A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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@HardwareGeek said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
why is that something there needs to be a strategic reserve of?
From the article
This strategic reserve is designed to stabilize the price and supply of maple syrup for a growing global market, and all commercial maple producers in Quebec are required to deliver part of their crop to the reserve each year.
Basically, they control the supply to control the price.
Think OPEP for Maple Syrup
Edit: a bit more info so the comparison makes sense
While Vermont is by far the highest producing maple syrup state in the United States, 70 percent of the world's maple syrup is made in Québec.
And that's where the benchmark global price for bulk maple syrup — the price paid by processors to Vermont's maple syrup producers — is set each year by a powerful, but legal, cartel.
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And those assets have excellent liquidity.
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
And those assets have excellent liquidity.
Not when it's cold.
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@TimeBandit said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Think
OPEPCHOAM for Maple SyrupThe syrup must flow.
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In related news, this guy still wants to try and dig up his old harddisk:
Man who accidentally threw out a bitcoin fortune offers $70 million to dig it up | CNN
A British man who accidentally threw a hard drive loaded with bitcoin into the trash has offered the local authority where he lives more than $70 million if it allows him to excavate a landfill site.
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It's Iran so who knows what's really going on.
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@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
In case:
turns out to be real.
Wow, that was such an awful book! I got it on the recommendation of someone I trusted. Turned out to be one of the few times he's been completely wrong about what I would enjoy...
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Do you dislike all of John Ringo or just that series?
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@Dragoon
That's the first book of his I ever read, and it was so terrible that I never read anything else by him.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Dragoon
That's the first book of his I ever read, and it was so terrible that I never read anything else by him.Ah, well his writing has gotten better (those are some of his early books) but his style hasn't changed.
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@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Mason_Wheeler said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Dragoon
That's the first book of his I ever read, and it was so terrible that I never read anything else by him.Ah, well his writing has gotten better (those are some of his early books) but his style hasn't changed.
It's been a while, so I might not have all the details clear in my head, but here's what stood out to me:
- Earth gets invaded by aliens, who have overwhelming technological superiority, and have no choice but to capitulate. So far, so good. This is a pretty standard sci-fi trope so far.
- The invasion destroys the Internet and much of the computer industry completely by accident, because the invaders demand all of some metal that's commonly used in some aspect of computer construction. There's a lot to unpack here, because this is just completely wrong on so many levels.
- First, raiding inhabited planets for [insert basic resource here] is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Never would actually happen. If it were some advanced biological product that can only be found in some species native to that world, that's one thing. But basic elements or simple compounds like water? Aliens have no good reason to invade Earth for that sort of thing and plenty of good reasons not to. (The most prominent being the difficulty of getting resources out of gravity wells, the abundance of these elements out in space, and of course the nonzero chance of provoking resistance.)
- Second, losing one component wouldn't take down the computer industry; we'd just come up with some alternative technology to accomplish the same thing a different way.
- Third, IIRC the problem was related to hard drives, of all things, and this was published well after the writing on the wall was clear that old-school hard drives were on the way out, being replaced by SSDs. (A process that is still not complete today, but the trend is quite clear. Making HDD technology unavailable would only accelerate that trend.)
- An out-of-work guy whose livelihood used to depend on the Internet economy accidentally discovers that maple syrup acts as some sort of narcotic for multiple different kinds of aliens. He starts selling it to them to get rich as an interstellar drug dealer.
- Multiple different alien species, from different worlds, who all react to maple the same way, making it seem as if it were a universal thing... except it's not universal, as evidenced by humanity.
- Multiple different alien species that survived well enough to make it into space and establish a galactic civilization, and somehow they have no societal prohibitions against the rampantly destructive effects of narcotics?
- Our protagonist is literally an interstellar drug dealer, and we're supposed to treat him as a hero.
- Somehow, the aliens never take over the production of maple syrup for themselves?
- He gets enough money to buy his own ship, and goes into asteroid mining, then uses this to bootstrap a series of ever-larger "mining ships" which are really warships designed to fight against the occupiers.
- Somehow the occupiers, an alien race intelligent and advanced enough to make it into space, never notice any of this and swat his mining ships like bugs.
- Somewhere along the line, something he does annoys the occupiers enough that they send biological attacks against Earth in attempts to wipe out him and his resistance. His reaction is essentially "that sucks, but hey, at least Social Security is solvent again now."
- Once again, severely unsympathetic and sociopathic protagonist.
- Eventually he makes an asteroid-ship so big, armed with guns so powerful, that he's able to easily blow away the bad guys (who have been at this for far longer than humanity, but somehow never noticed any of this going on beneath their noses) and liberate Earth.
So... yeah. The book was trash.
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John Ringo is 100% anti-govnerment and government failures are why we collapse (the exact reason of some metal is not important, government is the real reason).
All of his heros are flawed and very much strongest survive. They are not designed to be sympathic or really even likeable. They are designed to be the kind of person that wins. If that means that you have to sell "drugs" to defeat the invaders so be it.
His mining ships have no weapons on them. So they are no threat to the invaders.
There is an entire section on how the world governments try and take everything from him and he says F-U and offers anyone who wants protection they can pay for it. So when the world is attacked he says F-U to all the people who wanted to just take what he had made (the entire section is a jab at communism and nationalization of industry)
He turns the asteroid he has been mining into a giant kinetic weapon. Which, in the book is a tactic that the aliens have never seen before. (or possibly one that they feel is beneath them technologically and so don't see it as being a threat)
edit: His writing style is certainly not for everyone.
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@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
He turns the asteroid he has been mining into a giant kinetic weapon. Which, in the book is a tactic that the aliens have never seen before.
Good grief. For that idiocy alone the book should be consigned to "I'll pay you compensation if you read this!"
Seriously. Kinetic impactors are pretty much stone age technology. Everyone knows about that. I mean, throw stone, get hurt if hit by stone. Technology merely makes the stone faster and/or bigger.
There is an entire section on how the world governments try and take everything from him and he says F-U and offers anyone who wants protection they can pay for it. So when the world is attacked he says F-U to all the people who wanted to just take what he had made (the entire section is a jab at communism and nationalization of industry)
And that part sounds like someone tried to turn Atlas Shrugged into a sci-fi novel.
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@boomzilla Perhaps they secretly procured and deployed nation-wide electric vehicles?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Second, losing one component wouldn't take down the computer industry; we'd just come up with some alternative technology to accomplish the same thing a different way.
Taking all the silicon would be a rather big problem. Not insurmountable; GaAs and other such semiconductors are certainly feasible, although much more expensive. And it makes no sense, silicon is so very, very abundant throughout the earth's crust (and outer space) that taking enough to destroy the computer industry would mean destroying the entire planet.
A few other elements would be serious problems, too — copper, gold, aluminum, phosphorus, arsenic, fluorine — but none are irreplaceable.
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@HardwareGeek What about chemicals involved in wafer production and etching?
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@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
John Ringo is 100% anti-govnerment and government failures are why we collapse (the exact reason of some metal is not important, government is the real reason).
Yeah, I got that part. But a story has to work as a story first before its Important Message becomes relevant. This didn't, so it ended up just looking like some libertarian version of the "woke superhero" crap we've had to put up with for the last 4-5 years or so.
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@Applied-Mediocrity That's where the fluorine comes in — HF for etching the SiO2 insulation/dielectric/mask layers. Phosphorus and arsenic are, AFAIK, the main elements used as dopants in silicon (add extra or missing electrons to form the patterns in the silicon that make semiconductors work). Copper, aluminum and gold, of course, connect stuff together, including inside the chip. There may be other elements that are vital in chip production — that's a little outside my area of expertise — but the only other things I can think of off-hand are the organic compounds used in the photosensitive masks used to form the patterns. I don't know whether those rely on silver compounds to make them photosensitive (like photographic film) or if the organic compounds themselves are photosensitive. If the former, add silver to the list; if the latter, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and other common constituents of organic compounds are stupidly abundant, and trying to take all of those would have repercussions far worse than destroying the computer industry.
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@Mason_Wheeler: it sounds almost Battlefield Earth-bad. (No, I didn't read the book. I only watched the movie once because I wanted to see if it was really that terrible.)
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@HardwareGeek said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
A few other elements would be serious problems
Like coffee
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Mason_Wheeler: it sounds almost Battlefield Earth-bad. (No, I didn't read the book. I only watched the movie once because I wanted to see if it was really that terrible.)
You have a stronger stomach than me. I just watched the Nostalgia Critic's review of it to get the highlights.
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I only watched the movie once because I wanted to see if it was really that terrible.
Narrator's voice:
It was.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
So... yeah. The book was trash.
I don't know about the book, but I've enjoyed reading your summary.
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Mason_Wheeler: it sounds almost Battlefield Earth-bad. (No, I didn't read the book. I only watched the movie once because I wanted to see if it was really that terrible.)
I don't remember the book being terribly bad (it's been a while - maybe time has healed those wounds?). But the movie was complete trash.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
So... yeah. The book was trash.
That's impressively bad. I've read some of Ringo's books – mostly some of the Posleen War books and the Looking Glass Books – and I found them fun. But those are military sci-fi rather than general-sci-fi-with-a-military-bent-at-the-end, so there's a lot less time for characters to take actions independent of the government.
And yeah, some of his characters don't trust the government (but it's wartime, and there's some spy work, and skullduggery is an essential part of both war and spies), and there's the occasional governmental SNAFU, but it comes across a lot more organically than the novel you're describing. Especially since the anti-government bits are asides, or part-and-parcel of spy work rather than the main point.
Edit: don't read Ghost. It's a novel that Ringo himself wasn't planning on releasing (he wrote it for catharsis, then showed it to his editor and said "I wrote this, but we're not releasing it, right?"), and it's the ultimate evil-anti-government-bastard-that-saves-some-people kind of book. Bonus points for being a conservative screed where the bastard hero persuades some bleeding-heart liberals to become gun-toting conservatives. And then it became popular enough for him to write some sequels.
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@Rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Good grief. For that idiocy alone the book should be consigned to "I'll pay you compensation if you read this!"
Seriously. Kinetic impactors are pretty much stone age technology. Everyone knows about that. I mean, throw stone, get hurt if hit by stone. Technology merely makes the stone faster and/or bigger.My brother corrected me on this. The alien race invades earth to use humans as slave labor as that is all that they see of value in our planet, 7 billion slaves, the extration of the platinum group is just an aside. We are a slave work camp and need work to do until they can ship us to other more productive places to work. We are so technologically inferior to them that we arn't worthy of thought. So they don't, literally. The don't even think humans are capable of that level of thought, tech (turning an asteroid into a weapon), planning, etc... So they are caught completely off guard by the attack.
The asteroid attack would not stop their actual fleet, but they only have a small security fleet at the gate (how travel between worlds is economically feasbile is a gate system created by a different race) which is easily overwhelmed by the attack. The asteroid itself is used to destroy the gate and smaller kinetic porjectilces are used to take out the smaller ships.
The gate can be rebuilt (by that other race) but it will take time and during this time the protagonist is using the "drug" maple syrup to gain capital and buy tech from other races (primarily the race that creates the gates as they have superior tech but are a passive race). So that when the gate is restored and the slaver race comes back the protagonist has a fleet of ships that can deal with the slaver race.
This whole plot is done over three books.
And that part sounds like someone tried to turn Atlas Shrugged into a sci-fi novel.
I was going to make a John Galt reference when I described it earlier. It isn't quite the same as Atlas Shrugged, but parallels are certainly there. John Ringo is very anti-government and an under(over?)tone of this book (and most of his others) is that the government is almost always wrong.
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@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The alien race invades earth to use humans as slave labor as that is all that they see of value in our planet, 7 billion slaves, the extration of the platinum group is just an aside. We are a slave work camp and need work to do until they can ship us to other more productive places to work. We are so technologically inferior to them that we arn't worthy of thought.
You'd think an alien race so technologically superior to us would also have bleeding-edge automation, so no use for unreliable organic slaves from a planet far away.
(unless outsourcing to Earth is cheaper somehow
)
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The alien race invades earth to use humans as slave labor as that is all that they see of value in our planet, 7 billion slaves, the extration of the platinum group is just an aside. We are a slave work camp and need work to do until they can ship us to other more productive places to work. We are so technologically inferior to them that we arn't worthy of thought.
You'd think an alien race so technologically superior to us would also have bleeding-edge automation, so no use for unreliable organic slaves from a planet far away.
(unless outsourcing to Earth is cheaper somehow
)Thus proving that managers are truly an alien species? Our variant thinks out-sourcing to India/etc is cheaper...
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@dcon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Thus proving that managers are truly an alien species?
If only. In most stories, humanity eventually triumphs over the aliens...
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@dcon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Thus proving that managers are truly an alien species?
If only. In most stories, humanity eventually triumphs over the aliens...
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
You'd think an alien race so technologically superior to us would also have bleeding-edge automation, so no use for unreliable organic slaves from a planet far away.
This race is based on war and conquering. They enjoy the conflict and the enslaving and all the other "fun" parts of exploiting other races.
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@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
You'd think an alien race so technologically superior to us would also have bleeding-edge automation, so no use for unreliable organic slaves from a planet far away.
This race is based on war and conquering. They enjoy the conflict and the enslaving and all the other "fun" parts of exploiting other races.
And then they're incapable of taking care of kinetic impactors? Seriously?
You do realize that moving in space is all about momentum and stuff? And if you're able to sidestep the annoying Newtonian Laws then you're also able to simply shrug off such primitive projectiles.
Sorry, this does not compute. Because if they're such a conflict-seeking species then they should have already experienced all the varieties their opponents can come up with.
Either they go up against opponents who can almost beat them in which case their skills should be honed to a knife's edge. Or they mostly go against "primitives". In which case they should have plenty of experience with primitive weaponry, aka "rocks".
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@Rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Sorry, this does not compute.
Science fiction with a sociopolitical agenda handwaves technology:
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@HardwareGeek said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Sorry, this does not compute.
Science fiction with a sociopolitical agenda handwaves technology:
I wouldn't mind that so much if it did not necessitate making the opponent idiots. It paints a rather poor light on your agenda if it only succeeds because the other side consists of morons.
Y'know, for all the faults of the Honor Harrington series (a guilty pleasure on my part), that's the one thing Webster never did: Making the other side uniformly stupid.
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@Rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
And then they're incapable of taking care of kinetic impactors? Seriously?
You do realize that moving in space is all about momentum and stuff? And if you're able to sidestep the annoying Newtonian Laws then you're also able to simply shrug off such primitive projectiles.
Sorry, this does not compute. Because if they're such a conflict-seeking species then they should have already experienced all the varieties their opponents can come up with.
Either they go up against opponents who can almost beat them in which case their skills should be honed to a knife's edge. Or they mostly go against "primitives". In which case they should have plenty of experience with primitive weaponry, aka "rocks".Yes, because no inferior force with inferior technology has ever defeated a superior force with superior technology before. It has never happened. EVER!
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@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Yes, because no inferior force with inferior technology has ever defeated a superior force with superior technology before. It has never happened. EVER!
Usually only by throwing a lot of expendables at the enemy in combination with attrition.
I.e. a largely strategic approach. Afghanistan, Vietnam et al. were not decided in a single battle. Which reminds me: Not properly defending your singular ingress point is another sign of stupidity.
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@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Yes, because no inferior force with inferior technology has ever defeated a superior force with superior technology before. It has never happened. EVER!
There's a documentary about that... what was it called, again...
...oh yeah, "Independence Day"
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Yes, because no inferior force with inferior technology has ever defeated a superior force with superior technology before. It has never happened. EVER!
There's a documentary about that... what was it called, again...
...oh yeah, "Independence Day"
Well, the aliens were running MacOS on their servers so they got what they deserved.
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We need a reboot of that franchise where humans install Windows 10 on the spaceship, and just wait until an update causes it crash violently (as well as leaking all the alien secrets thru telemetry).
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
We need a reboot of that franchise where humans install Windows 10 on the spaceship, and just wait until an update causes it crash violently.
Well, they could also use Linux where they'll promptly fly into the sun because they entered
-rinstead of-Rwhen using the CLI.
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@Rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
We need a reboot of that franchise where humans install Windows 10 on the spaceship, and just wait until an update causes it crash violently.
Well, they could also use Linux where they'll promptly fly into the sun because they entered
-rinstead of-Rwhen using the CLI.Considering they'd be running on unsupported hardware, the drivers will take care of that for them.
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@Rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Yes, because no inferior force with inferior technology has ever defeated a superior force with superior technology before. It has never happened. EVER!
Usually only by throwing a lot of expendables at the enemy in combination with attrition.
I.e. a largely strategic approach. Afghanistan, Vietnam et al. were not decided in a single battle. Which reminds me: Not properly defending your singular ingress point is another sign of stupidity.
This was a strategic approach, it was using a tactic that the didn't believe humans capable of performing. We are a species that can barely get people into space, yet we were moving an asteroid at incredible speed (the asteroid isn't trolling for fish it is moving at an appreciable speed. I forget the speed that is mentioned but it is signficant)
How were they not defending the gate? They had guard ships there, of sufficient force (they felt) to handle a civilization that can barely get into space and one that they feel has been subjugated.
Also, the gates allows for efficient travel between systems, they can get here without it, just not immediately.
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@Zerosquare You forgot this:
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Here at TDWTF, we know that no competently run IT organization is going to let its entire shielding system across an entire battlefleet be vulnerable to a single virus delivered to a single node on the network. We know the real story must be quite the WTF.
And this is how we know we're talking about science fiction.
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Here at TDWTF, we know that there are no competently run IT organizations. There are only incompetent organizations and those who haven't yet been uncovered.
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@Dragoon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
This was a strategic approach, it was using a tactic
Those two words are not the same.
You will not be able to convince me that he didn't make the aliens stupid to let his ideology win. Oh, this also (once again, a familiar failing of SciFi) makes the aliens merely humans with a different skin.
Try Children of Time & Children of Ruin or The Swarm for books which try to convey a proper sense of dealing with aliens.
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@Rhywden said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
We need a reboot of that franchise where humans install Windows 10 on the spaceship, and just wait until an update causes it crash violently.
Well, they could also use Linux where they'll promptly fly into the sun because they entered
-rinstead of-Rwhen using the CLI.Instead of mining asteroids, mine bitcoin on their systems and just let them melt down.
Filed Under: Rerailed
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Filed Under: Rerailed
Filed under:
Who Stole the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve? And How?
https://www.amazon.com/Live-Free-Die-Troy-Rising/dp/1439133972
