I’ll be interested to hear your take on that, once you’re done reading the book. Let me know what you think!
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Well, here’s more on it before reading it: The railroads and other emerging industries and the vultures that surrounded Ulysses S. Grant.
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So
The Hugh Jackman movie was
Both are good.
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Now sat there also nodding. It’s contagious.
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Of all of Harry Harrison’s works, Bill the Galactic Hero also has a ‘actually moves the person’ drive that’s explained in enough detail to count, in the ‘bloater drive’ (!) Expand inter-atomic bonds way beyond what is actually feasable, pinning the back end of the ship in place, then pin the front end instead and reverse. Simple and dumb enough for a military farce c/w pulp SF parody.
(Of course, it’s presented as ridiculous, and the problems are manifold, but that test, it passes.)
The Greg Bear stories in question, were ‘Heads’ (prelude) and ‘Moving Mars’ (explanation) which used the ‘cosmic database’ theory that was interesting at the time, and using absolute zero (yeah, I know) matter as a way of affecting and moving the actual matter by manipulating it in a means not dissimilar to entangling.(‘tweaking the location of the matter’)
To it’s credit, the challenge of the first novella is about reaching absolute zero, and the second about (amongst lots of other plot) the computational power necessary to isolate and move discrete matter - but it was about moving the matter wholemeal, not encoding to data.
And of course, Schlock Mercenary, and teraportation, involving lots and lots of miniature wormholes. (Plot point, but the in universe method that preceded it had the very failings we’re discussing avoiding, used in gruesome and innovative ways)
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I nearly forgot, the painfully written-for-adolescent boys ‘Tamara Knight’ (by the eccentric and occasionally glorious Mel Croucher) had this as a specific plot point, where plentiful teleportation booths did a ‘Sweeney Todd’ with the suddenly surplus bodies - with the person who pushed the ‘teleport me now’ button being surprised to be dropped into a grinder, while his copy is generated at his destination, blissfully unaware.
( Overview here: http://www.melcroucher.net/books-journalism/fiction.html and actual text here
http://www.nonowt.com/magfold/articfol/tamara.html - it, well, we’re not adolescent males living in the 80s…)
And now I’ll shut-up about teleportation for bit - You know, quantum entanglement is starting to sound rather hopeful, in light of the alternatives. 
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Y’all have derailed my gloom thread with scientific optimism.
Carry on. 
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Unfortunately relevant hypothetical: if you could communicate with early-30’s Berlin, what advice would you give?
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I assume you mean pre-nazis in power Berlin?
Maybe don’t let Hindenberg make Hitler Chancellor?
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How?
Assuming normal people, not political elites.
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Find someone rabidly opposed to Hitler and co. Feed them the equivalent of grays sports alamanac help them build a political base against nazis with new found capital.
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You don’t need normal people. You need someone to stand firm on, “Hey, this guy’s Austrian. He doesn’t even qualify.”
Preferably using that as an anti-message long before the Chancellor issue even comes up.
Then again, there were people doing just that.
The bigger question is how to shut down populists.
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It’s just a terminology quibble, but I’d argue that the problem both then and now was demagoguery rather than populism.
Neither Trump nor Adolph ran a truly populist campaign; they appealed to the bigotry of a minority, not the interests of the majority. The modern populists are Bernie, Corbyn and the Pirates; the historical populists were mostly democratic socialists.
The tendency to conflate populism and fascism strikes me as the result of a deliberate tactic by the centre-right to discredit movements aiming towards economic justice.
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Plenty of good analysis, but it’s largely irrelevant while the electoral process remains under control of the TrumpGOP.
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At 2:40
“Left wing economic populism fights fascism; I want that message out there. And neoliberalism is fuelling it”.
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This is a bit long, but I think she has important points to make on what’s wrong with modern political parties; the “brands vs social movements” discussion.
The first 90 seconds is just intro; skip it.
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Good question. Maybe drum up more anti-Nazi support from the rank and file political parties?
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Maybe talk to Hindenberg himself and warn him?
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