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What about that "Sixth Sense" thing we all saw on TED a year ago?

demonstrating the use of cameras and laser pico-projectors to "extend" a laptop's user interface to adjacent surfaces.

As opposed to extend the output onto any surface in front of you, adjacent or not, and the input to any gesture in front of you?
This is unimpressive.

Pranav Mistry, TED, SixthSense... This HybridUI is so cheap copy it hurts.

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/the_surprising.php - basically intrinsic motivations works a LOT better than extrinsic motivation (aka money/bribes).

There is a related technology that shows great promise for rural medicine, especially in poor and remote places. The concept is based around a small, chemically-treated piece of paper (okay, not technically just a piece of paper, but it helps to visualize it that way) about the size of a postage stamp. A small sample of urine or blood (depending on the type of test) is placed on a receptor point and the blood is sucked across traces to several pads with special chemicals. These chemicals act as basic tests. For example, two urine tests could be for glucose levels and protein levels. The pads will change colors across a spectrum, giving a range of possible readings for each test. The pad can then be photographed with, say, a cellphone with a higher-resolution camera, then that picture can be sent to a computer elsewhere for analysis. The tests themselves are ridiculously cheap compared to typical 1st-world lab tests.

http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp.html

Here is his 2003 talk on designing solar collectors.

Those indexes are biased since they neglect key aspects of human happiness like community; health; external costs like pollution, systemic risk, and defense that businesses often pass on to society; and the corrupting effects of the concentraation of wealth in a few hands as the rich get richer -- things implicit in the original poster's comment.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

From:
    http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"""
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.
"""

Like many conservatives, they leave out community and health as part of a good life, but otherwise it's a great essay.

Hans Rosling has shown that many materially poor countries have made great progress towards building prosperous and healthy societies under a variety of political assumptions (often ones that emphasize social welfare).
    http://www.gapminder.org/
    http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

Another index:
http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm

As the value of human labor continues to fall from automation, better design, and voluntary social netwoks, we will need new models of prosperity that are not mainly about "every person for themselves". Freedom is also not very secure or meaningful without face-to-face community, which is often just assumed, but seems rarer these days as our individualized consumer-oriented society fails in so many ways.

I agree most of the world's problems are social problems (even if better technology can make some social problems easier to solve through increasing abundance).

Here's her TED Talk on the subject.

CGI animators, in some sense, have a much easier task then the roboticist. Its much easier to program a full musculature into an animated character than to physically build a robotic one.

The difficulty of all this is exemplified by Robert Zemeckis' dismal "Polar Express" and "A Christmas Carol". Even when capturing hundreds of control points on the faces of the actors, you're still left teetering on the edge of the Uncanny Valley.

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "Avatar" were more successful because they did complete surface capture of the actors faces rather than point-capture.

Which gets back to the difficulty of making robots appear human. Its the same problem, magnified 1000 times by the fact that, in essence, you have to pack the equivalent of a millions of "control-points" into the robots face.

Not an easy task.

-Sean

http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_changing_math_education.html In short, the statistics show calculus sucks.

No, you are wrong. Science can answer moral questions, as Sam Harris eloquently argues in his latest TED speech

Not only that, but scientific thinking is arguably the best way to think about morals. What makes us and others around us happy? What decreases suffering both ours and that of others?

Surely, those are questions that have factual answers and some approaches will be better and some worse at promoting wellbeing and decreasing suffering. This puts moral questions squarely into the realm of science.

Again, watch the Sam Harris video for a much clearer and brutally honest talk on the topic of science and morality.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

There's also a TED talk that breifly explains the distinction.

Here's a really interesting TED Talk about this type of stuff: http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html

There's a TED talk from last year on this subject from the lead researcher, Rebecca Saxe.

It looks like the Toshiba group accomplishes with one camera what these guys did with dozens.

Signs make drivers assume everyone is following the rules and then they get lazy and don't pay attention to their environment. Remove the signs and everyone will pay close attention to their fellow drivers and maybe even motorcycles! Also, cars are too safe and comfortable (at least, precieved to be). Airbags, large SUVs, DVD players, etc. They need to be stripped down to almost nothing. A tender meatsack will pay very close attention to road at 60 MPH in this kind of death trap.

Similarly, signs could be used in such a way as "Danger! Pay Attention" or this sign might work, too.

There's a good explanation by Patricia Burchat in a TED talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/patricia_burchat_leads_a_search_for_dark_energy.html

If impatient, jump to 4:20 for how do they use lensing.

I cam across this recently, which I found to be pretty interesting. In part of his discussion, Alan Kay talks about an elementary-level school in California where children are taught by doing, using visual/kenetic activities whereby they can learn advanced concepts without having to have their brains formed towards symbolic manipulation yet. Frankly, the lessons I learned in my younger days, or things which I repeatedly DO are the ones that stick with me, and I think this is true for a lot of people. Maybe we should stick with that mold for a longer stretch in school, kind of like solving integrals with paper strips or whatever.

Bill gave a speech on this at last years tedtalks.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

Watch this

You might not like Gates because of Windows, but if you're a fan of nuclear power this might stop your assassination attempt.

Forbidding the staff to exercise judgement in an emergency call center is the best illustration I've come across in a long time of what Barry Swartz refers to as the "war on wisdom".

Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom

From the online transcript:

The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job. How could you even write a rule that go the janitors to do what they did? And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic? It's preposterous on its face. And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom.

This is actually a bit of a talking head lecture. Not much sizzle, but a message worth repeating.

There ought to be nowhere to hide for a bureaucrat forbids the use of human wisdom when the rigid system that ensues makes a total hash of things.

Great article last year in the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16Bruce-t.html?pagewanted=all

Daily Show

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-september-28-2009/bruce-bueno-de-mesquita

TED Talk

http://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_bueno_de_mesquita_predicts_iran_s_future.html

There is a TED talk that is relevant. http://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_mohr_surgery_s_past_present_and_robotic_future.html Gene therapies are also advancing rapidly.

See Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice. Got to help someone with his Windows-PC lately and got seriously confused by this invasive dialog. :-)

They're opt-out in many European countries today.

And because of this, the number of donors in those countries is significantly higher.

Dan Ariely talks about this "organ donation phenomenon" about 5 minutes into his TED lecture.
Opt-in European countries: 4-28%
Opt-out European countries: 86-100%

If you want your citizens to donate more organs, you simply change the check-box at the DMV from an opt-in question to an opt-out question.

I'm really surprised no one has brought this up in the health care debate:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Anyway, I'm from Thailand, so I don't really care either way things roll. If the US doesn't bring its health care system up to the level of other industrialized nations and becomes paralyzed by preventable chronic conditions, it will be good for Thailand's "health tourism" industry.

Yes, but in the US this concept has spiraled out of control. It's gone beyond mere protection for the wronged into a massive chilling effect on society. But Philip K. Howard says it far better than I: Four ways to fix a broken legal system.

http://www.ted.com/talks/pw_singer_on_robots_of_war.html

It's a common meme to speculate what features of life on planet earth will prove hard to explain to ET once we finally meet one. Communal brainwashing might rank right up there. I lived through the seventies, which were the height of communal brainwashing, because there wasn't much else to do, unless you *really* liked winter sports.

It helps to think clearly about prostitution. In addition to the risk of violence and being raped financially by your pimp, the customers don't necessarily have good hygiene, you don't know where they've been, and your guesses would likely be far too accurate.

Advertising is sweaty with greed. After a hundred thousand ad impressions, you're not the same person any more. You've lived too long in the gutter of commerce. You're mentally unclean.

My policy is to ignore the ads even if they are turned on. I have a method for discovering things I need to purchase. It's the old Al Gore, and it serves me well, in blood hound mode. I don't need sweaty businessmen tapping me on the visual shoulder with their idea of a great offer. I'm one of those people where nothing goes in my cart until I've read the label. I've said this several times before. Capitalism only exists when *both sides* of a transaction are making rational decisions. Any effort by one side to tilt the landscape through brainwashing techniques or emotional appeals is a degradation of capitalism. Mutually informed, rational decisions are the miraculous device that make markets honest.

I would leave the ads turned on to benefit sites such as Ars, despite the fact that I think this is a ludicrous social convention, except for one small problem: too many ads blink. Thinks that blink eat away at my attention something fierce. I'm like one of Temple Grandin's cows. The flickering flag drives me mad. In some ways I have some autistic markers. OTOH, I'm extremely perceptive to emotion, only not so much the surface emotion that everyone else picks up quickly (I'm often slow to process this); I tend to pick up the underlying cognitive state beneath the emotion, given enough time to triangulate. It's a bit like what Feynman says about depth of explanation (segment on magnetism). I wouldn't call myself autistic, until an ad starts to blink on my screen, cutting my reading speed/comprehension by half. Instant ad blocker. Am I going to sacrifice 50% of my capacity for 100% of the reason I'm visiting a site, just so Ars can make a few pennies per page view when I've already made a blood pact with Adam Smith not to purchase anything I haven't independently researched? Not in this lifetime.

Ads are a ludicrous substitute for a workable micro-payment system. If we hadn't first invented the 1970s, this would be obvious to everyone. Imagine if we had the micro-payment system first, and it worked, then some guy comes along with a business plan where "we distract the reader with emotionally charged images, impelling the viewer to buy a product they wouldn't have purchased on native intelligence, through the power of communal brainwashing". Would this plan find any takers?

The entire culture of ad-influence commerce is an affront to human dignity, allowing us to become so caught up in image, we forget the nature of value. Neither does prostitution do much for human dignity, on either side of the transaction.

It's too bad the majority is coddled into becoming gullible consumers. We'd all be a lot more empowered if consumers voted their dollars rationally. Everything good about markets would become better. Good products would rise to the top, crap would be driven out.

I think long and hard about what life on planet earth might be like if we collectively less gullible, if this cheap Jedi mind trick didn't work half so well. Maybe our gullibility to emotional persuasion is critical to our teetering social cohesion. How is it tha

It's a common meme to speculate what features of life on planet earth will prove hard to explain to ET once we finally meet one. Communal brainwashing might rank right up there. I lived through the seventies, which were the height of communal brainwashing, because there wasn't much else to do, unless you *really* liked winter sports.

It helps to think clearly about prostitution. In addition to the risk of violence and being raped financially by your pimp, the customers don't necessarily have good hygiene, you don't know where they've been, and your guesses would likely be far too accurate.

Advertising is sweaty with greed. After a hundred thousand ad impressions, you're not the same person any more. You've lived too long in the gutter of commerce. You're mentally unclean.

My policy is to ignore the ads even if they are turned on. I have a method for discovering things I need to purchase. It's the old Al Gore, and it serves me well, in blood hound mode. I don't need sweaty businessmen tapping me on the visual shoulder with their idea of a great offer. I'm one of those people where nothing goes in my cart until I've read the label. I've said this several times before. Capitalism only exists when *both sides* of a transaction are making rational decisions. Any effort by one side to tilt the landscape through brainwashing techniques or emotional appeals is a degradation of capitalism. Mutually informed, rational decisions are the miraculous device that make markets honest.

I would leave the ads turned on to benefit sites such as Ars, despite the fact that I think this is a ludicrous social convention, except for one small problem: too many ads blink. Thinks that blink eat away at my attention something fierce. I'm like one of Temple Grandin's cows. The flickering flag drives me mad. In some ways I have some autistic markers. OTOH, I'm extremely perceptive to emotion, only not so much the surface emotion that everyone else picks up quickly (I'm often slow to process this); I tend to pick up the underlying cognitive state beneath the emotion, given enough time to triangulate. It's a bit like what Feynman says about depth of explanation (segment on magnetism). I wouldn't call myself autistic, until an ad starts to blink on my screen, cutting my reading speed/comprehension by half. Instant ad blocker. Am I going to sacrifice 50% of my capacity for 100% of the reason I'm visiting a site, just so Ars can make a few pennies per page view when I've already made a blood pact with Adam Smith not to purchase anything I haven't independently researched? Not in this lifetime.

Ads are a ludicrous substitute for a workable micro-payment system. If we hadn't first invented the 1970s, this would be obvious to everyone. Imagine if we had the micro-payment system first, and it worked, then some guy comes along with a business plan where "we distract the reader with emotionally charged images, impelling the viewer to buy a product they wouldn't have purchased on native intelligence, through the power of communal brainwashing". Would this plan find any takers?

The entire culture of ad-influence commerce is an affront to human dignity, allowing us to become so caught up in image, we forget the nature of value. Neither does prostitution do much for human dignity, on either side of the transaction.

It's too bad the majority is coddled into becoming gullible consumers. We'd all be a lot more empowered if consumers voted their dollars rationally. Everything good about markets would become better. Good products would rise to the top, crap would be driven out.

I think long and hard about what life on planet earth might be like if we collectively less gullible, if this cheap Jedi mind trick didn't work half so well. Maybe our gullibility to emotional persuasion is critical to our teetering social cohesion. How is it tha

This is why I moved the wii, dvd, receiver/amp down low. We allow, and encourage, our 2 year old switch out dvds, adjust volume, etc. We went from having a upset/frustrated child (due to wanting to help and be involved) to having a child that is careful and loves to help by letting the child be involved and help. When we sit down to watch a DVD, the little one ejects the carsole, drops in the proper DVD, with it oriented correctly, pushes the carosole back in, and turns off the overhead lights: all this started at about 20 months of age.

With the DVDs, the worst we have had to deal with is the finger prints (which can be cleaned very easily in the sink with some dawn liquid dish soap and warm water).

I feel it is better that kids be given the opportunity to learn as much as they desire as young as possible, provided they aren't risking serious injury to themselves or others....or aren't breaking stuff needlessly. This concept is also why we purchased some cheap plastic wine goblets (for drinking apple juice/water). If they get dropped, no biggy. But at the same time, they look like grown-up glassware and thereby can teach how to be careful and respect nice things.

This TED Talk entitled, 5 Dangerous things for kids really captures the idea I am trying to convey. I know that not all kids have the focus and attention to detail that is necessary for interacting with a home entertainment center, but for those that can, they should not be stifled.

Just by $0.02.

Try this video to get converts. http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html

Is LTO-5 the last hurrah for tape?

What about the problem of having a working LTO-4 drive ten years from now, if the tape industry begins to wither as other solutions continue to eat away at the tape market?

I think the creativity here is negotiating the nature of the SLA contract with the clients. My preference is just to set up a local disk array with enough spinning capacity, not promising to survive a site disaster, charging for the service only so long as the data remains live.

To complement this, send each client a master LTO-4 tape (or a disk drive) and tell them "it's up to you if you need to recover this, but I'll help you out if I'm able".

Otherwise, you get into this horrible risk calculus where the client is not thinking through the cost benefit with rational comprehension.

I would try to find some way to unpack convenience from autonomy from ultimate responsibility, because if you don't, your clients shouldn't be balking at the price of Amazon S3. If they are balking, it's because they don't really want all three of these packed together, but the timid bureaucrats don't wish to admit this, in case the day comes when data is lost.

In economics, it is common to do net present value calculations. It would be interesting to do a backward discount on prudence if the day comes when the shit hits the fan. There's a lot of weird asymmetry in human psychology associated with risk.

From a business perspective, it's sometimes good to give your customer's options priced at levels where you expect not to get many takers. See the story about The Economist subscription model in Ariely's lecture:

Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code

It's amazingly hard to find residential fire statistics on a per annum risk basis, if we're looking at personal acts of god rather than communal acts of god (hurricane, earthquake, etc.) The firefighters meticulously count the number of times they respond, but seem not to talk to the fire insurance people about the number of structures insured. Not one report I looked at from the UK, the US, or Canada denominated the statistics per residence.

A loose estimate for Canada in 2002 is a residential risk rate of 1 in 300 per annum. Older building stock with plush curtains and deep fat friers will have higher rates, recent building stock with working fire detectors and no children will have lower risk.

Another table shows me that the risk of a 45 year old male being diagnosed with cancer by age 50 is 1.5%, or about 300:1 against per annum. Radon gas causes 15% of lung cancer, and 15% of American homes exceed recommended action levels. How many of the stripes+parity+fail_over+hot_spare+IronMountain crowd here have bothered to purchase the $50 home radon test (excluding smokers who smoke indoors, who are in a different risk category altogether)?

The human mind seems to incorporate an instinctive Bayesian prior that if you are actively discussing a risk, the risk is immediately ten or a hundred times greater than it was five minutes ago, before the risk entered the conversation. Likewise, any hill you are standing at the bottom of seems ten times higher or steeper than any comparable hill on the other side of the valley.

Anthony Atala presented this (and much more!) on TEDMED recently.

Awesome.

Also see this great TED talk, Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Susan Blackmore has written more than a bit around it, and her TED talk about this and the future is pretty interesting.

I do not have first hand experience of many other countries, but this is just a stepping stone for the government - it will not deter the government from continuing in the same direction. In the last decade or so, it has been my distinct impression that there has been rise of cases where the German government first pushes through some (partially harsh) legislation, only to have it challenged at the Bundesverfassungsgericht and just continuing on with however much the judges let them get away with.

All this leads to is the politicians just putting the burden of finding out what the maximum restrictive law can be to the judges of the highest court.

No attempt is made at trying to find workable laws, but instead they try and overreach 'in the name' of terrorism or child porn in trying to control what people can do.

I laud the judges for their rebuke of the law, but I also mourn that our politicians still aren't considering educating themselves of what is possible, what is useful, what is sensible; or trying to find other ways of mitigating problems rather than just following the first impulse of prohibiting whatever the problem is perceived to be.

Germany, to me, is not that far off needing to take some guidance from a recent TED talk: 4 ways to fix a broken legal system:

http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_howard.html

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics.html
The relatives of dead crack dealers can get death benefits.
The crack dealers themselves can get a regular paycheck(though it's crappy pay since crack dealing isn't a high skill job).

If you're a really good virus writer, I mean really really good you can make a lot of money.

If you're good at finding exploits you can make good money selling them to the highest bidder through third parties who check the exploit to make sure it works and who hold the cash in escrow(they take a cut just like ebay).

Crime does pay despite the contrary claims.

As much as I hate posting twice on the same thread, I couldn't resist adding this to a thread concerning the persecution of lone voices. This old gal tops the charts in biddy charisma.

Elaine Morgan says we evolved from aquatic apes

If nothing else, it opens the window for some clear thinking about the surprisingly thin line between peer review and culthood.

Makes me wonder if the prevailing savannah hypothesis was stitched together in much the same way as the original anomalocaris.

Agreed. As well as the fact that Bill's speech is on such a different scale that it is not even comparable.
Eh, and there was I trying to submit the story a few days ago in what I thought was much more interesting/objective light.

At least we agree that the average US worker has not benefitted much economically from the last thirty years (beyond quality improvement in some goods)?

You have a good point that the wages of places outside the US are rising. And these graphs by Ted Rosling agree with you:
"Hans Rosling's new insights on poverty"
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

But Hans Rosling also suggests that countries tend to plateau out economically:
"Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when"
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_asia_s_rise_how_and_when.html

I'd suggest ultimately the fate inside the USA is more likely what will happen outside in Asia and other places eventually (unless there are other social reforms whether socialist or a gift economy or a Swadeshi economy or better resource based planning, or making work into play, etc., which may well be more likely to happen sooner outside the USA, like they have been happening in Western Europe).

But note, it is mainly the USA that is blowing up people and infrastructure with robotic munitions to make the economic facts fit scarcity theory, not Western Europe.

As for inflation, there is a question of who gets most of the benefits of inflation (and people disagree on that).

To begin with, inflation from the government printing money and giving it as a basic income to everyone is different from inflation from real estate prices or interest on mortgages that may mainly go to those who are already wealthy. By the way, the government can in theory print money without inflation if it only prints enough to match the needs of a growing economy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit

Likewise, inflation in relation to medical care or college costs may mainly benefit the children of the wealthy who can afford the up-front investment to become doctors and tenured professors and see rising salaries. Inflation is essentially a sort of tax, and it may have more to do with a borrow and spend fiscal policy that social programs themselves. In any case (inflation's a complex subject, and I'm not saying there is not some truth to your point on it), some moderate inflation may be good for the sort of economy we have (economists take various sides on that).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

For example, it provides debt relief to people. As an example, if we had 200% inflation in the USA over the next year, that would solve the problem of underwater mortgages for many working people (while creating other problems, of course). But again, who gets the benefits and who pays the costs? And how fast do wages adjust to inflation?

The bigger issue is, why have US workers not gotten salary increases adjusted for inflation? Could it have anything to do with other social policies as well as a surplus of labor from automation? While I don't think you say this directly, many people might think US wages have been held down because so much is imported now. But US imports are roughly US$1.6 trillion, offset by roughly US$1.0 trillion in exports. The difference of US$0.6 trillion is roughly 4% of the approximately US$14 trillion GDP right now (and was lower in the past). Is that difference is enough to explain complete wage stagnation for thirty years? Automation is a more likely explanation, as well as, like you point out, other bubbles related to speculation (mostly by the wealthy, so that also connects to fundamental economic issues about equity and wages and political power).

And then you are back to issues of limited demand, increasing automation, and better design meaning less stuff needs to be produced and it can be prod

At least we agree that the average US worker has not benefitted much economically from the last thirty years (beyond quality improvement in some goods)?

You have a good point that the wages of places outside the US are rising. And these graphs by Ted Rosling agree with you:
"Hans Rosling's new insights on poverty"
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

But Hans Rosling also suggests that countries tend to plateau out economically:
"Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when"
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_asia_s_rise_how_and_when.html

I'd suggest ultimately the fate inside the USA is more likely what will happen outside in Asia and other places eventually (unless there are other social reforms whether socialist or a gift economy or a Swadeshi economy or better resource based planning, or making work into play, etc., which may well be more likely to happen sooner outside the USA, like they have been happening in Western Europe).

But note, it is mainly the USA that is blowing up people and infrastructure with robotic munitions to make the economic facts fit scarcity theory, not Western Europe.

As for inflation, there is a question of who gets most of the benefits of inflation (and people disagree on that).

To begin with, inflation from the government printing money and giving it as a basic income to everyone is different from inflation from real estate prices or interest on mortgages that may mainly go to those who are already wealthy. By the way, the government can in theory print money without inflation if it only prints enough to match the needs of a growing economy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit

Likewise, inflation in relation to medical care or college costs may mainly benefit the children of the wealthy who can afford the up-front investment to become doctors and tenured professors and see rising salaries. Inflation is essentially a sort of tax, and it may have more to do with a borrow and spend fiscal policy that social programs themselves. In any case (inflation's a complex subject, and I'm not saying there is not some truth to your point on it), some moderate inflation may be good for the sort of economy we have (economists take various sides on that).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

For example, it provides debt relief to people. As an example, if we had 200% inflation in the USA over the next year, that would solve the problem of underwater mortgages for many working people (while creating other problems, of course). But again, who gets the benefits and who pays the costs? And how fast do wages adjust to inflation?

The bigger issue is, why have US workers not gotten salary increases adjusted for inflation? Could it have anything to do with other social policies as well as a surplus of labor from automation? While I don't think you say this directly, many people might think US wages have been held down because so much is imported now. But US imports are roughly US$1.6 trillion, offset by roughly US$1.0 trillion in exports. The difference of US$0.6 trillion is roughly 4% of the approximately US$14 trillion GDP right now (and was lower in the past). Is that difference is enough to explain complete wage stagnation for thirty years? Automation is a more likely explanation, as well as, like you point out, other bubbles related to speculation (mostly by the wealthy, so that also connects to fundamental economic issues about equity and wages and political power).

And then you are back to issues of limited demand, increasing automation, and better design meaning less stuff needs to be produced and it can be prod

I challenge anyone to find a quote from Lomborg suggesting that he questions climate change or its anthropogenic origin.
He does, however, make a pretty convincing case that focusing on it diverts resources and attention away from some other very serious issues. But I guess it's easier to vilify him than to actually LISTEN to him.

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

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

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

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

Treating Disease With Vitamin D

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

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

Albert Einstein on: Religion and Science

A wombat talks about a global mindshift

TED | Peter Eigen on moving beyond corruption

The Optimism of Uncertainty

Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence

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

Possible cures for a jobless recovery

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

Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future

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

What do people think and feel about all this?

TED: Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia (20m).

Could be in the middle of the path to get to SixthSense technology to phones. But if it even works to get a bigger screen for the phone (i.e. to see a movie in a wall instead of in a tiny phone screen) could have some sense.

Perhaps they've been talking to Bill Gates about his plans to solve the world energy crisis and global warming at the same time:

I'm actually not kidding about this. I can easily see the founders of Google being interested in this and partnering with the Gates Foundation over this issue.

Watch this presentation Gates gave at the TED conference recently about this topic.

(Really. Go watch this video! It's actually quite interesting, and more people should see it!)

"If all of the electricity you used in your lifetime was nuclear, the amount of waste that would be added up would fit in a Coke can." That's from Steward Brand. I was curious about that fact after reading your post, so poked around on Google and found his TED speech here, with interactive transcript.

Here's the URL for the video on the TED site, in a larger format, and without "techflash" anywhere nearby:

http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html

Here's the URL for the video on the TED site, in a larger format, and without "techflash" anywhere nearby:

http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html