[reversal] China caves to int'l pressure, will meet w/D. Lama reps

The problem is that an industrial democracy has the same flaw as communism: you never really get the "from each according to his/her ability" side of the equation because people have less of an incentive to be more productive. On the other hand, maybe we don't need to be so damm busy all of the time. Back to the first hand, prosperity never hurt anyone and it would become more difficult to fund social welfare programs. The way I see it, greed is a necessary part of generosity.

 

a better argument would have been radioactive decay because a "star" is a big system to look at. could just as easily say the universe changes

 

True. But since we were talking about societies, I figured that a macro example would be more appropriate.

 

In this thread, there is no 'off topic'

Dude, you're like Forrest Gump, you're at the center of all history.
Were you there when was invented?

And star's are fueled by gravity, whether that is an external or internal force is for someone smarter than me to chime in on.

I won't however go off on my dilettante's theory of entropy in social systems, though it does apply to why there is a Tibetan seperatisit movement. (everything in the universe trends from simplicity to chaos, you maximize stability as you maximize complexity by reducing the potential energy....like radioactive decay)

Most people in here think it's crap.

 

That's why there's "most people", and there's the contrarian minority

 

Categorizing the Tibetan separatist movement as part of the social entropy would paint the movement with a color of randomness. I'm not sure you wanna do that. Is it an outlier or a necessary component of the dynamic social equilibrium we're seeking? I don't know. We'll have to see.

 

I mean it the sense that the larger, simpler unit of 'China' will tend toward a more complex system of smaller autonomous states, much the same as the Balkans has. It's not random. People tend to put their highest priority on their smallest unit of organization: World< race< nation< region< clan< family< self. And only organize into the larger units when it is required to sustain the smaller unit or when forced on them by an outside agent.

It's why dictators always vilify an outside threat, Jews, Americans, Barbarians Chinese. The threat from without is what allows the unification within. Some are true threats and some are not.

If the US had been smart the first thing they should have done in Iraq was ratchet up a threat from Iran. Without an outside threat there is little to precipitate cooperation between Sunni's, Shia, Kurds, and all the Clans.

It the reason the US citizens quietly accepted a reduction in their civil rights after 9/11.

On the board one of the criticism of this was when I said that a more complex world was a more stable world was that there would be a proliferation of border wars. My response is that a large number of border wars is less dangerous than a small number of World Wars.

 

The problem is when those border wars end up becoming Somalias or Cambodias. The Cold War powers were left relatively unscathed, but it riddled the Third World with civil wars and border skirmishes that put casualties in the tens of millions.