Toxn

Thanks again for the help. One issue is that we currently have two very different approaches being tried out at once. Should X and I both reformat what we have, or is it possible for you to tell a priori which will work better?

I've met actual people (employed, even) who need help changing a light bulb. If they'd had to take a shop class of any sort they'd still be in school.

"They call it bombing up for a reason, son."

Funny, that's basically a gun regulation argument. Anyway, people who treat their technology like magic annoy me. If you own and operate something, you should at least be capable of performing basic maintenance on it. This includes cars, computers and houses.

My guess is that Bic used the slogan for their lighters and it got into the public consciousness at just the right moment for aging veterans to confuse it with the Ronson corporation during interviews for tv. Which is one reason why trademarks are supposed to be distinctive and non-descriprive: a good mark shouldn't allow products to get confused like that.

On searches, trademarks probably won't be that helpful. This is because the mark is usually a word rather than phrase, and "lights first time, every time" would probably be considered descriptive but not distinctive. I ran a quick search through the USPTO anyway, here are the results: "lights AND first AND time" returns one result (LIGHTS FIRST TIME ... EVERYTIME) for a word mark by the bic pen corporation. The mark was submitted in 1975 and cancelled in 1981. Searching for the owner name "Ronson" returns 314 results, the oldest of which is from 1974 (Ronson corporation, New Jersey). Given the above, I suspect that the USPTO online database only goes back to the 1970s, so we'd probably have to check paper records. I'll look into it over my lunch break and get back to you guys later. edit: did a date search. The first available records are from the 1970s. edit 2: I quickly searched WIPO, which has a bunch of records (from multiple countries) going back to the 1800s. Ronson corp applied for a logo in 1929, and had a couple of product-specific image marks (Red devil, an image of a smoking indian and so on) in the 1930s and 40s. Searching for the "lights first time" slogan just returns the Bic mark again, which strongly suggests that that was the origin for the meme. Here is the logo for reference:

Heretics is actually sort of okay, although that's about all you can say for it.

I don't care, I'm down with Dune taking over the topic. Ah, but what is the worst Dune? Do we consider God Emperor to be the Nadir? Or did Herbert's kids and Kevin "I can't write a novel without including brains in jars on spider bodies" Anderson truly plumb the depths?

Fremen are trained from a young age in the harsh ways of the desert, to hold it in until they get into the suit. And then to pointedly ignore the fact that everyone smells like they've been scuba diving in a sewer.

I thought it was where Paul noticed the smell of home-made explosives amongst the stench of spice and unwashed flesh.

From where I stand, the OP's futurvision seems at once a bit too radical and a bit too tame. For it being too radical, I will simply note all of the attempts to rationalise soldier's rations into energy bars, food cubes and the like. To which soldiers have universally responded by simply not eating their carefully-formulated glop. People like real food, with real flavours and textures. Their yearning only increases when said food is one of the only luxuries allowed to them and life is shit (see: war). As for the technology itself, I don't see how printing things on site would be any better than simply shipping pre-made food cubes (or whatever) in before formulating and packaging them on site. You could still get all the advantages of personalised nutrition without having to ship over a printer and feedstock*. For being too tame, I present my proposal for the Live Off the Land (LOL) digester/reactor: a containerised system designed to process meat/assorted protein (hopper A) or cellulose and complex carbohydrates (hopper B ) and convert them into feed steams for onboard bioreactors. The bioreactors, in turn, can be configured for a variety of cell types (yeast, bacterial, plant, animal and so on) and used to produce either cultured biomass or separated product. Products include: amino acid-complete proteins/fatty acids/sugars of various complexities for on-site food production raw biomass for food or storage fuel biomedical proteins, including recombinant vaccines drugs engineering materials, including fibroin, for use in on-site production of equipment and packaging Nitrate and acid feedstock for the production of explosives Just roll up, throw things (plant matter, items for recycling, animals, people, your old rations etc.) into the correct hoppers and you're good to go. Locals not up to scatch? Why not just LOL them and extract value directly? Even better: the system interfaces seamlessly our existing tissue culture and printing facilities, allowing you to produce and deploy autonomous units in the field! Combine with our other state-of-the-art reprocessing and printing technologies (each sold separately) to produce armies on the fly! * Yeesh... spirulina? Yeast? Why would we use this when modern agriculture already produces plenty of stuff that can be processed, packed and shipped as needed?

I'm coming up for air between exams, but just thought I'd add another future trend that I'm seeing unfold right now: more and more of my colleagues are going straight to IVF rather than trying for kids. Here's the background: South Africa has a very interventionist approach to pregnancy anyway (second-highest elective caesarian rate in the world, for instance) and pretty much all the folk in higher income brackets are waiting till their late 30s to have kids (my wife and I being massive exceptions). So it's perfectly rational, if you have a 50+% chance of having to go through IVF, to simply skip straight to it rather than struggling for a few years to convenience. Anyway, here's the upshot: a significant number (possibly a majority) of people in the top-1% income bracket are now having multiples (a side effect of IVF) and effectively reversing the historical trend of income leading to fewer kids. As a result, I can hazard a guess that that trend itself (which has formed the basis of so much hand-wringing by people who seem to equate 'has money' to 'carries genes for superior human') is merely a historical anomaly; an artefact caused by medical technology not keeping up with socioeconomic changes. So we might be back to the historical norm of the aristos outbreeding the lower classes and effectively populating the middle classes with their less-favoured offspring.

I am indeed a South African, and I thank you for your kind words. As for Zimbabwe, all of the people I have known (and, in one case, briefly dated) from there have been astonishingly hard working and intelligent. Their country, as terrible as it is right now, still holds hope for the future so long as it can produce such sons and daughters.

The recitation of Virdea's formulation was meant as a simple response, yes. Where I lose my sense of humour slightly is in being given glib, fact-free hypotheses (how the fuck do you even quantify cultural diversity?) while simultaneously being called out on what is clearly a simplified interpretation of my points. I've got to run off to a lecture and then study for an exam, but I will try to come in at some point and present a substantive argument.

Just how many Chicago schools are there? Because the last time I looked, the Chicago school of economics is about as far from Marxist thought as you can get.

Sociology, motherfucker. Correlation is about all you get. Also: sure, get at me for providing a study when our other hypothesis has nothing except cherry-picked examples and anecdotes. This will surely get us closer to the truth. Inequality, not poverty. Did you look at the follow-up post? Many causes, many possible remedies.

It lives!

I like this plan. I think it doesn't have a chance in hell of working, but I like it. South Africa will take 50 000 too, if only to show that we can be terrible and xenophobic to hard-working people from the middle east as well.

Yeah, single crystal grain structure is black magic. From what I remember, it involves really fine control of alloy composition and temperature during (what would normally be) the tempering/annealing steps. edit: nope, it's actually really fine control of alloy composition and temperature during the cooling step of a casting process.

Agreed, although I have a distinct hunch that a secular, liberal Israel is just not going to be around all that long. Too much crazy outside, and too much crazy inside. My guess for an end-state is something that looks (even more) like apartheid South Africa: a two-tier society with a small economically active elite and a large majority of disenfranchised people under permanent lockdown.

Except it has and will - crime and inequality are statistically correlated. Further, your 'advantage' comes at the cost of imprisoning a massive number of your citizens. Tell me how sticking so many people in jail is categorically different from 'giving up on human rights and human liberty'. I'm not saying that the answer is to stick a bandaid on the gaping hole that is your society by upping social spending as is. I'm saying that there are multiple approaches to dealing with crime, and one is to rework your society to be more equal overall in terms of resource distribution.

Good to know.

How much can you lower the materials requirements of the turbine blades by including bypass air in the engine core? I'm thinking of a setup where your combustion chamber consists of a cavity with a number of burner cans suspended inside. Part of the airflow from the compressor then bypasses the cans and cools the turbine blades. This might also be useful as a means to simplify the engine by removing the bypass fan entirely.

Part of the problem for Israel is also that they want to avoid having an arab majority in their country, as there would then exist a chance that arab Israelis would simply vote the nation into non-existence. This line thinking has sort of forced them to do everything possible to bottle up the Palestinians and prevent them from either breaking away or integrating into Israel proper (as well as virtually ensuring that existing arab-Israelis will be treated as second-class citizens for the foreseeable future). As luck would have it, the secular nation of Israel is probably going to go religious fundamentalist anyway: ultra-orthodox jews (who don't contribute much to the economy and are exempt from military service) are poised to become an electoral majority within the next century (projections have them as over 30% of the population by 2060). So Israel as we currently know it seems doomed to be something of a short-lived experiment no matter what happens.

Seconded, with a bit of an expanded explanation: functional societies harness people's natural tribish-ness by subsuming it within a greater social grouping (example: combatting racist tendencies by emphasising the universal rights and duties of citizenship). One of the central tensions in the modern rights state is thus that by allowing people to express themselves freely, we also allow them to self-segregate and develop tribal identities which inevitably end up circling the wagons against each other. edit: it should be mentioned that social groups ALWAYS involve an other who is contrasted with the in-group and demonised to some extent. Nations breed national hatred even as they lower racial/religious/whatever tensions.