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AC wrote: An interesting take on the problem from zerohedge: "Student Loan Bubble To Exceed $1 Trillion: "It's Going To Create A Generation Of Wage Slavery" And Another Taxpayer Bailout"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/student-loan-bubble-exceed-1-trillion-its-going-create-generation-wage-slavery-and-another-taxp

Yes, indeed. See also my:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

Solutions on my site or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005584.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/006005.html

AC wrote: An interesting take on the problem from zerohedge: "Student Loan Bubble To Exceed $1 Trillion: "It's Going To Create A Generation Of Wage Slavery" And Another Taxpayer Bailout"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/student-loan-bubble-exceed-1-trillion-its-going-create-generation-wage-slavery-and-another-taxp

Yes, indeed. See also my:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

Solutions on my site or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005584.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/006005.html

As I suggest here, the solar system does not have enough people: :-)
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html

As Julian Simon suggests, the more people, the more creative ideas:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

How else would we get the idea to grind up rock to fertilize soil?
http://www.remineralize.org/

Or to make solar power cheaper than coal?
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

Or to invent the computer mouse?
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html

Or to create terrific participatory democracies?
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010

Or to move beyond war by thinking better?
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
http://www.anwot.org/

Or maybe even to have cold fusion?
http://pesn.com/2011/09/14/9501913_Rossis_One_Megawatt_Reactor_Gets_A_New_E-Cat_Model/

The human imagination (empowered by education and health and access to basic resources) is indeed the ultimate resource.

"Obviously, in China, young people carry their old people like burdens while they're trying to manage their own families. That's not so great, either."

When people have six kids or so, it is not as much of a burden when the kids carry the elderly. Part of the problem is we are experiencing a "Peak Population" crisis.
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html

But Japan aims to solve that with robotics...

Thanks for being part of making the 1980s happen!

My wife and our little "labor of love" venture in the 1990s:
    http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

Sorry about your loss.

Health tips by me, the most important of which for most technology people is curing vitamin D deficiency (and which I could only learn about by hypertext-supporting networks and Google):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2478380&cid=37734208

There are plenty of resources to go around though, especially when you consider we could support quadrillions of people in space habitats in the solar system. But some causes for optimism:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/dpg/slim.cfm

And maybe even:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/17/hello-cheap-energy-hello-brave-new-world/

If we had any real resource problems, why are so many people out of work? :-)

Real solutions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#

The human imagination is truly the "ultimate resource", so the more the merrier IMHO: :-)
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

You've of course read "True Names" no doubt about what an older woman is up to on the net: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names

Take a look at the integrated cloud mesh creations that Meraki has on the market. Based on what I remember from their demo, their solutions may be rather viable for a network like you've described -- and they're reliable enough for use by Comfort Inn, as well as MIT, Stanford and a fair number of other big names.

How about a self-assessed buyout value taxed at 3% annually for copyrights, maybe less for shorter patents?

Some little progress documented on IP taxes is at: http://www.ip-tax.com/

Then (2003, by me):
http://p2pfoundation.net/Copyright_Tax
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000763.html

From one of those links: "Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax payments."

I got the idea from someone's slashdot sig back around; the sig asked something like, if it is intellectual property, why is it not taxed?

Ultimately we need to move beyond an economic system more-and-more built around "artificial scarcity". See also:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
   

These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:

• temporary measures like unemployment insurance and retraining funds, and when those fail, letting people live with relatives who still have jobs or be homeless (the USA now has one million homeless schoolchildren, an amount that has doubled in the last two years);
• government public works like in the 1930s (infrastructure, arts, research, medicine, etc.);
• a basic income for everyone, essentially Social Security and Medicaid for all with no means testing;
• improved local subsistence like with 3D printing and organic gardening;
• a p2p gift economy (like Wikipedia and Debian GNU/Linux);
• a shorter work week (like tried in France);
• rethinking work to be more fun so it is done as play;
• alternative currencies or other forms of exchange like barter or more formal rationing;
• increasing advertising to entice people into more debt (one cause of the current economic crisis as the debt bubble burst);
• intentionally producing shoddy merchandise or things with planned obsolescence, perhaps encouraged by promoting faddism in the culture;
• more prisons (employs guards and keeps people out of the labor pool);
• more schooling (employs guards/teachers and keeps people out of the labor pool) while suppressing true education; and
• more war (employs guards/soldiers, blows up and wastes abundance, and kills or disables workers to keep them out of the labor pool).

Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our best educators say compulsory school as we know it should disappear entirely.

The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un

"On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school."

I should have caught that as a problem too. Someday, public schools may be much more like public libraries open to anyone to use than day prisons for children of working parents, but until then, consider:

"Links about alternative peer-oriented education"
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education

"The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt

"State Controlled Consciousness" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

"University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by Robert D. Honigman
http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm

"In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm

"Teach Your Own" by John Holt (and other books)
http://www.holtgws.com/

"The Teenage Liberation Handbook" by Grace Llewellyn (and other books)
http://gracellewellyn.com/

"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and ... Resistance" By Matt Hern
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

"Sustainable Education" by Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1

"Federated Learning Communities"
http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-1/learning.html
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ilc/models.html

"The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to
Life/Work Planning" by Richard N. Bolles (also writes "What Color is Your
Parachute")
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583

General related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me

Speaking of anarchy and Wikileaks - Open-Mouth Sabotage, Networked Resistance, and Asymmetric Warfare on the Job ... a topical article on the P2P Foundation's blog by anarchist Kevin Carson.

Here are some links for the interested:

Music and books
http://questioncopyright.com/

Patents
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/again st.htm

Network economy
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.ph p/Main_Page

Collection p2p politics
http://www.p2pfoundation.net/

Software
http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/20 07/computer-2007-article.html

IP economics
http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/