Sherp ATV

I used to dismiss Russia as a boring fading socialist experiment.  Maybe they knew how to make Vodka or something.  What else are you going to do when there is snow on the ground for 11 months out of the year ?

And then I saw a video of the Sherp ATV.  I'm sorry but that is the coolest ATV I have ever seen period.  And I thought Americans knew how to make ATVs.  I guess living in ice and snow makes you good at engineering vehicles that travel over anything including water.  Wow.  That is one beautiful machine.  Really, really, really impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sherp+atv

UFOs and Intelligent Alien Life

• UFOs
• I wish I could see a good UFO, but unfortunately have not.
• Why do all the videos have to be at a distance and blurry, bummer
• If there are any aliens reading this please contact me.  Especially if you own a UFO.  I would really like to go for a ride in a UFO.

• Are We Alone ?
• Some smart folks ask why we haven't detected other intelligent life in the universe.
• Given the exponential rate of growth of technology the logic goes that we should be able to aim a telescope at distant stars and see cool giant space cities or some such.
• Good question.  One of the bigger good questions of life in fact.
• The more we look without seeing anything artificial the more it seems we might be alone.
• Perhaps we have underestimated the odds of things aligning for advanced life.  Maybe we under estimated earth's geographic and other factors that led to the evolution and adaptive nature of man.  Maybe it isn't just 10 things that had to happen to get to this point, maybe it is 100.
• An alternate option is that intelligent life has existed before but destroyed itself.  Does it make sense to leave hundreds or thousands of children unattended in a nuclear reactor control room ?   Now imagine 1 billion children in a control room that could wipe out the human race.  That is what we are looking at in the very very near future in the domains of AI and nanotechnology.
• Another alternative is that as other intelligent species have evolved they moved into other 'domains' of existence that are harder for us to detect.  The transformation of human existence into something 'digital' is not that crazy anymore.  We are only a few years away from computers being smarter than humans.  A computer with the capacity to download the sum of every interesting bit of a human can't be that far behind.  And once we're fully digital it get's really crazy.  

Politics: Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians

• Democrats
• Get right
• The game is rigged.  
• Minimum wage is a poverty trap
• Company execs do not work 1,000,000 million times harder than their janitors but they get paid that 
• Get wrong
• Taking money from people (via taxes) with no regard for fairness or results only makes things worse
• 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'

• Republicans
• Get right
• Policies based on physical world realities instead of wishful thinking
• Get wrong
• Capitalism without regard to society/ethics is evil
• How many people has tobacco killed ?
• Capitalism has creeps cold calling senior citizens trying to talk them out of their savings

• Libertarians

• Get right
• Elegant simple clean political philosophy
• Leans toward anarchy
• If you think Anarchy works a great example of that is Afghanistan.  Please go there and see how great it works.
• Get wrong
• Unfortunately it is too simple.  
• It does not deal with the reality of large groups of people, IE 'Political Power'.
• Similar to nuclear energy political power or the power of the mob needs to be understood and carefully managed.
• The truth is that political power (power of large group of people) is even more dangerous and complex and unpredictable than nuclear energy.
• As such the rules for managing it should be very robust and well designed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_forms_of_government