Insufficient Data
antipope.org
antipope.org
This might be the most interesting quote, but it misunderstands the intellectual underpinings of the right.
Society is fundamentally too complex to understand and therefore big government will cause untold damage and also the individuals should focus only on what they understand well. Governments give control to a system that can only cope with issues that the median person (ie, median voter) understands, and creates a single point of failure for corruption. The right deals with that by decentralising power and the left by building technocratic bureaucracies (not sure how that strategy still gets positive coverage after the USSR and China, but maybe the idea is some mild version works well). That they have a more effective strategy on this specific issue is a core strategic strength of the right, balancing out the fact that the rhetoric is generally a bit heartless.
Unfortunately, it's a delusion to believe republicans actually believe small government is better except in the sense they can corrupt it, Control it and bias it as they see fit.
The benefit of centralization is that it isn't given to the whims of some random gunmen or January 6 type treachery.
Elon Musk, Mars and the Modern Economy https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/opinion/musk-mars-twitter...
>What’s your reaction to that number? Does it seem absurdly high? In terms of the logistics of actually getting people to Mars, it probably is. But my original home field in economics was international trade. And if you know anything about trade, or for that matter the realities of industry, you realize that one million is actually an absurdly low number of people — far too few to support a modern economy.
and then he explains why
>... economies of scale mean that no one country can reasonably produce the full range of goods required to operate a modern, high-technology economy. International trade is essential, and more essential the smaller the economy — which is why Canada is far more dependent on imports than the United States, Belgium far more dependent than Germany, and so on
>Now, given access to world markets, even small countries can have full access to the benefits of modern technology; life in Luxembourg is pretty good. But unless we actually invent the Epstein Drive or something, the realities of transportation costs mean that Musk’s hypothetical Mars colony would have to be largely self-sufficient, cut off from the rest of the solar system economy. And it wouldn’t have enough people to pull that off with anything like a modern standard of living.
>As I said, I see Musk on Mars as a teachable moment, an unintended thought experiment that helps remind us of the positive aspects of international trade. Yes, there are downsides to globalization, especially to rapid change that can disrupt whole communities. But you really wouldn’t want to live in a world without extensive international trade. And you really, really wouldn’t want to live on another planet, cut off from the globalization we’ve created on this one.
It absolutely can. And a long term recession, climate change repercursions, and several other things will do it...
To wit: Starship is totally inadequate to make a Mars colony. Or, really, even a Mars outpost. Enough for a comfortable moon base, maybe.
They claim each rocket (with refueling) can deliver 450T to mars. SpaceX has supported a reliable and high rate of launches, I believe higher than their next few competitors combined.
What makes them "totally inadequate"?
I think many in 2010 had no idea how well SpaceX would do, how cheap the launches would be, and how many launches they would manage.
At 17 people per passenger trip, supported by, say, 5 cargo flights each, how many flights get you to 100M population? 1M population?
I get ~60,000 passenger flights for the first 1M pop, plus 300,000 cargo flights. Each cargo or passenger flight needs what, ten fuel launches? So, about 4 million launches. At 10 launches per day (!), in twenty years, you have 73k launches, and 19k colonists delivered. Presumably after twenty years you have made some bigger rockets and added more spaceports. So, the next 20 years maybe you get another 40k colonists?
60,000 people is a very small city.
You have maybe enough people to work the machines to keep people alive, but nowhere near enough to produce semiconductors, space suits, axial-flux motors, batteries, tires, diapers, dish detergent, shoes, cybertrucks, plastic sheeting for habitat expansion, solar panels, Starlink satellites, Starlink terminals, CAT6, optical fiber, superconducting tape, MRI scanners, laptops, phones, speakers, underware, pencils, paper, coffee, chairs, glass bottles, light bulbs, transformers, Romex, wall sockets, ductwork, duct tape, fans, compressors, vacuum pumps, pots, kettles, microwave ovens, refrigerators, dishwashers, laundry machines, CNCs, m3 screws, nuts, and washers, bulldozers, excavators, forklifts, plexiglas, mirrors, tupperware, eyeglass frames, pressure hose, hose clamps, hydraulic cylinders, zip ties, label-printer tape, activated carbon filter sheets. Antidepressants, anxiolytics. I might have missed something; they better not! Fortunately, scrap stainless steel sheet, pallets, and rocket engines will pile up fast.
Where do you get 450t per SS to Mars? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/the-martian-st... says 100t.
>>I think these ideas are mostly delusional because they rely on a fundamental misapprehension about the world around us — namely that we live in a society that can be made simple enough to comprehend.
More accurately, these are not *delusional*, but *deluding* — they are not so much believed by those promoting them, but are figments put up by demagogues to be believed by their followers in order to gain political power. It is always tempting and/or intellectually lazy to oversimplify and act like there are simpler and more convenient solutions that merely overlook the actual complexity.
In yet other words, "people who disagree with my opinion are deluded, and their thought leaders are evil schemers".
>It is always tempting and/or intellectually lazy to oversimplify and act like there are simpler and more convenient solutions that merely overlook the actual complexity.
It is also always tempting and/or an organizational tendency to oversell increasingly more complex solutions. With intellectually ambitious people coming in to make a living out of managing the bureaucracy and ride the inefficiencies they helped create.
No, merely pointing out how those shibboleths are used. Demagogic and populist politicians of all stripes consistently oversimplify and divert blame for their followers problems, and do it consistently to get them to vote against their own best interests.
We have an advanced technological society of vast scale and complexity. Without very substantial continual investment and reinvestment in infrastructure, standards, management, governance, defense, R&D, and science, it literally would not continue to work. If you think not, provide one counterexample of a similarly advanced and complex society that actually worked in your ungoverned libertarian fantasy.
>>It is also always tempting and/or an organizational tendency to oversell increasingly more complex solutions. With intellectually ambitious people coming in to make a living out of managing the bureaucracy and ride the inefficiencies they helped create.
Yup, there are always some fringe people and professional scammers who will attempt to overcomplicate things to their own advantage.
Any sufficiently scaled-up organization or process will have inefficiencies, and even microscopic percentages of budgetary waste can look like high nominal numbers when the overall amount is in the trillions. Squawking about the waste in this way is an example of such oversimplifying demagoguery, so thank you for providing an example ("see, govt has big people making inefficiency for themselves, so let's eliminate govt').
Well, some people also think it doesn't work, and it shouldn't continue to operate badly, with all the externalities cost and inefficiencies... And that we don't need "exponentially more" but to do with less, and distribute it better.
I used to feel the same way about the default should be no govt until I started looking at the system dynamics.
I notice you provide no example of a highly advanced society over 100 million people with a massively lightweight government.
As we even approach that scale, the data show that actually MORE govt is better, e.g., the numerous studies showing both better wealth & resources distribution and unrivaled overall happiness in the Nordic countries more govt, better distributed.
One huge problem with any gathering of people is that some will always try to arrogate to themselves the control over all the resources - without a collective government of some kind, you wind up with warlords in political space or oligarchs in the economic space, and the resources and freedom are all consumed by the few...
As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all others.".
No govt or even tiny govt isn't a valid option. If it was, we'd see libertarian paradises arising the various failed states around the globe. With not a lot of funds, like minded no-govt types could just go and setup to do anything they want where there is a literal absence of govt. But it turns out that you can't get anything done, literally, when there's no damn roads, communication, laws, or other infrastructure...