... Well, the map of Michigan that I have in front of me was presumably created by one or more human beings. But it doesn't seem to be an "abstraction." It's a

... Jeff, I think the U.S. government's record of military experiments on non-consenting subjects is a better example here than Northwoods. Northwoods was easy

... What positive effect, exactly, has having "one (1) voice for liberty" in Congress had? ... Well, no, he's not "fighting" anything. He's sitting in

... Joshua, Do you make no distinction between views which are (as a matter of fact) wrong, and those which are the product of cognitive vices like ignorance,

... If we're going to go for big secret government conspiracies that managed to stay secret for long enough to achieve the government's intended purpose, I'd

... Hash: SHA1 ... Perhaps it has done both, at different times and different places? The Church has been around a long time -- say about 1,600-1,800 years in

... Hash: SHA1 ... The people affiliated with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute are certainly not against natural rights, as a rule. Most if not all of them are

... Hash: SHA1 ... Michael, That's certainly one way in which the term "capitalism" is used. (Specifically, that's how a number of individualist anarchists and

Yeah. One of the notable subcategories of failed predictions, which, in the interest of brevity, I didn’t really discuss at much length, are the number of things which Kurzweil predicts which actually are now feasible or already implemented, and which have in some sense broken through — but as permanent niche products, which remain popular with a select class of people for a select few applications, and which pose no foreseeable threat of displacing anything or taking over the world like Kurzweil imagined they would. Reliable speech-to-text software is another example — you can pick up Dragon NaturallySpeaking for a couple hundred dollars and it’s good enough that a number of professional writers use it to do more or less all their writing. It’s just that all of them happen to have carpal tunnel syndrome or severe motor disabilities. Just about everyone else still uses a keyboard, even on devices like iPhones that don’t even have a physical keyboard (but do have a physical microphone, which could have been used for speech-recognition if anyone cared enough to insist on it).

It’s not that these technologies aren’t available, or even that they are priced out of most people’s reach; it’s just that people have the technology now but most of us don’t have much of a use for it as of yet. And there are, of course, drawbacks and trade-offs involved (you may love the idea of dictating your latest memo; but do you really want to hear all of your coworkers dictating theirs at the same time?), which futurists characteristically fail to take any account of.

If the mic cut-out occurs during a discussion of malign spontaneous orders, one thing to keep in mind is that Roderick does have a pun associated with that discussion — “spontaneous ordure” — which may be the occasion for both the groaning and the apologies, rather than anyone getting upset over the content of the claim.