We Can’t All Be Heroes
I’m just gonna copy from What Do You Do For An Encore? because he said it so well, and add a couple thoughts afterward.
Nightsky brought this to my attention. Kids, an inflected form of the “F” word appears approximately 4 times in this song. The “S” word appears once. So, I wash my hands.
The way it happened was I was trying to find a Youtube for Twaughthammer he was telling me about and then I thought that a video of Wax performing live was the one he meant based on the search terms I was using and I said to Nightsky is this it and Nightsky said no but this is good and then he checked out some more by Wax and recommended the above and thanked me for turning him on to it even though it was Nightsky that turned me onto it and the other Wax thing that I did turn him onto was just a mistake because I thought it was the Twaughthammer thing he was telling me about.
So somewhere in there credit is due to someone . . . for something.
Now that I got that out of the way, I like “We Can’t All Be Heroes.” I like to hear rap turning back to soul and horns. Rap is not really my thing (even though I liked some of Eminem’s stuff) but I certainly realize it’s my generational handicap.
In this case, I’m still dealing with the shock of finding a practical, realistic message coming from a rap song, or any song for that matter. [emphasis mine]
I’ve never been much into rap – I did like some of the 80s and early 90s stuff before it all turned into fake posturing by fur-wearing, champagne sipping poseurs, but most of it was just the same old themes of thug life over recycled music samples. This song is different. There’s a wealth in the lyrics if one really pays attention. This guy is telling his story. The story of a lot of guys.
Read the lyrics. It’s practically a manosphere anthem. Plus it’s got a nice retro-70s style groove.
Flash Drive Bullets
So I was reading this post by Elusive Wapiti, where he discusses assault weapons bans and totalitarianism. Good post, go read it. It’s about digitally fabricating guns, and how efforts are already underway to outlaw it. As usual, the self-anointed Guardians of Society build a house on a foundation of sand – the best way to ensure the safety of law-abiding citizens is not to disarm them, leaving them at the mercy of the lawless. Rather, if everyone has access to a gun, and knows that everyone else around him could be carrying as well, the chances of assault drop dramatically. But there’s a lot more going on here than a statist power grab.
A group named Defense Distributed is designing digital blueprints for firearms for 3D printing. The goal is to create a file via 3D modeling which can be distributed, and a working gun printed for anyone who wants it.
They sum up their goals, and the potential impact –
Insofar as possible, we hope to facilitate a printable firearm creative commons. Our weapons project’s namesake, a “wiki” is likely the best platform for preserving and collaboratively producing knowledge related to 3D printable firearms for years to come.
…This project might change the way we think about gun control and consumption. How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet? Let’s find out.
I like funny cat videos as much as anyone else, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what the internet is capable of. Printable guns! Store ammo files on your flash drive. And that’s just the beginning. There may come a day when 3D printers are capable of producing organic structures – people could keep digital scans of their bodies – including MRIs – on file. If they suffer an accident, replacement parts could be printed out, such as a new heart. Or new lungs for smokers. Lose a few teeth in a bar fight? Dental records on your phone. Your body could be scanned at age 20 and kept on file until you’re 50 and take a trip to Posh de Leon’s Fountain Of Youth and Rejuvenation Spa.
Some people are not too happy about this, however. As National Review writes –
The idea of crowd-sourced plastic rifles and pistols being zapped into existence, Weird Science–style, in workshops and garages across the nation unnerves Representative Steve Israel (D., N.Y.) — so much so that he’s sponsoring an amendment to the Undectectable Firearms Act in order to regulate 3-D-printed gun components and establish penalties for their private fabrication. But as others have pointed out, such a law would be a nightmare to enforce.
The utter lack of imagination among bureaucrats and progressive types (but I repeat myself) is stupefying. Not only do they not have the capacity to remotely visualize the possibilities such technology offers, but they make heavy-handed, short-sighted attempts at regulating or even outlawing it –
In an effort to outflank the likes of DD, a zealous government could move to mandate that manufacturers design 3-D printers to leave secret, unique watermarks on every object fabricated, as the Secret Service convinced manufacturers of color laser printers to do in an effort to catch currency counterfeiters. But technological control begets technological revolt: The secret laser-printer codes were discovered and revealed by a digital-rights group in 2005, and their existence prompted a public outcry. Besides, what good is a watermark when a 3-D assembler can assemble another 3-D assembler? [emphasis mine]
Seriously. It’s like filing off the serial numbers, but better. Make a new assembler. Or two. Or three. Destroy the original. Start a black market selling illegal, untraceable 3D printers along with all the other cool things you’re designing. Pair this up with an alternative currency like Bitcoin (I noticed one of the people on DD’s “About” page has some experience with it) and who knows what could happen? This could spark a tectonic shift in economic systems.
It looks like they’re running all this super-ultra-high-tech with Windows XP, which cracks me up.
Pranking will become a High Art
Stolen Car
From here –
…if your car is ever stolen, your first calls should be to every cab company in the city. You offer a $50 reward to the driver who finds it AND a $50 reward to the dispatcher on duty when the car is found. The latter is to encourage dispatchers on shift to continually remind drivers of your stolen car. Of course you should call the police too but first things first. There are a lot more cabs than cops so cabbies will find it first -and they’re more frequently going in places cops typically don’t go, like apartment and motel complex parking lots, back alleys etc. Lastly, once the car is found, a swarm of cabs will descend and surround it because cabbies, like anyone else, love excitement and want to catch bad guys.
Now you can (kind of) live a classic scene from the movies – “Taxi! Follow that stolen car!”
New On Stage
Regular commenter Wanderer has started his own site where he will be posting all kinds of music and related information, along with who-knows-what-else. He’s got a laid back, quietly witty style, and really knows his stuff, go check it out.
The only downside is now that he’s posting over there, my comment count will probably drop by at least half.
Quit It Or Hit It!
Meant to post this a couple days ago…
Father hires virtual hitmen to assassinate his layabout son in video game world
It didn’t work.
Ceres Mining Station
Every so often, almost like clockwork, the story goes around that natural resources are running out. In 1968, Paul Erlich published The Population Bomb, in which he claimed
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…
I’m sure you all vividly remember the huge population drop in the 70s. Hundreds of millions of people died as predicted, and worse, thousands of pizzerias closed their doors. [The government tried to blame the deaths on mass suicides to escape disco music.]
In 1980, Julian Simon – who stated the human mind the “ultimate resource” and that there are no natural resources until humans figure out a way to use them – called Erlich out. They wagered on whether the prices of five metals would rise or fall by 1990. Simon won the bet.
Some have claimed that if the bet had been longer, or for a different time frame, Ehrlich would have won. Tim Worstall of Forbes explains why this isn’t so –
The end result of all of this is that yes, it is true that Ehrlich could have, would have, won the bet depending upon the starting date. But note that it would have been either political actions, or teething problems with new technology, that would have allowed that. None of these metals faces an actual shortage as yet. Further, note that over variable time scales Simon is still correct: it really is true that new technologies of extraction are developed and these increase supply and push prices down.
Oil is a perfect example of how human innovation transforms worthless material into valuable resources. Alex Epstein wrote –
It is almost impossible to overstate the dramatic and near-immediate positive effect of a group of scientists and businessmen discovering that “rock oil,” previously thought to be useless, could be refined to produce kerosene—the greatest, cheapest source of light known to man. In 1858, a year before the first oil well was drilled, only well-to-do families such as that of 11-year-old Henry Demarest Lloyd could afford sperm whale oil at three dollars per gallon to light their homes at night.
The “teething problems with new technology” plagued the early business of kerosene – fires and explosions were not uncommon. Standard Oil owner John D. Rockefeller innovated numerous methods of improving efficiency, such as transporting oil in tank cars instead of filling railroad cars with barrels. Chemist Samuel Andrews refined Standard Oil’s formula for purifying distilled kerosene. Costs went down, not only for Standard Oil, but for everyone else too. The price of kerosene dropped by more than half – from fifty-eight cents in 1865 to twenty-six cents in 1870.
Chris Mayer of The Daily Reckoning quotes Joseph Schumpeter and makes his prediction for 2013 –
The great economist Joseph Schumpeter’s (1883-1950) criticism of the Malthusian position still holds. On Malthus and his ilk, he wrote: “The most interesting thing to observe is the complete lack of imagination which that vision reveals. Those writers lived at the threshold of the most spectacular economic developments ever witnessed.” Yet they missed it.
So here is my prediction: I believe we are on the cusp of even greater levels of innovation and development — another industrial revolution is in progress right now.
I think he’s right. Deep Space Industries just announced their plan to send out spacecraft called “Fireflies” into space to seek out resources for exploitation (no word yet on whether River Tam will be aboard). And they aren’t the first. Last year, Planetary Resources announced a similar undertaking. Rand Simberg raised a question at Deep Space Industries recent press conference
Is there room for two such companies? At the press conference, I asked if they saw themselves as complementary to, or in pure competition with PR.
“We love Planetary Resources,” said Rick Tumlinson, chairman of the board. “One company may be a fluke, but two companies showing up, that’s the beginning of an industry.”
Don’t believe anyone who claims the future is all doom and gloom. The future may not be all sunshine and flowers, there are far too many Black Swans in the water to just assume it’s all downhill from here.
Spinning The Wheels
Russ Roberts of Cafe Hayek discovers the rationalization hamster of economists –
We get the economics that’s in demand, the economics that people want. It’s the reverse of the Keynes argument about the influence of defunct economists. Keynes saw economics ideas influencing policy. But maybe it is policy that influences economics. So as the world becomes more interventionist, the economists respond by finding arguments that rationalize that policy.
…In this view, economists are not truth-seekers. They are producers of ideas who respond to market demand. So when the financial crisis comes in 2008 and everyone wants something to be done about it, suddenly, Keynesianism is obviously the right intellectual choice for hundreds of academics and bloggers who hadn’t given it much thought or if they had, they had rejected it previously.
Our product, the less interventionist, liberty product, is in demand but not nearly as popular. People generally don’t want to trust unseen, spontaneous order-based solutions that rely on invisible hand processes. They don’t trust solutions without top-down control–they are not as reassuring. Most people are eager to trust a person who says they care about them than they do a process they are unlikely to fully understand.
Perhaps we could name this pet hamster “Maynard.”
Beer Fire
Hate me enough to set my head on fire, you’re still not getting my Bud Light!
From Late Night Mistakes, one of the greatest sites ever invented, ever. Flaming Moe has nothin’ on this.
Yes, two “evers.” It’s that awesome.
