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Royalty
Will Mccarthy, in his amusing book The Collapsium, suggested that people are happier with a king or queen. I think there is something to that. A king gives tangible expression to people’s aspirations. A king is a representative of the country as a whole. A king is somebody who you can never be, but you…
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Stopping terrorism
I think there are some general guidelines that the U.S. as a society could follow to avoid terrorism. Unfortunately these will be rather to difficult to do in practice. * Invest heavily in intelligence to find out what people are doing. Spies and double agents seem to be the best sort of intelligence. Unfortunately they…
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Public companies considered harmful
The owners of shares of stock in a company are often described as the owners of the company. The executive management of a company is generally described as having a fiduciary duty to increase the share price for the benefit of the owners. Indeed any action which causes the share price to go lower may…
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Singularity, Schmingularity
Several science fiction authors have been writing about an idea called the singularity. The theory is that technology is being developed at an accelerating pace, one which will lead humanity to a point which will be incomprehensible to people living today. And, since the pace of technological development accelerates exponentially, this will happen much sooner…
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Missing coverups
The Bush administration recently admitted that it has authorized wiretapping of U.S. citizens without getting authorization from a special court which oversees wiretapping requests. The court was set up in the 1970s responding to the Church commission, which discovered the extent to which wiretapping was used to investigate anti-war and civil rights protestors during the…