The Most Powerful Known Race In The Local Bubble.

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Krulle
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Re: The Most Powerful Known Race In The Local Bubble.

Post by Krulle »

Yeah, I remember that oil makes about 20% of Russian economy directly. (old stat, higher oilprices usually also translate tohigher percentages....)
Any dollar down in barrel price hits directly, as the remaining industry and services are relying on oil-industry employees spending their income.
Indirect effects taken into account, the oil industry is (far) more than half of the Russian economy.
[edit]went to duckduckgo and searched a bit for sources:
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answer ... conomy.asp 30% of GDP is oil and gas (2014)
https://carnegie.ru/commentary/61272 : <26.5%, article from 2014, therefore numbers from before that; but then calculates other major effects (state expenditure paid by oil/gas extraction and export taxes, effect of oil export to pay for import), and gets to 57% of GDP. Also three graphs showing dependency of Russias GDP, gold reserves, and federal budget from oil price.
I'm not ashamed of my previous somewhat-out-of-my-ass numbers...
[/edit]
Last edited by Krulle on Wed May 29, 2019 9:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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boldilocks
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Re: The Most Powerful Known Race In The Local Bubble.

Post by boldilocks »

Krulle wrote:Yeah, I remember that oil makes about 20% of Russian economy directly. (old stat, higher oilprices usually also translate tohigher percentages....)
Any dollar down in barrel price hits directly, as the remaining industry and services are relying on oil-industry employees spending their income.
Indirect effects taken into account, the oil industry is more than half or the Russian economy.
Is that why they're pushing into gas? As I recall they're mostly raw natural resources. I think putin himself described russia as effectively a third world economy.

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Zorg56
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Re: The Most Powerful Known Race In The Local Bubble.

Post by Zorg56 »

Russian industry currently almsot non exist outside oil production and processing.
And even in those spheres we rely more and more on outside mechanisms.
Even in weapon production most of fire control systems produced either in belarus or in france.
More then 200 cities and vilalges were abandoned since 2010 and mroe then 1500 since 1991.
And more will come because many of cities in russia builded around one giant factory, that live it last days now.

Any other goverment will be better, this country will die very soon, in one large nuclear explousion.

Krulle
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Re: The Most Powerful Known Race In The Local Bubble.

Post by Krulle »

boldilocks wrote:
Krulle wrote:Yeah, I remember that oil makes about 20% of Russian economy directly. (old stat, higher oilprices usually also translate tohigher percentages....)
Any dollar down in barrel price hits directly, as the remaining industry and services are relying on oil-industry employees spending their income.
Indirect effects taken into account, the oil industry is more than half or the Russian economy.
Is that why they're pushing into gas? As I recall they're mostly raw natural resources. I think putin himself described russia as effectively a third world economy.
They're pushing gas, because European green parties think that CO2 from gas is less bad for the environment than CO2 from oil.....
Also, European economies started reducing their dependencies on oil, and simply need more gas.
We heat less with oil, and more with gas.
Production uses less oil now.
Electricity nearly uses no more oil, but more gas instead due to photovoltaic and wind energy fluctuating too fast for coal and oil power stations, but gas stations can react fast enough.

So, all in all, central and western European economies need less oil, and more gas.
Father Russia provides, despite us having gone to buy elsewhere, like Iran. (to implement US led sanctions, which now backfires on us Europeans again, as the US made a somewhat surprising turn and sanctions those who buy Iranian oil)
Thankfully Father Russia is only moderatly resentful, and provides us with the fossile energy we so need.
In return we provide them with foreign currencies they so urgently need.

We've become addicts, addicted on each other.


Let's make a EURu Federation!
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Werra
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Re: The Most Powerful Known Race In The Local Bubble.

Post by Werra »

Krulle wrote:So, all in all, central and western European economies need less oil, and more gas.
Father Russia provides, despite us having gone to buy elsewhere, like Iran. (to implement US led sanctions, which now backfires on us Europeans again, as the US made a somewhat surprising turn and sanctions those who buy Iranian oil)
Thankfully Father Russia is only moderatly resentful, and provides us with the fossile energy we so need.
In return we provide them with foreign currencies they so urgently need.

We've become addicts, addicted on each other.


Let's make a EURu Federation!
I don't think our politicians are as inept as they appear to be. They have to know that going for renewable energy and Russian gas makes our country less dependent on imports. Curiously, those plans finalise when a militarisation of Europe, including Germany is being implemented. It's been US doctrine for a long time now to keep Europe and Russia separate from each other. Looks like the US grip on the continent is slipping just as the US makes serious motions to return to isolation again. I wonder when the era of the aircraft carrier ends and what will do it.

boldilocks
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Re: The Most Powerful Known Race In The Local Bubble.

Post by boldilocks »

Werra wrote:Looks like the US grip on the continent is slipping just as the US makes serious motions to return to isolation again. I wonder when the era of the aircraft carrier ends and what will do it.
The US doesn't seem to be returning to isolation at the moment. Trump seems to have been pulled in a very globalist direction. I think almost all of the nationalists in his cabinet have been either ousted or rendered toothless.

Swindle1984
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Re: The Most Powerful Known Race In The Local Bubble.

Post by Swindle1984 »

Replying to multiple people, so forgive me if I quote one of your posts without your name attached.

Also, I'm still wondering about how devastating anti matter engines would be to an ecology if activated in atmosphere, since I'm not sure what the magnitude of the ecological disaster they pose is.
Depends on how the anti-matter engine operates. If it's a matter/anti-matter reactor powering an engine that converts the released energy to another form of propulsion (ion drive, gravitic drive, etc.) like in Star Trek, not much. If it essentially works like a Valkyrie engine or fusion torchship... it can do a LOT of damage.

Mixing one gram of matter with one gram of antimatter (and assuming all of it is annihilated instantly for maximum efficiency) nets you 1.8×10^14 joules of energy, or roughly equal to 43 kilotons of TNT. For reference, Little Boy hit Hiroshima with 15 kilotons, and Fat Man hit Nagasaki with 21 kilotons. So a gram of antimatter has some oomph to it.

Naturally, unless you need a LOT of thrust, you're not going to be annihilating that much anti-matter in one go. Your space drive needs to be able to fine-tune how much thrust it provides. An engine that goes all out every time you turn it on isn't much use; you'll burn up all your fuel in no time.

Now, matter/anti-matter annihilation actually would provide some good thrust. It's not the atoms themselves being annihilated, but the sub-atomic particles that make them up. If a hydrogen atom collides with an anti-hydrogen atom, both will be mutually annihilated: the positron and electron will annihilate each other, and the proton and anti-proton will annihilate each other. The released energy will act on surrounding matter and the annihilation of particles create new subatomic particles, but it's actually not all that efficient as a drive. You want more propellant to push your anti-matter rocket. So, anti-hydrogen is fine, but you want your matter to be larger atoms/molecules so there's stuff left over after the annihilation. The best example I was able to find was reacting anti-hydrogen (one positron, one anti-proton) to helium-4 (two electrons, two protons, two neutrons). The position and anti-proton will annihilate one electron and one proton, leaving the remaining electron, proton, and two neutrons to go flying off in the explosion and smash against whatever matter they come in contact with, transferring their energy to your rocket and propelling it more efficiently.

You can see this better with Project Orion, which used nuclear explosions to propel a spacecraft very efficiently. A standard nuke detonating in the vacuum of space isn't very efficient, as a weapon or as propulsion. It's essentially a super-powerful lightbulb that scatters its energy in 360 degrees, so very little of its total yield actually hits the target; in order for a nuke to do damage (or push against something you're trying to propel) in space, it essentially needs to be making physical contact, or very nearly,, in order for a decent percentage of its explosive yield to actually hit the target. Project Orion fixed this by essentially making a nuclear shaped charge, directing up to 85% of the nuke's yield in a cone blasting in a single direction. You can widen the cone so it blasts a broader area, more efficient for propulsion, or narrow the cone to make it a penetrative weapon (another benefit of the nuclear shaped charge, also known as a Casaba-Howitzer, is that your nuke doesn't have to be right up against the target to damage it). But you're only pushing against your spacecraft with the vaporized material that made up the nuke itself, and then only whatever was between the jet from the shaped charge and the target. Project Orion made it a better propulsion system by putting a tungsten plate over the charge so that the tungsten would be vaporized by the blast and shot at the spacecraft; more matter slamming into the spacecraft = more energy transferred to the spacecraft = better propulsion.

So you can see why you'd want more "left over" matter in your matter/anti-matter reaction if you're using it for propulsion. The more mass you're flinging around, the more propellant you have. More propellant = better propulsion.

Assuming you can control how much matter/anti-matter gets annihilated in your reactor and shot out the rear of your ship as propellant, you should be able to fly a ship through atmosphere with no more environmental damage than a conventional chemical rocket (liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen combustion reaction), that is to say: diddly. Yes, you'd get some short-lived radiation (mostly gamma rays) from the reaction itself and some of the new subatomic particles created in its wake, but as long as your ship is capable of containing the matter/anti-matter reaction and venting it like a rocket (because otherwise it'd just be an anti-matter bomb) it should also be able to contain the worst of the radiation. Any radiation exiting the vehicle with the exhaust/propellant would really only be dangerous to anyone standing near enough that they'd be fried to a crisp anyway.

If you cranked the engine up to full gain, as in "we should be able to achieve relativistic speeds in a reasonably short window of acceleration", while in atmosphere? You basically just nuked everything your exhaust touches, like a Tsar Bomb blow torch. Minus the radioactive fallout. Atmospheric shockwaves, both from your ship going hypersonic and your exhaust both traveling at insane velocities AND superheating the atmosphere would be on par with a nuke. It's unlikely your ship would survive friction with the atmosphere; if the people on the planet are lucky, your ship will be in orbit by the time it explodes. If they're not so lucky... how much anti-matter was on board again?

Big kaboom. A kilogram of anti-matter reacting with a kilogram of matter has a yield of 43 megatons of TNT. For reference, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated, the Tsar Bomb, had a yield of 50 megatons (a theoretical maximum yield of 100 megatons, but they didn't detonate it at max yield because the bomber dropping it wouldn't have been able to get far enough to survive the blast). The Tsar Bomb's fireball had a radius of 8.0 km (5.0 miles) and all buildings in the test village 55km (34 miles) away, both wooden and brick, were destroyed. Heat from the detonation was capable of inflicting third degree burns up to 100km (62 miles) away. Windows were shattered as far away as Norway and Finland.

So, again... how wide are you opening the throttle, and how much fuel are you carrying?

As far as environmental damage, outside the initial gamma ray burst, you're looking at something in between a massive nuke and an asteroid impact in damage (less dust since you don't have the mass of the asteroid blowing up/vaporizing, no radioactive fallout like from a nuke).


Oh I don't agree with that at all. American cities have grown increasingly bold in their arrogance, and I've noted the same problem locally in my own country.
The majority of the state of Illinois is rural, conservative, and pro-gun. They are dominated by Chicago, which has big city corruption, is mostly far-left in politics, and anti-gun. Add in the racial element (rural Illinois is overwhelmingly white and low-crime, Chicago is heavily black and high-crime), and there is some serious tension between the city and the rest of the state, to the point that there have been multiple movements to make it so Chicago, a single city, doesn't get to decide policy for the rest of the state simply based on its population.

That's actually why the American government and electoral system is set up the way it is. The founding fathers (particularly Jefferson and Madison) viewed democracy as nothing more than mob rule; conversely, monarchy and a system of landed nobility works fine so long as the people in charge are responsible and caring individuals. If they're just a bunch of rich snobs who think they can do whatever they want because they're in charge, you get revolutions. You can actually see this attitude growing in American politicians who keep getting elected to the same office for decades (one reason why congressmen and senators should have term limits).

So they established a system that avoided tyranny and mob rule/anarchy via a balance of power, term limits, representative government rather than direct democracy, etc. Until fairly recently, it worked pretty well too, and the reason it doesn't work as well now is because we either changed the rules or ignore them.

With the electoral college, you avoid the same scenario of the rest of Illinois being dominated by and resenting Chicago writ large on a national scale. Rather than presidential elections being a popularity contest (which the founders wanted to avoid strongly), it basically gave the power to the states themselves. If Nebraska, with its rather sparse (in comparison) population collectively votes for Candidate A, then Nebraska's representatives in the electoral college vote for Candidate A. What this does is force candidates to campaign in all fifty states and try to appeal to the populations of as many states as possible, even rural"flyover country" that is openly despised by big city liberals on the coasts. If it was purely a popularity contest, with whoever won the most popular votes becoming president, nobody would ever have to campaign outside of California and New York (and one or two others, but those are the most crucial), and the other 48 states can go screw themselves. Being as they started a revolution over the whole "no taxation without representation" thing (technically, the colonies were represented in Parliament, but not by anyone they had selected to represent them, nor by anyone who actually cared about and campaigned on behalf of their interests.), the founding fathers weren't eager to let one or two states (or cities) decide who got to rule over everyone else, so they set up the electoral college to ensure every state got an equal say in the election, regardless of their size, and had their interests catered to rather than ignored.

The current controversy over the electoral college basically exists because the Democrats lost the last election and still haven't gotten over it. When Obama won, they were cheering on the electoral college. Now they want to get rid of it because it made them lose this one. I'm sure we'd hear similar grumblings from the Republicans if the shoe were on the other foot.

The swiss work it out by being extremely ethnically homogenous and having a conservative culture, and having most decisions made locally.
You can sort of see how this works out by looking at Sweden. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally homogenous, fairly small population, so their largely democratic system of government and welfare state worked out, more or less. Introduce people who are of a different race, religion, and culture, speak another language, have nothing but contempt for the locals (due to said religious and cultural differences), and are more than happy to go on the dole, and the welfare state goes bankrupt, the political system divides, crime skyrockets, and tensions rise. Not just the obvious tensions (between the natives and newcomers), but between different groups of natives (those in favor of more newcomers who won't assimilate and those against, those in favor of high taxes and welfare and those against, etc.). Whereas before, political differences were polite and largely simply topics of discussion, now there's much more animosity (as one side views the newcomers as hostile invaders and sees their culture and even race/ethnicity under threat, and the other wants to shut up any dissenters as 'dangerous' and 'intolerant').

In America, we've reached levels of political and cultural divide that the majority simply takes it as a given that we're going to have a civil war sooner or later.

Swindle1984
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Re: The Most Powerful Known Race In The Local Bubble.

Post by Swindle1984 »

"The form of government I advocate for is the best one when it's executed 'properly'" is a line of argument that vindicates every single form of government.
Except communism. Even on paper, it doesn't work. As often as I hear the tired excuse of "that wasn't real communism", all you have to do is take exactly what Marx's proposals were and ask how you implement "real" communism without it failing or turning into a dystopian nightmare. They can't answer you. Doesn't work, except in fantasy where you get to handwave whatever you want into being.

Democracy/republics may never achieve the highs of a good dictatorship, but they rarely achieve the lows of a bad dictatorship. Mostly because by the time they sink that low, they're already a bad dictatorship.

Dictatorship of the proletariat is the only form of goverment that makes any sense, atleast in Russia.
I suspect that's largely because the Russian people are disposed to suffering and will just soldier on regardless. That and they don't know what they want, but they (mostly) know what they don't want.


You make it sound like most Californians are in your opinion nutjobs, if had their way war declarations would be the result?
California is desperately trying to become a colony of Mexico (no, really; they actively encourage illegal immigration and give driver's licenses AND VOTING RIGHTS to foreigners with no American citizenship), openly and persistently screws over its rural constituents and farmers in favor of the big cities, land and housing values are retarded, makes terrible decisions (Decades-long drought? Let's dump millions of gallons of fresh water into a river delta leading into the ocean on the theory that it will prevent a ****ing minnow from going extinct! Our water reservoirs keep evaporating? Let's spend millions on a system that makes it evaporate even faster AND has the added bonus of contaminating it with bacteria and algae! We want to protect the environment? Let's end the clean up of leaf litter, dead trees, etc. we did for decades and let nature handle things. Oh hey, all that flammable material we leave laying around 'for the environment' is catching fire and burning the entire state to the ground every summer. Yay. Let's not even get into how they have the largest economy in the union, the highest taxes, and literally everything is bankrupt and in ever-increasing debt.), and is actively making political arrangements with other countries, such as China and France, despite it being illegal for states to engage in foreign affairs, and only getting away with it because "technically the agreement isn't binding, so it doesn't count, lol".

California is insane. And they keep fleeing the high taxes, high crime, and Orwellian legislation for other states... that they then immediately try to turn into California 2.0 by demanding the exact same shit they fled from in the first place. They've thoroughly infested the capital of my state, they're moving into my city in droves and driving up property values (we have some of the cheapest real estate and lowest taxes in America), and they keep voting for more hippie granola crap the natives despise. I honestly think we legalized the open carry of handguns just to drive them off. Our current mayor is a transplant from California and is openly hated by the majority of the population because of his corruption and constant attempts to turn us into another San Francisco (the skyrocketing taxes and energy bills, insane policies like trying to ban cars from downtown to reduce pollution, wanting to remove, relocate, rebuild, or outright destroy state monuments and landmarks so he can rewrite history, etc.) have made him one of the more hated politicians in our history. And all the California transplants love him.

So yes, California is insane. Not in the harmless, "Teddy charging up the chairs and digging the Panama Canal in the basement" way, but in the "somebody get him out of the driver's seat before he kills us all" way.


Plot of one of my favorite anime...
I freaking love Legend of the Galactic Heroes. THAT is a well done show, and I could rave for hours about all the things it does right.

Absalom
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Re: The Most Powerful Known Race In The Local Bubble.

Post by Absalom »

Mr.Tucker wrote:
boldilocks wrote:Would you prefer racially homogenous? They are a people of a common genetic ancestry of a relatively small people in a limited geographical area. And I can assure you there is a swiss people.
I think we need a definition of the word "ethnicity" and "people".
An ethnicity is a bunch of persons with a common race and language. A people or "nation" is an ethnicity that shares a common culture. Europeans divide along language (ethnic) lines rather than racial lines (which is more common in the US). Asia is it's own, extremely complicated thing....
You know, I've always been under the impression that an ethnicity was a bunch of people with a common culture at least as much as race or language. Easy to see how race or language could foster a cultural divide, but just considering New England and the Carolinas in the US raises a question as to how unifying race & language are.
Mr.Tucker wrote:
boldilocks wrote:Carving california up into ethnically discrete blocks would probably improve conditions a great deal, especially if you could ensure a complete disconnect between rural and city politics. (Ie, ensured that one couldn't affect the others, with water rights belonging to the closest polity to the source of water, effectively giving rural areas control over the water supplies.)
I agree. The politics of it would be really complicated though....
Leave politics to the locals. Allocate north/south/center groups, decide on one county or city to be emblematic for each, run some affinity polls. Don't assign counties directly to the group that the have the highest affinity with, but instead use transition counties to lay out lines, grow the allocated areas out by some rule or another (probably start with the strictest rule first, and shift to more relaxed rules every time there are left-over counties), then adjust to match with whatever natural boundaries exist.

Maybe move eastern California entirely into Nevada, since the area within three counties of the coast is apparently culturally distinct from everywhere further east.
Mr.Tucker wrote:
boldilocks wrote:Oh I don't agree with that at all. American cities have grown increasingly bold in their arrogance, and I've noted the same problem locally in my own country.
It's where we are in the tech tree. It's a cycle. Look at history: the first cities sprung up in the wake of the Chalcolithic, in the various cradles of civilization (India, Mesopotamia, etc) and developed into hydraulic states that build the first kingdoms on the backs of bronze and chariots. They ruled the world for nearly 3000 years, before collapsing in the Bronze Age Collapse, due to the popularization of iron tools and weaponry (which is far more readily available), leading to a 1000 year period where they became insignificant and rural lives were prevalent.
As I recall, this just isn't true. Specifically, I understand the popularization of iron to have come after the collapse, rather than at it's beginning. I consider it more likely that the "Sea Peoples" were both emblematic and a transition-product of a generalized systems collapse, resulting from just enough "spark" reaching centuries-developed "tinder, kindling, and wood".

Incidentally, iron had apparently been in minor use for centuries before the collapse seems to have started, and apparently wouldn't be comparable to bronze in quality until the Roman Empire. The shift to iron is almost guaranteed to have been a side-effect (the tin required for bronze originated from a fairly small number of sites, so if trade routes disappeared, so did your bronze), rather than a cause.
Mr.Tucker wrote:Then the Classical ancient city-states rose up and once again power was vested in the cities, who now had the ability to build empires due to advancement in technology. These city states once again collaped as the introduction of steel and horsemanship lead to them becoming prime targets. They stayed down for the rest of most modern history, before once again being on the upswing today.
As far as the collapse of Rome goes (if you're talking about something other than Rome, then please clarify), that's another case of multi-factor collapse. If I had to point to any one thing, I'd point to either disease (one of the old pandemics is suspected to have swept through the western empire a bit before it really collapsed), practicality (the empire was probably just too big), or misunderstanding (the Roman Empire didn't fully collapse until the fall of the Byzantines).

There's seriously a lot of factors though (cities are more vulnerable to disease, you need the ability to feed and water those people, how vulnerable are you to war, etc.).
Mr.Tucker wrote:It's a pattern that gets reproduced anywhere there is technological advancement (though with different flavors; the Americas never really progressed beyond the Neolithic, but rather developed that specific strain of technology to a high level).
The Americas are a pretty good example. The Americas had plenty of cities, but many of them kept collapsing. For the Maya, it seems to have been a mixture of droughts and war (again & again). For the Aztecs, I'm sure they had some droughts, but my understanding is that they basically just had a war (when they relocated to modern Mexico City), then got hit by the Spanish after they'd recovered. For the Inca, the Empire was something like 100 - 200 years old, and had seemingly developed what Communists like to pretend Communism results in. In the case of most of the others, I understand it to pretty much be the same as the Maya (+ some transitions into different cultures... the Olmecs I think it was?). In the case of the Amazonian "Cities of Gold" (spoiler alert: the buildings were covered with thatching that looked golden), we can be pretty certain that it was disease.

And for North America, it seems like everywhere either didn't allow for further expansion, or kept killing everyone with a mega-drought every 500 years or so (Europe collapsed once in the last 2000 years, the US East to Plains seem to have done it twice).
Mr.Tucker wrote:Modern technology and economics relies, above all else, on human capital, and cities, by their very nature offer that in spades. Technology has advanced to the point where they can also be self-sufficient (large scale desalination, solar, wind and nuclear, vertical farming, in-vitro meat, and other such technologies; cities are affluent enough to build those) to a larger extent. Human are gregarious, and modern communications and transport have made them even more-so. It's where our path takes us (and it'll be even more prevalent in space; rural communities are impossible in space per se). We can protest, but that didn't help Rome or the Chinese Principalities, did it?...
The upshot is that urban centered periods tended to be quite good development periods (some rural centered ones were as well, but to a lesser extent).
And today, the very technology that makes cities possible is also undermining their utility. I don't know the "natural" size of New York City and San Francisco Bay nowadays, but I do know one thing: transport (cars), communications (internet, phones, etc.), and accessibility (e.g. Fed-Ex) mean that their "natural population" today is lower than it was 50 years ago. For a "natural population", you take intrinsic factors (New York City and San Francisco Bay are both ports, so their "intrinsic habitability" is automatically going to be higher than neighboring non-port areas), calculate in side-effects (the services used to support the port will automatically make it easier to live there than at neighboring non-port locations, unless artificially constrained), and that gets you what you should expect if everything were being magically placed in the most sensible location: it doesn't get you some of the largest modern cities, because their legacy populations push them above their natural numbers (a stereotypical example is the cost of living in New York City: it's really only achievable because of the legacy population; the city would still be highly populous, but the current population is overdoing it).

As for space, if you're defining rural in contrast to urban, then there's no particular reason that space can't be rural. I've never heard of anyone say that a space colony needs over 500 people to be viable while still accessible to other colonies , and I also haven't heard anyone describe 500 people as urban. For that matter, you could probably run a small habitat station with 5-50 people once things developed (or even 1 person, if you were feeling stupid that day), since most of the work will be checking redundant systems to make sure the self-diagnostics are working right, and occasionally re-top some supply hoppers. Rural space only becomes impossible if buildings are your objection.

Krulle wrote:
boldilocks wrote:
Krulle wrote:Yeah, I remember that oil makes about 20% of Russian economy directly. (old stat, higher oilprices usually also translate tohigher percentages....)
Any dollar down in barrel price hits directly, as the remaining industry and services are relying on oil-industry employees spending their income.
Indirect effects taken into account, the oil industry is more than half or the Russian economy.
Is that why they're pushing into gas? As I recall they're mostly raw natural resources. I think putin himself described russia as effectively a third world economy.
They're pushing gas, because European green parties think that CO2 from gas is less bad for the environment than CO2 from oil.....
Well, in the greenie's defense, Methane (primary constituent of "natural gas") is much easier to produce than other hydrocarbons. If anything, Methane is the default. So, if your ideology calls for moving to carbon-neutral, or even carbon-negative, then Natural Gas is a good choice, because it makes the transition easier. There's certainly a lot of fuss about batteries, but they just won't be a viable replacement for localized combustion among a lot of Earth's population for decades, because they're just going to be too expensive. By going to Natural Gas, at least you're using something that itself can realistically make an easy transition. That in turn makes it easier to achieve your goals in the mid-term, while you work on your long-term fixes.

Short-term's probably been realistically impossible since somewhere around the Carter administration. He or someone else around the same time needed to do much better with... something, solar-power-satellites or whatever, but something.

Swindle1984 wrote:With the electoral college, you avoid the same scenario of the rest of Illinois being dominated by and resenting Chicago writ large on a national scale. Rather than presidential elections being a popularity contest (which the founders wanted to avoid strongly), it basically gave the power to the states themselves. If Nebraska, with its rather sparse (in comparison) population collectively votes for Candidate A, then Nebraska's representatives in the electoral college vote for Candidate A. What this does is force candidates to campaign in all fifty states and try to appeal to the populations of as many states as possible, even rural"flyover country" that is openly despised by big city liberals on the coasts. If it was purely a popularity contest, with whoever won the most popular votes becoming president, nobody would ever have to campaign outside of California and New York (and one or two others, but those are the most crucial), and the other 48 states can go screw themselves. Being as they started a revolution over the whole "no taxation without representation" thing (technically, the colonies were represented in Parliament, but not by anyone they had selected to represent them, nor by anyone who actually cared about and campaigned on behalf of their interests.), the founding fathers weren't eager to let one or two states (or cities) decide who got to rule over everyone else, so they set up the electoral college to ensure every state got an equal say in the election, regardless of their size, and had their interests catered to rather than ignored.

The current controversy over the electoral college basically exists because the Democrats lost the last election and still haven't gotten over it. When Obama won, they were cheering on the electoral college. Now they want to get rid of it because it made them lose this one. I'm sure we'd hear similar grumblings from the Republicans if the shoe were on the other foot.
Eh, I sorta disagree.

The Electoral College wasn't supposed to work the way that we use it, it's just that it's been so long that noone remembers.

The Electoral College is supposed to work on the same model as Congress. Instead of being a direct democracy, it's supposed to be representative. You can point at the Electors and say that it's still the case, but Electors were supposed to exist in the absence of political parties. Instead of going up to represent what their voters had already decided, they were supposed to negotiate with other Electors. In the first two presidential elections, you weren't supposed to vote for President at all, instead you voted for Negotiator. As the political parties were created, and grew in power, this became corrupted and forgotten, resulting in the current situation, where the Electoral College is effectively a direct vote where some people have more voting power than others, rather than the genuinely different system that it was intended to be.

Just as well, I suppose. It's hard to imagine the original system properly working without a lucky outlier like George Washington anyways.

Swindle1984 wrote:
"The form of government I advocate for is the best one when it's executed 'properly'" is a line of argument that vindicates every single form of government.
Except communism. Even on paper, it doesn't work. As often as I hear the tired excuse of "that wasn't real communism", all you have to do is take exactly what Marx's proposals were and ask how you implement "real" communism without it failing or turning into a dystopian nightmare. They can't answer you. Doesn't work, except in fantasy where you get to handwave whatever you want into being.
I can think of ways, but all involve my own definition (my standard response to things like "that wasn't real communism" is to drag out the references, disembowel them in the street, and make doilies from the entrails: for Communism, I go solely with "the workers own the means of production", and throw the related "communal ownership" under "Communalism", since it makes sense), two are "embrace the dystopia", and the third is literally just allowing 100%-employee-owned companies while otherwise keeping Communism out of the government. I'm certain that Pol Pot considered himself a quite successful Communist while things were going well for him, and Mao seemed to think that it was all ok as long as everyone else was doing what he said.
Swindle1984 wrote:
You make it sound like most Californians are in your opinion nutjobs, if had their way war declarations would be the result?
California is desperately trying to [snip]

California is insane.
I think you give California too much credit, so I removed the bit I think you're wrong about: it's all insanity, almost 0% is planned. California's state mental disease is metaphorically Multiple Personality Disorder. There's multiple drivers, and they're all controlling something different at the same time. You only need to look at the blackouts in the 1990s & their causes to see this in practice.
Swindle1984 wrote:And they keep fleeing the high taxes, high crime, and Orwellian legislation for other states... that they then immediately try to turn into California 2.0 by demanding the exact same shit they fled from in the first place.
Agreed. Some folks worry about illegal immigration, but those of us who've been here for a while are better armed :p . What worries me genuinely is Californians & similar Left Coasters, fleeing their homes without fleeing their behaviors. Frankly, my state's drift to Anarchism is enough, we don't need the philosophically-deafblind screaming in our ears at the same time.
Swindle1984 wrote:They've thoroughly infested the capital of my state, they're moving into my city in droves and driving up property values
They don't need to move in. I know of a spot owned by a Californian who demands California prices: not only is it in the wrong town, but the location is honestly a pain because traffic's too fast there.
Swindle1984 wrote:insane policies like trying to ban cars from downtown to reduce pollution,
I can think or somewhere I'd like to ban cars from, but that's just because Bricktown is an inscrutable maze, not because of pollution.

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