[TAG] Hydrogen fuel (non-Linux)

[Jason Creighton]

On Tue, 25 May 2004 08:52:07 -0400, 
Ben Okopnik <ben at callahans.org> wrote:

> On Fri, May 21, 2004 at 04:11:48PM -0600, Jason Creighton wrote:
> > Reminds me of a short story entitled "The Last Question" I read once. It
> > went something like this. At some point in the future, the earth is
> > running on nuclear power. In this scenario, we'll run out of fissionable
> > (sp? And is that even a word?) materials in 100 years or so. 
> 
> That is the correct spelling, and it is indeed a word, and not an
> uncommon one - it's used to refer to any materials capable of undergoing
> fission.

Oh, good. I was almost positive I had heard the word before, but
spelling it "fissionable" just seemed too simple.

<snip>

> > One thing that has helped me determine what the limits are is
> > remembering that there is no such thing as good government. Strong libel
> > laws? Free speech suffers. Weak/no libel laws? People will abuse free
> > speech to hurt other people.
> > 
> > There's no good choices in governement; only endless tradeoffs.
> 
> There _is_ a good choice in government, actually, and it's absolutely
> implicit in what you've written above: a minimum necessary number of
> those who will make the best compromises. However, the reality is that
> politicians are *always* power-hungry - and we're all out of statesmen.
> Cincinnatus, where the hell are the children of your spirit? We need
> them desperately.

What I meant by "there's no good choices in governement" (I could have
made this much clearer, BTW; sorry.) is that no choices made by a
governement will result in a utopia. No possible choices will result in
a society full of happy, hard-working people with a crime rate of zero.
Not gonna happen.

And before I realized this, I had believed that a utopian society was
possible. If you had asked me point-blank "Do you believe that a utopian
society is possible?" I would have said no. At one level, I knew that
was impossible. But in my heart of hearts, I thought "If only this
country was put under proper management...".

But even under the best of management, there would still be injustice.
People would still exploit others for personal gain. People would still
kill each other, still steal. No amount of government programs can
change that. No amount of money thrown at the problem can change the
basic nature of people.

Some things can only be justified by the fact that anything else would
be worse. War is probably the most notable example. It's not good; It
is, in fact, a great evil. It's just that sometimes (very rarely)
everything else is worse.

And so, some choices in government are like that. No, it's not good that
allowing people to set the prices of goods they are selling will allow
some of them to exploit others with unfair prices. It's just that price
caps are worse. And so and so forth for almost anything done by the
government.

Jason Creighton