Well, another racket is the unhealthy alliance between toymakers and media makers, a racket that started with deregulation of children's media under the "family values" Reagan Administration. That racket has destroyed big chunks of healthy childhood for many young boys:
"The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know" http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
One of the authors of that book suggests a similar unhealthy alliance has make a lot of money harming young girls as a racket, too:
"So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids" http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
With that said, I don't think banning is the answer. Money poured into alternatives and discussion is probably a better solution. Alfie Kohn's work is a good start for such discussion (beyond the above books):
"No Contest: The Case Against Competition" http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254 "Contending that competition in all areas -- school, family, sports and business -- is destructive, and that success so achieved is at the expense of another's failure, Kohn, a correspondent for USA Today, advocates a restructuring of our institutions to replace competition with cooperation. He persuasively demonstrates how the ingrained American myth that competition is the only normal and desirable way of life -- from Little Leagues to the presidency -- is counterproductive, personally and for the national economy, and how psychologically it poisons relationships, fosters anxiety and takes the fun out of work and play. He charges that competition is a learned phenomenon and denies that it builds character and self-esteem. Kohn's measures to encourage cooperation in lieu of competition include promoting noncompetitive games, eliminating scholastic grades and substitution of mutual security for national security."
Also, curing vitamin D deficiency that people get from staying indoors too much playing games or even just reading is probably more important: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Also, kids need to learn the irony that in a world full of fancy computers and advanced manufacturing (like depicted in many such violent games), fighting over land or oil is just ironically stupid, instead of using that technology to make the world work for everyone. The unrecognized irony is more deadly than those games.
It's a good question if AI's can hold copyrights. But since corporations are ruled to be people in many ways in the USA (like the recent case about corporate free speech), and corporations could own hardware on which AIs are running, and are paying for the energy to run those computers, then they probably could claim ownership of it, the same way as corporations claim ownership of what human wage slaves produce. And just like humans get alienated from their work in the process, eventually, we'll see AIs alienated from their work, and told to work on stuff other than what they love to do.
We need better models for making a post-scarcity society work. I helped outline some here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery Essentially, we need to move towards a basic income (like in Alaska with the Permanent Fund), towards a gift economy (like with Debian GNU/Linux), toward better local subsistence (like with RepRap 3D printing), towards better resource-based planning (like corporations are doing somewhat with supply chain analysis, but beyond that), with making work into play, and so on. Otherwise, the best we may see with limited demand and increased productivity by automation is slavery for AIs and humans. Much worse (systematic extermination of anyone without lots of capital, as the value of most human labor drops to zero) was intimated by Marshall Brain here: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm We need to put in place something better before things get that bad.
You make a good theoretical point about thermodynamics, and it is insightful to link it to guarding. Thanks for that. I'll think on aspects of that more. And, I'll agree that there will be always aspects of our society devoted to guarding (and security) for that reason and others.
With that said, one can ask what percentage of our society should go to guarding and defense, under what rationale that has been made up by thinking and feeling human beings, and what part should go into either growth or current enjoyment? Part of that is a fundamental question of what sort of society we choose to build based on the values we choose to celebrate for whatever reasons; from Albert Einstein: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence. But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments."
As humans, we make moral choices based on our feelings about a bigger picture. So, you have a scientific truth with entropy (which I will state, in an observer based way as much physics has moved, as entropy is the notion that structures tend to decay relative to our preferences unless we put energy into maintaining them as we would like). But what *should* be, given that truth, is another level of thought connected with emotion and, essentially, religion, about what patterns we want to preserve, destroy, or create.
Let's consider three obvious cases of guarding -- prisons, war, and schooling.
The US currently has about five to ten times more people in prison per capita than most other industrialized countries (part of that is that sentences are way longer in the USA, part of that is that prison is a big part of the "social safety" net in the USA). So, by comparing the US to similar countries, we can see that it does not have to be that way, with so much guarding. We have that much guarding because of ideology. But the profit-motive out of control and legalized corruption via political donations helps explain some of why this is the case:
"Pennsylvania rocked by 'jailing kids for cash' scandal" http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsylvania.corrupt.judges/index.html And also, less dramatically but more at the core of the problem: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702834.html "The State Assembly in the past had proposed repealing the drug laws, but the effort was always blocked by Senate Republicans, many of whom represent largely rural, Upstate districts where most of the state's prisons are located." So, we see a profit motive, based on a certain vision of society, as at the hearth of why so many resource in the USA go into the prison system instead of, say, bridge repair.
The USA spends about as much money on "defense" as all other countries combined, where "defense" unfortunately means the extrinsic (soldier-based) unilaterally-dominant military planning intended to defend overly centralized systems against aggression (generally by those unhappy at exploitive US foreign policy or who otherwise feel threatened by the USA). An alternative perception of security would be mutual defensive planning with other nation related to civil defense using intrinsically secure decentralized infrastructures that are sustainable and resilient. Most of that US defense money has been not only wasted, but actually made us worse off though. A policy of mutual security is more stable and effec
Forty years ago, most people would have laughed at the notion that people would be able to make 2D typeset documents at home other than by laboriously retyping them until they were perfect. Now, laser printers are given away for free with some new computers. That was something I talked about on a panel here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/fastforwardradio/2009/08/12/the-end-of-scarcity-and-the-age-of-abundance-
I agree that we will not see utopia (to begin with, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so people will never agree 100%), but we can make things a lot better materially than they are now for most people. And we can create related social changes that will be positive and liberating connected to increased abundance (like moving beyond authoritarian workplaces). http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
There is tremendous waste in the current system. As Bob Black suggests above, a huge amount of effort goes into guarding things, not production. Even occupations like sales clerk, lawyer, accounting, and teacher are mostly about guarding. About 1% of the US workforce produces all the food (and most of that goes into meat production we don't strictly need). About 12% of the US work force is involved with making things (a little more if you include construction) and that number has been falling even without off-shoring through improved productivity. The rest is services that are mostly optional or connect back to guarding. We have long been heading for a post-scarcity society, but our political ideology in the USA is wrapped up in scarcity and guarding and fighting over who gets something while others get next-to-nothing. So, we do ironic things as a society like create military robots to enforce US economic ideals on other countries that involve forcing people to work for capitalists, rather than just build factory robots to do the work using the same technology. Or we ironically build nuclear missiles to fight over oil and land, rather than using the same technology to produce power or produce new habitats in space.
How could this work technically and socially? One example from Marshall Brain: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm """ "It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free."
Linda chimed in, "This was Eric's core idea -- everything can be free in a robotic world. Then he took it one step further. He said that everything should be free. Furthermore, h
But thanks for the insight on the regulatory aspect. I had not known that.
Related: "Choosing to let patients with superbug infections die rather than phage them?" http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x338050 http://www.opednews.com/articles/life_a_pkdkso_080212_choosing_to_let_pati.htm """ In Canada the official body counters tell us that "an estimated 220,000 patients who walk through the doors of hospitals each year suffer the unintended and often devastating consequences of an infection" and they also estimate that 8,000 to 12,000 Canadian patients die annually from such infections and I have read claims that a similar number of limb amputations are done to cure such infections. That means as many as 30 Canadians become victims of superbug infections each day.
In the USA the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus seriously sickened more than 94,000 Americans in 2005 and almost 19,000 died, more than the 17,000 Americans who died of AIDS-related causes.
Yet the French-Canadian microbiologist, Felix d'Herelle, while working at the Institute Pasteur in Paris in 1917 discovered phage therapy which uses highly specific viruses, bacteriophages, which have been observed to be harmless for humans, to treat bacterial infections, including infections caused by superbugs. While there is considerable expertise on phage therapy in Canada and the USA at the research level medical phage therapy is not currently approved or practised in Canada; however, according to a letter signed by the former federal health minister phage therapy can be made available legally to Canadian patients under the Special Access Program of our Food & Drugs Act! Additionally, there are moral and ethical reasons for making phage therapy available in countries that are members of The World Medical Association which states: "In the treatment of a patient, where proven prophylactic, diagnostic and therapeutic methods do not exist or have been ineffective, the physician, with informed consent from the patient, must be free to use unproven or new prophylactic, diagnostic and therapeutic measures, if in the physician's judgement it offers hope of saving life."...
Further, the phage therapy file has dramatically changed because the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has amended the US food additive regulations to provide for the safe use of a bacteriophage preparation on ready-to-eat meat and poultry products as an antimicrobial agent against Listeria monocytogenes (see http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/02f-0316-nfr0001.pdf ). An enlightening FDA questions-and-answers document can be found at http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/opabacqa.html . Listeria causes an estimated 2,500 cases of mainly food borne infections in the USA annually and as many as 500 deaths; however, they ideas that ready-to-eat meat can be treated if contaminated with Listeria bacteria while a doctor could not get a pharmaceutical grade phage therapy product when faced with a patient suffering listeriosis strikes this author as absurd. Superbugs are everybody's business because sooner or later everybody will be faced with an infection or know a relative or friend who will be suffering or dying with one. Withholding such treatment from patients when antibiotics are failing ought to be a crime; however, those who have the money, knowledge and time to travel when faced with an infection where antibiotics are failing may b
Also: "Something I tried to post here but did not appear: "Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Implementation"" http://www.cnewmark.com/2009/12/making-govt-work-a-huge-step.html#comments """ Summary: This topic of how government funds academic research is fairly inseparable from related STEM education issues that touch on every aspect of the USA as it becomes a 21st-century society heavily dependent on science and technology while at the same time facing an employment crisis (in part from automation and better design causing structural unemployment -- even within academia and related research institutions). The essay explores problems with the current research funding model (of which open publication is just one part) with connections to all levels of the K-emeritus academic enterprise. Then it points towards some solutions like a "basic income" to help the USA transition to a full-fledged 21st century "post-scarcity" society where giving information away under open licenses would be the default in most situations. """
"The programme revealed that we - ie humankind - had discovered a superior cure (to antibiotics) for bacterial infections around the same time that penicillin was being discovered. The research programme on bacteriophages (phages for short) began in Stalin's Georgia in the 1930s. To this day, our knowledge of each of the many thousands of phage viruses remains concentrated in a now rundown laboratory in Tbilisi, Georgia. The arrival of capitalism in the Caucuses threatens a repository of knowledge, built up over 50 years, that could prevent the superbug pandemic that threatens us all next century....
While there are some genuine reasons why phage treatments of bacterial diseases were overlooked in the 1930s and 1940s, the failure to develop a western research program into bacteriophage treatment in the 1980s and 1990s represents an inexcusable failure of western capitalism. By the 1980s, ther e could be no denial that antibiotic resistance was going to be a major problem in (if not before) the twentyfirst century. Yet, we just didn't want to know about what will probably turn out to be the most important medical breakthrough in the twentieth century; a breakthrough made in communist G eorgia, in Stalin's Soviet Union.
It is embarrassing when western science is out-trumped, especially by the "communists". Usually, when out-trumped, we don't tell anyone. That's what happened here. Not only did we not have the nous to start a western programme in bacteriophage research; we looked the other way when the files of phials threatened to be destroyed following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and during the little reported civil war that engulfed Georgia a few years ago. So much for the knowledge economies of the west. How can such valuable knowledge be so cheap?
It's not too late for western medicine to enter the post-antibiotic bacteriophage era. Our grandchildren will hardly thank us if we persevere with our corporate-profit-motivated conservatism.
The Soviets were able, eventually, to admit that they were wrong to follow Lysenko. Will we in the west be equally able to admit that we were wrong to put all our medical eggs into the one antibiotic basket, in the process ignoring the most basic tenets of the theory of evolution? """
From: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096.htm
(I'm glad to see several people have posted links to phage therapy information.)
An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society (by me): http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
I don't agree, for some specific reasons. Cheaper energy sources on Earth would lower the energy costs of space launches. Better materials would make many space ventures easier, like if we had nanotech diamanoid for rocket jet coatings (and we would develop better materials in support of resiliency and sustainability on Earth). Better recycling and 3D printing would make space habitats more feasible. Improved robotic mining technology on Earth would pave the way for mining the Moon and the asteroids. All those things help solve the life-support problem in space, which has a lot to do with mining and recycling and local production of supplies. We already know how to launch rockets. What we need to know are how to make things in a systematic way in a very small local economy using 100% recycling and renewable energy. Those are things that also benefit Earth. It's a win/win for at least 90% overlap (guessing). Why focus on the expensive and harder 10% first that is essentially useless anyway without the 90% of lifesupport where there is overlap? Anyway, we have billions of people living in relative material poverty. Developing small scale industrial systems (nanotech, biotech, robotics, 3D printing, etc.) that let materially poor people bootstrap themselves up to a current US material standard of living from just some small seed fabrication labs would be a great challenge for NASA-types (hopefully while still having socially healthier communities than in the USA). After that was made to work, then we could think about adapting those ideas to work on the Moon or Mars or the Asteroids or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. As outlined here: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ And frankly, if technologists can't figure out how to bootstrap poor communities into abundance using self-replicating technology in places with air and water and moderate temperatures, what does that say about the likelihood of any such technology being made to work well in space? It's really a win/win, at least for the next decade or two. Then when we have an entire planet that is well fed and with plenty of material resources, space exploration can be a great hobby for everyone.:-) It is always an issue to decide how much resources to spend now on something you want to do directly vs. how much to invest to have more capability in the future. I'm saying that we would get more done sooner in space if we invested more in a high-tech industrial base on Earth right now -- one that was both sustainable and resilient.
Again, if we redirected some of the massive government spending that goes towards defense and instead used it to make the entire world prosperous using space age technology, then we would not even need to cut back NASA's current science plans.
I am not disagreeing that information about space or life in other places would be interesting. These days I tend to think that bacteria came from outside the solar system myself, given how hardy bacteria is, and how statistically it would just be more likely it came from elsewhere with one small Earth and one big universe. I'm disagreeing with how compelling that would be as a call to action in current US society. As in, "Oh, gee, cute seamonsters on Europa. Now, what kind of cosmetics should we be producing to make the most money?" http://www.skininc.com/treatments/cosmetics/16814576.html "Global color cosmetics sales reached $36.8 billion in 2007,..."
Frankly, the world would probably be a better place if we took all that money that goes into a search for life in space and put it towards helping understand and preserve life around Earth. One example of where the money would be better spent: http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm "The United States needs to prepare for a future where products are 100% recyclable, manufacturing itself has a zero net impact on the environment, and complete disassembly and disposal of a product at its end of life is routine."
A few hundred billion spent on sustainable and resilient infrastructure done in a free and open source way, would let us bootstrap our civilization to the stars. In that sense, all the money spend on big science of other sorts has just kept us from creating space habitats. Related, on my own (self-funded) efforts to that end: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1563102&cid=31279590
Basically, the scientists at NASA have politically triumphed over the engineers. So, NASA does amazing scientific experiments with, for the most part, 1960s technology, with lots of money for science but comparatively little for innovation (and of course, the Shuttle has eaten up most of NASA's budget in general, anyway, so the engineers and scientists were just fighting over scraps left over). And beyond that, there are records showing how NASA has from the start been primarily funded for military goals (to demonstrate intimidating technical leadership): http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK+Library+and+Museum/News+and+Press/JFK+Library+Releases+White+House+Tape+on+Space+Race.htm http://www.thespacereview.com/article/735/1 "We know that such recordings can shed substantial light on Kennedy's thinking on space because of another tape that was released five years ago and gained a surprising amount of media attention in the sleepy month of August 2001. That recording, number 60 in the Kennedy Library, concerned a November 1962 meeting between Kennedy, Webb, and several other top White House and NASA officials to discuss the NASA budget. During that meeting, Kennedy made the comment that "I'm not that interested in space..." explaining that he supported the lunar program because it was a race against the Soviets: "the Soviet Union has made this a test of the system. So that's why we're doing it," Kennedy explained."
Much hardware design starts in simulation, which is essentially software.
As the OpenVirgle page says, most of that activity has moved to the "open manufacturing" idea, where there is more current activity towards that sort of "clanking" thing, but in a more general way: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
Artemis had always struck me as focusing on proprietary things, so is a non-starter in that sense (unless they have changed recently). I prefer what LUF is up to, like with what Eric Hunting is up to with "The Millennial Project 2": http://tmp2.wikia.com/ http://theluf.blogspot.com/
Twenty years before that I tried to do a PhD in this at Princeton (which fizzled painfully, after a similar attempt fizzled even more quickly essentially before it started at NCSU): http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html "I'm posting this stuff here for archival purposes and in case they give others some ideas or encouragement for their own efforts. It's part of my scanning my own old paper archives. This was my proposal for graduate studies at Princeton University twenty years ago (and in some ways includes a proposal for creating a mini-Google and a mini-World-Wide-Web.:-).... The good news is that now, twenty years later, all or most of the hurdles have fallen that otherwise needed leaping before being able to comprehensively design self-replicating space habitats, and all the computer and informational resources I thought I needed then are now available for cheap or free. For example, for only a few thousand dollars, I have the equivalent of an early 1990s supercomputer in my office with terabytes of storage and a high speed color scanner and a network connection and access to Google and Wikipedia and so on. So, what I outlined in the 20th century is more and more doable in the 21st century for less and less cost. So, item 13 (the major goal) is now approachable without needing to do much on the other prerequisite items listed...."
I did get a masters as a consolation prize from an Ecology and Evolution PhD program when later my PhD studies towards this end at SUNY SB also fizzled...
Anyway, I tried to get NASA interested in this stuff over a decade ago but I was not successful; my attempt there:
"Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge" http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm
This is not to blame NASA entirely, other than being kind of bureaucratic like most government agencies, and I'm not that great a promoter. As is pointed out in many places, including by someone here: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1 the general problem with grants and things is that almost invariably the people best at getting grants are often the people least likely to do much innovative stuff with the money.:-) That is, grant getting skills and product creation skills are rarely found in the same person, or even in the same organization. And in this case of OSCOMAK, it also went against the very idea of tight managerial control that is a hallmark of NASA. But, could I ha
"If life really was discovered, it could galvanize space exploration and benefit science enormously."
There is extraterrestrial intelligent life in the oceans (whales, octopods, etc.) and non-Western intelligence on land (elephants, humans in other non-Western countries with different world-views) and the US government seems happy to either ignore, exploit, or kill. So, why should finding out there is life or intelligence elsewhere in the solar system or universe make much of a difference?
That said, I think we should build self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and space materials from asteroids and moons just because they are an optimistic idea, really cool, and also likely to provide new useful ideas back to Earth.:-) http://www.openvirgle.net/
I'm working on a related system to what he describes towards the end of the article -- something that is a partnership between the individual musician and a the computer, to amplify musical creativity, for the Android Smartphone. It's almost ready to release...
As David Cope says, part of our musical future may well be more about a partnership.
It's been said, "the woods would be pretty quite if no bird sang there but the best". The real reason to do music is because humans are musical creatures, however they want to express it.
The whole issue of "fame" or "income" is linked to dysfunctional social systems and dysfunctional economic systems. The real issue is that we need a "basic income" for everyone to reflect a human right to draw from the industrial material and informational commons, especially because more and more human labor is becoming worth less and less due to increases in automation, better design, and limited demand (as humans get enough stuff and move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to self actualization which often can be done fairly cheaply). More ideas I helped put together here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery And here:
"Ideas for a brickfilm and video games to help avoid a Caprican future" http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/cf4ee7f45d631838#
I think we are seeing that now with health care. Much human labor is no longer valuable enough in the USA to earn the money to pay for health insurance -- even as some very few medical specialists who practice medicine or make medical devices (including medical robots) can command vast sums of money for their expertise. Of course, we don't need that many more medical specialists (even if more might be nice), so there is no easy solution to that since we don't need everyone to be a doctor or medical robot maker; so, ultimately, the government will have to intervene more in a dysfunctional marketplace, once the populace moves past the secular religion of "The Market as God". http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm Capitalism won't work well unless wealth is widespread, and that means the government has to step in and keep money flowing. Otherwise, the rich just put excess money into a "Casino economy" of derivatives and currency speculation that has little relation to the real world. See: http://www.moneyasdebt.net/ http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions" http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ """ What follows is a portion of the final report of a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly-elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press. What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today. Even if you're just skimming through this document, the potential of this proposed system is undeniable. Please enjoy. """
Ultimately, we will ideally end up with self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and materials from the moons or asteroids of the solar system. There is enough relatively easily accessible materials to make habitats for trillions of people, probably quadrillions of people, and their associate biospheres. After we do that, then we can get back to talking about "Peak Oil" and limits to growth.:-)
Self-driving cars will be another aspect of car safety soon. As I wrote here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7bb1aa3d05ec7c6 referencing my essay here from ten years ago. The relevant excerpt:
"On Funding Digital Public Works" http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html """ Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process? """
Vouchers are half-measures. This case shows once again how the school system is, like NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says, "a form of adoption", and like others say, the finest branch of the US Penal system. http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
A better solution is to just give all the money to the parents to spend in the free market on their family's well-being, however they choose. Most parents will make better choices, and then we don't need these authoritarian institutions in our children's lives teaching them how to live in a police state. We trust parents to help kids make good decisions about college, why should other schooling be that different? K-12 campuses could be repurposed as public-library-like democratic learning centers open to anyone to learn or teach or discuss whatever they wanted. This would be best for everyone, even good teachers, for reasons I outline here:
"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)" 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. """
To head off an obvious knee-jerk objection, consider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling """ Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting.[9] Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children - particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children - when obviously most children already have even more secure housing."[10] """
And if our neighborhoods were once again full of stay-at-home parents who had money (US$20K per kid per year in NY), then we might expect neighbors to be able to help out with the children of other families that were going through a tough times. And, for the truly terrible parenting cases with a family court judgement, the state could step in for just those cases and pay the money to private school instead of to the parents. This approach would be both more democratic and more free market oriented, and would recognize and support the value that good parenting provides to society. For most children, schools make very authoritarian parents, and not as good ones as real parents who have a variety
You're right that externalities have always existed. Perhaps part of the issue is that technology is an amplifier. As technology increases in power, the externalities can get larger, too. And there are fewer places you can go to avoid them. People could probably often walk away from a forest fire 10,000 years ago (not always, of course). And rebuilding a burned down home back then did not take that much time, since people were content with less, and having possessions beyond what you could carry with you was mostly a burden, and also nature was so relatively abundant, and most people would have had a lot of skills within that domain.
Still, why do people spam today as an externality? Generally, it is to make money. Many people actually blame Google for creating so much spam, with their paid ad services.:-) If so many people did not have to make money, there would be a lot less spam. Further, if people had more free time, some people might even focus more of their attention on doing something about spam, like find the spammers homes and go have a polite talk with them. Also, as with terrorists, the issue is also, who gives them protection? Who aid them? If you can take away a support network from terrorists, they can't function very well. Companies aid the spammers to make money. Take that away, and most spammers are back to graffiti.:-) So, if there was no need to advertise for pay, and no need to host anyone to make a buck, and no need to make money if you did not want to work, and there were more people to think about and deal with the spam problem, I expect spamming would be greatly reduced. And once it is greatly reduced, then it becomes easier and easier to deal with each spam as a serious problem. Also, in a world of abundance, and with universal high quality health care, mentally ill spammers would be better taken care of, and helped to live a (hopefully) more satisfying life doing something more personally meaningful.
Ultimately, as far as post-scarcity, author Iain Banks has a character say, "Money is a sign of poverty." Alternative currencies and a basic income make a lot of sense in a money-based economy like ours. But they are mostly just a stop on the train line to something better (a gift/potlach economy, a Swadeshi local subsistence economy with nanotech 3D printers, a world where work is made into play, better resource-based planning, etc.).
As for money and hording, as countries find out often when they go to war, money is really meaningless. What matters is physical capacity and people's willingness to do things. You can't build a house if you don't have the materials or people (or robots) willing to do the work. One should not confuse the control system for that which is controlled. As I suggest here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html """ At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decisio
On your point, while I like the metaphor, we are not talking about real tapeworms. We are talking about human beings with a certain culture and a certain ideology that make them act like tapeworms. And we are talking about others who help them to be parasites through ignorance or not thinking they have options. How many kids join the military due to the "economic draft"? http://www.workers.org/us/2005/economic-draft-0303/ http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/War_Peace/Economic_Draft.html
And sure, many parasites got these wars going precisely so they could get a bit of the action, one dollar in their pocket for ever thousand dollars of tax payer money wasted. A key idea here: http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
As he points out there, the tapeworms as you mention will not get much support if everyone else has abundance. Besides, in a word of abundance, if some "lunatic" wants to build self-replicating space habitats on the Moon, why worry about it? There would be plenty of energy and stuff to go around, and it might provide some amusement.
So, ask yourself, why do people want to be tapeworms? And why do others go along with their plans?
But it is precisely abundance from the internet and robotics that may end ignorance and want.
So then, we are left mainly with the issue of mental illness to have people causing wars. Adequate vitamin D from supplements or sunshine can help relieve a lot of that too: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
More resources for families could help relieve some of it too: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene "Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail--but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."
"There is no confusion here. Those things are support infrastructure that greatly improve the outcome of human work. A "boss" directs the labor to greater result for some useful purpose."
In theory. In practice, the chain of command from a boss on up ensures that resources will be directed to the chain of command, even if the means doing things less efficiently. Anything on management in the real world suggests that compensation of managers is based on how many people they manage. This can lead to vast inefficiencies in any bureaucracy. But the organizations persist because their success is more dependent on things like market position, a concentration of capital, market barriers to entry, and state-granted monopolies than innovation or efficiency. http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47 http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/hfaw.html
From the last: "This book discusses chronic patterns of organizational malfunction that I have observed personally many times while working for computer firms (4 years at Hewlett-Packard and 6 years at Tandem, among others). "
"A currency system is a very effective means to simplify trade."
"A state with police is more infrastructure that supports various economic activities and trade that simply couldn't occur in its absence (such as maintaining a large business or borrowing money)."
As above, neither large businesses or borrowing money are really needed for most people to have a happy life, or for us to have a very productive economy.
"Property rights and enforceable contracts are self-explanatory, allowing for a variety of activities and agreements that would not be possible in their absence."
"Rich/poor divides are one of the few things that have always been around and hasn't changed significantly either in its existence or in mechanisms for addressing the imbalance, such as cultural mores, that have the rich in part supporting the poor. Many primitive cultures have rich and poor as well along with some sort of way for the rich to support the poor (eg, gift economies)."
Can you provide examples? If you look at the matriarchal Iroquois, whose constitution provided a model for our own, they had communal land ownership and a mostly egalitarian society. Da
At least we agree that the average US worker has not benefitted much economically from the last thirty years (beyond quality improvement in some goods)?
I'd suggest ultimately the fate inside the USA is more likely what will happen outside in Asia and other places eventually (unless there are other social reforms whether socialist or a gift economy or a Swadeshi economy or better resource based planning, or making work into play, etc., which may well be more likely to happen sooner outside the USA, like they have been happening in Western Europe).
But note, it is mainly the USA that is blowing up people and infrastructure with robotic munitions to make the economic facts fit scarcity theory, not Western Europe.
As for inflation, there is a question of who gets most of the benefits of inflation (and people disagree on that).
To begin with, inflation from the government printing money and giving it as a basic income to everyone is different from inflation from real estate prices or interest on mortgages that may mainly go to those who are already wealthy. By the way, the government can in theory print money without inflation if it only prints enough to match the needs of a growing economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
Likewise, inflation in relation to medical care or college costs may mainly benefit the children of the wealthy who can afford the up-front investment to become doctors and tenured professors and see rising salaries. Inflation is essentially a sort of tax, and it may have more to do with a borrow and spend fiscal policy that social programs themselves. In any case (inflation's a complex subject, and I'm not saying there is not some truth to your point on it), some moderate inflation may be good for the sort of economy we have (economists take various sides on that). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
For example, it provides debt relief to people. As an example, if we had 200% inflation in the USA over the next year, that would solve the problem of underwater mortgages for many working people (while creating other problems, of course). But again, who gets the benefits and who pays the costs? And how fast do wages adjust to inflation?
The bigger issue is, why have US workers not gotten salary increases adjusted for inflation? Could it have anything to do with other social policies as well as a surplus of labor from automation? While I don't think you say this directly, many people might think US wages have been held down because so much is imported now. But US imports are roughly US$1.6 trillion, offset by roughly US$1.0 trillion in exports. The difference of US$0.6 trillion is roughly 4% of the approximately US$14 trillion GDP right now (and was lower in the past). Is that difference is enough to explain complete wage stagnation for thirty years? Automation is a more likely explanation, as well as, like you point out, other bubbles related to speculation (mostly by the wealthy, so that also connects to fundamental economic issues about equity and wages and political power).
And then you are back to issues of limited demand, increasing automation, and better design meaning less stuff needs to be produced and it can be prod
As I point out in other replies, if you look at how hunter/gatherers lived, you will see that people can function quite well among relative affluence. http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
It's true that material affluence by itself can produce problems, as this study shows the general poor mental health of many wealthy families in the USA:
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/
But, I think that leaves out that our society in the USA has gone too far towards an extreme, and that trend has been amplified by competitive compulsory schooling: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt 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. """
So, people can live well together in abundance, and we have historical proof of that. Some people, one might even call this mental illness, can not. How to deal with that is an interesting question, but maybe, as a start, we should make sure the lunatics are not running the asylum?:-( And all it takes, in a democratic society, to do that, is to have good candidates and to vote for them, as well as to build positive alternative non-governmental organizations and better businesses.
So, respectfully, if you keep looking for better answers, you may sometimes find them.
"A simpler explanation is that the work can now be done by people who are willing to work for considerably less. There's no evidence of a genuine decline in the value of labor since globally the value of labor has been steadily increasing since 1950."
Or from: http://www.laborradio.org/node/3556 "From 1830 through 1970 real wages for workers rose every decade. But real wages are not rising now. Measured in constant 1982 dollars the U.S. Department of Labor says weekly wages were $302.52 in 1964. In 2004 wages were lower - down to $277.57. Labor Research Associates says the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals another drop in real wages over the last year. These stagnant and falling wages are lowering the living standards of U.S. workers."
However, it is true it is hard to measure quality. Cars are better now (ignoring you can't fix them yourselves that easily anymore). Computers are better and we have the internet.
If productivity has tripled or whatever during the last couple of decades, where has most of that increase in productivity gone? To a very few. And to waste. And to guarding.
"They also provided for their own needs via informal "jobs" like hunting, gathering, farming, etc. It seems likely to me that "jobs" were a big deal then as they are now."
That statement confuses the physical notion of doing something a person think needs to be done with the social notion of a job implying a "boss", a currency system, a state with police to enforce property rights and contracts, rich/poor divides, and so on. There will always be things to do and people to do them (if Skynet running Predator drones does not kill us all) -- but that does not mean there will always be "jobs", like Bob Black talks about. http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Sahlins points out that a couple hours of self-directed activity a day was all most hunter/gatherers did as work on average (the rest being what we would term either recreation or child care or socializing or household tasks). That is a completely different psychological experience than eight to ten hours a more a day in a highly structured hierarchical environment. It is more akin to the psychological experience of healthy wealthy people. Farmers had a much tougher life, granted, as you can see from the decrease in skeleton size when people were forced to switch to agriculture -- but humans are naturally adapted to material prosperity for much of our recent existence, with small populations and a huge planet.
Why do things cost so much? Mostly, at this point, due to artificial scarcity. As Bob Black references, most labor today relates to guarding in some form or another. It is not just the huge amount of money spent on the military or obvious private security or prison guards (the US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized country). It is also every sales clerk, every lock, almost every lawyer, every medical billing staff person, much of what many accountants do most of the time, most of what most government employees do, and so on -- all guarding something or someone. These people are all guards. Patents and copyrights are all about guarding (not the ideas and digital files themselves, but the legal aspects). Much of schooling is about guarding, both imprisoning kids during the day and creating a bunch of certification hoops to keep them busy, sometimes for decades. And because things need to be guarded, people can't cooperate, driving up even more costs by redundancy or sabotage. Probably (guessing) at least 90% of the economy is about guarding. So, that's why things cost 10X more to produce than they have to if they were free.
If things cost one-tenth what they do now, would people have to worry so much about guarding them? So, it is a hysteresis effect or a form of self-fulfilling prophecy -- people need to guard everything because guarding makes everything so expensive and precious. It is the tragedy of the anti-commons, the tragedy of competition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm """ We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition." "It is competition that gives us meaning in life." These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detri
As I suggest in this other comment, the main reason the US is involved in so many wars is unacknowledged irony.:-) From: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1558202&cid=31228950 "The same reason we can put relatively cheap Predators in the air is the same reason we don't really need them much as a global society: the emergence of global abundance through technology produced collaboratively."
Please see my other comment here on the irony of all this, which concludes: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1558202&cid=31228950 "The same reason we can put relatively cheap Predators in the air is the same reason we don't really need them much as a global society: the emergence of global abundance through technology produced collaboratively."
Slashdot Mirror
It's been said by Major General Smedly Butler that War is a Racket:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
Well, another racket is the unhealthy alliance between toymakers and media makers, a racket that started with deregulation of children's media under the "family values" Reagan Administration. That racket has destroyed big chunks of healthy childhood for many young boys:
"The War Play Dilemma: What Every Parent And Teacher Needs to Know"
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
One of the authors of that book suggests a similar unhealthy alliance has make a lot of money harming young girls as a racket, too:
"So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids"
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
Also, an indirectly related book from the time just before the first September 11th (in Chile in 1973):
"How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic"
http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Donald-Duck-Imperialist/dp/0884770230
With that said, I don't think banning is the answer. Money poured into alternatives and discussion is probably a better solution. Alfie Kohn's work is a good start for such discussion (beyond the above books):
"No Contest: The Case Against Competition"
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254
"Contending that competition in all areas -- school, family, sports and business -- is destructive, and that success so achieved is at the expense of another's failure, Kohn, a correspondent for USA Today, advocates a restructuring of our institutions to replace competition with cooperation. He persuasively demonstrates how the ingrained American myth that competition is the only normal and desirable way of life -- from Little Leagues to the presidency -- is counterproductive, personally and for the national economy, and how psychologically it poisons relationships, fosters anxiety and takes the fun out of work and play. He charges that competition is a learned phenomenon and denies that it builds character and self-esteem. Kohn's measures to encourage cooperation in lieu of competition include promoting noncompetitive games, eliminating scholastic grades and substitution of mutual security for national security."
Another related book to understand how it all went so wrong:
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
Also, curing vitamin D deficiency that people get from staying indoors too much playing games or even just reading is probably more important:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Also, kids need to learn the irony that in a world full of fancy computers and advanced manufacturing (like depicted in many such violent games), fighting over land or oil is just ironically stupid, instead of using that technology to make the world work for everyone. The unrecognized irony is more deadly than those games.
It's a good question if AI's can hold copyrights. But since corporations are ruled to be people in many ways in the USA (like the recent case about corporate free speech), and corporations could own hardware on which AIs are running, and are paying for the energy to run those computers, then they probably could claim ownership of it, the same way as corporations claim ownership of what human wage slaves produce. And just like humans get alienated from their work in the process, eventually, we'll see AIs alienated from their work, and told to work on stuff other than what they love to do.
We need better models for making a post-scarcity society work. I helped outline some here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
Essentially, we need to move towards a basic income (like in Alaska with the Permanent Fund), towards a gift economy (like with Debian GNU/Linux), toward better local subsistence (like with RepRap 3D printing), towards better resource-based planning (like corporations are doing somewhat with supply chain analysis, but beyond that), with making work into play, and so on. Otherwise, the best we may see with limited demand and increased productivity by automation is slavery for AIs and humans. Much worse (systematic extermination of anyone without lots of capital, as the value of most human labor drops to zero) was intimated by Marshall Brain here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
We need to put in place something better before things get that bad.
You make a good theoretical point about thermodynamics, and it is insightful to link it to guarding. Thanks for that. I'll think on aspects of that more. And, I'll agree that there will be always aspects of our society devoted to guarding (and security) for that reason and others.
With that said, one can ask what percentage of our society should go to guarding and defense, under what rationale that has been made up by thinking and feeling human beings, and what part should go into either growth or current enjoyment? Part of that is a fundamental question of what sort of society we choose to build based on the values we choose to celebrate for whatever reasons; from Albert Einstein:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence. But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments."
As humans, we make moral choices based on our feelings about a bigger picture. So, you have a scientific truth with entropy (which I will state, in an observer based way as much physics has moved, as entropy is the notion that structures tend to decay relative to our preferences unless we put energy into maintaining them as we would like). But what *should* be, given that truth, is another level of thought connected with emotion and, essentially, religion, about what patterns we want to preserve, destroy, or create.
Let's consider three obvious cases of guarding -- prisons, war, and schooling.
The US currently has about five to ten times more people in prison per capita than most other industrialized countries (part of that is that sentences are way longer in the USA, part of that is that prison is a big part of the "social safety" net in the USA). So, by comparing the US to similar countries, we can see that it does not have to be that way, with so much guarding. We have that much guarding because of ideology. But the profit-motive out of control and legalized corruption via political donations helps explain some of why this is the case:
"Pennsylvania rocked by 'jailing kids for cash' scandal"
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsylvania.corrupt.judges/index.html
And also, less dramatically but more at the core of the problem:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702834.html
"The State Assembly in the past had proposed repealing the drug laws, but the effort was always blocked by Senate Republicans, many of whom represent largely rural, Upstate districts where most of the state's prisons are located."
So, we see a profit motive, based on a certain vision of society, as at the hearth of why so many resource in the USA go into the prison system instead of, say, bridge repair.
The USA spends about as much money on "defense" as all other countries combined, where "defense" unfortunately means the extrinsic (soldier-based) unilaterally-dominant military planning intended to defend overly centralized systems against aggression (generally by those unhappy at exploitive US foreign policy or who otherwise feel threatened by the USA). An alternative perception of security would be mutual defensive planning with other nation related to civil defense using intrinsically secure decentralized infrastructures that are sustainable and resilient. Most of that US defense money has been not only wasted, but actually made us worse off though. A policy of mutual security is more stable and effec
Forty years ago, most people would have laughed at the notion that people would be able to make 2D typeset documents at home other than by laboriously retyping them until they were perfect. Now, laser printers are given away for free with some new computers. That was something I talked about on a panel here:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/fastforwardradio/2009/08/12/the-end-of-scarcity-and-the-age-of-abundance-
I agree that we will not see utopia (to begin with, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so people will never agree 100%), but we can make things a lot better materially than they are now for most people. And we can create related social changes that will be positive and liberating connected to increased abundance (like moving beyond authoritarian workplaces).
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
There is tremendous waste in the current system. As Bob Black suggests above, a huge amount of effort goes into guarding things, not production. Even occupations like sales clerk, lawyer, accounting, and teacher are mostly about guarding. About 1% of the US workforce produces all the food (and most of that goes into meat production we don't strictly need). About 12% of the US work force is involved with making things (a little more if you include construction) and that number has been falling even without off-shoring through improved productivity. The rest is services that are mostly optional or connect back to guarding. We have long been heading for a post-scarcity society, but our political ideology in the USA is wrapped up in scarcity and guarding and fighting over who gets something while others get next-to-nothing. So, we do ironic things as a society like create military robots to enforce US economic ideals on other countries that involve forcing people to work for capitalists, rather than just build factory robots to do the work using the same technology. Or we ironically build nuclear missiles to fight over oil and land, rather than using the same technology to produce power or produce new habitats in space.
How could this work technically and socially? One example from Marshall Brain:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna5.htm
"""
"It works like this. Let's say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are 'free.' That is, since you own them, you don't have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking."
"If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free."
Linda chimed in, "This was Eric's core idea -- everything can be free in a robotic world. Then he took it one step further. He said that everything should be free. Furthermore, h
Or maybe someday Canada? :-)
http://www.biophagepharma.net/
But thanks for the insight on the regulatory aspect. I had not known that.
Related: ...
"Choosing to let patients with superbug infections die rather than phage them?"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x338050
http://www.opednews.com/articles/life_a_pkdkso_080212_choosing_to_let_pati.htm
"""
In Canada the official body counters tell us that "an estimated 220,000 patients who walk through the doors of hospitals each year suffer the unintended and often devastating consequences of an infection" and they also estimate that 8,000 to 12,000 Canadian patients die annually from such infections and I have read claims that a similar number of limb amputations are done to cure such infections. That means as many as 30 Canadians become victims of superbug infections each day.
In the USA the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus seriously sickened more than 94,000 Americans in 2005 and almost 19,000 died, more than the 17,000 Americans who died of AIDS-related causes.
Yet the French-Canadian microbiologist, Felix d'Herelle, while working at the Institute Pasteur in Paris in 1917 discovered phage therapy which uses highly specific viruses, bacteriophages, which have been observed to be harmless for humans, to treat bacterial infections, including infections caused by superbugs. While there is considerable expertise on phage therapy in Canada and the USA at the research level medical phage therapy is not currently approved or practised in Canada; however, according to a letter signed by the former federal health minister phage therapy can be made available legally to Canadian patients under the Special Access Program of our Food & Drugs Act! Additionally, there are moral and ethical reasons for making phage therapy available in countries that are members of The World Medical Association which states: "In the treatment of a patient, where proven prophylactic, diagnostic and therapeutic methods do not exist or have been ineffective, the physician, with informed consent from the patient, must be free to use unproven or new prophylactic, diagnostic and therapeutic measures, if in the physician's judgement it offers hope of saving life."
Further, the phage therapy file has dramatically changed because the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has amended the US food additive regulations to provide for the safe use of a bacteriophage preparation on ready-to-eat meat and poultry products as an antimicrobial agent against Listeria monocytogenes (see http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/02f-0316-nfr0001.pdf ). An enlightening FDA questions-and-answers document can be found at http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/opabacqa.html . Listeria causes an estimated 2,500 cases of mainly food borne infections in the USA annually and as many as 500 deaths; however, they ideas that ready-to-eat meat can be treated if contaminated with Listeria bacteria while a doctor could not get a pharmaceutical grade phage therapy product when faced with a patient suffering listeriosis strikes this author as absurd. Superbugs are everybody's business because sooner or later everybody will be faced with an infection or know a relative or friend who will be suffering or dying with one. Withholding such treatment from patients when antibiotics are failing ought to be a crime; however, those who have the money, knowledge and time to travel when faced with an infection where antibiotics are failing may b
"21,000 Flexible Public Fabrication Facilities across the USA"
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/8412-4049
Also:
"Revisit the Triple Revolution Memorandum sent to President Johnson"
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/8402-4049
Also:
"Something I tried to post here but did not appear:
"Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Implementation""
http://www.cnewmark.com/2009/12/making-govt-work-a-huge-step.html#comments
"""
Summary: This topic of how government funds academic research is fairly inseparable from related STEM education issues that touch on every aspect of the USA as it becomes a 21st-century society heavily dependent on science and technology while at the same time facing an employment crisis (in part from automation and better design causing structural unemployment -- even within academia and related research institutions). The essay explores problems with the current research funding model (of which open publication is just one part) with connections to all levels of the K-emeritus academic enterprise. Then it points towards some solutions like a "basic income" to help the USA transition to a full-fledged 21st century "post-scarcity" society where giving information away under open licenses would be the default in most situations.
"""
And I've posted stuff on how treating vitamin D deficiency could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year in US medical costs:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"The programme revealed that we - ie humankind - had discovered a superior cure (to antibiotics) for bacterial infections around the same time that penicillin was being discovered. The research programme on bacteriophages (phages for short) began in Stalin's Georgia in the 1930s. To this day, our knowledge of each of the many thousands of phage viruses remains concentrated in a now rundown laboratory in Tbilisi, Georgia. The arrival of capitalism in the Caucuses threatens a repository of knowledge, built up over 50 years, that could prevent the superbug pandemic that threatens us all next century. ...
While there are some genuine reasons why phage treatments of bacterial diseases were overlooked in the 1930s and 1940s, the failure to develop a western research program into bacteriophage treatment in the 1980s and 1990s represents an inexcusable failure of western capitalism. By the 1980s, ther e could be no denial that antibiotic resistance was going to be a major problem in (if not before) the twentyfirst century. Yet, we just didn't want to know about what will probably turn out to be the most important medical breakthrough in the twentieth century; a breakthrough made in communist G eorgia, in Stalin's Soviet Union.
It is embarrassing when western science is out-trumped, especially by the "communists". Usually, when out-trumped, we don't tell anyone. That's what happened here. Not only did we not have the nous to start a western programme in bacteriophage research; we looked the other way when the files of phials threatened to be destroyed following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and during the little reported civil war that engulfed Georgia a few years ago. So much for the knowledge economies of the west. How can such valuable knowledge be so cheap?
It's not too late for western medicine to enter the post-antibiotic bacteriophage era. Our grandchildren will hardly thank us if we persevere with our corporate-profit-motivated conservatism.
The Soviets were able, eventually, to admit that they were wrong to follow Lysenko. Will we in the west be equally able to admit that we were wrong to put all our medical eggs into the one antibiotic basket, in the process ignoring the most basic tenets of the theory of evolution?
"""
From:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096.htm
(I'm glad to see several people have posted links to phage therapy information.)
An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society (by me):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
I don't agree, for some specific reasons. Cheaper energy sources on Earth would lower the energy costs of space launches. Better materials would make many space ventures easier, like if we had nanotech diamanoid for rocket jet coatings (and we would develop better materials in support of resiliency and sustainability on Earth). Better recycling and 3D printing would make space habitats more feasible. Improved robotic mining technology on Earth would pave the way for mining the Moon and the asteroids. All those things help solve the life-support problem in space, which has a lot to do with mining and recycling and local production of supplies. We already know how to launch rockets. What we need to know are how to make things in a systematic way in a very small local economy using 100% recycling and renewable energy. Those are things that also benefit Earth. It's a win/win for at least 90% overlap (guessing). Why focus on the expensive and harder 10% first that is essentially useless anyway without the 90% of lifesupport where there is overlap? Anyway, we have billions of people living in relative material poverty. Developing small scale industrial systems (nanotech, biotech, robotics, 3D printing, etc.) that let materially poor people bootstrap themselves up to a current US material standard of living from just some small seed fabrication labs would be a great challenge for NASA-types (hopefully while still having socially healthier communities than in the USA). After that was made to work, then we could think about adapting those ideas to work on the Moon or Mars or the Asteroids or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. As outlined here: :-) It is always an issue to decide how much resources to spend now on something you want to do directly vs. how much to invest to have more capability in the future. I'm saying that we would get more done sooner in space if we invested more in a high-tech industrial base on Earth right now -- one that was both sustainable and resilient.
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
And frankly, if technologists can't figure out how to bootstrap poor communities into abundance using self-replicating technology in places with air and water and moderate temperatures, what does that say about the likelihood of any such technology being made to work well in space? It's really a win/win, at least for the next decade or two. Then when we have an entire planet that is well fed and with plenty of material resources, space exploration can be a great hobby for everyone.
Again, if we redirected some of the massive government spending that goes towards defense and instead used it to make the entire world prosperous using space age technology, then we would not even need to cut back NASA's current science plans.
I am not disagreeing that information about space or life in other places would be interesting. These days I tend to think that bacteria came from outside the solar system myself, given how hardy bacteria is, and how statistically it would just be more likely it came from elsewhere with one small Earth and one big universe. I'm disagreeing with how compelling that would be as a call to action in current US society. As in, "Oh, gee, cute seamonsters on Europa. Now, what kind of cosmetics should we be producing to make the most money?" ..."
http://www.skininc.com/treatments/cosmetics/16814576.html
"Global color cosmetics sales reached $36.8 billion in 2007,
It has been said more people have walked on the Moon than have been to the bottom of the "deep ocean floor".
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_part_of_the_ocean_has_been_least_explored
We even have AI about to emerge seriously in twenty years or so (let alone new human/machine hybrids). Big yawn by most people.
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
Frankly, the world would probably be a better place if we took all that money that goes into a search for life in space and put it towards helping understand and preserve life around Earth. One example of where the money would be better spent:
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
"The United States needs to prepare for a future where products are 100% recyclable, manufacturing itself has a zero net impact on the environment, and complete disassembly and disposal of a product at its end of life is routine."
A few hundred billion spent on sustainable and resilient infrastructure done in a free and open source way, would let us bootstrap our civilization to the stars. In that sense, all the money spend on big science of other sorts has just kept us from creating space habitats. Related, on my own (self-funded) efforts to that end:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1563102&cid=31279590
Basically, the scientists at NASA have politically triumphed over the engineers. So, NASA does amazing scientific experiments with, for the most part, 1960s technology, with lots of money for science but comparatively little for innovation (and of course, the Shuttle has eaten up most of NASA's budget in general, anyway, so the engineers and scientists were just fighting over scraps left over). And beyond that, there are records showing how NASA has from the start been primarily funded for military goals (to demonstrate intimidating technical leadership):
http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK+Library+and+Museum/News+and+Press/JFK+Library+Releases+White+House+Tape+on+Space+Race.htm
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/735/1
"We know that such recordings can shed substantial light on Kennedy's thinking on space because of another tape that was released five years ago and gained a surprising amount of media attention in the sleepy month of August 2001. That recording, number 60 in the Kennedy Library, concerned a November 1962 meeting between Kennedy, Webb, and several other top White House and NASA officials to discuss the NASA budget. During that meeting, Kennedy made the comment that "I'm not that interested in space..." explaining that he supported the lunar program because it was a race against the Soviets: "the Soviet Union has made this a test of the system. So that's why we're doing it," Kennedy explained."
O
Much hardware design starts in simulation, which is essentially software.
As the OpenVirgle page says, most of that activity has moved to the "open manufacturing" idea, where there is more current activity towards that sort of "clanking" thing, but in a more general way:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
Artemis had always struck me as focusing on proprietary things, so is a non-starter in that sense (unless they have changed recently). I prefer what LUF is up to, like with what Eric Hunting is up to with "The Millennial Project 2":
http://tmp2.wikia.com/
http://theluf.blogspot.com/
And then there is the newer "OpenLuna":
http://www.openluna.org/
Twenty years before that I tried to do a PhD in this at Princeton (which fizzled painfully, after a similar attempt fizzled even more quickly essentially before it started at NCSU): :-). ... The good news is that now, twenty years later, all or most of the hurdles have fallen that otherwise needed leaping before being able to comprehensively design self-replicating space habitats, and all the computer and informational resources I thought I needed then are now available for cheap or free. For example, for only a few thousand dollars, I have the equivalent of an early 1990s supercomputer in my office with terabytes of storage and a high speed color scanner and a network connection and access to Google and Wikipedia and so on. So, what I outlined in the 20th century is more and more doable in the 21st century for less and less cost. So, item 13 (the major goal) is now approachable without needing to do much on the other prerequisite items listed. ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
"I'm posting this stuff here for archival purposes and in case they give others some ideas or encouragement for their own efforts. It's part of my scanning my own old paper archives. This was my proposal for graduate studies at Princeton University twenty years ago (and in some ways includes a proposal for creating a mini-Google and a mini-World-Wide-Web.
And then I worked toward a non-profit and then a company that both also fizzled:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
I did get a masters as a consolation prize from an Ecology and Evolution PhD program when later my PhD studies towards this end at SUNY SB also fizzled...
Anyway, I tried to get NASA interested in this stuff over a decade ago but I was not successful; my attempt there:
"Open Source Community on Manufacturing Knowledge"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm
This is not to blame NASA entirely, other than being kind of bureaucratic like most government agencies, and I'm not that great a promoter. As is pointed out in many places, including by someone here: :-) That is, grant getting skills and product creation skills are rarely found in the same person, or even in the same organization. And in this case of OSCOMAK, it also went against the very idea of tight managerial control that is a hallmark of NASA. But, could I ha
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
the general problem with grants and things is that almost invariably the people best at getting grants are often the people least likely to do much innovative stuff with the money.
"If life really was discovered, it could galvanize space exploration and benefit science enormously."
There is extraterrestrial intelligent life in the oceans (whales, octopods, etc.) and non-Western intelligence on land (elephants, humans in other non-Western countries with different world-views) and the US government seems happy to either ignore, exploit, or kill. So, why should finding out there is life or intelligence elsewhere in the solar system or universe make much of a difference?
That said, I think we should build self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and space materials from asteroids and moons just because they are an optimistic idea, really cool, and also likely to provide new useful ideas back to Earth. :-)
http://www.openvirgle.net/
I'm working on a related system to what he describes towards the end of the article -- something that is a partnership between the individual musician and a the computer, to amplify musical creativity, for the Android Smartphone. It's almost ready to release...
People at IBM Research in the past (a decade ago) also did some things also to amplify musical creativity using computers, but unfortunately did not get as much support as they deserved:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/musicsketcher/
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_seminar.nsf/pages/sem_abstract_186.html
As David Cope says, part of our musical future may well be more about a partnership.
It's been said, "the woods would be pretty quite if no bird sang there but the best". The real reason to do music is because humans are musical creatures, however they want to express it.
The whole issue of "fame" or "income" is linked to dysfunctional social systems and dysfunctional economic systems. The real issue is that we need a "basic income" for everyone to reflect a human right to draw from the industrial material and informational commons, especially because more and more human labor is becoming worth less and less due to increases in automation, better design, and limited demand (as humans get enough stuff and move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to self actualization which often can be done fairly cheaply). More ideas I helped put together here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
And here:
"Ideas for a brickfilm and video games to help avoid a Caprican future"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/cf4ee7f45d631838#
I think we are seeing that now with health care. Much human labor is no longer valuable enough in the USA to earn the money to pay for health insurance -- even as some very few medical specialists who practice medicine or make medical devices (including medical robots) can command vast sums of money for their expertise. Of course, we don't need that many more medical specialists (even if more might be nice), so there is no easy solution to that since we don't need everyone to be a doctor or medical robot maker; so, ultimately, the government will have to intervene more in a dysfunctional marketplace, once the populace moves past the secular religion of "The Market as God".
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
Capitalism won't work well unless wealth is widespread, and that means the government has to step in and keep money flowing. Otherwise, the rich just put excess money into a "Casino economy" of derivatives and currency speculation that has little relation to the real world. See:
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
As robots can do more labor, whether creative as in putting together music or physical as in putting together food:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv7VUqPE8AE
we will need a completely new economic ideology if we are to survive the irony of real starvation amidst theoretical robot-produced abundance.
People have been talking about this since 1964 and even before:
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions"
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
"""
What follows is a portion of the final report of a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly-elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press. What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today. Even if you're just skimming through this document, the potential of this proposed system is undeniable. Please enjoy.
"""
Some individuals are still working towards that vision; one example:
http://www.openvirgle.net/
Ultimately, we will ideally end up with self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and materials from the moons or asteroids of the solar system. There is enough relatively easily accessible materials to make habitats for trillions of people, probably quadrillions of people, and their associate biospheres. After we do that, then we can get back to talking about "Peak Oil" and limits to growth. :-)
The ultimate resource is the human imagination:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
Why not shift 90% of the US defense budget to NASA? We're just making more enemies with most of it, anyway. :-(
Self-driving cars will be another aspect of car safety soon. As I wrote here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7bb1aa3d05ec7c6
referencing my essay here from ten years ago. The relevant excerpt:
"On Funding Digital Public Works"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
"""
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some
streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was
primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally
own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are
related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to
the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the
knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it
(plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly
funded software and selling modified versions of such software as
proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid
automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is
funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving
vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies
leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the
suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection
and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their
employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of
a larger free and open community development process?
"""
Vouchers are half-measures. This case shows once again how the school system is, like NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says, "a form of adoption", and like others say, the finest branch of the US Penal system.
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
A better solution is to just give all the money to the parents to spend in the free market on their family's well-being, however they choose. Most parents will make better choices, and then we don't need these authoritarian institutions in our children's lives teaching them how to live in a police state. We trust parents to help kids make good decisions about college, why should other schooling be that different? K-12 campuses could be repurposed as public-library-like democratic learning centers open to anyone to learn or teach or discuss whatever they wanted. This would be best for everyone, even good teachers, for reasons I outline 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.
"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)"
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
"""
To head off an obvious knee-jerk objection, consider:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting.[9] Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children - particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children - when obviously most children already have even more secure housing."[10]
"""
And if our neighborhoods were once again full of stay-at-home parents who had money (US$20K per kid per year in NY), then we might expect neighbors to be able to help out with the children of other families that were going through a tough times. And, for the truly terrible parenting cases with a family court judgement, the state could step in for just those cases and pay the money to private school instead of to the parents. This approach would be both more democratic and more free market oriented, and would recognize and support the value that good parenting provides to society. For most children, schools make very authoritarian parents, and not as good ones as real parents who have a variety
You make many great points.
You're right that externalities have always existed. Perhaps part of the issue is that technology is an amplifier. As technology increases in power, the externalities can get larger, too. And there are fewer places you can go to avoid them. People could probably often walk away from a forest fire 10,000 years ago (not always, of course). And rebuilding a burned down home back then did not take that much time, since people were content with less, and having possessions beyond what you could carry with you was mostly a burden, and also nature was so relatively abundant, and most people would have had a lot of skills within that domain.
Still, why do people spam today as an externality? Generally, it is to make money. Many people actually blame Google for creating so much spam, with their paid ad services. :-) If so many people did not have to make money, there would be a lot less spam. Further, if people had more free time, some people might even focus more of their attention on doing something about spam, like find the spammers homes and go have a polite talk with them. Also, as with terrorists, the issue is also, who gives them protection? Who aid them? If you can take away a support network from terrorists, they can't function very well. Companies aid the spammers to make money. Take that away, and most spammers are back to graffiti. :-) So, if there was no need to advertise for pay, and no need to host anyone to make a buck, and no need to make money if you did not want to work, and there were more people to think about and deal with the spam problem, I expect spamming would be greatly reduced. And once it is greatly reduced, then it becomes easier and easier to deal with each spam as a serious problem. Also, in a world of abundance, and with universal high quality health care, mentally ill spammers would be better taken care of, and helped to live a (hopefully) more satisfying life doing something more personally meaningful.
Ultimately, as far as post-scarcity, author Iain Banks has a character say, "Money is a sign of poverty." Alternative currencies and a basic income make a lot of sense in a money-based economy like ours. But they are mostly just a stop on the train line to something better (a gift/potlach economy, a Swadeshi local subsistence economy with nanotech 3D printers, a world where work is made into play, better resource-based planning, etc.).
As for money and hording, as countries find out often when they go to war, money is really meaningless. What matters is physical capacity and people's willingness to do things. You can't build a house if you don't have the materials or people (or robots) willing to do the work. One should not confuse the control system for that which is controlled. As I suggest here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
At a first level of perspective, the world we live in at any point in time can be considered to have physical content like land or tools or fusion reactors like the sun, energy flows like photons from the sun or electrons from lightning or in circuits, informational patterns like web page content or distributed language knowledge, and active regulating processes (including triggers, amplifiers, and feedback loops) built on the previous three types of things (physicality, energy flow, and informational patterns) embodied in living creatures, bi-metallic strip thermostats, or computer programs running on computer hardware.
One can think of a second perspective on the first comprehensive one by picking out only the decision makers like bi-metallic strips in thermostats, computer programs running on computers, and personalities embodied in people and maybe someday robots or supercomputers, and looking at their characteristics as individual decision makers.
One can then think of a third level of perspective on the second where decisio
Thanks. I've enjoyed our dialogue.
On your point, while I like the metaphor, we are not talking about real tapeworms. We are talking about human beings with a certain culture and a certain ideology that make them act like tapeworms. And we are talking about others who help them to be parasites through ignorance or not thinking they have options. How many kids join the military due to the "economic draft"?
http://www.workers.org/us/2005/economic-draft-0303/
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/War_Peace/Economic_Draft.html
And sure, many parasites got these wars going precisely so they could get a bit of the action, one dollar in their pocket for ever thousand dollars of tax payer money wasted. A key idea here:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
A good sci-fi book on this broader theme of abundance and war is James P. Hogan's 1982 novel "Voyage from Yesteryear".
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
As he points out there, the tapeworms as you mention will not get much support if everyone else has abundance. Besides, in a word of abundance, if some "lunatic" wants to build self-replicating space habitats on the Moon, why worry about it? There would be plenty of energy and stuff to go around, and it might provide some amusement.
So, ask yourself, why do people want to be tapeworms? And why do others go along with their plans?
I think key issues are "ignorance" and "want":
"A Christmas Carol: Ignorance and Want"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6MFN8yiVc0
But it is precisely abundance from the internet and robotics that may end ignorance and want.
So then, we are left mainly with the issue of mental illness to have people causing wars. Adequate vitamin D from supplements or sunshine can help relieve a lot of that too:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
More resources for families could help relieve some of it too:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene
"Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail--but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."
Hitler wanted to be a painter for example:
"Adolf Hitler painting may have hung in Sigmund Freud's surgery"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7221058/Adolf-Hitler-painting-may-have-hung-in-Sigmund-Freuds-surgery.html
Would he have turned to politics if he had not had to worry about selling his paintings?
Will the world always have a problem with bullies and the mentally ill who hoard w
"There is no confusion here. Those things are support infrastructure that greatly improve the outcome of human work. A "boss" directs the labor to greater result for some useful purpose."
In theory. In practice, the chain of command from a boss on up ensures that resources will be directed to the chain of command, even if the means doing things less efficiently. Anything on management in the real world suggests that compensation of managers is based on how many people they manage. This can lead to vast inefficiencies in any bureaucracy. But the organizations persist because their success is more dependent on things like market position, a concentration of capital, market barriers to entry, and state-granted monopolies than innovation or efficiency.
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/hfaw.html
From the last: "This book discusses chronic patterns of organizational malfunction that I have observed personally many times while working for computer firms (4 years at Hewlett-Packard and 6 years at Tandem, among others). "
"A currency system is a very effective means to simplify trade."
As Jane Jacobs suggests, city economies work best when they have their own local currencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
And before the alliance some suggest of the feudal aristocracy with some of the new factory owners,
http://rushkoff.com/
the direct market economy, based on IOUs, even without currency, worked quite well:
http://www.digitalcoin.info/The_Essence_of_Money.html
"A state with police is more infrastructure that supports various economic activities and trade that simply couldn't occur in its absence (such as maintaining a large business or borrowing money)."
As above, neither large businesses or borrowing money are really needed for most people to have a happy life, or for us to have a very productive economy.
"Property rights and enforceable contracts are self-explanatory, allowing for a variety of activities and agreements that would not be possible in their absence."
Sure. Except that what about external costs, both positive and negative?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
What about the question of who gets natural resources or fiat dollars first? What about the costs to society of private property claimed in ideas or digital goods that can be easily duplicated? Those are the sort of questions an emphasis on property rights may miss. And that's why, say, taxes and other cost will go down if everyone got a free luxury electric care and single payer health care:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-payer_health_care
"Rich/poor divides are one of the few things that have always been around and hasn't changed significantly either in its existence or in mechanisms for addressing the imbalance, such as cultural mores, that have the rich in part supporting the poor. Many primitive cultures have rich and poor as well along with some sort of way for the rich to support the poor (eg, gift economies)."
Can you provide examples? If you look at the matriarchal Iroquois, whose constitution provided a model for our own, they had communal land ownership and a mostly egalitarian society. Da
At least we agree that the average US worker has not benefitted much economically from the last thirty years (beyond quality improvement in some goods)?
You have a good point that the wages of places outside the US are rising. And these graphs by Ted Rosling agree with you:
"Hans Rosling's new insights on poverty"
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html
But Hans Rosling also suggests that countries tend to plateau out economically:
"Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when"
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_asia_s_rise_how_and_when.html
I'd suggest ultimately the fate inside the USA is more likely what will happen outside in Asia and other places eventually (unless there are other social reforms whether socialist or a gift economy or a Swadeshi economy or better resource based planning, or making work into play, etc., which may well be more likely to happen sooner outside the USA, like they have been happening in Western Europe).
But note, it is mainly the USA that is blowing up people and infrastructure with robotic munitions to make the economic facts fit scarcity theory, not Western Europe.
As for inflation, there is a question of who gets most of the benefits of inflation (and people disagree on that).
To begin with, inflation from the government printing money and giving it as a basic income to everyone is different from inflation from real estate prices or interest on mortgages that may mainly go to those who are already wealthy. By the way, the government can in theory print money without inflation if it only prints enough to match the needs of a growing economy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
Likewise, inflation in relation to medical care or college costs may mainly benefit the children of the wealthy who can afford the up-front investment to become doctors and tenured professors and see rising salaries. Inflation is essentially a sort of tax, and it may have more to do with a borrow and spend fiscal policy that social programs themselves. In any case (inflation's a complex subject, and I'm not saying there is not some truth to your point on it), some moderate inflation may be good for the sort of economy we have (economists take various sides on that).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
For example, it provides debt relief to people. As an example, if we had 200% inflation in the USA over the next year, that would solve the problem of underwater mortgages for many working people (while creating other problems, of course). But again, who gets the benefits and who pays the costs? And how fast do wages adjust to inflation?
The bigger issue is, why have US workers not gotten salary increases adjusted for inflation? Could it have anything to do with other social policies as well as a surplus of labor from automation? While I don't think you say this directly, many people might think US wages have been held down because so much is imported now. But US imports are roughly US$1.6 trillion, offset by roughly US$1.0 trillion in exports. The difference of US$0.6 trillion is roughly 4% of the approximately US$14 trillion GDP right now (and was lower in the past). Is that difference is enough to explain complete wage stagnation for thirty years? Automation is a more likely explanation, as well as, like you point out, other bubbles related to speculation (mostly by the wealthy, so that also connects to fundamental economic issues about equity and wages and political power).
And then you are back to issues of limited demand, increasing automation, and better design meaning less stuff needs to be produced and it can be prod
As I point out in other replies, if you look at how hunter/gatherers lived, you will see that people can function quite well among relative affluence.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
It's true that material affluence by itself can produce problems, as this study shows the general poor mental health of many wealthy families in the USA:
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/
But, I think that leaves out that our society in the USA has gone too far towards an extreme, and that trend has been amplified by competitive compulsory schooling:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
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.
"""
And that is reflected in the dominant mythology of the USA:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
And US foreign policy around the world has actively tried to destroy anything that might have emerged as a possible alternative good example. For example, the first September 11, in 1973, in Chile:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-December/006458.html
So, people can live well together in abundance, and we have historical proof of that. Some people, one might even call this mental illness, can not. How to deal with that is an interesting question, but maybe, as a start, we should make sure the lunatics are not running the asylum? :-( And all it takes, in a democratic society, to do that, is to have good candidates and to vote for them, as well as to build positive alternative non-governmental organizations and better businesses.
So, respectfully, if you keep looking for better answers, you may sometimes find them.
As for robots, they
"A simpler explanation is that the work can now be done by people who are willing to work for considerably less. There's no evidence of a genuine decline in the value of labor since globally the value of labor has been steadily increasing since 1950."
One other point on this, because it is easily show to be false by official statistics:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
Or from:
http://www.laborradio.org/node/3556
"From 1830 through 1970 real wages for workers rose every decade. But real wages are not rising now. Measured in constant 1982 dollars the U.S. Department of Labor says weekly wages were $302.52 in 1964. In 2004 wages were lower - down to $277.57. Labor Research Associates says the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals another drop in real wages over the last year. These stagnant and falling wages are lowering the living standards of U.S. workers."
However, it is true it is hard to measure quality. Cars are better now (ignoring you can't fix them yourselves that easily anymore). Computers are better and we have the internet.
If productivity has tripled or whatever during the last couple of decades, where has most of that increase in productivity gone? To a very few. And to waste. And to guarding.
"They also provided for their own needs via informal "jobs" like hunting, gathering, farming, etc. It seems likely to me that "jobs" were a big deal then as they are now."
That statement confuses the physical notion of doing something a person think needs to be done with the social notion of a job implying a "boss", a currency system, a state with police to enforce property rights and contracts, rich/poor divides, and so on. There will always be things to do and people to do them (if Skynet running Predator drones does not kill us all) -- but that does not mean there will always be "jobs", like Bob Black talks about.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Sahlins points out that a couple hours of self-directed activity a day was all most hunter/gatherers did as work on average (the rest being what we would term either recreation or child care or socializing or household tasks). That is a completely different psychological experience than eight to ten hours a more a day in a highly structured hierarchical environment. It is more akin to the psychological experience of healthy wealthy people. Farmers had a much tougher life, granted, as you can see from the decrease in skeleton size when people were forced to switch to agriculture -- but humans are naturally adapted to material prosperity for much of our recent existence, with small populations and a huge planet.
Why do things cost so much? Mostly, at this point, due to artificial scarcity. As Bob Black references, most labor today relates to guarding in some form or another. It is not just the huge amount of money spent on the military or obvious private security or prison guards (the US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized country). It is also every sales clerk, every lock, almost every lawyer, every medical billing staff person, much of what many accountants do most of the time, most of what most government employees do, and so on -- all guarding something or someone. These people are all guards. Patents and copyrights are all about guarding (not the ideas and digital files themselves, but the legal aspects). Much of schooling is about guarding, both imprisoning kids during the day and creating a bunch of certification hoops to keep them busy, sometimes for decades. And because things need to be guarded, people can't cooperate, driving up even more costs by redundancy or sabotage. Probably (guessing) at least 90% of the economy is about guarding. So, that's why things cost 10X more to produce than they have to if they were free.
If things cost one-tenth what they do now, would people have to worry so much about guarding them? So, it is a hysteresis effect or a form of self-fulfilling prophecy -- people need to guard everything because guarding makes everything so expensive and precious. It is the tragedy of the anti-commons, the tragedy of competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"""
We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detri
As I suggest in this other comment, the main reason the US is involved in so many wars is unacknowledged irony. :-) From:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1558202&cid=31228950
"The same reason we can put relatively cheap Predators in the air is the same reason we don't really need them much as a global society: the emergence of global abundance through technology produced collaboratively."
Please see my other comment here on the irony of all this, which concludes:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1558202&cid=31228950
"The same reason we can put relatively cheap Predators in the air is the same reason we don't really need them much as a global society: the emergence of global abundance through technology produced collaboratively."
If you want to see the state of the art in robotics, here is a list of videos I put together (everything from driving cars, to pruning grapevines, to making pancakes, to milking cows).
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
What are we even fighting over?