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The Problem With Abundance
GRW writes "Peter de Jager, "a speaker/writer/consultant on the issues relating to the Rational Assimilation of the Future", asks, 'What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?' He answers that 'they are all problems caused by abundance in a world more attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.' His article is a thought provoking discussion of the unintended consequences of technological change."
Personally, I'm happy to slaughter the sacred cow of "scarcity." Imagine fitting all your porn on a 1GB hard drive. Now scarcity is not so cool.
That if we use our nonrenewables wisely, we'll have an abundance of them to use, right?
If I get too fat, I die. If I drive way too fast, I have an accident and die.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Time to get out the flint and steel, bearskin rugs, and head for the hills!
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
I see his point now.
sic transit gloria mundi
What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?
By saying this he is trying to say that having an abudance of something is a bad thing, when this is not necessarily the case. Having an abudance of money might be a bad thing, but what about an abudance of happiness, or love?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
0'th post. It is interesting though, because I have always considered the elimination of scarcity one of societies goals. Where there is no scarcity there is no theft.
There are two types of people: those that can fill in the blanks,
traffic jams -> scarcity of alternative transportation
...is that there is so much of it.
Hot chicks with abundant cleavage that like guys really astute at programming and Linux System Administration.
In Star Trek, they have replicators that can create pretty much anything anyone could desire, and they no longer have money (except when they do). So... why do some people in the Star Trek universe have bad jobs? Why would anyone pick that? I can understand explorers, scientists, even farmers continuing in their work because they enjoy it, but why is someone going to pick to be a guard on the penal colony planet for the most dangerous criminals? It can't be the pay, because the pay doesn't matter when you can have anything.
By the look of Peter... Food isn't scarce at all in his house.
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
Of course, they don't compare to the problems of scarcity. As opposed to famine, plague, war, (real war, over necessities; not what we have now.) and back-breaking labor, a traffic jam is not such a big thing. Just put on some nice music, and enjoy the quiet.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
...is that I don't have enough of it.
Electric Monkey Pants
I agree with his points about abesity and traffic, though the traffic issues stem more from poor planing. His referenct to digital music is valid, but more economics than abundance. His analsis of SPAM seems to be a bit of a streach as well, as it is also just economics. When i think of abundance in a world designed around scarcity, i don't really think of economics. Interesting read, though.
Today we are surrounded by an excess of food and the body continues to follow a proven survival strategy -- it stores energy in fat for lean days which no longer arrive.
Given Peter de Jager's mugshot I think he has some authority on the matter.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
By this point, you've probably already bred, and thus your genes continue. Now, if you got fat and drove way too fast when you were 10 and died, it may work out.
Is this the guy who made a name for himself yelling about the sky falling at Y2K? As I recall, the sky didn't fall at all. I'm sure he'd like credit for that.
I guess he can't find another "crisis" so he's decided we have too much stuff.
Ecologists say essentially the same thing, but with different words. I attended to an Ecology class when I was in college, and I nicknamed it Apocalypse class, because every day our professor told us a different way to deplete natural resources which would lead humankind to extinction. And this usually had something to do with the fact that human population is always growing. I though it was interesting, but scary.
My neighbor's
For those calculus-savy, d*u^2/d^2*q That's been incorporated in the whole body of theory, to explain everything - from demand response to lower interest rates to risk management in capital asset portfolios.
'What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?'
Simple. Stupid fat f**ks read spam on their cell phones while driving and cause traffic jam.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
...it is called Science-FICTION for a reason.
I think the world suffers from an abundance of speaker/writer/consultants-- Oh the humanity!
In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production
Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto
Many people actually enjoy doing something productive with their life.
From what I gather from the article, our woes are due to our success. The author claims that we were designed for scarcity
What, he would have us living in the dirt like we did back in the 7th century? Hmmm
The problem here isn't an abundance of scarcity, it is a scarcity of ethics.
With added abundance comes added responsibility, both personally and socially.
And that goes both ways, both for those downloading music, as well as those who produce it.
--- have you healed your church website?
Newsflash: society must adapt to changes in its environment. This includes technological changes that render previous assumptions obsolete. At the bottom of the article, the columnist mentions how digital paper might kill the newspaper business, or how easily copied CDs affected the music business. He didn't mention how that motorized carrage invention killed the buggy whip business. If your line of work is being made obsolete by changes in the environment, then perhaps it is time to change your line of work. It is futile to try to change the world, although that doesn't stop people from trying, at best all you can do is slow down the rate of change. I know it will be painful for the people who don't adapt, but that is the way of the world.
I read the internet for the articles.
I cut your heart out and weigh it. It's a known fact that love comes from the heart, so the person with the bigger heart loves more.
This is like Fox News, the story doesn't tell you anything more than the headline did. Weak.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
Peter de Jager is, of course, the infamous "Y2K Guru", although he probably hopes we would just forget about that and move on...
there's no such thing as abundance. if you think you have an abundance of food, you're really facing either a shortage of people or a broken distribution model :-) no, i think this is really a breakdown of philosphy or rational thinking or something else. it's definitely not a problem of abundance.
With this short article, however, he's earned more respect from me. His thesis is relatively simple, but not one I'd ever thought of in quite so broad terms. We've talked about nanotechnology and abundance but this line of thinking really brings things home. Thought provoking...
..not a condition required for a problem free existance. For every problem solved, though, a new set will crop up. That's what drives progress. If we ever get to the point where there is no more adversity we will either create deom from nothing or self destruct as a species.
Problem:
...
What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?
Development:
What does it mean for "family time" when every room has a TV?
What does it mean for my company when everyone has instant messaging?
What does it mean for newspapers when everyone has access to digital paper?
What does it mean for the telecom industry when everyone has a wireless network?
Conclusion:
Any technology which creates abundance poses problems for any process which existed to benefit from scarcity.
Hmmm, duh
Thanks Peter for your great insight. I'll check if I can find more of your great articles here.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"When their cost to produce the CD dropped drastically to the point where consumers could create their own music CD for less than 50 cents, warning bells should have rung out loudly. Perhaps they did, but obviously nobody paid attention until the consequences began to nibble away at their profits."
It's been demonstrated, time and again, that there are many causes for the drop in record company profits. It's never, to my knowledge, been demonstrated through any honest research that the record companies have actually lost a significant amount of money to casual piracy. The only statistics I've seen that supposedly "prove" such a thing are from RIAA sock puppets.
I want to scream every time I see this kind of parrotry in the news media. Whatever happened to research, fact-checking, confirmation, and all those other supposed mainstays of the serious news organization?
i had the same enlightening realization on dope y'day.
It's interesting looking at the recording industry facing a shift in thinking like this... An industry previously surviving on information limited by the media that it was carried on, but now easily exploitable by cheap CD copiers. One wonders, as software (NB: open source would create the digital paradigm for this information) and other goods become digital and of which it is simple to access an unlimited supply, whether and/or how our economy, which is largely based on the sale of individual items, will adapt.
Don't look at me for an answer though, I just like to muse on these things. ;^)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
What about overpopulation?
Sounds cruel, but medical technology is largely to blame for overpopulation, boosting the birth rate, raising the average life expectancy...
Plauges, STDs are all, to some extent, 'reactions' by 'mother nature' to bring us under control. Want to see a clearer-cut example? Forest fire fighting. Forests have been around for quite some time without us meddling with their natural processes. We step in, start fighting the small fires which thinned the forests out- and boom, all of the sudden, nobody can figure out why we've MASSIVE fires.
The problem is not so much technology itself as the misappropriation of it by people egged on by thel "won't someone think of the children" types. Won't someone think of the tree owls who are homeless after that last fire? We'd better meddle!
Please help metamoderate.
The problem isn't in the abundance, it is in human choice. Though I admit that an abundance of food makes it more difficult to choose not to consume it, for example, there is still a human choice to do so. (insert Matrix Architect/Oracle joke here)
Humans must sacrifice convenience sometimes for personal, psychological, and spiritual gain. Turn that IM into a phonecall, that e-mail into visiting your co-worker -- bring the human factor back!
Abundance isn't the problem. Technology isn't the problem. Humanity and their choices are the problem...and it doesn't have to be.
Any form of change will have at least some unintended or unpredicted consequences.
:o)).
While a reduction in scarcity may be unintended, I find it hard to consider it automatically undesirable. Scarcity in terms of food is bad, by and large. Even though an abundance has its own issues, obesity is arguably less of a problem than starvation (though obviously, the middle ground is probably to be preferred).
(Now, if there were a scarcity of lawyers and politicians, that could be a good thing
It doesn't appear that the author is railing against technology, but there are people who will read it that way. "Technology is bad!", they will say, and point to any number of unintended problems that have arisen. What these people seem to miss is that the solution to those problems is further progress (and technology), not stopping in one place and burying our heads in the sand (or clamoring for a idyllic past that never existed).
Given that, for the most part, the problems caused by these unintended consequences are often less harmful than the problems that the technology addresses, I'm willing to accept the consequences, assuming that a goal is further advancement to address those problems, and so on.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
Each generation looks back on the previous ones with nostalgia. It's normal and natural. But it's also normal and natural when, in a nostalgic fit, we fail to remember the things that have demonstrably changed for the better.
Let's take obesity. Obesity is a real problem now. No one would deny it. But is it more of a problem than scurvy, caused by a lack of Vitamin C? Because that's one problem we don't really suffer from anymore in modernized countries. Nor do we see polio epidemics, or mass starvation, or unsanitary hospitals, or any one of a dozen other horrors that were relatively commonplace less than a century ago.
The problems we have now are different than the problems experienced by, say, the pioneers who travelled the Oregon Trail. But are they worse? I don't think so.
There is no perfect balance. Society is an ongoing experiment in achieving happiness without making us sedentary. Yes, modern society has problems that share a common root in our complacency, and we should work on these problems. But I, for one, have no desire to return to the "simplicity" of one hundred years ago.
If you eat right and exercise, you die too. No way around that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The future is coming, whether or not you "rationally assimilate it." What the fuck does this guy think he will achieve with such a purpose?
I'll grant you, I like having more choices, but the time constraints point out where growth is likely: trendsetting. People want to be able to make decisions without having to read pages of data, or doing testing for themselves. So expect Branding to increase in value, as well as review sites like amazon, epinions, and consumer reports.
Scarcity is getting scarcer?!?
I'd rather be sailing...
There is certainly a larger problem here -- the very mechanisms by which we were to be freed from the ravages of nature (esp. sewage, refrigeration, washing-machines, elevators ...) have enslaved us to convenience through a kind of hypnotization. We now must have convenience, for if we don't, we can't do anything. Think about what happens when the power goes out: our sleep-walk through existence is rudely disturbed, much like when a magician's victims find out that they have been barking like dogs. This is a much worse bondage.
Too damn fat to get out of your house, you'll have to order out for pizza and Chinese food.
should we really worry about the fate of outdated institutions that will succumb to technological abundance?? no! let them. that mind share, talent pool or whatever you call it forms the basis for the next wave of innovations. sure, its cruel. but that is true schumpertarian "creative destruction".
the only thing to watch for is companies like m$ that practise destructive destruction to maintain a monopoly. that is done mainly through marketing, not technology, mind you. everything else, let technology run freeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Technology might facilitate the illusion of abundance by allowing us to mitigate local shortages, but there's no actual abundance (see: Third World).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
he doesn't seem to grasp the concepts of 'self control' and moderation.
Just because there's a plate of food in me doesn't mean I have to eat it, nor does it mean that if the TV's there, I have to turn it on and watch it.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
(Marge comes home having discovered that she's pregnant with child #2.)
Marge: Great news, Homer. We're about to have twice as much love in this house.
Homer: We're going to start doing it in the mornings too?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
So far... so good.
The advent of cheap nanotechnolgy (and biotechnology), with nanotech causing a big explosion in material access and nano/biotech causing essencially very big life extention posibilities and also, brain power enhancment, we will see all sorts of these "excess quantity" effects. It will be very interesting to see what happens to the "normal benchmarks" of what scocieties think of beauty, monitairy success and really smart people, when everyone can obtain these goals reasonably easilly. What probablly will happen, is that a whole explosion of new ideas and looks will occure, which means that the limited abount of success benchmarks we have now a days will mushroom into vast ammounts of possibilities with none monopolizing the whole culture at once.
how come people still die?
how come there are stuill disabled people?
We're not so advanced after all.
He's wrong - at least about spam.
If Spam is truly caused by "abundance", then it wouldn't have existed without it, right?
If that's so, why did fax spam cause enough of an uproar that congress passed a law banning it?
Spam is caused by sociopaths that want something for nothing, and don't care who they harrass/steal from to get it.
For further proof that he knows as much about spam as he does about Y2K, here's this littl gem:
The ability to send sales pitches via e-mail at a negligible cost means it is economical and good business practice to send-millions of e-mails
I'm sorry, but alienating potential customers is never "good business practice."
I don't have any figures for you, because as you point out, the only people who are really in a position to create them are in the music industry, and they're just lying to us, but like any falsehood the kernel of truth is what makes it work.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's a good article to be written about this subject. Unfortunately, that one isn't it.
I haven't read the article (I may in the future) so take this for what it is worth...
Only a capitalist would want to maintain scarcity (so that their economic systems are preserved). Creating abundance is a good thing! One should not be unhappy with abundance (unless you are a business owner who profits from scarcity).
Man, you can say a lot of things about spam, obesity, etc but tying it into scarcity/abundance gives it away...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Where do you find overpopulation?
The most overpopulated parts of the world happen to have the lowest technology levels, I do believe.
GPL Deconstructed
Reducing the article from 777 words to 9 has certainly freed up a lot of time. Now let's go find some more blazingly obvious observations and post them to Slashdot, too.
I haven't bought a new CD in years.
I hit the local used CD store now and again, but for the post part I am ripping and burning.
Of course, I am just one person.... and it is amazing how my toilet generates millions of gallons of sewage.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
PHBs may contact him at www.technobility.com to have him spout his truisms at the next company event that requires a keynote speaker (he's a keynote speaker, according to his short bio in the article, so don't contact him for any other kind of speaking engagement)
You're incorrect in your assumptions, I think. Just because I'm copying more doesn't mean I'm buying less. That's the kind of thinking that the record companies are using, and it's never been proven true. I have friends who copy musice and/or DVDs. At the same time, those same people continue spending just as much per month on the real deal. Frequently, they'll even go buy a "real" copy of a movie they've ripped, when it becomes available to them, or when their budget allows.
You can assume all day long, but I still see no proof, and my anecdotal evidence is all to the contrary.
Exactly the kinds of things that would make a job bad, such as repetitiveness, physical difficulty and boredom, are exactly the kinds of job that will be replaced by technology and automation. Toilet cleaners would be replaced by self-cleaning toilets. Prison guards would be replaced by automated force fields.
The only jobs that would be left would be creative jobs, like artists and writers. These are the kinds of things people like to do anyway, so there would be no shortage of them.
My only concern is that technology may replace even these creative jobs, if computers may start making better art then people. Then the human race might suffer from terminal boredom.
I didn't say YOU were buying less, I said some people are buying less. Your anecdotal evidence may be to the contrary, but I haven't bought a CD in a long time, and I have new music to listen to. I use the cost as an excuse, but I pay $65/mo for broadband...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
THE SKY IS FALLING! Y2K IS GOING TO BE THE END OF THE WORLD!
No wait, OVER-POPULATION is going to be the end of the world!
Like I said... Fuck Peter de Jager.
Hammer of Truth
The price is going down because the food producers are paid a dollar a week and work much harder than you.
We'll run out of food when they have all our money and we're too fat to bomb the crap out of them to get it back. That should take awhile so you're more than welcome to over-consume and let your great-grandkids suffer the consequences.
In economic terms, this is a shortage. People want to "buy" more roadspace at the current price than is available. When there's a shortage, queuing costs dominate but the queuing costs benefit nobody. There's really only one solution -- make buying roadspace more expensive.
That means some sort of usage fee -- tolls. The problem with old-style tolls is that the transaction costs were too high (i.e. there's always a backup at the tollbooth). What we need is anonymous, electronic cash-based tolls.
Electronic tolls also make it easy to charge an arm and a leg during peak times and "bargain rates" at other times.
There is a problem. How do you deal with people who are out of electronic cash? Don't really know because it has to be anonymous.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
What is interesting about this is that it is a false dillema: we actually can do this and there is evidence that it can be done on a large scale. Some examples: environmental consciousness and its resulting behaviors such as recycling, use of alternative energy sources, etc. Although the progress is slow, there is progress.
I really think that solving these and many other problems requires an essentially spiritual or moral solution. People have to change in their hearts so they are less greedy, less ego-centric, less dishonest, less glutonous. The most important is honesty though: if we aren't truthful with ourselves and others, we simply won't even recognize the problems.
As Baha'u'llah says:
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Oh please, lets see: the average american diet consists of fried foods and red meat. Traffic is a symptom of a lack of a decent light rail system. I live in the middle of Chicago, take the train everyday to work and school and avoid the crap everyone else eats.
I used to eat like everyone else and realized I didn't want to carry a gut around and knew if I didn't change my diet soon I was going to be stuck with this gut the rest of my days. Working in technology usually means sitting in front of a computer all day.
Obviously, there's a lot of money to be made in selling greasy, unhealthy foods. Sugarwater is the prefered drink for most Americans and schools sign exclusive deals to provide high-calorie high-sugar/corn syrup drinks directly to children.
If America wanted to, it could change overnight. If people wanted health they could have it, but the current assumptions that 'fast food everyday isnt that bad' and a recent report that toddlers were being fed fries and cola didn't even shock the public. Sometimes people get the bodies they deserve. Its a shame that the media has no problem airing ads from McDonalds that make fast food look like a healthy and practically religious event while books on fast food, like fast food nation are largely ignored by the very same media.
Also, I think he's streching by calling spam abundance. If SMTP didn't become the standard but something else with built in authentication was then spam would be a non-issue yet the same mechanisms of "abundance" would be in place.
In the end, its how something is used not how much of something there is. Futurists need to realize that a simple hypothesis, or a simply answer that ties everything together is probably wrong. What's that famous HL Mencken quote, google?
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong"
That's just for Laura.
Not just true when comparing oneself and others. Its true within one's own set of loved people, as well.
I love my wife more than anything else. I love my daughter more than anything else. I love my son more than anything else.
Those are all true statements.
Technology doesn't remove checks and balances, people choose what they do. I eat a lot, I'm overweight. I commute to work, so I sit in traffic for 3 hours every day. Some company sells my email address, I get a lot of spam.
But I can choose to eat less, get a job closer to home, and kill an email account and create a new one. I can choose to change how my life is, technology doesn't necessarily remove the checks and balances in life, it merely changes it and puts more responisbility in my own hands
Besides, if I can't deal with the responsibility, there's always someone to blame it on and sue.
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
In first world countries with the medical technology you are blaming, the birthrate is currently less than what is nessicary to maintain population levels. Several countries in Europe are losing population before imigration because the natives are not having kids fast enough to replace those that die, despite people living longer.
In truth medical technology lowers the birth rate. When you don't have good medical care you are best off having a lot of kids, but not caring if they don't survive (because many will not, and caring leads to psycological problems if they don't survive). When you have good medical care you are better off having a few kids that you put lots of effort into ensuring the survival of, they live, and get the attention needed to do well. Medical technology also provides birth control that works.
This guy is a hypocrite! Look how much he wrote about "The Problem With Abundance."
You ever notice in Star Trek that no one has a shit job? It stands to reason, in the future, that nobody will have to do what they don't want to.
People join Starfleet because they want to see the galaxy, learn about new cultures and have vacations on Riza. Nobody there has some shit job being a fast food clerk, miner, farmer, et ctera because they don't have to.
The force behind the revolutions of the last few thousand years was need. It was always because of need that the world changed. We went from hunters and gathers to agriculture because of an increae in population. We went from villages to cities because of the need to share resources (specialities, wheat farmers trading with cattle farmers). And so on.
What about a revolution based on the LACK of need. What if technological advances removed the urgency to labor over crops, a mine, a steel mill or an oven? What would we do then? It might actually give us a change to do positive change rather than dwell on the acquistion of wealth and maintanence of the status quo. If we can advance past need, we might be able to grow as a species.
"Gee! When technology makes something ubiquitously available, the world changes! In some ways it becomes better and in other ways it becomes worse. That's something to think about in the future!"
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
This applies not only to the obvious things like food, clean water, and energy, but also intellectual resources as well. Something many slashdot readers may be familiar with -- think Intellectual Property. Be wary of those who seek to control the building blocks of human knowledge. The knowledge of how to do things is becoming more and more important as us humans are developing.
That is why I like the GPL and use only GPL'd software. It helps provide an abundant pool of knowledge (existing code) to work with. This at least allows code and what we can do with it to be in abundant supply. It's not exactly going to end world hunger, but the same type of thinking might just accomplish it.
P.S.
I don't think hamburgers and fries were ever scarce for the articles author, either. Heh.
FWIW, the book "In the Absense of the Sacred" by Jerry Mander goes into a great deal of depth on this issue. He approaches it primarily from how technologies over the last few centuries have affected indigenous populations. His basic thesis is that technology is not neutral and so we must do a better job (more proactive rather than leaving it to our economic system) of selecting which technologies we keep and propagate widely.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
...is there's too much of it -Yogi Berra
But the answer to the problem of abundance is simple. Wait. The rate at which our abundance is destroying the resources that create the abundance will soon lead to scarcity.
Food is a good example. The rate at which farmable land is being destroyed is astronomical. This short sighted consumerist mindset will eventually destroy itself. And like any natural system that grows to large for its resources will be restored to a level of equilibrium. Sad to note that "restored to a level of equilibrium" mean a whole lot of death and horror. But that is what happens when people as individuals and corporate entities don't make moral decisions.
Abundance simply ignores the fact that resources are limited. Resources are finite, whether they be one's health, or the raw materials used for one's sustenance. You engage too much of one, you pay with the other. It all evens out in the end.
When we solve the problem of the scarcity of steady paychecks, then we can talk about solving the problem of abundance.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
The diamond cartel has successfully enforced scarcity for over a hundred years in order to maintain the viability of an industry threatened by abundance. With a little bit of foresight, they managed to keep their genie in the bottle, to use de Jager's analogy.
Now the entertainment industry is trying to do the same thing with DRM; they want to clamp down on the scarcity that is threatened by new technology. Although the odds seem to be against them, it's worth remembering that it is possible to hold back the tide.
It seems to me that for a long time we've valued art on a sort of artificial scarcity. Previous to the last couple of decades, you had to have a very expensive education and connections to the larger art community (be it music, movies or books...) if you were going to create art that could be appreciated on more than a local level. Now that we've removed these limitations I suspect that we will see a exponential rise of great "artists". Who knows how many future Bachs are sitting around farming tobacco in some 3rd world country.
I think we are really on the cusp of a huge (read never seen anything like it before) wave of art. Does that mean we devalue art since it will become a commodity? I hope not, but it remains to be seen.
Quick! Everyone! Stop driving, stop producing, stop consuming, stop enjoying life!
Everyone move to live on a communal farm as soon as humanly possible( please don't use your vehicle to do so, of course - horse & buggy or backpack would work ).
Stop using Slashdot because technology is evil. Yeah I'll be out of a job, but at least I will have achieved my goal of eliminating progress. Tribalism, mysticism, poverty, and squatting in grass huts rules!
Thank you for your time,
- Michael "I've got a hard-on for Bill Joy and the Unabomber" Sims
This is why it is imperative to live your lives with the intent to share. Coexistent with that attitude is the idea of gratitude which ensures that those who have more than enough be thankful enough to find ways to help those who do not have enough. All this boils down to people not knowing the purpose of our existance, which is to seek God in our lifetime and do His Will. Without that wish and the further understanding that our success in fully reaching and serving God depends upon our choices, we do not have the proper perspective within our decision-making methodology to make selfless decisions. If you understand that we are tested by our Creator with gifts such as wealth, poverty, sickness and strength, then your perspective has the proper breadth.
If you think that when you die, it's all over, then you make you decisions for self, unless the selfless decision makes you feel good about yourself. That has nothing to do with making your decisions in light of our end-of-life (once the universe stops expanding) judgement and the countless (billions or trillions at least) years spent within an unaging energy body in one of the two possible destinations: heaven or hell.
What choices are you making and, more importantly, why do you approach your decision-making process as you do? Choose carefully, hell is a bad, bad place and The Deceiver of Man is ever-ready to whisper in you ear the things that will send you to accompany him in hell. He has the ability to speak in your own inner voice, making you think it is your own. That is why Muslims are blowing themselves and innocent civilians up and why priests are molesting children, amongst the other more minor tragedies of daily life, including the ridiculous obesity found in America.
Go to www.mihr.com to learn the truth and how to escape Satan and his hell. Laugh all you want, but there is no logic for *your* life choices. And certainly no big picture. And *absolutely* no real happiness (though, perhaps, pleasure).
Peace & Blessings
bmac
That seems to be what his statement indicates, even though he doesn't mention it in his article. Marx based his ideas on the fact that a capitalist society would eventually create such an abundance that most people would be able to live at a high standard of living doing any job.
Although this seems counter-intuitive as their are many studies available now indicating that more homes then ever are dual-income, and yet despite that they seem only just able to make ends-meet. Compare this to the 1950s where it was the norm for the man to work and the woman to tend the home.
If people are working more in order to maintain the same lifestyle, how is it possible that there is an abundance available that most people don't have access to. It's becoming a proven economical law that wealth, (along with many other societally influenced things..) follow a power curve, meaning that there is a huge disparity between the average and the median due to the small number of people with huge wealth throwing the average higher then it should be.
Examples of this rule are the 80/20 or 90/10 rules in economics and social behavior. For a good article on this check Shirky's Weblog. It's an interesting read.
Anyway, back to Marx, with this much disparity in wealth, and a real infrastructure that could easily provide the masses with a high standard of living (if we all lived at the average instead of the median), would a communist revolution be possible?
I still maintain that it isn't possible, because communism goes counter to human nature. As mentioned in the article above, we save for periods of scarcity. Even if those periods never come. Bill Gates certainly doesn't need 43 billion dollars, but he doesn't give his money away because, well, what if he does?
Even so, with the increasing abundance as technological advances are made, for instance with the advent of higher automation in much of society, will the proletariat rise up to beat down the wealthy?
Probably not, but I wonder how long the masses will continue to behave like sheep...
heh..ok..Probably Forever:)
--Shadar
In many species, there are free-ranging males (FRMs). Males who just couldn't crack the queue, so to speak. This guy, I think, is just a FRM. What a waste of good electrons printing this story. Really, Cragen.
In the Absence of the Sacred
Tyler's words coming out of my mouth.
I hope you die from porn.
Peter De Jager's Doomsday 2000 article published in 1993 in Computerworld is often credited with starting the whole Y2K phenomena. It was alarmist, but it was also a reasonable warning to industry at the time. In 1993, a lot of Y2K remediation was needed. But by late 1998, Peter De Jager was saying that Y2K would create minimal problems and became an opponent of Y2k hysteria fanatics like Ed Yourdon. He never beleived that Y2K would result in the whacked out scenarios taught by nut cases like Gary North.
Far be it from this poster to comment on a future meisters weight challenges. Judging by his foto tho, it seems like he is having a problem with cheeseburger n friez abundance. He coulld at least use that photoshop'd skinnistyle photo of himself he uses for dating sites if he's going to write an article like this!
A technology which has, as its primary advantage, an ability to create abundance, carries within it the potential to create problems invulnerable to simplistic solutions. Like genies let loose from the bottle, they are almost impossible to control.
Maybe on a sociological scale they're impossible to control, but on an individual basis it's easy to control. My wife and I deliberately limit ourselves so that we're not running after things that don't matter.
I think the _real_ problem isn't that there's too much, but rather people want more. The fact that 3% of the world's population (North American) controls 60% of the world's wealth is a problem with our society's refusal to want less. Although I don't think much will change in the future, the individual can choose to give his/her excess to others who don't have.
And no, I'm not going to give you my excess spam...
Ruby on Rails Screencast
"Problems with abundance" "Any technology which creates abundance poses problems for any process which existed to benefit from scarcity."
Is this a bad thing?? Do we want to promote scarcity?
Better agricultural technology equals more food. So this happens to cause obesity in some people. Is that worse then having everyone starve?
Having the rich be able to control scarcity and block tecnology to keep abundance under control is not somthing I wish to promote.
Technologies ability to bring equality be reducing cost to the point where everyone can buy it is a good thing. The inablity to handle it is it own natural balance.
The alternative is the artificial war state of Oceania.
The problem with abundance is there just isn't enough of it. 1000x more abundance and we still wouldn't have enough. What we really need is an infinite amount of abundance, then the problem with abundance goes away. Abundance isn't abundance when it becomes the norm.
Don't worry, your vote will be electronically counted as being for him anyway.
This has seriously reduced the enjoyment of music. A person's A+ list becomes pretty small. Probably about the same size as one's vinyl collection as a kid. (YAMV - Your age may vary)
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Attention Mr. Jager, paging Mr. Peter de Jager:
Your fifteen minutes of fame have expired. Please report to the dustbin of history at your earliest convenience.
Does this boil down to a theme from the spiderman movie?
h tm l
"With great power comes great responsibility"
That's the catch phrase of old Uncle Ben
If you missed it, don't worry, they'll say the line
Again and again and again"
http://www.com-www.com/weirdal/odetoasuperhero.
What does it mean for family time when there is a TV in every room?
What does it mean for family time when there is TV at all?
Sure, people *can* change. That's not the point. The point is that evolution has created people who do *not* want to change and who have difficulty resisting temptation even when they intellectually know it's in their best interests.
If it was as easy as you say there would be no obesity (who chooses to be fat?) nor smokers.
Clear, Dark Skies
I think you underestimate technology. Further, I think you misperceive the driving principle behind what is actually adopted.
If you crash at high enough speeds, you die. But what changes routinely is what speed that is. When my father was growing up, cars didn't HAVE seatbelts. They're still fighting to get people to wear them.
For instance, racing cars are routinely surviveable at very high speeds. But they cost more when they crash (because they do a lot of normalizing by breaking themselves) and they depend upon you strapping yourself into a working saftey harness.
When people don't use seatbelts, why would you expect them to use a harness? The problem you have is that if you sold a car with a standard harness, no one would buy that car because it would be more annoying to get into and out of. How much more will you pay for your car to be safer?
I _do_ suspect that the ability to accelerate and generally control a car at a given speed will generally continue to outpace the ability to reliably survive a crash at that speed. At least for cars not designed to pay attention to speed limits.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
...a lecture on obesity and overabundance coming from a big fat fuck of a man.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
"The worst fear that I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty and all manner of persecution, and be true. But my greater fear for them is that they cannot stand wealth; and yet they have to be tried with riches, for they will become the richest people on this earth." -- Brigham Young 1848
I don't know that the point is abundance is bad, but that abundance will likely have unintended consequences.
Sure, the first things a new technology does is have its intended consequences. After that however, if the "cost" to do something is dramatically reduced unintended consequences occur.
I don't know if the guy is a luddite or not, but his point valid. If you introduce a technology that dramatically reduces the cost to do something, it's probably guaranteed that additional consequences will occur besides the original reason why you invented the technology in the first place.
It may be wise to try to think through what those consequences might be. Once you've done that, you've got several options:
1) Don't release the technology (Boring)
2) Control the release, so society has time to adjust.
3) Introduce something that acts a counter balance, so the undesired consequences don't occur or are minimized.
4) Screw it, and just roll out the new thing already!
#1 - There so many reasons this is wrong, I won't go into it.
#2 - This almost never happens, maybe it should? I don't know
#3 - If strategy #3 was rolled out with a technology in the first place, things would probably go smoother.
#4 - This is what happens today, until eventually we go ooops (or somebody like the RIAA applies a lot of self-interested political pressure), and then we try to do #3 after the fact. This sometimes gets ugly.
But when all is said and done. #4 just pushes societal evolution. A disturbance enters or society; we struggle with it for 10-100 years; finally equilibrium is established around that new technology; rinse repeat.
#4 has actually worked great up until the industrial revolution. Since then the pace of innovation has been so great, that we don't have time to finish adjusting to the last change before we have to start adjusting to a new one.
That in itself is applying pressure on society to change. It is applying a pressure for society to become quickly adaptable.
So here's a piece for you to nibble on. What's more quickly adaptable? A democratic society or a totalitarian? I certainly prefer my good ol' democracy, but P.R.China has a government structure more like a corporation than Western countries. It can force painful societal adaptiations to occur quickly. Totalitarian governments can fail by being to rigid, too. But if they find the right mix of control, combined with encouraging a free market, they make a formidable force.
Might it be that democracy will fail, because it can't adapt to technological change fast enough? Time will tell.
The scarcest things in this commercialized world seem to be common sense and organization.
Advertising has some value but it should be corralled like they are in malls, shopping districts or commercial streets, not left to wander the darker boulevards, and our email boxes, like a pimp renting his trollops and/or their services by the hour or a pusher shouting "I GOT DA GOLD. I GOT DA GOLD," with boxes of "Special K" on their heads while wearing XTC T-shirts.
We arrest THOSE people.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
This sounds like an interesting twist on the Tragedy of the Commons problem: those who benefit from a free (or cheap) resource will try to accrue all its benefits to themselves, either denying that resource to others, or destroying the resource, or both.
Give serendipity a chance.
What is interesting about this is that it is a false dillema: we actually can do this and there is evidence that it can be done on a large scale.
Nonsense. Show me the years in which per-capita energy consumption has fallen in the developed world. Show me that the average new home is getting smaller, not larger. Show me that the per-capita amount of garbage has gone down. Show me that per-capita water usage has gone down.
All we've done so far is lower the rate of accleration.
Clear, Dark Skies
"The human body is designed to run on scaracity...."
tell that to groups like Christians Childrens Fund.
He makes such statements as, "We can't solve traffic congestion by reducing the speed of traffic to 10 KM/Hr" which is entirely false, as anyone who's studied the wave behaviour of traffic can attest to.
Then he makes the assertions, "Nor can we solve obesity by reducing the shelves in the supermarket, or Spam by making it difficult and costly to send e-mail."
Really, if you reduced the number of high-fat foods in super markets and made it so that email did cost more to send, would that not both reduce the fat in most people's diets, as well as make it harder for bulk mailers to send email cheaply? Wouldn't that solve those problems?
This article spends its entire time chasing its own tail around before making unsupported assertions!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
An abundace of traffic is an scarcity of roads. And abundance of fat is an scarcity of self control. And abudance of spam is a scarcity of cattle prods.
It's all a matter of perspective.
Since the article makes only trivial observations and provides no insights, I guess it's up to us readers. So here's my long rambling attempt:
The article's advice that people should think about the consequences of new technology is sort of worthless, for the same reason mentioned that you can't replace abundance with scarcity because people wouldn't stand for it. If it were normal for people to think ahead about consequences, they wouldn't mind a healthy dose of scarcity that promised them better health, lower stress and greater security.
In the real world, people who stand to profit from something rarely let the impact on others get in their way. At most, they consider their legal liability. When the damage starts to become obvious, all responsibility is placed on the customers who "demanded" the product. Demand, whether real or advertising-generated, is blamed for all the long-term consequences. The fast food industry doesn't accept the blame for creating a nation of lard-asses with heart disease. They just fulfilled the demand and raked up the profits. Those lazy customers did the damage to themselves. And of course, people should eat sensibly.
On the other hand, if you leave a big pile of concrete rubble in your front yard, and some curious kids climb on it and get hurt, you're going to be held liable for their injuries. An unfenced hazard like that is what's called an "attractive nuisance." You don't have to spend billions on advertising to get those kids to wander over and check it out. Merely making it easy to get to is enough to make you responsible for it.
So why aren't people who operate on a much larger scale equally responsible for "attractive nuisances" -- especially when they're handing out billions of toys in Happy Meals? I'm not talking about frivolous lawsuits for spilled hot coffee, I'm talking about people who learn to love products as kids, use them as directed for years and then drop dead at age 50 from the health effects. Apparently the loophole is the fact that almost anything is okay in moderation, and companies don't actually suggest in their advertising that anybody should consume TOO MUCH of their products. But then, the person with the pile of rubble likewise isn't asking anybody to climb on it. The pile is perfectly safe if you merely look at it and imagine the fun you could have climbing on it. So where's the consistency in the law?
I think we're between a rock and a hard place. Liability for future consequences could cripple innovation, or limit it to large companies with litigation war chests. Which is the same thing. Making people responsible for whatever happens to them requires that they have an unrealistic level of expertise and caution. We want a safe world. We want a changing, progressive world. What a can of worms.
Yeah, like these guys.
For as DeBeers well knows, the converse is, "Any marketing process that creates scarcity steals benefits from any persons who are ignorant of abundance."
Mod parent up.
Y2K wasn't a disaster because a lot of preparation and work made sure it wasn't.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No, I just take exception to the implication that there is some natural law that requires a certain amount of people to die, and that our use of technology to cure diseases and extend lifespan is violating that law. To me, laws of nature are things that are inviolate - you cannot get around the laws of thermodynamics, for example. (And if you can, then the laws were incorrect and not laws in the first place)
Yes, I agree that technology has allowed characteristics to prosper that in the past would have been selected against due to evolutionary pressure. But to say that "Technology, along with social 'altruism' has resulted in a situation where behavior which should result in its actor dying off and failing to reproduce " is to make a leap that I think is not properly justified. To claim that a certain behavior should result in the actor dying off is to add a value judgement to something that seems inherently valueless. Evolutionary pressure that results in certain attributes being selected against does not in any way imply that those attributes deserve to be selected against, that those attributes are somehow less worthy.
Just because nature did something a certain way, does not mean that that is the right way.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
From here you ought to be able to make some more interesting extrapolations about who loves whom more.
Arrr!
At one time, some well known thinker or another postulated that a city could only grow to a certain size because after a while it would be impossible to remove all of the horse dung.
Well, there you go.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Technology dosn't achieve "abundance", whatever the author means by that loaded word.
The ability to acquire, most often, to purchase, creates abundance. For example, Henry Ford's cars created a social evolution in the U.S because he was able to sell them at a price that many people could afford. Technology, combined with alterations in the social structure of production, can reduce the costs of getting a product to market, but the market still must have the means and the will to acquire it.
Thw owners of technology will only be motivated to reproduce it in "abundance" when the market is prepared to reward them acceptably. (RMS legions, please note that sentence deliberately avoids the use of the words "sell" and "pay_. Free software is reproduced because developers find their reward in the software market what when their code is made free.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Yes, it is...
If you get too fat you die, or maybe you go to your local gym. You retain the services of a trainer who applies the 'technology' of modern physiology and kinsieology to obviate your problem. So, the problem created by improvements in the technology of agronomy are 'solved' by other technological advances...
The automobile is a self-contained example. The automobile itself increased the ability to travel, and the attendant risk of injury or death. However, airbags, seat-belts, steel door beams, unibody construction, have mitigated the attendant risk.
Simplisitcally this would tend to indicate that the problems created by technology can be repaired by technology.
In reality, the largest problems created by advances have no quick technological fix. This is because by and large the most pervasive effects of such change are on the fabric of society.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
There are at least two options, and quite possibly three; you've neglected to mention them, however.
*IF* we can't support 7.5b at 1st world levels, you can do one of three things:
Reduce the Standard of Living
Reduce the population
Use technology to transform the standard of living
As an example, take cars. 20mpg average is not sustainable, but if we transformed our cars to hybrid electric vehicles, we'd go from 20mpg to 50mpg average, and at the same time our consumption of oil will drop, thereby freeing more oil for everyone else to consume.
Or as another example, nuclear power plants. With the reduced pollution, and proper radioactive processing of the waste, we can continue our consumption of electricity while simultaneously reducing pollution, freeing others to pollute at a 'reasonable' level.
The 'population' problem does get solved with education and technology, I believe. Everyone in a developed nation (US, Europe, Japan, even China) have lower than replacement birth rates, meaning that we are all losing population. Even if we, as first world or developed countries, do nothing, our population is falling.
It is the third world nations, with family size >> 5, that have population/consumption/quality of life problems.
Another way to state my point:
There is a correlation with high standard of living with low population size. No causation, just correlation. If we want a lower population size worldwide, there will probably be a higher standard of living as well (smaller families are, after all, cheaper and less stressful), so anything we can do that can raise quality of life will likely also reduce population size, density, and thus overpopulation.
GPL Deconstructed
The guys who used to live in former communist countries - remember the supermarkets with just 5 items for sale 2 of them being plastic bags?
Enough said.
Flipping burgers at McD's?
100 years ago that would be considered pretty damn cool.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Plus people don't want to experience the Memphis summer and the DC winter on a bicycle.
Biking isn't a real, full-time option. Biking's nice, and it certainly should be possible, but the real answer is public transportation. Without it, you have to own and drive a car anyway.
Not wanting to bike to work when its 105 or -10 and sleeting isn't lazy, its self preservation.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
and then crushed---that was very unnecesary
Every time I read slashdot and see an article for another device that can print circuits, or fabricate parts, it makes me realize that scarcity is a downfall to society. I think, by the dawn of the 22nd century, material goods will no longer mean anything. I think everyone will have almost Star Trek like replicators, that allow us to make any material good we desire. At that point, only information will have any value. And within another century, probably less, that will have no value. In my opinion, at least, it seems like the struggle by corporations, large and small, to stifle abundance is futile. Imagine the look on the faces of DeBeers executives when they realize that the average person can create a diamond from a printer in their home office...
The Abundance of crap articles on
-- everyones not everybody and neither is everybody like everyone.
For all practical purposes physical resources are infinite. Sun has an essentially infinite amount of energy, and the amount of minerals in the crust of Earth is almost infinite as well. Even the productivity of agriculture has been increasing exponentially over the history of civilization.
If you can't afford it, you wait until it becomes bad enough to have to go to the emergency room.
What did you think? That he was the mythical honest politician?
Next time vote for the other guy. (if you're old enough to vote, that is.)
Last time we were forced to vote (voting is mandatory in Belgium) I found the way to make it less painfull. Normaly it means getting up damn early on a sunday morning, and spending a way too long time waiting in a line. But last time I spend whole saturday night at a disco, coming home around 8 in the morning, picking up that stupid voting card and leaving again to vote. As a result I had to wait only a few minutes and didn't care too much about it because of the beers I had throughout the night.
But after seeing who won the elections, I'm convinced I'm not only one who did this.
Maybe it wasn't a disaster because it never really happened!
What if it's really 1999 we're just going through the motions year after year, like that movie, "Groundhog Day"?
If you ask me, M$ Office 2003 looks a *lot* like Office XP, which looks a lot like Office 2000. Hmmmm...
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, almost everything has been becoming less and less expensive. That is the whole point of mass production. You make thingies, you sell plenty of them, you make more, thingies become cheaper, eventually everybody has a thingy. The trick is to get out of the thingy market and into wossnames before this point. Once the patent on a thingy runs out, some chancer is certain to try starting making their own thingy clones while you concentrate on producing wossnames.
What you mustn't do is bitch over it when you can't sell as many thingies as you used to. By creating a supply, you are eroding the demand you set out to meet - you have sown the seed of your own undoing. Failing to adapt to the consequences of your own actions is always fatal.
There are some goods, of course, for which there will always be a steady demand - food, toilet paper, electricity, recreational drugs, for example. The day to day essentials - things that by nature can only be used once.
These things are now becoming obvious, but that will not prevent an attempted but futile backlash, with a few players trying to cling onto the old ways for dear life. One attempt against the inevitable is to try to make durable goods less durable. That is why we are seeing cheap and plasticky printers, for example. People won't be fooled by crap forever - as soon as someone steps in with a well-built printer, customers will snap them up. That's not to say it won't take another technological leap first; in fact, then would be the most sensible time to introduce a quality-built, long-lasting product. "Intellectual Property" and litigation as a source of income will end up passing as a fad. The lie behind closed-source software will be exposed. Nobody will stand for laws that attempt to prohibit the growing of plants.
If that sounds like doom and gloom, remember it's only that for some. The key to survival is, and always has been, adaptability. Today we are better fed, better educated and better cared for than we have ever been - but we have a new set of challenges to face. Success will be richly rewarded - but failure will be punished with the brutality only Nature can mete out.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Next in line for this treatment is VoIP. In four years or so, your average telecommunications company will either be adapting or be gone.
there is no spoon
...what really happened in Spain in the late 1400's once all their "new world" gold started flooding their market and gold essentially lost any of its inherent awe and value because it was no longer relatively scarce?
What about computer networking? How many Slashdot readers are old enough to remember wanting to get a student job at the University because they had mainframe accounts, and some of the larger universities might have had a system set aside (really, a Vax 11/780) with Unix on it, and this funny thing called "arpanet", just to get computer accounts?
Interesting topic. Incredible topic, actually.
Those who work on computers for a living are facing this more and more as the enabling technology (i.e., computer clustering) has become commodity.
However, it's just as important not to underestimate how abundances can create opportunity via a "domino effect" and not just look at "more X means Y", which is the approach the article takes.
In this case, it's because we can generate or gather many-fold times more data than previously, new career opportunities can arise in data mining, database development, security industry, watchdog groups, politicians, etc. Now, whether any of these things is useful, well, those are entirely their own topics.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Actually its not just a tendancy, it WILL happen eventally...
"On a long enough timeline, everyones survival rate drops to zero"
As far as reproduction goes, outside forces that kill off the parents IS self limiting. Two parents nees the resources for two people. They have six children (as a sidenote, in the past parents hade to create eight or ten children just to get six of them to live long enough to be useful, and thats assuming childbirth didnt knock off the female) and now their family uses the resources for eight people. When the parents die off, the families need for resources for goes down to six people, making room for the next generation.
The longer the parents live, the more resources they eat up that could be for their children and grandchildren.
Before you post, I am WELL AWARE of the intangible benefits of grandparents helping raise their grndchildren, being a product of it myself.
[The thing is: How many grandparents are doing this and not spending their later years playing golf in arizona and driving to the drugstore in their golf carts?]
Other intangibles: What is the stress in resources on an extended family (and a community) when grandpa spends a year or seven in the hospital recovering from a stroke on life support that in earlier times would have given him a quick out with less pain and suffering.
What about the stress on soceity taking care of people with debilitating illnesses that can barely take care of themselves, requiring constant care (RESOURCES), after some hero doctor has brought them back from their second or third (etc.) flatline?
Do YOU wanna spend the last 15 or 20 years of your life causing your family unintentional grief while youre barely strong enough to change the channel on the clicker and eating all your meals theorugh a straw? Mainly because as a soceity we've totally given up on the concept of being able to let go?
Its Death, people. its gonna get all of us. The WORST thign we can do is not dealt with it head on.
+--+--+--+
[News Note On all of this]
What about that woman in Florida that FLAT OUT SAID she didnt want her life to degrade to the level of being a really expensive-to-take-care-of-houseplant? Take her off the machines and she'd die naturally. She wouldnt even FEEL IT at a conscious level.
She's no longer has any consciousness.
She EXERCISED HER RIGHT as a Fully Coherent Adult to say "Do Not Do This To Me" and how much hand wringing and pain and resources are being WASTED on this bullshit?
The main reason for which being a politician saw an opening to garner points with the right-wingers by taking the emptional pain of her parents and turining it into a circus?
Ref: CNN for various articles on the stupidity
Parents who simply cannot face the facts that shes gone and thats that.
Its sad, but its the facts.
[/News Note O
s'wut i sed.
When we were studentsw we would have killed for a 9600 baud internet connection.
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2003 and provide the ability to edit posts?
Hopefully and probably never. It's too open to abuse, and lord knows that some chump here would get his kicks abusing it.
How to abuse it is simple: I make a post saying something agreeable, say "Windoze sux, Linux rox". Symbolic replies with "I Agree!". I edit my post to read "Symbolic sucks donkeys".
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Just because nature did something a certain way, does not mean that that is the right way.
Right and wrong are human ideas. Nature just does what it does (typically, by the aforementioned laws of physics.)
Last I checked, nature didn't give a damn that the fires in southern california not only burned trees buut peoples houses is seen as "wrong" by most people, and "right" by a some of them.
Nature didn't care that these fires were started by some goofballs going something "wrong", either.
Nature just sees that the fire has a crapload of fuel, and is burning it.
If I had to give nature some human qualities, Is say Ol' Mom Nature is pissing herself laughing watching us stop a fire that is going insanely crazy because we wouldn't let smaller natural ones thin out that property-value-raising forest
Check this, in further offtopic discussion
Nature doesn't care that were causing all these problems for ourselves.
That's all us: babbling emotionally at each other and hoping we can figure out a way to make a buck off of it.
s'wut i sed.
Not to defend SUVs, but ...
-- Driving while seated higher up than in a regular car is helpful; you can see more, especially in the city.
-- They are spacious.
-- Arms race: I'm not sure what the actual stats are, but it certainly seems (viscerally) safer to crash into an SUV while in an SUV as opposed to a Mini. So if everyone else is in an SUV...
-- SUVs are well-advertised, and so people feel adventurous or however the commercials tell us to feel. You can't really blame people (if you did, then advertising wouldn't work!).
I don't own an SUV, nor do I advocate owning one, but I think that I understand why people do, and I don't think that they're losers.
Get over the fact that not everyone has your priorities.
This guy makes a lot of observations but provides very little, if any, proof of concept. Does he really want us to believe that the progression and advancement of mans mind is to be stagnate in order to keep the "natural checks and balances of scarcity"? He asks us to consider "What are the long term consequences if this advance reduces costs to zero, or increases access so that everyone with a desire to do so, can use the technology?" I believe this is a trick question, because the cost will never be zero, not while man continues to cling to moral values. That said the answer lies in his question: Advancement. We work out the kinks with time as we have throughout history.
It seems that his "theory" is more based on ether or the abundance of food he apparently has no problem with consuming, than reality. It also seems contradictory or incredibly incomplete. He quotes the life of the human family as "50,000-plus years", which eludes to theories of evolution and the big bang. If he believes in evolution, then isn't that what his observation would serve to prove, evolution in progress.In actuality, the medical technology is available to both the first and third worlds. In the first world, the overpopulative effect has been counteracted by education.
Despite the fact that the third world does not have anywhere near the heath qualities of the first, medical technology has succeeded in raising the birth rate to what it is now.
Just think about it. We have an overabundance of /. first post trolls!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Why do people by SUVs? People are greedy and like to buy the next sexiest in-the-fad type of thing. They don't buy it because they need it, they buy it to show off, or they think they want extra power, etc. The first thing I read in a marketing text book is that not everyone is like Ghandi - meaning there is a very strong potential to make 'I would like to have' to 'I really *need*'.
It's the same thing about video games - these days people just play games because 'it's cool and their friends do play it'. But very few can appreciate the magic that goes into making video games. Man when I saw Half-life2's AI in the video mpegs released, it inspired me more than the guy who said, "wow wiked graphics d00d".
The entire methodology of wealth distribution we have created is predicated on infinite needs and limited production capacity. Once production capacity exceeds needs the whole system goes on the fritz. The referenced article was vapid bullshit. There is some real meat to this topic. Unfortunately this margin is too narrow to contain my proof...
mt
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
'What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?'
Traffic Jams are caused by a scarcity of roads in the direction that the majority of citizens wish to travel. We can allieve this problem by (1) building more roads, (2) change the tax structure so that it is more desireable for people to live closer to where they work, (3) build more accessable mass transportation systems. The problem is you're fighting NIMBY local commissions who don't want alternal routes through their towns, cities who love their wage taxes driving people to the suburbs, and crappy subsidised mass transits.
At its core, Obesity is an byproduct of genetics combined with a recent societal changes regarding liesure time. Our bodies are built to survive famine, plain and simple. If we provide more food than we are currently burning, then the body stores it as fat, not "knowing" that we in Western civilizations are not lacking food supplies. Some people are more prone to storage, plus our nutritional intake has vastly changed with respect to a century ago (see processed foods). Some people believe there are hormonal reactions to plastics and polyesters that are changing our biological balance. What we need is more research to understand HOW and WHY our bodies are converting all these foods to fats, and develop more chemicals to naturally halt these processes. Excercize works, but as a society, we want the end product without the work. Given time (which our society has plenty of), I believe we will come to understand how these hormones function, and solve this with research.
Spam is a processed meat source... as well as a natural progression in Advertising. It is an extension of junk letters in electronic form, and when you factor in the speed difference in the electronic realm, then you understand the increase speed of advertisement delivery... We don't like it, but you could have predicted it the day that Lycos put their first banner ad at the top of their search pages. What we need to help is MORE email content processing, smarter email clients, servers to authenticate, blacklists & whitelists... and it'll sort itself out. It took a decade to get here, and it'll take time to get out.
The problem is not that we have too much, but that we don't have enough in the right areas.
When something is abundant, it's free. Witness the Internet. Once software/movies/music gets out, it's available gratis. Anything that can be digitized (i.e. any information) can be made available for zero price. That scares the hell out of the Entrenched Capitalist, as well it should.
As far as information goes, creativity isn't a team sport. Ever hear of a fiction novel written by 12 people? Didn't think so. It may be true that developing ideas may require resources and manpower, but inspiration strikes individuals.
Maybe the legacy of the Information Age will be that eventually, only tangible goods and artificially scare information will carry a price tag. This is a Good Thing. It means everyone benefits from the collective thought of the creative, but you still have to work building things to make a living. We could have that utopia, or just sell information through Absolute DRM, which we're well on the way to having. It's obvious that The Powers That Be know this future, and are actively lobbying for it. It's long past time we sent our own legions of Smart People up to Capitol Hill to sell our vision of the future, too.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
We've grown so rapidly in the past 100 years or so as a species, gorwing in population and advancing so rapidly with technology, that we're all caught up in doing more more more and blazing ahead as fast as we can market it.
BUT, we're not taking the time to sit and think out our decisions about how technology shuld be implemented and it's long term effects completely.
(Then again, what do I know. If I'm so goddamn smart howcome I don't have a fucking job?)
s'wut i sed.
Paraphrased, he said "These solution won't work because people refuse to go along with them."
You say "Really, if you reduced... Wouldn't that solve those problems?" as if that is a counterargument to "people will not permit these solutions to be implemented". It's just wishful thinking unless you can come up with a way to cause those changes to actually happen!
A step forward in technology is the same as taking today's technology back in time.
The first few people do it, and they get amazing results. Other people figure out what they're doing, and jump on the bandwagon. Before long, everybody is on equal footing again.
Trouble is, it isn't a natural progress over time that allows us to see and avert trouble spots. Nope, it's a mad rush to use the futuristic technology, and damn the consequences.
The automobile is the perfect example of this.
Once upon a time, everyone lived close to their jobs, because they couldn't travel very far very quickly. Everyone shared this problem.
Then the car came along, and people realized they could buy cheaper land further away, and still make it to work on time.
Over time, they completely abandoned the residential centers near their workplaces in favor of outlying homesteads, and the abandoned residential centers fell into disrepair.
Suddenly, everyone looks around at the traffic and realizes they wish they lived closer to work -- and the huge demand makes housing prices near people's workplaces even MORE expensive than before, even though the housing stock is in disrepair. Everyone shares this new problem.
Applying the time travel idea, if you were to take today's SUV back to the late 1800s, you could purchase a huge pile of land in an outlying area and still make it to work on time.
People would see you driving, though. And they'd figure out how to do what you were doing. And they'd eventually be able to move out to the cheaper land. And so on, until they were looking around and wishing they could live closer to work, just like we are now.
As an aside, this is something that SUV drivers should think about. When there are only a few SUV drivers, they get a huge benefit -- but when everyone drives SUVs, the benefits are lost. Gas becomes more scarce, so prices go up. Accidents are between SUVs rather than one SUV and one car, so no SUV driver is any safer than car drivers were when accidents were between cars. SUVs can handle roads in bad condition (and actually contribute to faster road deterioration) so there's less need to keep the roads up, and eventually you NEED an SUV to drive on the crappy roads. And so on.
Sorry, slipped into a rant there. But seriously, if all you need to do is be trendy, buy a Mini -- and if all you need to do is carry seven kids, buy a minivan.
Right. There's a difference between being "too lazy" and "not serious about it".
I'm saying that just because you refuse to bike in -13 degrees through sleet and snow on your separate winter bike in your special cold-biking suit with your work clothes on your back across salt-covered roads, you do not fit the definition of "a lazy person".
That's what I was saying originally, that its not that people are "too lazy", its that the barriers to commuting by bike are higher than just pedaling your fat ass all the way to work.
I recommend voting for mass transit construction funded by car and gasoline taxes.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
It's fashionable to conveniently forget that there we hordes of lurking bugs, waiting for the rollover to happen. De Jager woke people up to that fact, and it paid off. The critical bugs were fixed in time. Ahead of time, even; for the last couple years of the 90's, he was on record as saying that the worst problems were largely solved, that there would be no mushroom-cloud catastrophe.
But nobody pays attention to people when they're saying that. Only when they're screaming. So that's all he's remembered for.
If he had never done the screaming in the first place, managers would never have listened, and the worst bugs would never have been fixed. Or even noticed until it was too late.
It's like the population of Rohan getting pissed off at Gandalf and Aragorn for warning them about the oncoming army. "Fuckers! You said there was going to be disaster, so we spent all this time and money and effort building defenses and moving out of homes, and look! We're still alive! Buncha con artists..."
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Isn't that part of the premise of The Matrix - that we're stuck in 1999 because we can't handle anything better?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Check out his article, "The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons," on his old web site on the Well .
As Solomon (or somebody) commented a few thousand years ago, there is nothing new under the sun.
Catherine
The food that you eat is just as much a manufactured product as the computer you are typing on, and it's all based on petroleum. The whole "Green Revolution" is based on petroleum. Or what the "agriculture" industry likes to call "inputs".
/. is just crawling with) like to prate on and on about the wonderful productivity of our agriculture, and how it has become more and more efficient.
The no-nothing techno-pollyannas (which
What a crock of shit. What people call "agriculture" in this country is totally subsidized by petroleum. Petroleum for tractors, petroleum for fertilizers, petroleum for herbicides, petroleum for pesticides, and petroleum to get the stuff to market. 1.2 liters of petroleum per bushel of corn - and you can buy that bushel of corn for less than it cost the "farmer" to "produce" it, because of government subsidies. There is absolutely zero real world feedback - nothing like a "market".
And that's not even figuring in the fact that the price of that petroleum is whacked, and doesn't include all the subsidies given to the petroleum industry, and all the externalities (can you say "war in Iraq"?)
As petroleum becomes scarce (maybe sooner, maybe later) and way more expensive, look for food prices to go out the window, and scarcities to occur. Forget about getting a Prius, or taking fewer car trips. Personal transportation is not going to the problem when the crunch comes.
And it will. The bursting of the Tech Bubble of the 90's is going to look like child's play compared with the bursting of the petro-bubble.
Shatner said it best...
"Will you people get a life?"
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
I didn't buy an SUV, I bought a truck - a short-bed full-size four-door truck, with a real back seat and a bed tonneau cover. I paid about the same price for it as I would have for a sedan that I would have bought instead. (about == "within $3000")
This vehicle lets me carry 4 people (driver + 3) and scuba diving gear for 4 people, comfortably (5 if we're feeling friendly), without smelling stinky dive gear on a several-hour drive back from the dive site. I thought about an SUV, and having to breathe the same air as the cargo area was a deal killer for me.
I pay about the same in maintenance for the truck as I would for a sedan. I get about half the gas mileage that I'd have gotten with the sedan, so in a year gas costs me about $700 more than it would if I had the sedan. Renting an equivalent truck would run about $50/day (more?), and would likely be a 2-day rental most times. (I like long days diving.) So, 7 dive trips in a year would be breakeven, and any more than that and I lose money. In the past 12 months, I've done 13 little dive trips like this.
I made a good decision, financially.
Outside of scuba diving, would I need this vehicle? Nope, I'd have gotten the sedan. Probably. Because, I admit, I also like sitting high and being able to see what's happening in the traffic around me.
Perhaps I'm one of those "few people - who I mentioned - who actually uses the capabilities provided by the vehicle".
But then again, I also bought it simply because I like it, so maybe I'm not one of those few people.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
The problem with abundance is that there's just too much of it anymore.
i could use a few as slaves to do my bidding... toss em' over here!
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
What does it mean to a website when everyone read /. ?
Reminds me of a Pohl book (or was it a short story?) "The Midas Effect". The premise was a future in which there was rampant overproduction, and the poor had to consume like mad, while the rich got to live a simple lifestyle.
I've been thinking about this story for a while now. Scarily enough, it's becoming true for certain things. A huge house at the outskirts of your metropolitan area is cheap. What's expensive is a small apartment in the city (depending on your city, of course). Huge washer and dryers? Cheap. Small washer/dryer combo? Expensive.
Things are definitely becoming stranger and stranger...
It also depends on what you collide with, though. Remember, most racing accidents are not perpendicular crashes. If they're into the wall, they're usually at an extreme angle, which is part of why it takes them a quarter of the track to stop. Even if they strike other cars first, they're all moving in approximately the same direction and speed, so the effects aren't nearly as extreme as could be with the available speeds.
That freeway that one may be driving 75 MPH on is designed as well as it could be, for the costs involved. There are still barriers that can be struck head on, barriers that do not move when collided with. Walls. Foliage. Signposts. These things do not cause the car to simply slow down a little and change direction, they cause the car to crush itself severely or tear apart. I don't care how well your car's passenger compartment is designed, striking a freeway pole at 75 MPH in a new car would be worse than in an older one, since the older one weighs more and will exert more force upon the pole, maybe even shearing the pole, while the new car will just crush or break apart.
New cars are designed to hit new cars. They're not designed to hit walls, pillars, or trees with more than moderate force. They're not designed to hit semi trucks. They're not designed to hit older cars. Thing is, we still have semi trucks, poles, walls, trees, and older cars out there to contend with.
A friend of mine was T-boned in her '70s Buick Riviera by some schmuck in a late model Accord. She walked away. Half of his car was found on the other side of hers. It did total her car, and she did have some minor injuries, but he had to be secured to a stretcher. He hit her on the driver's side, by the way, and the back half of his car tore free and flew over the top of hers to land on the other side. If the Riviera hadn't had it's pillared side caved in, I'd have recommended she have it fixed. I heard that she bought a Monte Carlo of the same era, probably trusting the mass to do a better job of keeping her alive than any crumple zone would.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
AB SO LUTELY! however it should be duly noted that one might make an argument that this strange twist in human history (the poorer folks growing fatter than the rich) is the cause of America's strong political stability.
I mean, for all the debate, boredom and laughter/tears over the 2k bush/gore floridiot fiasco something that would have certainly happened in less than three months in most other countries would have been violence and possibly armed struggle over the same. instead, we counted, and argued, and debated and judged and a hundred other boring methods. why???
obesity has washed the poorer citizens of America into sheeplike obedience. they have sold out to mcdonalds and their taste buds. obese people lack stamina, speed, and often, after a prolonged spell, the willpower or urgency to change their fortunes. obesity is a choice, first and foremost. poorer people could eat healthier, but that is rarely the path of least resistance.
as a result, the working masses have been placated. i can't honestly see anything wrong with having the choice to be thin or thick and choosing thick. throughout history, rebellions and revolutions have been born in the depths of famine. the french revolution started (the bastille) when the price of bread went through the roof, while simutaneously, the price of wine remained constant. yep! the third grade history books don't mention that the famous mob of Paris was blind, stinking drunk (on empty stomachs).
poor people the world over would kill to be fat and not starving! just their leaders know that if that kind of cultural blight happens to their countries that a) they would be at risk of revolution if america removed the fat and b) obesity is a legitimate problem
personally, i think it will be solved just because there's never obese people in Star Trek ;) just kidding!
really though. this issue is close what makes america tick.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
deJagr says
> "Any technology which creates abundance poses problems for any process which existed to benefit from scarcity."
and I think "hooray for technology!"
Wouldn't it be nice if fewer people benefited from maintaining scarcity. Manipulating scarcity for profit is a corruption of capitalism. Capitalism ought to be about being rewarded for producing goods and services useful to society. The goal should not be extracting the most profit from scarcity.
So hooray for technology if it can lead to more equitable distribution of scarse resources...
Fraid so. H P Lovecraft, Leigh Brackett, Sam Moskowitz and various other established SF or Fantasy authors all wrote one chapter each of a round robin novel called "The Shadow out of Space" (or something like that), and the semi-soft-core-porn novel "Naked came the Stranger" was written by no less than 24 people if memory serves (Including chapters by Phillip Roth and some other major literary authors). That's two. There are probably others. How about "Creativity is seldom a team sport"? Oh, and fiction novel is redundant, whereas non-fiction novel is an oxymoron.
Who is John Cabal?
This ludicrous claim is a failure of experience and imagination. Consider the area used by a bike vs. an automobile or truck... not just the area of the vehicle itself, but the area used when driving (tailgating aside) and parking. There's plenty of room, especially at the lower speeds involved. Never ridden in a crowd, eh?
I agree that the public transit system in most cities would break under heavier usage--many of them are broken already.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Every once in a while, I enjoy being a selfish human being. This is one of those times.
I can deal with taking line of sight from others, so I get it myself.
You see, not only am I selfish, I'm also conceited. I believe that my chances of avoiding an accident are better if I can see and others can't, than if we all can not see equally. Because if everyone drives the same vehicle, we all see equally badly.
Egotistical of me, isn't it? (Am I allowed to laugh at myself while I'm being selfish and conceited?)
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Sounds alot like a Capitalist grasping at straws to stop the growing trends of Democratic Socialism and Freedom ... "not to see here move along"
People worrying about this problem should read some of Ian M Banks' CULTURE series.
One of the basic premises there is that "money is a sign of poverty"
i.e. if you have little enough of something to be worth anything then you are poor.
RJG
Peter de Jager? Why is he being linked to here, of all places? This is the same asshole who brought us the Y2K paranoia. I will never listen to anything this moron has to say ever again.
-JemAn abundance of traffic is a scarcity of roads.
Due to induced traffic, this is not true. The amount of traffic represents the equilibrium point between people's desire to live further "away", and their desire to get places quickly. If you increase the amount and width of roads, people will satisfy their desire to live further "away" (ie, they will travel further), and the level of traffic will quickly rise to the level of the previous equilibrium.
Building roads therefore does not ease traffic in the medium term. It increases travel distances, thereby further entrenching car travel as the only practical means of transport.
A more sensible solution is to recognise that the level of traffic cannot be reduced, and that a higher level of traffic has certain advantages - it can encourage greater population densities, and the healthier lifestyles that these encourage (walking, cycling, and greater social interaction).
Morbid obesity is not a good example for your argument. There are probably genetic tendencies toward obesity with regards to impulse control and depression. However nothing is forcing these people to eat insane amounts of food. If morbidly obese people have kids the chances that their kids are also morbidly obese are not significantly swayed by genetics.
The government built a bunch of roads and isn't charging much in the way of tolls for their use. Suprise! The roads are crowded, and you can get stung by traffic jams (i.e. "long lines"). Everybody wants to use the roads because they're "free" and gas doesn't cost much in the US (I've heard it argued that we effectively subsidize that too).
It isn't so much that people aren't adjusting to the crowding as the crowding happens, because they certainly are (try googling "traffic evaporation" some time). It's just that some people are total gluttons for punishment in this respect, spending four hours a day in nail-biting traffic if it means reducing their morgage payments slightly.
The author insists "We can't solve traffic congestion by reducing the speed of traffic to 10 KM/Hr." But no one suggests that that's the solution. What they do propose is "congestion charging" to discourage people from driving when and where it tends to be too crowded (e.g. they recently began experimenting with this in downtown London).
What this says about internet traffic, on the other hand, I dunno. I would hate to think that ARPA blew it by not building in per-byte charges into the net, but at the very least you could make a plausible case for that.
By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.
The checks and balances are still there - their roles are simply filled by other things. Instead of scarce information, we now have scarce attention. Instead of scarce software, we have scarce expertise.
Enterprises are still viable - they simply require re-tooling around the benefit of providing the new scarce resources.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster!
(of fat f***ing cellular traffic jams?!?)
back to work....
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
... and we will solve it in others, as the need arises.
The only thing standing between us and our roads is a huge environmental lobby and politicians who don't want to fix the problem. You'll notice traffic wasn't a problem during the 50's and 60's, despite the booming economy and rapid increase in car ownership. That is because they built newer, better, faster, and safer roads. Comes the 70s, 80s, 90s, and now the thirds millenium, and guess what? In my home state of Washington, we have built less than 10 miles of new roads in the past decade?!?!
It's this wonderful thing called "innovation" -- not the Microsoft kind -- and "humanity". We are intelligent creatures. Even the dumbest rocks are far brighter than any other animal on the planet. We find solutions to our problems, and we use engineers for the really hard ones. If some guys in the middle of a desert thousands of years ago could build a giant rock formation for a tomb, then by golly, we can build solutions for all of our problems. We don't have enough roads? We'll build them better and higher and faster. We don't have enough internet bandwidth? We'll find ways of connecting to overcome the "last mile". We don't have enough factories, or blue collar workers to build our toys? We'll build robots if we have to, but it will get done.
You'll find the greatest attention is paid to the biggest problems in this nation. While you think "the environment" and other petty things rank pretty high on the agenda, the truth is they don't.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
The general trend of change in a capitalist system is to make things which used to be expensive cheap, because ideas and technologies that don't do that disappear.
This puts businesses that can't adjust out of business.
And that is scary.
I don't have any solutions, and that is scary. If I did, it wouldn't be scary anymore.
Pay me to speak at your convention/wedding/bar mitzvah, and I can imbibe you with my enormous wisdom at explaining how scary the future is.
Ned Ludd is my hero. He saw how scary all this was. Sheesh, some people just don't think before they invent things.
Krill
The human body was designed to survive on scarcity, and it has served us well over the past 50,000-plus years. On those rare occasions when food was abundant it was stored as fat in advance of future scarcity. Today we are surrounded by an excess of food and the body continues to follow a proven survival strategy -- it stores energy in fat for lean days which no longer arrive.
Hmm, there are a lot more "survivalists" than I thought there was.
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo
Lots of engineers I know who have not studied economics and have only a layperson's understanding of it, said that the high wages paid to people who wrote HTML during "the bubble", the amount of fiber optic cable laid, the millions paid for the rights to the name whatever.com, the high stock prices and so on and so forth "made no sense" and was not "economically correct", as if we had a normal working overall system and a few people had made a mistake. As if the system itself functioned fine by itself, and under the rules it operates by, but that things went wrong due to the greed/stupidity of some individuals. This requires a faith in the current economic system on the level of a religious devotion however - the people running the economy are human and make mistakes, sometimes large ones. And sometimes it's apparent they don't know what is going on, and even bring into question if they ever did know what's going on (like in the Depression). In the twentieth century, "capitalism" underwent two major changes in relations to the government - the Depression brought into the forefront the ideas of Keynes and changed the system. Slowdown in economic growth and stagflation brought forth the ideas of the monetarists like Milton Friedman in the 1970's - staglation was fixed (but the slowdown in economic growth didn't, it was very tepid from the early 1970's to mid 1990's compared to the decades beforehand).
Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, JM Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are chronologically some of the most important economic thinkers starting from the 18th century. Now that things are in the dumper, I've been reading more of the modern economists who have a more dismal than rosy view of things, like Paul Krugman and article writers for Monthly Review. The market crashed in early 2000 and things are still crappy, which doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of whatever we're doing now, nor of what we've been doing in the years previous to now.
I was afraid it was something like that.
+&x
"He didn't mention how that motorized carrage invention killed the buggy whip business"
Thats because the buggy whip business didn't die, it simply changed its target market from horse & buggy owners to the fetish crowd.
Not a bad thing strictly speaking. Even if you have no religious beliefs at all, I would recommend checking out the book Abundance through Reiki. (Ignore the reviews if you've never heard of Reiki...the book really is about the concept of "abundance.")
:-)
I'm incidentally an Economics major, and am proud to consider myself a cold hearted, asshole economist.
Right, it's not zero-sum... it's negative sum.
If you look just at the bad and not the good you'll always be losing.
This is a common failing of the barren critic, known as ecclesias.
Every major economy is driven at least in part by the destruction of pre-existing, irreplacable resources.
not driven by, burden with.
Nobody creates wealth- they just shift it from place to place, with transactional inefficiency bleeding off 5% here and there.
I think Newton, Gauss, Einstein and all scientists and engineers might
have begged to differ
What economists call "growth" is the same thing venture capitalists call "burn rate". Both can make a system appear vigorous and attractive, for a time. Reality will set back in sometime.
You know, old ecclesiases have been crying:
"there is nothing new under the sun"
every generation
bright youngsters of the following generation
Working for necessity's mother.
According to market research conducted by the United States' leading automakers, SUV purchasers tend to be "insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic, and less social than most Americans are. They tend to like fine restaurants a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church and have limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others."
U V_Market.html
from http://www.columbia.edu/~eag115/Ethan/Web-pages/S
If there's one thing, the mere fact that absolutely everybody can afford a piece of whichever brandname product has done zippo to resolve poverty caused by the ever rising price of appartment rents.
People, let's face it, Capitalism is the root of all evil, because it creates false scarcity:
As anyone who followed the history of the automobile industry (to pick just one example) will tell you, pioneers like Tucker had build cars that were safe and built to last, which would have ruined the business of the automobile giants, but given the average Joe wheels for life and money to spare on, maybe, getting around travelling the world like he always wanted to, instead of struggling to pay the rent AND buy a new automobile because his 3-year old wheels are dying on him.
Another example is the Concorde plane. Many have said that it could not have been designed today and that nothing ever close to it will ever see the light again. Why? Because this great evil called Capitalism forces even the lamest dimwit to get a job to sustain himself, which results in brainless idiots getting into University just because they think that getting a degree is their birthright.
Until the 50's, getting a degree was a hard-earned priviledge, which meant that only the best of the breed got there (having to pay a fortune to go there is WRONG, but having though entry exams is RIGHT). So you failed? Big deal; go back to the farm - where, as surprising as it may sounds to people today, real abundance is found: real houses built to last, fresh food straight off the land and, nowadays, yes, broadband and satellitle TV still reaches if you need it. What else could you possibly want?
One last example: noticed how early solid-state audio equipment by Sony (and others) is still among the most coveted audiophile hardware, both because whatever was built in the early days was built to last and because it was also the state-of-the-art in terms of quality. Yet, how many of you can say the same of anything built since the 90's?
Let's face it, the commoditization of diplomas required a lowering of standards which is 100% consistant with mass production: first, mass production of cheap goods, then mass production of incompetant alumni. Result? Polution because of an over-abundance of throw-away products, designed by people with a throw-away degree. Back in the 50's, when the Concorde design started, they might have been using slide rules, but they were REAL engineers, striving for perfection, that you could trust to build life-critical systems with the utmost care. Can you honnestly say that you would trust, say, Microsoft software developers for designing life-critical systems? Yet, Microsoft is one of this planet's most brlilliant of successful Capitalism. People keep on making money with that mass production mentality, but at what cost to our future?
Meanwhile, the average Joe can afford a DVD player, but is still struggling to pay the rent of his vermine-infested appartment in a downtown neighborhood whose crime rates continue to increase (and DO remember that "downtown" tends to mean dodgy populist areas, while "uptown" means peacefull ritsy neighborhoods). Is that what you call abundance?
Am I advocating Communism? Not necessarily. In fact, individualism has its place in life. However, I have yet to find an ecologically-sound economical theorem to replace the currently only decent compromise that is Socialism.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
You've swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker if you think the "war" in Iraq or Afghanistan is about self defense.
No, the parent poster is right in that this "war" is over scarcity as well - scarcity of oil and natural gas.
America is systematically arraying its armed forces in all the areas where natural resources occur in large quantities. It's like a huge game of Risk, structured around the resources and the transport routes of those resources to the US.
You think Afghanistan is about stopping "terrorism"? Iraq? Hardly. Why not see where US forces have their presence in Afghanistan. They are guarding the huge trans-national pipeline leading from the Dauletabad Natural Gas Field and the Apsheron Trend Oil Basin in the Caspian Sea. The pipeline through Afghanistan is the most economical way to transport the resources to the sea where it can be loaded on ships and sent to the US. Turkey is another route to the sea, which is why the US continues to court them (and has the huge base at Incirlic). That's but a couple of examples. There are many more if you do some research.
There are other ways to secure the resources for the US too that don't involve war. Sometimes you can have a sympathetic government which will accede to US demands peacefully. Sometimes you can bribe or blackmail them. Sometimes the US manages to install its own sympathetic government. Occasionally though, those governments turn around and go against the wishes of the US strategic interest (ie. oil and gas supply). Then it's time to oust those governments either by force (Iraq) or surreptitiously (like Venezuela, Bolivia etc). More recently, amazingly, some of those governments have found that the common people have had the willpower to prevent this happening (Venezuela, Bolivia again).
Of course this is never openly acknowledged. They couch it in terms that make it sound like those governments are either an "Axis of Evil", or the heads have lost their minds, become unstable etc. Lack of proper media balance makes selling this version of the story easy.
Sure, it's not a perfect world. Saddam was undoubtedly a madman. But the US implicitly kept him in power knowing this because it was in their interest to keep the devil you know, as long as he played your game and didn't go doing stupid things (like openly invading Kuwait).
And yes, terrorists DO exist. But nowhere near as many as the government would like you to believe.
Just remember to look at wars objectively and try to assess what scarcity is behind them. You'll usually find one, be it arable land, food, oil, gas or any other resource needed to keep a population sustained.
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
We should all go back to farming then there would be no ghettos. And there would only be the blues and no rap music. Scarcity IS cool !!!
You're seeing some reasonable trees, but you're missing the forest.
I don't disagree with the detail of your point - my parents late 70s (?) Oldsmobile Cutlass was rear ended at approximately 50 mph. Luckily it was parked and no one was inside. It was totalled, but essentially the correct size. Three smaller foreign cars in front of it were compacted tremendously. The momentum of the traveling vehicle is it's m1v1, while the end momentum of the system is going to be the same. So the velocity change of the stationary vehicle is m1v1/(m1+m2) Obviously, the ideal case is for your semitruck to get hit by a speck of dust. But assuming your car weighs 3x as much as mine and you hit me at 40 mph, the basic idea is we'd both end up going 30, you've undergone a 10mph collision, I've undergone a 30mph one.
But that's a false argument on many levels, especially regarding our current discussion. For ease of discussion here, lets compare hitting something of essentially infinite momentum, like a bridge. In this case the velocity change of your car is going to be to zero, and quickly. In this case I'd bet a well designed newer car with crumple zones and air bags would be much more survivable at, say, 40mph than an older one without them, because the mass doesn't matter. I'm not saying either is very survivable at 75mph, today. This applies pretty well to you hitting a semi, actually, too. Basically hitting a car is MUCH better...
Now, certainly, if I was going to hit something with a roughly similar mass, I'd rather be in the heavier car than the lighter one. Or if I was going to hit anything under a critical threshold where the collision wasn't going to be too great, like a signpost, a newer (breakaway) powerline...
Car-car accidents involve a devilish number of details, too...
To wrapup, I frankly think being a proficient driver, being aware of your surroundings, having good tires and brakes, etc, are more important than 10% more crumple zone. And I certainly like a real side-impact frame, wear my seatbelt, etc. But that doesn't mean that the actually survivability of an accident hasn't gotten a lot better, and won't continue to get a lot better.
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