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Storm has some good points. The main character is ignoring mystery of consciousness, to begin with, and leaps from the fact that science does have a lot of explanatory power to a religion of "scientistic" materialism assuming that whatever is not currently explained well (and may never be explained well) should be or can be ignored.

Google on work by Charles T. Tart for example: http://www.paradigm-sys.com/end-of-materialism/index.cfm
"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. This hurts people, it pressures them to reject vital aspects of their being."

Or:
http://www.esalenctr.org/display/confpage.cfm?confid=9&pageid=121&pgtype=1
"According to Tart's model, the interface between the transpersonal "mind" and our brain-body's computational assessment and virtual reality construction of the physical world results in consciousness as-we-experience-it. Our consciousness is not pure, and we don't see "reality" as it is. Rather, what we experience is a semi-arbitrary construction derived from the balance between the transpersonal mind and the brain-body to produce a virtual reality that we simplistically call "reality." This virtual reality is a good simulation of the physical world, so it works well most of the time for our practical purposes, but it isn't reality per se. "

Many people loved the "Matrix" movies. Plato had the allegory of the "Cave" millennia ago which is similar. How do we know that reality and our own conscious being is not much more complex than our current limited brains can handle? It is indeed a leap of faith to say we are nothing but carbon atoms, or even just patterns of carbon atoms. It is not scientific! But many, many people make that "scientistic" leap of faith quite possibly in error because science can be so blindingly helpful sometimes in developing technology or making some predictions.

More points here on the limits of science as a *social* enterprise:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html

I give an example there about how for many people homeopathy may indeed work as a system of healing, even if only from the fact that the placebo effect is scientifically proven (it's even getting stronger) and homeopathy is a way of accessing that placebo effect power. There may be other aspects in practice as well, like most homeopaths may listen more to clients than MDs and may give good nutritional advice.

Also, unlike most usually innocuous homeopathc remedies, many drugs are put on the market after questionable studies and may be deadly. For example, consider Vioxx that may have contributed to my own father's death (when now I know better nutrition and vitamin D might have helped with his joint pain):
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/29/merck-pays-a-pittance-for-mass-murder/
"Q: Who killed more Americans-- al Qaeda crashing airplanes into the World Trade Center, or Merck pushing Vioxx?
A: Merck, by a factor of 18."

That disaster is one more reason we need better health sensemaking:
http://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking

Als

http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (Marcia Angell)."

Some cancer (as well as much other chronic Western disease) can be prevented and sometimes treated with vitamin and eating more vegetables and other run-of-the-mill things:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

But there is not much profit in telling people that...

So, who really are the frauds and/or dunces here?

Rather than build robots to guard prisons, why not just get the robots to do the boring work outside instead of imprisoning people for not wanting to do the work (and stealing, selling drugs, etc. for money)?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

We need "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://anwot.org/

Where this may all be leading, Marshall Brain's "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Why not just have a "basic income" instead, funded by a tax on robotic factories?
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

More alternative ideas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

The text for the presentation is here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

http://www.changemakers.com/node/113512/comments

See also: http://psychcentral.com/lib/2010/bipolar-disorder-and-nutrition/

Good luck with it. Everyone has something...

Still, as I say here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"In the end, what I have learned about suicide is that it is ironically a hopeful act and a sign of great faith. It is hope things could get better, and faith that one's actions can make one's world a better place. Anyone even thinking of it has the seeds within themselves for something much more life-affirming. "

"There is no spoon"

True, but there are five interwoven economies that can all acquire spoons in different ways: :-)
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

The text for the presentation is here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

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

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

Thanks for the challenging reply. And you indeed have a good point about cells and gravity, although mammals spin around so much, it's not clear how essential that is. More research is needed.

I think you have not yet gotten the mindshift about post-scarcity though, sorry. Even regular economics can take us very far with enough cheap energy, that we almost certainly will have soon from fusion or thorium power if nothing else:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR06.txt

"It's been shown over and over that giving out hand-outs encourages abuse and laziness."

What would you say if someone said you had to start paying $10,000 a month for breathable air supply? You'd say that was not fair, right? You would question the "mythology" behind that enclosure of the atmospheric commons you depend on, right?
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

So, why should you have to pay for access to the fruits of industrial commons and agricultural commons given the government has said all the land has been privatized (or is government owned and effectively off-limits for personal use)?

A basic income is a right, not a hand-out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who divided the factors of production into only land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny these factors in production, he believed the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ was the primary factor. Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep âoereinventing the wheelâ. âoeWe are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception.â"

So, sure, some of wealth is work. But most is not. So, one half the GDP could be a basic income, and the other half would motivate those who needed motivating by money. That would be a basic income of US$2000 per month per citizen, leaving a GDP from 1993 or so to motivate those who needed motivation. Weren't people motivated enough to do a lot of stuff in 1993?

Also, when welfare is only for the sick and disabled, you get "jurisgenic disease" from only getting money when you seem sick or disabled, so you have an incentive to think that way. It's very sad.

On motivation in the information age:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

On moving beyond money:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

People help children. Does that destroy them? Eventually, they want to contribute to their communities (most of them, eventually, if they are not sick physically or mentally in some way).

Our society is becoming so productive that it only takes a very few to provide for the many, given technology is an amplifier. It may take thousands of people to contribute to Debian GNU/Linux, but it provide software for billions of people. Related by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

On how robots (or AI or better design or voluntary social networks) are going

"True again, except that we have to build giant structures with radiation shielding and artificial gravity, no easy feat."

Yes, but with automation to help we could do that. If we can learn to live in zero gravity, other possibilities open up like Marshall Savage talked about in the Millennial Project with Asgard habitats that were basically bubbles with a two meter thick layer of water at the surface between two layers of transparent plastic.
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Asgard
http://oceania.org/images/plate6.jpg
http://oceania.org/images/plate7.jpg

There are at least four ways I know of in theory to support good bone health in space (even assuming astronauts in space were not just vitamin D deficient since the RDA was ten times too low). People can wear clothes designed to provide resistance. People can live in a liquid environment that provides resistance (possibly breathing an oxygen enriched liquid) -- since whales do OK in effectively zero G. People could take (hypothetical) medicines to prevent bone loss. People could have their DNA altered.
http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss

Obviously, more research is needed for all of them. The big thing is that it is not clear if mammals always need gravity for babies to develop in a healthy way. Example: http://www.welcometospaceblog.com/2011/09/babies-in-space.html

I would agree we should solve our problems on Earth first, rather than export a tragic way of thinking. Related ideas (the last two by me):
http://www.anwot.org/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

We seem to know answers to the social problems (stuff like a basic income, unschooling and life-long learning, advanced conflict resolution techniques, and so on). The problem seems more putting them into practice against entrenched interests ranging from short-sighted billionaires (of the 1%) with a narrow sense of self, to public school unions, to those who profit from war, to the rest of us (99%) and social inertia with fear of change even as our technosphere is quickly changing. I think we could easily do much better socially than this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside

As for scams and Rossi's Cold Fusion E-Cat device, I agree it is very suspicious -- it's just at the edge of plausibility, and he could easily dispel any doubt with some better testing. But in general, whether that pans out (we'll know soon), we have lots of energy alternatives, being developed including thorium power, hot fusion, solar PV, solar thermal, and more.
http://www.caelusgreenroom.com/2011/05/26/torresol-opens-world%E2%80%99s-first-molten-salt-c-s-p-plant-ecoseed/

I was a Senior Associate with the Space Studies Institute in the late 1980s (just meant I gave them money). I thought the space power idea was interesting then and it might have made sense then -- even though I suggested to Gerry O'Neill (I took a class with him) that we should build self-replicating space habitats instead -- he called *me* a dreamer. :-) He saw that we would have a slow industrial expansion into space driven by capitalism (which I now think is baloney because we will be moving beyond money soon enough with 3D printers and robotics and s

"Or Asimov predicting that robots/androids would be nearly human-like in their behavior and complexity at the same time that computers still filled whole buildings and would need specially trained people to translate instructions into code and readouts from ticker tape."

Good ironic catch.

I've been rereading some of "I, Robot" aloud to my kid, and what is interesting is that Isaac Asimov suggested robots would understand speech before they were able to talk, whereas things have gone the other way around, it's much easier to get a computer to say things than to get it to understand things. So, for example, Robby the robot is very human in its ability to understand whatever a kid says, and to mime gestures and such, but can't say anything, and the only robot that can talk is the size of a room and does not do it well.

Anyway, it's an example of how we can be right about some things and wrong about others. Ultimately, Isaac Asimov does start to explore deep issues of what it means to be "human" and further, what it means to take care of someone else without destroying their identity as self-actualizing (as his robots begin to fade away).

I do think Isaac Asimov foresaw the economic problems posed by robotics in a capitalist society, like Marshall Brain has:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://marshallbrain.com/robots-in-2015.htm
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

I can wonder if he might have written different stuff (robots being banned on Earth to preserve jobs) if he had grown up in a more communist/socialist system?

But, there are solutions for capitalism besides banning robots, such as a "basic income", like I talk about at my site and elsewhere:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

There is a picture of me on my site with a robot that I presented at the Albert Einstein Science Centennial, where Isaac Asimov gave a talk and later called me a "rotten kid" after I told him about "The Golden Age of the 70s". :-)

"It also underlines a fact I have known for years. Senior staff, officials, managers the political classes and military staff don't understand the technology at all."

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."

"but where would they fit?"

I think you might have missed the sarcasm, which is more obvious in the context of the whole book, sorry.

I feel pretty much anyone can be amazing given the right circumstances and environment.

But hey, even if things are a mess, we can at least try to do the basics for our own lives -- eat well, get vitamin D, develop mental disciplines that help us stay as positively engaged as possible, and so on.

Be careful too of making life too abstract -- there are pleasure traps but there are also pleasures that keep us rooted. We need both roots and wings.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

It is sometimes the depth of our roots -- little pleasures, family, friends, hobbies, habits, spirituality, music, communities, and so on -- that keep us from blowing over in life's storms.

Or, from a different direction, as I quoted from the book version of "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.

I hope your insightful post and related predictions are very wrong, but I am hard pressed to find flaws in what you say other than trying to stay hopeful.

Links you might find of interest:

"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html

"Voyage from Yesteryear"
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

My site with lots of alternatives to disaster:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

On optimism and other things by Howard Zinn:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html

Please make sure you are getting your vitamin D, eating lots of vegetables and fruits, and getting omega-3s to be in the best of health for any tough times to come.

Tell your friend about my website: :-)
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/

For a start though, a "basic income" would be a good idea.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

But other ideas are here:
    http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

In brief, there have always been five interwoven economies, and the balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat.");
* A theft (or conquest) economy ("What's yours is mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, or can afford better lawyers.").

Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including:
* robotics, AI, and other automation,
* better design,
* the accumulation of physical infrastructure,
* relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or
* the emergence of voluntary social networks.

So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics;
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and
* Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.

The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society.

If you go there again, please mention my: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

The text for the presentation is here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

I sent an email about it to the Occupy Wall Street website. Basically, that outlines alternatives to think about.

Building on your theme (by me): http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

"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. ..."

Productivity has been rising in US society, like when better software tools help, say, human medical insurance claims processors be 10% more productive, or when we get other productivity improvements via robotics and other automation, voluntary social networks, or better design including government streamlining. If productivity rises, then in the absence of increased demand, employment goes down. Your statement assumes demand will rise faster than productivity. Most mainstream economists take that as an article of faith (since otherwise their fancy elegant equations suffer divide by zero errors). But we are not seeing increasing demand in the USA.

There are several reasons for this over the past few decades. Here are some of them:

* Environmentalism with a "reduce, reuse, recycle" ethic has reduced demand for many new things.

* A voluntary simplicity movement has reduced people's desire for more stuff.

* As people get enough material goods, they tend to move up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs towards things like self-expression and self-actualization, which generally (not always) don't require too many personal material goods.

* There is a law of diminishing, and then even negative, returns to more goods and services. Too much clutter in our life makes us unhappy. Too many choices makes us stressed.

* Real wages in the USA have been flat for the past three or more decades while wealth concentrates upward due to supply and demand (too much cheap labor, including as women entered the workforce in big numbers). There were zero net jobs produced in the USA during the last decade, even as the US population grew significantly. Consumption of all the goods produced was supported by the wealthy 1% loaning workers the money that otherwise might have come from wages, but that credit bubble, driven in part by home mortgage refinancing, has popped (and we are about to see the student loan bubble do the same).

* The top 1% are now so wealthy they do not need to buy much physical stuff with their wealth. So, they put much of their cash into the "casino economy" (see Money as Debt II) of currency speculation, stock and land speculation, and so on, that neither creates real wealth or really consumes much of it. This creates a de facto currency crisis in the physical economy, just the same as if the wealthy had just burned all their dollars. Mainstream economists ignore this when they look at the total money supply, assuming that cash on these financial casino tables is the same as cash in the pocket of a middle class person.

* There is the usual fear/greed cycle coinciding with all this (but made worse by 9/11).

* There has been a simple accumulation of infrastructure and high quality long-lasting good-enough goods in the USA (so, when do we have enough?).

(Offshoring is a factor in all this, but is generally a red herring overall, since these trends will affect other countries soon enough, and are in Europe already as the OP mentioned.)

I have collected numerous possible solutions on my website: http://www.pdfernhout.net/

But in brief, solutions include some mix of a basic income, improved local subsistence by advanced technology like 3D printing and solar panels, a stronger gift economy, and participatory democratic planning.

People are making desperate appeals to improve the teaching of economics, but so for the mainstream economists have a monopolistic stranglehold on the profession (which is ultimately choking to death our society as these academic economics knowledge workers desperately fight to keep their own paid positions as professors despite their increasing obsolete knowledge and world views, since economics is the science of the management of scarcity and creation of artificial scarcity, not the creation and management of true abundance):
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three

"There are many public university around the globe, who also do not put their curriculum on-line, largely due to the over-reach of copyright locking out knowledge from the public good, for no other reasons than greed and ego, even when it was taxpayer dollars that paid for those works to be produced. "

A related essay I wrote:
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."

Other idea by me:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process? "

And:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or b

"There are many public university around the globe, who also do not put their curriculum on-line, largely due to the over-reach of copyright locking out knowledge from the public good, for no other reasons than greed and ego, even when it was taxpayer dollars that paid for those works to be produced. "

A related essay I wrote:
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."

Other idea by me:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process? "

And:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or b

The agreements could be standardized by convention... Or by legal requirements (like Nolo Press contributes to). That might eliminate 90% of lawyer's workload. People googling on advice can also reduce the need for paid advice, or allow individuals to use what little they really need more effectively (so, less billable hours).

See also Marshall Brain's Manna on breaking down tasks and deskilling them, even lawyering.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

If you can just make lawyers twice as productive with some tools, what happens to half the lawyers we have now?

What if with limited AI you can make lawyers 10X more productive? What do 90% of the current lawyers do, considering lawyers getting out of school now are finding now jobs for them?
http://lawschoolscam.blogspot.com/
http://www.lawyerswithdepression.com/

Or do we get a legal arms race of pointless lawsuits to keep lawyers employed? IIRC the USA has something like 2X to 5X more lawyers per capita than much of the rest of the world to begin with...
http://www.averyindex.com/lawyers_per_capita.php
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_country_in_the_world_has_most_lawyers_per_capita

My site has a lot about post-scarcity economic alternatives to a collapsing exchange economy in the face of the decline of the value of moct paid human labor:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

For another alternative, check out my comment here:
"PlantStudio Evolutionary 3D Software"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2443828&cid=37504222

For information about software my wife and I wrote for breeding 3D plants (about fifteen years ago):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm
https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio/blob/master/README.txt

And now breeding music:
http://www.evojazz.com/
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz

For the plants, we tried to use rules similar to what nature uses for most plants. The music one is more random and could be a lot better.

So, yes, they could make this a lot better. In general, what such a tool needs is support for a parameterizable model, where the parameters can be bred, and eventually the models themselves can be bred.

But with that said, I agree with all the hype that this is a big part of the future of 3D. We got lots of positive feedback about PlantStudio. We just ran out of money to keep developing it back then, and had to work for years at places like IBM Research on unrelated stuff to repay living expenses debt we incurred while writing it and related software (an educational garden simulator) and then got distracted with various life events and other projects.

Anyway, I wish the Cornell people the best of luck as long as the system is free and open source. And if it is not open source (I don't know) they should read this: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html

For another alternative, check out my comment here:
"PlantStudio Evolutionary 3D Software"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2443828&cid=37504222

For information about software my wife and I wrote for breeding 3D plants (about fifteen years ago):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/userssay.htm
https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio/blob/master/README.txt

And now breeding music:
http://www.evojazz.com/
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz

For the plants, we tried to use rules similar to what nature uses for most plants. The music one is more random and could be a lot better.

So, yes, they could make this a lot better. In general, what such a tool needs is support for a parameterizable model, where the parameters can be bred, and eventually the models themselves can be bred.

But with that said, I agree with all the hype that this is a big part of the future of 3D. We got lots of positive feedback about PlantStudio. We just ran out of money to keep developing it back then, and had to work for years at places like IBM Research on unrelated stuff to repay living expenses debt we incurred while writing it and related software (an educational garden simulator) and then got distracted with various life events and other projects.

Anyway, I wish the Cornell people the best of luck as long as the system is free and open source. And if it is not open source (I don't know) they should read this: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html

Straightforward solutions to employment issues exist, like a "basic income"; see my website: http://www.pdfernhout.net/

Anyway, solutions exist if we really want them.
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm

http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

http://www.davidbrin.com/transparent.htm

Which suggests much the same as you did.

And also see "The light of other days" by others as a sci-fi story with a related theme of cultural transformation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days

In general, it's ironic we will put all these computer resources into surveilling people who we fear are up to no good (like stealing property or escaping from society via drugs) instead of just building robots (and other infrastructure) to make what people want along with providing a basic income so they can purchase such things. Related by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

Agree. From about 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."

"No, I think you'll find what's "hard" is actually making things that other people talk or dream about :-)"

True, but that is also hard to do when most of the social resources to do that are diverted into "me, too" redundant competition, paperwork related to that like patents, or, alternatively, military arms races.

I would have been happy to work on the details of all sorts of neat socially-useful devices. (I've ended up do mostly software because it was cheaper to do that as a small independent compared to stuff like robotic hardware or things requiring lab chemistry.)

Essentially, there is little support for fundamental or basic civilian research anymore, including at places like IBM Research. The few slots to do that are intensely fought for these days, meaning the best social infighters tend to get them (not saying some of them are not good scientists, too).

So, what is really hard is actually making things with essentially no budget while also having to do something else so you can get ration units to pay your bills and also trying to be a nice person. :-)

Still, the scale of our society is so big that fundamental stuff happens anyway here and there. But it is such a lie compared to the picture I was painted in the 1970s when I was in school. Part of the reason:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://disciplinedminds.com/

That's one reason much better fundamental science will flourish with something like a "basic income".

Here is a 12 minute YouTube video I just made that talks about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
A PDF file of the presentation is here:
      http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

Also indirectly related to life in big organziations:
"Smile or Die"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo
"Have Fun at Work"
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/hfaw.html
"It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system. ... On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there."

Dr. Fuhrman's writing is based on his reviewing thousands of studies (or so he claims, with the footnotes to prove it in "Eat to Live"). Nutrition is at the root of the "diseases of kings" in the Western world, which seem to include to some high degree obesity, heart disease, diabetes, much cancer, stroke, and perhaps even early dementia. That's seems fairly scientifically proven at this point. The big problem is their is not big profit in prevention or cure through nutrition (including fasting and sunlight), but there are big profits in palliation and endless treatments. So, no one suggests strongly to eat a lot of vegetables to get rid of type II diabetes, while doctors line up to do bariatric surgeries and install insulin pumps.

I agree with you on the need for more research. Dr. Fuhrman is trying to do that:
https://www.nutritionalresearch.org/

Much of the research out there is compromised though by financial interests.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

I've looked at thousands of health documents over the years, and Dr. Fuhman's stuff stands out as the best researched (even if he is not perfect IMHO, but really close).

That's why we need a "basic income", stronger local subsistence communities with solar panels and 3D printers, a stronger gift economy, and/or better participatory democratic government planning.

My presentation on that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

You're right. Here is a 12 minute YouTube video I made that talks about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems. "

A PDF file of the presentation is here:
      http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf

Other related stuff by me:
    http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

But right now, pretty much not one gets this. Mainstream economists are in denial. They just assume infinite demand (not limits from environmentalism, voluntary simplicity, or a law of diminishing or negative returns), that robots and AI and better design and voluntary social networks can't replace most paid human labor, that wealth be evenly distributed (not centralized to the owners of capital), that the mean on the bell curve on IQ will suddenly jump globally from 100 (remember, half below) to 200 to everyone can have great high technology creative jobs, and so on.

Some alternative economists have called for change, but are so far mostly ignored:
    http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/

Anyway, I've put all my resources into understanding these issues and telling peopel about solutions to the point of my own family's economic collapse. But for the most part no one cares; well, I should really say, many people care do about the problem, or say they care, (especially when it effects them personally or someone they care about), but most people just want a solution that does not entail any substantial change to the status quo. It seems our current political and economic leadership would rather drive our society off a cliff to collapse rather than consider things like a basic income, expanded gift economy, better democratic resource based planning, promoting local subsistence via 3D printing and organic gardnening robots, and so on.

Anyway, there are solutions if we can find the collective social will to put them in place. Already the US averages about US$700 per month per citizen in payments for social security, schooling, unemployment, and disability. We could bring that up to US$1000 or even $2000 a month. And we could get rid of or shorten patents and copyrights and do other things to promote a gift economy. And so on. Someday we will probably do all those things or similar ones if we are to survive and thrive. It's just a question of how much suffering will happen before then.

But, as Martin Ford said, while military planners are planning for and funding the development of robots that can do tasks in unstructured battlefields, economists continue to assume robots and AI will never take over most work in a highly structured factory or office.

See also, by Marshall Brain:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html

This was originally posted to Slashdot on May 25 2002:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33107&cid=3582999
It was in relation to an article: "MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!" about the MPAA wanting copyright protection built into all computer hardware. I sent a copy to Richard Stallman back then and he said it made him laugh. :-) My comments to the Department of Justice request for comments were in the form of this satire:

Transcript of April 1, 2016 MicroSlaw Presidential Speech (Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under 2011 Fee Requirements Law)

My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.

There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.

First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.

MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.

In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far more efficiently, inexpensively and, I assure you, justly, by large corporatio

"Your analysis, while lengthy, is riddled with inaccuracies and exaggerations."

Thanks for your comment, AC. I guess it is hard to summarize ten years of thinking on these things and reading tons of references in a short post, but you can find lots of detail in essays on my website: http://www.pdfernhout.net/

Even in this comment, I cited an academic and a reporter citing sources. That article on the UK being last and the US being second to last in child welfare (of industrialized countries) was based on a UN report from that time, so, while anyone can question such a report, that is not an accusation made up out of thin air.

You can stick your head in the sand, but that is a fact -- many kids in the USA are suffering in a variety of ways. Example:
"Record numbers go hungry in the US: Government report shows 50m people unable to put food on the table at some point last year:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/17/millions-hungry-households-us-report
"More than a million children regularly go to bed hungry in the US, according to a government report that shows a startling increase in the number of families struggling to put food on the table. President Barack Obama, who pledged to eradicate childhood hunger, has described as "unsettling" the agriculture department survey, which says 50 million people in the US â" one in six of the population â" were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy at some point last year, in large part because of escalating unemployment or poorly paid jobs. That is a rise of more than one-third on the year before and the highest number since the survey began in 1995. ..."

That said, sure, I have no doubt there are inaccuracies and exaggerations in what I have written in various places, which I would be happy to eventually correct if supplied with specific information. But it seems to me that you have supplied mostly generalizations (and also responded to points I did not raise, as I agree the USA still makes a lot, at least by dollar value), generalizations that ignore how the USA has systematically disrupted grassroots movements for democracy and social accountability in other countries. That is why so many people in so many countries are angry at US Americans, just for two example where the USA helped overthrow a democratically elected government, see Chile and Iran.

Has the USA also done some good things abroad? No doubt.

Is the USA multi-cultural in a lot of ways? Yes, to its credit.

Has the USA some big technical accomplishments, like the internet? Again, no doubt. Although other countries did have computer networks, like France's Minitel or Chile's Cybersyn -- the last being destroyed by the US fomented overthrow on the first 9/11 in 1973 -- that could have become like an internet someday.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

Are US accomplishments commensurate with having a huge (genocidally) depopulated continent to work with and being the only major surviving industrial base after a World War (where it helped arm both sides?) and bringing in the best German/Nazi scientists both before and after the war? Well, that is subject to debate...

My understanding is that the USA would have collapsed a long time ago based on mismanagement had it not been so wealthy to begin with. And as I see it, both the USA and the USSR lost the Cold War; it is just taking the USA a bit longer to fall. I agree with you the large stockpiles of WMDs the USA has make its collapse very problematical for the world.

As I mentioned, I've tried to propose alternatives to collapse, but so far, without much success in implementation.

Anyway, I'd suggest there is a lot of exaggeration in what you have written. Where did I suggest the USA was "evil per

Collapse like the fashion industry? :-)
"The Fashion Industry's Piracy Paradox"
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/597
"The typical explanation for intellectual property law goes something like this: Creating new books, films, drugs, songs, etc. is expensive, but once the nifty new thing is produced, copying is cheap (or, in the case of copying done over the Internet, free). Unrestrained copying robs creators of the means to profit from their works -- the copyist can always outcompete the originator. So we need IP protections to make sure that the original author or inventor has control over copying. This way, authors and inventors will be properly motivated to create.
That's a sensible theory, but it doesn't always translate in the real world. Consider the fashion industry, a creative industry larger by far than the film, recorded music and book publishing industries. The logos and labels that adorn apparel and accessories are protected by trademark law. But the designs of the garments themselves - the cut of a sleeve, the fit of a bodice - are not. Copyright law does not cover most fashion designs because clothing is a "useful article", a class of items that falls in the jurisdiction of patents and not copyrights. But patent law is almost irrelevant to fashion designs, both because the patent standard of "novelty" cannot be met by most designs, and for the practical reason that the patent application process proceeds too slowly to be meaningful for most fashion designs, which live a brief commercial life and then disappear.
So current U.S. IP law does little to protect fashion designs, and yet the fashion industry is doing quite well, thank you. How can that be? Take a look again at the typical explanation for IP law that I set out in the first paragraph of this post. Anyone who shops - even us men - cannot help but notice that there is lots of copying (aka, "piracy") of fashion designs. And yet the stores are full of innovative new designs every season. We have a puzzle. ...
So what does this matter? Well, if the law prohibited fashion design copying, then the fashion industry would have a much harder time creating and responding to trends. U.S. copyright law prohibits not only verbatim copies, but also any work that is "substantially similar" to a preexisting copyrighted work. So if copyright law were extended to fashion designs, the unique innovation culture of the fashion world might come under intense legal scrutiny. Designers will give way to lawyers, as every season's new collection is carefully examined for potential legal liability. Young and unknown designers will be worst off, as they will not be able to afford the lawyers' fees that will be part of the new price of admission to the industry. And an industry that has been a thriving locus of both unbridled creativity and profit may suffer. ..."

So, let's talk about how can anyone make a sofwtare project or innovative hardware device when they have to learn about and negotiate 250,000 patents, any single one of which can lead to an injunction to stop production? It's just absurd.

A related satire I write from almost ten years ago that is sadly more true everyday:
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. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all f

"Torching cars and stealing TVs is not the solution. The shooting is just being used as an excuse by the rioters and the unhelpful people encouraging them."

Much the same is said here:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html

But, the more a society is stretched to the breaking point by bad social policy, the more likely it will break into violence. Most humans can be civilized, but only while things are going at least not too terribly badly socially. The 9/11 attacks were also the product of social problems, although in that case, by frustrated young men from Saudi Arabia who blamed the USA for supporting who they saw as their local oppressors (ironically spun as "they hate us because we are free").

But, as far as the UK, from 2007, and I doubt it has gotten better with the global recession, consider this article (sadly, no longer directly at Adbusters):
http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/167082-How-Britain-is-Eating-Its-Young
http://web.archive.org/web/20071019031111/http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
"Around the nation, airtime was cleared for cathartic phone-ins, heated discussions, and a torrent of contributors that simply would not stop. As if sensing that many of the problems might in part stem from the government's unparalleled obsession with monitoring, measuring and homogenising the very children it once sought to cherish, many former Labour advisors suddenly sought to introduce daylight between their ideas and those of the heavily surveilled nanny state. Neil Lawson of the Labour think-tank Compass bleakly admitted: "Society is hollowing out, but not just in the rotting boroughs of south London. The middle classes are anxious too. Many are richer but few seem happier. Mental illness abounds. White-collar jobs are outsourced to India. Everyone looks for meaning in their lives -- but all they find is shopping."
"The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""

Does not bode well for either the UK or the USA. And when the violence starts, things tend to just get worse for everyone, with more police, more fear, less comunity, and a downward spiral that is really expensive to recover from (like in Iraq after the civil war there that started after the US invasion).

I tried really hard to find other ways forward, and I found the conceptually, but implementing them against entrenched dogma is another thing.
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

The use of the word "Theft" in the title there is not intended as advocacy -- it is more to point it out as what happens w

"just how does he intend to evaluate the student's progress, capability, and absorption of knowledge?"

By talking with the student? How do you evaluate other people around you? How do you tell them what you think of them when it matters?

"I found great pride and satisfaction in knowing I successfully solved all the (physics or math) problems on a test."

I found great pride in flunking an advanced physics course that was full of sycophants and people who refused to question dogma. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

Like in my other reply in this thread, to use your "Force" analogy (even though Taoism and Yin/Yang is more subtle and nuanced), *feedback* may have a light side and a dark side. Grades are the dark side. Sounds like the dark side may have seduced you by pretending to be the light side? Why did that professor need to put a grade on that paper in addition to the comments? You've spent probably almost two decades of your life being graded, and being told grades are important (by people whose salary you were paying, or who were paid on your behalf, when that money could have just gone directly to you and you could have learned on your own from peers, parents, neighbors, apprenticeships, and books, like people used to). Grades are a means of social control. Can't we do better than that, even if we need some control here or there?

"We have an extremely complex set of problems to resolve that we cannot fix without some form of cooperation between both sides."

Or we need to admit "both sides" are clueless and elect independent replacements.

That said, you make some great points about looking at the issues from multiple points of view.

Here is a presentation I put together on what I see as the deeper issues that transcend both mainstream US parties' platforms:
    "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft "
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems. The text for the presentation is here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf "

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

At least I tried to get the ideas out there. But great minds think alike, so it may well be independent invention. :-)

Good luck to the new merger. Too bad it is not centered aroun free and open source software for the CAD side.

Why let the state dictate so much? Let the parents decide how to spend that redistributed money to best take care of their families. http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

"If you are willing to work for a shadowy unaccountable government agency that loves to violate the rights of its own countrymen, well, you didn't have much character or moral/ethical fiber to begin with."

AC, The problem with this line of argument is that if no good people work there for that reason, it is bound to be even worse. It's a general problem with the US DOD more broadly. I feel the US military is being horribly misused by US politicans to fight wars whose main point seems to be to line the pockets of those in the war racket (see Smedly Butler), but, if only the worst of the worst join the US security forces because they are being misused, where does that leave us as a country?

I wrote this about the CIA, but it applies equally well to a place like the NSA:
"On dealing with social hurricanes (like the US CIA) "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. Another theme is exploring the meaning, if true, of a allegation by Wayne Madsen about President Obama's deeper connection to the CIA than was otherwise known."

The thing is, we all need security. The issue is how to go about getting it in a non-ironic way, whcih I suggest here means focusing on intrinsic security and mutual security:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

One other alternative is for civilians to take on more of an interest in security and other public intelligence matters; see:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1

"If you are willing to work for a shadowy unaccountable government agency that loves to violate the rights of its own countrymen, well, you didn't have much character or moral/ethical fiber to begin with."

AC, The problem with this line of argument is that if no good people work there for that reason, it is bound to be even worse. It's a general problem with the US DOD more broadly. I feel the US military is being horribly misused by US politicans to fight wars whose main point seems to be to line the pockets of those in the war racket (see Smedly Butler), but, if only the worst of the worst join the US security forces because they are being misused, where does that leave us as a country?

I wrote this about the CIA, but it applies equally well to a place like the NSA:
"On dealing with social hurricanes (like the US CIA) "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. Another theme is exploring the meaning, if true, of a allegation by Wayne Madsen about President Obama's deeper connection to the CIA than was otherwise known."

The thing is, we all need security. The issue is how to go about getting it in a non-ironic way, whcih I suggest here means focusing on intrinsic security and mutual security:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

One other alternative is for civilians to take on more of an interest in security and other public intelligence matters; see:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1

Contrast: ""VMR will be an enhanced capability to generate the intelligence required for successful counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations" the agency said."

With: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. ... 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, it seems like a cool project technically, with multiple uses in civilian applications.

Exactly, AC, it is a game (though one with potentially deadly legal ramifications for people who go to prison over copyright issues, even ignoring how stress like the article poster is experienceing can itself be deadly).

So, basically, how do we prove anything about ownership in a digital world of abundance where copies of anything digital are essentially free and can also be easily altered?

The answer is probably that it is very hard to impossible -- it depends on how much trouble people are willing to go to, or how much skill they have. And people in other posts have pointed out how unfair and unreasonable that is -- that justice then depends on how much money you have to hire that skill.

As I said the other day:
"Copyright and a police state (Score:4, Informative)"
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2344152&cid=36854132
"A deep issue that no one seems to be talking about is that ultimately, how can you "prove" you have legal access to any digital pattern at all, or "prove" that you do not have patterns you should not -- without a complete review of every financial and informational transaction you have ever made? Like to see if you gave the original away and so forth? How can you prove you have a right to read some book you purchased and format shifted to digital media? And so on. This is a big issue when there are reward-offered "tip lines" for people to rat on their employers or coworkers. Ultimately, the only way copyright can be enforced in the age to come, where you can store the library of congress on your cell phone in twenty years plus all the music ever recorded, is to have an unbelievably intrusive police state... Is an all pervasive police state what we want in the USA in order to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which is the constitutional intent of copyright? Or is a police state likely to shut down a lot of creativity in a society?"

Ultimately, the BSA and forces like it may be the biggest reason why we move beyond copyright as a society (or the USA will descend into so much dysfunctionality it ebceoms the has-been laughingstock of the world). A related satire I wrote about a year ago on that and sent to the US DOJ:
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. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law. ... There are 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,

"The question is: will all this lead to an era of unprecedented splendor, or of poverty? I'd say it depends on how fast we can wean ourselfs off of our ideological commitment to capitalism and turn to some form of socialism (technically, a post-scarcity society)."

Yes -- Marshall Brain says much the same in "Manna". And Iain Banks says "Money is a sign of poverty." Bob Black writes about this too.
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Please see my other post in this thread or my site for my related comments on these trends: http://www.pdfernhout.net/

Or just my sig below.

Essentially, I feel a big issue is for us to get our socioeconomic house in order before we create so many weapons and competitive processes with all this advanced technology that we accidentally do ourseves in with it. We need to make the social transition first, because our path out of any singularities may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into them. But it is tricky, because better technology makes it easier to solve some social disputes by having a bigger pie. I like James P. Hogan's 1982 "Voyage From Yesyeryear" novel that explores these themes.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

I agree, and more: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"

And: "Useless Studies, Real Harm"
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/useless-pharmaceutical-studies-real-harm.html

On alternatives:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

By me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems. The text for the presentation is here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf "

I've been wondering if I should include attention and reputation in there too?

So, there are alternatives to the exchange economy. Also"
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6928744.ece
"Former teacher Heidemarie Schwermer has lived without money in Germany for 13 years. Our writer finds out how she does it."

Think also about did people live before money existed?
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html

But back then not all land was "privatized" and hoarded and rented for money... So people could hunt and gather.

Note also that "money", like fiat dollars, is essentially imaginary.
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

"Whats wrong with government spending money to create jobs?"

While I'm sympathetic to the government subsidizing projects if the government is correcting for some externalities, overall, a tax-funded basic income would be a better and more general idea; see:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee

There are plenty of things that need doing, like raising children well, or comforting the dying, or being an informed citizen or good neighbor, that ideally should not be "jobs".

Some other economic reform ideas I've collected are outlined on my site:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/

But even though born in the USA, my parents were both from the Netherlands and I've visited there, and so I tend to think most US politics related to economics is crazy as it is based on false assumptions about human nature and what is possible with decently run government that better accounts for market externalities and focuses more on mutual/intrinsic security than a war racket.

See also:
    "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
    "RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment "
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
   

"figuratively speaking that's what the future holds for those kids, as their future has already been eaten by their great grandparents and grandparents and parents, who voted themselves a system, that promoted bread and circuses, income transfer from the young and unborn to the old and the dead."

True enough, sadly, especially when you consider social security and medicare, and if ou assume the money on schooling is mostly misspent like John Taylor Gatto or John Holt suggest. Still, with robotics and other automation, 3D printing, better design, voluntary social networks, and accumulation of infrastructure, and so on, the future may still be bright. Stuff like Social Security or the US debt may become meaningless when money has less value (like Iain Banks says, "Money is a sign of poverty.")

I like the Peter Schiff video you link to (even as I can quibble that he may ignore some issues like the USA having the only intact major economy after WWII allowing expansionism, or ignoring an explanatory reason the chinese made stuff for the USA as a way to gain access to US technology to bootstrap themselves and gain political advantage, as a sort of tax on Chinese workers).
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj8rMwdQf6k

Here is a video on 21st economics economics I made that can help understand how our kids may still have a good future:
    "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY

I put together a knol on the deeper issues, and why the kind of business cycles and bubbles Peter Schiff talked about are only some of the trends, where deeper trends of rising productivity in the face of limited demand are createing permanent structural unemployment (without other major changes) -- so his explanation is incomplete, like he ignores no net job growth in the 2000s and flat real wages for three decades in the USA despite productivity increase during those decades by a factor of two to three times.
    http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

Redistributism, but to families as basic income: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not. "

... the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

Maybe they did not read this? 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. "