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Yes, and we should be planning for that now! Our path out of any technological singularity may have a lot to do with our path into it, and that path includes our politics and socio-economics. Are we going to wait twenty years until most human labor has little value even in most service industries?
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Other thing we can do beyond a basic income include expanding our gift economy, improving democratic participatory planning at all levels of government, and improving tools for local subsistence (like gardening robots and cheap solar panels).

http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Homeopathy_as_a_big_picture_example

Yes, there is a lot of nonsense in alternative medicine. But there is a lot of nonsense in mainstream medicine, too (e.g. much mainstream cancer and heart disease treatment is misguided dues to financial conflicts of interest in the providers). We need the best of both. The mind can affect health in a variety of ways -- including by moderating the immune system to reduce inflammation (and possibly destroying some cancer), providing natural internal painkillers, and by choosing to eat healthier and otherwise live a healthier lifestyle (which may even include religious-motivated things like periodic fasting that can have health benefits in some contexts). We need to make the most of those possibilities in a responsible way.

As I suggest in that essay, Randi himself probably got scammed by mainstream medicine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi

"In February 2006, Randi underwent coronary artery bypass surgery."
"If you look into the nutritional medicine that Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD, practices, but you can also find several others who say the same, you will find that most bypasses are unnecessary and blocked arteries can be unblocked and brought back to health in about two years of an agressive nutritional approach of a diet heavy on vegetables, fruits, and beans (and a little nuts, seeds, and whole grains). So, in one of the greatest decisions of your life, you were, I'd suggest, scammed by the mainstream medical community and its connection with the mainstream agri-business. In fact, people who get a bypass but don't change their eating habits tend to just have the same problem come back."

See also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportuni

From 2011: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2368162&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=37016386
"Twirlip: Towards a 21st Century Worldwide Public Intelligence Desktop Platform for Collaborative Sensemaking, Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Horizon Scanning"

Around them, I also put together another proposal to collect and organize stories about security issues as a modernized "Risks Digest" using software like my wife desiged my wife wrote called "Rakontu":
http://www.rakontu.org/

Another spin on that from this month:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/

With some more code links and a video here:
http://twirlip.com/

See also:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/

From 1999 to NASA, some ideas about rethinking our manufacturing infrastructure systematically and in an open source way:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

And also to DARPA in 1999:
"DARPA Progam Manager Position on Self-Replicating technology"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!msg/virgle/feS-LaqnFyM/z0sqkvvCx2QJ
"We of course need to minimize military tensions around the world through arms control, international aid, and setting a good example. This delays the culmination of these other trend to war, but in my opinion will not prevent them because of ever-present potential for a small group of unstable people to use weapons of mass destruction. ... I also don't think we have a significant choice. Such self-replicating and self-repairing systems will be developed eventually anyway, if only from commercial competitive pressures. The only thing we can do is slow down their development. Yet that has its own risks of our current infrastructure being overwhelmed by current weapons of mass destruction or sophisticated terrorism. Also, should such self-replicating technology be developed first clandestinely by an oppressive regime, the consequences for the United States could be disastrous."

From 1987 for grad studies on improving security via self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

A long string of failed proposals. :-)

Well, at least I can still try to promote great ideas by others that have met with more success: :-)
"A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance"
http://hissa.nist.gov/chissa/SEI_Framework/framework_1.html

And I can keep on working towards those other ideas as very limited spare time permits.

I guess I am mostly just a creation of 1960s-1970s TV about our future in space -- to keep banging my head against the wall of space and security for decades? :-) Star Trek, The Starlost, Space 1999, Silent Running, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Lost In Space, Thunderbirds, and so on... And way too many sci-fi novels. :-)

Xest makes some good points about reasons to be more optimistic. However, I've certainly been pessimistic about this myself in the past. Here is an excerpt from a satire I wrote about this and posted to slashdot over a decade ago in relation to an article: "MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!" after sending a copy of the US Department of Justice who had asked for comments (I also sent a copy to Richard Stallman who said it made him laugh):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
"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. ... [Inaudible shouted question] Prisons? There are only a million Americans behind bars for copyright infringement so far. No one complained about the million plus non-violent drug offenders we've had there for years. No one complained about the million plus terrorists we've got there now, thanks in no small part to a patriotic Supreme Court which after being privatized upheld that anyone who criticizes government policy in public or private is a criminal terrorist. Oops, I shouldn't have said that, as those terrorists aren't technically criminals or subject to the due process of law are they? Well it's true these days you go to prison if you complain about the drug war, or the war on terrorism, or the war on infringers of copyrights and software patents -- so don't complain! [nervous audience laughter] After all, without security, what is the good of American Freedoms? Benjamin Franklin himself said it best, those who don't have security will trade in their freedoms. ..."

Sad it is all becoming a little too true, even with some progress on the drug war front.

As I've realized, the USSR had to guard its borders to keep people from escaping that often dysfunctional society -- and we've all been told that showed how bad a country they were. But the USA needs to guard its medicine cabinets instead to keep people from escaping -- what does that say about the USA?

Some books related to your points:

"War is a racket" on the profit-oriented ("fascistic") military-industrial complex
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

"Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me" on cognitive dissonance
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0156033909

In one of Freeman Dyson's books, like "Infinite in All Directions" he talks about the coming conflicts between government and individuals wanting to redefine themselves biologically, where drug use is just a first example of a more general issue.

On the accelerating problem of addiction to "supernormal stimuli", which is a much more general issue than "drugs":
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

By the way, some health ideas to look into, including vitamin D deficiency and eating more vegetables and omega-3s, which can help in avoiding depression:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

When all else fails, somethign from Howard Zinn:

... it gets even worse: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

There certainly is a lot of truth to your point. To broaden it out a bit, here is something I wrote years ago:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
" ... I agree with the sentiment of the Einstein quote [That we should approach the universe with compassion], but that sentiment itself is only part of a larger difficult-to-easily-resolve situation. It become more the Yin/Yang or Meshwork/Hierarchy situation I see when I look out my home office window into a forest. On the surface it is a lovely scene of trees as part of a forest. Still, I try to see *both* the peaceful majesty of the trees and how these large trees are brutally shading out of existence saplings which are would-be competitors (even shading out their own children). Yet, even as big trees shade out some of their own children, they also put massive resources into creating a next generation, one of which will indeed likely someday replace them when they fall. I try to remember there is both an unseen silent chemical war going on out there where plants produce defense compounds they secrete in the soil to inhibit the growth of other plant species (or insects or fungi) as a vile act of territoriality and often expansionism, and yet also the result is a good spacing of biomass to near optimally convert sunlight to living matter and resist and recover from wind and ice damage. I try to recall that there is the most brutal of competition between species of plants and animals and fungi and so on over water, nutrients (including from eating other creatures), sunlight, and space, while at the same time each bacterial colony or multicellular organism (like a large Pine tree) is a marvel of cooperation towards some implicitly shared purpose. I see the awesome result of both simplicity and complexity in the organizational structure of all these organisms and their DNA, RNA, and so on, adapted so well in most cases to the current state of such a complex web of being. Yet I can only guess the tiniest fraction of what suffering that selective shaping through variation and selection must have entailed for untold numbers of creatures over billions of years. To be truthful, I can actually *really* see none of that right now as it is dark outside this early near Winter Solstice time (and an icy rain is falling) beyond perhaps a silhouette outline, so I must remember and imagine it, perhaps as Einstein suggests as an "optical delusion of [my] consciousness". :-)
    So much for "world peace" when even the tranquil seeming forests have so much Yin-Yang complexity going on within and around the trees. :-) The best I feel we can hope for is balance (like Ursula K. Le Guin's writings):
        http://www.ursulakleguin.com/
or maybe, transcendence to some form of universe certainly way beyond our present understanding; example, with its own flaws:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect
But still, no matter what examples the universes sets before us, or in what proportion, as *ethical* and *spiritual* beings, we humans can choose a different way, and at least approximate world peace among ourselves as best we can. Something I learned from an old and wise biologist (Larry Slobodkin) who studied both philosophy and nature."

So, we can make choices, as sentient creatures, about how we want to live. The current laws of physics may constrain those choices, but we can still make choices as individuals and collectives. How do we want to live? How can we shape our rules, norms, prices, and architecture to influence that behavior? (Lawrence Lessig's point in "Code 2.0").

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512386/danger-lurks-in-growing-new-internet-nationalism/?hubRefSrc=permalink#lf_comment=63033832
----
As I suggest in this essay: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). "

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."

That said, I sent notes to my Senators to support Rand Paul on the narrower issue he raised via "FreedomWorks" (not saying I endorse all of their or his other campaigns).
http://www.freedomworks.org/press-releases/freedomworks-%E2%80%9Cstands-with-rand%E2%80%9D-paul%E2%80%99s-senate-fili

Well, in what remains of our democracy and its core value of freedom of speech, you're certainly entitled to your opinions and speculations. :-)
http://bullies2buddies.com/Essential-Articles-for-Home-Page/the-true-meaning-of-the-golden-rule-love-your-bullies.html

Is some fraction of what I write ill-informed BS? No doubt. I just don't know which part or I'd correct it. :-) Still, let me reiterate, as I said in the post you responded to, in thirty years these sorts of economic discussion will likely be moot. With the growth of robotics and AI, 3D printing, advanced nanotech materials, probably hot and/or cold fusion power, certainly dirt-cheap solar panels (down to $1.75 or so a watt deliver from Amazon at the moment from 3X times that ten years ago), continued breakthroughs in nutritionally-based medicine and related diagnostic sensing, and so on, the economic landscape will almost certainly be radically different in 30 years than today. Most paid human labor will be replaced by such innovations, and most human labor will have little conventional economic value. That is the core point of my post. That is why I advocate rethinking economics, including by having a "basic income" like Marshall Brain proposes or along other lines like expanding the gift economy, improving subsistence production via 3D printers and solar panels, or improving government planning so it is more participatory at all levels. So, we are only quibbling about how the economic lines squiggle a bit to the left or right on the way there, IMHO.

A focus on individual people or their follies tends to ignore the long-term trends we see playing out, like the above. The progressing "Did You Know" series is interesting to watch on that including changes with the internet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmwwrGV_aiE

Or stuff by Hans Rosling:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Or by me: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Ignoring the ad hominems -- and the possibility you are just a psyops technician of the kind you claim elsewhere to despise :-) -- thanks for the challenge to get me to think more about this issue of floating exchange rates and currency manipulation. I have to agree that it is possible for countries to manipulate their currencies for an extended period of time to achieve certain national (or leadership-related) goals. China has been accused of that, probably with a lot of truth, like discussed here:
http://welkerswikinomics.com/blog/2010/11/23/exchange-rates-and-trade-a-delicate-balancing-act-currently-out-of-balance/

As discussed there, what are the key issues related to exchange rates and labor costs? Well, the cost of a product from China is essentially the cost of Chinese labor in China (plus costs from rent-seekers and raw materials that I'll ignore) times the conversion rate of Chinese currency to US currency (currently 0.16 USD per RMD according to one calculator I tried). You are implying that both Chinese wages and the currency conversion rate will hold fairly constant for 30 years. I am suggesting that both the Chinese wages and the conversion rate will likely significantly rise over the next thirty years and that this will happen in most other huma

On robotic trends and societal implications, see my post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3515335&cid=43077393

Or see my site for lots of ideas about the economics aspects of ongoing economic changes related to automation and increased productivity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Essentially, as I say on my site, there are five interwoven economies (or types of economic transactions -- subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and the balance between them changes along with technology and culture. Right now, we need to be talking about things like re-strengthening the subsistence, gift, and planned economies, while softening the exchange economy with a basic income. Because in a world full of cheap robotics, the exchange value of native human labor in the USA is not going to be that high. And otherwise theft increases as the moral bargain behind any particular economy is seen to break down -- and growing theft has its own huge costs and undesirable aspects.

Marshall Brain's site is great about the general topic of the economic implication of robotics (including wealth concentration):
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

There are only so many hours in the day. If we put those hours into finding new ways to kill other people and win conflicts, we will not be putting those hours into finding new ways to heal people and resolve conflicts. Langdon Winner talks about this topic in his writings when he explores the notion of whether artifacts have politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner

Albert Einstein wrote, after the first use of atomic weapons, that everything had changed but our way of thinking. You make some good points about us long having cruise missiles, but on "forces of good", here is something written decades ago by then retired Marine Major General Smedley Butler:
http://www.warisaracket.com/
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. ..."

Just because it was "hot" before, with cruise missiles and nukes and poison gases, does not mean we will be better off when our society reaches a boiling point -- with robotic soldiers and military AIs and speedier plagues and so on. Eventually quantitative changes (like lowering prices per unit) become qualitative changes. Every year our planet is in conflict is a year of risk of that conflict escalating into global disaster. So, the question is, do our individual actions add to that risk or take away from it?

I'm impressed with what some UAVs can do in terms of construction vs. destruction, so obviously there is a lot of different possibilities in that field.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/107217-real-life-constructicon-quadcopter-robots-being-developed

Good points, but my wife and I put more than six person-years on our own dime into making a free garden simulator so people could grow their own food on "Spaceship Earth" -- and it is also a step towards living in space because people in space need to eat too. There is an edited version of one of Rick Guidice's pictures as a backdrop in the add-on pack:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

So a lot of the ideas are complimentary. You're using the internet now to make your point and some of that technology indirectly came out of the space program which pushed technology along, including satellite communications. The picture of Earth seen from space has (arguably) done probably more than any one single thing to unite our planet (especially the image with a small Earth in a sea of darkness)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg

Thinking about things on a smaller scale like for a space habitat can focus the mind wonderfully on issues like recycling, meeting essential needs vs. expansive wants, being efficient in resource use, learning to get along with neighbors, sustaining human health without lots of expensive interventions, developing economic paradigms that are sustainable both socially and physically, and so on.

Anyway, one of the reasons for my not getting further directly on this is, beyond raising a next generation, actually investing significant my time on those topics you point to, for example education about health & nutrition and about transcending militarism & artificial scarcity:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://artificialscarcity.com/

But as I say, making good places to live in space and on Earth is complementary from a certain perspective, so it is not like that was wasted time in that sense in progressing towards space habitats.

Anyway, there are very few material resources in short supply on Earth. Pretty much all such shortages are politically motivated or the product of competitive economic tragedies or unaccounted for externalities. At the current rates of falling prices for solar, the world will be running off of mostly solar energy in 20 years unless something even better (like hot or cold fusion) is cheaper. As it is, probably at least 95% of the work done on Earth in the industrialized world is either useless or harmful to the common good, so there is plenty of spare capacity; see:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

As I wrote in 2008, (perhaps a bit wishfully as far as OSCOMAK itself, true):
http://oscomak.net/wiki/Main_Page
====
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/20/

except you can't easily change the locks...

Anyone who has your DNA sequence could in theory make a plague targeted just at you (maybe wth some collateral damage). That may be as trivial to do in thirty years as "script kiddie" computer attacks are these days. Our society has not yet thought through the implications of all this...

See also my essay:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"... Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? ..."

I had hoped to work on them while getting a PhD in the 1980s: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Still trying to make them on-and-off:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://oscomak.net/
http://openvirgle.net/

The human imagination is the ultimate resource (as economist Julian Simon said). What really killed the 1970s vision was Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award. It's taken a long time to recover from that nastiness politically, coupled with other mistakes like the Shuttle (compared to cheap rockets with a return capsule). Plus computers have absorbed most of the creative energy that was going into the space program in the Apollo era.

The world itself has plenty of material resources and energy. We'll even probably have both hot and cold fusion soon which will make it easy to recycle everything. The real reason to go into space is about diversity, challenge, curiosity, exploration, community, and just room for more creativity -- to use space resources in space.

I took an undergrad course with Gerry O'Neill. He called me a "dreamer" for wanting to make self-replicating space habitats. :-) I was inspired by James P. Hogans's sci-fi novel "The Two Faces Of Tomorrow" which has a space habitats with an automated factory.
http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm

I I later found out J.D. Bernal proposed them in the 1920s:
http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/

Gerry O'Neill anticipated there would be a slow capitalistic expansion into space, and built his plans around that. Sadly, US capitalism was not kind to any of his business plans (Geostar, LAWN) which he had hoped would fund more space ventures.

Meanwhile, the non-profit world of cooperation in cyberspace seems to be what is taking off, and what ultimately may get us space habitats (self-replicating or not). I tried a couple times over the past two decades to try to get his legacy non-profit SSI interested in supporting a free and open source effort towards developing space habitats. But I found the core there was still enamored of Gerry's old business plan of creating solar space satellites and using that to fund a slow expansion into space. That plan may have made sense in the 1970s, but it ignore today's reality that such satellites could be used as weapons, and the cost of solar power on Earth is falling exponentially, and local power storage is rapidly improving via batteries and fuel cells, etc.. Once we are in space for other reasons, maybe beamed power might make sense for either facories or to aircraft or laser launch systems.

Anyway, I'm still trying to keep some of the dream alive. Mostly, in my spare time, for decades I've been focused (too much) on making a triple-based social semantic desktop to organize all the needed information (while the world passed me by on that too, like with RDF and URLs and so on):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

It's been interesting, even if not too much obvious direct results to show for it.

You make some great points I agree with about cruise missiles and indoctrination ("brainwashing") already being around for a long time in warfare. I agree we need to think more deeply about this, and your proposal is a start in that direction. One issue with your suggestion is that these days even invading a country like Iraq that posed the US no immediate danger was labelled "defensive". The best of ideas can just get spun around when core values are lost. That has given us "free speech zones" that are literally cages miles from any events. And it has given us "border zones" that extend 100 miles inland and cover 75% of the population where citizens rights are essentially suspendable whenever desired by law enforcement calling in the border patrol. Thus, your suggestion might never be invoked because leaders would just label any war of aggression as "defensive" -- and who is to stop them?

You might like two related links. The first about something written by Marine Major General Smedley Butler in the 1930s called "War is a Racket", where he concludes only by taking the profit-motive out of warfare can it be ended:
http://www.warisaracket.com/

The second is by me, and is the product of more than a quarter century of thinking about this issue since I spent about a year as a visitor/volunteer to two heavily-military-funded CMU robotics labs:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."

I signed the petition anyway (and included a link to my essay in the "sincerely" closing line which was the only part of the letter that was editable besides my name). But I feel that only by addressing the issues Butler raises and I raise and you raise will we all move towards a real long-term solution on this for humanity (and AIs) as a whole.

Currently, between about US$600 per capita average is spent in the USA on a combination of social security, welfare, unemployment, and public schooling. So, that is quite a bit of the way towards US$2000/month per person (which times about 313 million people times twelve months a year would about half of the current US GDP of about US$15 trillion per year). A basic income could replace all those other things. So, one just has to find the rest through taxes, royalties on public assets like the spectrum or minerals on public lands, social credit related to the creation of new money through the banking system as needed (the issue of who gets the money first), and so on. Or, we could start with a lower amount like US$1000 per person per month, which would be easy to get pretty close to by, say, cutting a bunch of defense spending or farm subsidies. Why typical farm subsidies hurt most US Americans:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html

You're throwing around conclusions about investments without giving any specific numbers, so I really can't evaluate the rest of what you are suggesting. The numbers for such a basic income add up as far as I look at them. As above, your numbers don't add up given I've outlined how this proposal is just for one half the US GDP. That leaves a GDP of around the US 1995 GDP for people to compete about, and that was enough to motivate many people back then. Also, people have still invested in the past even when there was a 90%+ top-tier tax on income and capital gains.

Also, please be clear when talking about wealth whether you are talking about paper money (of which there can be an arbitrary amount) or real physical wealth (which is related to how you use the productive capacity of a nation for either consumer goods like cosmetics or producer goods like robots or military items like weapons).

Here is the bottom line. In a couple decades, unless you are in a very small number of occupations, your job will be replaced by a robot or an AI. Even most investors will find it impossible to compete with huge automated trading systems. So, if you oppose fixing the inequality now, think about how much harder it will be to fix in a couple decades when you and your family and everyone you know is destitute because you can't "compete" with a robot or AI that never takes sick time, never makes a careless mistake, never goes on strike, and so on.

Even the mainstream is starting to wake up to this:
http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-class-jobs-051306434--finance.html
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/practically-human-smart-machines-job-052642993--finance.html
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/smart-machines-create-world-without-051025381--finance.html

Here is a list of possibilities I put together for dealing with this (of which a basic income is only one of many options, not all of which are as pleasant):
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Why do many millionaires still "work" then? A related essay I wrote: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html

"It all comes down to one question: Do you have faith in science and technology or not?"

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"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."

Good points. As I see it, the unknowns about human biochemistry and the genetic "code" have been like "security by obscurity" about an encryption algorithm that kept all human safe from intentional plagues (or mind control or suffering or whatever). Now that the obscurity is going away, for whatever well-intentioned reasons about curing illness, all humans are at ever increasing risk from engineered bioweapons. When our computer encryption "code" algorithms or their keys get compromised, we can generally replace the algorithm and/or keys. That is not possible when the human genetic code is fully understood. The risk will only continue to increase in that sense as our understanding of the genetic code increases. There may be ways to manage that risk through mutual security and intrinsic security and recognizing the irony of using post-scarcity technologies from a scarcity-biased world view, but it hard to get people raised in a scarcity-focused-culture to accept them. I discuss that at length here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

As Bucky Fuller said, whether it will Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. Fears of bioterrorism have been one of several concerns motivating my efforts towards better information management and collective design software so that communities have some chance of transcending the threat somehow:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319

http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html
"I guess you might say what I am trying to do here is save you a million dollars, so you can keep it around to keep debunking the more usual paranormal claims related to ESP and so on. :-) In general, I think your skepticism about cold fusion is commendable and well warranted, but, a flat denial of its possibility is shading into the area where science progresses by going beyond what we know well and exploring into that which we are just speculating about (such as the exploration of human flight over a century ago that eventually led to success after much skepticism and many failures). I am concerned that you may have not been skeptical enough about the claims of mainstream hot fusion scientists when they dismiss something like cold fusion that might impact their funding. As I reflect on that issue of cold fusion, and think as well about another contentious human enterprise like homeopathy and as it compares to mainstream medicine with its own problems, I guess I begin to wonder about the general issue of the limits to knowledge given it is part of a social process. You have made it all too clear how anything involving people is subject to corruption and confusion for several reasons. I quote several fairly mainstream academics who say the same thing. So, this is plea in a way for skepticism about mainstream science. Of course, if one is skeptical about mainstream science, then that opens the door to all sorts of possibilities, either now, or in the future as our technology and science continue to change. I also mention in passing nutritional interventions to cure heart disease that you may have an interest in following up on. "

It is good to be skeptical. It is possible to take it to the point of dysfunctional pathology, too.

BTW, on being caught up in a cult of a materialistic world view:
http://www.paradigm-sys.com/
"Charles T. Tart is internationally known for his more than 50 years of research on the nature of consciousness, altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and parapsychology, and is one of the founders of the field of Transpersonal (spiritual) Psychology. His and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientistic, materialist philosophy of our times, masquerading as genuine science, dogmatically denies any possible reality to the spiritual."

"Seems like bullshit to me."

No doubt most people would agree with you. :-) That is part of the reason the US economy is in such a mess. :-(

But hey, if people won't listen to a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Paul Krugman for ideological reasons, why should they listen to me? His book on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_This_Depression_Now!
"But the essential point is that what we really need to get out of this current depression is another burst of government spending. Is it really that simple? Would it really be that easy? Basically, yes."

But before I reply to your points, agreeing with some and elaborating on other, let me make one point clear. I feel a healthy society balanced four different types of economic transactions -- subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange, while minimizing theft. I write about that on my site.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

The rest of this is my musings about getting the exchange economy moving again (short of a basic income which would be better) and is certainly arguable. But what I feel is unquestionable is that ultimately we need all four types of those economic transactions for a healthy society. The USA has been suffering a huge loss in those other three areas of subsistence, gift giving, and planning, meaning those areas were not as available recently as they could have been to pick up the slack when the exchange economy started failing a big percent of the US population.

In many ways, getting those other types of economies to function well is a more important issue than tinkering with the money supply. As Zimbabwe shows, one can always make mistakes with regulating a money supply. We can't count only on fiat dollars to sustain a healthy society, even though they are by themselves easy to count and so mainstream numerically-oriented economists tend to focus on exchanges of them while ignoring non-monetary gifts like posts on slashdot, or subsistence efforts like people being able to print their own toys at home or generate their own solar power on their roof.

Those areas are actually in resurgence these days and will interact or substitute for the exchange economy more and more in years to come. Which actually might argue for a decrease in the need for as much money supply. :-)

Now on to your points.

"If there really is inadequate money supply there wouldn't be inflation, you'd get deflation."

True in general as the economy freezes up. I don't think I said we face much inflation overall right now? My point is the economy has stopped functioning for many people in the USA and also China (leading to few jobs for the college educated in China due to having an product-export-oriented economy needing factory workers until they can be automated away).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57549450-92/foxconn-reportedly-installing-robots-to-replace-workers/

"The last I checked that was not happening at least with the US dollar."

Well, over the last few years, US household have lost on the order of US$8 trillion in wealth; seems like something must have deflated in value to me (mainly real estate, but some other things too like some stocks etc.):
http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/news/economy/household_wealth/index.htm
"U.S. household wealth fell by about $16.4 trillion of net worth from its peak in spring 2007, about six months before the start of the recession, to when things hit bottom in the first quarter of 2009, according to figures from the Federal Reserve. While a rebound in the stock market, an improved savings rate and consumer steps to reduce debt resulted in net worth g

BTW, "TheLink", thanks for the link to the Zimbabwe 100 Trillion Dollar Bill Banknote 2008" at Amazon. I just bought a few such notes for home education and to give away. :-)

It is unfortunate the solutions to Zimbabwe's economic problems on this Wikipedia page do not include other possibilities of improving the subsistence, give, and planned parts of the Zimbabwe economy, or creating LETS systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe

The Wikipedia page on Zimbabwe talks about problems in Zimbabwe with lack of transparency and corruption. It just goes to show that any token is meaningless without some sort of democratically-accountable or otherwise generally-agreed-upon way of defining what it means. That goes the same for bank notes as twitter hash tags. So you are right to be concerned, but that does not mean the issue can not be managed in practice most of the time (at least until we fully transition to a post-scarcity economy where rationing via ration unit tokens like fiat dollars is not very important in practice, similar to how the USA does not generally ration access to public library drinking water fountains). See also on symbols and meanings:
"Data and Reality"
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
And on post-scarcity economics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

Still, as you point out, those Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar banknotes still can be useful in various ways. So, their symbolic meaning may just be different than the original printers intended. :-)

But that example does not mean all printed materials have no meaning depending on the social context. Clearly, LETS dollars can have useful value in local areas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system
"LETS can help revitalise and build community by allowing a wider cross-section of the community -- individuals, small businesses, local services and voluntary groups -- to save money and resources in cooperation with others and extend their purchasing power. Other benefits may include social contact, health care, tuition and training, support for local enterprise and new businesses. One goal of this approach is to stimulate the economies of economically depressed towns that have goods and services, but little official currency: the LETS scheme does not require outside sources of income as stimulus."

Realistically, there are hundreds of trillions of US dollars in the US financial system in various ways (including derivatives and future obligations). Printing even another 15 trillion (the US annual GDP) would likely have little effect overall if, say, the money went to invest in improved infrastructure., education, preventive health care, sustainable energy, rethinking national security to be mutual and intrinsic, and general scientific R&D (including on fusion energy and agricultural robotics) which all would increase the value of the USA as an ongoing community. China has already been doing some of that with great success. I'm suggesting it could do even more to even more success.

More on all of lots of other alternatives here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Expecations in our global society are changing. TFA about expectations rising in China is just part of all that. It is hard to predict where those rising expectations will lead us. Maybe the asteroids and then stars?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/22/space-mining-gold-asteroids

With space craft powered by LENR (aka cold fusion)?

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm "With most of the rank and file employees replaced by robots and eliminated from the payroll, all of the money flowing into a large corporation has only one place to go -- upward toward the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will be dramatic when robots arrive."

Some solutions I've cataloged: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
The most obvious is a "basic income" like they have some of in Alaska with the Alaskan Permanet Fund: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

It's kind of surprising how much politicians think they can get away with now in the USA. There is still massive unemployment and they think they can push through legislation like this. Why not instead, say, just mandate that all US companies be willing to pay for two months of employee training a year, to level the economic playing field and promote the growth of the US workforce? And also mandate vacation time as well?
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
""Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork ... Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?"

Personally though, I'm all for throwing open the borders. The issue is making H1Bs second-class citizens. If you want to import workers, make them citizens when they step off the boat. And give everyone a basic income. It's an experiment, but its hard to imagine doing much worse than what we have.

What ever happend to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"? Why not ake the USA into the "Australia Project" Marshall Brain wrote about in Manna?
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

In the book "The China Price", a factory worker is discussed who had his hand mangled in an injection molder. He was left to fend for himself with a tiny bit of "compensation" from the factory. No wonder smart people in China want to avoid factory jobs -- they are not like factory jobs in the USA. See:
"The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage" by Alexandra Harney
http://www.amazon.com/The-China-Price-Competitive-Advantage/dp/0143114867
"In this landmark work of investigative reporting, former Financial Times correspondent Alexandra Harney uncovers a story of immense significance to us all: how China's factory economy gains a competitive edge by selling out its workers, environment, and future. Harney's firsthand reporting brings us face-to-face with a world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact a staggering toll in human misery and environmental damage. This eye-opening expose offers, for the first time, an intimate look at the defining business story of our time."

China is already moving to increase automation. From a couple years ago:
http://ww5.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen."

The same issues will play out as in the USA with a declining need for most human labor in all areas. For ideas on what to do about it:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

I also don't understand why China does not just print money to give out as a "basic income" to Chinese citizens so they can buy Chinese factory products (eventually recycled by taxes when the money supply grows to the right size). While in the past it might have made sense for Chinese factory workers to accept low wages as a sort of "tax" so China could learn how to make things based on Western know-how, it seems that has passed the point of diminishing returns. The big issue is that the Chinese don't have enough cash to buy their own goods, and that should be relatively easy to solve. I guess even the Chinese don't understand modern fiat-dollar economics, let alone the emerging post-scarcity economic model? Of course, I could say much the same about the USA, where there is a shortage of money supply because so much digital cash is either sitting on the sidelines parked in zero interest bank accounts or is in the zero-sum "casino economy" on Wall Street. Related links:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/an-emergency-program-of-monetary-reform-for-the-united-states/5494
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3p48upXJaA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My kid st

Terrific point about separating an appraisal of the world from general moods.

And after all, some people even like tough challenges:
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html

As I quote here from "What Dreams May Come":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
===
"This is their composite mental image?" I asked. Soundless; hueless; lifeless.
"It is," he said.
"And you work here?" I felt stunned that anyone who had the choice would elect to work in this forbidding place.
"This is nothing," was all he said.
===

Howard Zinn also suggested there is always reason for the "optimism of uncertainty": http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm

I agree about the bringing nutrition/lifestyle stuff all together synergistically:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Also maybe of interest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depression

And:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/307761/
"Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."

While Shirky's post has some great insights, I actually disagree with a sentiment implied where he says: "Most of us won't kill ourselves, no matter how bad things get. ... Madoff hasn't killed himself because he isn't the kind of person who kills himself." While perhaps true, it is misleading. I'd suggest depression and suicide could happen in almost anyone's life probabilistically, but that certain circumstances make it more or less likely. Then, if it does, the survivors tend to work backwards from "if only" proximate causes, but overall it is always a network of interacting causes and effects. Genes are one thing affecting probabilities, but so is nutrition, lifestyle, mental outlook, mental habits including gratitude, religions and spiritual upbringing or life philosophy, social networks, physical infrastructure, and many other factors (including what we think about the world) which interact with each other. Or, in other words, a life is like a tree, and whether that tree is blown over by any particular storm in life is about both how big the (perceived) storm is and how deep the tree's roots are (and roots help us grow more roots). For a person, roots are things like nutrition, family, friends, hobbies, community, music, values, habits, religion/philosophy, and so on. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology

Thanks for the success story of personal growth to grow deeper roots in various ways. Good luck in continuing to grow them as best as is possible in this plane of existence filled with various dualistic tensions, with life at a Yin/Yang interface of

"The unfortunate fact is that there's no way to fix depression."

Nutrition can help oftentimes: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx

See also on optimism:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
    To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

More health advice:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Ideas towards building a better world:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

"The unfortunate fact is that there's no way to fix depression."

Nutrition can help oftentimes: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx

See also on optimism:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
    To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

More health advice:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Ideas towards building a better world:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

"The unfortunate fact is that there's no way to fix depression."

Nutrition can help oftentimes: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx

See also on optimism:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
    To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

More health advice:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Ideas towards building a better world:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

Related by me: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

By others:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.anwot.org/
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/

So their tax-exempt status could possibly be revoked. From a decade ago: 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."

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-dealing
"Self-dealing is the conduct of a trustee, an attorney, a corporate officer, or other fiduciary that consists of taking advantage of his position in a transaction and acting for his own interests rather than for the interests of the beneficiaries of the trust, corporate shareholders, or his clients. Self-dealing may involve misappropriation or usurpation of corporate assets or opportunities. Self-dealing is a form of conflict of interest.[1]"

The self-dealing happens because the non-profit could make its digital resources available to the world for essentially free these days. But instead MIT and JSTOR impose artificial scarcity to extract a revenue stream for its staff in order so it may then create new resources which it also sells access to make more such resources etc.. That model may have made some sense in the 20th century, but it makes no sense in the 21st. The argument that access to digital resources today should be restricted to support making more digital resources tomorrow is not one that a tax-exempt organization should legally be able to make these days IMHO. And in order to sustain their self-dealing, they contributed to the death of an idealistic young man, Aaron Swartz to sustain their obsolete and now essentially corrupt business models, which just highlights how evil what they (and many other non-profits) are doing has become bit-by-bit year-by-year if artificial scarcity ever made sense for a non-profit.

So, perhaps a way forward here is to make an example of both MIT and JSTOR by getting their IRS tax exempt status and also corporate charters revoked (a corporate "death sentence") for the act of self-dealing? That might serve as an example to other tax-exempt non-profits to shape up and make their digital works freely available before they get the same treatment? See also:
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/
"In most states a lot of the language from the early days, that reflected the subordinate nature of corporations is still on the books

http://www.escapingnorthkorea.com/
"During his time in China, he learned of the hundreds of thousands of North Koreans fleeing to China through a 6,000-mile modern-day underground railroad, which runs from Pyongyang to Bangkok, in search of food and freedom."

Why dont; more peopel leave North Korea or revolt? Psychology and culture... (which includes things like "quorum sensing").

See also:
http://anwot.org/
"Mental Wealth is the skillful thinking we require to create a wonderful fantastic lifeâ(TM)s experience. Not everyone can accumulate and give their loved ones a sizeable monetary inheritance. Each of us can accumulate mental wealth and experience the joy of giving it away! The wisdom embodied in mental skills enriches us, even more than the benefits money may provide.
                I recommend taking The Short Course to Mental Wealth prior to undertaking the fuller course, A Newer Way of Thinking. The short course provides mental skills that equip us to become our own best friend, lifelong. It introduces the vocabulary that frees our will to act using reason and wisdom, replacing instinct and habit; directing and producing our own destiny rather than remaining a servant to fate and circumstance.
                The more complete course, A Newer Way of Thinking, explains why we must upgrade our thinking to survive and thrive in the Nuclear Age. Of greater importance, it offers the practical steps to create global peace through our collective efforts. Learn what others have found works and have gladly shared for our benefit. Help make the world a kinder gentler place. Begin with The Short Course to Mental Wealth."

Or, a top Google search result on mental chains:
http://www.calresco.org/lucas/breaking.htm
"Our world of today creates many barriers, walls built of prejudice, of monetary difference, of national boundaries, of belief systems. All these self-created divisions are arbitrary and abstract ideas which often act to avoid growth, to prevent humanity exploring those areas of state space so far not understood. What is possible in our world is unknown by anyone, despite the arrogant assurances with which pronouncements (e.g. "there are no other options") are made by leaders in all fields. No leader, of any type, can possibly deal with all the available information on any subject, so the centralised (undemocratic!) decision making so beloved of corporate, political and bureaucratic systems alike is fundamentally flawed, and increasingly is becoming destructively unsustainable in both social and planetary terms. Every scientific (or political) assumed certainty is now questionable however within our new science. We need not fear to question, only by so doing can we go beyond the errors of the past, those dogmas of static truth and conformity.
    It is far too easy to assume that what we already know is all there is to know. This delusion of perfection, the 'authority knows best' syndrome, is endemic to many of our political leaders, academics and experts. Yet throughout history the bullying 'conform or die' certainty of one time or group has been overturned by the discoveries of the next. Today's reality will become tomorrow's stupidity. Transcending what we believe today may be the essential step in taking humanity onwards into a new millenium based upon a better understanding of complex systems. Our essays and papers further explore these themes."

This extends to the core of "science" as a social entreprise:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

Yes, I guess Morris Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that regard, and much worse than parts of Europe: "How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system? For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries -- the Scandanavian nations come to mind -- where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons. But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for many other countries, is the United States, where proposed "changes" are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 315 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones -- Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al. -- aren't going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard."

So yes, Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that sense (fascist in a corporatist sense, but more disorganized), but he is not the only one. For example here is something by Thomas L. Friedman in the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html
"Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions."

Of course, like people, every country has its unique mix of characteristics that can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the context... North Koreans, for example, may face less "pleasure trap" issues?
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Sad to watch this all play out as so much of the USA suffers for crazy ideological reasons (such as justifies the denial of access of health care and vegetables to a lot of the population). Even sadder to be stuck in the middle of this crazy ideological bubble while it does... Not that I have not tried to help move things to a higher level of sense (as have many others):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

So little, so late... As Bucky Fuller said, wh

Yes, I guess Morris Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that regard, and much worse than parts of Europe: "How, then, can excess be curbed in a free democratic system? For we can be sure that the intelligent frogs, who are really quite exceptional, are not going to be listened to, and certainly have no power to enforce their insights. True, there are certain countries -- the Scandanavian nations come to mind -- where for some reason the concentration of intelligent frogs is unusually high, resulting in decisions designed to protect the commons. But on a world scale, this is not very typical. More typical, and (sad to say) a model for many other countries, is the United States, where proposed "changes" are in fact cosmetic, and where the reality is business as usual. In the context of 315 million highly addicted frogs, the voices of the smart ones -- Bateson, Frank, Posner, Hardin, et al. -- aren't going to have much impact or, truth be told, even get heard."

So yes, Berman is saying the USA is worse than China in that sense (fascist in a corporatist sense, but more disorganized), but he is not the only one. For example here is something by Thomas L. Friedman in the NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html
"Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying "no." Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he's a centrist. But if he's forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions."

Of course, like people, every country has its unique mix of characteristics that can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the context... North Koreans, for example, may face less "pleasure trap" issues?
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Sad to watch this all play out as so much of the USA suffers for crazy ideological reasons (such as justifies the denial of access of health care and vegetables to a lot of the population). Even sadder to be stuck in the middle of this crazy ideological bubble while it does... Not that I have not tried to help move things to a higher level of sense (as have many others):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

So little, so late... As Bucky Fuller said, wh

Maybe MIT could learn from this online book I wrote almost five years ago about getting Princeton University to adopt a post-scarcity worldview? http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

It includes stuff about supporting copyright reform and creating more freely licensed works. And it talks a lot about how the institution could support everyone in the related community to be healthier and less prone to destructive acts.

Here is essay I wrote four years ago about helping Princeton trancend to post-scarcity values: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

From two of the beginning sections on it that relate to this issue:

One motivation for writing (or reading) this essay

I have written on these post-scarcity topics before. The biggest single motivation for the organization of this specific essay is the PAW article on "Jumping From the Ivory Tower".
http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW07-08/13-0514/features_phd.html

Is that title going to bring up echoes of this controversy?
"Automaker agrees to changes after meeting with suicide prevention group that objected to spot showing fired robot jumping off bridge."
http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/09/news/companies/gm_robotad/

The robot is shown forced to take a number of menial jobs, including holding a speaker at a fast-food drive through and becoming upset enough [by repeated failure at them] to throw itself off a bridge.

(I won't link to the video, which contains a graphic image of leaping from a bridge.)

That PAW article title was selected only a little over a year after this statement by a recent Princeton University alumna on behalf of her family:
"Cho family statement"
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/04/20/shooting.family.statement/index.html

On behalf of our family, we are so deeply sorry for the devastation my brother has caused. No words can express our sadness that 32 innocent people lost their lives this week in such a terrible, senseless tragedy. We are heartbroken. We grieve alongside the families, the Virginia Tech community, our State of Virginia, and the rest of the nation. And, the world. ... We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person. ... There is much justified anger and disbelief at what my brother did, and a lot of questions are left unanswered. Our family will continue to cooperate fully and do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well.

With Princeton-praising articles titled "Jumping From the Ivory Tower", it seems like PAW is not helping answer these deep questions. If anything, PAW is helping bury them under inappropriate humor. This essay is not intended in any way to condone violence or the abdication of personal responsibility. But it is intended to help understand some of these issues of suicide and alienation in a university context, and to make suggestions for improvements to the social part of these issues. It even tries to use humor in relation to suicide and morbid themes a bit more appropriately (satirically about PU in this case, discussing options like its voluntary peaceful self-dissolution to help a billion poor children get an education, or its metaphorical death and rebirth as an agent of global economic transcendence to a post-scarcity society of abundance for all). It is always easier to destroy than to create, so this essay includes some specific suggestions for improving the situation at Princeton University, which is a mythologically troubled institution (even as it is filled with many wonderful and caring people).

Like how the Cho family describes Virginia Tech, PU also is filled with people with "so much love, talent and gifts to offer". Even the brother of Sun-Kyung Cho '04, Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech,

http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
"A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
* it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
* it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
* it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered.
Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour.
But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment.
There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low - and slowly increasing - basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added.
Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income - among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature - on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects - is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network. "

See also the "Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964, which I quote here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potent

http://pesn.com/2013/01/03/9602259_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_January3/

The same may be starting in medicine and (re)realizing how important nutrition is:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Informative summary, thanks 0x7e!

Some other economic and political aspects as well:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion

With laser launch systems, we would all have Cheap Access to Space. And then we could develop self-replicating space habitats to make lots of new land and collects lots of solar energy for use in space. So, we could then support quadrillions of people in style in the solar system.

Instead, it sounds like most of the money is going to make technology to do ourselves in fighting over land and oil.

This is just another example of the dangerous deep ironies of people steeped in 19th century "security" strategy holding 21st century technology in their hands:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. ..."

Or also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
      1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
      2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
      3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
      4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
      5. age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
    This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
    Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. "

For ways beyond that, see my online book:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

Or this book by Jeff Schmidt:
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/

Maybe from vitamin D deficiency, not enough exercise, not enough mind-body interaction -- as well as the fact that one can "prove" any crazy thing by logic in the absence of experimental validation?

On the general topic see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

flyaway vs. program cost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor

Nonetheless, I'd much rather that money went to the space program than the war "racket": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

For this reason: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

I think asteroid capture is a cool idea. However, it just brings closer the day where a single patient-but-psychopathic physics major with a laptop and a solar-sail-propelled spacecraft could slightly deflect a bigger asteroid and destroy all life on the planet. My guess for that is around 2050 (such a laptop would be more powerful than all of Google today), if humanity still exists the -- although it might take hundreds of years for a cheap spacecraft to do that. Although we'll probably reach the point where the average biochemistry major could wipe out the human race with an engineered plague first (2030?) -- which is a good reason to develop self-replicating space, underwater, and antarctic habitats first, and this project is a step towards that, and so probably worth the risk.

No one ever talked about the human genome project as like giving copies of the keys to your house away to every random stranger on the planet. But humanity has been protected through genetic security by obscurity, and that obscurity is rapidly being dispelled through all the best of intentions... (even though simply eating more vegetables, fruits, and beans, and getting enough vitamin D, iodine, and omega-3s will accomplish much but not all of the promises of genetic medicine). And that's not even talking about the threats of systems designed directly by the military as weapons of mass destruction or mass confusion...

So, we need to rethink our approach to security, emphasizing mutual security and intrinsic security, like I talk about at that essay. I can only hope the US or global defense establishment stops investing mainly in preparing to face 20th century threats and starts thinking about effectively preparing to deal with emerging 21st century threats. F-22 Raptors are just more "security theater" when major 21st existential threats are things like plagues, asteroids, nanobots, killer robots, deadly financial dogmas, and bureaucracies out of control.

But hey, I lost out on getting a PhD at Princeton in the 1980s on this stuff in part because in the 1980s I would not go along with the game there of justifying optimally picking on nickels before an existential steamroller (even though I missed out on understanding the power of networks):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

I can hope the same sort of social force and group think behind those financial threats that finally emerged in 2008 won't apply entirely to contemplating these existential threats still to come. We all need some security. The issue is how we go about getting it non-ironically.

flyaway vs. program cost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor

Nonetheless, I'd much rather that money went to the space program than the war "racket": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

For this reason: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

I think asteroid capture is a cool idea. However, it just brings closer the day where a single patient-but-psychopathic physics major with a laptop and a solar-sail-propelled spacecraft could slightly deflect a bigger asteroid and destroy all life on the planet. My guess for that is around 2050 (such a laptop would be more powerful than all of Google today), if humanity still exists the -- although it might take hundreds of years for a cheap spacecraft to do that. Although we'll probably reach the point where the average biochemistry major could wipe out the human race with an engineered plague first (2030?) -- which is a good reason to develop self-replicating space, underwater, and antarctic habitats first, and this project is a step towards that, and so probably worth the risk.

No one ever talked about the human genome project as like giving copies of the keys to your house away to every random stranger on the planet. But humanity has been protected through genetic security by obscurity, and that obscurity is rapidly being dispelled through all the best of intentions... (even though simply eating more vegetables, fruits, and beans, and getting enough vitamin D, iodine, and omega-3s will accomplish much but not all of the promises of genetic medicine). And that's not even talking about the threats of systems designed directly by the military as weapons of mass destruction or mass confusion...

So, we need to rethink our approach to security, emphasizing mutual security and intrinsic security, like I talk about at that essay. I can only hope the US or global defense establishment stops investing mainly in preparing to face 20th century threats and starts thinking about effectively preparing to deal with emerging 21st century threats. F-22 Raptors are just more "security theater" when major 21st existential threats are things like plagues, asteroids, nanobots, killer robots, deadly financial dogmas, and bureaucracies out of control.

But hey, I lost out on getting a PhD at Princeton in the 1980s on this stuff in part because in the 1980s I would not go along with the game there of justifying optimally picking on nickels before an existential steamroller (even though I missed out on understanding the power of networks):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

I can hope the same sort of social force and group think behind those financial threats that finally emerged in 2008 won't apply entirely to contemplating these existential threats still to come. We all need some security. The issue is how we go about getting it non-ironically.

The biggest thing about this article is it shows how quickly something taught in science textbooks for decades like the notion of "absolute zero" is slowly realized to be, if not 100% false, then at least a gross oversimplification. We may someday say the same about things like LENR (Cold Fusion) or even deep issues like consciousness and spirituality (Charles Tart's work, for example). Examples:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://pesn.com/2013/01/03/9602259_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_January3/
http://web.archive.org/web/20090308132014/http://suppressedscience.net/physics.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

Elaborating on my previous posts, as I wrote about in a term paper project for a 1980s college undergraduate course run by Prof. Steve Slaby, called "The Technological Imperative of the Arms Race", technology is an amplifier -- the question is, what sorts of things do we want to amplify?

The book "Descartes' Error" makes the point that we can't "reason" without emotions. This seems obvious to me now, but back in college it did not seem so in a philosophical sense. Modern psychology can show us how our emotions drive our reasoning process (even as reasoning can provide feedback that may affect our emotions and again our reasoning etc.). And our emotions are generally first determined by our values (including psycho-physiologically values, like perhaps a instinctive reaction to a snake or a bad smell). And those values in turn are generally determined by our personal biology, our family upbringing, our friends and neighbors, our personal history, and our culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error

Albert Einstein talks about aspects of that in an essay at this link where he says that science can perhaps tell us something about what seems to be, but science can never tell us what should be. And our thoughts on what should be are the basis of our actions (including how we direct our thoughts). The essay:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm

I haven't finished reading it yet, but there is a recent New Yorker article (still available as full text) about a scientist and his feelings about the ethics about his past research on weapons of mass confusion derived from nerve gas:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/17/121217fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all

One discussion of it here:
http://incunabula.org/2012/12/the-doctor-behind-the-armys-psychedelic-manhattan-project-has-some-regrets-weed-isnt-one-of-them/

I was thinking as I read the New Yorker article (around the part I stopped at), that these scientists, or at least the scientific enterprise in general, had other choices than to make the next weapon or the next defense for a theoretical attack. They could have focused on using science to make the world work better for everyone (or at least most people) and thus reduce conflicts, like Bucky Fuller did with his focus on "Livingry". They also could have researched the social and organizational issues behind war and other conflicts, like Morton Deutsch did or Alfie Kohn did. Thus this essay by me mentioning such people:

... I've been involved with: http://oscomak.net/
http://www.openvirgle.net/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Maybe some ideas there might be useful in growing your efforts.

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere? ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

So, what we need is the right sort of mutants...

Well, it's not clear your are replying entirely only specifically to my points, but any quick google search on robotic welding will produce stuff like:
http://www.lincolnelectric.com/en-us/support/application-stories/Pages/chrysler-dodge-motorsports-robotic-welding.aspx
"Similar to every passenger car manufactured, race cars incorporate thousands of welds. Dodge teams were spending many hours manually MIG welding the frame, middle section and front and rear clips that make up each car frame kit. Wanting to reduce man hours, as well as increase weld consistencies for the teams, Chrysler investigated robotic welding options and decided on a Lincoln Electric/Fanuc robotic welding cell. The result: Chrysler realized a 75 percent decrease in chassis assembly time when compared to hand welding the chassis. The Lincoln Electric/Fanuc robotic welding cell offered other benefits as well, a more consistent chassis for the teams and the cost savings associated with the reduced man hours to weld the chassis by hand. ... Oâ(TM)Dell explains that the consistency of the weld, including torch angles and travel speeds, was difficult to keep consistent during manual welding, especially if different people welded different sections of the chassis. This translated into variations in weld quality, which could result in lower strength welds. Too often, an inconsistent weld pattern resulted in distortion on the center and rear sections that were unpredictable and resulted in a dimensionally unstable assembly. ... The roughly 50 hours the teams previously spent welding the center and rear sections can now be used to focus on other aspects of assembling the car."

Or, to see a video of a human in a hard had "operating" a 21st century welding system (at 0:50-01:10 of a ten minute video):
"Arc Welding Ships - Kawasaki Robotic"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBFSfyZoX-o
"Specialized Arc Welding System for Ship Building. Robots are lowered down from the ceiling and automaticaly secured in the ribs of large shipping vessels. The robots use sensing to find the area to be welded and execute the process."

Another company selling such equipment:
http://www.kranendonk.com/en/double-hull-welding
"Welding the double hull of a ship is difficult because of the limited space. For robots it is easier to get into these spaces but the programming is an issue. KRANENDONK developed several double hull solutions which are combined with RinasWeld. Using this software component programming is not an automation issue. As an addition the RinasWeld software enables multiple robots to work together."

There are other things I've seen that say essentially that human welders just can't produce most of the kind of welds needed in some current automobile designs in terms of consistency. I think it is a reasonable analogy to expectations for human accuracy in any domain. In the 1980s I managed a robotics lab that was involved in repurposing a GE P50 robot designed for welding to other purposes like carving 3D shapes. While it has taken decades, those sorts of ideas and technologies are spreading everywhere now (as should be obvious to any regular reader of slashdot). Like another person replied to my comment, organizations need to design processes accepting that humans make mistakes (including mistakes about making mistakes). And yes, that is driving many pushes to automation, for good or bad -- including in places like China with otherwise cheap labor. With about a decade of flat employment levels in the USA while the US GDP has risen by something like 30%, these are not "fantasies" about people being put out of work -- these are realities. See for details: http://pdfernhout.net/b

"The student in this case didn't exactly make the best of decisions: With tensions high, it would probably be better to not be drawing guns or give any potential "danger indicators" to school officials, etc."

For adults, your point might make sense. but kids may process information like the tragedy in CT by role-playing through it. That is described in a book called "The War Play Dilemma" by by Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, which I review here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.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. ..."

People who draw may often draw what is on their mind. With 24X7 news coverage of the tragedy, how could guns not be on the minds of a lot of kids?

Beyond all the other insightful comments people have made here, this NJ situation shows the fundamental lack of understanding that is so prevalent in so many schools about how children really learn and grow.

Better information on how kids learn:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0fg73WnLWQ
http://www.holtgws.com/howchildrenlearn.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm

"People don't like believing that cops will lie in court and falsely accuse people of stuff and are just bad/evil in general. So they don't believe it."

A book about that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_Were_Made_(But_Not_by_Me)
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is a non-fiction book by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, first published in 2007. It deals with cognitive dissonance, self-serving bias and other cognitive biases, using these psychological theories to illustrate how the perpetrators of hurtful acts justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes become polarised."

There is a whole chapter on how good cops go bad one small step at a time.

That said, I'd expect a solid majority of police officers are trying to do the best job they can under difficult circumstances. The police are on the front lines of the fact that the USA is a very broken and disintegrating society in many ways, very much in need of a good dose of self-renewal.

As I comment here about John Gardner's 1971 book "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
===
From John Gardner's 1971 book:
        "As I was browsing in a university bookstore recently, I heard an apple-cheeked girl say to her companion, "The truth is that our society and everything in it is in a state of decay." I studied her carefully and I must report that she did not seem even slightly decayed. But what of the society as a whole? Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly grasp all the implications. ... Only the blind and complacent could fail to recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us -- in government, in education, ..."
    John Gardner goes on to say that every generation faces the problem of renewing itself to meet new challenges emerging from the very success of the old ways of doing things. And he suggests that social values are not some drying up old reservoir, but rather a reservoir of variable capacity that must be recharged anew in every generation. Democracy -- use it or lose it. Free speech on the internet -- use it or lose it. Social capital -- use it or lose it?
===

Some of Gardner's book:
http://books.google.com/books/about/Self_Renewal.html?id=U5hXpnwUmW4C