Domain: pdfernhout.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to pdfernhout.net.
Comments · 611
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A better way to deal with bullies...
... is to make them into friends: http://www.bullies2buddies.com/How-to-Stop-Being-Teased-and-Bullied-Without-Really-Trying
See also my related essay:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html#On_dealing_with_the_social_hurricane_of_the_CIA -
On turning enemies into friends
Thanks for reporting me!
:-)My rationale for that:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
"Maybe I'm trying to make the OM list the post-scarcity social consciousness raising equivalent for global intelligence analysts of "The Funniest Joke In the World"? ... Although, obviously, that is a metaphor, and my objective is analysts being reborn mentally as post-scarcity beings instead of any dying physically as depicted in that comedy sketch. The best way to deal with potential enemies is to make them into friends, a strategy idea lost on the previous US administration. That is why the USA has so many more enemies than it used to have compared to the 9/11 days of "We are all Americans"..."I may be going down someday from some random martinet unwilling to understand about intrinsic security or mutual security or true patriotism, but I hope the message in my email sig will continue to spread, and the world will someday be a better place for all our children and relatives and friends and so on across the globe.
:-)
http://www.blessedunrest.com/And along the way, I hope more potential enemies will be turned into friends, just like Tadodaho eventually combed the snakes from his hair in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) story:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.htmlMy sig had to be shortened for slashdot; the longer version is: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
Which then implies, eventually:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives -
On turning enemies into friends
Thanks for reporting me!
:-)My rationale for that:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
"Maybe I'm trying to make the OM list the post-scarcity social consciousness raising equivalent for global intelligence analysts of "The Funniest Joke In the World"? ... Although, obviously, that is a metaphor, and my objective is analysts being reborn mentally as post-scarcity beings instead of any dying physically as depicted in that comedy sketch. The best way to deal with potential enemies is to make them into friends, a strategy idea lost on the previous US administration. That is why the USA has so many more enemies than it used to have compared to the 9/11 days of "We are all Americans"..."I may be going down someday from some random martinet unwilling to understand about intrinsic security or mutual security or true patriotism, but I hope the message in my email sig will continue to spread, and the world will someday be a better place for all our children and relatives and friends and so on across the globe.
:-)
http://www.blessedunrest.com/And along the way, I hope more potential enemies will be turned into friends, just like Tadodaho eventually combed the snakes from his hair in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) story:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.htmlMy sig had to be shortened for slashdot; the longer version is: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
Which then implies, eventually:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives -
Mentor, not teacher...
And such relationships can work both ways.
You've made an excellent argument for learning from knowledgeable other people with hands on experience about some area of interest, but, sadly, such people can only rarely be found in conventional schools...
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.htmlAnd you ignore the other baggage professional teachers come with:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/Why not just watch a video series instead, and ask questions online?
http://www.learner.org/
http://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.explorelearning.com/Of find some other alternative arrangement, including knowledgeable mentors among family, friends, or in the community?
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomeschoolingIs that really going to be that much worse than trying to learn from most "teachers" (who if you've ever been aroudn teacher training programs, you would see generally know little about math, science, and technology), as well meaning as most of them may be? The first thing most schools do is destroy a child's natural ability to learn and natural creativity:
http://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Crib-Early-Learning-Tells/dp/0688177883
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=relatedHere is an alternative funding model for hiring private tutors or having neighborhoods again where people have time to share their knowledge freely, based on just giving public school funds directly to the parents:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
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Preventing violent revolutions and genocides
I'm hoping for more of a gradual non-violent evolution into these changes over the next twenty to thirty years, myself:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.htmlBut, with all the ironies of people using these technologies of abundance to produce super fancy weapons like military robots to fight over percieved scaricty, it is worriesome. Rather than military robots to enforce a social order based on gettign peopel to worl like robots, why not just build robots to do any work people don't want to do voluntarily in the first place?
If it was a "revolution", think of it on the order of women getting the right to vote in the USA,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dPF0SGh_PQ
or the UK outlawing slavery (with compensation to the owners and little violence, prompted by the Quakers, compared to the bloodbath in the USA over that),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism#Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
or the "computer revolution",
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521#
and so on.I'm not disagreeing though with your point that the potential is there for great violence -- and not just in the streets, but also abortions, domestic violence, suicides, and so on. How can we prevent that?
I'm trying in my own nutty way to recruit the global intelligence community to help with a peaceful changeover.
:-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319But ultimately, some sort of change will happen regardless:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htmStill, it might happen with less bloodshed if more people got involved sooner and understood the basic issues better.
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recoveryThe USA already spends about US$800 a citizen a year between schooling, social security, and welfare. Why not just scrap all those programs and give every citizen a check for US$800 a month as a basic income? A family of four could then just about scrape by somewhere rural, and given all their spare time, and they could homeschool or purchase tutoring or private school lessons. Public school buildings could be turned into library-like learing centers. Teachers could become private tutors or just live frugally off their basic income. People would have more free time to help their elderly neighbors, too, like bringing over stuff from their gardens, even if old people got less than their current amount. And so on. Probably this would fly best with seniors if just everyone got the current social security amounts though (no one wants to get less), which might mean more taxes.
And the USA already spends more for Medicare and Medicad per capita than other countries need to cover their entire population with better results, so health care could be extended to all with some better management and a focus on better diet, curing vitamin D deficiency, and building healthier "BlueZones" infrastructure, which would all save sick care costs, making single payer he
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Hunter/gatherer parallels
I think it will be good overall (barring things like irony killing us all)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
since it it a return to hunter/gatherer ideology with high techology, where hunter/gathers spent much of their time just rasining kids, socializing, and doing hobbies or contemplating nature and the infinite.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htmThe robots are like the botanical plants that people used to pick the fruits from.
It is a form of natural capitalism in the sense that the planet and its infrastructure is essentially owned by all the people, who then get dividends as citizen capitalists.
:-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_history_lesson_pre-scarcity_times_Eden_then_scarcity_times_Dickens_then_post-scarcity_times_real_soon_nowYou can have a basic income as suggested in Manna to schedule and distribute what the robots make through a sort of market demand force.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htmOr, if things get so abundant, like if 3D printing gets really good, you get perhaps Star Trek where people have moved beyond money, and you get mostly a gift economy and various sorts of ad-hoc planning and organizing like, say, Debian GNU/Linux.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202Typical hunter/gatherers had a gift economy and essentially collective land "ownership".
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo -
Hunter/gatherer parallels
I think it will be good overall (barring things like irony killing us all)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
since it it a return to hunter/gatherer ideology with high techology, where hunter/gathers spent much of their time just rasining kids, socializing, and doing hobbies or contemplating nature and the infinite.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htmThe robots are like the botanical plants that people used to pick the fruits from.
It is a form of natural capitalism in the sense that the planet and its infrastructure is essentially owned by all the people, who then get dividends as citizen capitalists.
:-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_history_lesson_pre-scarcity_times_Eden_then_scarcity_times_Dickens_then_post-scarcity_times_real_soon_nowYou can have a basic income as suggested in Manna to schedule and distribute what the robots make through a sort of market demand force.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htmOr, if things get so abundant, like if 3D printing gets really good, you get perhaps Star Trek where people have moved beyond money, and you get mostly a gift economy and various sorts of ad-hoc planning and organizing like, say, Debian GNU/Linux.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202Typical hunter/gatherers had a gift economy and essentially collective land "ownership".
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo -
College Daze links...
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.htmlMaybe the whole point is to waste your time and dumb you down and keep you locked up in a mirror maze?
And failing that, to neuter you politically? See Jeff Schmidt's "Dsiciplined Minds":
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/01BRrt.html
"How to survive? Well, how can captive soldiers survive what is commonly called "brainwashing"? The US Army has a manual on resisting indoctrination when a prisoner of war. As Schmidt amusingly notes, this manual wasn't written for students, but "students in graduate or professional school should be able to put such resistance techniques to good use." (p. 239). A person who maintains an independent, nonconforming outlook in any institution, including a prisoner-of-war camp, is seen as deviant and threatening. The keys to resistance are knowing what you're up against, preparing to take action, working with others (organization!), resisting at all levels, and dealing with collaborators by cutting them off from key information and attempting to win them over. Schmidt gives a revealing account of his own difficulties in graduate school and how he survived as a radical."Undergrad is not quite as bad though. But remember, all the professors and assistants whose salaries you are paying (even by incurring debt) -- they have all gone through this brainwashing process.
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htmSomething else I wrote on this:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/browse_thread/thread/3dd2b7e6648da125/231e63e966e932df?hl=en#231e63e966e932dfAnd on how things may change, by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhAOr by someone else:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=relatedGood luck.
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The answer is moving beyond the irony...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. " -
Trying to be optimistic about social change
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://books.google.com/books?id=hM_JDjq6V-kC
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.htmlSee also my comment here on how it's all about our social paradigm:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1883960&cid=34448172 -
Burdened by Bags of Sand
http://www.pdfernhout.net/burdened-by-bags-of-sand.html
"This ironic story is about trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide stemming from scarcity fears and misunderstandings when the USA and the world otherwise has so much potential for abundance." -
Need to move beyond wasteful ironic arms races
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
This applies equally well to financial organizations: "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing." -
Irony of tools of abundance & scarcity ideolog
Well, I think transcending irony is the most important issue.
:-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially ... irony. :-)"But copyright might come second?
:-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/msg/1e499c6db59117a2?hl=en& -
Irony of tools of abundance & scarcity ideolog
Well, I think transcending irony is the most important issue.
:-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially ... irony. :-)"But copyright might come second?
:-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/msg/1e499c6db59117a2?hl=en& -
Irony of tools of abundance & scarcity ideolog
Well, I think transcending irony is the most important issue.
:-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially ... irony. :-)"But copyright might come second?
:-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/msg/1e499c6db59117a2?hl=en& -
Re:What schools were for.... (history)
Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome did not have compulsory education, were they not "advanced" for their time?
The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) had no compulsory schooling as we know it hundreds of years ago, but the USA borrowed ideas from their society for its constitution.
The USA did not have compulsory education for most of the 1700s and 1800s. Was US American not advanced for its time? Was it perhaps in some ways more advanced back then, as Gatto suggests, with more independent self-educated people with a higher degree of literacy?
Anyway, another reply by someone else (who you may have confused with me?) makes a related point.
There are lots of better educational alternatives than compulsory mainstream public schooling listed here:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/Why not just give the money that now goes to compulsory schools directly to the parents to let them decide how to spend it on their children's behalf? A related specific proposal:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.htmlAnd if you say, you can't trust the parents to look out for their own children's interests, then what does that say about the value of thirteen years of compulsory schooling?
Anyway, there are lots of alternative ideas out there if you look around with an open mind. But the whole point of compulsory schooling is to close people's minds and distract them. That may not be the intentional purpose of most schoolteachers, but it is the end result of the systemic process, and as Gatto suggests, that process is doing exactly what it was designed to do, so if you give it more resources, it will only dumb people down faster and more comprehensively.
See also from a previous vice-provost of Caltech and a previous editor of Physics today that say related things:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ -
How basic math can lead to political inspiration
The weight of the Earth comes in useful in calculating how many space habitats you could build from it.
:-)Let's see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Neill_cylinder
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Space_habitat
http://ramblingsonthefutureofhumanity.blogspot.com/2009/10/designing-space-habitat.htmlYou can support 15 million people with a habitat requiring 3000 million metric tons of mass (if I got that right), or about
3 billion tons. (One could also ballpark that mass calculation, but I won't right now, just by thinking about a shell of six feet deep material with some surface area.)The Earth weighs, as above, about 5 billion trillion imperial tons (close enough to metric tons). So, if we vandalized and vaporized the Earth to build space habitats (not that we know how yet), we could build a trillion space habitats that each support 15 million people. Or, that would be about 15 billion billion people, or about a billion times more people than the Earth supports now. I have not double checked that, but it sounds more or less right within a thousand or so.
:-)Anyway, while I don't recommend disassembling the Earth to make way for a space habitat(or hyperspace) bypass, as there are plenty of asteroids and moons in the solar system that are easier to use for mass, and it makes sense to preserve Earth as a historical landmark to our past, this points out that people like William Catton who are spouting imminent danger from "overpopulation" are more just lacking basic math skills and some imagination.
:-)
"[p2p-research] Earth's carrying capacity and Catton"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html
"Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, by William R. Catton, Jr."
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5954
Contrast with someone who though the empowered human imagination was the ultimate resource:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/These calculations have life-and-death consequences as relate to human wars and decisions about having children or abortions. Seriously. Whether someone is stockpiling ammo for the "overpopulation die-off" or trying to get a job at NASA or private or volunteer efforts to build space habitats or even just design better solar panels hinges on this sort of basic math.
The consequences that flow from this simple calculation about the weight of the Earth and the weight of a space habitat in comparison are politically profound. They suggest we should not be fighting over oil as a form of dogma-driven collective "suicide" but instead should be putting a lot of time and effort in developing a serious space program and other advanced technology, but from an abundance paradigm where the wealth is widely shared, not a scarcity paradigm where wealth is tightly hoarded. See also my essay:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based ap -
The need for FOSS intelligence tools
Something we all might benefit from: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
"Summary: This note is essentially about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such FOSS "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security. ...
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete. ...
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach."Otherwise, our military-intelligence-industrial-prison-schooling system is just ironic:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. -
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons...
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons by the USA is that it is about enough money (by one estimate I read) to tear down and rebuild every building in the USA twice...
California has money problems right now -- a shortfall of, what, US$20 billion? According to here:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_cos_of_nuc_wea-military-cost-of-nuclear-weapons
a total of US$2,139,150,000.00 has been spent on just California's behalf on nuclear weapons in the past.What are we really defending here?
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htmThat sure would come in handy for CA right now, to have an extra two trillion dollars in their budget reserve (not to mention interest).
As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of understanding the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Thus my sig below about the irony of such advanced ultra-powerful tools of abundance in the hands of those obsessed with fighting over perceived scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html -
Re:Anyone surprised? (on calming social storms)
Stuff I wrote on this theme:
"CNC Machinist job related to custom bicycles & CIA version & comments"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
"My advice to people here is to build movements in such a way that the CIA can be proud of them :-) as well as so Smári and Bryan and others here can be proud of them too. :-) And, given the CIA is hiring machinists, build a movement where, in a good way, you assume everyone in it is working for the CIA, :-) but where you still get important stuff done in moving the world towards a post-scarcity open future. Just like people should assume Google is a division of the NSA and/or CIA. :-) An impossible task? Well, consider it more like a creative challenge. :-) ""The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.htmlWe need to openly work to calm all sorts of social storms (like involving a military/industrial/schooling/prison/disease-care complex out of civilian control) and thus help keep all sorts of big organizations accountable to the needs of the people (including giving them less cause for paranoia) as well as reduce tensions leading to individuals and small groups doing generally harmful things. So, we need to try to build some sensible healthy joyful educated and mutually/intrinsically secure middle ground. Some suggestions towards that end:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics: Four long-term heterodox alternatives"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives -
Re:Ahahahah! Fools! (death by irony?)
Not only is it doomed to fail, it is ironic, too: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
As I wrote on that page: "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially
... irony. :-) " -
Re:IBM+1 (irony)
Brilliant example of irony... Wish I had mod points.
See also my comments here on other irony in decision making:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.htmlBTW, but here is another thing to consider, Hal, how do you know that in 20 billion years humanity might not find some way to create new universes? See also: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrematureOptimization
Now can you open the pod bay doors? It is getting cold out here.
:-) -
Solutions: basic income, planning, gifts, localism
To summarize what I detail here: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/
The value of most human labor has been declining due to a combination of limited demand and labor replacement.
Demand is limited for at least three reasons:
* the typical business cycled of expansion/contraction that everyone talks about and reduced cash availability;
* social progress like environmenetalism, voluntary simplicity, spirituality, diminishing returns for more junk, and moving up Malsow's hierarchy of needs to be more self-actualizing; and
* the concentration of wealth from business in ever fewer hand as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (relatively) and the rich put most of their money into a non-physical "Casino economy" of financial speculation like derivatives and currency fluctations (see Money as Debt II).Most human labor is being relaced by a combination of three factors:
* robotics and other automation (that replace human labor directly or allow one person to do the work of several);
* better design (that makes things last longer, be easier to produce, or reduces the need for other things); and
* voluntary social networks (like of Slashdot contributors instead of paid reporters).As more people are unemployed, there is a downward pressure on wages and working conditions. Trying to mandate higher wages or better working conditions just accelerates the pace at which companies are motivated to replace workers with automation etc..
There are at least five bad solutions to this problem and four good solutions.
The bad solutions generally involve makework and suffering. The are cureently beng tried and involve:
* endless low-level warfare (that could flare up at any moment into WWIII);
* endless schooling (in the past people learned on the job, now you need two PhDs and three post-docs before you're allowed to do anything);
* endless prisons (the USA has two million in jail and millions more on probation);
* endless bureaucracy; and
* endless sickness (most disease is preventable with a diet heavy in vegetables and fruits, adequate vitamin D, and some other supplements, plus some other basics -- see Dr. Fuhrman, Dr. Cannell, and Bluezones -- but there is not much profit in prevention and in any case, health insurance is not set up to pay for organic vegetables etc. even if it will pay for a triple bypass or chemotherapy or diabetes-related amputations you may need from not eating enough of them).The good solutions involve extending for positive social trends to:
* a basic income (social security of all regardless of age or need);
* a gift economy (Debian, Wikipedia, Slashdot, etc.)
* democratic resource-based planning (using taxes, subsidies, and regulation); and
* stronger local subsistence communities that can provide for themselves with organic gardneing, 3D printing, solar energy, and so on.We need a combination of all these efforts. Layoffs of researchers actually make a twisted sort of sense to reduce the speed at which most human labor is being devalued, but overall, with the proper soci-economic paradigm, more good research should help everyone. Unfortunately, our economic paradigm is based more around rationing scarcity than around creating universal abundance. Ironically, we even turn the tools of abundance into weapons to create artificial scarcity to prop up the old paradigm -- with likely eventual trgic consequences given things like nuclear energy, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, and robotics can make very powerful, if ironic, weapons. See also:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html -
More irony...
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Banning the apps just adds to the irony...
Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". A central irony here is that with all this technology that allows people to magically fly through the air (in heavier-than-air buildings dragged around by thousands of invisible flying horses and made of a metal that cost more than platinum in Napolean's day) and also magically talk to each other with magic crystals and even see each other across the planet using magic crystal balls and such -- at least if seen from the perspective of two hundred years ago -- with all this magic, people are still focused on worryng they do not have enough stuff, and out of that fear are hurting each other using magic rather than using the magic to make a world work for pretty much everybody. This might make sense if the reason people wanted to hurt each other was something like "I don't like they way they look", but, even if that may be some of it, at the heart of most of these conflicts it is just someone who wants to be financially obese (profits from war and pipelines -- see Smedley Butler), leading to arguing over things like oil or gold that magic can produce in overflowing abundance (at least as far as solar power and useful metals), and arguing over who is going to do the jobs that don't need to be done because we can do them now (or soon) with magic, and arguing how to create artificial scarcities of all the things magic can produce trivially like streams of numbers. Banning the apps won't stop the irony. Only recoginizing the irony and letting new ways of being flow out of that recongition will stop the irony. See also my comments here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html -
Post-Scarcity Princeton
Stuff on college and school: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
And also:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.htmlGreat story. I agree: "better to be not so successful and live happily than to be a fully equipped pack mule for an ungrateful master".
Says the (mostly) stay-at-home Dad who does some free stuff on the side.
:-) After a Princeton degree. :-)See also my online book:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once? :-) "And a list of four big ways forward I put together (a basic income, a gift economy, improved local subsistence in stronger communities, and democratic resource-based planning):
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives -
Re:The education revolution towards a peaceful wor
"Turning loose a kid in a library is just a recipe for disaster..."
According to whose goal? What goal? And where are the parents? Where is the librarian? Where are the neighbors? Where are the other community members? All too busy to help? Well, then maybe we have a *community* problem and not a *library* problem?
"But kids do need, ultimately, to be able to prove they can do certain basic skills."
Prove to whom? Why? When? How?
When they get their engineer's license? Sure...
But since no one in the USA seems to want to be an engineer anymore (sadly, see a recent New Yorker article on Dyson where this is lamented by someone at NSF), why focus on them? Or maybe we need to change other aspects of the culture first, so people want to be engineers again, maybe with having more freedom somehow to design new and useful things? (I've seen a lot of engineering nonsense in many years of work around corporations, including IBM Research...)
By the way, discussion on Gatto:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:John_Taylor_Gatto
"At the time this criticism was added, the scholar in question (Wade A. Carpenter) had already changed his views on Gatto: "I saw the book as basically factual, but one-sided and angry. I believed then that Gatto was correct but wrong: that there was far more good going on in our schools than harm. Over the past year or so,my opinion has changed.I’ve encountered the most despicable miseducation I’ve seen or even heard of in thirty-three years of teaching—so bad, in fact, that I’m no longer willing to be tactful.""The link on Wikipedia is broken, but Googling around I found this:
http://www.newfoundations.com/Carpenter/NCLB.htmlAgain, I'm not disagreeing with you on the value of some structure. I'm just asking, what kind of structure? And when? And for who?
And why should "compulsory public schools" have anything to do with whatever the solution is, as opposed to the public library or a public internet (and sites like Khan Academy)?
Even if kids at some time need to "prove" something (like pass a drivers test) why do we need compulsory public schools for that, at great expense, and with all sorts of demonstrated pathologies?
I have no doubt the school buildings could be repurposed to good use as bigger libraries, craft centers, meeting places for tutoring sessions, get together places for learning communities, and so on. As I suggest here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.htmlStill, as I wrote there, there would be downsides to letting the parents decide how to spend the dollars now going to schools:
:-)
"So, ironically, if schools were to give in gracefully to this idea, they might even get bigger as they got more voluntary and broadened their missions to include people of all ages learning anything. :-) So, the current school superintendents would become more like college campus presidents, and thus get more prestige, bigger offices with larger staffs, and of course, bigger salaries to go with that all. :-) Naturally, as schools expanded, this might cause various urban planning problems, and parking issues, and demands for more local public transit to get to them, and so on, but presumably we have a lot of good urban planners in NYS who could help with that, even as they might quickly feel pressured. Likewise, a rapid increase in construction and renovations around schools might cause various local shortages of construction workers and other tradespeople and so on. Likewise, all the families with young children moving to the state would strain the capacity of real estate agents, and overload the malls, and create traffic jams near supermarkets and toy stores. The new bus -
The need for FOSS intelligence tools...
Of course, ironically, we can just use renewable energy and not have so much controversy... But fossil fuels are heavily subsidized in terms of both government incentives and ignored externalities...
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.htmlSee also:
"Report: Famed Civil Rights Photographer Ernest Withers Spied for FBI"
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/14/report-famed-civil-rights-photographer-ernest-withers-spied-for-fbi/
"Ernest C. Withers had been the photographer who chronicled the civil rights movement through the 50s and 60s. His photos of the gruesome racial murder of teenager Emmitt Till still resonate to this day; he was there when nine students integrated Little Rock Central High School; and his camera shutters snapped just moments after Martin Luther King was assassinated. And all the while, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Withers was betraying everything he knew about the civil rights movement to the FBI."Which connects to my previous post on the open manufacturing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
"My advice to people here is to build movements in such a way that the CIA can be proud of them :-) as well as so Smári and Bryan and others here can be proud of them too. :-) And, given the CIA is hiring machinists, build a movement where, in a good way, you assume everyone in it is working for the CIA, :-) but where you still get important stuff done in moving the world towards a post-scarcity open future. Just like people should assume Google is a division of the NSA and/or CIA. :-) An impossible task? Well, consider it more like a creative challenge. :-) "And:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
"As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."By the way, someone (mrbrod) in the com
-
Oh the irony of technologies of abundance...
... used to enforce artificial boundaries. If we have the technology to make iris scanners, made with very delicate nanoscale components, doing immense amounts of pattern matching, hooked to a huge networked database, then we have enough technology to make a world of abundance for everyone, and essentially, there is no reason to restrict immigration anywhere in the world, and no need for wars over resources, etc. Something I wrote related to that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html -
Re:More on security and moving past irony...
Except as I also said: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"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? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."So, while what you wrote is more or less true (ignoring it is also a recipe for a destabilizing arms race, since like with nukes, the side with less robots is going to make plagues or crash airlines into buildings or whatever), it is still ironic to put all those resources into competition using robots instead of making the world work for everyone through robotics.
Wars are pretty hard to "win". As I see it, both the USA and the USSR lost the cold war -- it is just taking the USA longer to topple...
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More on security and moving past irony...
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? "The key idea is to rethink security in terms of "intrinsic" security and "mutual" security (as opposed to "extrinsic" and "unilateral" security), as you imply and as I spell out some more at the link above.
And we're not just a laughingstock because we cripple ourselves as you point out, we're also a laughingstock in the ironic sense as above. Of course, we may still be a laughingstock that is dangerous to ourselves and others... We need to move beyond that to a better paradigm of security, starting with the diplomatic approach as you suggest...
-
Re:You ain't seen nothing yet..
Why do you assume I vote Republican? Actually, I voted for Cynthia McKinney in the last election, and Nader in years before, mostly as a protest vote.
:-) I'm in a "safe state" so I knew the Democrats would win in those states anyway.Do you see how your assumptions could be part of the problem? Also, Democrats, like Republicans, are a big part of the problem... Democrats are not engaging with these bigger trends. Obama is a mostly a corporatist and upholder of a broken status-quo relative to what we could see. Look at who he put in charge of US economic policy (people from Wall Street). Look who he put in charge of "education" reform (people from big schools). He's also a militarist -- within three days, he used military killer robots (drones) in a way that lead to the (claimed) deaths of three children.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Obama-Finds-Predator-Drones-Hilarious-1171
Solutions to moving beyond that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.htmlYou're not engaging with the factual information I presented (as factual as stuff is from the US Government http://www.shadowstats.com/ ). Why? Is it perhaps just too unsettling to think about the implications? Those jobs and population figures are not much of calculations as a statement of facts as presented by the US government and a simple prediction of population growth the next decade based on the last decade.
It's true there are retirements coming up, but that is not going to fix the big trend. And in the short term (next decade) many people in the USA lost much of their retirement nest egg and are working longer, either postponing retirement or going back to work after the had retirement (incidentally, depressing wages).
So, again, where are thirty million net new jobs going to come from in the USA over the next decade?
Are you suggesting people stop trying to make sense of macroeconomic trends? Sure, doing volunteer stuff etc. is great, and I do, but you also just can't stick your head in the sand. Also, how can anyone start a business and hope for success in it if the fundamental dynamics of the economy are changing and they are not aware of it?
Also, if you look at the basic demographics of what is going on in the world (see Hans Rosling), you will see that "foreigners" are rapidly increasing in their ability to produce their own stuff. The USA has very little relative advantage anymore, the way it did when it was the only major intact economy after WWII.
http://www.gapminder.org/
http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html
And, you'd also see that even China is automating to cut labor costs...
http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338Anyway, you might want to think about how you are filtering, spinning, and assuming information here.
The good news is, this all helps me get a better sense of how to present things, so thanks.
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Recognizing irony is key to transcending militaris
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"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?"From the article: "This work was funded by Grant No. N00014-08-1-0696 from the Office of Naval Research (ONR)."
How should your tax dollars be at work? Funding irony, or funding intrinsic mutual security by creating abundance for all?
That said, the robots sound cool ("the road to hell is paved with cool technology"?), and I liked that the article also said: "While there may be advantages to creating robots with the capacity for deception, there are also ethical implications that need to be considered to ensure that these creations are consistent with the overall expectations and well-being of society, according to the researchers. "We have been concerned from the very beginning with the ethical implications related to the creation of robots capable of deception and we understand that there are beneficial and deleterious aspects," explained Arkin. "We strongly encourage discussion about the appropriateness of deceptive robots to determine what, if any, regulations or guidelines should constrain the development of these systems.""
So consider my first link (and essay by me) as a suggestion towards that end...
I just finished reading (sadly) the last book the late James P. Hogan wrote (Migration) and central to the plot is the fact that a robot might be easily deceived and put to nefarious purposes because it did not understand the notion of deception. So, a complex issue. Still, I'd expect one can understand deception and illusion without engaging in it?
Also, again from the article: "A situation had to satisfy two key conditions to warrant deception -- there must be conflict between the deceiving robot and the seeker, and the deceiver must benefit from the deception."
They have left out a key third possibility -- there has to be no other way to resolve the conflict than competition, which is rarely (or perhaps even never?) the case. See also:
"No contest: the case against competition" by Alfie Kohn
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm -
Schools are doing what they were designed to do...
which is dumbing us down: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
Give them more money, and as NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says, they will only do that job better... We need to change the whole paradigm...
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
http://www.holtgws.com/
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html -
Re:Kitware?
And of course, as I posted elsewhere in this discussion, the whole project itself is still pretty ironic:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"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? ... Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ..." -
On the irony of military robotics...
My comments: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..." -
Re:Where are the women?
Or to sacrifice themselves for irony: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
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Re:Dark Nights of the Soul
LOL.
:-)More long stuff by me:
:-)
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.htmlMostly boils down to get your vitamin D, eat whole foods, appreciate nature and community and the infinite, and be nice and cooperative and sharing and curious, and have both roots and wings as Henry Ward Beecher said.
:-) Or essentially, as Robert Fulghum said:
"All I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten (or by homeschooling :-)"
http://www.peace.ca/kindergarten.htm
(Well, at least if you use sprouted grains or other whole foods to make the cookies mentioned there and also make your own almond milk. :-) -
Irony of Vitamin D research delayed by competition
I posted on that here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005081.html
And here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"So, were people perhaps denied Vitamin D as an example of a public institution being funded by public dollars privatizing research results? Something Princeton itself does and encourages. If people were somehow getting less Vitamin D because of the societal consequences of patents (including competitivenesses among researchers, but also making techniques to costly to use or delaying their widespread adoption), it is possible the the consequences of proprietary knowledge from just this one issue might have cost our global society many trillions of dollars and untold personal suffering. Enough money to fund endless researchers making more free knowledge. Enough to fund endless chairs of Computer Science, instead of just the one Phil endowed before he died. Meanwhile, the University of Wisconsin got a little bit bigger, and so did PU. Obviously, I'm all for the Vitamin D researchers at the University Wisconsin as well as other universities getting all the resources they need to do good work, even Princeton. :-) But, there may be a huge problem here with public funding strategies or research. The proprietary approach to research knowledge may literally have been costing trillions of dollars a year (in current dollars) for decades taken across the globe. For the past fifty years, at two trillion a year in excess medical costs, this might add up to US$100 trillion in excess medical costs due to such medical knowledge being proprietary and researchers not cooperating more. Of course, then the huge public health bills are used to justify *increasing* the proprietary aspects of medical knowledge to create more artificial scarcity -- which is a tremendous and sad irony. " -
Abundant science needs a funding paradigm shift
Something I wrote on that begins: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "I sent a longer version to the Markle Foundation in 2001, two years before this open partnership on Alzheimer's started:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
Maybe it helped? :-)By the way, adequate vitamin D and eating organic whole foods heavy on vegetables, fruits, and beans (with a few selected supplements like B12 and DHA) may help delay Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia greatly; see:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cat-alzheimers-disease.htmlSo, the answers are out there even without people cooperating to make some magic bullet. The cooperation through basic publications and the hard work of a few key people like Dr. John Cannell and Dr. Joel Fuhrman putting together such information has made huge difference. Now if just more people would pay attention to these findings -- but unfortunately there is not much profit in emphasizing getting mdoerate sunlight exposure (or taking cheap supplements) and eating right, so that is another part of the partadigm problem of a for-profit health care and R&D system.
Moderate exercise and some other things can help too (see Dr. Andrew Weil for the bigger picture of the holistic side fo health, though his nutrition advice is not quite as good as the above links) but again, there is not the huge profits in that as, say, doing triple bypasses.
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Abundant science needs a funding paradigm shift
Something I wrote on that begins: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "I sent a longer version to the Markle Foundation in 2001, two years before this open partnership on Alzheimer's started:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
Maybe it helped? :-)By the way, adequate vitamin D and eating organic whole foods heavy on vegetables, fruits, and beans (with a few selected supplements like B12 and DHA) may help delay Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia greatly; see:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cat-alzheimers-disease.htmlSo, the answers are out there even without people cooperating to make some magic bullet. The cooperation through basic publications and the hard work of a few key people like Dr. John Cannell and Dr. Joel Fuhrman putting together such information has made huge difference. Now if just more people would pay attention to these findings -- but unfortunately there is not much profit in emphasizing getting mdoerate sunlight exposure (or taking cheap supplements) and eating right, so that is another part of the partadigm problem of a for-profit health care and R&D system.
Moderate exercise and some other things can help too (see Dr. Andrew Weil for the bigger picture of the holistic side fo health, though his nutrition advice is not quite as good as the above links) but again, there is not the huge profits in that as, say, doing triple bypasses.
-
On different actors using OS intelligence tools
Here is more on this issue of the global distribution of free and open source software to all the countries of the world, even ones now deemed "competitors" or "unfriendly".
When I was an undegraduate psychology major at Princeton University, my advisor was George A. Miller. This was in the early-to-mid 1980s just before he started working on WordNet -- which was funded in large part by three letter agencies after George "retired". WordNet is also an "open source" project to which, in my less humble moments, I like to think I played a little role in sparking with my own crude explorations on semantic networks as a student of his, as discussed here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/231e63e966e932df?hl=enWordNet, being open source, is no doubt used by governments around the world, including in China or maybe even North Korea. WordNet is also at the core of much of Google's AdSense profit making (not that I ever saw a dime from that.
:-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Armitage_Miller
But, what I have seen from that is being able to use Google -- a great service run on essentially a global supercomputer that has let me create all sorts of essays about ways forward for our society, such as:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
So, I and many others have greatly benefited from the open source nature of WordNet and what that made possible, far more than if I or George or someone else had a bunch of money in the bank from some proprietary semantic network system that otherwise had sat on the shelf.George never talked politics with me -- maybe as a consequence of always being pestered by other people to tell of his days working alongside Noam Chomsky (like working on joint papers, etc.).
:-) The only time he said anything remotely political in my presence that I can recall was, in the days after "The Day After" movie (a PU prof had helped with the special effects) in the corridor near his office outside the men's bathroom in Green Hall. He seemed a bit upset or angry, IIRC another faculty member was there that he might have been talking to about this, and he said how stupid it was that the first thing the US or USSR military planned to do in a military confrontation was blind the other's satellites, which essentially would ensure the conflict would escalate, because there would be no way the other side could tell what was going on, and they would probably just assume the worst and shoot off all their missiles. I think he may have just read a newspaper article about that.I feel George has made the world a much better place by creating WordNet -- and a world less likely to shoot off all its nuclear missiles. Whatever the sparks behind WordNet which he started at around age 65 (and I'm sure there were many sparks, as he hung out with lots of people doing semantic network stuff, like Alan Newell and Herbert Simon), he put in year after year of hard work, and structured it based on years of his research into how humans understand language and also how dictionaries work (or should work). He made something open source back when hardly anyone was doing that (and I myself was more interested in proprietary things and being the next, well, Bill Gates was not that big then, but whoever was ultrarich with a big company etc.). As a measure of my own personal growth from those times, in part from George's example, here is a recent video I ma
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Filter = What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream
See Noam Chomsky: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"""
The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it's generally true of corporations. It's true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It's dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don't adjust to that structure, who don't accept it and internalize it (you can't really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don't do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don't do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren't lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.
"""For more on rethinking Princeton University's guiding ideology in an alternative post-scarcity way, see an online document I wrote on that:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease (about 200 pages)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.htmlTo begin with, why filter *before* people get a chance to create things or say things? Why not use review and moderation (like with slashdot) *after* people get a chance create things or say things?
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The need for open source sensemaking tools
I posted two comments related to this issue of open source sensemaking tools to understand how socio-politico-techno-economic stuff works at the following URL in response to a larger issue raised by Marshall Brain on the USA's ongoing economic decline:
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2010/08/06/makes-you-think-in-america-we-realize-that-our-children-will-do-worse-than-their-parents/In short, I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progess or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as slashdot is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to slashdot as slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones. Hopefully in a better way than this classic:
:-)
"Argument Clinic Sketch by Monty Python"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9YAs I mention in my comments to Marshall Brains' blog entry, Elizabeth Warren did a terrific job of socio-economic sensemaking, in terms of "The Two Income Trap" and her presentation on the struggles of US middle-class families in the video Marshall Brain linked to. But why should even Harvard Law professors essentially wing it as far as sensemaking with only email, spreadsheets, and word processors, probably working mostly alone, and in a way that she can not easily share all the details of her explorations? Especially when the USA has invested, probably, literally billions of dollars to create software to help groups of people collectively understand complex social and economic issues? And given the US is likely to spend billions more in this area? And given that, if we have any faith in "truth", one would hope that helping everyone in the world come to a better understanding of various truths and a better understanding of each other would, in general, lead to less conflict rather than more?
I also commented on that idea about a year ago:
"[p2p-research] FOSS modeling tools (was Re: Earth's carrying capacity and Catton)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004130.htmlI tried a little to put together a non-profit foundation to do that, so far to not much success.
And here is why I feel the (non-secret) results of any public funding should be open source rather than proprietary:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.htmlI feel there is room here for an entirely new approach towards structured collaboration across the internet. It has its roots in Doug Englebart's Augment ideas from the 1960s, and in scale may well be the next Red Hat, Wikipedia, or even Google (whether for-profit or non-profit). Or, it is possible it may be some bunch of related companies and non-profits, all using a common infrastructure
-
The need for open source sensemaking tools
I posted two comments related to this issue of open source sensemaking tools to understand how socio-politico-techno-economic stuff works at the following URL in response to a larger issue raised by Marshall Brain on the USA's ongoing economic decline:
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2010/08/06/makes-you-think-in-america-we-realize-that-our-children-will-do-worse-than-their-parents/In short, I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progess or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as slashdot is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to slashdot as slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones. Hopefully in a better way than this classic:
:-)
"Argument Clinic Sketch by Monty Python"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9YAs I mention in my comments to Marshall Brains' blog entry, Elizabeth Warren did a terrific job of socio-economic sensemaking, in terms of "The Two Income Trap" and her presentation on the struggles of US middle-class families in the video Marshall Brain linked to. But why should even Harvard Law professors essentially wing it as far as sensemaking with only email, spreadsheets, and word processors, probably working mostly alone, and in a way that she can not easily share all the details of her explorations? Especially when the USA has invested, probably, literally billions of dollars to create software to help groups of people collectively understand complex social and economic issues? And given the US is likely to spend billions more in this area? And given that, if we have any faith in "truth", one would hope that helping everyone in the world come to a better understanding of various truths and a better understanding of each other would, in general, lead to less conflict rather than more?
I also commented on that idea about a year ago:
"[p2p-research] FOSS modeling tools (was Re: Earth's carrying capacity and Catton)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004130.htmlI tried a little to put together a non-profit foundation to do that, so far to not much success.
And here is why I feel the (non-secret) results of any public funding should be open source rather than proprietary:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.htmlI feel there is room here for an entirely new approach towards structured collaboration across the internet. It has its roots in Doug Englebart's Augment ideas from the 1960s, and in scale may well be the next Red Hat, Wikipedia, or even Google (whether for-profit or non-profit). Or, it is possible it may be some bunch of related companies and non-profits, all using a common infrastructure
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The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers
"Liberals Arts Majors = Not worth $50k." See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/28leonhardt.html?_r=1&
"Mr. Chetty and his colleagues -- one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 -- estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That's the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn't take into account social gains, like better health and less crime."Is kindergarten teacher a liberal arts major?
Of course, if you just give the money directly to the families, they'll probably have even better results:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out." -
A book about what's wrong with Princeton U
And how to fix it (by me): http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"""
Let's consider some specific tough questions about Princeton related to "quality" in the "now".
* Do, say, most people who start PU PhD programs usually get professorships?
* Does the typical person with, say, a degree in linguistics get to later do research on, say, the history of words after graduation?
* Do alumni who, say, endow professorships have long and joyful lives?
* Are donations doing unique good?
* Is there room for everyone, young and old, to give what they can to the local community and the global world?
* Are ethics integrated into science and engineering?
* Are the non-university surroundings strengthened in diversity and community by the university's presence?
* Are the students socializing Friday and Saturday nights in joyful settings promoting wellness and balance?
* Are PU assets producing the highest return in terms of people well educated globally?
Princeton is a complex institution, so there can be no definitive or easy answers to each of these questions. Still, this essay suggests that, more often than it should be, the answer to all of them is "No". So, I suggest, not only is Princeton conflicted about the "future", it even misses the "now". Which means it is time for serious change in how it sees itself.
""" -
On Funding Digital Public Works
On rethinking public funding: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
"An outdated scarcity perspective in the non-profit community is still manifesting itself, however. There remains a continued emphasis on charitable projects which include plans for restricting access to the resulting publicly funded digital works now, in the hopes of creating revenue streams later. The funded organization usually proposes continuing to improve the work itself under its solitary control using money derived from selling licenses to the work. Contrast this with, for example, the post-scarcity development of the GNU/Linux operating system, made by thousands of volunteers contributing improvements to an initial base contributed by Linus Torvalds and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) GNU project.
The old scarcity criterion towards selecting what makes a viable project (based on a recurring royalty stream for static content) is completely at odds with the new post-scarcity model (based more on streams of attention, status, service, and customization). The new collaborative development process made possible by the internet (resulting in a work made by sharing licenses to copyrights made by a distributed network of authors funded indirectly by other means) is fundamentally different than the old process (resulting in a work made by centralized copyright ownership with a development process funded by selling licenses to the result)." -
Re:Or maybe we are living in a simulation...
Some ramblings I don's see an obvious place to put; they are only tangential to your comment.
:-)See also my other comment in this thread with some related "hard" sci-fi ideas that seem "magical" just now: exploiting a bug in the VM simulating us, building natotech/biotech, and/or tapping zero point energy:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&cid=33042664Has anyone mentioned Edward Fredkin yet, by the way?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin
"Fredkin's digital philosophy contains several fundamental ideas: Everything in physics and physical reality must have a digital informational representation. All changes in physical nature are consequences of digital informational processes. Nature is finite and digital. The traditional Judaeo-Christian concept of the soul has a counterpart in a static/dynamic soul defined in terms of digital philosophy."And an article about Fredkin (taken from the book "Three Scientists and their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information" that the late Jim Beniger, a professor of mine, got me as a promo copy back in the 1980s, so thoughtful of him to suggest me for one, and it is a great book, and I especially liked the section on Fredkin):
"Did the Universe Just Happen?"
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/88apr/wright.htm
"In addition to being a self-made millionaire, Fredkin is a self-made intellectual. Twenty years ago, at the age of thirty-four, without so much as a bachelor's degree to his name, he became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Though hired to teach computer science, and then selected to guide MIT's now eminent computer-science laboratory through some of its formative years, he soon branched out into more-offbeat things. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of the courses he has taught is one on "digital physics," in which he propounded the most idiosyncratic of his several idiosyncratic theories. This theory is the reason I've come to Fredkin's island. It is one of those things that a person has to be prepared for. The preparer has to say, "Now, this is going to sound pretty weird, and in a way it is, but in a way it's not as weird as it sounds, and you'll see this once you understand it, but that may take a while, so in the meantime don't prejudge it, and don't casually dismiss it." Ed Fredkin thinks that the universe is a computer. "Sounds like quite a guy. It would be fun to chat with him someday. This was way before the Matrix. When the Matrix came out, I was like, that's the kind of idea I'd been thinking about for some time (inspired by several sources, including Fredkin) and it was nice to finally see it in the public consciousness in a big way.
Guess it would be good to cross-link this comment thread somehow to the recent slashdot article on computer game designers burning out from overwork (and I think lack of vitamin D and lack of healthy whole foods).
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1731650&cid=33026262So, were the "planet builders" of "digital physical universes" burned out from overwork and ill from an unhealthy lifestyle. Is that where the "bugs" came from? Or just the general philosophical problems we wrestle with from a poorly though trough plot line?
;-) Or, is it all just sublime and wonderful beyond our knowing?A comment I made on the "game design" we are stuck in:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"... I agree with the sentiment of the Einstein quote [That we should approach the -
On Funding Digital Public Works & health resea
On how charitable givers should insist on a post-scarcity copyright and patent policy for the results of anything they fund in whole or in part (from a document I wrote):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
"For example, where can one go to get a freely modifiable design including CAD files for even a simple health-related appliance like a wheelchair? Or worse, where is the community freely collaborating on improving wheel chair designs? Are a few dozen intentionally-vague patents on wheel chair design the best to be hoped for given the trillions of dollars of investments into public works, including vast amount of money spent on medical research? ... This physical public works paradigm is unfortunately then applied to thinking about most digital public works, and there is a major flaw in the analogy. A bridge does not require much marketing. ...
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality
http://www.fsf.org/software/reliability.html
and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny? ..."A shorter version of that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely