Inspired by this post I spent a couple of hours today trying to set this up on my toy server, only to immediately run into what seems to be a bug where <video> tags loading a simple WebM video from right next to index.html broke because the media response got Anubis’s HTML bot check instead of media.

I suppose my use-case was just too complicated.

I mean that you get arrested and go to jail.

People like Thoreau and Emerson aren’t fringe; they are extremely influential in American political philosophy, to the point where there’s a long-ass Wikipedia page about them.

Now there’s a lot that could be said about them and I don’t want to start writing essays here, so to cut to the chase I will just write down a couple of bullet points.

• As we can both see, that page considers itself “part of a series on socialism”, which I believe is because these thinkers courted socialist ideas at their time, seeking to come up with an alternative more along the lines of their personal very American individualist philosophy. I think it should not be contentious to say that time has proven that individualism and socialism are not compatible ideologies.

• I think time has also proven that this brand of anarchism did not survive contact with industrialization – this is what I meant by it giving birth to libertarianism, because the same (very American) principles of individualism underpin both.

• Nonetheless, this philosophy is a school of anarchist thought. They themselves called it that, other people at the time called it that, and scholars that came after call it that. Ergo, anarchism is a far broader category that contains more than just the clearly leftist schools of anarchist thought like anarchist communism, and therefore using just the word “anarchism” to refer to contemporary leftist anarchism is incorrect and going to confuse people.

If you think it’s thoroughly left-wing then I think you must not be familiar with individualist and libertarian anarchist thinkers. I don’t think free-market anarchism involves much social production for example. In American political theory anarchism is what gave birth to libertarianism, which is pretty much a right-wing ideology.

Thank you Mr ChatGPT

What? It’s possible for both modern democracy and Athenian democracy to be democracy, because it is an umbrella term that covers many different implementations of rule by the people.

The exact same thing applies to anarchy. It is possible for both The Culture and Lord of the Flies to be anarchy, because anarchy is an umbrella term that covers many different situations of “no rulers”.

the phase space of vague stuff like political ideology would have an arbitrary large number of parameters, not whatever 2 you see in memes.

Weird to hear this from the person who moments ago was arguing that there’s no problem projecting this concept on an even smaller number of dimensions.

The political compass has both an X and a Y dimension, you know. As it happens, the Y dimension exists almost specifically because of anarchy.

Secondly, I’m not referring to what the random person thinks anarchy is, but what actual anarchists believe, and among anarchists anarcho-capitalism is fringe, and an offshoot of liberalism.

You’re doing the monopoly thing here again. When by “anarchist” you refer exclusively to left-leaning anarchists, of course anarcho-capitalism is going to be fringe among them.

Not to mention the fact that free-market anarchism is a distinct ideology from anarcho-capitalism and, to my understanding, much less fringe among self-described anarchists. The primary distinction seems to be that anarcho-capitalism exists at a lower energy state, a sort of a decay product that free-market anarchism would likely almost immediately decay into upon contact with the real world.

Plato having talked about anarchy at one point doesn’t suddenly mean that the entirety of anarchist history suddenly doesn’t matter.

One ideology misappropriating the term also doesn’t mean that all other meanings of the word suddenly don’t matter. Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize with many of the ideas of left-leaning anarchists, but they do suck at naming things. When the same concept covers both extreme right-wing libertarianism and extreme socialism, you really should be qualifying it with something to avoid confusion.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here? But to go along with what I assume your analog is, if you’re talking about height then you need to say you’re talking about height regardless of what unit you’re using. “Two metre box” means constrains only one dimension, much the same as the word anarchy by itself does.

This is a pretty biased way of putting it. The concept of anarchy predates the interpretation used by modern left-leaning self-identified anarchists by a couple of thousand years. In online circles such anarchists often seek to monopolize the term (like you are doing right now), but they factually weren’t the ones to coin it; when it was originally coined by Plato, nobody had any idea what the fuck capitalism or socialism even are, and in fact Plato used it as a cautionary example.

I am guessing your gut reaction will be to recoil at this grave attack on your ideology. I implore you to stop and consider that most people are not in fact at all familiar with left-wing anarchism as defined by Proudhon etc., but are vaguely familiar with the concept from many other sources. Therefore when you talk about anarchism without a qualifier to mean anarchic socialism, most people will assume you are talking about some Mad Max law of the jungle nonsense and then summarily dismiss anything you say as insane rambling.

Half the problem with capitalism is that we aren’t allowed to bash in the heads of the people who took all the resources.

Lol. None of this had to do with Musk. I don’t know why you brought him up.

The woman in the video is the one who brought him up.

You can’t just maneuver a space elevator. The entire way it works is it sits at one point. The amount of forces it’d put on the structure to maneuver it is insane, especially if it has to be in time to avoid a hurricane. It has to stay at the equator

OK, you’ve got space elevators wrong, and that’s OK.

In most designs the base station sits on a moving platform in the ocean. That way it can be moved around to avoid things like storms. This doesn’t put much extra force at all on the cable, because the cable is very, very long, and as a consequence even a large movement at any given point is only a small change in terms of angles.

The cable itself is also flexible, which means that even with a stationary base station it could be maneuvered to avoid collisions by pushing on it along its length.

Trash can’t be maneuvered. We don’t even know where 100% of it is.

By the time we’d actually be building a space elevator we would also undoubtedly be a lot more capable and motivated to track orbital debris along its path, and probably also able to clean it up.

You can’t shield the cable. The weight of the cable is the entire issue why we need insane materials to build it. If you add shielding then you’re adding to the weight, and therefor multiplying the size the cable needs to be.

Shielding can be very light and it would be in space, probably only along high-risk segments. In any case, it’s mostly an implementation detail that may not actually be necessary anyway.

The people who opened companies “doing research” into it have all shut down. Either it was a scam or they realized it isn’t possible.

This means absolutely nothing. Quarterly capitalism is incompatible with extremely long-term projects like space elevators, is this news to you? Nobody sane actually expects a space elevator to be built on a timescale that is of use to investors. Even if we had the requisite materials and technologies and the construction started right now, it would likely take decades to complete.

The people doing materials science adjacent to this are not doing materials science to build a space elevator. They’re just trying to come up with new useful materials.

Exactly. Where did I claim otherwise? My point is that the research has been done to show that it’s physically possible and what the approximate material requirements would be. Material science research has shown us that materials that can meet those requirements exist (carbon nanotubes, diamond nanothreads), but currently can’t be produced at scale. Thankfully such materials would also be incredibly useful for a great many other purposes, so materials research labs can stay in business investigating how to manufacture them at scale, and at some point in the future once they can be manufactured at scale, they may be used for constructing a space elevator.

Again, how is this unusual to you? This is how literally all technological development works. Theory will show that some technology is physically possible decades or even centuries before practice catches up and makes it practically possible, and after that manufacturing and economical realities may or may not make it practically feasible.

One could argue that a space elevator will never be practically feasible because e.g. launching rockets will always be cheaper, or even that it’ll never be practically possible because e.g. manufacturing the necessary quantities of advanced nanomaterials will forever be out of reach – a much more tenuous argument than the first. But no, you’ve chosen the most tenuous argument of them all, that it is physically impossible – something theory has already shown to be false.

Space elevators aren’t “pop-sci”. There’s a plenty of real research that says that one is possible. That is not to say one is going to be built any time soon (though it’s not as implausible within a century or two as one might think), but it is to say that one is not physically impossible; physics very clearly says that it’s possible. Not “on the very edge of being physically possible”. Possible, period. The margins are more than realistic.

The people who did that research weren’t idiots and did in fact account for everything you brought up rather than just assuming a perfect vacuum and spherical cows.

Sure… How do you deal with wind on a space elevator?

By maneuvering the base station to avoid high wind weather systems. Though the effect of wind on the cable would not actually be anywhere near as great as you make it out to be.

We can barely build buildings that withstand storms.

Oh, really? When’s the last time a skyscraper fell due to wind?

Then there’s also satellites and space trash which will be hitting the cable. It’s not a thing that can work on Earth.

The cable can maneuver to avoid trash and satellites, and satellites can maneuver to avoid the cable. Shielding can be applied to protect it from micrometeoroid impacts.

This video talks about some of the issues realistically, though it’s mostly focused on math. It mostly is in the position of “if it were possible, why would we even want it” though, not is it actually possible:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z5aHMB4Tje4&pp=ygUcYXJlIHNwYWNlIGVsZXZhdG9ycyBwb3NzaWJsZQ%3D%3D

“Why would we even want it” is such a colossally idiotic question that it could only have been uttered by a regressive leftist who’s so brain broken by their Elon Musk hateboner that they literally become the guy in the below image, and lo and behold that’s exactly what I found by clicking open the video. “Uhhhh we don’t need more satellites in space actually because uhhh we have problems down here right now? And uhh billionaire tourism le bad.”

I am so fucking sick of terminally status quo brained people like this who view everything through a lens of present-day American politics and are as a result completely unable to envision a better world.

No, it’s not physically impossible. For an explanation see my previous comment.

I find it funny that you started this conversation by telling me that I’ve “got space elevators wrong” and then proceeded to spout strange and verifiably false nonsense like this on multiple different points.

I hope you’re right, but on the other hand let’s not forget that Hitler started out by wooing the working class with socialist rhetoric, but got in bed with bankers and industry moguls as soon as enough of the working class was tricked into supporting him.

This is, in many ways, exactly what Trump has done too. His rhetoric was never socialist, but then the American working class has gone through 50 years of conditioning to ensure that capitalist rhetoric of a certain kind appeals to them more than socialist rhetoric.

It’s not “physically impossible” on Earth. The forces involved are great, sure, which means you can’t build it out of any present-day material like steel, but they’re not so great that constructing a space elevator would be physically impossible using non-exotic matter like it would be on, say, the Sun, or possibly even just Jupiter. We already know of materials that could be used to make a space elevator cable on Earth if they were available in sufficient quantities – namely carbon nanotubes.

The “top” can’t be anywhere, because not everywhere along the length of the elevator will put released objects in orbit. Turns out on Earth, an object released off of the elevator would reach a stable (but very eccentric) orbit 2/3rds of the way to geostationary orbit – below that, it would fall back to Earth. Conversely escape velocity would be reached at about 53000 km, which is past geostationary orbit but much closer than where the counterweight would be (in most designs?). Objects above escape velocity will by definition escape Earth’s orbit, which most of the time means ending up in a solar orbit.

The counterweight orbits above escape velocity, pulling the space elevator’s cable taut. If the cable were severed the counterweight would drift off into space into a solar orbit. So if you jump off at the counterweight, you’ll enter solar orbit.

At geostationary orbit (which could be considered the “top” of the space elevator as that’s where you would normally get off, presumably) the space elevator orbits at exactly orbital velocity, so if you jump off there you end up in orbit. Below that your velocity would be below orbital velocity and you’d fall back to Earth.

Wouldn’t jumping off the top of a space elevator just put you in orbit? Or, if by top you mean the point where the space elevator anchors to its counterweight, in orbit around the sun.

The Dems in 2025 are the people who lost the presidency to the most incompetent man in the world. Twice. I do not think it’s smart to trust them to be the stewards of what seems to be shaping up to be the primary resistance movement.