I think it is more accurate to say that the _legitimacy_ of the US government has been hollowed out. As long as the US government retains the ability to throw its "citizens" in prison to be raped by HIV and Hep-C infected ethnic gangs for the crime of not obtaining Federal Reserve notes as legal tender for payment of "taxes", it can offer the world something valuable: Torture of US "citizens".

There were 9 stocks that spiked in virtual unison. This is very much like a system dynamics test where you run a transient through the system and then observe the time distribution of signals. You can get a lot of information about a system's structure if you can stimulate it with a discontinuity (and track the system's reactions over the subsequent time interval). This gives you the high frequency structure of the global economy so you can make near-term predictions better. This, of course, is highly useful for bots.

Duncan, governmental stability arises from a combination of vendor lock-in (via network effect) and customer loyalty. Gates is all about vendor lockin. Getting control of a network effect gives you the vendor lock-in. The biggest vendor lock-in right now is the US dollar's reserve currency status. The "financial" GG's are actually monetary GG's first capturing, then exploiting the Federal Reserve's "Bill Gates status". It merely _appears_ "financial". Gates represents another kind of "reserve currency" -- in this case an IT standard network effect that has imposed vendor lock-in ever since IBM started mass distribution of the IBM PC with MS-DOS. Controlling that vendor lock-in is highly valuable because you gain control of the "Windows update" stream.

Duncan Kinder asks: "whence Bill Gates?" Listen to this: http://www.majorityrights.com/audio/treason.mp3 Basically, Gates will try to buy mercenary protection and the mercs will end up owning his ass.

BenK asks: "... what are the fracture lines that would cause a division between the US military and the US financial elites, for example?" "Now THAT was the Mossad." said the wife of a friend of mine when the Pentagon was hit.

Club-K reminds me of a hilarious incident back in 1987 where WW II vintage mines were floating around the oil shipping lanes and the US heroically stepped in with their Navy to protect the oil tankers. The problem was that all of the mine sweepers were decommissioned except in the Pacific. So the destroyers sent to "protect" the oil tankers ended up cruising around behind the oil tankers because the destroyers were more valuable than the oil tankers. Oh, you didn't hear about this? Yeah. I know...

There is something else going on here: When Bill Norris, founder of Control Data Corporation and benefactor of Seymour Cray, started making major investments in localizing production and virtualizing via the PLATO network, he was viciously attacked by the financial press and made such a pariah in his own company than when some fellow engineers and I demonstrated a mass market version of PLATO in 1979 ($40(1979)/month for unlimited service and terminal rental (512*512 bit map with touch panel input) including phone and cable local comm lines), we were blocked by middle management from presenting the system to the executives and it died on the vine. It is as though some sort of religious fervor infects those who want everything centralized and interdependent -- a religious fervor reflected in the increasingly "evil" connotations of words like "survivalist", "stockpiling", etc. Its as though the old Boy Scout motto of "Be Prepared" has become the original sin of a new theocracy that now has control of the centers of power. The desire for control is a vicious cycle -- the more you acquire, the more you need to maintain it.

WHOOPS! A dimensional error caused failure of a fairly obvious sanity check: 5MW/5MV = 1 amp Although the described cable will carry that easily, 1 amp will more than kill you at 5MV. Oh, well, that's what John McCarthy means when he says "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."

My own preference is for individual sovereignty upheld by minimal law, but no one is really dealing with what that minimal law must be outside the Valorian Society. That's probably because no one else can face the fact that a minimal law individual sovereignty society entails replacing war and most other force with single combat (primarily between men competing for resources) to the death under conditions found in nature. Of course, I recognize that "The 10,000 Year Explosion" has left a large fraction of humanity as Socrates' "political animals", so it certainly wouldn't work for everyone.

A couple more quick calculations on the 5MV DC grid approach: A 5MV line would be critical at the dielectric strength 0f a low density polyethylene insulator radius of 50mm: 100kV/mm;5MV ? mm = 50 mm So let's double that radius to 100mm. That 20 mile transmission line, given a factor of 2 safety factor on its dielectric strength (100mm radius) with low density polyethylene (buried), would cost: pi*(100mm)^2*20mi;1000dollar/ton;940kg/m^3 ? dollar = 1.04776E+06 dollar If you charge 1 penny per kWh and run that line at capacity, over a 10 year amortization period you bring in: 5MW;10year;.01dollar/kWh ? dollar = 4.38E+06 dollar I really don't know how close you could get to capacity utilization but there is some slop here.

Erratum: That should have been 2mm^2 cross section.

A quick calculation indicates 5MV transmitted over a 1mm^2 cross section aluminum conductor for 20 miles, carrying 1milliamp (minimum sensible by a human) would let two very rural small towns share about 5MW of capacity with almost zero loss. 28.2e-9ohm*m;2mm^2;20mile;.5*(5MV)^2;5MV ? 1mamp = 5.50861E+06 1mamp http://www.calchemy.com/uclive.htm

What use, if any, could a resilient community make of a very efficient (>50%) 5MV DC generator that was very easy to fabricate and could burn just about anything?

I would hardly call Detroit irrelevant. It is a harbinger -- an experimental result.

RanDomino, the answer isn't "worker ownership" but "citizen sovereignty" which means that just as a sovereign in a feudal kingdom collects land rents from his serfs, so does the citizen collect land rents -- or their modern equivalent which is net tax on IN PLACE LIQUIDATION VALUE -- and distributing the revenues evenly to all citizens thereby bypassing bureaucracies and special interest politics. That removes rent seeking from both the public and private sectors. Business activity proceeds untaxed as does the value of property above its liquid value.

You're not only divorcing life from reproduction which is nonsense -- you're divorcing life from subsistence. I demand not only personal subsistence, but what I would have in the state of nature: Either enough resources to raise children, or death. Anyone who thinks they "own" the land to the point that an intelligent, able-bodied man and a mutually compatible and fertile mate don't have a right to fight for the resources to reproduce -- and I mean FIGHT meaning INITIATING FORCE -- anyone who "axiomatically" opposes such force is anti-life.

Personally, no. Why would I, a living creature that has carved out a niche for himself from nature -- else he wouldn't be alive to agree to anything -- agree to give up my right kill intruders on the assets I need to raise a family unless I had some sort of iron-clad guarantee that I would not be deprived of those assets? Capitalism is predicated on the sanctity of property rights over the sanctity of life.

"The anger is mostly Boomer Rage hence irreverent." That's the first time I've heard the idiom "Boomer Rage". What is it, hence its irrelevance?

Tom "The Greatest Generation" Brokaw has the answer for the establishment: Portray "The Boomers" as "The Most Spoiled Generation" so they accept whatever the elites do to them rather than leading the fight for genuine reform. See: http://www.cnbc.com/id/34840866/ I give Brokaw too much credit, of course. This is obviously something that has beeen in the works for some time as is obvious from Elizabeth Warren's incredulity at her own findings being typical of her Harvard peers.

The explanations aren't mutually exclusive. In other words, the staging may have been designed to elicit the tipping point phenomenon in crowds. This is part of what I was alluding to in my comment on MISleadership.

Actually, this is even more interesting as a MISleadership technique. If there is the potential for a movement you want to neutralize, its easier to put up a lightning rod and ground it out than it is to put up a lightning rod and put the energy to use. The recent suicide attacks by software engineers against the government are a good example of MISleadership. Imagine if the Muslim suicide bombers had a kill ratio of 2 suicide bombers to one death and then got a Muslim suicide bomber movement going where the technique was so ineffective that you decimated your most dedicated followers while taking out only half that many random bystanders. Genius!

HS's proposed solution to private sector rent seeking by the value transference class is precisely 180 degrees out of phase. The solution is to remove all taxes on economic activity and replace them with taxes on LIQUIDATION VALUE OF NET ASSETS -- preferably at modern portfolio theory's "risk free interest rate". It is true that folks attracted to value transfer as opposed to value creation tend to be more of a "zero sum" mentality, but where the real problem arises is from the resulting rent seeking mentality including all manner of not only zero sum but negative sum games played in the private sector and, via regulatory capture, in the public sector. The liquidation value of their assets are the "no brainer" value of those assets: By definition takes no particular skill or insight to realize liquidation value. Likewise, modern portfolio theory's "risk free" interest rate is usually defined as the short term treasury rate, averaged over time. This is, again, a "no brainer" investment -- relying on the government to break kneecaps for you in collections via taxation. With a standard exemption of net assets equal to those exempt under Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the system will very quickly dispense with private sector rent seekers in all sectors, from Microsoft to Goldman Sachs. In the process, it will dispense with the ridiculous bias toward importation of workers from nations where rent seeking has been honed to such an exquisite form that not even its practitioners see it as anything but "the way of things".

http://www.objectwatch.com/whitepapers/ITComplexityWhitePaper.pdf IT project failures lose over $6e12/year worldwide. This, of course, has little to do with the quality of programmers and if you think it does, then you're most likely an unemployed, childless white programmer suffering from age-related cognitive decline who has live a life of sexual frustration. Just die now and stop sharing your misery with the rest of the world.

The fundamental problem with any currency is redemption. Fiat currency redemption is at tax time. e-gold redemption was problematic because there were only a few vendors who would actually sell you physical gold for e-gold and toward the end (of the time it was active in Nova Scotia) it became increasingly difficult if not impossible to obtain physical gold.

They actually claim 90% to 100% "quantum efficiency" which is to say that of the amount of light absorbed, almost all of it turns into electrons. I don't know where the inefficiencies limiting near-term to 20% come from though.