Slashdot Mirror

I got the idea from someone's Slashdot sig maybe around 2002 or so saying something like, "if it is intellectual property, shouldn't it be taxed"?
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

What is the social justification for such a tax?

Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.

Copyrights were originally monopolies granted "for a limited time" with the notion that the costs they imposed on society would be repaid by the work moving into the public domain after that limited time. That bargain has effectively been broken because the terms are so long (and likely will be in perpetuity in the U.S.A. given the recent Supreme Court decision). Yet, copyrights still pose a cost on society. There must be courts to dispute them, police to enforce them. There must be prisons to hold the millions of copyright offenders. Like no one in the 1960s would imagine a million U.S. citizens behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s, it is possible that there may be a million U.S. citizens behind bars in the 2010s for copyright violations as the "War on Those Who Share" gets underway. There must be an information superhighway to transport these works, and standards for disseminating them. Authors of derivative works must spend time researching whether a work is already in the public domain, or locating all the related rights holders if it is not. Extensions of the principle of copyright to cover the ideas in the work such as characters or plot lines or other structures make it ever more costly to create new non-infringing works. Many new or derived works are not created because of these chilling effects, which is a hidden cost of copyrights. People in developing nations or others who cannot pay use fees for copyrighted works are deprived of education or enjoyment when such a deprivation does not directly benefit anyone. So, given all these indirect costs of granting copyright monopolies, society is justified in imposing a financial cost on copyright holders to rebalance the copyright bargain.

Real estate is typically taxed at a small percentage of an assessed value. If the taxes are not paid, the real estate essentially becomes owned by society. Note that these annual property taxes are in addition to any fees for recording deed transfers, liens, title searches, and such.

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.

This approach could include a digital archive of all copyrighted works. Essentially, upon initial registration of a self-assessed value, a rights holder would be required to send in a digital copy of the work. This copy would be used to determine rights holders for works by means of a digital search. Any work not in this database would be presumed public domain. If the annual tax were not paid, th

From my post in 2009, echoing your points: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

[After citing some articles with statistics on low birth rates in most industrialized countries...]

Again, sick or dead young people can't pay for the health care of old people, nor can sick or dead young people be health care practitioners for old people. You would think old people could see it, but maybe it will take some leadership to help them see it?

Again, this is not to disagree with Michel's main point that people need to
focus on commonality to solve problems. The last paragraph in the first item makes a related analogy to old wars and how the youngjust want the same thing the older generation got. I'd suggest my point just above is one such point of commonality -- the young can not take good care of the old if the young are sick or dead.

That point by David Willetts was actually the quote in my mind when I wrote my previous reply, but I could not find it.

As with the comment on Ireland, that is why the industrialized globe is facing a "Peak Population" crisis, not a "Peak Oil" crisis, even though people are confusing the two, which is odd given solar is now (or soon will be) cheaper than coal. :-)

But, think about it, how many of the industrialized world's current problems are better explained by "Peak Population" rather than "Peak Oil"?

And how much has the "Peak Energy" misrepresentation of the "Peak Oil" fact by people like Catton led to smaller families and made worse the "Peak Population" crisis? Gloomsters and Doomsters are in that sense creating the terrible problems we are facing right now. In Voyage from Yesteryear, James P. Hogan talks about despair versus optimist in a culture, in part based on appreciation of the potential abundance energy in the universe.

The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.

We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essentially had the specific technological ideas in the 1970s we needed to do that, even given refinements since then. So, a focus on zero or negative population growth for the human race as a whole right now, as opposed to just limiting the population currently on Earth (which might be sensible, even though I think we could easily grow 10X on Earth), has created a "Peak Population" crisis that we didn't need to have for 1000 years when we filled up the solar system (and by then, we would have better technology and better social ideology to deal with changing demographics of moving from a triangle to a square of population by age).

Sure, let's set a population target for some carrying capacity on Earth the same way the health and fire departments limit the maximum number of people in a restaurant. But, you don't limit the human population of a city (or the solar system) the same way you limit the number of people that can safely be in a restaurant (the Earth). That is ultimately the mistake that gloomsters like Catton make -- they confuse the two, mostly IMHO from lack of imagination, but also because some profit from artificial scarcity, as well, as

... as he explains in his "The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined" book: https://www.khanacademy.org/ab...

Sal Khan says it won't be right for everyone, but if you are motivated, the "seat time" as a "passive learner" in large lecture courses is mostly wasted time compared to being an "active learner" working through problem sets. He says there that skipping classes was how he and others at MIT were able to take double the normal course load and graduate with high grades and multiple degrees. See:
https://books.google.com/books...

So, in that sense, it might not be surprising or an indictment of college that the GP AC poster was able to miss all the 8am classes for a course and still pass it -- if they did the assignments and otherwise read the text book or other readings and such.

Of course, while class skipping may work for large lecture courses, it may be more problematical for the best sort of small seminar courses where a lot of active participation goes on in class as discussion and is part of the learning process.

So, without knowing the class and what the GP AC did to pass it, it it hard to generalize about college.

That said, you might like these links I put together almost a decade ago on problems with current schooling practices and various alternatives:

"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

... as he explains in his "The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined" book: https://www.khanacademy.org/ab...

Sal Khan says it won't be right for everyone, but if you are motivated, the "seat time" as a "passive learner" in large lecture courses is mostly wasted time compared to being an "active learner" working through problem sets. He says there that skipping classes was how he and others at MIT were able to take double the normal course load and graduate with high grades and multiple degrees. See:
https://books.google.com/books...

So, in that sense, it might not be surprising or an indictment of college that the GP AC poster was able to miss all the 8am classes for a course and still pass it -- if they did the assignments and otherwise read the text book or other readings and such.

Of course, while class skipping may work for large lecture courses, it may be more problematical for the best sort of small seminar courses where a lot of active participation goes on in class as discussion and is part of the learning process.

So, without knowing the class and what the GP AC did to pass it, it it hard to generalize about college.

That said, you might like these links I put together almost a decade ago on problems with current schooling practices and various alternatives:

"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

... as he explains in his "The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined" book: https://www.khanacademy.org/ab...

Sal Khan says it won't be right for everyone, but if you are motivated, the "seat time" as a "passive learner" in large lecture courses is mostly wasted time compared to being an "active learner" working through problem sets. He says there that skipping classes was how he and others at MIT were able to take double the normal course load and graduate with high grades and multiple degrees. See:
https://books.google.com/books...

So, in that sense, it might not be surprising or an indictment of college that the GP AC poster was able to miss all the 8am classes for a course and still pass it -- if they did the assignments and otherwise read the text book or other readings and such.

Of course, while class skipping may work for large lecture courses, it may be more problematical for the best sort of small seminar courses where a lot of active participation goes on in class as discussion and is part of the learning process.

So, without knowing the class and what the GP AC did to pass it, it it hard to generalize about college.

That said, you might like these links I put together almost a decade ago on problems with current schooling practices and various alternatives:

"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

Supposedly Trump would be as welthy or wealthier if he had just put his inherited money in an index fund:
http://www.celebritynetworth.c...
"Depending on which figures you use, if he had taken that $40 million and put it in a simple index fund, he'd have about $3.4 billion in the summer of 2015 (not counting investment fees and taxes), which is in the same neighborhood as what he's worth now [assuming his public claims are accurate]"

Of course, that probably would have been boring to Trump...

Back in 2009 I started an email thread on "the psychopath as peer" on the p2presearch list, and here was a most insightful and cautionary comment by Andy Robinson about using the term "psychopath" to describe anyone (including, in this case, Trump) which amplifies on your concern about indirect diagnosis and labelling:
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...

From: Andy Robinson
Mon Nov 2 16:17:58 CET 2009

I'd be careful with these kinds of classificatory schemas for other reasons
as well - they have a history of complicity in regimes of regimentation and
control, as ways of pathologising difference. While I'd be the first to
endorse the idea that there are real kinds of neurological difference in
cases such as autism and possibly schizophrenia, I'm sceptical of the idea
that real differences can be deduced simply by creating checklists of
"behaviours" or subjective stances. Most often it is a matter of old men
with beards sitting round in smoke-filled rooms deciding arbitrarily which
"behaviours" or subjective dispositions will be classified as "abnormal" and
hence included on these lists - hence the inclusion of such things as
homosexuality. We are never far away from the world of Soviet and Chinese
designations of dissidents as mad - and there have been cases of this kind
in Britain and Holland too. Today we have another sinister development in
Britain of the use of psychiatric testing to jail people "indefinitely" (for
life) for middle-level offences, on the grounds of the supposed risk they
pose. I actually know someone who had to argue with her psychiatrist to
avoid being classified as a psychopath (presumably she means ASPD?) on the
grounds of her political support for property damage in some circumstances.
Psychiatry mobilised as system of control - the opposite of what it should
be doing, which is protecting difference from persecution through
assumptions of sameness. A full recognition of the radicality of
psychological difference has drastic effects for ethical theory and
jurisprudence, amounting to an effective suspension of judgement due to
incommensurability of difference and intangible effects of unjust context -
something recognised in historic ideas of *mens rea*, but increasingly
resisted today.

The historical construction of the "psychopath" is problematic, because it
is clear from the studies of the "London Monster" that the *figure* of the
psychopath in popular imaginations precedes the actual emergence of serial
attackers of this particular kind. Also that the emergence of this figure
is closely connected to the rise of modernity and the alienated city in
praticular. Of course, the biological determinists will then revise the
historical record to attempt to reinterpret earlier instances of mass-murder
in the same terms - but the discursive status was quite different. Anyway -
it is clear that the social fears of the random stranger without social
ties, who will behave in a "predatory" way, arises from the disintegration
of social density in the modern city and the increasing frequency of contact
with people with whom one has no particular affinity or specific relation.
Hence the fear that such a person might be

Riiight. He doesn't need that wallet, he could simply post on the P2P Foundation message board again.

The fact that he can't do even that means he's not Satoshi.

See: https://archive.org/details/Th...

And: http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...

More links on how schooling is not about education, and how schooling is a form of (prison-like) adoption:
http://p2pfoundation.net/John_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Check out John Holt, too. That's all a big reason we homeschool/unschool.

More links: http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Enjoyed your informative post from the trenches, thanks! Especially your point about teacher incentives. You get what you measure -- so, as you imply, if you incentivize teachers to dumb down kids faster and better, that's what you'll get more of.

Long term, I feel a basic income may be part of the answer:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...

As for what you can do in the short-term, it's tough. If you walk away, your (virtually adopted) kids will suffer. And you'll lose your income in a tough economy.. And one less voice for change in the system will be lost. But it's a painful situation if you care about what you do (although you run a high risk of burnout). Don't know what to advise, but at least you are not alone! :-)

See: https://archive.org/details/Th...

And: http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...

More links on how schooling is not about education, and how schooling is a form of (prison-like) adoption:
http://p2pfoundation.net/John_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Check out John Holt, too. That's all a big reason we homeschool/unschool.

More links: http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Enjoyed your informative post from the trenches, thanks! Especially your point about teacher incentives. You get what you measure -- so, as you imply, if you incentivize teachers to dumb down kids faster and better, that's what you'll get more of.

Long term, I feel a basic income may be part of the answer:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...

As for what you can do in the short-term, it's tough. If you walk away, your (virtually adopted) kids will suffer. And you'll lose your income in a tough economy.. And one less voice for change in the system will be lost. But it's a painful situation if you care about what you do (although you run a high risk of burnout). Don't know what to advise, but at least you are not alone! :-)

You are 100% correct. They use environmentalism to destroy economic freedom. http://p2pfoundation.net/Degro... These Utopian fanatics are dangerous.

True to some extent, but imagination and innovation can create resources where there were none before. Trees grow wood mostly just from CO2 in the air and water. Germany has plenty of those. Many new materials are essentially plastic or carbon fiber. Germany could have invented all that with chemistry instead of going to war. That it did not is a failure of the German imagination back then.

Right now, the state-of-the-art in Germany for a new home is not to even need a furnace:
"No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in 'Passive Houses'"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12...
"DARMSTADT, Germany â" From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace. "

Other things I've written about that, including another "Downfall" parody where Hitler rails against abundance and open source and productive imaginative engineers: :-)
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Granite can be melted into building material and also separated into a variety of elements. Seawater has just about every element in it and Germany has access to the sea. It may be more profitable to get something like aluminum from a specific ore abundant in it, but with the right technology and enough energy (like from fusion power), you can get pretty much any element anywhere on the planet. Ignoring what is possibly now or soon with nanotechnology, here are the basic chemical paths proposed around 1980 for use in turning lunar ore (basically granite) into a variety of materials:
"Flowsheet and process equations for the HF acid-leach process"
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/...

So, Germany could (in theory) have done that all instead of launching two world wars for "lebensraum" and access to foreign materials -- if it had invested more in the chemistry of production than the chemistry of destruction.

Germany does have some limited iron production, BTW; but not much. However, Germany probably also has a lot more as-yet-undiscovered ores and such in mountains and underground (like perhaps a mile or two down). They are just harder to find or get to than ones that are obvious from the surface. But if Germany had made more of an effort, including creation of better technologies for prospecting for ores, maybe it would have found various ores at home? Also, while I'm not a big fan of seabed mining for environmental reasons, that is another possibility, and in any case, they show the possibility of finding new resources by looking deep within the earth:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...
"Mr. Dettweiler has now turned from recovering lost treasures to prospecting for natural ones that litter the seabed: craggy deposits rich in gold and silver, copper and cobalt, lead and zinc. A new understanding of marine geology has led to the discovery of hundreds of these unexpected ore bodies, known as massive sulfides because of their sulfurous nature."

Also, I've read that one reason Germany did so much for so long militarily in WWII (as imports were cut off) was that it put in place an intensive recycling program. Ignoring the holocaust and forced labor parts of it, it showed what was possible (discussed I think in the book "Other Homes and Garbage". As you imply, right now the automotive industry has become a net producer of metal from car recycling. But, even granted the industry needed some meta

Yes, bad things are happening. But unless we remember and celebrate the past successes, we may more easily give way to despair.

Examples of problematical episodes from US history: The McCarthy era in the 1950s, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s, the US Eugenics movement in the 1930s and before -- where the Nazis got the idea, the lynching of black citizens in the South along with a US white supremacy movement (again, long before "Arianism" took hold in Germany), the tragic Civil War of the 1870s, and many more such things... Plus so much problematical foreign policy, including grabbing big parts of Mexico and invading Canada multiple times, not to mention the systematic genocide committed against the Native Americans to steal their land (the US Army's primary function in early years was taking part in all that). The USA may criticize China's "human rights" record, but the US past is filled with many horrors that may be far worse than things China is doing now (even in Tibet etc.).

Governments always demand to be respected in various ways. Those ways may change over time. Yes, there are bad trends, and bad episodes, some still ongoing and growing like you and others including me point to, but the USA has muddled through them in the past. Some wrongs have been righted decades later (even as "justice delayed is justice denied"); others have yet to be resolved. Generally, the successes are helped along by efforts from citizens, as in: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. (Margaret Mead)".

I can urge you to read "A People's History of the United States" to get a broader perspective on all this regarding the USA. It is a perspective not taught in the past in most US classrooms or probably still in most civics classes for immigrants. It is the history of US citizens struggling repeatedly to control a government and industry (the two being intertwined), to keep them accountable to human needs. It is full of examples both of successes and failures. Here is an online version, but it is probably available in any major book store:
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...

Another good book is John Gardner's 1971 book "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society". Here I quote what he says and comment on it:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
""As I was browsing in a university bookstore recently, I heard an apple-cheeked girl say to her companion, "The truth is that our society and everything in it is in a state of decay." I studied her carefully and I must report that she did not seem even slightly decayed. But what of the society as a whole? Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly grasp all the implications. ... Only the blind and complacent could fail to recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us -- in government, in education, ..."
John Gardner goes on to say that every generation faces the problem of renewing itself to meet new challenges emerging from the very success of the old ways of doing things. And he suggests that social values are not some drying up old reservoir, but rather a reservoir of variable capacity that must be recharged anew in every generation. [He also suggests every generation must re-learn for itself what the words carved on the stone monuments really mean.]
Democracy -- use it or lose it.
Free speech on the internet -- use it or lose it.
Social capital -- use it or lose it?
P2P -- use it or lose it? :-)
Again, Gardner's book was written in 1971, so, about forty years ago. Although it's true the last thirty years in the USA has prett

http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

I agree some technoligies should be banned or heavily taxed because they create unpaid for externalities like pollution. However, in general, what we need are more efficient technologies, technologies that create new resources out of abundant materials (like fusion of hydrogen), and also technologies that let us expand out into space (or responsibly in the ocean or desert or Antarctic, or underground).

The human imagination is the ultimate resource, The more (educated, well-fed) people you have, the more imagination.
"The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment"
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

If I told you that someone had (really) just invented fusion energy (or dirt cheap solar), and someone else had invented automated indoor agriculture, and someone else had invented 3D printers that can recycle 100% of everything they print in a non-polluting way -- even electronics and houses, and together these technologies could feed a trillion people on the planet and house them and clothe them and so on, would your feelings change about "over population"? BTW, we are not very far from all three of these technologies or equivalents.

Even if for aesthetic or environmental reasons we might want to limit the population of humans on the Earth at any one time, the carrying capacity of the solar system, even just with essentially known technologies discussed in 1980, is probably in the quadrillions of humans (plus much more of everything else in supporting ecosystems).
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/...

In any case, the bigger issue is that populations of industrialized countries are peaking already with non-immigrant female citizens in most generally having less than two or so kids each, so less than replacement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

As I wrote here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"As with the comment on Ireland, that is why the industrialized globe is facing a "Peak Population" crisis, not a "Peak Oil" crisis, even though people are confusing the two, which is odd given solar is now (or soon will be) cheaper than coal. :-)
But, think about it, how many of the industrialized world's current problems are better explained by "Peak Population" rather than "Peak Oil"?
And how much has the "Peak Energy" misrepresentation of the "Peak Oil" fact by people like Catton led to smaller families and made worse the "Peak Population" crisis? Gloomsters and Doomsters are in that sense creating the terrible problems we are facing right now. In Voyage from Yesteryear, James P. Hogan talks about despair versus optimist in a culture, in part based on appreciation of the potential abundance energy in the universe.
The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun.So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.
We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essen

"I think you know we now live in a world where you can make a fairly benign statement and their exists a very real possibility someone with an axe to grind may strip it of its context and use it against you. "

Nothing new; see Cardinal De Richelieu (1585 -- 1642): "Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive, and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows."

As a socially-minded countess who lived through WWII told me once somewhat tounge-in-cheek yet also very seriously (paraphrasing, and she probably got it from elsewhere in those times):
"If you think, don't talk;
If you talk, don't write;
If you write, don't publish;
If you publish, don't sign."

So, again, this is not a new issue. That is one reason for the protections in the US constitution against "fishing expeditions" in people's lives. "Selective enforcement" of the law or "selective scrutiny" of political adversaries is a corrosive thing in a democracy.

But the problem is, in order to make social change on a broad scale, such as Martin Luther King was involved with regarding civil rights, is that you have to think, talk, write, publish, and sign. And as I've said before, that is the problem with an emphasis on security through "encryption" as opposed to community if you are interested in social change, because in order to make social change you need to spread a message generally in a very public and committed way. Related comments by me:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Wow, she was also an aunt of my father! Small world! :-) I think we might have commented on slashdot on that coincidence a few years back? But you'd have to be pretty old if she was your aunt, as opposed to, like me, a great aunt? I met her once with my father when she was still in her own home, and maybe incidentally another time or two perhaps (decades ago).

Glad that "open sourcing" runs in the family. :-) Although I might feel differently about open sourcing my body or DNA than open sourcing some software I've written. :-) Still, it is kind of a mental calculation of the risk that personal DNA sequences could be used against one or one's family somehow versus the benefits of medical breakthroughs for your own family and also everyone, and also that DNA is not that hard to get via copies of medical samples or from trash or whatever...

I've put some links in other replies to ideas about health sensemaking to help everyone live longer and healthier lives.
https://www.newschallenge.org/...

And while I was born and raised in the USA, maybe it shows some Dutch roots that I believe we can make more "land" for a growing population by reclaiming it from "space" in addition to the sea. Of course, with falling birth rated in industrialized countries, long term population growth does not seem to be one of our problems/blessings, even if many people start living a lot longer.
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Health may be also be partially a function of what you do relative to your genes and environment, so her preferences, say, for orange juice and herring might have worked better for herself than for others in different situations. For health commonalities, one can read about "Blue Zones" and also I like Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work overall emphasizing eating more vegetables (but quibble about some parts).
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

Attitude and "morale" is also a surprisingly big part, for many reasons including because it affects your connectedness to your community from which other good things flow. Probably easier to have higher morale in the Netherlands than in a much crazier place like the USA though. :-)

Contrast:
http://www.findingdutchland.co...
"According to Unicef's most recent Child Well Being in Rich Countries survey, Dutch kids ranked as the happiest kids in the world. Dutch kids led the way in three out of the five categories, namely- material well being, educational well being, and behavior and risks."

With:
https://www.adbusters.org/maga...
""The reason our children's lives [in the UK] are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""

Anyway, we're all not going to live that long unless we sort out some of the wealth inequality and distribution issues given the spread of AI, robotics, and other automation that makes most human labor less and less valuable economically. The following may sound silly in the Netherlands or other parts of Western Europe, but it sound all too plausible in the USA given current politics:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"But that's stupid." I said, "What possible justification is there for a whole population of people to be living on welfare or t

You seem to me to be aiming to imply "involuntary" within an arbitrary legal framework where the person who first twiddled some bits together can control what others later do with that set of bits. I'm assuming you are implying that those other people sharing the original pattern further without permission is "involuntary" sharing by the person who first put the pattern together. I guess I can see that perspective on "sharing", even if it is defining "sharing" in a way that emphasizes (using contract law) the preferences of the original creator over the preferences of any current holders of a copy of the bit sequence.

If you have a digital copy of a recent song released under a typical commercial license, it is illegal in the USA to give a copy of that song to someone else (maybe with some fair use exceptions). You have a local copy of something, but the law says you can't share it with those who want or need it based on the license chosen by the author or the current copyright holder. That is the sharing I'm talking about.

What if it was a song like, say, "Desperado" and you were too poor to buy a copy to give to some young guy like, say, Aaron Schwartz about to do something really alienated and foolish? :-( Thankfully there are still other options:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics...
"And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone
[other great parts omitted out of copyright fears]"

It is really a very odd idea though, when you think about it, that some initial distributor of the song (let alone a government-funded research paper) gets to prevent you from copying, modifying, and/or redistributing a pattern of bits stored on hardware in your possession. It seems very undemocratic as it opens up the possibility that on the flimsiest of evidence anyone who claims any sort of copyright on anything can demand an inspection of the contents of any data storage to make sure a crime has not been committed?

In ancient times, someone inspired to write a song might have been seen to have received a transmission from some godly muse. From that perspective, by what right can such a person enter into a contract to restrict the redistribution of that muse's work? Isn't such a restriction imposed by the government an interference with the divine as well as with charitable human society?

I'm not saying I necessarily see it that way myself, but it's an example of how there are all sorts of ways to look at these things. The way that is dominant in the current legal system is the result of past political struggles and is not the only perspective. As is mentioned here:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
"Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a "leisure class". As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies - gods, the "great chain of being" etc. - are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new "rational" world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites. That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology."

Another perspective:
http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs...
"In India, where monopolisation is mostly frowned upon especially with the respect to creative aspects, Creative Commons seems like a fitting option to be adopted."

Or further:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/...
""There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the laun

A lot of work goes into creating a good API. Copyright should be greatly reduced or eliminated if we care about human progress, but bad law passed by Congress is still law. The Supreme Court will probably rule against these computer scientists, and that may make things worse than ambiguity. "For a limited time" has already been deemed by the Supreme Court to be effectively equal to infinity minus one in the "Eldred v. Ashcroft" decision instead of the Supreme Court ruling copyright longer than a few years was now defeating "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which IMHO would have been a better ruling. Given that, what should happen is that either Congress should change the copyright laws or we should change the Constitution and withdraw from various copyright treaties. But that would interfere with the Constitutional right for existing big businesses and long dead authors to make a profit.... Of course, it's also been shown that profit is no motivation for creativity, but that is conveniently ignored in a capitalist society:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

See also:
http://www.neurope.eu/article/...
"Ignoring these exclusive rights - the copyright monopoly - allowed Eastern Europe to leapfrog 20 years of development. This is a consistent pattern through economic history: it is only the countries that are geopolitically dominant at a particular time that seek to impose their exclusive rights upon others, as a means of kicking away the ladder to the top. When the United States was in its infancy, those who illegally copied science, production plans, and useful arts from Great Britain were proclaimed national heroes. It was only recently - the 1980s - that the United States began aggressively pushing its exclusive rights regime as part of being a superpower, and as an integral means of maintaining that superpower."

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/...
""There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?" "

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since. ...
    To most of us who are professors, finding gems to polish is not our principal problem. Recently, Leon Lederman, one of the leaders of American science published a pamphlet called Science -- The End of the Frontier. The title is a play on Science -- The Endless Frontier, the title of the 1940's report by Vannevar Bush that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation and helped launch the Golden Age described above. Lederman's point is that American science is being stifled by the failure of the government to put enough money into it. I confess to being the anonymous Caltech professor quoted in one of Lederman's sidebars to the effect that my main responsibility is no longer to do science, but rather it is to feed my graduate students' children. Lederman's appeal was not well received in Congress, where it was pointed out that financial support for science is not an entitlement program, nor in the press, where the Washington Post had fun speculating about hungry children haunting the halls of Caltech. Nevertheless, the problem Lederman wrote about is very real and very painful to those of us who find that our time, attention and energy are now consumed by raising funds rather than teaching and doing research. However, although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in 1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch."

See also from 10 years ago!
http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

And somewhat more recently:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

A collection of general links I put together on schooling:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since. ...
    To most of us who are professors, finding gems to polish is not our principal problem. Recently, Leon Lederman, one of the leaders of American science published a pamphlet called Science -- The End of the Frontier. The title is a play on Science -- The Endless Frontier, the title of the 1940's report by Vannevar Bush that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation and helped launch the Golden Age described above. Lederman's point is that American science is being stifled by the failure of the government to put enough money into it. I confess to being the anonymous Caltech professor quoted in one of Lederman's sidebars to the effect that my main responsibility is no longer to do science, but rather it is to feed my graduate students' children. Lederman's appeal was not well received in Congress, where it was pointed out that financial support for science is not an entitlement program, nor in the press, where the Washington Post had fun speculating about hungry children haunting the halls of Caltech. Nevertheless, the problem Lederman wrote about is very real and very painful to those of us who find that our time, attention and energy are now consumed by raising funds rather than teaching and doing research. However, although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in 1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch."

See also from 10 years ago!
http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

And somewhat more recently:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

A collection of general links I put together on schooling:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Great dynamic analysis of engineering social systems! For ways around this via skunkworks development, see William L. Livingston's writings, like "Have Fun At Work":
http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun...

From a review:
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipm...
"It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system.
This is the message of William L. Livingston, a mechanical engineer with over 100 patents and decades of industrial experience. Several books and a newsletter detail his disturbing but important worldview. ...
``Have Fun at Work'' (1988, ISBN 0-937063-05-3, $24.95) is the basic work. ...
The book sketches a different social structure that is better equipped to cope with complexity: the Skunkworks. The term comes from a legendary aircraft development shop that produced the U-2 and Blackbird aircraft. In general, a Skunkworks is a small (3--5) team of battle-hardened, generalist engineers equipped with the latest in software tools for simulating the behavior of all the involved systems (mechanical, electrical, software, and social).
On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there.
Livingston's more recent work, ``Friends in High Places'' (1990, ISBN 0-937063-06-1, $28.50), spends less time discussing organizational pathologies and more time discussing the Skunkworks procedure. It is a somewhat more positive, less bitter work than ``Have Fun at Work.''"

I also think free and open source collaborations via "stigmergy" are another way around this, where people collaborate by adding to a shared digital artifact.
http://p2pfoundation.net/Stigm...
"3. Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.
4. Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent upon stigmergy. "

Even at IBM Research, technologies like the Jikes Java compiler only got picked up by other groups because they were made open source. Otherwise the organizational barriers within a big organization like IBM would be too strong to use the tools. That was something mentioned somewhere by one of the authors as the biggest surprise of open sourcing Jikes, that other IBMers suddenly were using it.
http://jikes.sourceforge.net/

By contrast, back aound the same time Jikes went open source, I desperately wanted to try IBM's embedded Smalltalk (acquired from OTI) in a research project at IBM instead of using VxWorks for the portable IBM Personal Speech Assistant (a handheld speech recognizer and TTS system as a coprocesser to a Palm Pilot, a forerunner in a way to Siri and Google Voice). That other group said I would need to come up with about US$200,000+ worth of funding to their team before they would make their code available for use even just inside IBM, claiming they would have to dedicate a support person to it. Sadly, that was not feasible; I was only a contractor, and this was my own idea because I loved Smalltalk. So that technology did not get used at all in that project. Too bad for that group, because the then IBM chairman Lou Gerstner asked for one of the devices for his office to show people -- and wouldn't it have been nice for that IBM group if their technology had been used instead of or in addition to VxWorks?

If IBM/OTI Embedded Small

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition. ...
    We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
    It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus. ..."

So, the academics you knew were from before the "Big Crunch". Such people advised me, from their success, and meaning well, to get a PhD. But the world I faced was post-Big-Crunch and so their advice did not actually make much sense (although it took me a long time to figure that out).

More related links:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Caltech Vice-Provost on pyramid scheme: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

From 2004, and it has only gotten worse: http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

Still, also problems in science for anyone: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

More by me from 2009:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

We can and should do better than this as a society.

My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

One example (not saying it will work, but is it tabletop physics/chemistry on the cheap):
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Even most millionaires would be better off with a basic income IMHO:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Caltech Vice-Provost on pyramid scheme: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

From 2004, and it has only gotten worse: http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

Still, also problems in science for anyone: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

More by me from 2009:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

We can and should do better than this as a society.

My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

One example (not saying it will work, but is it tabletop physics/chemistry on the cheap):
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Even most millionaires would be better off with a basic income IMHO:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?"

That said, sure, I've always likes Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. He explores how they work and how they don't work. Asimov came from strong Jewish religious tradition, and it seems to me likely aspects of religion influenced his thoughts on them. A big part of religion is about how we interact with other people to be in community with them. So, to some extent, what the Navy is asking for is religious robots. See also Albert Einstein on "Religion and Science" and how science tells us nothing about how things *should* be,

Intelligent robots will probably eventually gain human rights, like in "The Bicentennial Man" by Isaac Asimov.

And as in my first point, an ethical and intelligent robot might ask, "Is War a Racket"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

A big reason for keeping humans in the loop is in theory their veto power when things get too far out of hand. However, science and technology has gotten ever better at shaping humans into killing machines for their own kinds, sadly, if you even just look at how many more soldiers fire their guns in combat now than 100 years ago,

So yes, let us build Gandhi-bots! :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

And let's have them act as nannies to a new generation of more ethical humans like James P. Hogan wrote about: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
http://p2pfoundation.net/Voyag...
"What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!"

Anyway, even if it misses the big picture about post-scarcity as in my sig, this sounds like one of the more worthwhile things the Navy has spent money on recently.

Thanks for the reply to this and my other in this thread. Yes, "supposed" was intentional. :-) My point about Google's service offerings and Android was not to express a preference, just to point out why Google's Android had an edge in adoption. I'd rather use services that spy/track/advertise less, even if you still have to assume for prudence that all communications are logged and decryptable.

And for my other comment and your reply, I read on Glassdoor a lot of people inside Mozilla are unhappy with the current direction anyway, so agreeing with them could have been a plus, who knows. :-)
http://www.glassdoor.com/Revie...
"Con: "And if you work in Firefox OS expect no understanding of what's happening and when" in 3 reviews"
And: "Most of the org is in service to Firefox OS - this is necessary given the company's direction, but sucks resources from other projects." And: "They're now spending $100m/yr on developers. It's very hard to see what that's achieving. Seems as if top talent is wasting its time there compared to what's being achieved at Google, Apple and others. One reason is massive technical debt and an insane codebase."

To respond to your points on cost and underserved markets, it sounds like you know a lot about Mozilla. I won't disagree that their strategy is plausible. However, I've seen a similar approach not work our well for the OLPC as an entire new software ecosystem, so I remain skeptical. If even Microsoft can't succeed in the smart phone market, is Mozilla likely to?

Here were some comments I wrote about five years ago on the OLPC project as a software developer who participated in the Give-One-Get-One program (getting two and giving two):
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"Imagine, Google and Verizon could even make a promise now to customers -- buy your Droid through Verizon, and in two years, if you continue your cell phone plan, we will give you the latest Droid version and if you return the old one to a Verizon store, we'll send it to materially poor kids loaded with educational software that teaches them how to read, write, and do math. And with bluetooth, and WiFi, the Droid could even have some software that works along the lines that Sugar aspired to do, with kids collaborating together. What a deal -- and it might greatly boost current sales. :-) Maybe someone should forward this note to someone they know at Google or Verizon? :-) Seriously, what US teacher would not buy a Droid over an iPhone knowing it was going to teach some poor kid to read in two years? (Of course, Apple might eventually have to follow suit. :-) And that gives me and the rest of the free software developer world two years to write all that free software for those kids. :-) "

As I suggest there, hand-me-down phones (perhaps with new batteries) may well be much cheaper than anything else for emerging markets. And those phones run Android plus some other OSes. I also think it unlikely Firefox will meet any special low-power goals or cost goals that Android phones would not meet. Most apps are not that performance critical so Java on Android is good enough, and Java will probably be more power efficient than JavaScript in Firefox OS. So where is the power savings or other costs savings really going to come from? I like ideas like "Design For The Other 90%", but it is still hard to beat a free Android phone given Moore's law and continued falling prices. The Kyocera Hydro is now US$30 on Amazon. It is better than probably any Android phone from 2009 when I wrote the above -- especially the G1 Android Phone I got as an Android developer which dies eight months later. In another couple years that same Hydro phone might be US$20 or less in the USA. And it would probably be already much cheaper now if purchas

Like at Chernobyl, as I suggest here: http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"At SUNY Stony Brook, I knew one grad student who studied wildlife (turtles) in a reservation around a nuclear contaminated area, and while there was more mutations, in general, the wildlife was thriving [because human activities including hunting and habitat destruction were effectively excluded]. ... So, despite the problems, half-seriously, I suggest designating the NY Adirondack Park (where I live) for a nuclear waste disposal of glassified (vitrified) apple-sized lumps of waste. :-) That would be very good for a resurgence of wildlife in the Park. I might move out, but I would know a place I love would be "forever wild" for sure. :-)"

See also: "Chernobyl Area Becomes Wildlife Haven"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Very insightful! The Culture series is great for exploring these ides and clashes.

And on your water example, there was an episode in Star Trek: Voyager where Neelix is first introduced and he considers water a rare luxury. There is a a funny scene onboard Voyager where he surrounds himself with glasses of water the way we today might surround ourselves with gold and diamonds and i7 cores. But as you said, Neelix did not then drink himself to death, and he went on to find other useful and interesting things to do with his time.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik...

See also James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" (VFY) sci-fi novel which has a gift economy in it where people acquire status by being good at something and using it for the public benefit. There is a clash of cultures there (one from old Earth similar to ours today) which includes a scene where some aristrocratic person in the old culture is going on about how fine some new silverware or something is (the old status system in play) when the two people she is trying to impress know such things could be had just for the asking in the new culture (which is powered by fusion energy and automated production lines). I think VFY really addresses the culture shock of the transition, something so brilliant I did not recognize how insightful it was when I first read the novel, thinking instead how silly that the old Earthlings could not get that things have changed and abundance is there for the asking. Sadly, I know see how prescient James P. Hogan was.
http://p2pfoundation.net/Voyag...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
http://www.baenebooks.com/chap...

Sadly, the late James P. Hogan's site seems to be down recently:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...

So I'll quote this here at length:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
-----
An Earth set well into the next century is going through one of its periodical crises politically, and it looks as if this time they might really press the button for the Big One. If it happens, the only chance for our species to survive would be by preserving a sliver of itself elsewhere, which in practical terms means another star, since nothing closer is readily habitable. There isn't time to organize a manned expedition of such scope from scratch. However, a robot exploratory vessel is under construction to make the first crossing to the Centauri system, and it with a crash program it would be possible to modify the designs to carry sets of human genetic data coded electronically. Additionally, a complement of incubator/nanny/tutor robots can be included, able to convert the electronic data back into chemistry and raise/educate the ensuing offspring while others prepare surface habitats and supporting infrastructure, when a habitable world is discovered. By the time we meet the "Chironians," their culture is into its fifth generation.

In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compe

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

The film begins by studying the Zero Tolerance policies in public schools in the 1990s, which were designed to eradicate drugs and weapons at schools. By arbitrary application of this policy via unchecked authority, soon nail clippers, key chains, and aspirin were considered dangerous and violations of the rules. This policy, combined with Columbine-inspired fear, has resulted in kindergartners being suspended for using pointed fingers as guns in games of cops and robbers and students being suspended for having Midol and Alka-Seltzer. This policy has turned schools into Kafka-esque nightmares, absurd and demoralizing. Increasingly, issues once dealt with by the guidance counselor or a trip to the principal's office are now handled by handcuffs and tasers in the hands of police.[1]

Students are denied basic constitutional rights. They can be searched, drug-tested, forced to incriminate themselves, and capriciously punished. Surveillance cameras, locker searches, and metal detectors are shown to be commonplace. Courts routinely uphold the school's right to do whatever they choose, creating an atmosphere of fear and loathing, anger and despair. The physical structure of these institutions are themselves oppressive, resembling prisons in many ways, yet even more dreary.[2]

Ironically, the film shows that the drastic measures schools employ are ineffective as tools of protection. Security cameras did nothing more than film the Columbine massacre for news outlets. This oppressiveness does nothing to advance learning. Various teachers state on camera that this atmosphere is frustrating to work in, with all curriculum handed down from the state and that this "one-size-fits-all" approach doesn't work well with human beings.[3]

Even more harmful than this physical oppression is the use and abuse of psychiatric tools. The rampant diagnoses of ADD and similar conditions are shown to be intimately connected to pharmaceutical companies' promotional activities. The alleged disorder known as ODD - oppositional defiance disorder - is used to further control kids by serving as a gateway for further authoritative measures, often of the extreme kind.[3] Ritalin and other drugs are being over-prescribed. These strong drugs can have dire consequences, including suicide and murder. Some school shooters, including the Columbine killers, have used or been on these drugs.

This film touches on an area almost completely ignored in any discussion of education - the genesis of compulsory education. Public schools are modeled after a Prussian system, one geared towards creating compliant soldiers.[4] Later, it was modified during the industrial revolution to train people for the work force (hence the bells signaling movement).[5] Ultimately, the film argues that more money, smaller classrooms, better trained teachers and other bromides won't produce effective education because the problems are deep and institutional. In director Cevin Soling's words, "I was converted by teachers, by a number of people I interviewed is that the main mission of school is submission to authority."[5]

---

Lots more links:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Sad almost all the discussion here misses the deeper issue of compulsory schooling...

I'd agree with Joe_Dragon that apprenticeships can make a lot of sense. Your post makes me think about something else, putting a few factoids together in a new way. I'm thinking, speculating a bit from what I saw in academia the 1970s and 1980s, that there was a time, decades ago (like before the 1970s) when academia was growing so fast (exponentially) that people from industry without PhDs or much anything beyond real knowledge could become well-respected reasonably-paid teachers (unlike today's somewhat disrespected and poorly-paid adjuncts). In the 1970s, exponential growth of academia stopped (as David Goodstein points out). So, at that point, there came a glut of PhDs on the market with few job prospects since academia kept churning them out at a rate appropriate for exponential growth that was no longer happening. Working conditions for most new faculty plummeted (supply and demand). It became impossible to get even a mediocre college teaching job without a PhD (or at least a Masters for lesser schools). So, academia over the last couple decades became staffed with *only* academics with little real-world life experience which it generated internally. The two-way interchange between industry and academia became essentially one-way, academia to industry. Add to this in the USA the loss of the family farm, loss of good hands-on union mechanical/electrical jobs with apprenticeships, the expansion of the school year, and the increase of opaque black boxes in industry, and the result is few entering academia had any practical non-academic experience or had any way of getting any (like by summer jobs). This of course is all a bit of an over-simplification, yet is may explain why courses are less useful now? References:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

More links here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

See also my: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

Bottom line: most real education is "self-directed education", whether it is in the garden, in the shop, in the library, or in the "classroom". However, self-directed does not mean we do not learn much from other people, whether face-to-face or through their writings or recordings. Thus, you learned from people who wrote the textbooks, even if the "teacher" you say regularly face-to-face may have had little to offer.

You may be beyond this, but this is probably a good way to learn computing almost from the ground up these days:
http://www.nand2tetris.org/

Or one can build programmable computers from Redstone in Minecraft? :-)

It sounds like anyone who teaches optimization by teaching assembly probably does not know much about optimization, since assembly is just a distraction from it, especially given today's compilers can generally write better assembly for most CPUs than most programmers ever could. The real optimization challenges are in algorithms, thinking about prioritization of values and managing complexity (of both data and implementations)...

Nand-to-Tetris is a bottom up book. "Data and Reality" by William Kent is a complementary book that is in-a-sense top-down:
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm

I'd also recommend playing around with Forth (or a latter day equivalent like "Joy") to get a good sense of factoring problem well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language)

My kid st

Could boys perhaps be more susceptible to vitamin D deficiency and mitochondrial dysfunction? http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

One of the reasons we homeschool/unschool is that school especially these days push intense academics on all kids way too early, and boys especially suffer for that. Echoing your point, at least one study I've heard of shows that the focus on early academics is depriving children of the early experiences they need in nature and with water and sandboxes that kids need to later have an intuition about scientific and engineering things (so that they know what the symbols for mass, force, volume, rates of change, and so on actually physically represent).
http://www.ci.pleasanton.ca.us/services/recreation/gb/gb-playessentials.html
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
http://susanlemons.wordpress.com/category/early-academics/

And then the schools push parents to drug the non-compliant children...
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

Almost any school is filled with large numbers of well-meaning good-hearted hard-working adults who really care about children. The problem is they and the children are trapped in "an abstraction that has escaped its handlers":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

Here is a psychologist saying the only reason affluent kids do better on math is that their parents teach it to them since most schools are terrible at teaching it:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools

The iPad has a lot of math-learning games for it that your son might like. We just got several for our kid. Here is one:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/motion-math-wings/id508228412?mt=8

See also:
http://www.autismspeaks.org/autism-apps
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/14/tech/gaming-gadgets/ipad-autism/index.html
http://www.squidoo.com/ipad-for-autism

The directness of the interface is probably a big win for that situation.

There are lots of interactive online resources for learning math of course, and PC simulation environments like "Scratch", and lots of other such tools you can use together with your kid (like geometry related ones).

Just watch out from becoming even more vitamin D deficient by being even more inside using fascinating computing gadgets. A focus on early academics instead of outdoor play also harms kids in that sense. My speculation about that:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005083.html

See also the writings of John Holt and Seymour Papert on math education, including Papert's idea that to learn any foreign language, whether French or Math, it is best to be im

"I know this because I emailed him looking for a citation once, and his assistant returned my email and told me"

Citation please? :-) Or are anecdotes, like in Gattos' story, permissible as evidence in discussion?

Yes, in one of Gatto's books he says he wants readers to research this for themselves. See:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue8.htm
"Despite its title, Underground History isn't a history proper, but a collection of materials toward a history, embedded in a personal essay analyzing why mass compulsion schooling is unreformable. The history I have unearthed is important to our understanding; it's a good start, I believe, but much remains undone. The burden of an essay is to reveal its author so candidly and thoroughly that the reader comes fully awake. You are about to spend twenty-five to thirty hours with the mind of a schoolteacher, but the relationship we should have isn't one of teacher to pupil but rather that of two people in conversation. I'll offer ideas and a theory to explain things and you bring your own experience to bear on the matters, supplementing and arguing where necessary. Read with this goal before you and I promise your money's worth. It isn't important whether we agree on every detail.
    A brief word on sources. I've identified all quotations and paraphrases and given the origin of many (not all) individual facts, but for fear the forest be lost in contemplation of too many trees, I've avoided extensive footnoting. So much here is my personal take on things that it seemed dishonest to grab you by the lapels that way: of minor value to those who already resonate on the wavelength of the book, useless, even maddening, to those who do not."

Gatto may play fast and loose with some things, but overall he paints a coherent big picture and the core points of his arguments are easily found through some web searches. Here are two examples both with a bunch of citations on similar themes to what Gatto says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
http://www.social-ecology.org/2003/10/the-emergence-of-compulsory-schooling-and-anarchist-resistance/

I collected lots of links to a variety of authors who say similar things here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

Or see:
http://studentliberation.com/main-anti-school-literature.html

What Gatto does have is a free online book that goes into depth into this based on his award-winning thirty years of experience teaching in the NYC public school system. Disagree with him and his perspspective and analysis perhaps, but at least he writes from a tremendous amount of first-hand experience.

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
    Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

However, schooling is certainly effective in keeping young people out of the work force. What most of the comments here seem to ignore is that 200 years ago, children at age 4 or 5 were working on farms and in mines and in factories. Now, with automation and electric motors, children are out of the work force generally until they turn 21 (or longer if they go to grad school). Things have changed so much, and many people posting here seem unaware of that. At this point, most work is "make work" related to guarding or pointless zero-sum competition.

I agree with your point about decision makers being out-of-touch with emerging technological realities. See my site for more on that.

And see also:
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/
http://anwot.org/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

Vitamin D deficiency is a hazard of indoors work, and contributes to why academia in general is messed up (along with other parts of the industrialized world). Likewise for people not getting enough good nutrition from omega 3s and vegetables -- poor health just makes people messed up. Other ideas I've collected on improving health:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Here are some links I put together for context about current academia:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

See especially:

      "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/

And one other that is not there:
    http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Good luck.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
in US academia is part of the reason for that.
See also: http://disciplined-minds.com/

Lots more links: http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

What we need is a basic income for all (or similar things), which would allow those with intellectual aspirations to live their lives at a graduate student level without senior academics having such life-and-death control over whether other thinkers can lead a life of thought. Likewise, those who wanted a life in the arts or a life raising children could focus on those things. Our society has become so materially wealthy by everything we have learned over the millennia that we no longer need to live by the old scarcity myths that there is not enough to go around for everyone to have a reasonable good life materially even if few choose to be materially productive) given modern industry, robotics, AI, cheap communications, youtube educational videos, etc.) And beyond that, we've even got at least another good 1000 years of exponential growth possible if we expand into space in the local solar system and build space habitats.

"tl;dr"

Your loss. The Skills of Xanadu is an amazing story, especially for having been written in the 1950s. It inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext, which we are essentially using to communicate right now.

As for forests, the Native Americans were surrounded by them, and probably did not plant most of them. So, you can have "permaculture" without too much work. See also:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

If robots are more expensive than Chinese labor, why do we see things like this article?
http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen."

What would it take to convince you that robots can be used for mining, manufacturing, and for services if we truly wanted to do that at this point?
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005926.html
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

People for decades wanted to make agricultural robotics but were stymied by the economics of our society and its acceptance of cheap (slave wages) illegal labor. Give it a decade to adjust and we'll see robots in the Georgia and Alabama fields.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_robot
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/2009/04/autonomous-grape-vine-pruner.html

Then you will see how software can be eaten. :-)

What are "raw materials" but stuff collected from the surroundings? Robots can build new factories too (as if we did not have more than enough already). Don't confuse the fact that for historical reasons some few humans claim entitlement to "rent" on accessing resources they control socially with the issue that robots can increasingly supply substantially all the labor needed to use resources to make stuff. See Marshall Brain's Manna for one idea on how that might work economically:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm

And to see how robotic mining is emerging:
"Rio on edge of new world of robotic mining"
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6cc3482-6756-11df-a932-00144feab49a.html

That all said, it can be fun to do things and make stuff, especially when we are deciding for ourselves what to do or make. Look at how much people like Minecraft. So, it's not clear we need the robots in a big way. The alternative is to rethink the work so it is fun. How many trillions of one meter cubes have been mined over the last two years in Minecraft? People even pay for the privilege of doing so.

"Practical cold fusion, or anything that delivers on the promises of cold fusion, would nail it."

On cold fusion, see:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/03/dr-george-miley-to-present-on-lenr-at-march-23-conference-will-awareness-of-new-energy-source-spread/
http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?page_id=522

The Widom-Larsen idea is that strange things happen at the surface of metals, where protons and electrons can become slow neutrons which then are absorbed which leads to conventional radioactive decay.

Or on solar panels, a commend by the director of GE's research lab:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

In theory, to have space habitats, all we really need to do is launch one robotic seed factory to the moon, and then have it make all the space craft and habitats there. No need for CO2. And rising CO2 is really the least of our problems as a species -- it may already have forestalled another ice age we are due for. Much of it may have come from topsoil depletion by bad farming practices, too. That is solveable with relatively small amounts of energy and materials like so by grinding up rock: http://remineralize.org/

A little idea sketch I made about three years ago of what it would take to evacuate all humans from the Earth into space habitats:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004037.html
"Current launch costs are about US$10,000 a pound. People on starvation diets might weigh about 100 pounds. So, that's about US$1 million per person for launch costs using today's technology in small production runs. I feel it reasonable to assume that if we were going to launch billions of people into space, launch costs would come down by at least a factor of ten to US$100K per person, considering how people are already talking about such lower costs, and the actual energy to lift someone into space if you can do it really efficiently (space elevator) is maybe US$200 worth of electricity ... So, seven billion people soon, minus a few doomsters, times US$100K per person, is US$700 trillion. The world GDP is about US$60 trillion, so, in round numbers, this is about ten years of world economic output to put everyone into space. We can assume that with these self-replicating space habitat seeds that an entire space infrastructure is being prepared for free from sunlight and lunar ore and asteroidal ore (though it might take some time to produce it on an exponential growth curve). So, we only need to get people into low Earth orbit and shuttles can ferry people without luggage beyond low Earth orbit to a life of abundance produced with resources from space. Also, since we're evacuating the entire planet to leave it as a nature park, we don't need to do any upkeep on infrastructure as it is all abandoned. So, we can devote close to 100% of the industrial base to producing rockets. Also, people in space can still provide services to Earth like telemedicine or teleoperating mining equipment and launch control, so essential services can be kept going the whole time even as the last person goes on the last rocket (except the doomsters who want to stay :-)."

Of course, we could ask, how many times has this been done before over the last few billion years? :-)

Thanks for your other comment too (which this kind of addresses in part as well). Good luck with your robotics work. Robots could be a boon instead of a bane as long as we adjust our economy to a post-scarcity model. One example I put together:
"The Riches

"The main thing is the solutions are there, the problem can be solved."

Yes, that is my key point. Solutions exist even if we may choose collectively not to pursue them. Thanks for the summary and insights into issues of power. A related item:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

Whether we decide to solve these problem is getting to be more a social issue than a technological one. A related essay I wrote:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points. :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points.
So, 50 * 2 = 100.
Or, 2 * 50 = 100.
or, 10 * 10 = 100."

One big problem is that every day it gets easier and easier for fewer and fewer people to wipe out all of humanity. For example, the genetic code was like a lock that prevented designer plagues (or attempts at them). Now that that code has been "broken", we are all at extreme risk of plagues created for whatever reasons. And it is not as easy to change your DNA as it is to change your ssh key.

As Bucky Fuller said decades ago, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end...

I find this 1950s story called "The Skills of Xanadu" inspirational about the possible power of the internet for social change, but even then, the internet could be used for a crackdown too:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51#v=onepage&q&f=false

So, I don't know what will happen. I only can see from everything I've read on slashdot and elsewhere what could possibly happen in terms of solutions.

Likely we may get a range of outcomes in different places. India actually seems to me a place that may get it together best -- a culture of villages, a culture of sharing, a common knowledge of English, a youthful population, and so on...
http://p2pfoundation.net/Creative_Commons_-_Critiques#The_perverse_effects_of_CC_in_the_developing_world
"There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?"

Maybe we'll see more good things from Skikshantar?
http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/udaipur.html

There is probably room for quadrillions of humans living in space habitats just around the local solar system, so we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the solar system for human life and life we bring with us, even just considering current or near-future-term technologies. The biggest problem of industrialized societies is actually declining populations...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html

With "free energy," yes - if we're using coal and oil to make chemical rockets, we'd need to double planet-wide CO2 release for a decade to even start a decent sized space habitat project.

Space elevators (still fantasy in the materials, and energy transmission realms) would help.

A moon base would help.

Practical cold fusion, or anything that delivers on the promises of cold fusion, would nail it.

Personally, I like the currently proposed "all of the above" strategy for future energy development, it's not a clearly focused sound-bite message like "drill, baby, drill" but I think it is a direction with much more chance of a good long-term future.

"Who is supposed to pay for the construction of such a space habitat?"

"Zeitgeist Star Trek"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6cN-1dLoPY
"Captain Picard promotes a Resource Based Economy"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui6g23ygov8

"Where will the materials come from?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill
"One application O'Neill proposed for mass drivers was to throw baseball-sized chunks of ore mined from the surface of the Moon into space.[50][51] Once in space, the ore could be used as raw material for building space colonies and solar power satellites. "

And from around 1927:
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus."

"What about mission support?"

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization

"Even on such a station, there will be a class system and scarcity, whether anyone likes it or not."

Yes, some people may always choose to be poor and enslaved...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect

Read James P. Hogan's novels like "Voyage From Yesteryear" for an alternative vision:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

"Someone will have to fly the damn thing."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 :-)

"Likewise, unless the powers that be use fascist tactics to control reproduction, procreation will put a further strain on resources."

There is probably room for quadrillions of humans living in space habitats just around the local solar system, so we are nowhere near the carrying capacity of the solar system for human life and life we bring with us, even just considering current or near-future-term technologies. The biggest problem of industrialized societies is actually declining populations...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html

Something like that unfortunately actually happened to our old family station wagon (Oldsmobile?) around 1970. Basically, the car had issues on the trip (we might have even stopped for some repair) and the rear axle somehow eventually caused heating (sparks?) that caused the flammable rearmost seat to catch fire eventually, which happened overnight and smoked up and then burned much of the interior of the car. This happened on a long car trip to take my sister to college just after we had reached the destination. Fortunately, the car was parked outside in a hotel parking lot, and someone else at the hotel noticed the flames when they got going and they were extinguished quickly. Unfortunately, the car had all my sister's clothes and other items for starting undergrad college which had not yet been unloaded, essentially ruining them. That rough start was a contributing factor to ending her promising college career as a "doctor of tomorrow" pretty much before it got started at RPI's then new BA/MD program.
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/bio/undergraduate/physician.html

Although I was told much later that some harassment by an administrator there who did not think women should be doctors was probably a bigger compounding factor. I'm sure RPI is much more progressive 40 years later now. Also, I think her roommates then and some others tried to help make up some for her losing all her clothes and belongings. I was pretty young then, so I don't know all the details. But in some ways, perhaps losing a career is much worse than losing a house?

BTW, more reasons to be cautious about tying your hopes in life to college:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

And how medical programs got so bad in the first place that some women had to become pioneers again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
"One of the consequences of Flexner's advocacy of university-based medical education was that medical education became much more expensive, putting such education out of reach of all but upper-class white males. The small "proprietary" schools Flexner condemned, which were contended to be have been based in generations-old folk traditions rather than relatively recent western science, did admit African-Americans, women, and students of limited financial means. These students usually could not afford six to eight years of university education, and were often simply denied admission to medical schools affiliated with universities. While many such doctors continued to practice, they did so under proscribed circumstances and for less pay. It also made it more difficult for people of color, residents of rural areas, and for those of limited means generally to obtain medical care in any form."

We were of "limited means" then ourselves, or so I was told, so my father had to keep old cars going as best as he could.

So, it can be true that we tend to ignore what goes wrong with older technology. Right now, people are all worried about the first time a "self-driving" car will kill someone in an accident, ignoring that 35,000 or so people are killed in the USA in car accidents every year, and maybe 1.2 million people die a year across the globe from car accidents, and self-driving vehicles will probably greatly reduce that number. One reason is especially because many accidents happen at night, and cars can use sensors to see better than people in the dark and won't fall asleep at the wheel. Also, self-driving cars can talk to each other and negotiate right of way, and so on.

http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html

I had related experiences when interested in university teaching (as well as far-off research).

Interesting link. Here is a sci-fi story about even-cheaper-than-foreign-labor AI and robotics leading to unemployed US Americans ending up in "Terrafoam" cages: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A great essay by Philip Greenspun on why US Americans, especially women, avoid science:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."

Posts I made to the p2presearch list concerning education (it would take years to read through all the embedded links on Gatto, Holt, Goodstein, Schmidt, Honigman, Lewellyn, etc.):

* [p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")

* [p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow

* [p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)

Interesting link. Here is a sci-fi story about even-cheaper-than-foreign-labor AI and robotics leading to unemployed US Americans ending up in "Terrafoam" cages: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A great essay by Philip Greenspun on why US Americans, especially women, avoid science:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."

Posts I made to the p2presearch list concerning education (it would take years to read through all the embedded links on Gatto, Holt, Goodstein, Schmidt, Honigman, Lewellyn, etc.):

* [p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")

* [p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow

* [p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)

Interesting link. Here is a sci-fi story about even-cheaper-than-foreign-labor AI and robotics leading to unemployed US Americans ending up in "Terrafoam" cages: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A great essay by Philip Greenspun on why US Americans, especially women, avoid science:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."

Posts I made to the p2presearch list concerning education (it would take years to read through all the embedded links on Gatto, Holt, Goodstein, Schmidt, Honigman, Lewellyn, etc.):

* [p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")

* [p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow

* [p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)

Great points. See also my: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

See also these collections of links i put together:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005584.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/006005.html

Great points. See also my: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

See also these collections of links i put together:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005584.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/006005.html

Great points. See also my: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

See also these collections of links i put together:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/005584.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/006005.html

My G1 (bought as a Android developer https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz ) died after about six or seven months (would no longer charge or turn on), but I did not get it replaced under the warranty in time (too busy with other stuff). I also figured I'd probably be replacing it with something better eventually, anyway.

The built-in keyboard on the G1 had had problems with not recognizing some keys even before it died totally.

One problem with cell phones and warranties is that you don't know what happens to personal data on it in internal flash memory when you send it into be replaced.

The same thing is true for hard drives, of course.

So warranties on products you store information on can be problematical.

The main reason I thought about going to the trouble to replace it would have been to be able to give it away or repurpose it in the future.
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-November/006250.html

"There is no way for the parent to know if issues in the classroom are from poor learning on the child's side or poor teaching on the teacher's side."

Or just because the whole idea of compulsory school is broken:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html (A bit too business focused though and expands school instead of contracts it)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.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