cmhamill

This is a very silly use, but I use `ascii` when I can't distinguish between 0 and O in a font ? `ascii 0`, for example, clears that right up.

I haven't tried it, no. I'm big on the HHKB's layout, so the Realforce didn't really interest me.

I'll add my voice to "the HHKB2 is the greatest keyboard imaginable."

Also, re: arrow and paging keys, I manage to avoid them as much as possible, but reaching for 'Fn' with the pinky and hitting the appropriate key with my index or middle finger became second nature rather quickly.

Also, rarely noted — and the thing that every single keyboard gets wrong, including Atwood's here — is that the HHKB has the Escape key in line with the number row, so that it can be reached easily without taking your fingers off the home row.

For us vim users, this is really excellent.

I am very happy with it.

"Provable but not true" statements only arise in logical systems which are inconsistent, so it's fairly normal to not be able to come up with one.

So you need to assume two contradictory things are true, somewhere deep down in your logical system. As a trivial example, assume that both the following are true:

1. I am a robot. 2. I am not a robot.

And our false statement which we are going to prove is:

Pizza is made of fear.

We know that the following proposition is true:

I am a robot OR pizza is made of fear

Because we know that I am not a robot, the first term in the above must be false, and so the second term must be true. Therefore, pizza is made of fear.

That's really more an example of the principle of explosion, but the above is a tiny logical system which contains statements that are provable, but not true.

In practice, we tend to use logical systems which can't prove all true statements, but don't let you prove false ones. Much more useful, really.

Put plainly, no.

In all honesty, what the hell are you on about?

I don't have

You might enjoy: <http://longnow.org/>.

What a sensible viewpoint!

So tell me, are you the one who will fund the protesters in their construction project? Or provide the engineers and scientists? Would you be willing to pay a tax that funds such groups? Who would be responsible for deciding which groups ought to receive that funding?

It's called protesting because it is complaining. If it were feasible to simply "build [the] world's largest solar plant," then perhaps we'd see that.

Any folks on here know of good resources that might help someone begin to understand what they're looking at here?

More generally, learning about the physical operation of microprocessors? I'm particularly iffy when it gets to where the wires and the assembler meet, if you will.

> I've heard the "Libertarians are one step away from anarchists" argument multiple times before, but I've honestly always found it perplexing. At least with regards to my own libertarian views, government is essential.

Perhaps I haven't been clear, but I'm pretty sure I'm (mostly) agreeing with you.

U.S. Libertarianism is incompatible with most forms of anarchism espoused by those who use the term.

The term "libertarian," however, has a much longer history in Europe, associated with the spiritual heirs of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and so forth. Which is, to me, a fascinating transition in the commonly-accepted meaning of the word.

Also, I would note that:

> Without the government, you would have anarchy, which is a rule by force by intrinsically dishonest people resulting in the exact opposite of the upholding of contract law and rights.

is your editorializing. No self-described anarchist would accept that definition, and neither would most political scientists.

If you mean, on the other hand, that any form of anarchy as espoused by those who self-identify as such would lead to the kind of scenario you describe, then there's a whole other issue.

I was operating under the notion that we were discussing political philosophies as espoused by those who advocate them, not the plausibility of those philosophies as they might be plausibly implemented in the world.

I'd personally be inclined to say that what you're doing when you resist my threat is contingent upon what kind of social arrangement we find ourself in.

In a Western-style parliamentary republic, your action will probably be interpreted as asserting property rights. If my intentions were obviously physically harmful, then we can throw in the self-defense, too.

But let's change the chair to something more consequential—a small crate of canned food. Let's say that you and I both know that you are not lacking for resources or food, and that I am homeless. And let's say that I steal this crate.

According to the interpretation of the NAP which takes property rights as a fundamental and does not admit of property already being an act of aggression in the first place, I'm the criminal, and you'll be in the right (maybe an asshole, but in the right) to resist my theft.

But assuming all the above, is it any more of an aggression to take your food (assuming I'm not off to stab you or whatnot) than for you to benefit from a societal interpretation of rights that threatens me with retaliation if I attempt to feed myself?

> How is that not a government?

You could call it that. But most anarchists are not opposed to the existence of structures of government, but rather the existence of the nation-state.

> I'd like a society that can plausibly exist in the world as it is now, thanks.

Okay, now you're being much more specific.

> This would work on a small scale in the presence of massive social pressure to conform. All anarchy seems to be predicated on the existence of massive peer pressure to conform to their social norms, and we all know where not being able to question peer pressure leads.

I'm not sure; where does it lead? ;) But really, we already have massive social pressure to conform, that's how societies work. Anarchism doesn't get rid of that. Anarchism isn't utopianism, or at least not only utopianism.

> This is incoherent because it tries to force a distinction where none exists. The very existence of cottage industries and family farms puts the lie to the concept.

What do you mean? Distinctions never exist a priori, they're always conceptual tools for the sake of delimiting between situations.

> In other words: My family farm is empowering until I hire on my first field hand to help bring in a big harvest, at which point I become an evil capitalist oppressor.

Not quite; according to most anarchists you're still kosher, unless the renumeration you give that field hand is worth significantly less than the surplus value you obtained via his cooperation. Moreover, most anarchists object to an entire society being based on that model, not simply the existence of it.

Again, I'm not saying these are all 100% coherent or viable political options, I'm just trying to articulate my understanding of an anarchist position.

We can't, really! But we try anyway. That's the nature of political and social problems: there's no specification that we can refer to to clarify our terms.

Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

We can have a government because we can set expectations and behavior. Only when we have police and a state apparatus do we then become a society whose mode of governance is via the state.

Nowhere. But that's not property, right? I mean, that's a man claiming he owns a chair.

Now let's say I steal your chair. This is the moment in our narrative where we get to see whether you and I live in a society that adheres to the property principle.

If I steal your chair, and everyone gets sort of angry with me, and I say shove off and sit on my new chair, then we live in a society where the property principle is at most weakly enforced.

Let's say I steal your chair and get arrested. That implies that there are police, who are funded by some kind of entity which has taken it upon itself to enforce property rights. Which means that the means by which property becomes a real social fact is force enacted by, say, the state, against those who choose to disregard the principle.

Thus in a society where the property principle is taken for granted, that principle is in itself upheld by the implicit threat of force.

Some of the founding fathers were, yes. There are real problems with the maintainability of that model, of course.

This is way, somewhat famously, Noam Chomsky considers his anarchism a straightforward extension of the principles of enlightenment political philosophy to industrial society.

There's a layered irony, of course: most of the founding fathers were members of a political and economic elite which openly favored aristocracy and commerce over the 'regular folk.' Not all of them of course. The American Revolution was a strange tenuous cooperation between an economic elite that saw independence as the way out of a mercantile demand on the part of Britain, and a political class which was versed in Enlightenment political philosophy and saw an opportunity for using Locke and Montesquieu as a handbook for a new kind of government.

I never said the position was coherent or viable. ;)

That said, I think there are various answers.

One is to have a militia to enforce those kinds of principles. Anarchists who are also pacifists naturally reject this option.

Another option is to claim that in a society where everyone's needs were met, there'd be no desire by anyone towards private property, and that the desire for private property is a historically conditioned product of capitalism, and feudalism before that.

Another argument is that it wouldn't much matter as long as the default state was no private property. John T. Private can take his guns and go live in the woods if he wants to, what is essential is that the majority of property is public and therefore private property does not give a specific class control over the output of others' labor.

Another position, and this was Proudhon's, is that there is a distinction between personal property and private property. Proudhon would actually say that a family's household is an empowering, important kind of property which must be protected and preserved. Ownership of capital, however, Proudhon objected to, because it allowed, in his view, for those who owned the factories, machinery, mills, and plantations to present those who had no stake in the means of production to either work for one of them or to fend for themselves. As industrial society developed, fending for yourself because less and less plausible, and eventually the choice was between selling the output of your labor for (a socialist would say) less than its cost, or dying, basically.

Calling that choice barbaric is the essence of the social-anarchist critique of capitalism.

Very good question. That's probably one of the largest sources of division between various anarchist schools.

One way to tackle the problem is to separate governance from the state, and say that we want a governance structure accountable to the workers, and populated by workers, but no associated state apparatus—no police, no army, no state lines, etc.

Many forms of anarchism turn into a kind of pastorial agrarianism because of this. It really is hard to come up with a governance structure beyond a certain size that meets the accountability requirements for the kind of society socialism wants, and so many socialist anarchists see the answer as the self-governance of communities small enough to manage some kind of general council.

> First, I don't quite understand how you can be socialist and anarchist at the same time.

Simple: anarchism refers to the belief that governments are unnecessary and/or unjustified; socialism refers to the opinion that the means of production ought not to be owned by private individuals or entities.

> Second, 'libertarian' means 'anarchist' in the same way 'Republican/conservative' means 'fascist' and 'Democrat/liberal' means 'socialist'. Anarchist/Fascist/Socialist are extremes, and libertarian/conservative/liberal are regions along the spectrum. IMO.

Depends who you ask! These words all have different meanings across societies and cultures. I don't think these ideologies can be collapsed into points or regions along a spectrum.

Except that Kantianism is by no means the only form of deontology, and in fact has nothing to do with any of this.

I do _not_ mean deontological in a derogatory sense. I mean it descriptively in contrast to consequentialism.

Edit: To quote your own source, "The non-aggression principle, also known as the non-aggression axiom and zero aggression principle, is an ethical stance which states that any initiation of force is illicit and contrary to natural law. It is the basic moral axiom of deontological libertarianism, most upheld by philosophers such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics#Non-aggre...

All communism or socialism directly imply is that the means of production is not held privately, but by some kind of collective communal or social entity. This is often the state, but was often imagine to be some kind of community council or representative entity.

The distinguishment between that hypothetical entity and the 'state' as we know it is certainly up to debate, but I wouldn't therefore say that anarchism and communism or socialism are therefore contradictory.

My understanding was that 'deontological' simply means (indeed, almost literally means) having been derived from rules. Deont being the Greek to refer to duty or rule.

Kantianism is probably the most famous from of all the deontological ethical systems. But structurally the NAP and the categorical imperative serve the same purposes in Kantianism and nirvana's libertarianism, respectively: they provide the principle by which all other actions are held to account.

Of course; virtually all arguments are semantics. I was simply looking for clarification into nirvana's intended meaning. That that involved getting into the semantics of anarchism/socialism/libertarianism/what-have-you is the nature of this kind of discussion.

If I was concerned with finding the 'right' answer, or pushing my own political ideology (which happens not to be any of those currently under discussion), then I could see why we'd need to have a discussion about what 'anarchism' with or without adjectives really is.

I was, however, only concerned with the history of these ideologies (as a former student of precisely this topic). I had hoped to probe into that by bringing up the diverging uses of the category libertarian in the broader history of European politics and the divergence of U.S. political categories from those.

Certainly never meant to upset anyone.

I'm genuinely sorry that you feel that way.

> I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists. I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement.

You'll be glad to know, then, that Proudhon, the first to self-describe as an anarchist, is also perhaps most famous for coining the phrase "property is theft". It's hard to imagine how socialists could be co-opting anarchism, given that both ideologies were born in the same intellectual climate and have, as a matter of historical fact, been associated time and time again.

You said: "The workers taking over a company and kicking the owners and managers out to run it as a 'workers collective': Immoral. Using force to take property from others violates the NAP." Am I wrong in taking this to mean that you consider a workers' occupation an act of force?

> I'm not insisting anything. I'm giving you the definition. I'm a Libertarian, and that is what we believe.

I cannot apprehend the confusion of ideas which lead you to believe that defining a term, enumerating your own beliefs, and speaking for an entire political movement, are one and the same.

> FWIW, wikipedia is a crowd sourced entity. It is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased when it comes to political topics that leftists have a strong opinion about.

Do you object to my using of Wikipedia to simply note the existence of a leftist journal calling itself "The Libertarian" over a hundred years prior to the founding of the U.S. Libertarian Party? If so, feel free to read the French yourself:

http://joseph.dejacque.free.fr/libertaire/libertaire.htm

No engagement with my second-to-last paragraph, I see. I'm sorry to find that you're no more serious about your politics that all the other libertarians I've encountered. I had hoped you'd be willing to engage with the content of my argument instead of its dressings. I am disappointed to find that you are not.

Edit: spelling.

What's funny about your response, to me, is that 'libertarian,' outside of the U.S., and in Europe especially, is generally associated with an anarchist position, and most anarchists are socialists or communists. The associations with the French revolutionaries is strong.

"The first anarchist journal to use the term 'libertarian' was La Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social, published in New York City between 1858 and 1861 by French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque." [1]

The U.S. Libertarian Party's use of the word is an intentional effort by free market supporters to express their support of a certain kind of "hands-off" policy without the baggage of the left.

You're also insisting that "libertarianism"—a political philosophy—tells us anything about morality or ethics. The stance your describing above is actually a deontological ethics which takes aggression and coercion as its principal 'bad acts.' That's a much stronger position than what, in my experience, even U.S.-style libertarians tend to espouse.

Your position is also incoherent, to be blunt. You say that "using force to take property from others violates the NAP." You mean to say that a workers' occupation is an act of aggression or force, if I understand correctly. I simply ask you this: if the taking of property via force is a violation of your "NAP," what do you say to the implicit threat of force which establishes the principle of property in the first place? If your answer is that that force is not used, then I ask you whether it is okay for me to follow you around with a gun, as long as I never actually use it. If your answer is that property is a natural right or a self-evident 'thing,' I ask you to please explain why you feel this way.

I don't want to start a political flame war, but these are the issues at the heart of the article's claims. I'd love if you'd be willing to engage.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#History

Linux. S3 sleep doesn't work in Windows, for reasons I haven't bothered to figure out. I only use Windows to play games, so I never had reason to care that it didn't go to sleep.

The subreddit system did, in fact, save Reddit. It's not the a perfect answer to the Eternal September problem, but it's one of the best I've seen so far. AskScience is one of the best examples of the bunch, but there are many others.

It's a shame Reddit's gotten such a bad rap and that it's so hard to find the quality subreddits.

Okay, let's use evidence.

Anecdotal, but numerical.

The current Mac Mini is supposed to pull between 10W (at idle) and 85W (at load---this is the limit of what the PSU can take from the wall.[0]

Let's be generous and say that the Mac Mini, if left on continuously without sleeping, pulls on average 20W.

Let's be pessimistic and assume that power costs you $0.20 per kWh.

# The time in which the Mini will use 1 kWh

1000 Wh / 20 W = 50 hr

# The number of hours in one year

365 days * 24 hrs = 8760 hrs

# The number of kWh the Mini will use in one year

8760 hrs / 50 hrs = 175.2

# Cost of running the Mini continuously for one year

175.2 kWh * $0.20 per kWh = $35.04

That's amazing, no? Let's say, then, that you bought a mini for $599 dollars; your cost of ownership would be 599 + 35.04n, where n is the number of years you've owned it.

No doubt impressive.

A desktop I built relatively recently, which a Core i5 and an unnecessary graphics card, along with a few hard drives, pulls roughly 60W at idle and 150W at load (measured at the outlet by a Kill-a-Watt).

Let's be not-so-generous and say my machine pulls 100W on average, is left on continuously, and my electricity costs $0.20 / kWh.

My computer will use a kWh in 10 hours (1000 / 100); and will cost $175.20 per year to operate ((8760 / 10) * 0.2).

My initial cost for this machine (excluding monitor, keyboard, etc.) was $450. SO my cost of ownership is 450 + 175.2n.

The cost of ownership for east will equal in :

599 + 35.04n = 450 + 175.2n

149 = (175.2 - 35.04)n

149 / 140.16 = n

n = 1.06 years

So after a year of ownership the Mini becomes "worth it," if power consumption if your first requirement.

Note however, that I've given the Mini every benefit of the doubt possible, did not take significant steps to minimize the power consumption of my machine, am able to upgrade my machine piecemeal instead of discretely (and thus have significantly lowered future costs of ownership), and have assumed we've been leaving the machines on continuously.

The Mac Mini, let's say, pulls 0W when in S3 sleep.

My machine pulls 1W in S3 sleep, and about 0.2W when off (to answer your query, it wakes reliably and quickly).

If we assume my machine is asleep half of the time:

Half the time (8760 / 2 = 4380 hrs), my machine pulls 1W. While asleep, it will take 1000 hrs to use 1 kWh. Therefore, it uses 4.38 kWh in the time it is asleep.

Which means the new yearly cost is:

(175.2 / 2) + (4.38 * .2) = 87.6 + 8.76 = 96.36

The Mini ends up costing $17.50 yearly.

So:

599 + 17.5n = 450 + 96.36n

149 = 78.86n

n = 1.889 years

Once you factor in the cost of replacing the Mini versus upgrading a small bit of my machine, I think the answer is much less clear cut.

P.S. I don't mean to pick on you, but excitement about power consumption that doesn't factor in the numbers is a pet peeve. The Mac Mini is only "worth" it if having the computer you actually want is worth less that $80 or so per year to you.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT3468 Edit: formatting.