I need to move to a country that isn't insane

Post Reply New Topic

This^. We are in a real mess right now, but I stay positive because the bad things will be reversed. I learned to stay positive through a Turkish friend who I was talking to around 2 years ago when there was an attempted coup that failed and Erdogan is getting more and more extreme. He follows the news back home a lot and has family there. I asked with all this going on how does he not get down about things, he said history shows that it is always 1 step backwards followed by 2 steps forward. He said in a country like Turkey which goes through major issues every few years it is important to remember that when terrible things have happened, the people have learned, eventually overturned them and pushed even further away from them.

I think history will view those at the top in the UK right very poorly. I try and remember though that the current fashion at the top for cronyism disinformation etc will only last so long. The country belongs to the people, and the people won't put up with it long term.

DearOne pointed out that there's a lot of potential variance in terms of what robotics could do - and potentially that could even increase population if the robots are able to do a lot with vertical farming.

If these had to be self-sufficient for food though my way of thinking considers how much a given family eats in a year, how many acres it takes to provide their needs, and short of extreme advances in vertical factory farming I don't see food constraints allowing many Manhattans unless one or two have specifically been chosen as commercial districts to then outsource their farming to other cylinders. While I'm sure none of these are going to be an escape to Alaska, Siberia, or Nunavut Canada something suggests that there's probably going to be some sort of walk down toward Dunbar numbers. Having a Dunbar-sized layer would probably be a lot of help in some other ways, particularly thinking of David Sloan Wilson and some of his sense of the positive-sum game theory that they can bootstrap at the grass roots level.

There might also be older cylinders near retirement or under refurbishment where they may not have anyone living on them but may want a Marine or some old crank with a gun sleeping there and making sure that no one's ripping out the copper piping. That's probably a role I could see people taking up who really want their space.

If things get too bad I would like to move to Canada or New Zealand. For now I just want to move to a sane part of the U.S. that has mountains. I'm thinking Colorado.

I thought of Colorado, but its expensive to live there.

I'll add Taiwan to my list for consideration.

I always wondered what the Philippines is like.

Ask Edna.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=393215&start=48#p8682614

Conform or die, from what I hear.

The international space station is not a place for would be hermits. These colonies would be like space stations multiplied thousands fold. It would be Manhatten, as a whole, being isolated. But the inhabitants would not be isolated from each other. They would invent alot of novel sports - like a real life version of that school sport in Harry Potter -wieghtless soccer essentially- that would be played in the central core of the revolving cylinders - where it would be zero G. Thats the sort of thing the visionaries envision.

The way the ONeil colonies are described and envision -its more like the city state of Singapore, or Maoist Commune, -the opposite of a refuge for hermits. Stay on earth if you wanna be a hermit.

Robots would do most of the physical work of building these colonies. But humans have to run the robots.It wouldnt just be a pleasure cruise, even after the colonies are completed. Once theyre built then you all would have to get work making export products...like perfect ball bearings made in zero G. and like that.

I admit that I dont recall exactly how agriculture is supposed to work. But they would make up for lack of land by intensive hydroponics, and greenhouses.

Funny ...

I have heard about the Gerard ONeil colony idea since the Seventies. Read the High Frontier in the Eighties. And have brought it up on this website many times since day one. But no one ever responds like they have ever heard of it. So I am surprised to see you, another WP person, all of sudden bring up the subject! You must be the only other WPer to have ever heard of Gerard ONeil.

Fiction is wonderful for entertainment, but short on practical guidance. The only "vertical gardens" that make sense are south-facing slopes (north in the antipodes) In a city, they just shade out the poor folk. In space, you have the problem of getting sunlight past a pressure hull onto about a half-acre per person. Plants have definite limits on processing speed. The dietary restrictions would cause riots on earth.

So they do actually have viable vertical farms / plant factories right now but there are limits - ie. the economic efficiency depends on the height of the plant and how it fruits or what part of it people eat.

It seems like they're considering this sort of farming at three levels of difficulty or at least relative technology:
1) herbs (most of the plant itself is eaten)
2) most relatively low-growing vegetables, one example being tomatoes.
3) the really hard stuff with a lot of height and little of the plant being eaten - ex. corn and wheat.

There's an added fertilization system they can do where they have a small fish farm in something like a 100+ gallon cylinder and have the fish feces in the water to then for hydroponic fertilization - ie. kill two birds with one stone.

The trouble with it is that the ease of economic vertical farming seems inversely proportional to what it is we eat the most of. There was at least one thought given in one of the videos that were talking about this, ie. that live stock could be shifted from wheat or corn to oat grass and that at least for meat production shift the feed source from a level 3 to a level 1 difficulty for factory farming. At least here the goal is re-wilding the earth's surface and helping to avoid over farming.

It's not that vertical farming is a pipe dream so much that where it is practical it's still niche applications. It's possible that we could have vertical farming figured out well for both levels 1 and 2 plants but 3 seems like it's a ways off, potentially even impossible if we're thinking of earth real estate value and costs.

If you want to minimize the inputs, human waste is the only organic fertilizer, and there is no meat of any kind, unless insects are essential. I don't really trust high-tech farming, especially as a sole source. The very best scientifically formulated feed for calves still does not add pounds as fast as the original wild prairie grass, grazed every fifth year.

ONeil was an engineer, and he was mapping out what he thought was a practical vision. It was not a fiction novel.

The two things that what make his colonies more feasible than you might expect would be a) zero g, and (b)unlimited solar power. You can build big stuff space easier than on earth.And your not hampered by night fall, an atmosphere, and weather, in collecting sunlight with solar panals. The solar power means you can harness boundless energy. So you could harness solar power to make electricity ...to make sun lamps inside the colony to grow plants. That was probably the solution he had in mind. Inefficient (to turn sunlight into something else, and then back into fake sunlight), but who needs efficiency when your power source is unlimited?

But whatever. My point is just that living in an isolated community in outer space does equate to living as an isolated individual. You would still have a lot of people. And it would be a community with a lot of conformist rules to survive I would think.

But who knows? The group would be composed of folks of a certain mindset who could live and work in this wierd environment. An aspie might fit in. Or might not.

Well, you actually have a good point on the insects - ie. they will be essential if they want to have anything resembling top soil in these cylinders for growing more traditional harvests. Letting them mulch plant husks mixed with something might not be a bad idea in which case they could also be used for food.

I don't know if like or dislike of the factory farms will mean as much as the desire to get as much agriculture in as little a space as possible. It might be that if one lives in a cylinder it'll be a small high-tech town surrounded by fields of wheat, oats, possibly soy beans, potatoes are possibly level 2, but mostly the plants that fill out the bottom of the food groups. Pescatarians might also not be in a terrible situation because fish have utility and nutrients needed for both plants and people.

I figure that it depends what kind of aspie.

I've often heard it suggested that people who tend to be 'more grounded' or 'less crazy' have more frequent contact with the unforgiving in nature. There'd clearly be plenty of that, anyone who knew what happened if someone went out an air lock or if the cylinder sprung a rapid leak would have quite a clear sense of that, probably plenty of hands-on experience as well with building structures in the cylinder and maintaining it. I'm guessing there either wouldn't be many superfluous people or those who were would probably be sent back to Earth.

Yes, the judge investigates the case. There are several types of experts: Medical -a negligence lawsuit for example-, psychological - trying to find out if someone if lying-, appraiser - a commercial dispute for example-, etc.

But lawyers continue to be hired, they take care of doing the paperwork, and they also try to argue to the judgue, for example trying to interpret the law in a way that benefits your client, because the law can be interpreted in various ways. This happens a lot, there is a latin proverb that says: Inventa lege, inventa fraude. In english: Every law has a loophole. And it is so, and in Spain too.

For example: there are ways in wich a company can pay much less taxes than be should theoretically pay, making things that are borderline legal, or that are in a kind of loophole, where technically it is neither legal nor illegal. Obviously to do something like that, you should have a good tax advisor and a good lawyer.

The same happens in other cases, a lawyer doesn't always win, no matter how good he is, there are cases that are indefensible, in such a case, the lawer will try to reduce the sentence for this client as much ass possible, because it isn't something fixed and can vary in part according to the judge's decision, whether they reach an agreement with the other part, etc. So, a better lawyer doesn't ensure victory, bit it certainly helps a lot.

There are also public lawyers, for people who can't afford a private one.

However, corruption exists, and judgues aren't free from it. If a judge is known to have an interest in one of the parts, he doesn't take that judgment, for example, a judge can´t bring a trial to his brother, his son, his wife, etc. But sometimes it isn't know, for example a defendant may have contacs with the judge, the judge can be bribed, maybe he/she is the secret lover of a woman/man in the process of divorce and it benefits her/his, etc.

And the penalties for corruption are ridiculous, for example, a judge who committed the last example i put, and the penalty that he has is 1,5 years os suspension of employment and salary. And that's it, you are a corrupt public worker and all happens to you is that you spend a 1,5 years without working and without receiving the salary, it's ridiculous.

But it's not just the judges, it happens with the majority of public corps, it happens with politicians, all parties in parliament have corruption cases, ALL, govermment and opposition. It happens to the previous King, that the Royal House forced him to abdicate in an attempt to clean up his image. I don´t know if it also happens in the Anglo-Saxon and northern countries or is it just a matter of the Latin countries, but here we are extremely corrupt in the public sphere.

There is even legalized corruption, for example: Public workers can take a leave of abscence, so they go to work privately but without losing the public work position, so that they can return to their public work in the future. Well, there are only two corps who usually do this: State Lawyers (don't confuse with public lawyers, state lawyers are in charge of advising and representing the Public Administration) and tax inspectors, nobody else, for two reasons, none of her referring to her training:

1) They are few and their first destination is a delegation or subdelegation of the Government, where they deal daily with politicians.

2) Know the defects of the System, how far the Public Administration reaches in fact and what does he miss.

In brief, who hires them, buys contacs ans inside information, that a lawyer traine doutside can't have, no matter how god it is. They are hired as tax consultans paying them 3 or 4 times more that what they charged in their body.

The leave of abscence of these corps it's pure corruption, but it's legal.

There are presidents that or mayors who legislate in favor of a certain company, and after his leaves his position, they hire him as an advisor or with a managerial position as a reward.

And like this 1000 more things, corruption in this Country is legendary.

Another problem that I see is the metod of access to the public work, judges included, consisting mainly of memory, I'm not saying it's not important, but whas is most evaluated the ability to memorize and repeat at full speed legal texts, than the ability to think, build arguments with legal materials and assemble a correct conclusion with all the data.

The hardest test of this type of oppositions is "to singing" the text, recite them orally at full speed:



That's singing a text, thats one in particular isn't for the judiciary, but the procedure is the same. In the case of the judiciary, they have to memorize 325 texts like that, and sing those who touch him, witch are 10, spread over to test.

The selection is almost reverse: The one who thinks is at a disadvantage over the one who does not and limits himself to putting on his blinders and pulling forward with the memorization.

Seeking equality is utopian, a country works if it has people who invest and create companies, and this implies that some will do better than others. You must legislate fairly and prevent abuses, but if you charge the legal security and you start expropriating people who are doing very well, what you gets is that nobody stars anything, and the country sinks.

Corruption could be fought if it were truly penalized, if you get cauth being corrupt, you lose your position and you have a huge fine or go to the jail some years, you will think it a lot before being corrupt. If you are, they catch you and nothing serious happens to you, it's a joke and hardly anyone thinks about anything before doing it.