Again, better sensemaking tools could help with that.:-) Both for making sense and for educating people who use such tools.
For example, if that despairing and angry guy had known, through a global sensemaking process, that we could make self-replicating space habitats with room for quadrillions of humans, maybe he would not have said so much about "human overpopulation" in his Discovery manifesto? The Earth may have limits, but space is limitless as far as we know (although we may reach limits, but they are 1000s of years away). He might have learned that the major problem in the industrialized world is actually lack of population growth, not a high birth rate: "[p2p-research] Peak Population crisis (was Re: Japan's Demographic Crisis)" http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-A... Likewise, he might have seen that the problem is not lack of solutions (because they were nicely cataloged in such a tool, including some with their SKDB apt-get instructions), but the problem was more in lack of broad understanding of the solutions we do know about, and lack of the will to put them into action more quickly or think them through systematically, in part from economic dogma? And then, rather than threaten the Discovery Channel with a bomb, he perhaps could have seen a non-violent way forward to improve his local community through contributing to the gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, lobbying for a basic income, and helping improve local subsistence production in a stronger community?
Instead, lots of people went through a lot of stress and he is dead, and some police officer has to live with having killed him, because of a failure of effective sensemaking on his part, and, I might suggest, a lack of FOSS public sensemaking tools that might have made the process easier for him. And in the proc
And of course, as I posted elsewhere in this discussion, the whole project itself is still pretty ironic: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?... Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone...."
Oops, the first and third Google groups links are swapped. I didn't check those URLs carefully enough before posting. Dang, there goes my chance to impress them as a careful programmer.:-)
They have other things. MIDAS, for example, is really spiffy and under a BSD-ish license, and is probably part of why they got this contract: http://www.kitware.com/MIDAS/resources/software.html "MIDAS integrates multimedia server technology with Kitware's open-source data analysis and visualization clients. The server follows open standards for data storage, access and harvesting. MIDAS has been optimized for storing massive collections of scientific data and related metadata and reports. MIDAS is available under a non-restrictive (BSD) open-source license."
But I might just be saying this because I live not too far from them and maybe I'll need a job there someday.:-) And they might have the contacts and social infrastructure to get this project better funded::-)
"The need for open source sensemaking tools (Score:5, Interesting)" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866
My comments: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all...."
From the last, written in the 1920s by J.D. Bernal: "Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant."
Anyway, I work towards that dream on-and-off as I can...
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1937-unnatural-acts-breaking-the-fever-of-militarism.html#comment-2450 "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? Likewise, nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? "
Also, vitamin D deficiency is an oocupational hazard of indoor IT workers. You may want to start taking 5000 IU Vitamin D3 daily and get your blood tested regularly, as recommended here: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
And get your coworkers to get tested for vitamin D deficiency too, before OSHA gets on your case.:-)
I'll agree that the best way to get vitamin D is moderate sun exposure, however, in our society practically no one can accomplish this. Lifequards are about the only profession where people dress and behave like our ancestors as far as sun exposure, a lifestyle for which the human body is adapted.
See: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDPhysiology.shtml "Studies show that if you go out in the summer sun in your bathing suit until your skin just begins to turn pink, you make between 10,000 and 50,000 units of cholecalciferol in your skin. Professor Michael Holick of Boston University School of Medicine has studied this extensively and believes a reasonable average of all the studies is 20,000 units. That means a few minutes in the summer sun produces 100 times more vitamin D than the government says you need! As discussed in other pages, this is the single most important fact about vitamin D. The skin does another amazing thing with cholecalciferol. It prevents vitamin D toxicity. Once you make about 20,000 units, the same ultraviolet light that created cholecalciferol begins to degrade it. The more you make, the more destroyed. So a steady state is reached that prevents the skin from making too much cholecalciferol. This is why no one has ever been reported to develop vitamin D toxicity from the sun, though it is possible when taking vitamin D orally."
See also: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml "Is vitamin D toxic? Not if we take the same amount nature intended when we go out in the sun. Vieth R. Vitamin D supplementation, 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration, and safety. Am J Clin Nutr. 1999;69:842-56. Vieth attempted to dispel unwarranted fears in medical community of physiological doses of vitamin D in 1999 with his exhaustive and well-written review. His conclusions: fear of vitamin D toxicity is unwarranted, and such unwarranted fear, bordering on hysteria, is rampant in the medical profession. [Vieth R, Chan PC, MacFarlane GD. Efficacy and safety of vitamin D3 intake exceeding the lowest observed adverse effect level. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Feb;73(2):288-94.]"
As is suggested on that site, the worries about vitamin D toxicity are essentially like worries about drowning by someone dying of dehydration in the desert. Sure, it can happen, but it's not the urgent problem. But with a rising autism epidemic, worries about influenza, lots of cancer, and so on, pretty much everyone in the USA desperately needs a lot more vitamin D.
Also, vitamin D3 (the recommended form) may have less issues than the vitamin D2 variant.
Essentially, can you point to even one case where a child has died from vitamin D toxicity, in the way there are endless cases for children who died from toxicity from ingesting iron pills or over the counter pain killers?
And in the rare cases in the literature where people got to much vitamin D (like from a manufacturing error), the symptoms went away with discontinuing the high doses. You would be hard put to find a safer vitamin, in that sense. With that said, sure, any pill you take has risks (including manufacturing errors, tampering, and so on). And no one out there is suggesting taking more than 5000 IU D3 daily for an adult without a regular blood test (and it looks like 10,000 IU D3 daily is a reasonable safe limit, not the 2000 IU long since suggested, which as you can see from above, is just one tenth of what your body will make normally).
For example, from that article, it is suggested 40,000 IU D3 a day in *infants* will result in toxicity in one to for months. An infant weights one tenth of what an adult weight (or less). They cite 50,000 IU D3 for several months in an adult to produce toxicity. No one recommends that kind of levels. (Although people may recommend 50,000 IU D3 for a day or so if you are coming down with influenza...)
Anyway, I'm sorry to hear the news, because I so much enjoyed his shows.
From Albert Einstein on Science and Religion: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."
Jack Horkheimer, in his own unique and quirky way, was one of those "powerful personalities", one who helped showed me the beauty of the universe in a way that made sense intellectually as well as aesthetically and emotionally. I'll try to "Keep Looking Up", and I hope you are on to better things, Jack.:-)
If MRI scans are justifably expensive in hospitals, then why can you get a full body scan for "free" going through airport security? (Granted, they may be somewhat different technologies, but not that different...)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/autism-information.shtml "It is plausible that vitamin D deficiency is a major contributing factor to the onset and progression of autism. Though only still a theory, first put forth by Vitamin D Council Executive Director Dr. John Cannell, the idea of a major role for vitamin D in the etiology of autism is gaining momentum. From Harvard scientists to Swedish research teams, more and more scientists are examining the possible link between vitamin D deficiency and autism in the hopes that Cannell's theory will hold up against scientific scrutiny -- what would herald the discovery of a simple, natural solution to an increasingly-common, and very tragic, condition.... Quick info: To lower risk of autism, Dr. Cannell recommends at least 5,000 IU of vitamin D3 per day for pregnant women. For autistic children, Dr. Cannell recommends at least 2,000 IU of vitamin D3 per every 25 pounds of body weight per day, with frequent [blood test] monitoring of 25(OH)D, targeting 100 ng/mL (250 nmol/L)."
Yes, "The Light of Other Days" was a great book in terms of thinking about, by analogy, privacy in the compuyter age. See also David Brin's non-fiction book, "The Transparent Society" on the theme you raise of symmetry and asymmetry in recording. http://www.davidbrin.com/transparent.htm
I like your proposal, especially because it has a basic income as part of it: "What is left over, is divvied out to all adults in the nation as an equal proportional check, to do with as they please. That's how the rest of the new money gets into circulation." That is also called "social credit", and indeed it is important that the government gets new money first, and not the banks, which is a great thing about your proposal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
Here is a website about creating local currencies if you pursue your interest in currency at the local level: http://www.lets-linkup.com/ "LETS... is a group of people from a small community who all agree to exchange goods and services with each other without the need for cash. "
Still, a big problem with designing currency is it serves two separate purposes, which get at the issue you raised of money vs. wealth. One purpose is a store of value (so, "wealth"), the other is to signal demand (which is not exactly "money", but is similar). These are related purposes (because you can use wealth to signal demand, or you can process demand to create wealth), but they are not the same.
If you want to store value abstractly, you want something like what you outline -- some sort of commodity (gold, land, energy, ram chips, grain, whatever). Granted, some commodities may be better than other -- gold historically has been useful, as grain molds and ram chips become obsolete. (Though, once we have nuclear fusion, something like gold might be produced cheaply, the same as how aluminum used to be worth more than gold and platinum, but now we throw aluminum away because it has become cheap through technological innovation. Or even through, as mentioned on your linked home site, finding some "forgotten" big mining opportunity in some country like Afghanistan.)
The problem with running a big economy on gold or whatever is that the biggest issue is to signal demand. Think of this as like in a factory with "Kanban" tokens. From (more homework?:-) Or you may know this from automotive days?): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban "An important determinant of the success of production scheduling based on "pushing" the demand is the quality of the demand forecast that can receive such "push." Kanban, by contrast, is part of an approach of receiving the "pull" from the demand. Therefore, the supply or production is determined according to the actual demand of the customers. In contexts where supply time is lengthy and demand is difficult to forecast, the best one can do is to respond quickly to observed demand. This is exactly what a kanban system can help with: It is used as a demand signal that immediately propagates through the supply chain. This can be used to ensure that intermediate stocks held in the supply chain are better managed, usually smaller. Where the supply response cannot be quick enough to meet actual demand fluctuations, causing significant lost sales, then stock building may be deemed as appropriate which can be achieved by issuing more kanban. Taiichi Ohno states that to be effective kanban must follow strict rules of use[4] (Toyota, for example, has six simple rules, below) and that close monitoring of these rules is a never-ending task to ensure that the kanban does what is required."
Kanban tokens can be anything, like a ball or a basket. They don't have value in themselves; they just signal demand within the system (of course, outside a controlled factory, there could be counterfeiting of tokens). Fiat dollars have something of this role in the economy, too. Fi
Good points, and I hope you are right.:-) Still, as in that later link I added in a reply, apathy is a big issue too, that you indirectly raise:
"Ignorance, Apathy, and Greed" http://www.progress.org/fold21.htm "So, greed, apathy, and ignorance are all related. Greed depends on the absence of sympathy, and it benefits from ignorance about a social problem. Apathy can be reduced if there is less ignorance and less greed. Ignorance is reinforced by apathy, since apathetic folks don't care to obtain the knowledge which would reduce their apathy. Greed exploits the ignorance of the majority who do not have sufficient sympathy to counter the greedy faction. "
And there are also larger "herd" social dynamics of systems, as social pendulums swing back and forth.
But even if you are right, the system still won't work given apathy, ignorance, and greed unless some committed people are out there doing good-for-most-everyone stuff. From:
"What Social Science Can Tell Us About Social Change" http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science.html "Third, the change agents have to understand a key difference between themselves and other people. Most people are focused on the joys, pleasures, and necessities of their everyday lives, and will not leave these routines unless those routines are disrupted, whereas change agents sacrifice their everyday lives -- family, schooling, career -- to work on social change every waking minute. This means that change agents must be patient for unexpected social circumstances to create disruption, or else find effective ways to disrupt everyday life without alienating those they wish to become supporters of their cause."
Except that article is about, in part, what Germany was like before WWII. So, this stuff can happen from social stresses (granted, their was an economic legacy from WWI).
With DRM being built into so many things, and laws being passed about software patents, etc., and the ACTA treaty, and so on, there are counterpoints, even if I would like to believe you are right.:-)
Sorry, but you most likely have not looked at the data. Just one example:
"Vitamin D Deficiency Is Widespread And On The Increase" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630143523.htm "A new report issued by the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) and published in the scientific journal Osteoporosis International1, shows that populations across the globe are suffering from the impact of low levels of vitamin D. The problem is widespread and on the increase, with potentially severe repercussions for overall health and fracture rates."
Now, ask yourself, why did you make that reply without looking around a little more?
Slashdot Mirror
See: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
on "The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc.".
I wrote most of that weeks ago, but was getting it ready to post coincidentally on seeing this slashdot article.
From there
Summary: This note is essentially about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such FOSS "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security. ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
How does one figure out what is right in such a manifesto and what may be
very wrong in a manifesto (or the actions that accompany it)?
"Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence"
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence....
Again, better sensemaking tools could help with that. :-) Both for making
sense and for educating people who use such tools.
For example, if that despairing and angry guy had known, through a global
sensemaking process, that we could make self-replicating space habitats with
room for quadrillions of humans, maybe he would not have said so much about
"human overpopulation" in his Discovery manifesto? The Earth may have
limits, but space is limitless as far as we know (although we may reach
limits, but they are 1000s of years away). He might have learned that the
major problem in the industrialized world is actually lack of population
growth, not a high birth rate:
"[p2p-research] Peak Population crisis (was Re: Japan's Demographic Crisis)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-A...
Likewise, he might have seen that the problem is not lack of solutions
(because they were nicely cataloged in such a tool, including some with
their SKDB apt-get instructions), but the problem was more in lack of broad
understanding of the solutions we do know about, and lack of the will to put
them into action more quickly or think them through systematically, in part
from economic dogma? And then, rather than threaten the Discovery Channel
with a bomb, he perhaps could have seen a non-violent way forward to improve
his local community through contributing to the gift economy, democratic
resource-based planning, lobbying for a basic income, and helping improve
local subsistence production in a stronger community?
Instead, lots of people went through a lot of stress and he is dead, and
some police officer has to live with having killed him, because of a failure
of effective sensemaking on his part, and, I might suggest, a lack of FOSS
public sensemaking tools that might have made the process easier for him.
And in the proc
And of course, as I posted elsewhere in this discussion, the whole project itself is still pretty ironic: ... Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Oops, the first and third Google groups links are swapped. I didn't check those URLs carefully enough before posting. Dang, there goes my chance to impress them as a careful programmer. :-)
They have other things. MIDAS, for example, is really spiffy and under a BSD-ish license, and is probably part of why they got this contract:
http://www.kitware.com/MIDAS/resources/software.html
"MIDAS integrates multimedia server technology with Kitware's open-source data analysis and visualization clients. The server follows open standards for data storage, access and harvesting. MIDAS has been optimized for storing massive collections of scientific data and related metadata and reports. MIDAS is available under a non-restrictive (BSD) open-source license."
More on the sorts of issues any FOSS-oriented progressive company may struggle with (by me):
"Re: [Open Manufacturing] Open source manufacturing social organization"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/6819187b74f4b7db
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/fa4459793c6b7ed3
"Jobs at Materialise 3D in the Ukraine; thoughts on social change"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/04fbdf60ad463dbb
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
But I might just be saying this because I live not too far from them and maybe I'll need a job there someday. :-) And they might have the contacts and social infrastructure to get this project better funded: :-)
"The need for open source sensemaking tools (Score:5, Interesting)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866
My comments: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."
"... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
You're welcome. Thanks for reading it.
Or to sacrifice themselves for irony: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
NASA could coordinate a global effort towards designing and deploying self-Replicating Space Habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore; ideas towards that here by me:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=62113&cid=5821178
and others who inspired me:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0671878484/0671878484.htm
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
From the last, written in the 1920s by J.D. Bernal: "Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant."
Anyway, I work towards that dream on-and-off as I can...
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1937-unnatural-acts-breaking-the-fever-of-militarism.html#comment-2450
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? Likewise, nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? "
Guess "Joe Sixpack" does not need diagnostic medical imaging (supercooled by helium)?
Adequate vitamin D (Dr. Cannell) and eating more vegetables (Dr. Fuhrman) can do a lot of medical good, but not everything. :-)
Wow, what a great point.
See also: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
Are you posting from work? :-)
Not safe for work in a political sense:
http://whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Also, on rethinking economics related to jobs:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Also, vitamin D deficiency is an oocupational hazard of indoor IT workers. You may want to start taking 5000 IU Vitamin D3 daily and get your blood tested regularly, as recommended here:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
And get your coworkers to get tested for vitamin D deficiency too, before OSHA gets on your case. :-)
"Neither party is wrong" perhaps but both are ironic: http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1937-unnatural-acts-breaking-the-fever-of-militarism.html (see my comment there on irony).
I'll agree that the best way to get vitamin D is moderate sun exposure, however, in our society practically no one can accomplish this. Lifequards are about the only profession where people dress and behave like our ancestors as far as sun exposure, a lifestyle for which the human body is adapted.
See:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDPhysiology.shtml
"Studies show that if you go out in the summer sun in your bathing suit until your skin just begins to turn pink, you make between 10,000 and 50,000 units of cholecalciferol in your skin. Professor Michael Holick of Boston University School of Medicine has studied this extensively and believes a reasonable average of all the studies is 20,000 units. That means a few minutes in the summer sun produces 100 times more vitamin D than the government says you need! As discussed in other pages, this is the single most important fact about vitamin D. The skin does another amazing thing with cholecalciferol. It prevents vitamin D toxicity. Once you make about 20,000 units, the same ultraviolet light that created cholecalciferol begins to degrade it. The more you make, the more destroyed. So a steady state is reached that prevents the skin from making too much cholecalciferol. This is why no one has ever been reported to develop vitamin D toxicity from the sun, though it is possible when taking vitamin D orally."
See also:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml
"Is vitamin D toxic? Not if we take the same amount nature intended when we go out in the sun. Vieth R. Vitamin D supplementation, 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration, and safety. Am J Clin Nutr. 1999;69:842-56. Vieth attempted to dispel unwarranted fears in medical community of physiological doses of vitamin D in 1999 with his exhaustive and well-written review. His conclusions: fear of vitamin D toxicity is unwarranted, and such unwarranted fear, bordering on hysteria, is rampant in the medical profession. [Vieth R, Chan PC, MacFarlane GD. Efficacy and safety of vitamin D3 intake exceeding the lowest observed adverse effect level. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Feb;73(2):288-94.]"
As is suggested on that site, the worries about vitamin D toxicity are essentially like worries about drowning by someone dying of dehydration in the desert. Sure, it can happen, but it's not the urgent problem. But with a rising autism epidemic, worries about influenza, lots of cancer, and so on, pretty much everyone in the USA desperately needs a lot more vitamin D.
Also, vitamin D3 (the recommended form) may have less issues than the vitamin D2 variant.
Essentially, can you point to even one case where a child has died from vitamin D toxicity, in the way there are endless cases for children who died from toxicity from ingesting iron pills or over the counter pain killers?
And in the rare cases in the literature where people got to much vitamin D (like from a manufacturing error), the symptoms went away with discontinuing the high doses. You would be hard put to find a safer vitamin, in that sense. With that said, sure, any pill you take has risks (including manufacturing errors, tampering, and so on). And no one out there is suggesting taking more than 5000 IU D3 daily for an adult without a regular blood test (and it looks like 10,000 IU D3 daily is a reasonable safe limit, not the 2000 IU long since suggested, which as you can see from above, is just one tenth of what your body will make normally).
For example, from that article, it is suggested 40,000 IU D3 a day in *infants* will result in toxicity in one to for months. An infant weights one tenth of what an adult weight (or less). They cite 50,000 IU D3 for several months in an adult to produce toxicity. No one recommends that kind of levels. (Although people may recommend 50,000 IU D3 for a day or so if you are coming down with influenza...)
So, anywa
Anyone who works indoors and late at night is at risk: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
People with adequate vitamin D and good nutrition are much less likely to catch respiratory infections or to under or over respond to them.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/science/research/vitamin-d-and-influenza.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
Anyway, I'm sorry to hear the news, because I so much enjoyed his shows.
From Albert Einstein on Science and Religion:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."
Jack Horkheimer, in his own unique and quirky way, was one of those "powerful personalities", one who helped showed me the beauty of the universe in a way that made sense intellectually as well as aesthetically and emotionally. I'll try to "Keep Looking Up", and I hope you are on to better things, Jack. :-)
Same here, although I saw him before Dr. Who where I was, which was always nice to put me in the right mood for the Doctor... Sad.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
If MRI scans are justifably expensive in hospitals, then why can you get a full body scan for "free" going through airport security? (Granted, they may be somewhat different technologies, but not that different...)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/autism-information.shtml ... Quick info: To lower risk of autism, Dr. Cannell recommends at least 5,000 IU of vitamin D3 per day for pregnant women. For autistic children, Dr. Cannell recommends at least 2,000 IU of vitamin D3 per every 25 pounds of body weight per day, with frequent [blood test] monitoring of 25(OH)D, targeting 100 ng/mL (250 nmol/L)."
"It is plausible that vitamin D deficiency is a major contributing factor to the onset and progression of autism. Though only still a theory, first put forth by Vitamin D Council Executive Director Dr. John Cannell, the idea of a major role for vitamin D in the etiology of autism is gaining momentum. From Harvard scientists to Swedish research teams, more and more scientists are examining the possible link between vitamin D deficiency and autism in the hopes that Cannell's theory will hold up against scientific scrutiny -- what would herald the discovery of a simple, natural solution to an increasingly-common, and very tragic, condition.
Yes, "The Light of Other Days" was a great book in terms of thinking about, by analogy, privacy in the compuyter age. See also David Brin's non-fiction book, "The Transparent Society" on the theme you raise of symmetry and asymmetry in recording.
http://www.davidbrin.com/transparent.htm
I like your proposal, especially because it has a basic income as part of it: "What is left over, is divvied out to all adults in the nation as an equal proportional check, to do with as they please. That's how the rest of the new money gets into circulation." That is also called "social credit", and indeed it is important that the government gets new money first, and not the banks, which is a great thing about your proposal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
You've probably seen "Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed"?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=money+as+debt+ii
Here is a website about creating local currencies if you pursue your interest in currency at the local level: ... is a group of people from a small community who all agree to exchange goods and services with each other without the need for cash. "
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
"LETS
Still, a big problem with designing currency is it serves two separate purposes, which get at the issue you raised of money vs. wealth. One purpose is a store of value (so, "wealth"), the other is to signal demand (which is not exactly "money", but is similar). These are related purposes (because you can use wealth to signal demand, or you can process demand to create wealth), but they are not the same.
If you want to store value abstractly, you want something like what you outline -- some sort of commodity (gold, land, energy, ram chips, grain, whatever). Granted, some commodities may be better than other -- gold historically has been useful, as grain molds and ram chips become obsolete. (Though, once we have nuclear fusion, something like gold might be produced cheaply, the same as how aluminum used to be worth more than gold and platinum, but now we throw aluminum away because it has become cheap through technological innovation. Or even through, as mentioned on your linked home site, finding some "forgotten" big mining opportunity in some country like Afghanistan.)
The problem with running a big economy on gold or whatever is that the biggest issue is to signal demand. Think of this as like in a factory with "Kanban" tokens. From (more homework? :-) Or you may know this from automotive days?):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
"An important determinant of the success of production scheduling based on "pushing" the demand is the quality of the demand forecast that can receive such "push." Kanban, by contrast, is part of an approach of receiving the "pull" from the demand. Therefore, the supply or production is determined according to the actual demand of the customers. In contexts where supply time is lengthy and demand is difficult to forecast, the best one can do is to respond quickly to observed demand. This is exactly what a kanban system can help with: It is used as a demand signal that immediately propagates through the supply chain. This can be used to ensure that intermediate stocks held in the supply chain are better managed, usually smaller. Where the supply response cannot be quick enough to meet actual demand fluctuations, causing significant lost sales, then stock building may be deemed as appropriate which can be achieved by issuing more kanban. Taiichi Ohno states that to be effective kanban must follow strict rules of use[4] (Toyota, for example, has six simple rules, below) and that close monitoring of these rules is a never-ending task to ensure that the kanban does what is required."
Kanban tokens can be anything, like a ball or a basket. They don't have value in themselves; they just signal demand within the system (of course, outside a controlled factory, there could be counterfeiting of tokens). Fiat dollars have something of this role in the economy, too. Fi
http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2010/08/16/is-our-technology-sapping-our-brains/
Good points, and I hope you are right. :-) Still, as in that later link I added in a reply, apathy is a big issue too, that you indirectly raise:
"Ignorance, Apathy, and Greed"
http://www.progress.org/fold21.htm
"So, greed, apathy, and ignorance are all related. Greed depends on the absence of sympathy, and it benefits from ignorance about a social problem. Apathy can be reduced if there is less ignorance and less greed. Ignorance is reinforced by apathy, since apathetic folks don't care to obtain the knowledge which would reduce their apathy. Greed exploits the ignorance of the majority who do not have sufficient sympathy to counter the greedy faction. "
And there are also larger "herd" social dynamics of systems, as social pendulums swing back and forth.
But even if you are right, the system still won't work given apathy, ignorance, and greed unless some committed people are out there doing good-for-most-everyone stuff. From:
"What Social Science Can Tell Us About Social Change"
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science.html
"Third, the change agents have to understand a key difference between themselves and other people. Most people are focused on the joys, pleasures, and necessities of their everyday lives, and will not leave these routines unless those routines are disrupted, whereas change agents sacrifice their everyday lives -- family, schooling, career -- to work on social change every waking minute. This means that change agents must be patient for unexpected social circumstances to create disruption, or else find effective ways to disrupt everyday life without alienating those they wish to become supporters of their cause."
Why bother? Well, historically lots of big systems collapse with suffering if just left entropically to meander on their own:
"Beyond Civilization" book review
http://www.swans.com/library/art9/mws042.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Civilization
Except that article is about, in part, what Germany was like before WWII. So, this stuff can happen from social stresses (granted, their was an economic legacy from WWI).
With DRM being built into so many things, and laws being passed about software patents, etc., and the ACTA treaty, and so on, there are counterpoints, even if I would like to believe you are right. :-)
Sorry, but you most likely have not looked at the data. Just one example:
"Vitamin D Deficiency Is Widespread And On The Increase"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630143523.htm
"A new report issued by the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) and published in the scientific journal Osteoporosis International1, shows that populations across the globe are suffering from the impact of low levels of vitamin D. The problem is widespread and on the increase, with potentially severe repercussions for overall health and fracture rates."
Now, ask yourself, why did you make that reply without looking around a little more?