Slashdot Mirror

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

Thanks for the comments. I would agree with you that there is no upper limit as to what people would do -- the real issue is how they do it and what social arrangement surround that. For example, when someone plants a Redwood tree seed, how much work are they really doing to produce a huge tree? The tree grows on its own if the conditions are right (granted, it might be more likely to grow with some occasional tending). Our technology as it incorporates robotics and AI will be more like that -- so we'll see things like self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from asteroidal ore and sunlight, same like a Redwood, but the total human intervention required may be minimal (relative to the total outcome in terms of providing living space for millions of humans -- so such a project might preoccupy thousands of people, but with their output amplified so much by technology that the total human labor is a trivial percentage). Our scarcity economics may work OK when humans face the dilemma of work hard as a wage slave or slowly starve, but that economic logic breaks down when the choice is work hard as a slave for someone else for a little bit more or work for yourself and your friends and family and still have a good life. Some people will still choose wage slavery perhaps (ambitious people? stupid ones? addicted ones? desperate ones? materialistic ones? etc.), but I'd suggest more and more people would not and would look for more joyful ways to spend their time. So, we need alternative social arrangements as robotics becomes more and more capable (like this video shows).

There are exceptions even now though. A lot of people at Microsoft or Google were or are millionaires (thorough stock appreciation) and do not have to "work" to have a modest lifestyle; so you would be right to point to examples of that, where people work because they want to change the world somehow (or to have a more profligate use of resources). Human social dynamics, as James P. Hogan suggests, leaves most young people adapted to want to show off somehow to attract a good mate, and showing off materially has been long ingrained in our culture (including buying trophy wives for older guys, or the whole "cougar" thing now in the other direction).

Of course, "men" are already under the gun in our society:
"The End of Men"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/
As are families:
"The Two-Income Trap"
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
Robotics just add to other ongoing social trends...

Still, I'd suggest, the dynamics of how society is arranged (and what relationships women prefer and why) would change somewhat if essentially everyone in the society felt like a millionaire through something like a basic income or other fundamental change, as I wrote here:
"Basic income from a millionaire's perspective?"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
"Essentially, with a break in the link between having a job and having a right to consume at a moderate level, workplaces could be organized however they wanted. And potential employees would just vote with their feet about where they wanted to work to make the most money, have the most fun during the day, or do the most good for society as they saw it. While it is true that many unpleasant jobs would no longer find low wage workers to do them, for those jobs, either wages would go up, or they would be automated or redesigned out of existence, for example, like with some towns that have garbage trucks with robot arms to pick up curbside standard garbage cans. So, overall, most of the jobs that remained would be ones that people

A basic income would eliminate poverty (and was endorsed by Nobel Prize winners):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
The right amount of vitamin D would reduce sick care costs by maybe a third in industrialized countries:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
A good diet, occasional fasting, and moderate exercise would reduce another third or so of sick care expenses by helping people break out of a pleasure trap from supernormal stimuli:
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
Single payer health care in the USA would reduce expenses (for paperwork) by a third as well (these are not all additive, of course):
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/what-is-single-payer
Reinstating regulation on children's TV might help prevent damage to kids:
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
A more vegetarian diet would also free up three-quarters of agricultural lands in the USA:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Renewable energy has been cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear, when you factor in the externalities, like pollution, defense spending, and risk:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
Switching to electric cars would probably reduce our electricity use, and eliminate the need for much oil (since it takes more electricity to refine the oil into gas than it would to run electric cars the same distance as a gallon of gas in an ICE car):
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
We can develop the technology of being able to produce almost anything from commonly found raw materials:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
We know how to make healthier communities:
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
Nuclear weapons and military robots are ironic because the same technology could produce abundanc

Let's just give the school money directly to the parents instead of schools, as I suggest here in some detail:
    "Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)"
    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. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities.
"""

We should also implement a basic income (social security and medicare for all, without age limits or a means test) for everyone as a human right, while we are at it:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
If every person got a basic income, everyone could afford to purchase the education they wanted from the market.

So true. And it's sad your post got modded down as Troll, since you are 100% right on, and whoever did that is probably caught up in the ideology behind monstrosity that is modern schooling (of course, most private schools are little better). Escalante failed to make large changes and was taken down by the institution because, ultimately, he was doing what should not be done in schools -- get poor people to think and climb out of their assigned class in life. More supportive links:

Gatto:
    "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"
    http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/086571231X
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""

Illich:
    http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
    http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html

John Holt:
    http://www.holtgws.com/

Collections of links by me on this:
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Why not just give the school money directly to the parents as they see fit to take care of their children? One proposal (by me):
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will: ... Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
"""

For more on the history of schooling in the USA:
"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

For more on the history of schooling globally:
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance "
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
"The history of the development of Western schooling is a complex and meandering thing, but I think it is worth looking at in a very abbreviated form here. A little insight into the logics and basis for contemporary compulsory schooling might be useful to social ecologists. ..."

The bottom line: schooling and education have very little to do with each other... Schooling was designed to dumb people down to produce mindless factory workers, obedient soldiers, and compliant consumers. Education helps a person grow into someone who can be part of or help create a healthy society while also creating joy and health for themselves and their family, friends, and neighbors.

I agree with you on the vouchers part to some extent; the better solution may be to just give all the money directly to the parents, as I suggest here:
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.
"""

Really good teachers would have nothing to fear from such a plan, because their would be enough money floating around so they could have flexible

And that argument essentially is made here, which discusses what to do about an unhealthy alliance between toymakers and children's media makers (and food companies), that started with the media deregulation during the "family values" Reagan Administration:
"The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know"
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X

Some comments on that book in my review of it here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"A few key ideas from the book:
The deregulation of children's media during the early 1980s (Reagan administration) led to an alliance of media companies and toy companies and other companies (like food companies); the result of this is an immersion for many children in an interlinked experience of seeing media about violence, purchasing related action figures and toys and video games, and having these items promoted every place they go (whether to buy fast-food or just in other kid's homes). This is a big change from the media environment from the 1960s and 1970s that many of today's parents grew up in.
The authors point out that the behaviors promoted by this alliance tend to be very sex-role stereotypical, as in boys need to be fighters and girls need to be princesses. For many children, the authors suggest they can get locked into a pattern of endless cycling through stereotyped behaviors. While it is true that knights and princesses have long been important parts of many children's play (so this is not intended to dismiss that), what has changed for some children is the tone and extremeness of those experience because of the high degree of continual interrelated media/toy/game/food saturation. Rather than children being able to express themselves building on those knight/princess themes in their own unique ways, because of the integrated marketing, for many children there becomes only one way to be a knight or a princess (as defined by some media and accompanying purchased toys to be used in only very precise and narrow ways). The book focuses mainly on the boy part of this equation. One of the authors has writings on the female stereotyping aspect of media and other issues, described here:
http://www.dianeelevin.com/writing.html
The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options. ...
So, whether you are a dove or a hawk, a progressive or a conservative, I would hope there is at least some common ground on concern about excessive (and often dysfunctional) war-themed play being promoted by an alliance of media companies, toy companies, game companies, and food companies for their mutual profit. Still, this is just one more set of difficult issues to navigate while parenting. Some families do better on some issues, some do better on others. Again, as Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige say in "The War Play Dilemma", there are no easy answers for every situation or every family -- otherwise it would not be such a "dilemma". "

Of course, then a deeper issu

Well, I guess people agree with you that citing two experts in the field on child development and violent media and games is "trolling" in the context of a discussion on banning violent video games (people who outline a nuanced view if anyone bothered to look at the book). The link again:
"The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know"
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X

The "dilemma" in the title is the conflict between helping kids work through developmental issues about violence vs. sending a message about violence being undesirable. I wrote a review of that book here with the key points:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"""
From the table of contents, here is the list of topics in their "Guidelines for Resolving the War Play Dilemma" (each topic has a few pages of explanation and suggestions):
* Guideline 1: Limit Children's Exposure to Violence
* Guideline 2: Help Children Engage in Creative and Meaningful Dramatic Play
* Guideline 3: Learn as Much as You Can [about the media scenes kids view]
* Guideline 4: In Children's War Play, Address the Issues
* Guideline 5: Work to Counteract the Lessons About Violence and Stereotyping
* Guideline 6: Make Keeping the Play Safe You Highest Priority
* Guideline 7: Limit the Use of Highly Structured Violent Toys
* Guideline 8: Work to Counteract Highly Stereotyped and Limiting Gender Roles
* Guideline 9: Create an Ongoing Dialog Between Educators and Parents
In my own life, I grew up being taught in public school that I lived in a modern day Athens. As I've grow older, and paid more attention to politics and where taxes go, it feels more to me more like I live in a modern day Sparta. :-( Here is a long list of where many of our tax dollars have gone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_history_events
I was surprised to learn how long that list is, regardless of how one feels about the value of any specific event.
I've come to agree with the late Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC Retired), based on his decades of combat experience, that "War is a Racket":
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"""

Whatever you think of the rest of what I wrote, please look into the issue of vitamin D deficiency I mentioned, both for yourself and to help your family or friends or neighbors:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/

Most slashdotters probably suffer from vitamin D deficiency, and it might help explain some of the increasing hostility and problematical posts here with people spending so much time indoors using computers, whether they are playing violent games or not:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/

But it is not just mental things; vitamin D deficiency can also contribute to joint pain, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, tooth decay,

Thanks. Well, I guess, as you predicted, others don't agree, and the first item has been modded down to (0, Troll).
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1571756&cid=31365414
So has another gone down as offtopic:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1571756&cid=31365538
And another market Troll:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1571756&cid=31366202
How citing a book by acknowledged experts on the interrelation of child development and violent media and toys is off-topic and trolling in the context of discussing banning violent videogames and toys, well, I guess that happens sometimes. :-) Some people don't want to know (granted I say other stuff people may not like, too).

As a stay-at-home Dad (to some extent, and homeschooling) and also technology person, I've spent a lot of time thinking on this stuff, reading about it, and writing on it, (as in, years), so I have all the links etc. ready to go.

More by me on options for social progress (or regression) could be found here:
"Jobless Recovery"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.html
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"Achieving a Star Trek Society"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
"A brickfilm movie idea about preventing a Caprican future"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/cac4e38a9b68d083

As I say elsewhere, I don't think censorship is the answer to this sort of problem. Actually, I also think Chavez has the problem wrong. Violence and addictive-seeming consumption of social media happens in large part due to social stress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
The key is to reduce the stress, and to direct people to more positive activities.

As Bucky Fuller said:
http://challenge.bfi.org/movie
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

That's really what Chavez is doing wrong with this, and some other things. It's sad. Venezuela could repeal the Berne convention on copyrights, institute a basic income, expand the public library system instead of the public school system, grind up rock for fertilizer, promote cooperative games, and a variety of other more essential and effective things to create prosperity for all there. Banning the violent video games does not address any of these core issues.

Twenty years from now, when renewables replace oil (a major revenue for Venezuela) through exponential growth, and AI and robotics and better design (a better RepRap) can produce really cheap products in any industrialized country (and so they will flood in from abroad), Venezuela will be in bad shape unless it has transitioned beyond capitalist economics entirely

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
"""
The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
"""

Freedom from want includes things like redistribution, but also socially-directed investment to create health and material abundance for all. Freedom from fear includes things like reducing violence in a society. In this case, the chose method of banning the games to free people from fear and want can be seen as conflicting with freedom of speech and expression.

I think taxing the games would have been a more sensible approach to the externality created by violent media:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
and either redistributing the tax revenue equally to everyone, or using it to combat violence somehow and promote the creation of more pro-social media.

A tax on violent media is kind of like saying people could shout "fire" in a crowded theater, but if they do it as a prank and it makes trouble for everyone, they are going to pay a serious fine to reimburse everyone for the trouble they cause.

Still, it is hard to say how much different games (violent or not) really harm society. A worse general problem is that people spending too much time indoors playing any sort of game (or even reading books) become vitamin D deficient.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
So, should all games and books have a tax on them for that?

And, children do need to work through issues of violence, even as they also need to be told that violence (and other aggression) is anti-social, which creates a dilemma (discussed in this book, which recommends reducing exposure to violent media, but not banning it):
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X

I wrote a review of that book here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"""
From the table of contents, here is the list of topics in their "Guidelines for Resolving the War Play Dilemma" (each topic has a few pages of explanation and suggestions):
* Guideline 1: Limit Children's Exposure to Violence
* Guideline 2: Help Children Engage in Creative and Meaningful Dramatic Play
* Guideline 3: Learn as Much as You Can [about the media scenes kids view]
* Guideline 4: In Children's War Play, Address the Issues
* Guideline 5: Work to Counteract the Lessons About Violence and Stereotyping
* Guideline 6: Make Keeping the Play Safe You Highest Priority
* Guideline 7: Limit the Use of Highly Structured Violent Toys
* Guideline 8: Work to Counteract Highly Stereotyped and Limiting Gender Roles
* Guideline 9: Create an Ongoing Dialog Between Educators and Parents
"""

On the broader topic of freedom, consider:
"Libertarianism: Marxism of the Right"
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"""
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simp

Please see this book (and my other previous comment here):
    http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X

I wrote a review of it here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html

Other related books about general issues and about what has been done to girls via media (and poor nutrition):
    http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
    http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

And something every caregiver should know now that kids spend a lot of time indoors and have become vitamin D deficient:
    http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

We got rid of broadcast TV long ago too (we do use DVDs like Mr. Rogers and nature videos, and selected YouTube).

While I don't recommend any screen media for younger kids if you can avoid it, this site is pretty good for age four:
    http://www.poissonrouge.com/

As is this:
    http://www.starfall.com/

For older ages, some good things are:
    http://www.learner.org/
    http://www.khanacademy.org/
    http://www.cosmolearning.com/

A caregiver needs to create a safe nurturing environment within a child's needs and abilities. You are doing the right thing.

Other useful links:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles
    http://www.motherstyles.com/

An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society (by me):
    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. "

Much hardware design starts in simulation, which is essentially software.

As the OpenVirgle page says, most of that activity has moved to the "open manufacturing" idea, where there is more current activity towards that sort of "clanking" thing, but in a more general way:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing

Artemis had always struck me as focusing on proprietary things, so is a non-starter in that sense (unless they have changed recently). I prefer what LUF is up to, like with what Eric Hunting is up to with "The Millennial Project 2":
http://tmp2.wikia.com/
http://theluf.blogspot.com/

And then there is the newer "OpenLuna":
http://www.openluna.org/

Twenty years before that I tried to do a PhD in this at Princeton (which fizzled painfully, after a similar attempt fizzled even more quickly essentially before it started at NCSU):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
"I'm posting this stuff here for archival purposes and in case they give others some ideas or encouragement for their own efforts. It's part of my scanning my own old paper archives. This was my proposal for graduate studies at Princeton University twenty years ago (and in some ways includes a proposal for creating a mini-Google and a mini-World-Wide-Web. :-). ... The good news is that now, twenty years later, all or most of the hurdles have fallen that otherwise needed leaping before being able to comprehensively design self-replicating space habitats, and all the computer and informational resources I thought I needed then are now available for cheap or free. For example, for only a few thousand dollars, I have the equivalent of an early 1990s supercomputer in my office with terabytes of storage and a high speed color scanner and a network connection and access to Google and Wikipedia and so on. So, what I outlined in the 20th century is more and more doable in the 21st century for less and less cost. So, item 13 (the major goal) is now approachable without needing to do much on the other prerequisite items listed. ..."

And then I worked toward a non-profit and then a company that both also fizzled:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html

I did get a masters as a consolation prize from an Ecology and Evolution PhD program when later my PhD studies towards this end at SUNY SB also fizzled...

Anyway, I tried to get NASA interested in this stuff over a decade ago but I was not successful; my attempt there:
"Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm

This is not to blame NASA entirely, other than being kind of bureaucratic like most government agencies, and I'm not that great a promoter. As is pointed out in many places, including by someone here:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
the general problem with grants and things is that almost invariably the people best at getting grants are often the people least likely to do much innovative stuff with the money. :-) That is, grant getting skills and product creation skills are rarely found in the same person, or even in the same organization. And in this case of OSCOMAK, it also went against the very idea of tight managerial control that is a hallmark of NASA. But, could I ha

Much hardware design starts in simulation, which is essentially software.

As the OpenVirgle page says, most of that activity has moved to the "open manufacturing" idea, where there is more current activity towards that sort of "clanking" thing, but in a more general way:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing

Artemis had always struck me as focusing on proprietary things, so is a non-starter in that sense (unless they have changed recently). I prefer what LUF is up to, like with what Eric Hunting is up to with "The Millennial Project 2":
http://tmp2.wikia.com/
http://theluf.blogspot.com/

And then there is the newer "OpenLuna":
http://www.openluna.org/

Twenty years before that I tried to do a PhD in this at Princeton (which fizzled painfully, after a similar attempt fizzled even more quickly essentially before it started at NCSU):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
"I'm posting this stuff here for archival purposes and in case they give others some ideas or encouragement for their own efforts. It's part of my scanning my own old paper archives. This was my proposal for graduate studies at Princeton University twenty years ago (and in some ways includes a proposal for creating a mini-Google and a mini-World-Wide-Web. :-). ... The good news is that now, twenty years later, all or most of the hurdles have fallen that otherwise needed leaping before being able to comprehensively design self-replicating space habitats, and all the computer and informational resources I thought I needed then are now available for cheap or free. For example, for only a few thousand dollars, I have the equivalent of an early 1990s supercomputer in my office with terabytes of storage and a high speed color scanner and a network connection and access to Google and Wikipedia and so on. So, what I outlined in the 20th century is more and more doable in the 21st century for less and less cost. So, item 13 (the major goal) is now approachable without needing to do much on the other prerequisite items listed. ..."

And then I worked toward a non-profit and then a company that both also fizzled:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html

I did get a masters as a consolation prize from an Ecology and Evolution PhD program when later my PhD studies towards this end at SUNY SB also fizzled...

Anyway, I tried to get NASA interested in this stuff over a decade ago but I was not successful; my attempt there:
"Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm

This is not to blame NASA entirely, other than being kind of bureaucratic like most government agencies, and I'm not that great a promoter. As is pointed out in many places, including by someone here:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
the general problem with grants and things is that almost invariably the people best at getting grants are often the people least likely to do much innovative stuff with the money. :-) That is, grant getting skills and product creation skills are rarely found in the same person, or even in the same organization. And in this case of OSCOMAK, it also went against the very idea of tight managerial control that is a hallmark of NASA. But, could I ha

Self-driving cars will be another aspect of car safety soon. As I wrote here:
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7bb1aa3d05ec7c6
referencing my essay here from ten years ago. The relevant excerpt:
      "On Funding Digital Public Works"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
"""
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?
"""

Vouchers are half-measures. This case shows once again how the school system is, like NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says, "a form of adoption", and like others say, the finest branch of the US Penal system.
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

A better solution is to just give all the money to the parents to spend in the free market on their family's well-being, however they choose. Most parents will make better choices, and then we don't need these authoritarian institutions in our children's lives teaching them how to live in a police state. We trust parents to help kids make good decisions about college, why should other schooling be that different? K-12 campuses could be repurposed as public-library-like democratic learning centers open to anyone to learn or teach or discuss whatever they wanted. This would be best for everyone, even good teachers, for reasons I outline here:
"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)"
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.
"""

To head off an obvious knee-jerk objection, consider:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting.[9] Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children - particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children - when obviously most children already have even more secure housing."[10]
"""

And if our neighborhoods were once again full of stay-at-home parents who had money (US$20K per kid per year in NY), then we might expect neighbors to be able to help out with the children of other families that were going through a tough times. And, for the truly terrible parenting cases with a family court judgement, the state could step in for just those cases and pay the money to private school instead of to the parents. This approach would be both more democratic and more free market oriented, and would recognize and support the value that good parenting provides to society. For most children, schools make very authoritarian parents, and not as good ones as real parents who have a variety

You make many great points.

You're right that externalities have always existed. Perhaps part of the issue is that technology is an amplifier. As technology increases in power, the externalities can get larger, too. And there are fewer places you can go to avoid them. People could probably often walk away from a forest fire 10,000 years ago (not always, of course). And rebuilding a burned down home back then did not take that much time, since people were content with less, and having possessions beyond what you could carry with you was mostly a burden, and also nature was so relatively abundant, and most people would have had a lot of skills within that domain.

Still, why do people spam today as an externality? Generally, it is to make money. Many people actually blame Google for creating so much spam, with their paid ad services. :-) If so many people did not have to make money, there would be a lot less spam. Further, if people had more free time, some people might even focus more of their attention on doing something about spam, like find the spammers homes and go have a polite talk with them. Also, as with terrorists, the issue is also, who gives them protection? Who aid them? If you can take away a support network from terrorists, they can't function very well. Companies aid the spammers to make money. Take that away, and most spammers are back to graffiti. :-) So, if there was no need to advertise for pay, and no need to host anyone to make a buck, and no need to make money if you did not want to work, and there were more people to think about and deal with the spam problem, I expect spamming would be greatly reduced. And once it is greatly reduced, then it becomes easier and easier to deal with each spam as a serious problem. Also, in a world of abundance, and with universal high quality health care, mentally ill spammers would be better taken care of, and helped to live a (hopefully) more satisfying life doing something more personally meaningful.

Ultimately, as far as post-scarcity, author Iain Banks has a character say, "Money is a sign of poverty." Alternative currencies and a basic income make a lot of sense in a money-based economy like ours. But they are mostly just a stop on the train line to something better (a gift/potlach economy, a Swadeshi local subsistence economy with nanotech 3D printers, a world where work is made into play, better resource-based planning, etc.).

As for money and hording, as countries find out often when they go to war, money is really meaningless. What matters is physical capacity and people's willingness to do things. You can't build a house if you don't have the materials or people (or robots) willing to do the work. One should not confuse the control system for that which is controlled. As I suggest here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decisio

I decided to post the whole thing as a reply here since it is not easily accessible, even though there are a couple of replies there and additional comments by me.

Embedded software developer Joseph Stack allegedly intentionally flew a small plane into government offices in Austin, TX, in an act that has been labeled as domestic terrorism. He cited, among other things, IRS regulations about independent contractor status as well as other issues related to government corruption.

Could his behavior have been partially due to vitamin D deficiency syndrome from indoor work? Could vitamin D deficiency also have contributed to the violent behavior alleged of Hans Reiser or Amy Bishop? And is part of the problem also that Joe Stack was not talking to anyone about any of this to think through real solutions and find positive things to do that, as Mr. Rogers sang, would not hurt himself or anyone else?

Here are some useful resources for preventing more copycat violence to show how there are plenty of alternatives to violence despite Joe Stack's claim otherwise in his manifesto:

Treating Disease With Vitamin D

Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy

Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

Albert Einstein on: Religion and Science

A wombat talks about a global mindshift

TED | Peter Eigen on moving beyond corruption

The Optimism of Uncertainty

Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence

As another software developer who has done embedded work, here are some non-programming things I've worked on related to helping people see positive alternatives to violence:

Possible cures for a jobless recovery

Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease

Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future

The amazing thing to me is not that stuff like this happens. What is amazing is that it does not happen more often, which is a tribute to most of humanity's basic social nature. In a way, even Joe Stack chose a relatively limited approach; an embedded software developer such as he was could have done far more damage if trying to create general mayhem (he could have tampered with nuclear power plants or medical devices or airplane software). There is also irony here that a person took a very advanced piece of technology — a private airplane, and all that it represents as a technological marvel — and used it to destroy a past instead of to create a future.

What do people think and feel about all this?

Wow, I had never heard of "Special Agent Oso" that I remember. Creepy. Still, we will do better in a democracy by creating alternatives than by censoring. We need to make it easier for parents to find better media alternatives, and better non-media alternatives to having their kids immersed in such things.

You're right about early indoctrination. Although, it's also true that all education is a form of indoctrination in some sense. The issue is mainly, what values and habits and assumptions are we passing on? And that's something every person in our society should reflect on (and no one is perfect, of course). I grew up on 1970s stuff like Sealab 2020, Mr. Rogers, The Magic Garden, New Zoo Review, Star Trek, Electric Company, the old Sesame Street, Yogi and his Friends, and so on, and they (hopefully) shaped my values in positive ways, along with many other influences from books, individuals, and organizations (including some positive aspects of schools and teachers).

Here are two books co-written by the same educator (Diane E Levin) which talk about the problems resulting from an unhealthy alliance between toy makers and media makers in the 1980s that displaced a lot of 1970s children's media (especially since media regulation in the USA under the "family values" era of Roland Reagan), one about the problems mostly boys face (locked into violent play) and one about the problems mostly girls face (locked into sexualized roles):
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

But what you link to moves in yet another direction, acquiescence to continual intimate surveillance, like in Orwell's 1984. Some of this may not be intentional by the authors as just a reflection of changing cultural norms powered by other things. A related slashdot article from just now:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/075223/The-Surreal-World-of-Chatroulette

One can sometimes read malice where there was just ignorance or difference or change. Still, often media is both a message and has other messages embedded in it reflecting the norms of the people who pay a lot of money to produce it.

Here is a related item on thinking about media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck
"How to read Donald Duck (Para leer al Pato Donald in Spanish) is a political analysis book, by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, published in Chile in 1971. It is seen as a pioneering work on cultural imperialism. Written in the form of essay (or as a decolonization manual, as described by the authors[1]), the book is an analysis of mass literature, specifically the Disney comics published for the Latin American market. It's considered a key work of its genre, mainly because it is one of the first social studies of two broad subjects: entertainment and the leisure industry from a political-ideological angle, and the problem of children's literature, meaning by this the analysis of cultural products which have children as main targets.[2]"

Another example is how Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory celebrates capitalism, secrecy, discarding workers to replace them with automation and half-humans, copyright, patents, not sharing, competition, and a bunch of other negative stuff -- which actually is all good for the conventional (wealthy) movie maker's bottom line.

Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer or Good Will Hunting also has some weird message in them, when you think about it. A comment by me here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.

Notice how the character of the bus changed when it became a place with more learner-directed learning-and-playing-on-demand instead of just an extension of day prison. (This is not to advocate violent games for behavior control, of course.) But, as with all such reports, there is no acknowledgment of the bigger issues, or apologies for past trauma and pain caused by aspects of schooling and ignored. What about all those years of bus problems? Those are just ignored, even as they are admitted now that there is a possible solution. What about the implications about children having more control over what they do versus behavior problems including aggression? Again, ignored. Also, what are the political implications of schools controlling network access to children and logging everything they do? Also, ignored. What are the implications of some kids having computers and others not? Again, ignored. Granted, it's a short article, my question is not so much about the reporting as the schooling culture it might reflect.

There are negative issues for media like being indoors away from sunlight and vitamin D, issues of being sedentary (even on a bus), issues of problematical content, and issues of other displaced healthy activities. But those need to be weighed against benefits of media for education, creativity, connectedness, and empowerment. And that media landscape continues to change with new technologies or new understanding about health issues.

Some more thoughts on the general topic; rather than wi-fi on the bus, why not just give the school taxes directly to the parents to spend on their family in the free market based on their own unique needs?
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)"
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 "

"1. Let me try to illustrate the problem another way:
From Google:
World GDP: $60.6 Trillion
World Population: 6.7 billion
If we confiscated all the wealth in the world and divided it up amongst us all that would be:
$9,045 per person
The poverty line for a 1 person household is:
$10,830
If we redistributed all the wealth in the world we would all live below the poverty line."

Several problems there.

GDP is just annual production measured in currency. It is not a good indicator of true progress:
http://www.rprogress.org/index.htm

Nor is GDP a good indicator of total wealth. Total wealth would include the biosphere, all ideas, all land, the moon, all genetic information, everyone's skills, all buildings, and so on.

Also, US$10,000 a year would go really far in India or China or parts of Africa (you'd live more like a US millionaire, assuming you were the only one with that, which you wouldn't be if everyone got it), so it does not account for wage differentials or living cost differentials. The first big problem here is confusing levels of reality. I talk about that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system.
"""

So, when talking about rethinking economics, it is easy to get confused about what currency is or what would happen if we moved it around differently. As Douglas Adams wrote: "This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most

The parent poster is very informative, and practical, although misses the open source point as a cultural thing, as well as does not discuss the issue of open standards, which may be even more important than open source for a big project (since with open standards, you can at least replace tools over time).

Also, since much work related to rocketry is considered some form of munitions, that is another stumbling block. Although hopefully OpenLuna can avoid most of those issues and focus on the habitat aspect?

But there is one other aspect that is even more important than CAD, and this is simulation and related standards for storing that data connected to simulations. And there are all sorts of simulation tools emphasizing all sorts of different things at all sorts of different levels of detail. And there are all sorts of very interesting simulations that can be made about how to make things that have both on-Earth benefits and advance the cause of making space habitats.

Take for example these ideas for the US National Institute of Standards And Technologies:
"Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing"
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
"The United States needs to prepare for a future where products are 100% recyclable, manufacturing itself has a zero net impact on the environment, and complete disassembly and disposal of a product at its end of life is routine. To document and monitor these changes, US industry will require key resources and methods that will enable it to measure sustainability along several dimensions (such as carbon foot print, energy accounting and recyclability of materials) allowing accurate assessment of status and progress."

That is exactly the kind of information you need in designing a space habitat too, whether on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, or even anywhere on Earth (like under the sea, or in Antarctica, or in the desert).

Over the last ten years this paper I co-wrote for the Space Studies Institute conference on space manufacturing has gone from unimaginable to mostly obsolete, now that so many people are doing open source design. :-)
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

But, one big issue to consider is to save design costs, you ideally need a good simulation framework for doing virtual testing of concepts. And to do detailed simulations, you ideally might need millions of people to donate spare CPU cycles. If you can get to the point where you can launch an automated seed factory to the moon that would then build infrastructure, all you would need is a billion dollars to build it and launch it (which hundreds of individuals could swing today). But to get to that point you need a credible design. Getting that design together, with as much virtual testing as possible, is something that could productively occupy many people for years, and the best value for a small group might be to put together enough seed information to make the equivalent (maybe not web based) of a Wikipedia of space habitation and open manufacturing information. Three fizzled attempts by me in those directions from years gone by (roughly two, ten, and twenty years ago, respectively):
http://www.oscomak.net/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html

James P. Hogan, the sci-fi writer, has been a big inspiration to me, especially with these with two books:

If you read the essay I wrote linked below, a major point is that most millionaires themselves would be better off living in a society with a basic income, and I give a list of reasons (better medical care especially in disaster times, a better love life, a better family life and less worries about their children, less stress, happier communities and safer streets, more friends, less regulation in having businesses with employees, more free music and free software, and so on).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
But, a lot of it has to do with what sort of society you want to live in.

Also, there are a lot of ways such a system could be paid for other than direct taxes. As I wrote there: "The US government has a lot of assets. It controls the broadcast spectrum and can rent it. It can rent fishery rights. It owns about a third of the land in the country and can get royalties for mining and forestry rights. The government controls water rights. The government can assess fines for risky or anti-social behavior (as it could have done to Wall Street instead of a bailout. :-) In Alaska, there is a Permanent Fund that gives one to two thousand dollars a year to every Alaskan resident based on royalties from oil development, as well as paying for the operation of the Alaskan government (so, no income or sales taxes). There is also control of the money supply, which needs to expand as commerce expands, and the extra money needed can be printed by the government inflation free. So, there are various ways the government can fund a basic income, even without a wealth tax. "

The core issue is, does every human have a claim to some of the productivity of the industrial commons and ecological commons by right of being alive? If you answer that yes, then you get a basic income or some other sort of similar thing however it is implemented (until we move entirely to a gift economy). If you say no, then in an age of robots and computers being able to do more and more of what humans do, what is the alternative to starvation for most people without lots of capital? Eventually, all those who can't sell their labor for less than what robots cost to operate or for what other desperate humans are willing to work for as the human-labor requiring jobs go away:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

And, eventually, these economic dislocations may even effect most millionaires, since a million dollars is not a lot of money these days, especially in times of social unrest and economic turmoil.

As for getting over materialism, why do most billionaires still work or do other volunteer things, when they could retire and play golf all day and live in a big house? It is the natural inclination of healthy humans to want to do positive things. It is not a misleading comparison to look at stressed out people beaten down by school or work or prejudice who look for pain relief in television or drugs and then say this is how everyone would spend any leisure they had.

Our entire society can produce so much wealth that everyone can have as much as they need, or even, for the most part, as much as any healthy person would want. So, is materialism "human nature" or is it a culture that has been promoted by a particular form of economic arrangement that even the poor have been socialized to support against their own interests? More ideas on this theme:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"""
Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for t

Everyone could get a basic income, even millionaires:
    "Basic income from a millionaire's perspective? "
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?"

We will need to move to some sort of post-scarcity society. Some stuff I wrote here:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
Marshall Brain wrote some ideas here:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I helped organize this article listing more ideas by various authors:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

The conclusion there: "Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations."

It is possible that some of this vitamin D deficiency disaster could have been prevented with more information sharing. As I wrote here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005081.html
"""
Ryan pointed out to me the University of Wisconsin has patents related to Vitamin D. So, were people perhaps denied Vitamin D as an example of a public institution being funded by public dollars privatizing research results? Same as I can't easily see that study above on the web. ...
I don't know for sure, but I'd suspect most of this research is funded at least in part by public dollars.
I'm assuming, because the University of Wisconsin says they make a lot of money still from Vitamin D, that lawsuits might start flying if someone else starts using Vitamin D therapies without a license for various illnesses?
Is it possible this is a case of the patent system linked to profit-oriented non-profits damaging the health of billions of people globally? Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
If the global health care costs of treating all the diseases that have been suggested related to Vitamin D deficiency each year in whole or in part were totaled up, from flu through cancer to schizophrenia, it might total in the trillions of dollars per year in costs.
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. Meanwhile, the University of Wisconsin got a little bit bigger.
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. But, there may be a huge problem here with public funding strategies for 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.
"""

Here is one study of the cost to Western Europe of vitamin D deficiency, and it does not even included costs for excess mental illness:
"Estimated benefit of increased vitamin D status in reducing the economic burden of disease in western Europe."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19268496
"""
Vitamin D has important benefits in reducing the risk of many conditions and diseases. Those diseases for which the benefits are well supported and that have large economic effects include many types of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, several bacterial and viral infections, and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Europeans generally have low serum 25-hydroxyvit

The biggest challenge of the 21st century is technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

Money is a collective fantasy about rationing; how can we move beyond it? As Iain Banks wrote, money is a sign of poverty. James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" also envisioned a post-scarcity society that had moved beyond it.

The last time an big company recruiter sent me an inquiry, I sent back this link: :-)
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

The problem:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"School Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Some more links about moving beyond the need to work for pay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_economy

From something I helped put together:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
"Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations."

Well, are you lazy because you are leaching off of 5000 years (and more) of innovations made by our ancestors? Do you reinvent the science and technology from scratch when you want a new computer? At what point after all that hard work by so many will we be able to stop working so much?

Over the last 200 years, the US workforce has gone from about 90% farmers to about 1% farmers, using mostly machinery like tractors and harvesters. Over the last 50 years, the US workforce has gone from about 30% manufacturing workers to about 12% (with some imports, but much has been productivity increases). We now have massive and increasing unemployment. Industrial productivity continues to increase exponentially. Where are all these things that people need to be working at? Services? Robots are doing more and more, as is computer software, and most (not all) service jobs doing things like telemarketing or being a restaurant employee are not very good jobs. A relative handful of people maintaining Debian GNU/Linux are supplying software to billions. Technology is an amplifier. The whole nature of economics is changing.

What we have now is actually vast amounts of effort that go into non-productive activities because of the attitude you outline, where in the end a greater and greater percentage of effort goes into "guarding" rather than production. RIAA or SCO are great examples of this, with endless lawsuits trying to get income for some few and wasting everyone's time and energy. But much the same is true even these days about basic material things like cars. Here is something I wrote on why taxes would go *down* if everyone got a free luxury electric car, because of the savings on health care costs, pollution remediation, and war taxes:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

The "conventional wisdom" assumptions about work and income are out of date for the 21st century. Let alone they are *cruel* given people are homeless and hungry amidst so much abundance in the USA, and those numbers continue to grow. As is said at the third link below: "The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."

Related:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html

Two by me on why robots are changing the nature of employment:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004216.html

Here is something I wrote on why even *millionaires* would be better off with a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html

You are voting against your own self-interest because of obsolete 20th century ideology. The age of one-for-one trade is coming to an end (even if there may always be aspects of trade in our society). We're in a new age of emerging abundance from advanced technology, one that makes possible aga

As I wrote about here, inspired by the Virgle April fools joke, I see Google as being conflicted about its identity in a world that could provide abundance for everyone if we made a post-scarcity ideological shift, but which currently does not because a scarcity ideology is still dominant:
"A Rant On Financial Obesity and an Ironic Disclosure "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"""
Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness):
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there. :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( ...
The fact is, there are far more than six *million* millionaire families in the USA who would never have to "work" another day in their lives if they were frugal (and so could work full time on space settlement or other worthwhile charitable free ends).
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_billionaire_next_door.htm
There must just be a failure of imagination that keeps them from it. Or an excess of a certain capitalist religion shown on a libertarian-leaning college mailing list I am on (and usually disagreeing :-). Or a failure to be able to define "enough" and move beyond a fear of becoming poor. And the millionaires I've known or heard of who became suddenly wealthy generally are suddenly adrift in a life that has not prepared them for thinking about deep questions like what their values and priorities really are and why -- and working through that takes time which they often don't have as money runs away from them spent on trivialities of "their stillborn adult lives". And the stable millionaires who have slowly earned their wealth are often so enmeshed in the current order of things to make it hard to see beyond it (a current order which they may well have genuinely and sincerely tried to make better, like at Google, and even succeeded at doing so to an extent, within the bounds of Empire.) ...
Maybe the millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires (governments) out there should think on Spock's choice as capitalistic and militaristic irrational exuberance starts reentering the stratosphere (wars over food, water, arms, climate, and oil profits, and yes, blowback from terrorism).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=globalization+blowback
And actually do something besides compete and mak

http://www.unschooling.com/

Lots of links on how and why schooling has failed:
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html

More:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

An easy fix:
    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. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons"
   

What about this?
    http://cabinet.auriol.free.fr/Documents/cache_catharsis.htm
"""
Popular belief in the catharsis theory remains strong despite the theory's dismal record in research findings. According to the catharsis hypothesis, acting aggressively or even viewing aggression is an effective way to reduce anger and aggressive feelings. One likely reason for the continued widespread belief in catharsis is that the mass media continue to endorse the view that expressing anger or aggressive feelings is healthy, constructive, and relaxing, whereas restraining oneself creates internal tension that is unhealthy and bound to lead to an eventual blowup.
    The present research was concerned with a pair of related questions. First, can media support for the catharsis hypothesis cause people to engage in catharsis-seeking activities, such as aggressive action? Second, if media messages do persuade people to believe in the effectiveness of catharsis, will their own indulgence in aggressive action produce that effect?
    The concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy suggests that people's beliefs can shape their choices and the outcomes of their actions, so that expectations tend to come true by virtue of the changed behaviors resulting directly from the expectations (e.g., Darley & Fazio, 1980). Although researchers have mostly failed to find laboratory evidence of catharsis effects, it is plausible that media endorsement produces such self-fulfilling prophecies, which in turn might be sufficient to sustain popular belief in catharsis. In the present research, we provided people with procatharsis messages telling them that acting aggressively or expressing anger is a good way to reduce inner tensions. Consistent with the self-fulfilling prophecy notion, we investigated whether such messages would increase behavioral choices of aggressive activity following an anger provocation (Study 1) and, more important, would help produce the anticipated benefits of expressing anger (Study 2)--specifically, by reducing aggressive behavior toward another person after the participant was supposedly able to reach catharsis by hitting a punching bag.
"""

That said, I agree with you lots of aspects of our current social system, especially the school system, are messed up in various ways. My own thoughts on how to fix them:
    "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

Also related by me more recently on education issues:
    http://www.cnewmark.com/2009/12/making-govt-work-a-huge-step.html#comments
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Two related items I've written on this:

"An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html

"On Funding Digital Public Works "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html

The executive summary from the first (the second is a longer version of the first):
"""
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.
"""

Two related items I've written on this:

"An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html

"On Funding Digital Public Works "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html

The executive summary from the first (the second is a longer version of the first):
"""
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.
"""

By the way, there is one pill these days that can help a lot with life-extension for most US Americans. Vitamin D3 gelcaps 5000 IU, with this treatment protocol including blood testing:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

Human lifespan in hunter-gather times past infant mortality might have been into the 60s or older.

The following is from something I wrote elsewhere:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

Humanity used to live in relative abundance with a few people with limited wants living on a big planet.
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

Let us call this time "pre-scarcity". Because of the very success of hunter-gatherers, their populations grew, and they got harder to feed. That was the beginning of scarcity. In desperation, people turned to agriculture. But it had problems. Humanity had to suffer the resulting worse nutrition from less diversity of sources. Human skeletons actually were shorter from the advent of agriculture until only reaching hunter-gatherer stature about this century.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."

Populations grew even further and militaristic bureaucracies arose like hurricanes on a warming ocean.

As Marshall Sahlins suggests, then comes along "Modern Times":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
"Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization."

Let's call this time "scarcity" times. Those are what our recent ancestors lived through, and to an extent we are still living in now. All the things you have read about how certain things have gotten better from the 1800s and early industrialization are probably true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
But, they miss the big picture of the phase change transition from pre-scarcity hunter-gatherers (like the Hmong or Iroquois in older times) to

As outlined here:
    "http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html"
    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. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still, homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not.
"""

The last time they tried this in 2002, I sent this satire to the Senate Judiciary via their request for comments:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
"""
This was originally posted to Slashdot on May 25 2002:
        http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33107&cid=3582999
It was in relation to an article: "MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!"
about the MPAA wanting copyright protection built into all computer hardware. I sent a copy to Richard Stallman back then and he said it made him laugh. :-) My comments to the Department of Justice request for comments were in the form of this satire:
    Transcript of April 1, 2016 MicroSlaw Presidential Speech (Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under 2011 Fee Requirements Law)
    My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
    There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
    First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation. ...
"""

And it goes on from there...

I sent it to Richard Stallman too, and he said it made him laugh. :-)

The biggest problem we face is post-scarcity technologies of abundance wielded by scarcity-obsessed people, because things like biotech, robotech, infotech, nanotech, nucleartech, and so on make terrible, if ironic, weapons. It is ironic to use military robots to fight over economic issues the robots make obsolete. It is ironic to use nuclear missiles built with advanced materials to fight over oil supplies that nuclear power or solar energy make unimportant. It even takes more electricity to produce a gallon of gasoline than an electric car takes to go the same distance, if you really want some deep irony -- we'd use less electricity if we switched to electric cars. So, as an example of post-scarcity thinking, considering that and safety issues, our society would save money and have lower taxes if everyone got a free-to-the user safe luxury electric car.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en

From Post-scarcity Princeton:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
* Some comments on the PU Economics department and related research directions from a post-scarcity perspective

The PU economics department, of course, should be abolished as part of this transition. :-)

OK, that will never happen, so it should be at least "strongly admonished" for past misbehavior. :-(

What misbehavior? Essentially, the PU Economics department has taken part in a global effort to build an economic "psychofrakulator". How does a psychofrakulator work? Consider a paraphrase of something Doc Heller says in the movie Mystery Men:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/quotes

Dr. Heller: It's a psychofrakulator. They used to say it couldn't be built. The equations were so complex that most of the scientists that worked on it wound up in the insane asylum [in Chicago]. ... It creates a cloud of [dollar denomiated] radically-fluctuating free-deviant chaotrons which penetrate the synaptic relays [via television]. It's concatenated with a synchronous transport switch [of values from long term seven generation life-affirming love of caring to short-term immediate profit and immediate gratification suicidal death-affirming love of money] that creates a virtual tributary [back to large corporations]. It's focused onto a biobolic reflector [of the elite controlled mass media] and what happens is that [economic] hallucinations become reality and the [global] brain [and global ecosystem] is literally fried from within.

Or in other words:
"Screwed: What 30 Years of Conservative Economics Feels Like"
http://granby01033.blogspot.com/2008/04/screwed-what-30-years-of-conservative.html
Or:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-autistic_economics
And:
"Obituary: Conservative Economic Policy"
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/10/19/obituary_conservative_economic/

Conservative economic policy is dead. It committed suicide. Its allegiance to market solutions, tax cuts and spending cuts, supply-side nonsense, manipulative and corrosive ties to industry and the rich, have left it wholly unable to cope with the challenges we face. Its terribly limited toolbox simply cannot address the economic insecurities and opportunities generated by today's global, interconnected, polluted, insecure, dyna

Wow, thanks for the fascinating and informative reply.

Related links:
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue21/Stanford21.htm
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47

On Marxism, Joan Roelofs
http://mysite.verizon.net/joan.roelofs/index.htm
has suggested that Charles Fourier said anything good that Marx said decades before him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier
Bob Black wrote this essay inspired in part by Charles Fourier's ideas:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

My take on economics, inspired by cybernetics:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
In general, economists need to look at what are major sources of *real* cost as opposed to *fiat* cost in producing anything. Only then can one make a complete control system to manage resources within those real limits, perhaps using arbitrary fiat dollars as part of a rationing process to keep within the real limits and meet social objectives (or perhaps not, if the cost of enforcing rationing for some things like, say, home energy use or internet bandwidth exceeds the benefits).
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spo

High math and analytical GRE scores, a degree in psychology, previous work in the speech group at IBM Research, lots of programming and simulation knowledge... :-)

Might as well make a little money out of the market before post-scarcity issues obsolete it. :-)
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

I go one step further here: :-)
    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. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not.
"""

As John Taylor Gatto suggests, if you can only keep your kids out of school for a few years, the early years are most important to avoid.
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
"""
What to do?
    Take Melville's insight "I would prefer not to," from Bartleby, the Scrivener and make it your own watchword. Read Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych for a shock of inspiration about what really matters. Breaking the hold of fear on your life is the necessary first step. If you can keep your kid out of any part of the school sequence at all, keep him or her out of kindergarten, then first, second, and maybe third grade. Homeschool them at least that far through the zone where most of the damage is done. If you can manage that, they'll be okay.
    Don't let a world of funny animals, dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and treacly music suffocate your little boy or girl's consciousness at exactly the moment when big questions about the world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North German social engineers; they knew something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.
    Your four-year-old wants to play? Let him help you cook dinner for real, fix the toilet, clean the house, build a wall, sing "Eine Feste Burg." Give her a map, a mirror, and a wristwatch, let her chart the world in which she really lives. You will be able to tell from the joy she displays that becoming strong and useful is the best play of all. Pure games are okay, too, but not day in, day out. Not a prison of games. There isn't a single formula for breaking out of the trap, only a general one you tailor to your own specifications. ...
"""

So, by the time a kid is ten or so, they may be tough enough to survive in a prison-like environment as most schools without as much damage. Some might even thrive on it as long is they choose it themselves and know they can leave. Different kids have different needs and interests.
""Why Don't Students Like School?" Well, Duhhhh... "
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh

Unfortunately, for many kids, it is the opposite way usually, with school before homeschooling. The parents try school for a few years, when the most damage is done, and then homeschool the rest of the time after not liking the results of schooling. They may spend years trying to undo schooling and try to get kids to love learning again, and helping children unlearn a lot of consumerism, excessive stereotyped war-play, and a bad self-image that often comes from all that (of having your main role models be an authoritarian teacher and media-absorbed age-mates). A review of a related book I recommend to everyone that goes into some of these issues:
    "The War Play Dilemma"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html

Just to be clear, I think many school teachers are wonderful people trying their hardest to make a broken system work as best as they can. It's the "abstraction that has escaped its handlers" (Gatto's phrase) that is evil, not most of the people who are trapped inside that system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uexMYBkfCic

See also a longer written history that goes back farther (to Plato):
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and ... Resistance"
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

However, redistributing wealth towards families with kids is still a good idea IMHO, or in more general, a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

So, I part company with Propertarian-libertarians on that (many of whom would just eliminate schools as well as the wealth redistribution aspects, leaving families with children with no formal social support in an industrialized society now in the midst of "The Two Income Trap").
    http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap

The makers of that video:
    http://www.freedomofeducation.net/

The more general issue:
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
   

I'm shocked by the amount of ignorance in the comments here about schooling and the reason for alternatives. I can only think the "Stockholm Syndrome" is in play. With that said, I did not understand these issue when I was in school, either, and I resisted accepting them even when they were pointed out once or twice back then.

Some links:

"John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ

http://www.school-survival.net/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/freeschool.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/faqabouthomescho.html

My writings:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy
Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early
Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by
other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early
Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the
anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores
began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young
children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They
presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency,
nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education
classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier
enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that
orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent,
with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were mentally
retarded teenagers - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced
children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical
western children, by western standards of measurement.[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made
at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results
that were cut short by enro

I'm shocked by the amount of ignorance in the comments here about schooling and the reason for alternatives. I can only think the "Stockholm Syndrome" is in play. With that said, I did not understand these issue when I was in school, either, and I resisted accepting them even when they were pointed out once or twice back then.

Some links:

"John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ

http://www.school-survival.net/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/freeschool.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/faqabouthomescho.html

My writings:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy
Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early
Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by
other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early
Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the
anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores
began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young
children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They
presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency,
nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education
classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier
enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that
orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent,
with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were mentally
retarded teenagers - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced
children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical
western children, by western standards of measurement.[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made
at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results
that were cut short by enro

I'm shocked by the amount of ignorance in the comments here about schooling and the reason for alternatives. I can only think the "Stockholm Syndrome" is in play. With that said, I did not understand these issue when I was in school, either, and I resisted accepting them even when they were pointed out once or twice back then.

Some links:

"John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ

http://www.school-survival.net/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/freeschool.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/faqabouthomescho.html

My writings:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy
Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early
Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by
other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early
Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the
anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores
began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young
children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They
presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency,
nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education
classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier
enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that
orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent,
with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were mentally
retarded teenagers - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced
children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical
western children, by western standards of measurement.[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made
at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results
that were cut short by enro

An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society:
    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. "

From:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"""
Executive summary: 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 wrote on that here:
    "Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) Licensing issues"
    http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/da82d9fd52265dbc?hl=en
"So basically, SME is using post-scarcity charitable dollars and tax
exemptions to finance the creation and distribution of artificial scarcity
of manufacturing information, which otherwise they could put up for free for
all on their website. ...
To be blunt, I feel it is unethical for a tax-exempt non-profit to withhold
17000 papers on manufacturing from easy global distribution, just so some
current staff can make money for future activities by creating artificial
scarcity. That is 20th century ethical reasoning, now outdated by easy
distribution via the internet at no incremental cost (I'm sure there are
many places like Ibiblio or Archive.org who would host them for free if
bandwidth was an issue). And making things "members only" doesn't really
solve it, and I'd expect even members can't redistribute content or make
derivative works without special permission. "

From stuff I wrote around 2001:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"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."

One of the biggest problems is that the money that is being spent by the US government (and foundations) for basic research is being less effective because of a misguided notion that research results are worthless unless they are exclusively owned by someone and turned into a proprietary business in a narrow way. See:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act
    http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html