambassador is murdered for the first time in 30 years and the administration blatant lies and dodges questions for months on the matter, and people call the issue "almost nothing" or a "witch-hunt". Similarly, the president uses executive privilege to cover for his buddy Eric Holder on a ridiculous operation like Fast and Furious that is garnering a very high civilian body count in another country and not only does nobody care, but Bill Maher says that all of the civilians dead "would've been dead anyway" on his TV show, and his audience, as well as MSNBC news anchors laugh out loud. As if a bunch of dead Mexican women children is funny...
People today are not paying attention in the same way and holding themselves and their government accountable in the same way. But once upon a time, when they did, this idea was very feasible, and in fact central to the vision the Founding Fathers had for this country. It gave the people a formerly unknown bargaining chip with their government. If the government didn't keep the people happy, the government didn't get paid. That was also during a time when people relied considerably less on the government in their daily lives, and so was much more feasible back then. With how we've allowed government to grow today... if large sections of the country decided to withhold federal tax dollars then huge sections of society could shutdown instantly.
That was the way it was though, when the government was much smaller and the people were much more accountable. It's very different today, and not nearly as feasible without some kind of a revolution, in the true meaning of the word.
I won't bother responding to this, since our opinions on the matter are likely so different as to preclude any meaningful discussion. - Quote:
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So yes, no area will be homogenous, but under that scenario areas will still have majorities, and if the majority is upset enough, people act... stupidly.
Irrelevant, because a majority is not a homogenuity. It means that if people fight, they won't be fighting as a state, they'll be fighting within states. Which in retrospect is probably more like a "typical" civil war than the 1860s US variety. Sure, the Union and the Confederacy of the Civil War were ethnically diverse, but the causes of the civil war didn't involve people hating eachother over their ethnicity. - Quote:
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And as far the story of what happened before the Palestinians started firing their pussy Qassam rockets over the Gazan border. That story, like I said before, is all over the internet. However, I also mentioned before that that is the story that I heard from Anna Baltzer, the author of Witness in Palestine when I was talking to her via email about where I might be able to purchase her book. She's not very hard to get a hold of either. Check out the book website and shoot her an email on the subject if you would like to get her take. She's a very credible source of information, and her book is a very good read.
Don't call five kilograms of explosive pussy, because it isn't. That said, the lethality of a weapons system depends on the context within it is used. The figures between 2001 and 2009 average out to something like 300 rockets per death, so the weapons are not highly lethal on a statistical basis. Still, continued artillery bombardment can be pretty disruptive. There's no way you can indiscrimnantly fire artillery at an area with the intention of hitting civillians and occupy the moral high ground. As for your story as to the origin of this Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the information I could gather indicated that he was killed in a conflict between IDF and Palestinian militants (though accounts are conflicted), and I couldn't find anything beyond conspiracy murmurs stating that the IDF shot up his funeral. In addition, all of the events you mentioned occured in November of last year, while hostilities had been occuring long before November. As for pro-Israel or pro-Palestine pundits, I won't waste my time. - Quote:
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Concerning a guerilla war within the US, I do partially agree. I think you are in part underestimating what a guerilla war could entail though. It could be something as simple as insurgents running around the Cascade/Rocky mountains with automatic weapons. However, for something a little larger, I would imagine that an insurgent group would have to get involved with organized crime to get the kind of weaponry that they need to compete with the US military.
Obviously you can have conflict without things like machine guns and light artillery (which I suppose one could classify thins like RPGs and mortars as), but it'll heavily hurt the force without them. A big hindrance to the US in places like Afghanistan are the very real linguistic and cultural differences between the occupying forces and the civillian population. Those won't exist in the US and thus the ramifications for a guerilla war will be considerably different. You can't magically get a hold of heavy weaponry, importing such things into the US surreptitiously would likely be pretty difficult. In any case noone in the US is prepared to go guerilla with the weapons they already own, let alone fight a proper conflict with decent weaponry. There aren't sizable proportions dedicated enough to enter such a conflict, even when considering political radicals. - Quote:
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Still, if the military were to to start pursing any group of American citizens on American soil right now, the people out West at least would start crapping bricks. Although Posse Cometatus was officially suspended in 2012, nobody is used to the idea of the National Guard patrolling US soil yet. If a state held an emergency referendum and declared its independence, the American people would be far more interested in a peaceful resolution of the problem than a violent one. And a violent response by government, as likely as it is, would only upset the populace even more.
Of course they'll be interested in a peaceful resolution, the problem is that a peaceful resolution will break down into a military conflict if people continue acting silly. And people will support it, because the objective of such a military action will be to put an end to the disruption caused by secession rather than to kill people indiscriminantly (people are generally more acceptable of violence if they believe it's justified). But it'll never happen, because states won't secede in the first place. There isn't enough of an impetus for it and if the state leadership were acting rationally they'd realise that it could only end badly for them.
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If it has to go, it has to go. I just wanna know if it's salvageable.
They can still mine asteroids, I'd just imagine that they wouldn't be the only ones and they wouldn't have mined out all of them, so you'll need some different reason for the colonisation of Kurys and the disposition of the languages there. I suspect the best method for those languages to establish dominance would be for the development of civilisation on Kurys to favour Sarraipense and Bochani-speaking peoples, for whatever reason (presumably geography and soforth).
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somehow thinking that social networking prevents a country going to shit.
Modern telecommunications don't prevent the US from going to shit, they just prevent it from acting like a nation from centuries before telecommunications were created and getting a message across a continent took months.
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 16 2013, 09:18 AM.
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A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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Zirantun
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Feb 16 2013, 04:09 PM
Post #27
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In other words, it isn't culture shock at all. I suspect you're just blowing things out of proportion because your ideological beliefs support the idea of cultural differences in the US leading to balkanisation and/or a the establishment of strong independance for states.
What bothers me is I've never heard of these supposed differences in western US culture anywhere, ever, from anyone other than yourself, while for instance cultural differences or animosity over the Civil War in the South are fairly well-known phenomena. There's a rather famous phrase, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. All of my research, including first-hand accounts from various Americans, paints a very different picture from what you're depicting here. I suspect that picture is far closer to the reality than yours.
Well, I had 3 paragraphs detailing differences that are fairly significant. Maybe I should've left them there, I just didn't think that you were silly enough to assume that cultural differences over such a wide geographic area are nonexistant. So we can waste the time going into them, if that's really necessary  Now, there are a variety of reasons for why this is difficult to find research on online and get an opinion on from other Americans. First of all, most Americans don't get around their own country as much as I have. Even Whachamacallit admitted that his experience base with the West is with the culturally isolated State of California, which differs in a number of ways from the West and so many people out West consider it unfair to judge the entire geographic area by California-experience based standards. For example, in asking people if they've ever been to the Western United States, whether you're from the West or not, if the answer of the party being asked is, "I've been to California", then the person who is asking is likely to say, "Have you been anywhere else?" That's a phenomenon you encounter quite a bit. Because the other Western states are much different than California, and kind of consider California to be an overpriced slum. Unfortunately on this forum, the number of active members is very limited (although there are some 600 registered members, right?), and even fewer still is the number of active users who are American, and even fewer still are users who have been able to spend a lot of time on either side of the country. Maybe that's because of the average age. Most people don't get to get around until they're older, and most of us are young adults. Here's a fact to consider. If Americans don't get out of their country that much, what's to say they get out of their separate regions that much? Nothing is, because they don't. Most people in the United States will never live in another country, let alone live on the other side of their own. Just because there is the technology to fly, doesn't mean that flying is A. comfortable (I hate it for this reason), B. cheap, or C. easily accessible to everyone. I directed you and Whacha to look at a map of airports between the two coastlines to see how many there are out West. Any map you pull up on a simple Google image search will show you a decrease in the density of airports out West. That doesn't mean that the airports on the maps are the only airports in a given state, but many states out West may have only 1-3 International Airports within its borders and maybe 1-5 lesser airports that are only serviced by a certain amount of airports in the geographic area. You cannot fly from LA to the Tri Cities for example without stopping to change airlines in San Francisco. San Francisco is the only city in California with an airport that services the Tri Cities area. And it's not like the Tri Cities area is particularly small either, it just doesn't have a bigger airport yet. And as the condition of American infrastructure continues to decline, that's not apt to change much. Moreover, many cities in Utah lack any kind of an airport at all, and most airports in the region only fly into Salt Lake as it is an international one and a hub city. So you may end up driving 3, 4, or even 5, hours from where you flew in to get to your desired location. And when gas prices are as high as they are at the moment, that's not a very attractive proposition. So, people don't travel much between coasts. Because they don't travel much between coasts, interaction between the two areas is going to be at a minimum, constrained mostly to business transactions and such which by far do not speak to the interaction of the general populace. It is true that we live in a society in which a phone call can take you all the way around the world, just as Facebook and any other social networking website or internet forum can. However we on internet forums are a unique community. Not many people go online to chat about anything really with strangers that they have no idea if they are who they say they are. The world is still much more comfortable sticking to who we know in person. For this reason, that knocks an argument for social networking connecting the coasts and eliminating regionalisms in any significant way out of the water, because the very basis of social networking is in your geographic area 90% of the time. Your Facebook friend's list does not normally consist of many people that you met online in varying parts of the country or the world. In fact, a Facebook friend's list is more often than not made up of the people that someone knows where they grew up, or where they live, and often times the only friends on the list who will live in some wildly removed location are the people who moved there from where you grew up for whatever reason. In my case, people who live outside of areas where I grew up or have close social ties (Iceland) only live in places like Georgia, Texas, New York, etc. because they're in the military and live on base. So now that we've established that East-West interaction between the common populace on a regular basis is rather limited, we can now explore how that has affected the culture. As I said earlier, the two regions share very histories. This article was probably the best one I could find that goes into a little bit of depth, yet it still uses California as a reference. An example that that article gives though is how different areas of the United States were settled. That in and of itself will have a long lasting effect on the culture of the region. It describes the differing histories of Boston and San Francisco, and that Boston's Puritan heritage has had an effect on the over all rigidity of social values, whereas San Francisco's gold mining history has set the spirit of the area up to be more free thinking. Consider then the different histories of Washington and New York, and that New York, though to a lesser extant than the South, once practiced slavery, and in Washington, slavery and anti-Black racism don't have any kind of a history at all. In fact, Blacks immigrated to Washington during the Great Migration because of the state's clean history on the subject. Even Oregon when it became a state had adopted racist laws that led Black families in the 1850s to prefer Washington instead. How is this differing history on the subject of racism relevant today? Because no matter how much they deny it, there is still pronounced racism and classism that exists back East. I brought up the results of the stop-and-frisk law in New York the other day. That is a prime example. After the law was passed, the NYPD went on to stop and frisk more Black males then live in the city three times over. The implications here are quite obvious. The police stopped the same Black men multiple times and frisked them. Why? Well I don't know, because there certainly wasn't a high stop-and-frisk rate for Jews, Italians, Greeks, Russians, or any other prevalent minority in the area. At least not one that even came close to the number of Blacks... That kind of racial profiling of individuals is very looked down upon in Washington, no matter how true it may be. I know that Blacks are only around 13% of the population and account for 49% of the violent crime in this country, and I've seldom met a Black person close to my age who doesn't have some kind of a criminal record. We know these things in Washington, but we still treat Blacks as though they have a clean slate when they enter our communities here. It's a part of our history, and it's now a part of our day-to-day culture. Our law enforcement officers would never dare to stereotype any minority in such away, not only because they could be sued, but because it's just not done here. Another thing that also makes a huge difference in culture and over all lifestyle is the way that cities are laid out and the business culture. I've spent long paragraphs in my posts in here detailing the difference between neighborhoods with family businesses, and neighborhoods without. Back East, where there are a number of local family *businesses in a given neighborhood within your bigger and older cities, there is a greater sense of community. This is because the requirements to leave that neighborhood for anything other than perhaps your job (and even that could be in walking distance) are not as present. There is a grocery store right there, there are restaurants to eat out, there is a bakery where you buy your bread, and a butcher's shop where you can buy your meat (the last one isn't as common anymore), and probably neighborhood parks and theatres where you can spend recreational time. The majority of the items that keep someone in their neighborhood mentioned above are also more likely to be family owned, which only further strengthens the sense of community. The same people will be working the same desk where you buy your goods for most of your life, and you'll get to see them at least once a day or a few times a week. This is a very European lay out to towns, and it is this way back East because the East was settled, and its cities constructed long before many of the cities out West, or at least cities back East boasted large populations beforehand. The West was settled, planned, and built more recently; because of this, scores upon scores of cities out West don't have neighborhood anything. In fact, the word "neighborhood" out West is often associated with residential areas, even in a big city, like Salt Lake. In *a Western big city, you are often lucky to live in a residential area with any of the things mentioned above within walking distance, and if you do live in such an area, people who visit you from other parts of town will comment on how "convenient" it is where you live as opposed to where they do. "Ugh... Carol, it would be so nice to have a hair salon right around the corner! Or a park where I can take the kids without having to wait in traffic... aaaaahhh I wish I lived in Sugar House!" Says Martha, who lives just a mile away in Holiday, in the Salt Lake metropolitan area. Not only will your residential area lack any of the above mentioned commodities, but if it has them, they are not, and I repeat NOT going to be family owned. ALMOST NEVER. If they are family owned, they are part of a local chain within the city, and you probably don't live next to the specific facility where the family members work. So, you meet nameless employees who come and go all the time. Many of them will be college kids, some of the management might be there for years, but they actually don't live nearby, so you're not as incentivized to get to know them because at the store/restaurant/bakery/butcher shop/hair salon is the only place that you'll see them anyways. Because these things are not close by in Western cities, people have to drive everywhere, and being in a car as opposed to walking depersonalizes populations. You don't roll down your window and have a conversation with Sally who lives kitty corner because she's in the next lane and you're stopped in traffic. Not only is that just weird, it's potentially dangerous. You need to be watching the road. So you don't get to see the people in your neighborhood beyond when they're working the yard and you happen to be outside, or when you run into them somewhere around town. Church is one of the only ways that neighborhoods get together out West. And because we place a lesser significance on religion in the USA then say, people in Syria or Iraq, it's not a very community binding factor. Furthermore, it is only a community binding factor if you happen to be so lucky as to live in a specific religious belt. Mormons in Utah for example have the luxury of having their wards (groups that meat for Church services on Sunday at a given time) divided into neighborhood segments, because 75% of the state is Mormon. Mormons *in Washington do not make up nearly as large a segment of the local populace and therefore people from all corners of the town might make up a ward. In the latter scenario, the only time that the ward members will see each other in a week is for Church services. Still, Mormons by their very religious standards tend to be very gracious, friendly, and benevolent to those within their own Church (and out of it as well). But they're the exception to the general rule that if you go to Church you only interact with the people at Church on Sunday or on whatever other day other Church services should take place, if you're even interested in attending those. So communities out West are VERY lose knit. There is not the day-to-day interaction betwixt your neighbors that there is back East because the city lay outs are different and the business environments are different. Close knit communities tend to have rigid standards and belief systems, lose knit ones don't. A very interesting fact to consider, is the percentages in the article I linked above. Only 38% of people within San Francisco grew up there? That means that people there are moving around, A LOT, as opposed to their Eastern counterparts. There are a variety of mannerisms that differ as well. Easterners, ESPECIALLY New Yorkers, are very intense people. That stereotype is even present in the media. Very blunt, very in your face, and very... in the opinion of people out West... rude. Of course, they don't see themselves as being rude, they see it as being "straight up". I once had a New Yorker tell me while in New York, "If you were walking around with your fly down, wouldn't you want somebody to tell you?" He told me that after he told me I looked like a "sissy-ass-sausage boy" with my hair straightened. Some of these stereotypes even have names to them, like "Minnesota nice", where people are polite to you in person, but do everything they can to undermine you behind your back. It's a common way for Minnesotans to avoid outward conflicts. That happens in other places as well, but Minnesotans are renowned for avoiding conflicts this way. Here's an entire thread on a forum dedicated to discussing the differences though. I think I've gone into enough. If you don't believe me that there are significant regionalisms in the United States then come here and travel and see what you notice. - Quote:
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It seems to me though that a one-size-fits-all solution is what you're advocating. If every state had equal representation, a voter in Vermont would have something like 40 times the influence of a voter in Texas. I find that level of inequality so horrendous as to be antithetical to the very notion of democracy. And it won't fix the issue of battleground states in any case, because candidates will still focus their attention on states that polls show are mostly undecided.
It seems a far better option to me to have a national and a sub-national legislature, which is, if I understand correctly, already the case in the USA. That way everyone can have an equal (per person basis) influence on the nation as a whole, and people within a state can have an equal influence on issues that face their particular region.
Hmmm... I had never thought about it that way, but I can definitely see what you mean. Of course, once upon a time, the executive branch of government did not have as many powers as it does today. In the days before power grabbing presidents like Barack Obama and George Bush Jr., a president did not have the same power to affect regional politics as they do today, and so your level of say in the national election wasn't as big a concern. So perhaps my solution is more of a mask to the symptom than it is a cure to the sickness. The sickness is that the president and the executive branch has far too much power. So catering to the importance of the national elections would be like taking aspirin for a headache caused by whiplash. The executive branch needs to be cut, and a number of the powers of the president need to be put back in the House, where they belong. However, that's discussing a solution to the problem, not the future of the problem. Nobody is seriously talking about curtailing executive powers in American government at present with the exception of a few congresspeople and senators. We have a government that supports executive power grabs and then seeks to dissolve the Electoral College, which still polarizes the country with the present scenario. People in Western States are still left with very little influence in determining their own future. You brought up impeachment in your previous post though. Let me first tell you that first of all, no American president has ever been impeached and removed from office. Three US presidents have in fact been impeached: Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, and Bill Clinton. The first two were acquitted, the latter was found guilty, but not forced to resign. With that said, even in the present system, it is nigh impossible to force a president to leave office, ESPECIALLY in today's world that doesn't give a damn when our president is a war criminal (Obama, Bush). However, second, and more importantly, you're obviously unaware (as most Americans are) of certain executive orders that are on the books that grant the president powers to suspend the Constitution, suspend Congress, and set up a Council of Governors (that's the name of the EO in question, you may look it up). I did link you to three of these yesterday, but I don't think I kept them in the revised post. That was silly. I'll look them up again for an edit so you can read them for yourself. The Council of Governors however, sets up a government with no state representatives in which the United States is divided into 10 regions with 10 governors appointed by the president himself. It is in theory meant for a state of national emergency, and only to be temporary. So the only thing that actually needs to happen before a president can actually declare himself the Supreme Dictator of the United States is something like a massive terrorist attack, a horrendous natural disaster, or an outbreak of disease. The president could also orchestrate an emergency should he choose to be able to legally seize these emergency powers. - Quote:
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Don't call five kilograms of explosive pussy, because it isn't. That said, the lethality of a weapons system depends on the context within it is used. The figures between 2001 and 2009 average out to something like 300 rockets per death, so the weapons are not highly lethal on a statistical basis. Still, continued artillery bombardment can be pretty disruptive. There's no way you can indiscrimnantly fire artillery at an area with the intention of hitting civillians and occupy the moral high ground.
As for your story as to the origin of this Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the information I could gather indicated that he was killed in a conflict between IDF and Palestinian militants (though accounts are conflicted), and I couldn't find anything beyond conspiracy murmurs stating that the IDF shot up his funeral. In addition, all of the events you mentioned occured in November of last year, while hostilities had been occuring long before November.
As for pro-Israel or pro-Palestine pundits, I won't waste my time.
"Conspiracy murmurs", "Pro-Palestine pundits"... It's probably best that you don't. Your opinion on this matter seems to be based on mainstream Western media which is unthinkably Pro-Israeli. That being said, I'm not really interested in your opinion on the matter. No offense. In the future scenario I have painted, the entire region (Israel Palestine) is one bi-national state within 200 years... doesn't matter. - Quote:
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Obviously you can have conflict without things like machine guns and light artillery (which I suppose one could classify thins like RPGs and mortars as), but it'll heavily hurt the force without them. A big hindrance to the US in places like Afghanistan are the very real linguistic and cultural differences between the occupying forces and the civillian population. Those won't exist in the US and thus the ramifications for a guerilla war will be considerably different.
You can't magically get a hold of heavy weaponry, importing such things into the US surreptitiously would likely be pretty difficult. In any case noone in the US is prepared to go guerilla with the weapons they already own, let alone fight a proper conflict with decent weaponry. There aren't sizable proportions dedicated enough to enter such a conflict, even when considering political radicals.
Ok first, it's not as difficult as you think. Ever seen The Sum of All Fears? That was and continues to be the most likely scenario for an actual terrorist attack because anyone who knows anything about shipping knows that American ports are trying to operate far beyond the capacity at which they were originally designed, and therefore as little as 3% of what comes into this country as cargo by sea actually gets examined. So, it would actually be very easy to get something like a nuclear bomb into the United States. It is for this reason that I and people like myself question the authenticity of the government story of international cartels of terrorists planning attacks against the United States because they "hate our freedoms". If anyone was sincerely interested in blowing up a port city like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, or Miami, all you'd have to do is ship a bomb in a shipping container that has a 3% chance of getting caught and detonate it before it leaves the docks. Second, we are assuming here that the government is in any position to wage a war on its own soil. You say that there isn't anyone willing to go to war with the government right now, and you're absolutely right. Things will have to get muuuuuuuuuuuuuuch worse before the apathetic populace of the United States decides to take arms against their government. There are divisive factors right now, but the only reason I bring them up is because they are seeds to a tree. The tree is only a shoot right now. Given time and proper conditions, it will grow. If the proper conditions are taken away, that shoot will die. However if they're not, it will grow into a very big tree with many, many branches. By the time the tree is grown, the country will likely be in such a state of financial ruin that the United States government may not even be able to afford to mobilize its troops. Already, our government is employing corporate mercenary soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan because even the government has realized its own wasting habits. When a government employs private mercenaries over its own soldiers, that is a tell-tale sign of a government that is coming apart. In a scenario where things are so bad that state governments are holding referendums, you're probably looking at a government that is having trouble issuing basic services to its people. It would then be very expensive just to pay the cost of drone or missile strikes, and Bashar Al-Assad is learning the hard way that soldiers don't always do what they're told when you turn them against their own people. - Quote:
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Of course they'll be interested in a peaceful resolution, the problem is that a peaceful resolution will break down into a military conflict if people continue acting silly. And people will support it, because the objective of such a military action will be to put an end to the disruption caused by secession rather than to kill people indiscriminantly (people are generally more acceptable of violence if they believe it's justified). But it'll never happen, because states won't secede in the first place. There isn't enough of an impetus for it and if the state leadership were acting rationally they'd realise that it could only end badly for them.
Why would it only break down into a military conflict? I fail to understand your reasoning here. And again, you're right, there "isn't". This is significant, because you have used the present tense of the verb conjugation. "Isn't" means "right now". We are talking about the future, so when you indiscriminately mix present and future tense by saying "But it'll never happen, because states won't secede in the first place. There isn't enough of an impetus..." Just because there isn't doesn't mean that there won't be or can't be in the future as you propose, because divisive shoots and seeds already exist within the nation, and their existence poses a number of possibilities... especially when we're considering 1500 years. No nation-state in history has ever covered the exact same borders for that amount of time, with the same political ideology, the same language, and the same ethnicity for that amount of time. Assuming that things are more concrete just because we can talk on the phone, and on the internet, is just silly. Both of those things can be knocked out at the drop of a hat anyways, and only an isolated number of people would know how to fix telecommunications if that happened. Even China is not made up of the same ethnicities with the same borders, and Egypt, which covers roughly the same borders has undergone a complete ethnic replacemnet (Egyptians vs. Arabs). Countries that exhibit similar borders today as they did a thousands or even thousands of years ago have broken up several times.
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I don't think the danger is that the US will balkanise. It is obviously the most dramatic possible decline of the US, but it isn't how the US will actually go down. My personal opinion is that the US will decline in a similar way to the Venetians, or even Argentina in the 20th century. Put simply, there is a growing economic inequality in America, and it is translating into political inequality. If one person can finance your entire campaign, do you think you'll give them priority over a majority? Unless that type of corruption of the democratic process is curbed, it is going to get worse under present circumstances. You only have to look at a lot of the developing world and realise, that, when a government serves the interests of a political and economical elite , it is not going to be able to maintain long term economic strength, power and presence when in competition with nations that provide economic and political incentives to the majority of its population. If the US continues as it is now, and no serious attempt at reform is made, it will not be able to compete in the long run with a reformed China or India. Obviously its a whole other debate on whether or not India or China can become politically and economically inclusive to maintain a long-term superpower status, but the US could easily become worse than it is now. Of course, it takes time for a prosperous nation to stagnate. Its just how I view the US going downhill, as opposed to Balkanisation or somehow thinking that social networking prevents a country going to shit.
Balkanization would not plausibly occur until long after the US has lost its status as a world superpower and has gone to hell financially and economically. So if current trends in government and the economy were to continue, it probably won't balkanize until the end of this century or sometime during the next.
As far as the asteroid mining is concerned, I had forgotten that my friend and I had discussed that Kurys might have originally been settled to mine diamonds when Earth decided to switch its currency backing material from gold to diamonds. Indian and Brazilian currencies, which would be 100% backed by gold would lose some value, but would still hold value based on trust and the stability of the currency. So changing what backs the currency wouldn't make their currencies collapse and their economies implode. What ends the Brazilian-Indian century (or maybe two centuries) is when deep crust extraction technology is invented, eliminating their monopoly and allowing the nations of the world to compete on a more even scale.
As far as the settlement of Kurys is concerned, this is what he had to say:
Spoiler: click to toggle And why Kurys, not anywhere else? It's the closest one they know about Maybe their tech isn't good enough to travel farther yet One would think he would've assumed that And once you have some settlers, it's where you would go, naturally; pour more resources into something that can take them Rather than start all over again Once you have multiple independent powers at the game, it'll be a different story But with only India/Brazil at it And they're both fighting over an apparently very lucrative piece of pie Besides, tell him this: Kurys might be very Earth-like There are other Earth-like worlds out there, but many of them are only marginally so Eccentric orbits; ridiculous tilts, habitable bands Why go for those when you have a gem right next to you? And why expand in the solar system when you have something that easy to work with and cheap FTL? Mars on its nicest days is still hell compared to Antarctica, but you can walk outside on Kurys without a spacesuit Even with travel costs it might be better worth it to get to Kurys (Rant over)
Edited by Zirantun, Feb 16 2013, 06:37 PM.
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T.Neo
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Feb 16 2013, 07:13 PM
Post #28
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Translunar injection: TLI
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Spoiler: click to toggle I'm going to make this perfectly clear. I don't like getting angry with people, but sometimes it's unavoidable. I've been trying really hard to keep my cool in this discussion and be logical, and quite frankly, it isn't really working.
I'm not going to respond piece-by-piece to your gigantic article of text, indeed, I'm not going to take the time to read it in its entirety, because there simply is no point. Yes, I've read the site you link to. I'm aware of the cultural stereotype of New Yorkers being brash. I'm aware that the president can take executive actions. I'm aware that the danger of nuclear weapons being smuggled into US ports has been discussed by some
See, here's the thing: you're putting out a whole lot of extraordinary claims, and you're not backing them up. People don't move around the US? I'm not going to take your word for it, I want numbers. How many people have lived in another state? How many people have visited another state in the last year? Last five years? Last ten years? I'd believe you if you provided any real substance to your claim, but you don't. Saying that "people don't fly often because it's uncomfortable, and that's one of the reasons you don't like to fly" is irrelevant. I like fezzes. Big deal.
The same goes for cultural differences. I don't think you actually know what cultural differences mean. "New Yorkers tend to be a bit rude" and "but this place was founded in this manner, and this place was founded in that manner, thus they're incredibly different, all of the mixing and further developments have occured in the interleading over a century since they were founded be damned". I suggest you come to a place with real cultural differences, like Africa. We have thousands of languages, various ethnic groups, gross national products per capita that the US would have to step down an order of magnitude to match, real unrest and political dissatisfaction, and racial hatred that goes back generations. If an entire continent is too much, just come to one country- South Africa. We have eleven official languages (the US doesn't have any de jure official language, for comparison). We have Afrikaners, Anglo-Africans, Vendas, Xhosas, Zulus to name a few. 31% of our population lives on less than $2 a day, some sources name us as the second worst nation on the planet in terms of income inequality (Gini coefficient of 63.1). We have real reasons to hate eachother- a system of racial oppression that lasted nearly half a century and ended only about 20 years ago (not nearly 150 years ago as your civil war did). We have had things like the Anglo-Boer wars, which saw things like the Scorched Earth policy and concentration camps that claimed the lives of thousands of people.
When you're talking about such supposed "tensions" and "deep differences" in the US, I am bemused.
Sure, bad things could happen in the US if things got worse there. But they'd have to get a whole lot worse. Your GDP would have to decline at levels similar to those of Greece for 50 years before it hit levels similar to those in Nigeria or Ghana, for instance. And your entire premise involves things getting as bad as they possibly can. It isn't "The US suffers stupendous economic downturn", it's "the US suffers a stupendous economic downturn and fragments!" It's not "Dissatisfaction of the population leads to societal and governmental change", it's "dissatisfaction of the population gets so bad that people want to kill eachother!" And all the while people don't react to these situations until they become absolutely critical, and when they do, their reaction invariably involves civil war, secession, or both. I'm not interested in a semantic discussion of the meaning of the word "isn't". By 'isn't' I mean "not happening and not bloody likely to happen".
Look at your claim that no impeached US president has left office, for example. No US president has tried to emulate Muammar Gaddaffi, either. Of course, researching the subject is rather difficult as a search for "what if the US became a dictatorship" pulls up infowars.com.
And then you have the nerve to point out that since I complained about pro-Palestinian pundits, I'm "entirely based off of the western media", when I spoke against my frustration for pro-Israeli pundits in the exact same sentence. It isn't about being based off of "biased western media", it's about not being interested in the folly of pro-this, or pro-that. If it's any disappointment, I apologise, but I like your idea for the future of the region.
That's the thing. It's all about what you believe, your personal fiat, and if anyone disagrees, they're ignorant, they're a sucker to the biased western media, etc. You're coming along with claims that are more often than not (but not always) outlandish, but you're failing to back them up with logical reasoning, with evidence. In short, your arguments are based on much pathos and ethos, but precious little logos.
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Assuming that things are more concrete just because we can talk on the phone, and on the internet, is just silly.
Assuming that inventions such as modern transport, telecommunications and information technology do not have a major effect on human society is silly, and that's a demonstratable fact, unlike your claim above (it should also be noted that telecommunications in general are not as fragile as you assume- sure, you could wipe out the entire internet in theory, but an event large enough for the task would likely kill a good fraction of the human race as well). "It is because it is" and "it happened in this manner hundreds of years ago, therefore it'll happen exactly in the same matter regardless of circumstance" is built upon the fiction that the world is unchanging. And just to clarify: I've stated repeatedly that I think the US of 3500 CE would be considerably different from the US of today. Indeed this one of the reasons why I think divisive issues in the US would be unlikely to lead to secession- the issues facing modern-day America will be ancient history in just a few centuries.
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As far as the asteroid mining is concerned, I had forgotten that my friend and I had discussed that Kurys might have originally been settled to mine diamonds when Earth decided to switch its currency backing material from gold to diamonds.
Diamonds would likely still not be expensive enough to mandate shipping out of a planetary gravity well either, unfortunately.
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 16 2013, 07:16 PM.
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A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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Zirantun
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Feb 16 2013, 08:12 PM
Post #29
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Fine, T.Neo, don't read.
You say you want figures, you want numbers, and statistics. Figures, numbers, and statistics, and similar data are all easily manipulated though. Human behavior is not something you can monitor and predict beyond any certainty the way you can in a chemistry equation. Chemical A does not react with Chemical B the same way 100 of the time, or even 70% of the time. Because of the sheer unpredictability of humans as people, it doesn't make any sense to try and apply numbers to cultural differences, and if you had any real understanding of human beings, as you so claim, you'd know that. Culture, like evolution, is a snapshot, a still frame of a scene in a greater film. You can't look at a scene still and say: "I know exactly what happens next." Unless you've already seen the movie... Unless your God or some other figure that acts outside of space and time and therefore can know all possible outcomes of a given situation, outcomes can only be predicted based on what you see in the still of the scene, what has happened up until the movie was paused right there, and what your opinion is of what will happen next. So of course there will be "personal fiats".
Your personal fiat is frankly quite absurd. And not only is it absurd, but it shows that your own upbringing has stained your entire outlook on humanity and has rendered you virtually incapable of looking at the world outside of your South African glasses.
Every political separation to you has to get bloody, and you hold cultural differences to a ridiculously and quite subjectively high standard. And you also are married to the idea that the US can never break up, nor will it be off the global stage as a superpower in 1500 years...
There are some 100+ languages spoken on a daily basis in the United States today, the majority of which are Native American languages that are restricted to reservations and in a sharp state of decline in use. I know, my father is a linguist that specializes in Salishan and Na-Dene languages, which are not only two of the most diverse language families on the continent, but also the most numerous in native speakers (excluding languages of Mexico, many of which don't show any sign of going extinct in the next century). Not only are there Native languages though, but immigrant languages that are alive and well within peoples households that are not taken into a public setting unless immigrants form an enclave. In Boston you can still go to Little Italy and here 3rd or 4th generation Italian Americans conversing in minority languages that they brought over with them pre-WWII. In Washington, there are communities of some 5,000+ Scottish Gaelic speakers who live in scattered, isolated towns in the Cascade Mountains who speak that language almost exclusively within their communities and their home environments, yet the signs read in English and they switch on to English when they realize you're English-speaking.
Just because mainstream American media is so exclusively English to the point of it being nigh impossible to find material on the internet about our linguistic and cultural minorities does not mean they are non-existant. These people have real cultural differences. Most Native Americans worship Gods that make me feel like they've invited a malevolent presence into the room, the Gaels in the Cascades seem to think that the oldest man in town is the best person to act as mayor or police chief, and Amish, Hutterites, and German Baptists, speak various dialects of the German language long isolated from Germany over a 400 year period and reject modern life.
Of course these are all minorities, but I only mention them because you seem to operate under the media-induced fantasy that Anglo-American culture is not only the only culture present in the United States, but that it is something uniform in and of itself.
The entire planet is not Africa, T.Neo. Montenegro just achieved independence a couple of years ago from Serbia without a war, and Kosovo had their war, they lost, and then they applied peacefully for their independence and they just got it. Ireland also broke off from the UK without any kind of a war, and the only war was within Ireland to determine what they were to do with themselves afterward. Scotland is holding a referendum on independence next year (granted, their independence strategy isn't very realistic), and there are no signs of a war breaking out between England and Scotland. Likewise, we Icelanders broke off from Denmark without Denmark trying to reassert any kind of an imperialist claim.
Unlike where you come from, cultural differences do not mean that people have to speak a totally different language or dress completely differently or want to kill each other, they can just mean that people would be happier determining their own destiny as they already live life very differently.
Even though I've already been places with real differences, like when I went to Sweden and paraded around with my mom's clan for awhile in the forest running reindeer with my cousins (which is like stepping into another time), or the other countries in Europe I've been to for that matter, does not mean that I cannot acknowledge that the United States is still a very diverse place. It is diverse in different ways, and to differing levels than other places, but that doesn't make the diversity any less real, nor does it make the potential for that diversity to increase any less real.
You are trying to apply your standards of diversity of political opinion and culture, one which is based on the model of your home country, which is a markedly divided, and oft times violent place, to the rest of the world. You admitted this in the other topic when you had your post about "when I think radical, here's what I think". Not everyone has a 3rd of the country living on $2 a day or tribes being thrown into the modern world that do not approach problems in modern ways. Not everyone had apartheid or approaches racism in as overt a way. But just because it is not the same, does not mean that it is not present, or rampant for that matter. Just because people are not actually poor as they so claim in the United States, does not mean that they don't perceive themselves as poor, and in humanities subjects, perception is everything.
So that being said, I would encourage you to come back to the discussion when you can read long posts objectively without muttering to yourself, "What the fuck does he know, he lives in a cushy country like the USA." But until you're able to do that, your input is very uninteresting, and lacks any kind of creativity. You are not everyone, and I haven't told everyone who has put their two cents in that their input is irrelevant or linked to perceptions based on the mainstream Western media. I only told you that because your view of the United States seems to be based almost totally off of a media perspective. You tell me, someone who LIVES here, has grown up here, and been privileged to travel around here and experience the various portions of my country that my description of it is irrelevant because I can't give it to you in numbers and graphs. That's... well it's not intelligent behavior. Especially when we're talking about a subject that has remained largely unstudied. Our media paints a very different picture of the reality of life in this country. Just the fact that 90% of your TV series and movies are based in 1 of maybe 5 cities speaks to that effect.
We are trying to create a scenario in which India and Brazil can eclipse current superpowers, not go on about how the superpowers that exist today will not only exist as such forever, but also never suffer from some kind of a political and national break-up... you're absolutely right that things are always changing and do not stay the same way forever. That is precisely why the USA is almost certainly going to break up, and precisely why it doesn't have to be bloody when it does. Bloody break ups of countries have happened many times in our past, but as we move into the future, the world is changing. And your argument that "everything is changing, so it will remain the same" is an oxymoron.
If you don't think the USA could be removed as a superpower permanently with current trends, then the discussion isn't to bicker about that, but how we might alter the scene so that we can make it so for the sake of my friend's story. He's writing plants after all and I wanna give him something good, since he's already gone into some interesting levels of detail on that for me.
And I don't even want to get into the fragility of telecommunications right now. Cuz right now, what was meant to be a creative topic with creative yet intelligent input has descended into an argument, and that would only make it worse.
Edited by Zirantun, Feb 16 2013, 11:04 PM.
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T.Neo
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Feb 17 2013, 09:31 AM
Post #30
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Translunar injection: TLI
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You say you want figures, you want numbers, and statistics. Figures, numbers, and statistics, and similar data are all easily manipulated though. Human behavior is not something you can monitor and predict beyond any certainty the way you can in a chemistry equation. Chemical A does not react with Chemical B the same way 100 of the time, or even 70% of the time. Because of the sheer unpredictability of humans as people, it doesn't make any sense to try and apply numbers to cultural differences, and if you had any real understanding of human beings, as you so claim, you'd know that. Culture, like evolution, is a snapshot, a still frame of a scene in a greater film. You can't look at a scene still and say: "I know exactly what happens next." Unless you've already seen the movie... Unless your God or some other figure that acts outside of space and time and therefore can know all possible outcomes of a given situation, outcomes can only be predicted based on what you see in the still of the scene, what has happened up until the movie was paused right there, and what your opinion is of what will happen next. So of course there will be "personal fiats".
There's a difference between fallible numbers and fallible opinions. Numbers are fallible because they can be measured badly, used incorrectly or tampered with. Opinions are fallible because their nature is not contingent on a connection with reality. No, an understanding of the situation through demonstratable, objective facts won't be perfect, but that's hardly reason to abandon it for the unscientific ignorance of "I believe this, therefore it's true!"
And as for "numbers are easily manipulated", yes, there's obviously a massive conspiracy to manipulate all studies and statistics on the US in order to trick people into thinking that the US isn't about to balkanise.
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Your personal fiat is frankly quite absurd. And not only is it absurd, but it shows that your own upbringing has stained your entire outlook on humanity and has rendered you virtually incapable of looking at the world outside of your South African glasses.
Bullshit. I describe my own country as an example of a place where cultural differences abound, and it's personal fiat how, exactly?
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Every political separation to you has to get bloody,
Felgercarb. Look at South Africa, the nation you so criticise me for being limited in my view to- that institution of racial oppression? Apartheid could have ended in bloody revolution, but it didn't.
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and you hold cultural differences to a ridiculously and quite subjectively high standard.
No, I see cultural differences of a differing nature to have, well, a differing nature. "The East Coast seems so fast-paced" is different from "X ethnic group is a bunch of devils, they're religious heathens who sympathised with white imperialists". The problem here is that you understand the former in the manner that most of the world understands the latter.
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And you also are married to the idea that the US can never break up, nor will it be off the global stage as a superpower in 1500 years...
USA could be relatively irrelevant in a world where India or China were developed nations, or where other powers have emerged in Africa or Asia. You've turned my views into a strawman that happens to blatantly conflict with what I've said previously.
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Just because mainstream American media is so exclusively English to the point of it being nigh impossible to find material on the internet about our linguistic and cultural minorities does not mean they are non-existant. These people have real cultural differences. Most Native Americans worship Gods that make me feel like they've invited a malevolent presence into the room, the Gaels in the Cascades seem to think that the oldest man in town is the best person to act as mayor or police chief, and Amish, Hutterites, and German Baptists, speak various dialects of the German language long isolated from Germany over a 400 year period and reject modern life.
Yes, I am actually aware of the existence of groups such as the Amish, Hutterites and Native Americans. I'm also aware that they make up less than 2% of the population of the US (that number being mostly Native Americans, and including the number of people who recorded Native American as part of their ethnicity). Trying to claim that a group of a couple of tens of thousands of people who live a simple agricultural life represents to the US what the various South African ethnic groups represent to SA is just plain balderdash. The same goes for your examples of linguistic diversity.
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The entire planet is not Africa, T.Neo. Montenegro just achieved independence a couple of years ago from Serbia without a war, and Kosovo had their war, they lost, and then they applied peacefully for their independence and they just got it. Ireland also broke off from the UK without any kind of a war, and the only war was within Ireland to determine what they were to do with themselves afterward. Scotland is holding a referendum on independence next year (granted, their independence strategy isn't very realistic), and there are no signs of a war breaking out between England and Scotland. Likewise, we Icelanders broke off from Denmark without Denmark trying to reassert any kind of an imperialist claim.
I think you have no idea what goes on in Africa. For starters, there's South Sudan, which became an independant state in 2011. There's Eritrea, which became independant in 1993 (Ethiopia was apparently supportive of the referendum for independance), and Somaliland, which is a de facto sovereign state, but internationally recognised as an autonomous region of Somalia.
In addition, all of the nations in Europe you cite involved areas associated with linguistic, ethnic or religious groups. Nothing of the sort exists in the US. And Denmark's reaction to Icelandic independance, for instance, seems like it was quite positive. That doesn't correlate to the case in the US at all.
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So that being said, I would encourage you to come back to the discussion when you can read long posts objectively without muttering to yourself, "What the fuck does he know, he lives in a cushy country like the USA."
No, I'm muttering to you because you've filled your posts with an incredibly large block of text that is at odds with reality, not because you live in a cushy country like the US. Cushy being a highly relative term, of course.
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I only told you that because your view of the United States seems to be based almost totally off of a media perspective. You tell me, someone who LIVES here, has grown up here, and been privileged to travel around here and experience the various portions of my country that my description of it is irrelevant because I can't give it to you in numbers and graphs. That's... well it's not intelligent behavior. Especially when we're talking about a subject that has remained largely unstudied. Our media paints a very different picture of the reality of life in this country. Just the fact that 90% of your TV series and movies are based in 1 of maybe 5 cities speaks to that effect.
Yes, I am telling you that the fact that you live and have grown up in the US is irrelevant. Appeal to authority, and bare assertion fallacy. If you're making a claim- especially an extraordinary claim like many of those that you're making, you have to provide a logical basis for it, and you haven't done that. Your issue with "the mainstream western media" verges on an ad hominem, and the fact that you think you know exactly what is going on inside my head, and what methods I use to reach my opinions is frustrating me to no end. My view of the United States is based on all the information on the matter I have gathered, including historical data, demographics, personal accounts from Americans and their collective view on the matter, and yes, your much hated "mainstream western media". If nothing else, it's useful for understanding what some of the perceptions on the matter are.
So basically it's you vs. everyone, and everything else. Either you're wrong, or you happen to be so incredibly enlightened that you've discovered and understood this supposedly incredibly important matter while everyone else remains totally ignorant. The former is incredibly more likely.
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And your argument that "everything is changing, so it will remain the same" is an oxymoron.
No, my argument is that everything is changing, therefore it won't change in the manner you expect it to, and you clearly don't understand it. One cannot ignore the fact that information technology allows cultural ideas to spread far faster and with far less regard to geographical boundaries, due to modern transport populations can shift to a much greater degree and geographically distant locations can be far more dependant on eachother for goods, that industrial technology and urbanisation has had a huge effect on the nature of employment and the dependance of the population on infrastructure, that the predominant form of government today is different from that in 500 or 1000 CE, reducing the likelyhood of fragmentation due to the lack of a clear heir for instance, and that warfare today is incredibly different to what it was merely a hundred years ago, changing the manner in which wars are fought and how likely they are to be fought in a specific circumstance.
And that's not even considering the advent of things like artificial intelligence or widespread automation.
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And I don't even want to get into the fragility of telecommunications right now. Cuz right now, what was meant to be a creative topic with creative yet intelligent input has descended into an argument, and that would only make it worse.
Oh sure, because telecommunications are so fragile. One Inevitable Conspiracy Catastrophe and the principle of sending messages across long distances via wires, optical signals or radio waves will absolutely and totally vanish into a puff of thin air, and stay that way for decades, if not centuries...
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 17 2013, 09:50 AM.
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A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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