Trump's Pirate Ship Needs My 1980s Usenet Tech Reforms

General Discussion
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Before Trump’s Pirate Ship gets so addicted to the booty of World Reserve Currency that they can’t think straight they need to be informed of some of the science and technology reforms I proposed on Usenet back in the late 1980s.

However, it appears that Google scoured the countryside to find any remaining independent copies of that era of Usenet content including Henry Spencer’s archive – and then made it all but inaccesible:

From “Do female anime fans exist?” The impact of women-exclusionary discourses on rec.arts.anime

Before Deja News, individual users saved Usenet contentmanually on tapes, creating an alternative, grassroots archive, notably Canadian HenrySpencer who did this from 1981 to 1991. After the acquisition of Spencer’s archives, GoogleGroups displayed a collection of 700 million posts and 35,000 saved newsgroups.

Did Henry really sign away his rights to keep and distribute his own archive to “Be Evil As All Hell” Google?

I was able to find – on a website – one of my 1989 proposals, based on the idea that empirical data can be quantified in terms of bits of information that can be purchased by the appropriate agencies as a market incentive.

Oh, and get this, it featured “Trump Space Services” as a hypothetical rocket booster company:

Another proposal was to replace virtually all government science bureaucrats by sending all science budget through inventors of technologies that had the most patent royalties – the idea being that you can’t patent laws of nature but that scientific utility is best measured by applications.

Can’t find that via Google Groups which, now that the Internet Archive was forced to shut down their Usenet archive, looks like the only place it might be saved.

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This is a 1989 polemic Andy Cutler wrote with my help – mainly with me writing the introduction to try to grab the reader. It’s not really a specific policy paper but I include it because I was able to find it via google groups.

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.space/c/uvkhPcrUb0E/m/MSb2B6LnDwEJ

Andy and I were sitting around discussing it when he wondered what counter-examples of traditional American values should be included to counterbalance the emphasis on traditional American values. Feeling rather impish about it, I suggested “A woman’s place is in the home,” with a slight smirk. Boy did Andy like that one!! He actually clapped his hands! That was when I discovered how much of a “feminist” Andy was.

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It might even be better for the preservation of these ideas if you copy-pasted the post!

The one reply:

For those of you who have been asking about what alternatives to
NASA planning we NASA-critics propose, this is the most definitive and
agreeable that I have seen. My differences with it are only on the
trivialities. Great work, guys!

is by Nick Szabo himself - a very impressive endorsement. Wow.

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Yeah Nick was quite helpful in getting the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 passed. He was one of the few voices on Usenet that was supportive of my “libertarian extremism”. If people think I’m a curmudgeon now, just imagine someone who foresaw just how horribly the legacy of the Apollo program was setting back access to space. I was not popular and that may have been the first time I just said “FI… cancel me you bastards.”

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