And Smalltalk's more descriptive message passing syntax of "Foo x: 10 y: 20". instead of "new Foo(10, 20);"
And Smalltalk's extendable control syntax...
And Smalltalk's "doesNotUnderstand" concept for proxying.
And Smalltalk's become: method.
And Smalltalk's ability to rethrow exceptions...
And Smalltalk's multi-generational garbage collector...
And so on...
One step at a time...
If only the ParcPlace suits had not been so greedy when Sun wanted to use Smalltalk in set top devices, and instead Sun turned to a Frankenstein "Plan B". http://fargoagile.com/joomla/content/view/15/26/
"When I became V.P. of Development at ParcPlace-Digitalk in 1996, Bill Lyons (then CEO) told me the same story about Sun and VW. According to Bill, at some point in the early '90's when Adele was still CEO, Sun approached ParcPlace for a license to use VW (probably ObjectWorks at the time) in some set top box project they were working on. Sun wanted to use a commercially viable OO language with a proven track record. At the time ParcPlace was licensing Smalltalk for >$100 a copy. Given the volume that Sun was quoting, PP gave Sun a firm quote on the order of $100/copy. Sun was willing to pay at most $9-10/copy for the Smalltalk licenses. Sun was not willing to go higher and PP was unwilling to go lower, so nothing ever happened and Sun went its own way with its own internally developed language (Oak...Java). The initial development of Oak might well have predated the discussions between Sun and PP, but it was PP's unwillingness to go lower on the price of Smalltalk that gave Oak its green light within Sun (according to Bill anyway). Bill went on to lament that had PP played its cards right, Smalltalk would have been the language used by Sun and the language that would have ruled the Internet. Obviously, you can take that with a grain of salt. I don't know if Bill's story to me was true (he certainly seemed to think it was), but it might be confirmable by Adele. If it is true, it is merely another sad story of what might have been and how close Smalltalk might have come to universal acceptance."
How much people forget...
Of course, fifteen years later, Java is not that bad... Most of the bugs are out. There are some good libraries. There is a better garbage collector... And so on...
I agree illegal immigration has reduced the incentives in the US to automate agriculture for decades. And I say that as someone who was long interested in agricultural robotics since the 1980s, but there was little money for such research. Ultimately, because organic agriculture has been knowledge and labor intensive, robotics will help farmers produce large quantities of cheap organic food without as much pesticides, conventional fertilizers, or widespread irrigation, by precision irrigation, robots that can pick insects of plants, and other things. (Still, many people do like to be around growing plants... So I'm not saying we have to automate all of this, or that we should, just that we could...)
Still, the alternative to illegals is sometimes cheap imports from places with relatively cheap labor (like from China).
We would be importing, say, cheap sugar from South America, and sugar is healthier than corn syrup (even as raw sugar can be unhealthy too) except for import duties on imported sugar, created mostly for the US farm lobbies to appease corn growers. http://www.fas.usda.gov/itp/imports/ussugar.asp So, instead the typical US consumer is paying more to have their pancreas destroyed by HFCS and become diabetic.
We have not had much illegal immigration for factory work in the USA, but we still have lost a lot of jobs both to imports but even more to increased productivity in the USA. See the graphs here: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-not-dead.html "US Manufacturing is alive and well. The real issue is manufacturing employment, which is dropping like a stone. And the reason for the drop is an increase in productivity."
Ultimately, even preventing illegal immigration will not fix these overall trends and the effects on US jobs, even as above, I agree that having people around willing to do dangerous jobs for little pay distorts the labor market and affects what things we choose to automate, and it also removes the likeliehood there will be anyone around to blow the whistle on things like agricultural pollution. (So, we have polluted watertables instead...)
Eventually though, robotics are going to be cheaper than illegal immigrants. It's only a matter of time with all the continuing advances (including ones driven by the military for various reasons). Of course, by then, most US jobs will be going the same way, as indicated by factor work. The fact is, only about 1% of US employment is in agriculture, down from 50% a century ago. Fixing the illegal problem in agriculture won't make much of a difference in that sense because we are talking such a small percent of the workforce, even as those unskilled agricultural jobs illegal immigrants take are otherwise great for people who want a job and like the outdoors (if they paid well).
US manufacturing employment has dropped from about 30% fifty years ago to about 12% now (and continues to drop). I'm not sure how many illegal immigrants work in US manufacturing? Maybe you know? Again though, even if we tried to employ more people in US manufacturing, between automation and offshoring, the trend is towards less employment. (I predict, like agriculture, we will see 1% of the workforce still in manufacturing in a couple decades...)
That leaves services. But many services can be offshored, and most services are optional. By the time we have 1% of people growing all our food, and 1% making all our stuff, then I think we need a different model for our economy than 98% of the population paying each other for hair cuts and investment advice you can get for free from friends or through the internet.
Then, if there is possible resource contention, rather than pass laws about IDs, it would seem that the most essential thing to do is to help everyone to use their imagination as "The Ultimate Resource" http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/ to address any potential scarcity problems and create material abundance for all. People have already been doing that for hundreds of years, for example, Benjamin Franklin who made the pot bellied stove and bifocals and refused to patent any of that.
By the way, fossil fuels are not cheap overall, they are just profitable to a few. http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461 "According to a 2000 study for the Department of Energy, there is a significant cost attached to the mere fact of our dependence. Supply disruptions, price hikes, and loss of wealth suffered through the oil market upheavals have cost the U.S. economy around $7 trillion (1998 dollars) over the 30 years from 1970 to 2000....
Milton Copulus, the head of the National Defense Council Foundation, has a different view. And as the former principal energy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a 12-year member of the National Petroleum Council, a Reagan White House alum, and an advisor to half a dozen U.S. Energy Secretaries, various Secretaries of Defense, and two directors of the CIA, he knows his stuff. After taking into account the direct and indirect costs of oil, the economic costs of oil supply disruption, and military expenditures, he estimates the true cost of oil at a stunning $480 a barrel."
Coal has huge costs in environmental damage and health costs (from mercury pollution and other things). It actually takes more electricity to make gasoline from crude oil that in would take to make an electrical vehicle go the same distance a regular car goes on one gallon. http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
It's been known since the 1980s that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels (or nuclear) when you account for external costs and risks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power "Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"
Anyway, please name ten jobs you do not think could *not* be fairly easily automated over the next twenty years as robotics and AI continue to advance (at least to the point where one human can do the work of ten now)?
So, as I see it, the urgent need is to rethink the basis of our economy before then.
There is room for quadrillions of people in the solar system if we build space habitats, so IMHO talk of birth control based on resource constraints is premature.:-)
"The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps" http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizi
A list of current robotics videos I put together, with robots doing everything from milk cows, prune grape vines, throw and catch cell phones, put laundry in washing machines, invent and test new theories in yeast genetics, and do autopsies (the last one isn't a video, thankfully): http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
So, ID cards and worries about illegal immigrants are all a distraction from rethinking the economy along the lines of having some mix of a basic income, local subsistence production from 3D printing and organic gardening, a gift economy like GNU/Linux, better resource-based planning, making work into play, a spread of local currencies and LETS systems, and lots of other possibilities I helped organize here for moving beyond a jobless recovery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
If you want to worry, worry about how to build an economy where we get past the irony of using abundant military robots to enforce a scarcity-based economic system designed around getting humans to work like robots.:-)
With such a schedule, please make sure you get enough vitamin D3 (the sunlight vitamin), like from supplements and have your vitamin D3 levels checked with a 25(OH)D blood test: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml """ We predict that treatment with physiological doses of vitamin D3 (between 4,000-10,000 IU/day from all sources, including sun, food and supplements) along with periodic monitoring of blood calcidiol and calcium levels will become routine. [Zittermann A. Vitamin D in preventive medicine: are we ignoring the evidence? Br J of Nutr. 2003;89:552-572. Holick M. Vitamin D: A Millennium Perspective. J Cell Biochem. 2003;88:296-307.] Research indicates it will help several vitamin D deficiency-associated diseases such as: autism, autoimmune illness, cancer, chronic pain, depression, diabetes, heart disease, hyperparathyroidism, hypertension, influenza, myopathy (neuromuscular disorders), and osteoporosis. """
Most people in the USA are vitamin D deficient from our indoor lifestyle, but a schedule like would just about ensures it.
My wife is a night owl, and I'm not, another set of issues... I stayed up late a lot when I met her, and she just assumed that meant I was a night owl.:-) With that said, I've seen both her and my sleep patterns shift over time in different ways, including when having a kid... So, these rhythms can changes sometimes. But, there are advantages and disadvantages to all sorts of things. Getting up late on, say, the US East Coast means you can better connect to people in certain other timezones. Because we both work at home, and I need somewhat less sleep than her, we see a lot of each other anyway. If we both worked outside the home, this would be much more problematical. She has trouble getting up for a 9-5 job (she needs many alarm clocks) -- which her mom growing up probably saw as laziness; but she can happily work very hard on stuff long into the small hours of the morning after everyone else has given up for the day in exhaustion...
We homeschool, and our kid is following her sleep patterns... And it creates another issue, since while we're happy to do afternoon and evening things, many homeschoolers, like most people, seem to be early in the morning kind of people...
And sadly, night driving is several times more dangerous as far as frequency of accidents, since many drivers get tired late at night but push it anyway, and even with good headlights, you see a lot less at night than during the day. http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/21/car-accident-times-forbeslife-cx_he_0121driving.html "Nationwide, 49% of fatal crashes happen at night, with a fatality rate per mile of travel about three times as high as daytime hours. Of people killed at night, roughly two-thirds aren't wearing restraints. During the day, the percentage of unrestrained fatalities tends to be under half."
So, my advice for night owls: * Use vitamin D supplements or UV-B lamps and have regular 25(OH)D blood tests; * Marry someone with a similar schedule (or, work at home together), and don't assume about people you're seeing; * Homeschool; and * Drive a Volvo or other extra safe car and wear your seat belt.
Well, I'd say those same advice for anyone,:-) but those all can be a bigger issues for people with different rhythms.
Every person should have a right to draw from the industrial commons, and so be able to run such websites for free without ads (Alaska has a partial basic income with the Alaska Permanent Fund); see: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html """ A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
* it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
* it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
* it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered. Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour. But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment. There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low - and slowly increasing - basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added. Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income - among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature - on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects - is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network. """
Just to note that curing vitamin D deficiency (very inexpensive, either from sunlight or supplements) can prevent many cases of cancer: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml as well as many cases of heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, influenza, autism, and more (there are different degrees of scientific evidence for those). See: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
There are other inexpensive treatments to prevent or cure cancer with various degrees of anecdotal evidence (like IV vitamin C as a cancer treatment), http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/OtherCancers/2938 but curing vitamin D deficiency (now widespread as we all spend more time indoors at computers) has lots of scientific evidence about its value in relation to cancer and a wide variety of other things because vitamin D is essential to regulating the expression of thousands of gene. That is why being vitamin D deficient has such widespread negative effects -- sort of like deleting thousands of files at random on your hard drive... What's amazing is that humans survive at all with so little sunlight... So big is this effect of vitamin D deficiency on health that for Western Europe alone it has been suggested:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum" http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
Where are the US CDC, FDA, AMA, and other acronyms doing about all this? Good question...
Essentially, the US RDA for vitamin D is about ten times too low, as it was set decades ago for healthy bones, not a healthy heart, a healthy brain, a healthy immune system, or a healthy weight. The toxicity fears have also been overblown (vitamin A is much more toxic, and according to Dr. Cannell who runs the vitamin D council website, many people through supplements have too much vitamin A which interferes with vitamin D.) http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-december.shtml
Although just how much vitamin D as supplements you need depends on things like your weight, your skin color, your behavior outdoors, your latitude, your personal biochemestry, and so on, so regular blood tests are important (even though people still disagree over what the optimum level should be). Example: http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html
The average light skinned human adult in a bathing suit at moderate latitudes under noonday summer sun will make 10,000 to 20,000 IUs of vitamin D in twenty minutes or so in their skin, and up to 50,000 units before their skin turns pink (sunburns are of course bad for you). The reaction is self
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt """ Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will:... Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes. """
For more on the history of schooling globally:
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance " http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm "The history of the development of Western schooling is a complex and meandering thing, but I think it is worth looking at in a very abbreviated form here. A little insight into the logics and basis for contemporary compulsory schooling might be useful to social ecologists...."
The bottom line: schooling and education have very little to do with each other... Schooling was designed to dumb people down to produce mindless factory workers, obedient soldiers, and compliant consumers. Education helps a person grow into someone who can be part of or help create a healthy society while also creating joy and health for themselves and their family, friends, and neighbors.
I agree with you on the vouchers part to some extent; the better solution may be to just give all the money directly to the parents, as I suggest here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html """ New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. """
Really good teachers would have nothing to fear from such a plan, because their would be enough money floating around so they could have flexible
On: "The problem is that the dumb kids lack the mental function necessary to comprehend what they have just downloaded. "
There may be some truth to that, but the deeper problem is more like this, from John Taylor Gatto: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm """ The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh. The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior." """
Schools *intentionally* dumb people down. Schools may stuff people with facts, but that does not make a whole intelligent person able to think and act -- it generally creates quite the opposite, someone unable to think for themselves. And that is actually the point, as a form of social control to implement a vision of a pyramidal society, as John Taylor Gatto suggests here: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm """ I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. Fi
That's insightful, to see schools from a different viewpoint, like any business. Schools exist primarily for other reasons than to educate. See John Taylor Gatto or John Holt. From Gatto: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
And schools generally can't be fixed because none of the major players in the school system are rewarded for children becoming whole human beings capable of healthy participation in a healthy society:
"Power ÷ 22" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm """ PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more) SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests. THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than prin
The primary reason school was created was to dumb people down as a form of social control to create factory workers (and soldiers) for a 19th century factory-based economy, according to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm """ As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched. """
Or:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt """ Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes. """
So, that's why pouring more money into schools does not work, because they just do this dumbing down process better. Oh, you may get kids stuffed with more facts, you may get kids with better grades, you may get kids who are better are regurgitating state doctrine, but you won't get good human beings who can have a happy whole life. A whole person comes from an engagement with the whole of life, not from doing paperwork all day in a minimum security day-prison from ages four to eighteen. The entire system must be changed from assumptions through practices, and school is so resistant to fundamental change that the best approach is probably just to shut it down entirely and start over in new ways using the same resources in entirely different ways.
For example, the central pillar of most schooling, grading, is harmful to children and communities in all sorts of ways:
"From Degrading to De-Grading" http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm """ 1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself.... 2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks.... 3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.... 4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective.... 5. Grades distort the curriculum.... 6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning.... 7. Grades encourage cheating.... 8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships
Except that the problem is not solved if (and I say if, since it is controversial) violent games contribute to broader social violence and dysfunction.
We do know for sure that spending too much time indoors leads to vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunlight that leads to grumpy people with lots of health problems. Of course, reading anything too much indoors (even sacred texts) can do that too. So, if you are an indoor gamer or a reader of any sort, please at least get vitamin D from supplements of some sort: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
There is also the bigger issue that advertising creates demand for these violent products. And like cigarettes, violent games and toys are often targeted to very young children in various ways (Joe Camel, etc.). As talked about here:
"The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know" http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X their is an unhealthy alliance between toy makers, fast food makers, video game makers, media makers, and licensed product makers to bombard young boys 24X7 with violence-related images to sell product. So, for example, a ten year old boy gets a Star Wars "Happy" meal at McDonalds, watches Star Wars cartoons at home, sleeps under Star Wars blankets, buys Star Wars lightsabers, plays Star Wars video games, sees Star Wars related commercials at random times even when watching other things on TV, has Star Wars pictures on their school notebook covers, and so on. This is 24X7 infiltration of the kid's mind with the implicit suggestion that violence and wars are the best way to solve conflicts, and that there are clearly defined good guys (us) and clearly defined bad guys (by whatever means, color, shape, speech, dress, etc.), and that military robots are a good idea (rather than using technology to bring abundance to all). Rather than define the Emperor as a mentally ill and financially obese person needing help, he is just "evil" and only killing him is the solution. And kids get locked in a cycle of endless tightly scripted play at home, at school, outdoors -- anywhere, where there is only one solution to a conflict -- killing. There are a lot of other reasons kids are hurting, but this continual onslaught by for-profit companies 24X7 just adds to it.
So, while it is easy to blame the parents for not regulating everything a child engages in, clearly the job of parenting has become much harder over the last few decades in this regard (even since the "family values" Reagan Administration gave this alliance their blessing), and parents are not getting much help in general. It takes a village to raise a child.
Everyone acts so concerned about physical predation by strangers on a child (which very rarely happens even if it is a tragedy when it does). But people in the USA just accept mental predation on young children as a given in our society through the logic of profit-making and an unregulated "free market". But the fact is, any marketplace is a social construction:
"The Mythology of Wealth" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 Venezuela has decided to change the nature of that social construction. I don't agree w
With its larger economy, and if you included interest payments and all related expenses (including incurred future obligations like for disabled soldiers), the USA spends about a trillion dollars a year on the military, so the more accurate figure may be closer to 8% of the US GDP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
There is nothing wrong with spending some on security if the focus is mainly about mutual security (so, everyone feels secure and part of a mutual security community, as in "We're all secure together."): http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430 and intrinsic security (sustainable resilient infrastructure as civil defense, as in "We're secure in our core infrastructure regardless of typhoon, earthquake, electromagnetic storm, crop failure, plague, or bombs."): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
But the USA has pursued mostly a doctrine of unilateral security ("We're secure because you're insecure") and extrinsic security ("We're secure because we have soldiers everywhere guarding insecure installations.") This approach persists because it is extremely profitable for a narrow part of society, as two-time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC) said:
"War is a Racket" http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
For all the money spent, the USA is one of the most insecure countries on the planet (with long energy supply lines, long food supply lines, long goods supply lines, an unhardened and unecrypted civilian communications infrastructure, no comprehensive national health care system scaled for disasters, and in many other ways). This can't be fixed by spending more money the same way on more soldiers and more weapons -- the USA passed the law of diminishing returns on that decades ago. These fundamental insecurities can only be fixed by spending the money differently.
Likewise, for a fraction of one year's defense budget, the USA could put in place local flexible manufacturing facilities that remove the need to defend shipping lines to China, as I suggest here:
"21,000 Flexible Public Fabrication Facilities a
And that argument essentially is made here, which discusses what to do about an unhealthy alliance between toymakers and children's media makers (and food companies), that started with the media deregulation during the "family values" Reagan Administration:
"The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know" http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
Some comments on that book in my review of it here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html "A few key ideas from the book:
The deregulation of children's media during the early 1980s (Reagan administration) led to an alliance of media companies and toy companies and other companies (like food companies); the result of this is an immersion for many children in an interlinked experience of seeing media about violence, purchasing related action figures and toys and video games, and having these items promoted every place they go (whether to buy fast-food or just in other kid's homes). This is a big change from the media environment from the 1960s and 1970s that many of today's parents grew up in.
The authors point out that the behaviors promoted by this alliance tend to be very sex-role stereotypical, as in boys need to be fighters and girls need to be princesses. For many children, the authors suggest they can get locked into a pattern of endless cycling through stereotyped behaviors. While it is true that knights and princesses have long been important parts of many children's play (so this is not intended to dismiss that), what has changed for some children is the tone and extremeness of those experience because of the high degree of continual interrelated media/toy/game/food saturation. Rather than children being able to express themselves building on those knight/princess themes in their own unique ways, because of the integrated marketing, for many children there becomes only one way to be a knight or a princess (as defined by some media and accompanying purchased toys to be used in only very precise and narrow ways). The book focuses mainly on the boy part of this equation. One of the authors has writings on the female stereotyping aspect of media and other issues, described here: http://www.dianeelevin.com/writing.html
The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options.... So, whether you are a dove or a hawk, a progressive or a conservative, I would hope there is at least some common ground on concern about excessive (and often dysfunctional) war-themed play being promoted by an alliance of media companies, toy companies, game companies, and food companies for their mutual profit. Still, this is just one more set of difficult issues to navigate while parenting. Some families do better on some issues, some do better on others. Again, as Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige say in "The War Play Dilemma", there are no easy answers for every situation or every family -- otherwise it would not be such a "dilemma". "
Well, I guess people agree with you that citing two experts in the field on child development and violent media and games is "trolling" in the context of a discussion on banning violent video games (people who outline a nuanced view if anyone bothered to look at the book). The link again:
"The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know" http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
The "dilemma" in the title is the conflict between helping kids work through developmental issues about violence vs. sending a message about violence being undesirable. I wrote a review of that book here with the key points: http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html """ From the table of contents, here is the list of topics in their "Guidelines for Resolving the War Play Dilemma" (each topic has a few pages of explanation and suggestions):
* Guideline 1: Limit Children's Exposure to Violence
* Guideline 2: Help Children Engage in Creative and Meaningful Dramatic Play
* Guideline 3: Learn as Much as You Can [about the media scenes kids view]
* Guideline 4: In Children's War Play, Address the Issues
* Guideline 5: Work to Counteract the Lessons About Violence and Stereotyping
* Guideline 6: Make Keeping the Play Safe You Highest Priority
* Guideline 7: Limit the Use of Highly Structured Violent Toys
* Guideline 8: Work to Counteract Highly Stereotyped and Limiting Gender Roles
* Guideline 9: Create an Ongoing Dialog Between Educators and Parents
In my own life, I grew up being taught in public school that I lived in a modern day Athens. As I've grow older, and paid more attention to politics and where taxes go, it feels more to me more like I live in a modern day Sparta.:-( Here is a long list of where many of our tax dollars have gone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_history_events
I was surprised to learn how long that list is, regardless of how one feels about the value of any specific event.
I've come to agree with the late Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC Retired), based on his decades of combat experience, that "War is a Racket": http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm """
Whatever you think of the rest of what I wrote, please look into the issue of vitamin D deficiency I mentioned, both for yourself and to help your family or friends or neighbors: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
As a stay-at-home Dad (to some extent, and homeschooling) and also technology person, I've spent a lot of time thinking on this stuff, reading about it, and writing on it, (as in, years), so I have all the links etc. ready to go.
As I say elsewhere, I don't think censorship is the answer to this sort of problem. Actually, I also think Chavez has the problem wrong. Violence and addictive-seeming consumption of social media happens in large part due to social stress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park The key is to reduce the stress, and to direct people to more positive activities.
As Bucky Fuller said: http://challenge.bfi.org/movie "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
That's really what Chavez is doing wrong with this, and some other things. It's sad. Venezuela could repeal the Berne convention on copyrights, institute a basic income, expand the public library system instead of the public school system, grind up rock for fertilizer, promote cooperative games, and a variety of other more essential and effective things to create prosperity for all there. Banning the violent video games does not address any of these core issues.
Twenty years from now, when renewables replace oil (a major revenue for Venezuela) through exponential growth, and AI and robotics and better design (a better RepRap) can produce really cheap products in any industrialized country (and so they will flood in from abroad), Venezuela will be in bad shape unless it has transitioned beyond capitalist economics entirely
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms """ The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear """
Freedom from want includes things like redistribution, but also socially-directed investment to create health and material abundance for all. Freedom from fear includes things like reducing violence in a society. In this case, the chose method of banning the games to free people from fear and want can be seen as conflicting with freedom of speech and expression.
I think taxing the games would have been a more sensible approach to the externality created by violent media: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality and either redistributing the tax revenue equally to everyone, or using it to combat violence somehow and promote the creation of more pro-social media.
A tax on violent media is kind of like saying people could shout "fire" in a crowded theater, but if they do it as a prank and it makes trouble for everyone, they are going to pay a serious fine to reimburse everyone for the trouble they cause.
Still, it is hard to say how much different games (violent or not) really harm society. A worse general problem is that people spending too much time indoors playing any sort of game (or even reading books) become vitamin D deficient. http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/ So, should all games and books have a tax on them for that?
And, children do need to work through issues of violence, even as they also need to be told that violence (and other aggression) is anti-social, which creates a dilemma (discussed in this book, which recommends reducing exposure to violent media, but not banning it): http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
I wrote a review of that book here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html """ From the table of contents, here is the list of topics in their "Guidelines for Resolving the War Play Dilemma" (each topic has a few pages of explanation and suggestions):
* Guideline 1: Limit Children's Exposure to Violence
* Guideline 2: Help Children Engage in Creative and Meaningful Dramatic Play
* Guideline 3: Learn as Much as You Can [about the media scenes kids view]
* Guideline 4: In Children's War Play, Address the Issues
* Guideline 5: Work to Counteract the Lessons About Violence and Stereotyping
* Guideline 6: Make Keeping the Play Safe You Highest Priority
* Guideline 7: Limit the Use of Highly Structured Violent Toys
* Guideline 8: Work to Counteract Highly Stereotyped and Limiting Gender Roles
* Guideline 9: Create an Ongoing Dialog Between Educators and Parents """
On the broader topic of freedom, consider:
"Libertarianism: Marxism of the Right" http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/ """ The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simp
An alternative approach instead of censorship is to just put a heavy tax on certain media, because of the cost it may impose on society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality """ In economics, an externality or spillover of an economic transaction is an impact on a party that is not directly involved in the transaction. In such a case, prices do not reflect the full costs or benefits in production or consumption of a product or service. An advantageous impact is called an external benefit or positive externality, while a detrimental impact is called an external cost or negative externality. Producers and consumers in a market may either not bear all of the costs or not reap all of the benefits of the economic activity. For example, manufacturing that causes air pollution imposes costs on the whole society, while fire-proofing a home improves the fire safety of neighbors.
In a competitive market, the existence of externalities would cause either too much or too little of the good to be produced or consumed in terms of overall costs and benefits to society. If there exist external costs such as pollution, the good will be overproduced by a competitive market, as the producer does not take into account the external costs when producing the good. If there are external benefits, such as in areas of education or public safety, too little of the good would be produced by private markets as producers and buyers do not take into account the external benefits to others. Here, overall cost and benefit to society is defined as the sum of the economic benefits and costs for all parties involved. """
Media that contributes to social violence, or which displaces time that could be spent on learning better solutions to social conflicts, could be considered as creating a negative externality. More on this general issue, about the dilemma between helping kids work through developmental needs to move beyond violence versus sending a message about avoiding violent solutions: http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
Here is another first hand report on someone from the US heading to Venezuela and then heading back to the USA, realizing they would never fit in for a variety of reasons (even as they admired aspects of the changes there): http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110706_mcr_evolution.shtml
Intrinsic security (sustainable, resilient infrastructure) is a better answer than extrinsic security (soldier-defended infrastructure). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
So, we may need to move to a society that is moving beyond the profit motive to have true security. To do that, we need a basic income, an expanding gift economy, improved local subsistence with 3D printing and organic gardening, more resource-based planning, a push to turn work into play, and other similar things, if we are to be reasonably secure. As long as war is profitable and profits are worshiped, we will have endless war.
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/rethinking_human_nature/ """ In Born to Be Good, Keltner takes Eckman's insights one step further by proposing a new model of human nature that turns the conventional one on its head. Instead of the survival of the fittest, Keltner proposes the survival of the kindest. He demonstrates that in early human society prosocial behavior was the most effective survival strategy. Early humans needed to take care of "vulnerable, big-brained off spring," a job that required two parents. As a result, males evolved to know their own off - spring and to take care of them, which in turn created a fragile sexual monogamy. The hunting stronger, faster, and ferocious prey required teamwork, which turn facilitated the development of communication. Gossiping amongst the lower ranks of early humans put pressure on high-status members to build consensus rather than rule through force.
Keltner argues that emotions work to promote kindness, humanity, and respect between people, which is of immense evolutionary value. Embarrassment is a way of restoring social order by eliciting reconciliation and forgiveness after a transgression. Touching triggers a cascade of emotions, such as devotion, trust, and even a sense of reward. Compassion holds a special place in the canon of emotions (for Darwin it was the strongest instinct). Its physiological embodiment-- via the many touch points of the vagus nerve--encompasses our communicative system, heart rate, and release of oxytocin, which sends feelings of trust, love, and warmth throughout the body.
In Born to Be Good, Keltner shows that people receive significant emotional rewards when acting for the benefit of others, even when it means operating against one's self-interest. Our ability to work for the greater good comes from fundamental instincts honed over millions of years. If Keltner is right, and I think he is, our most modern problems will be solved by our most ancient responses. """
So, as Marshall Brain suggests, the end point of capitalism is the starvation of all people who do not have a lot of capital (because, when their labor is worthless, they will not be able to pay for food, clothes, rent, medical costs, etc.). Everything from milking cows to doing genetic research is being automated:
"VMS robotic milking" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPqWpOxQmIs
"Robot Scientist Makes Discovery" http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/02/robot-scientist.html
Are you a billionaire? Otherwise, by capitalist standards, if your work can eventually be automated, your life will then be worthless in their eyes, and you should then logically starve once everything you can do of value to billionaires has been automated. And don't say you'll just get another job, because as Marshall Brain suggests, that one will be automated too once we pass some critical thresholds in AI and robotics. That's like saying you will hide under a tree to stay dry in a rainstorm and when that tree gets wet through you will go find another.
The only question is, do we put in place social reforms now, or do we wait until even more people are starving? Well, there's an obvious answer to that in a capitalist society, and as American financier Jay Gould said after hiring strikebreakers, it is "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
The real reason why violent (and other) games are evil in a way is just that they are a distraction from dealing with that very serious issue of rethinking our society on some better ba
Gamesdon't have to use violence as a setting. Groups of people can cooperate to overcome natural disasters or other challenges. People building with Lego together does not have to be either violent or competitive to be fun. See Alfie Kohn's book: http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254
I don't think censoring as a society is the answer. But censoring as a parent for age/development appropriate levels to create a nurturing environment for kids makes a lot of sense IHMO (up to some point).
Slashdot Mirror
See the Smalltalk browser:
http://onsmalltalk.com/on-the-smalltalk-browser
Now if only Java had Smalltalk's blocks.
And Smalltalk's more descriptive message passing syntax of "Foo x: 10 y: 20". instead of "new Foo(10, 20);"
And Smalltalk's extendable control syntax...
And Smalltalk's "doesNotUnderstand" concept for proxying.
And Smalltalk's become: method.
And Smalltalk's ability to rethrow exceptions...
And Smalltalk's multi-generational garbage collector...
And so on...
One step at a time...
If only the ParcPlace suits had not been so greedy when Sun wanted to use Smalltalk in set top devices, and instead Sun turned to a Frankenstein "Plan B".
http://fargoagile.com/joomla/content/view/15/26/
"When I became V.P. of Development at ParcPlace-Digitalk in 1996, Bill Lyons (then CEO) told me the same story about Sun and VW. According to Bill, at some point in the early '90's when Adele was still CEO, Sun approached ParcPlace for a license to use VW (probably ObjectWorks at the time) in some set top box project they were working on. Sun wanted to use a commercially viable OO language with a proven track record. At the time ParcPlace was licensing Smalltalk for >$100 a copy. Given the volume that Sun was quoting, PP gave Sun a firm quote on the order of $100/copy. Sun was willing to pay at most $9-10/copy for the Smalltalk licenses. Sun was not willing to go higher and PP was unwilling to go lower, so nothing ever happened and Sun went its own way with its own internally developed language (Oak...Java). The initial development of Oak might well have predated the discussions between Sun and PP, but it was PP's unwillingness to go lower on the price of Smalltalk that gave Oak its green light within Sun (according to Bill anyway). Bill went on to lament that had PP played its cards right, Smalltalk would have been the language used by Sun and the language that would have ruled the Internet. Obviously, you can take that with a grain of salt. I don't know if Bill's story to me was true (he certainly seemed to think it was), but it might be confirmable by Adele. If it is true, it is merely another sad story of what might have been and how close Smalltalk might have come to universal acceptance."
How much people forget...
Of course, fifteen years later, Java is not that bad... Most of the bugs are out. There are some good libraries. There is a better garbage collector... And so on...
I agree illegal immigration has reduced the incentives in the US to automate agriculture for decades. And I say that as someone who was long interested in agricultural robotics since the 1980s, but there was little money for such research. Ultimately, because organic agriculture has been knowledge and labor intensive, robotics will help farmers produce large quantities of cheap organic food without as much pesticides, conventional fertilizers, or widespread irrigation, by precision irrigation, robots that can pick insects of plants, and other things. (Still, many people do like to be around growing plants... So I'm not saying we have to automate all of this, or that we should, just that we could...)
Still, the alternative to illegals is sometimes cheap imports from places with relatively cheap labor (like from China).
We would be importing, say, cheap sugar from South America, and sugar is healthier than corn syrup (even as raw sugar can be unhealthy too) except for import duties on imported sugar, created mostly for the US farm lobbies to appease corn growers.
http://www.fas.usda.gov/itp/imports/ussugar.asp
So, instead the typical US consumer is paying more to have their pancreas destroyed by HFCS and become diabetic.
We have not had much illegal immigration for factory work in the USA, but we still have lost a lot of jobs both to imports but even more to increased productivity in the USA. See the graphs here:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-not-dead.html
"US Manufacturing is alive and well. The real issue is manufacturing employment, which is dropping like a stone. And the reason for the drop is an increase in productivity."
Ultimately, even preventing illegal immigration will not fix these overall trends and the effects on US jobs, even as above, I agree that having people around willing to do dangerous jobs for little pay distorts the labor market and affects what things we choose to automate, and it also removes the likeliehood there will be anyone around to blow the whistle on things like agricultural pollution. (So, we have polluted watertables instead...)
Eventually though, robotics are going to be cheaper than illegal immigrants. It's only a matter of time with all the continuing advances (including ones driven by the military for various reasons). Of course, by then, most US jobs will be going the same way, as indicated by factor work. The fact is, only about 1% of US employment is in agriculture, down from 50% a century ago. Fixing the illegal problem in agriculture won't make much of a difference in that sense because we are talking such a small percent of the workforce, even as those unskilled agricultural jobs illegal immigrants take are otherwise great for people who want a job and like the outdoors (if they paid well).
US manufacturing employment has dropped from about 30% fifty years ago to about 12% now (and continues to drop). I'm not sure how many illegal immigrants work in US manufacturing? Maybe you know? Again though, even if we tried to employ more people in US manufacturing, between automation and offshoring, the trend is towards less employment. (I predict, like agriculture, we will see 1% of the workforce still in manufacturing in a couple decades...)
That leaves services. But many services can be offshored, and most services are optional. By the time we have 1% of people growing all our food, and 1% making all our stuff, then I think we need a different model for our economy than 98% of the population paying each other for hair cuts and investment advice you can get for free from friends or through the internet.
Then, if there is possible resource contention, rather than pass laws about IDs, it would seem that the most essential thing to do is to help everyone to use their imagination as "The Ultimate Resource"
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
to address any potential scarcity problems and create material abundance for all. People have already been doing that for hundreds of years, for example, Benjamin Franklin who made the pot bellied stove and bifocals and refused to patent any of that.
By the way, fossil fuels are not cheap overall, they are just profitable to a few. ...
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
"According to a 2000 study for the Department of Energy, there is a significant cost attached to the mere fact of our dependence. Supply disruptions, price hikes, and loss of wealth suffered through the oil market upheavals have cost the U.S. economy around $7 trillion (1998 dollars) over the 30 years from 1970 to 2000.
Milton Copulus, the head of the National Defense Council Foundation, has a different view. And as the former principal energy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a 12-year member of the National Petroleum Council, a Reagan White House alum, and an advisor to half a dozen U.S. Energy Secretaries, various Secretaries of Defense, and two directors of the CIA, he knows his stuff. After taking into account the direct and indirect costs of oil, the economic costs of oil supply disruption, and military expenditures, he estimates the true cost of oil at a stunning $480 a barrel."
Coal has huge costs in environmental damage and health costs (from mercury pollution and other things). It actually takes more electricity to make gasoline from crude oil that in would take to make an electrical vehicle go the same distance a regular car goes on one gallon.
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
It's been known since the 1980s that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels (or nuclear) when you account for external costs and risks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"
Anyway, please name ten jobs you do not think could *not* be fairly easily automated over the next twenty years as robotics and AI continue to advance (at least to the point where one human can do the work of ten now)?
My take on that:
"60 jobs that will rock the future... (not)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004216.html
So, as I see it, the urgent need is to rethink the basis of our economy before then.
There is room for quadrillions of people in the solar system if we build space habitats, so IMHO talk of birth control based on resource constraints is premature. :-)
"The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps"
http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizi
See for example Marshall Brain's writings:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
A list of current robotics videos I put together, with robots doing everything from milk cows, prune grape vines, throw and catch cell phones, put laundry in washing machines, invent and test new theories in yeast genetics, and do autopsies (the last one isn't a video, thankfully):
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
So, ID cards and worries about illegal immigrants are all a distraction from rethinking the economy along the lines of having some mix of a basic income, local subsistence production from 3D printing and organic gardening, a gift economy like GNU/Linux, better resource-based planning, making work into play, a spread of local currencies and LETS systems, and lots of other possibilities I helped organize here for moving beyond a jobless recovery:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
If you want to worry, worry about how to build an economy where we get past the irony of using abundant military robots to enforce a scarcity-based economic system designed around getting humans to work like robots. :-)
With such a schedule, please make sure you get enough vitamin D3 (the sunlight vitamin), like from supplements and have your vitamin D3 levels checked with a 25(OH)D blood test:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"""
We predict that treatment with physiological doses of vitamin D3 (between 4,000-10,000 IU/day from all sources, including sun, food and supplements) along with periodic monitoring of blood calcidiol and calcium levels will become routine. [Zittermann A. Vitamin D in preventive medicine: are we ignoring the evidence? Br J of Nutr. 2003;89:552-572. Holick M. Vitamin D: A Millennium Perspective. J Cell Biochem. 2003;88:296-307.] Research indicates it will help several vitamin D deficiency-associated diseases such as: autism, autoimmune illness, cancer, chronic pain, depression, diabetes, heart disease, hyperparathyroidism, hypertension, influenza, myopathy (neuromuscular disorders), and osteoporosis.
"""
Most people in the USA are vitamin D deficient from our indoor lifestyle, but a schedule like would just about ensures it.
My wife is a night owl, and I'm not, another set of issues... I stayed up late a lot when I met her, and she just assumed that meant I was a night owl. :-) With that said, I've seen both her and my sleep patterns shift over time in different ways, including when having a kid... So, these rhythms can changes sometimes. But, there are advantages and disadvantages to all sorts of things. Getting up late on, say, the US East Coast means you can better connect to people in certain other timezones. Because we both work at home, and I need somewhat less sleep than her, we see a lot of each other anyway. If we both worked outside the home, this would be much more problematical. She has trouble getting up for a 9-5 job (she needs many alarm clocks) -- which her mom growing up probably saw as laziness; but she can happily work very hard on stuff long into the small hours of the morning after everyone else has given up for the day in exhaustion...
We homeschool, and our kid is following her sleep patterns... And it creates another issue, since while we're happy to do afternoon and evening things, many homeschoolers, like most people, seem to be early in the morning kind of people...
And sadly, night driving is several times more dangerous as far as frequency of accidents, since many drivers get tired late at night but push it anyway, and even with good headlights, you see a lot less at night than during the day.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/21/car-accident-times-forbeslife-cx_he_0121driving.html
"Nationwide, 49% of fatal crashes happen at night, with a fatality rate per mile of travel about three times as high as daytime hours. Of people killed at night, roughly two-thirds aren't wearing restraints. During the day, the percentage of unrestrained fatalities tends to be under half."
So, my advice for night owls:
* Use vitamin D supplements or UV-B lamps and have regular 25(OH)D blood tests;
* Marry someone with a similar schedule (or, work at home together), and don't assume about people you're seeing;
* Homeschool; and
* Drive a Volvo or other extra safe car and wear your seat belt.
Well, I'd say those same advice for anyone, :-) but those all can be a bigger issues for people with different rhythms.
Every person should have a right to draw from the industrial commons, and so be able to run such websites for free without ads (Alaska has a partial basic income with the Alaska Permanent Fund); see:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
"""
A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
* it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
* it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
* it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered.
Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour.
But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment.
There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low - and slowly increasing - basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added.
Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income - among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature - on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects - is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network.
"""
Just to note that curing vitamin D deficiency (very inexpensive, either from sunlight or supplements) can prevent many cases of cancer:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml
as well as many cases of heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, influenza, autism, and more (there are different degrees of scientific evidence for those). See:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
But vitamin D supplements or sunbathing is so cheap, there is not profit in telling people about this...
"Treating Disease With Vitamin D"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"Why Michelle Obama is More Likely to Die From Breast Cancer than Hillary Clinton"
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html
There are other inexpensive treatments to prevent or cure cancer with various degrees of anecdotal evidence (like IV vitamin C as a cancer treatment),
http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/OtherCancers/2938
but curing vitamin D deficiency (now widespread as we all spend more time indoors at computers) has lots of scientific evidence about its value in relation to cancer and a wide variety of other things because vitamin D is essential to regulating the expression of thousands of gene. That is why being vitamin D deficient has such widespread negative effects -- sort of like deleting thousands of files at random on your hard drive... What's amazing is that humans survive at all with so little sunlight... So big is this effect of vitamin D deficiency on health that for Western Europe alone it has been suggested:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
Where are the US CDC, FDA, AMA, and other acronyms doing about all this? Good question...
Essentially, the US RDA for vitamin D is about ten times too low, as it was set decades ago for healthy bones, not a healthy heart, a healthy brain, a healthy immune system, or a healthy weight. The toxicity fears have also been overblown (vitamin A is much more toxic, and according to Dr. Cannell who runs the vitamin D council website, many people through supplements have too much vitamin A which interferes with vitamin D.)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-december.shtml
Although just how much vitamin D as supplements you need depends on things like your weight, your skin color, your behavior outdoors, your latitude, your personal biochemestry, and so on, so regular blood tests are important (even though people still disagree over what the optimum level should be). Example:
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html
The average light skinned human adult in a bathing suit at moderate latitudes under noonday summer sun will make 10,000 to 20,000 IUs of vitamin D in twenty minutes or so in their skin, and up to 50,000 units before their skin turns pink (sunburns are of course bad for you). The reaction is self
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" ... Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will:
"""
For more on the history of schooling in the USA:
"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
For more on the history of schooling globally: ..."
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance "
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
"The history of the development of Western schooling is a complex and meandering thing, but I think it is worth looking at in a very abbreviated form here. A little insight into the logics and basis for contemporary compulsory schooling might be useful to social ecologists.
The bottom line: schooling and education have very little to do with each other... Schooling was designed to dumb people down to produce mindless factory workers, obedient soldiers, and compliant consumers. Education helps a person grow into someone who can be part of or help create a healthy society while also creating joy and health for themselves and their family, friends, and neighbors.
I agree with you on the vouchers part to some extent; the better solution may be to just give all the money directly to the parents, as I suggest here: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"""
New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
"""
Really good teachers would have nothing to fear from such a plan, because their would be enough money floating around so they could have flexible
On: "The problem is that the dumb kids lack the mental function necessary to comprehend what they have just downloaded. "
There may be some truth to that, but the deeper problem is more like this, from John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"""
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh. The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior."
"""
Schools *intentionally* dumb people down. Schools may stuff people with facts, but that does not make a whole intelligent person able to think and act -- it generally creates quite the opposite, someone unable to think for themselves. And that is actually the point, as a form of social control to implement a vision of a pyramidal society, as John Taylor Gatto suggests here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. Fi
That's insightful, to see schools from a different viewpoint, like any business. Schools exist primarily for other reasons than to educate. See John Taylor Gatto or John Holt. From Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
And schools generally can't be fixed because none of the major players in the school system are rewarded for children becoming whole human beings capable of healthy participation in a healthy society:
"Power ÷ 22"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
"""
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than prin
See: "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/0865714487
The primary reason school was created was to dumb people down as a form of social control to create factory workers (and soldiers) for a 19th century factory-based economy, according to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates--these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched.
"""
Or:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
"""
So, that's why pouring more money into schools does not work, because they just do this dumbing down process better. Oh, you may get kids stuffed with more facts, you may get kids with better grades, you may get kids who are better are regurgitating state doctrine, but you won't get good human beings who can have a happy whole life. A whole person comes from an engagement with the whole of life, not from doing paperwork all day in a minimum security day-prison from ages four to eighteen. The entire system must be changed from assumptions through practices, and school is so resistant to fundamental change that the best approach is probably just to shut it down entirely and start over in new ways using the same resources in entirely different ways.
For example, the central pillar of most schooling, grading, is harmful to children and communities in all sorts of ways: ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
"From Degrading to De-Grading"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm
"""
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself.
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks.
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.
4. Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective.
5. Grades distort the curriculum.
6. Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning.
7. Grades encourage cheating.
8. Grades spoil teachers' relationships
Except that the problem is not solved if (and I say if, since it is controversial) violent games contribute to broader social violence and dysfunction.
We do know for sure that spending too much time indoors leads to vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunlight that leads to grumpy people with lots of health problems. Of course, reading anything too much indoors (even sacred texts) can do that too. So, if you are an indoor gamer or a reader of any sort, please at least get vitamin D from supplements of some sort:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
There is also the bigger issue that advertising creates demand for these violent products. And like cigarettes, violent games and toys are often targeted to very young children in various ways (Joe Camel, etc.). As talked about here:
"The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know"
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
their is an unhealthy alliance between toy makers, fast food makers, video game makers, media makers, and licensed product makers to bombard young boys 24X7 with violence-related images to sell product. So, for example, a ten year old boy gets a Star Wars "Happy" meal at McDonalds, watches Star Wars cartoons at home, sleeps under Star Wars blankets, buys Star Wars lightsabers, plays Star Wars video games, sees Star Wars related commercials at random times even when watching other things on TV, has Star Wars pictures on their school notebook covers, and so on. This is 24X7 infiltration of the kid's mind with the implicit suggestion that violence and wars are the best way to solve conflicts, and that there are clearly defined good guys (us) and clearly defined bad guys (by whatever means, color, shape, speech, dress, etc.), and that military robots are a good idea (rather than using technology to bring abundance to all). Rather than define the Emperor as a mentally ill and financially obese person needing help, he is just "evil" and only killing him is the solution. And kids get locked in a cycle of endless tightly scripted play at home, at school, outdoors -- anywhere, where there is only one solution to a conflict -- killing. There are a lot of other reasons kids are hurting, but this continual onslaught by for-profit companies 24X7 just adds to it.
For girls, it is even worse: :-(
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
Though some of that is also from environmental toxins (estrogen mimics) and poor nutrition heavy on fats connected especially to fast foods; see:
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
So, while it is easy to blame the parents for not regulating everything a child engages in, clearly the job of parenting has become much harder over the last few decades in this regard (even since the "family values" Reagan Administration gave this alliance their blessing), and parents are not getting much help in general. It takes a village to raise a child.
Everyone acts so concerned about physical predation by strangers on a child (which very rarely happens even if it is a tragedy when it does). But people in the USA just accept mental predation on young children as a given in our society through the logic of profit-making and an unregulated "free market". But the fact is, any marketplace is a social construction:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Venezuela has decided to change the nature of that social construction. I don't agree w
"Hey, why not disband the countries army then? Violence is not the answer, you know."
Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Venezuela: 1.06% of GDP
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=venezuela+military+spending
Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, United States: 4.28% of GDP
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=usa+military+spending
With its larger economy, and if you included interest payments and all related expenses (including incurred future obligations like for disabled soldiers), the USA spends about a trillion dollars a year on the military, so the more accurate figure may be closer to 8% of the US GDP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
There is nothing wrong with spending some on security if the focus is mainly about mutual security (so, everyone feels secure and part of a mutual security community, as in "We're all secure together."):
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
and intrinsic security (sustainable resilient infrastructure as civil defense, as in "We're secure in our core infrastructure regardless of typhoon, earthquake, electromagnetic storm, crop failure, plague, or bombs."):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
But the USA has pursued mostly a doctrine of unilateral security ("We're secure because you're insecure") and extrinsic security ("We're secure because we have soldiers everywhere guarding insecure installations.") This approach persists because it is extremely profitable for a narrow part of society, as two-time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC) said:
"War is a Racket"
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
For all the money spent, the USA is one of the most insecure countries on the planet (with long energy supply lines, long food supply lines, long goods supply lines, an unhardened and unecrypted civilian communications infrastructure, no comprehensive national health care system scaled for disasters, and in many other ways). This can't be fixed by spending more money the same way on more soldiers and more weapons -- the USA passed the law of diminishing returns on that decades ago. These fundamental insecurities can only be fixed by spending the money differently.
For example, for one half of one year's military spending, the USA could go all solar with improved energy efficiency and no longer have to defend oil supply lines:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
(while also improving human health and environmental health and creating many jobs). As part of that, free luxury electric cars to everyone in the USA would greatly reduce our taxes for defense and care of the sick:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
Likewise, for a fraction of one year's defense budget, the USA could put in place local flexible manufacturing facilities that remove the need to defend shipping lines to China, as I suggest here:
"21,000 Flexible Public Fabrication Facilities a
And that argument essentially is made here, which discusses what to do about an unhealthy alliance between toymakers and children's media makers (and food companies), that started with the media deregulation during the "family values" Reagan Administration:
"The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know"
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
Some comments on that book in my review of it here: ...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"A few key ideas from the book:
The deregulation of children's media during the early 1980s (Reagan administration) led to an alliance of media companies and toy companies and other companies (like food companies); the result of this is an immersion for many children in an interlinked experience of seeing media about violence, purchasing related action figures and toys and video games, and having these items promoted every place they go (whether to buy fast-food or just in other kid's homes). This is a big change from the media environment from the 1960s and 1970s that many of today's parents grew up in.
The authors point out that the behaviors promoted by this alliance tend to be very sex-role stereotypical, as in boys need to be fighters and girls need to be princesses. For many children, the authors suggest they can get locked into a pattern of endless cycling through stereotyped behaviors. While it is true that knights and princesses have long been important parts of many children's play (so this is not intended to dismiss that), what has changed for some children is the tone and extremeness of those experience because of the high degree of continual interrelated media/toy/game/food saturation. Rather than children being able to express themselves building on those knight/princess themes in their own unique ways, because of the integrated marketing, for many children there becomes only one way to be a knight or a princess (as defined by some media and accompanying purchased toys to be used in only very precise and narrow ways). The book focuses mainly on the boy part of this equation. One of the authors has writings on the female stereotyping aspect of media and other issues, described here:
http://www.dianeelevin.com/writing.html
The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options.
So, whether you are a dove or a hawk, a progressive or a conservative, I would hope there is at least some common ground on concern about excessive (and often dysfunctional) war-themed play being promoted by an alliance of media companies, toy companies, game companies, and food companies for their mutual profit. Still, this is just one more set of difficult issues to navigate while parenting. Some families do better on some issues, some do better on others. Again, as Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige say in "The War Play Dilemma", there are no easy answers for every situation or every family -- otherwise it would not be such a "dilemma". "
Of course, then a deeper issu
Well, I guess people agree with you that citing two experts in the field on child development and violent media and games is "trolling" in the context of a discussion on banning violent video games (people who outline a nuanced view if anyone bothered to look at the book). The link again:
"The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know"
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
The "dilemma" in the title is the conflict between helping kids work through developmental issues about violence vs. sending a message about violence being undesirable. I wrote a review of that book here with the key points: :-( Here is a long list of where many of our tax dollars have gone:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"""
From the table of contents, here is the list of topics in their "Guidelines for Resolving the War Play Dilemma" (each topic has a few pages of explanation and suggestions):
* Guideline 1: Limit Children's Exposure to Violence
* Guideline 2: Help Children Engage in Creative and Meaningful Dramatic Play
* Guideline 3: Learn as Much as You Can [about the media scenes kids view]
* Guideline 4: In Children's War Play, Address the Issues
* Guideline 5: Work to Counteract the Lessons About Violence and Stereotyping
* Guideline 6: Make Keeping the Play Safe You Highest Priority
* Guideline 7: Limit the Use of Highly Structured Violent Toys
* Guideline 8: Work to Counteract Highly Stereotyped and Limiting Gender Roles
* Guideline 9: Create an Ongoing Dialog Between Educators and Parents
In my own life, I grew up being taught in public school that I lived in a modern day Athens. As I've grow older, and paid more attention to politics and where taxes go, it feels more to me more like I live in a modern day Sparta.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_history_events
I was surprised to learn how long that list is, regardless of how one feels about the value of any specific event.
I've come to agree with the late Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC Retired), based on his decades of combat experience, that "War is a Racket":
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"""
Whatever you think of the rest of what I wrote, please look into the issue of vitamin D deficiency I mentioned, both for yourself and to help your family or friends or neighbors:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
Most slashdotters probably suffer from vitamin D deficiency, and it might help explain some of the increasing hostility and problematical posts here with people spending so much time indoors using computers, whether they are playing violent games or not:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/
But it is not just mental things; vitamin D deficiency can also contribute to joint pain, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, tooth decay,
Thanks. Well, I guess, as you predicted, others don't agree, and the first item has been modded down to (0, Troll). :-) Some people don't want to know (granted I say other stuff people may not like, too).
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1571756&cid=31365414
So has another gone down as offtopic:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1571756&cid=31365538
And another market Troll:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1571756&cid=31366202
How citing a book by acknowledged experts on the interrelation of child development and violent media and toys is off-topic and trolling in the context of discussing banning violent videogames and toys, well, I guess that happens sometimes.
As a stay-at-home Dad (to some extent, and homeschooling) and also technology person, I've spent a lot of time thinking on this stuff, reading about it, and writing on it, (as in, years), so I have all the links etc. ready to go.
More by me on options for social progress (or regression) could be found here:
"Jobless Recovery"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"Achieving a Star Trek Society"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
"A brickfilm movie idea about preventing a Caprican future"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/cac4e38a9b68d083
As I say elsewhere, I don't think censorship is the answer to this sort of problem. Actually, I also think Chavez has the problem wrong. Violence and addictive-seeming consumption of social media happens in large part due to social stress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
The key is to reduce the stress, and to direct people to more positive activities.
As Bucky Fuller said:
http://challenge.bfi.org/movie
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
That's really what Chavez is doing wrong with this, and some other things. It's sad. Venezuela could repeal the Berne convention on copyrights, institute a basic income, expand the public library system instead of the public school system, grind up rock for fertilizer, promote cooperative games, and a variety of other more essential and effective things to create prosperity for all there. Banning the violent video games does not address any of these core issues.
Twenty years from now, when renewables replace oil (a major revenue for Venezuela) through exponential growth, and AI and robotics and better design (a better RepRap) can produce really cheap products in any industrialized country (and so they will flood in from abroad), Venezuela will be in bad shape unless it has transitioned beyond capitalist economics entirely
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
"""
The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
"""
Freedom from want includes things like redistribution, but also socially-directed investment to create health and material abundance for all. Freedom from fear includes things like reducing violence in a society. In this case, the chose method of banning the games to free people from fear and want can be seen as conflicting with freedom of speech and expression.
I think taxing the games would have been a more sensible approach to the externality created by violent media:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
and either redistributing the tax revenue equally to everyone, or using it to combat violence somehow and promote the creation of more pro-social media.
A tax on violent media is kind of like saying people could shout "fire" in a crowded theater, but if they do it as a prank and it makes trouble for everyone, they are going to pay a serious fine to reimburse everyone for the trouble they cause.
Still, it is hard to say how much different games (violent or not) really harm society. A worse general problem is that people spending too much time indoors playing any sort of game (or even reading books) become vitamin D deficient.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
So, should all games and books have a tax on them for that?
And, children do need to work through issues of violence, even as they also need to be told that violence (and other aggression) is anti-social, which creates a dilemma (discussed in this book, which recommends reducing exposure to violent media, but not banning it):
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
I wrote a review of that book here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"""
From the table of contents, here is the list of topics in their "Guidelines for Resolving the War Play Dilemma" (each topic has a few pages of explanation and suggestions):
* Guideline 1: Limit Children's Exposure to Violence
* Guideline 2: Help Children Engage in Creative and Meaningful Dramatic Play
* Guideline 3: Learn as Much as You Can [about the media scenes kids view]
* Guideline 4: In Children's War Play, Address the Issues
* Guideline 5: Work to Counteract the Lessons About Violence and Stereotyping
* Guideline 6: Make Keeping the Play Safe You Highest Priority
* Guideline 7: Limit the Use of Highly Structured Violent Toys
* Guideline 8: Work to Counteract Highly Stereotyped and Limiting Gender Roles
* Guideline 9: Create an Ongoing Dialog Between Educators and Parents
"""
On the broader topic of freedom, consider:
"Libertarianism: Marxism of the Right"
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"""
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simp
Thanks for the first hand report.
An alternative approach instead of censorship is to just put a heavy tax on certain media, because of the cost it may impose on society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
"""
In economics, an externality or spillover of an economic transaction is an impact on a party that is not directly involved in the transaction. In such a case, prices do not reflect the full costs or benefits in production or consumption of a product or service. An advantageous impact is called an external benefit or positive externality, while a detrimental impact is called an external cost or negative externality. Producers and consumers in a market may either not bear all of the costs or not reap all of the benefits of the economic activity. For example, manufacturing that causes air pollution imposes costs on the whole society, while fire-proofing a home improves the fire safety of neighbors.
In a competitive market, the existence of externalities would cause either too much or too little of the good to be produced or consumed in terms of overall costs and benefits to society. If there exist external costs such as pollution, the good will be overproduced by a competitive market, as the producer does not take into account the external costs when producing the good. If there are external benefits, such as in areas of education or public safety, too little of the good would be produced by private markets as producers and buyers do not take into account the external benefits to others. Here, overall cost and benefit to society is defined as the sum of the economic benefits and costs for all parties involved.
"""
Media that contributes to social violence, or which displaces time that could be spent on learning better solutions to social conflicts, could be considered as creating a negative externality. More on this general issue, about the dilemma between helping kids work through developmental needs to move beyond violence versus sending a message about avoiding violent solutions:
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
A violent media tax could be redistributed equally to everyone as a "basic income", or it could be used to fund other projects (including other media) that promote cooperation.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
Here is another first hand report on someone from the US heading to Venezuela and then heading back to the USA, realizing they would never fit in for a variety of reasons (even as they admired aspects of the changes there):
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110706_mcr_evolution.shtml
Mutual security is a better answer than unilateral security (and even deterrence):
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
Intrinsic security (sustainable, resilient infrastructure) is a better answer than extrinsic security (soldier-defended infrastructure).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
The problem is that unilateral extrinsic security theater that actually is insecure and spawns more enemies (like in Iraq) is very profitable, according to a US Major General:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
So, we may need to move to a society that is moving beyond the profit motive to have true security. To do that, we need a basic income, an expanding gift economy, improved local subsistence with 3D printing and organic gardening, more resource-based planning, a push to turn work into play, and other similar things, if we are to be reasonably secure. As long as war is profitable and profits are worshiped, we will have endless war.
Censoring the games won't fix that. People tend to turn to addictive behavior when they are under stress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
We need to improve society so there is less bad stress. One part of that is improving general human health now that we all spend so much time indoors:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Another part is making sure everyone feels secure in the basics.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
And then more things flow from there.
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/rethinking_human_nature/
"""
In Born to Be Good, Keltner takes Eckman's insights one step further by proposing a new model of human nature that turns the conventional one on its head. Instead of the survival of the fittest, Keltner proposes the survival of the kindest. He demonstrates that in early human society prosocial behavior was the most effective survival strategy. Early humans needed to take care of "vulnerable, big-brained off spring," a job that required two parents. As a result, males evolved to know their own off - spring and to take care of them, which in turn created a fragile sexual monogamy. The hunting stronger, faster, and ferocious prey required teamwork, which turn facilitated the development of communication. Gossiping amongst the lower ranks of early humans put pressure on high-status members to build consensus rather than rule through force.
Keltner argues that emotions work to promote kindness, humanity, and respect between people, which is of immense evolutionary value. Embarrassment is a way of restoring social order by eliciting reconciliation and forgiveness after a transgression. Touching triggers a cascade of emotions, such as devotion, trust, and even a sense of reward. Compassion holds a special place in the canon of emotions (for Darwin it was the strongest instinct). Its physiological embodiment-- via the many touch points of the vagus nerve--encompasses our communicative system, heart rate, and release of oxytocin, which sends feelings of trust, love, and warmth throughout the body.
In Born to Be Good, Keltner shows that people receive significant emotional rewards when acting for the benefit of others, even when it means operating against one's self-interest. Our ability to work for the greater good comes from fundamental instincts honed over millions of years. If Keltner is right, and I think he is, our most modern problems will be solved by our most ancient responses.
"""
To turn that around, advanced technology, sir, is walking a line dangerously close to communism! :-)
That's because we are seeing the value of most human labor slowly plummeting to zero (one reason why no one can afford health insurance anymore except the doctors and medical equipment manufacturer owners. :-) See:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
So, as Marshall Brain suggests, the end point of capitalism is the starvation of all people who do not have a lot of capital (because, when their labor is worthless, they will not be able to pay for food, clothes, rent, medical costs, etc.). Everything from milking cows to doing genetic research is being automated:
"VMS robotic milking"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPqWpOxQmIs
"Robot Scientist Makes Discovery"
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/02/robot-scientist.html
Robots are making the leap from less coordinated than humans to more coordinated than humans:
"High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation"
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
More links to robot videos here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
The thing is, "ownership" is ultimately a political construction:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Propped up by millionaire wannabees and slightly privileged guards:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"The Coming Revolt of the Guards"
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
Are you a billionaire? Otherwise, by capitalist standards, if your work can eventually be automated, your life will then be worthless in their eyes, and you should then logically starve once everything you can do of value to billionaires has been automated. And don't say you'll just get another job, because as Marshall Brain suggests, that one will be automated too once we pass some critical thresholds in AI and robotics. That's like saying you will hide under a tree to stay dry in a rainstorm and when that tree gets wet through you will go find another.
The only question is, do we put in place social reforms now, or do we wait until even more people are starving? Well, there's an obvious answer to that in a capitalist society, and as American financier Jay Gould said after hiring strikebreakers, it is "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
So, ideally, we need to find alternatives to a society build around a conception of work:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
The real reason why violent (and other) games are evil in a way is just that they are a distraction from dealing with that very serious issue of rethinking our society on some better ba
Gamesdon't have to use violence as a setting. Groups of people can cooperate to overcome natural disasters or other challenges. People building with Lego together does not have to be either violent or competitive to be fun. See Alfie Kohn's book:
http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254
Non-violence even works better at the political level in a democracy: :-)
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
I don't think censoring as a society is the answer. But censoring as a parent for age/development appropriate levels to create a nurturing environment for kids makes a lot of sense IHMO (up to some point).
Resources about non-violent cooperative games:
http://www.familypastimes.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Playfair-Everybodys-Guide-Noncompetitive-Play/dp/091516650X
http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254
Except those drives can send us places we don't want to go in the industrial age:
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
Please see this book (and my other previous comment here):
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
I wrote a review of it here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
Other related books about general issues and about what has been done to girls via media (and poor nutrition):
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
And something every caregiver should know now that kids spend a lot of time indoors and have become vitamin D deficient:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
We got rid of broadcast TV long ago too (we do use DVDs like Mr. Rogers and nature videos, and selected YouTube).
While I don't recommend any screen media for younger kids if you can avoid it, this site is pretty good for age four:
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
As is this:
http://www.starfall.com/
For older ages, some good things are:
http://www.learner.org/
http://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.cosmolearning.com/
A caregiver needs to create a safe nurturing environment within a child's needs and abilities. You are doing the right thing.
Other useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles
http://www.motherstyles.com/