[Duke Leto]

Can you please link to the documentation discrediting the hockey stick graph? I know Freeman Dyson is touted by Orson Scott Card as a GW skeptic, but I have extreme doubts about Card’s objectivity on the matter, and frankly namedropping in the sciences is pretty well worthless. Most of the Al Gore bashing I see comes from sources like South Park, and while Parker and Stone are consistently funny, I don’t always find their political or scientific judgement particularly impressive.

Can’t bloody well win around here. If you say you advocate a “Stalinist Plan” in obvious scarequotes of top down corporate management and deployment of FF to contrast it with the bottom up management method generally advocated by Eric and the FF circle, (Call it Bukaninesque.) then you offend the FF circle by being a greedy corporate scumbag and manage to convince the outsiders that you’re a hardcore Stalinist.

Fine. Let’s pretend global warming doesn’t pose a grave danger that needs action. Doesn’t Peak Oil necessitate a WWII style Corporate-Government collaboration/mobilization to yank the US (And the world at large) off of Oil and Coal ASAP? Let’s say that I were able to finance the development of FF and were then entitled under the present standards of market capitalism to direct a significant share of the profit capital to whatever endeavors I saw fit. Are the list I enumerated in my first post all such bad ideas? Why has no one responded to that?

[Duke Leto]

I do not, at any stage, whatsoever, advocate single party authoritarian government.

I clearly made a mistake in using the analogy of Stalin’s five year plans.

I meant only that the makers of FF should use their economic political power to forward environmental causes and political liberalization, NOT assume that in merely making the technology universally available the present political system will automatically reorder itself to eliminate the Big Oil political influence in the US, or that it would automatically focus its resources on solving the most pressing ecological and social problems.

If anything, I think we can safely say that the delay in implementing FF by the market proves that the market can’t be trusted 100%.

[Duke Leto]

Figure of speech Brian. I was alluding to the organizational paradigm rather than the politics.

And say what you like about the old bastard, he got those steel plants, electrical plants and T-34 factories up and running FAST. Faster than anything achieved by any other industrializing nation before or since. Sure he wrecked raw materials gathering, destroyed agriculture and killed millions of people doing it, but if your only criteria is to get the FF generators up and running as fast as humanly possible and stop global warming before it becomes irreversible, then that’s unfortunatly the paradigm you have to be looking at.

Preferably with vastly less killing, naturally.

[Duke Leto]

Well, lemme take another tack:

“What would I do with the Focus Fusion profits?”

Since we’d be looking at $100 Billion per year for the first few years for a centralized Corporate profit driven system. (Which I think Eric wants to avoid.) Plus maybe an additional $200 Billion in productivity increase injected into the general economy and consequently ~ $120 Billion falling into the Federal Revenues.

The profits will exist, it’s simply a question of who controls them. If Focus Fusion is rolled out as a publicly licensed technology with the local governments and consuming owning the generators and licensing their operation to consortiums of skilled contractors, that is somewhat nice overall, but it effects no political changes. In fact it seems more likely that a network of small profiteers would appear competing to deploy and operate the generators in an oligopolistic fashion. In either case, the US profits will mostly end up in the hands of Republicans and will thus contribute to the political status quo. Perhaps Global Warming will slip onto the GOP party plank since there is no point in placating the now dead coal interest. But that’s all.

De facto institutionalized racism will continue because there will be no need to address it in a booming economy. Evangelicalism will retain its stranglehold on the national political dialogue. Media will continue to have its agenda set by Murdoch. Worst of all, the current Bush Taxation system will not be fixed because it will be perceived as not broken. Some — will even credit as being instrumental in the development of Focus Fusion.

Things will certainly improve, yes. But it might take a few generations to right the US away from Reaganism.

That’s why I think Focus Fusion should adopt a “Stalinist Model”. A single company licensing the operation of the generators and selling the power worldwide at a uniform rate of 2 cents the kwh, drawing down 1 or 2 mils in price every year, aiming for full deployment of the tech in 5 years or less, working in close harmony with a Democratic government. (ie. Obama). Effectively take the place of Big Oil as political force.

That means something on the order of a trillion dollars to play around with in developing industries, jobs, research, etc. So my list is, what would I do with that? Fix the big environmental issues and try and leverage towards the “Open Society”. Some of these will be helped along by a friendly political party in symbiotic dominance of the Federal System.

1.) Shrimp and Fish in tanks on land. Since you can now grow as much Algae as you like on a 24 hr artificial sun cycle, and fish are the ultimate livestock in that they reproduce in huge numbers, I’d start making massive tanks in the inner cities to provide clean and regular seafood to the masses and terminate commercial fishing, which is one of the most serious environmental hazards going on right now. Cheap and healthy meat, relief to a huge portion of the ecosystem, lots of city manufacturing jobs. (A few angry Newfoundlanders, but omlettes and eggs…)

2.) Synthetic wood pulp and/or wood. At least one can graft some heavy cellulose producing DNA onto a fast growing fungus or algae and eliminate the connection between forests and paper supply. Preferably a synthetic process to make construction grade boards, even if contour crafting ends up running the roost in terms of construction. Trees are vital to combat Global Warming, but they also help prevent flooding by locking in ground moisture, and thus contribute to cutting soil erosion in their watersheds and help ensure a more regular supply of fresh water.

3.) Blue Revolution. Put all coastal cities on a desalinized water supply, break up the old aquaducts and reallow their fresh water to the rural areas. This will bring a large area of Southern California back under cultivation, for a start.

4.) Work on getting Carbon Nanotube synthesis from atmospheric CO2 or coal down to a precise science. (Preferably CO2 with carbon tax subsidies.) This should provide a more stable long term system for concrete construction in preference to the corrodable steel reinforcements, as well as hopefully enabling space elevators.

5.) Battery/Supercapacitor research. (Almost a requirement anyway for capacitor bank optimization in FF generators.)

6.) MagLev research and construction if possible.

7.) Research into using the FF generator as a compact electrolytic power source for existing jetliners. (Both to cusion the transition and make sure the Hawaiians don’t get lonely with all the MagLev traffic.)

8.) Acquire and direct a media network, probably CBS/Viacom, to counteract Fox. (Forcing The Hills and The Real World off of syndication is a bonus.) Take the unprecedented step of making intelligent entertainment and analytical news. Wait for them to come after building it.

9.) If necessary, rebuild mountain glaciers syntheticly with pipelined and prefrozen freshwater. (Once the average winter temperature gos back to pre 1900 levels.)

10.) Massive Ecological/Gaiaforming research. Find ways to kill off alien species in the wild that are threatening local biodiversity. Find alien species as closely analagous as possible to the ones that have gone extinct in areas where biodiversity is severely threatened, and deliberately experiment with introducing them. Get very good at maintaining closed biospheres.

11.) Force an end to the Israeli-Arab conflict by witholding FF/Blue Revolution technology from all parties that do not agree to a just and equitable treaty. (Give the House of Saud a few villas in Bali for good measure and tell them to get lost.)

12.) Encourage sodomy, feminism, condoms and abortion to bring down population growth everywhere.

13.) Build the Space Elevator and start making asteroid mines and self contained orbital colonies. Get a few billion folks OFF Earth.

[Duke Leto]

Breakable wrote: Now lets get back to topic.
What defence can you use against a railgun?

Being somewhere other than where it’s pointing, or having a lot of matter between you and the point of impact.

[Duke Leto]

That’s not alliteration.

Only outright overrepetition of one initial letter is alliteration.

[Duke Leto]

Well Rezwan, the study cited assumes the ICBMs are gonna stay there to keep the great powers honest. As long as that stays true and cash keeps rolling in making the elites richer, there will be no general war. It’s been so long since WWII that we’ve forgotten how truly horrible a “real war” is. Not to trivialize Iraq, but it’s a parlor brawl by comparison to the big one.

Now that I’ve thought about it, I really hope Eric is right. It would be a tragedy if FF stopped Peak Oil and Global Warming only to bring back the bad old days of nation state power jockeying.

[Duke Leto]

There is absolutely no way the exchange begun by the post immediately above is going to end well.

I’m just going to duck behind some cover an wait until the it subsides.

[Duke Leto]

I think my point can be summarized as “don’t dicount the idea, but don’t turn it into a catchall explanation either.” There are obviously more factors involved than just religion and sexual frustration.

Rezwan wrote: This seems to demonstrate the utility of suicide bombing as a military tactic. Expensive weapons systems are useless, but some unsuspected person, walking into a crowded place, blowing himself up with a cheap bombs, that will have an impact. Not on the military. On the people behind the military who order the military around, e.g., the national will.

Well, remember that the national will of the US et al is generally not willing to utilize the superior military technology to “suppress” the suicide bombing population to the extent they are capable of so doing. I cited old Ghenghis’s mayhem in Central Asia because he had a conscious method of heading off future intifadas… “Kill them all and let Allah sort them out.” I don’t recall the Chagatai dynasty having any problems in that area until Temur came along a few generations later, in spite of the persisting religious difference. I certainly don’t advocate that method, but if FF doesn’t get off the ground in time to take some the wind outta Peak Oil, I worry that some less ethical leaders in suddenly overpopulated areas might decide to put it back into practice.

The analogy you make on my hypothetical Railgun flak system is a bit off. The monstrosity would be no less expensive than the present systems, it just renders the current ones useless. I think Eric might not have read the specs I posited: “Able to put up 1000s of projectiles per minute at escape velocity in a small target area.” By a small target area I mean a few fractions of an Arc second of sky. That’s an immense amount of concentrated electrical power and targeting software we’re talking about. FF makes it practicable, not cheap. Think Rommel driving a Panzer Division around back of the Maginot line and mooning the French, not IEDs. (What’s wrong with me that I typed IUDs at first?)

[Duke Leto]

As I said, I agree with the principle but think the writing and methodology are sloppy.

That being said, it would depend on the society and the historical context. Where were the suicide bombers attacking Gheghis Khan? Why do old-line Mormon males not display the same violent tendencies as Islamic militants? Was the habit of Muslim militancy greater or lesser than that of the Christian, Hindu and Oriental societies prior to the modern period? Did they experience more or less social unrest?

I invoked Freakanomics because these are the kind of things Levitt would have stopped to ask himself and Kanakawa clearly did not stop and try.

[Duke Leto]

Let me make that more clear then, and for Full Disclosure I graduated in History so I was demeaning myself as well. He was making an argument for a historical interpretation by egregiously cherry picking his data. There’s no attempt at what the Freakanomics boys call regression analysis.

At the top of page 15 we find that he says insurgency is a natural Muslim/polygynous response to foreign occupation, and that monogomous countries have no such response. He cites only the examples of Algeria, Angola and Oman, as insurgencies against occupation by polygynous societies, and only the postwar occupations of Germany and Japan as examples of monogomous societies being inclined to passivity. He did not try to anticipate the obvious counterargument that Vietnam is not particularly polygynous and the level of resistance there made Iraq look like a cakewalk, or that the Vietnamese on Vietnamese killing was much more horrific.

He could have strengthened his case by reviewing the recorded history of occupations and insurgencies and setting certain variables describing the characteristics the societies involved in each case: the nature of the occupation, the amount violence exerted towards the populace, religious distinctions and attempts to force changes to the societies involved, and then showing that all other things being equal a polygynous society is more likely to violently resist occupation than one which is not. That methodology of assembling all historical data and analyzing it to death is the most effective method of experimentation in the “historical sciences”, cosmology and evolutionary biology included.

He didn’t do this. One reference to someone else’s study was enough for him to prove a universal pattern. That reliance on other people’s work and habit of not considering potential counterarguments is a habit that permeates the piece. As I said above, the colloquial style doesn’t inspire confidence either.

More than all this, he overreaches badly in his Conclusion. He does not make the eminently defensible claim that polygymous societies tend to be more unstable and violent than monogomous ones, he states “Maybe the Muslim suicide bombings are not

[Duke Leto]

I had been aware of the hyposthesized polygymy-suicide bombing link but was not aware this paper was the source of the hypothesis. I’m not sure I agree with Eric that it is an object of ridicule, although the author certainly makes himself ridiculous in his presentation, his colloquial contempt for academic convention aside, but the premise seems reasonable enough. I’m certainly not impressed by his cavalier disregard for the need of some kind of experimental verification other than a superfical data mining. I’d say more research is needed but certainly Middle Eastern Gender Inequality is heinous enough to warrant change without any more indictments against it.

I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater on Evolutionary Psychology because I associate it with the Richard Dawkins/Maynard Smith/Daniel Dennett school of Evolutionary Biologists who foray into Psychology rather than the Psychologists who try and cherry pick from Evolutionary Biology.

Thus I see it as more of an example of Post-Modern Derridan self-indulgence. Put another way, it’s an example of my maxim: “Never send a Liberal Arts Major to do a Hard Scientist’s job.

[Duke Leto]

I REALLY want to think you’re right about eliminatibg the motivation to war Eric, but human nature and past history suggest otherwise. Remember what happened to poor Alfred Nobel’s Dynamite-Cleared road of good intentions.

The reason I’m mulling this over is to prevent a “power vacuum” scenario where the US, EU and India rest on their Laurels building up the social benefits of the Fusion Industrial Revolution while the more “humanitarian-neutral” major powers such as China and Russia start making new guns instead of butter that the US/EU Military monopoly has no means of opposing. In other words I don’t want to see another WWII taking shape where the bad guys have the superior equipment and tactics at first.

I’m taking that suspcious line towards the Russian and Chinese governments in their current forms, BTW, not the people of said countries. I’m also assuming that the Republican-Military Axis of Pentagon-Big Oil-Evangelical Christianity falls over and dies with Big Oil gone and that America has had enough of Imperialistic military horseshit for another half of a generation or so. That is that we’re going to see a 2nd Roosevelt in Obama, and consequently less of the crap that US Foreign Policy has consisted of for 60 odd years.

Lot of assumptions there.

I admit that my physics calcs are back of the napkin and will defer to Eric’s ballistics knowledge until such a time as I can make my own thorough study.

[Duke Leto]

Point taken, but you have to climb to the “high ground” for the little buggers to be at all useful. Which is no easy feat.

I still think my basic point stands, that FF renders just about all military hardware that has been stockpiled obsolete and changes all geopolitical miliatary assumptions. But you are right, which ever nation-state is the first one to get a “Space Fleet” operational is going to have a huge advantage.

In the meantime, if rapid fire ground/sea based rail guns are feasible and will work as I have outlined, then I think the following conclusions are valid.

Conclusion 1) Conventional Air Forces have now become flying turkeys. No unstealthy fighter, bomber or gunship will be able to dodge a shotgun barrage of these little things going at escape velocity, and the stealthy ones will be in deep trouble too since the enemy only needs to have a general idea where they are to kill them.

Concludion 2) Carrier Attack Groups are therefore every bit as worthless as Battleships were after the advent of Carrier Aviation.

Conclusion 3) In fact, the only Naval Ship that will remain useful is the Submarine, which will have to mix its present role with that of the old style Battleship to make up the backbone of the new navies. Surface vessels are in even worse shape than planes, but subs can use the oceans to avoid detection, and as about the only armor that can possibly protect anything.

Conclusion 4) The bigger the tank, the more danger it is in as a target. Armored columns have to be reduced in size and upped in speed a lot to remain effective. May have to scale down to “Motorcycle Cavalry”. Even that may not be fast enough.

Conclusion 5) In ground warfare, you’re basically looking at a return to WWI conditions, artillery slugging it out with high accuracy and the infantry hiding underground.

Conclusion 6) The artillery still has to be mobile to keep from getting slaughtered by counterbattery fire. It also has to be totally disposable. That means highly mechanized drones, ground or air based. But the air drones would have to stay way back, move really fast and be as small as possible, and stay below radar. For a self contained FF generating station with turret, this might mean a “Stealth Zeppelin”. Nuts as that sounds.

The practical upshot of all this is in fact that space is the only place to be. Especially if you could use teh FF to turn one of these jobbies “up to 11”. http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9567&feedId=online-news_rss20

[Duke Leto]

Brian H wrote: IMO, EEStor is a huge short circuit waiting to happen until robustness is demonstrated. Pure vapourware, so far.

And FF is officially as mature a tech as AC/DC? (Either meaning.)

[Author]

Posts