Pocket change

Josh Marshall links to this article on Sen. Clinton's health care proposals, summarizing the news this way: "Edwards campaign accuses Hillary of swiping his health care proposals."

Apart from the specifics of this particular instance, I've always wondered why candidates in the primaries didn't do more of this kind of "swiping." For example, Matthew Yglesias suggests that there's a lot to like in Gov. Bill Richardson's energy proposals. If Richardson's campaign never makes it past Ultra-Super-Bionic-Tuesday (or whatever the new, earlier-than-ever, mega-primary day is called) why should it have to mean that his ideas on energy policy are also left behind?

A bit of policy syncretism can be a good thing.

* * * * * * * * *

How dumb do you have to be to believe, simultaneously, that: A) the Iranian government is the greatest threat to national, and international security; and B) the Iranian government's intelligence apparatus is far less competent than ABC News?

* * * * * * * * *

Pharoute linked to this in comments: "The monumental task of warning future generations."

The monumental challenge is to address how warnings can be coherently conveyed for thousands of years into the future when human society and languages could change radically.

See also:

• "EPA Expected to Issue Million-Year-Long Regulation," from NPR

• "This Place Is Not a Place of Honor"

• "Danger! Do NOT Dig Here"

* * * * * * * * *

Things I don't understand, Part MCXVI

Why would a state or local government lease a highway to a private operator?

Either the thing operates at a loss, in which case no sensible private operator would want to deal with it, or the thing is profitable, in which case leasing it out doesn't seem like a smart move.

Am I missing something? Or is the current enthusiasm for leasing out public infrastructure nothing more than the sleight-of-hand budgetary trick it appears to be?

* * * * * * * * *

Matt also links to this April 1962 Atlantic Monthly article warning against the dangers of "Jukebox Piracy."

This reminded me of a recent installment of Little Steven's Underground Garage (warning: sound), in which he read excerpts from Gary Marmorstein' book The Label: The Story of Columbia Records. Part of Columbia's early success was due to its embrace of radio -- which other labels feared would undermine record sales. After all, why would people buy their records when they could hear them for free on the radio? So while the other labels worked to keep their records out of the hands of radio DJs, Columbia started sending them records for free. Hmmm.

One of Little Steven's current heavy-rotation faves on the Garage is the new album from Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las. Weiss was 16 when "Leader of the Pack" hit No. 1 in 1964. Now it's 2007 and she's got a new record out and it rocks. Pretty cool.

* * * * * * * * *

Via Carl at FoolBlog I learn that New York City's recent ban on aluminum bats didn't include funding for wooden bats to replace them. I second Carl's take on this: "Time for MLB and/or Louisville Slugger to step up."

* * * * * * * * *

Not long after posting this -- about the call by some Southern Baptists to pull all their children out of the public school system -- I heard this NPR report from New Orleans:

Teacher Dorothy Riley is supposed to be retired, but she came back to teach kindergartners at Drew Elementary School in New Orleans' Ninth Ward.

"I felt as though if a child ever needed a teacher, it was after Katrina," Riley says. Riley lived with her mother in Lafayette after the hurricane, but she says she felt she had to return to New Orleans.

"I don't think it was my decision. I think it was a decision from the Lord to go down and touch somebody and bring these children up," she says.

Dorothy Riley's notion that teaching in public schools can be a kind of calling and a service to others is probably incomprehensible to the me-mine-ours moguls of the SBC and the religious right.

* * * * * * * * *

Kevin Drum and Tamara Draut explain that it's not just me. Most people aren't as financially secure as their parents were.

* * * * * * * * *

More evidence that the World's Worst Books are dangerous:

• Grist examines a poll on global warming and finds that 4 percent of Americans believe that climate change is due to "the coming end of the world or biblical prophecy."

• Will Bunch notes that "The No. 2 book on Amazon right now is a 'Christian' plea for attacking Iran." That would be The Final Move Beyond Iraq, by Mike Evans. Amazon says that people who bought this book also liked Evans' book, The American Prophecies: Ancient Scriptures Reveal Our Nation's Future.

Comments

[cjmr]

Am I missing something? Or is the current enthusiasm for leasing out public infrastructure nothing more than the sleight-of-hand budgetary trick it appears to be?

I think the rationale is supposed to have something to do with the fact that the company that is running the road is paying for the upkeep maintenance, not the city/county/state, so highway funding can be used to build new roads. Like it's possible to build our way out of a traffic crisis. Anyone who's ever played SimCity could tell you that won't work.

[Jesurgislac]

How dumb do you have to be to believe, simultaneously, that: A) the Iranian government is the greatest threat to national, and international security; and B) the Iranian government's intelligence apparatus is far less competent than ABC News?

You have to be dumb enough to still be a Bush supporter.

[ako]

The monumental challenge is to address how warnings can be coherently conveyed for thousands of years into the future when human society and languages could change radically.

There's some really interesting questions here, and some good ideas (personally, I think that if you've got material that will keeps a legible message for ten thousand years, the best idea is pictures of sick and radiation-burned people as a warning.) They all leave out one essential question, though.

Why would anyone take it seriously? Not many archeologists pay much attention to ancient curses placed on monuments, and "touch this and you will die of (invisible poison/deadly energy/bad stuff that shoots out of rocks/some unknown force that makes you sick), doesn't really sound that different. I can see future archeologists looking over the warnings, going, "Well, they must have been fairly impressive to build this, but I don't buy this curse business," and dying of radiation burns.

[ako]

The monumental challenge is to address how warnings can be coherently conveyed for thousands of years into the future when human society and languages could change radically.

There's some really interesting questions here, and some good ideas (personally, I think that if you've got material that will keeps a legible message for ten thousand years, the best idea is pictures of sick and radiation-burned people as a warning.) They all leave out one essential question, though.

Why would anyone take it seriously? Not many archeologists pay much attention to ancient curses placed on monuments, and "touch this and you will die of (invisible poison/deadly energy/bad stuff that shoots out of rocks/some unknown force that makes you sick), doesn't really sound that different. I can see future archeologists looking over the warnings, going, "Well, they must have been fairly impressive to build this, but I don't buy this curse business," and dying of radiation burns.

[cjmr's husband]

Private companies can get away with things that the government can't, such as non-union or even illegal workers, sweeping environmental regulations under the rug, and bribing government workers.

They don't have to use Joe's brother's contracting company because of the bribe Joe paid, (but they do have to use the CEO's brother's contracting company)

The only real benefit that I can see is that a private company can see that the road needs repair and do it immediately, where the government will need to study the problem, apply for funding, and put out competetive bids before giving the job to contractor that pays the highest bribe.

But it's much more likely that the private company will let the road get into much worse shape before spending any precious money on it, even if the money goes to the CEO's brother's company.

[the opoponax]

my point was going to be the same as cjmr's husband's.

i'd also add that a lot of jobs related to government infrastructure are either unionized or civil service positions, and there's a lot of rules about how much you have to pay them and how they have to be treated. not so for "independent contractors".

not to mention that if people are pissed about the way things are being run, politicians have a convenient scapegoat. i actually saw this happen yesterday watching a news story on electricity privatization in Illinois. they interviewed some state legislator who felt totally justified in getting his panties all in a twist about how they'd all been "duped" by these power companies who'd scammed the shit out of everyone. well, yeah, that's why you went for it -- so that when people got screwed, it wouldn't directly be your fault.

[the opoponax]

oh, and yeah. when has any big warning written on the side of a building prevented archaeologists from digging?

[David]

"Danger! Do NOT Dig Here": Sci-fi author Gregory Benford was on the expert panel this article refers to in 1990, and a significant chunk of his excellent book "Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millenia" is devoted to its conclusions. For anyone who doesn't have the book, the committee's report ("Ten Thousand Years of Solitude") is available online, and makes for some interesting reading.

[David]

See also: Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and Permanent Markers Implementation Plan.

[LMM]

the opoponax -- I would think part of the rational is that if future archaeologists know what's buried in Yucca Mountain, they won't be likely to dig there. Part of the plan is to have plaques which spell out what Yucca Mountain contains -- with periodic tables and the like. Hopefully, societies which have archaeologists will have some knowledge of the dangers of radiation, and can plan accordingly. The "this site is cursed" aspect is, I think, mostly aimed at people who don't know what's going on.

The message is somewhat of a cross between "this site is cursed" and "this box contains smallpox scabs".

Incidentally, what do other nations do with their waste fuel?

[cminus]

Why would a state or local government lease a highway to a private operator?

In addition to the reasons given above, it might be a rational decision if the government needs a lot of money now, and can't wait for toll revenues.

But it's usually just corporate welfare.

[King Tut]

"oh, and yeah. when has any big warning written on the side of a building prevented archaeologists from digging?"

I'll say!

[Jon H]

"Why would a state or local government lease a highway to a private operator?"

The up-front payment. Chicago recently got about $2 billion when it leased the Skyway.

[hf]

For the thinking behind privatization, see Brad's post on the New Capitalist Man.

[Arturus]

The issues with setting up markers for radioactive waste sites are really interesting to me. They're not talking about big keep out signs, and they've specifically specified that any physical attempt to keep people out will fail. Rather, the designs center around a number of key points, at different levels:

The first level to communicate is that something human is here, and that it is not something of value, but it is something important. Most of the designs call for very large scale, forboding constructions to acheive this. The designs specify that a concious rejection of geometric forms must be made. Pyrimids and Obelisks represent an ideal, something valued, something with craftsmanship put into them. These are none of these things, and are designed to be crude, unattractive, and obviously rejecting perfection, as well as cheap material, but also something that obviously took time and effort to construct.

Another common aspect to the designs is that the material be black local stone, such that it will be very hot and unfriendly at day, offering no shelter, and obstructing any reasonable use.

The next major level of information is danger, and this is where images of disease and horror are used. Following this, specific information about what is here, at varying levels of technicality, are available.

It's not a "this place is cursed", it's a "we went through a lot of trouble to make this place inhospitable, and unliveable. There was a reason for this. Details available if you still have the technology to understand."

[the opoponax]

"Another common aspect to the designs is that the material be black local stone, such that it will be very hot and unfriendly at day, offering no shelter, and obstructing any reasonable use."

I can just see the archaeologists of the year 6782:

The monuments are unique in material, all using a locally prevalent black granite. Extremely hot to the touch during daylight hours, the monuments seem to have been designed to offer no shade or shelter, and cannot have been constructed for any practical use that we are aware of. Clearly the black granite is an extreme prestige material, and the structures are as grand monuments, temples perhaps, to a sun god. It is almost certain that additional treasures and offerings abound under the surface of the monuments -- we hope to break ground next digging season, if the appropriate funding is made available. We have reason to believe that the structures may house elaborate tombs which will reveal much valuable information about the people of 21st century USA culture.

much more glaring errors have been made, in terms of ridiculous assumptions made about a certain type of structure or artifact. not so much in terms of crazy dangerous radiation, though. which is nice.

[Wakboth]

One thing that comes to mind: yes, you can't build a nuclear waste dump so that no-one is going to be able to get into it, but surely you can build it such that anyone with the technological ability to breach it is going to either know about radioactivity, or able to figure it out?

[Jesurgislac]

ako: Why would anyone take it seriously? Not many archeologists pay much attention to ancient curses placed on monuments, and "touch this and you will die of (invisible poison/deadly energy/bad stuff that shoots out of rocks/some unknown force that makes you sick), doesn't really sound that different. I can see future archeologists looking over the warnings, going, "Well, they must have been fairly impressive to build this, but I don't buy this curse business," and dying of radiation burns.

Heh. Yes.

(There was an article on Salon.com a few years ago that dealt with exactly this issue: that the human instinct to find out what's behind that warning notice is going to impell everyone to dig there...)

[Richard Hershberger]

"...the human instinct to find out what's behind that warning notice is going to impell everyone to dig there..."

I am also reminded of Jerome K. Jerome's Two Men in a Boat, where they greatly appreciated "No Trespassing" signs because they made excellent fuel for campfires.

[josephdietrich]

Fred asked: "Why would a state or local government lease a highway to a private operator?"

cminus replied: "In addition to the reasons given above, it might be a rational decision if the government needs a lot of money now, and can't wait for toll revenues."

To which I add: This is pretty simple. For the politicians that put such plans into action, the short-term benefit of having the money now is a good thing. The long-term negatives -- that is, net loss of money, poorer service, and so on -- won't come due under their watch, so it doesn't even figure into the equation.

[linnen]

Re: Privatizing the Public Infrastructure.

Ah yes, the famous 'Invisible Hand' of the Market at work here. Maybe it will hire invisible workers to fix the problem.
I call shenanigans. Given the ADDITIONAL regulations and oversight the state / local governments would need to enact, it makes very little sense to move care and management of the infrastructure into the private sector. Contractors to do this and sub-contractors to do that, very soon we are talking serious cost over-runs.

Unless the governments doing this also pass legislation that the entire upper management of the firms maintaining the road MUST use those same roads to go to work, there is no way for the situation to improve.

[bulbul]

ako and everyone else with the exception of Arturus,

Why would anyone take it seriously? Not many archeologists pay much attention to ancient curses placed on monuments
I don't think anyone has ever missed the point so spectacularly as all of you did just now. This research has been made PRECISELY for this reason: everybody is aware of the fact that a simple "No tresspassing" sign will not suffice. The key word is REDUNDANCY on all levels, something that is neither common nor typical of, say, Egyptian tombs. Plus, and that's the most interesting aspect, they seem to know their semiotics and are trying to avoid any near-universal symbols. "They would be designed to be unnatural-looking so they would draw attention, but not be misconstrued as memorials of honor." Now it's obvious that the obelisks will not have their usual phallic shape (memorials of honor, indeed :o). I'd really like to know what shape they will go for in the end.
Also, it is quite obvious that no one here has an idea about real archeological work. I like Indiana Jones movies as much as the next guy (hell, I got the dvds), but that's not what archeologists do. The warnings will most likely not help some curious poor sod. But should anyone ever attempt an archeological or other survey of the area in question, they will notice immediately that something is not ok here.

[bulbul]

opo,

Clearly the black granite is an extreme prestige material
and
locally prevalent black granite
Econ 101: something locally prevalent and therefore freely available cannot be, by definition, an extreme prestige material.

and the structures are as grand monuments, temples perhaps, to a sun god.
I'm assuming it's a group of undergrand students who compiled this report. Fortunately, they will not be returning to the dig site, because they all flunked their final exams. That comes as no surprise, since judging by the text of the report, they're all as dumb as a brick.

[Francis]

Why would a state or local government lease a highway to a private operator?

Either the thing operates at a loss, in which case no sensible private operator would want to deal with it, or the thing is profitable, in which case leasing it out doesn't seem like a smart move.

Am I missing something? Or is the current enthusiasm for leasing out public infrastructure nothing more than the sleight-of-hand budgetary trick it appears to be?

Speaking as a Brit where we get this sort of rubbish all the time (PFI/PPP), it's sleight of hand budgetary trickery - but may improve cash flow. The only thing that the corporate side might get out of it other than money is extra advertising (or the ability to cut costs by cutting quality, as is normal).

[Nick Lamb]

None of the sites linked refer to the very cynical but perfectly workable idea that I had most faith in for very long term protection of nuclear depositories. It's definitely discussed in the official reports.

Deliberately design the depository to leak slowly when it is not properly maintained. For as long as our civilisation exists to post guards and complete routine maintenance it could be safe to visit, school children can be taken there to see, if nothing else, the scale of the civil engineering achievement. Once the site is abandoned, safety measures fail gradually so that the area becomes radioactive. Anyone clever enough to be able to dig the site up should also be smart enough to notice that people entering the forbidden zone become sick, and those who stay die. No further warning needed.

Egyptologists realised that excavating a pyramid was dangerous, and that the builders had intended grave robbers to die inside. But actual losses were minimal, a few workers trapped in a collapse, perhaps the occasional European got sick from a local disease and died after a time. If everyone who went inside died within 24-48 hours of a mysterious illness then attempts to break open the tombs would have been abandoned until the phenomenon was understood.

As to the question of what everyone else does, the answer is that they hold their breath and wait. No-one yet has a suitable long term repository for the most dangerous nuclear waste, other countries either expect to pay someone else to store it, or they have geologists investigating similar deep burial sites within their territory. In every country there is widespread opposition to any such plan, this is if anything the perfect example of a flaw in democracy - everyone hopes to put the difficult decision off until tomorrow, and keep doing so forever, despite the knowledge that every day of delay costs money and increases the risk of an accident.

[bulbul]

Anyone clever enough to be able to dig the site up should also be smart enough to notice that people entering the forbidden zone become sick, and those who stay die.
Actually, wouldn't they notice a suspicious lack of animal activity around the area first?

[the opoponax]

"something locally prevalent and therefore freely available cannot be, by definition, an extreme prestige material."

Archaeology 101: our ideas of "locally prevalent" and their ideas of "locally prevalent" don't always match up. see also: obsidian, flint, red ochre. all incredibly ubiquitous materials that would have been considered highly valuable at one point.

also, by your definition, oil cannot possibly be a motivating factor for anything going on politically in the Middle East, Alaska, Russia/Siberia, or the US Gulf Coast. i mean, it's so locally ubiquitous, right?

also, i'm gonna repeat, you would be SHOCKED (or maybe not) to see the levels of ridiculousness occasisionally proposed by archaeologists. it's not so long ago that all the experts asserted that, clearly, the Venus of Willendorf and similar figures found in central and eastern Europe must have been intended for use as pornography.

oh, and you don't get jokes, much, do you?

[the opoponax]

not to mention, what happens if at some point in the next 5000 years somebody decides that all that locally ubiquitous black stone makes a great building material, or has some industrial use, or something, and by the time our hypothetical future archaeologists are doing their research, that kind of stone is not locally prevalent at all?

[Erick Oppeen]

FWIW, the really bad radioactive stuff has what is called a "short half-life." Which means that in a short time, it loses most of its radioactivity.

Lots of things are mildly radioactive---granite stone, for one, people, for another---and we somehow manage to survive. I will acknowledge that back in the day, people were very cavalier about radioactivity, but hysterical fear of anything that might be radioactive is no cure.

[ako]

I don't think anyone has ever missed the point so spectacularly as all of you did just now.

Enlighten me, then. Because what I'm seeing is basically a sophisticated form of the "Keep Out" signs. Yes, multiple ways of conveying the same message, but still telling people "Go away, there's bad things here." Whether it's the disturbing shapes or the repeated engravings, it's still putting up a warning signal and hoping people will heed it. And while people looking at the big, weird, unnatural buildings will likely get the idea that someone really wants them to keep out, and thinks it's scary, bad, and wrong, what I don't get is why they're supposed to believe that this bad scary thing is actually real, and will actually hurt them, instead of just being a superstition, or a danger that ended thousands of years ago.

But should anyone ever attempt an archeological or other survey of the area in question, they will notice immediately that something is not ok here.

Really? Even if they don't understand our modern way of describing and communicating about radiation? Because I thought archeologists avoiding the mysterious invisible force that the inscription said would kill you only happened in Indiana Jones movies (where you had to, or you face would melt off.)

So, the archeologists do a survey, and they spot the mounds of dirt, the irregular and non-phallic black granite obelisks, the messages in multiple languages they don't know how to translate properly (perhaps they manage to translate lines like "The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy," but not the periodic tables.) What are these future archeologist going to spot that tells them the danger is real, not bad magic or angry gods?

[Drak Pope]

What if somehow, thanks to the globalization of society, major writings of the world are able to be preserved and all knowledge of science and technology is not lost between now and then? Could such a fantastic and magical situation help mitigate the danger?

[ako]

Honestly, the more they knew of our culture, the better equipped they'd be to understand the warnings and the purpose of the site. But the chances that, even with the new technology available, they'd be able to understand 1) modern languages and 2) current attempts to describe and explain radiation, are pretty slim. Over a ten-thousand year schale virtually any civilization's likely to become an unknown quantity. Look at efforts of modern archeologists to understand what happened four or five thousand years ago, and how little is preserved. Granted, we have a lot of stuff written on plastic, which ups the odds of some portions of our language lasting, but there are still going to be huge cultural and linguistic gaps.

[bulbul]

ako,
Because what I'm seeing is basically a sophisticated form of the "Keep Out" signs.
So a computer is basically a sophisticated calculator, right?

Even if they don't understand our modern way of describing and communicating about radiation?
The whole point of the whole thing is trying to find some way of describing radiation and communicating the sense of danger to life which, in part, would go beyond our culture and its semiotic systems. Some get it, some don't, like the guys in the NPR report.

the messages in multiple languages they don't know how to translate properly
Again, redundancy. The probability that all six working UN languages will become extinct and/or leave no descendant is much lower than if one were to use just one, like, say, the ancient Egyptians did.

What are these future archeologist going to spot that tells them the danger is real, not bad magic or angry gods?
That's exactly the problem they are trying to solve.

opo,
obsidian, flint, red ochre. all incredibly ubiquitous materials that would have been considered highly valuable at one point.
And why aren't they anymore? Two reasons: they have been replaced by other materials AND their value in the past was to some degree dictated by the difficulty in obtaining them. And that applies to both mining/gathering and trade. Consider amber. On the Baltic coast of Poland, it was a useless piece of shiny rock. Greek traders felt differently.
And all of your exampless were easily transportable items - gems, stones, dust. Black granite of size sufficient to use as a building material, that's a completely different story.
So unless the hypothetical future archeologists discover any other evidence of a society with a class division where prestige matters, they will have no reason to consider black granite a high-prestige material if it still remained as ubiquitous.

oil cannot possibly be a motivating factor for anything going on politically in the Middle East, Alaska, Russia/Siberia, or the US Gulf Coast. i mean, it's so locally ubiquitous, right?
I hate to repeat myself, but here we are dealing with apples and handgrenades again. Among other things, oil needs to be processed to be of some use. And it's largest producers are far from being the largest consumers. In other words, the value of oil is currently dictated by the global economy, not by anything local.

and by the time our hypothetical future archaeologists are doing their research, that kind of stone is not locally prevalent at all?
They will do what any decent archeologist would do: try to find out how the granite got there, why the people went through all the trouble to build something that complex and weird in the middle of the fracking desert, how they got the stuff there etc. etc. etc. Not to mention the fact that quarries - such as the ones where black granite is mined - tend to leave a big frigging mark on the countryside.

you would be SHOCKED (or maybe not) to see the levels of ridiculousness occasisionally proposed by archaeologists
Having worked with archeologists, trust me, I wouldn't. Most of the archeologists I know smoke dope and you wouldn't believe the shit they come up with :o)

it's not so long ago that all the experts asserted that, clearly, the Venus of Willendorf and similar figures found in central and eastern Europe must have been intended for use as pornography.
ALL THE EXPERTS? Hardly. Most of them? Ditto. Venus of Willendorf and Venus of Věstonice have sometimes been described as "works of erotic art", but the accepted opinion has always been fertility goddess/plain and simple art.

oh, and you don't get jokes, much, do you?
I like my comedy funny.

[bulbul]

ako,
but there are still going to be huge cultural and linguistic gaps.
Precisely. And the good folks at NRS and the Yucca Mountain Project are trying to come up with a way to bridge those gaps.

[LMM]

Erick: If you honestly believe that, I've got quite a nice plot of land near Chernobyl to sell you, cheap. Good farming country, with lots of second-growth forest. And no taxes to pay for, oh, probably the next two hundred or so years.

[the opoponax]

"the accepted opinion has always been fertility goddess/plain and simple art."

ummm, no. have you read the scholarship on this? until pretty recently (the 70's or so), most of the scholarship suggested "erotic art", aka a polite way of saying porn. even now, the "fertility goddess" idea faces CONSTANT attempts at refutation, due to the fact that, hey, it could totally just be something like erotic art... and even then, "fertility goddess" is only marginally more likely -- the honest truth is that we have no idea what the Venus figurines were used for, and we probably never will unless we find out some new information that either verifies a current hypothesis or suggests something else.

oh, and i know plenty of archaeologists, myself. i majored in anthro in college, hung mostly with the archaeologists, seriously considered going that way at one point, and in fact happen to be sitting next to an archaeologist as we speak.

also, you seemed to be confused about the level of debate here. to my reading, nobody here is seriously refuting what the people involved with this project are trying to do. we're all just bantering, joking, kidding around about our cultural associations (and some experiental associations) with archaeology and the like.

personally, i think the best solution will probably be a design feature rather than some kind of elaborate warning signal. there's just too much likelihood that 100,000 years from now, whatever sentient beings exist will have no cultural continuity with 21st century western humans. even if they are advanced enough to understand radioactivity, comprehend written language, and the like. i mean, what if everything on the Lascaux caves is actually not "art" at all but an elaborate written language warning that we just don't understand? i think this, not because i hate archaeology or don't know anything about it, but because, yeah, cultural symbols change over time and can be lost easily. a design feature like "people will start to feel sick when they get too close" is pretty universal.

[the opoponax]

oooh, another great example of how "weird looking local stone structure" does not equal OMG TOTALLY DANGEROUS DON'T GO HERE! -- Stonehenge and the other british megaliths.

i don't think it's EVER been hypothesized that Stonehenge is an elaborate warning system about something buried in the area. we're all pretty sure it was some kind of religious thing, or calendar system, or observatory, or something. we have almost no cultural continuity with the people who built these structures, we don't even quite know who built them or how they came to be. we don't have very many sources that would indicate that any of our hypotheses are correct -- most of them come out of vague cultural associations with pagans and druids and stuff, not any real knowledge about who built them and what their cultural symbolism was all about.

[bulbul]

have you read the scholarship on this?
Actually, yes. Starting with the part of it written by Karel Absolon, the guy who discovered/identified the Venus of Věstonice and all the stuff written by our local guys. I could for example quote J.R. Harding's article "Certain Upper Palaeolithic 'Venus' Statuettes Considered in Relation to the Pathological Condition Known as Massive Hypertrophy of the Breasts" from Man - New Series (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland) 11/2, 1976, where s/he says:

... at least two European Upper Paleolithic 'venues' statues, which are widely excepted as images of female fertility...

The two statues in question are Venus of Willendorf and Lespugue Venus. And that's from 1976, in case you didn't notice.
Then there is also LeRoy McDermott's "Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines" (Current Anthropology, Vol. 37, No. 2, 1996) which, coincidentally, provides an overview of "previous interpretations" of these figurines. Aside from the minority pornographic explanation, it also mentions feminist critique thereof, the more mainstream associations with fertility and magical rites, up to more recent possibilites, such as the representation of matrilineal clan structure to theories according to which these figurines might have played a role in obstetric practicies and neonatal care.

i majored in anthro in college
Duly noted. That's a BA, right?

we're all just bantering, joking, kidding around about our cultural associations (and some experiental associations) with archaeology and the like.
No. You and ako are doing what you've been doing for quite some time now: sticking to the principles of the unofficial Internet motto "Welcome to the Internet where everyone knows everything and nobody likes anything". And that's a polite way of putting it.

[bulbul]

oooh, another great example of how "weird looking local stone structure" does not equal OMG TOTALLY DANGEROUS DON'T GO HERE! -- Stonehenge and the other british megaliths.
Good point with those, but again, note how the columns are all vertical. That's very easy to achieve with the simplest of tools. The idea is that at Yucca Mountain, none of the obelisks will point straight up, they will be crooked if not bent. I suspect that's a good way of attracting attention to the fact that there's something wrong. If the idea of an obelisk is as universal as I think, which is far from certain. The idea goes like this: monument of honor = straight obelisks, pretty much recognizable in any culture. Crooked columns, now that's something most cultures would see as weird.

[bulbul]

which are widely excepted as images of female fertility
Read "accepted".
Shit.

[the opoponax]

but how do we know that a bent or crooked obelisk shape would be read by people tens of thousands of years from now as "wrong"?

for all we know, 40,000 years from now, the crooked obelisk will be considered the most aesthetically pleasing form, ideally suited to monuments and holy places. even now, you have people like Frank Gehry and Richard Serra fooling around with things like that, and the forms they're inventing don't evoke danger or wrongness at all. Really, if you were in Bilbao, Spain, and you happened upon the Guggenheim Museum, you would assume that it was a toxic waste site of some kind? What about if you were wandering through downtown Liverpool and happened upon this? Would you flee the scene, thinking it must demarcate a radioactive zone?

this isn't meant to display that i know everything and think everything is wrong, btw. i just have pretty strong convictions that if we want to send a message perhaps a million years into the future, we probably shouldn't rely on cultural symbols, because, y'know, they totally change. and "cultural symbols" isn't just stuff like written language or the poison or radioactive waste symbols. it's things like what an obelisk means, what shapes are considered aesthetically pleasing, what materials are associated with what kinds of objects. all of those deep seated assumptions are subject to change when you're talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

[Richard Hershberger]

"Really, if you were in Bilbao, Spain, and you happened upon the Guggenheim Museum, you would assume that it was a toxic waste site of some kind?"

Insert inevitable comment about modern art here.

[twig]

Opponax:

What exactly is your point? We shouldn't even /bother/ trying to create a multiple-redundancy situation to house something that will be terribly lethal longer than the span of recorded human history, because oh it will never work anyway?

[Kate]

I like the idea of a failure system as a final warning, but I have difficulties with it as well. In the same way cultures can and will shift in tens and hundreds of thousands of years, climates can. If a failure is built into the plans, can we be certain that it does not contaminate groundwater, spreading the contagion much farther than necessary for a warning? Would there be some way of pictorally adding instructions to "turn off" such a failure?

There are problems with all the options at the moment, mostly because we can't project far enough into the future to be doing anything but making wild guesses, no matter what we believe at this point to be "universally understood".

Of course that should not prevent us from trying, but I think that there will be the strong chance that distant archaeologists feel a compelling need to know exactly what was buried at the site that caused modern man to build such an extreme monument.

[Kevin]

FWIW, granite isn't all that common in this part of Nevada. A quick glance at the geological survey map suggests that volcanic tuff would be used. Which IIRC is what the statues on Easter Island are carved from.

[Kevin]

Termination problem?

[Jesurgislac]

twig: We shouldn't even /bother/ trying to create a multiple-redundancy situation to house something that will be terribly lethal longer than the span of recorded human history, because oh it will never work anyway?

Can't speak for the opo, but my point is that we certainly shouldn't be creating a substance that will be terribly lethal for longer than the span of recorded human history, because no, knowing what we do about human nature, the various methods of trying to stop people from digging it up will not work.

[the opoponax]

"What exactly is your point? We shouldn't even /bother/ trying to create a multiple-redundancy situation to house something that will be terribly lethal longer than the span of recorded human history, because oh it will never work anyway?"

no, that containment or the communication of danger should be located in a design feature, not a "warning message". we know, if we are honest with ourselves, that we have no ability to create any meaninful message of warning (no matter how complex or how much it transcends written language), because we don't know whether people of the future will use the same cultural symbols in the same ways. we do know, however, that even 100,000 years from now, humans are likely to share most of the same biological traits with humans today, are likely to move in the same ways, are likely to have similar kinds of cognition.

for instance, creating a controlled release wherein people will experience the symptoms of radiation sickness before they're able to come in close enough proximity to actually be burned or poisoned or contaminate anything irreparably is a brilliant idea. we can pretty much count on the fact that thousands and thousands of years from now, humans will still have similar negative reactions to radiation. much more reliably than that they will still think "warped obelisk" = danger, which is an association we don't make with any reasonable accuracy even today.

[the opoponax]

also, ditto Jesu.

[Ursula L]

A design feature like "people will start to feel sick when they get too close" is pretty universal.

And when humans are trying to drag themselves back into civilization after The Great Collapse, the combination of warnings and actual illness will be objective proof that curses do work, setting back the progression of rediscovering science significantly.

And humans will still try to break in to gain access to that kind of power, to be able to use it to curse their enemies. Or hope that destroying the "warnings" will break the curse and free them from the threat of illness. Or if the old folk take the warnings seriously, the kids will be breaking in as a form of teenage rebellion, because teenagers think they're immortal, anyway. Or if the waste is in you're enemy's territory, you try to break in, open it up to damage your enemy's homes, and run.