Pretty good until the crib part (baby cage issue)
on
Google Airs Super Bowl Ad
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Keeping babies in cages is frowned on by most other societies, according to anthropologist Meredith Small:
"Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent" http://www.amazon.com/Our-Babies-Ourselves-Biology-Culture/dp/0385483627 http://books.google.com/books?id=925HAAAAMAAJ """ "In the winter of 1995, in a dimly lit room in Atlanta, Georgia, I witnessed a birth. Not the birth of a baby, but of a new science, ethnopediatrics." Thus begins Meredith Small's new, groundbreaking book on the study of parents and infants across cultures and the way different caretaking styes affect the health, well-being, and survival of infants. Pediatricians, child development researchers, and anthropologists today have turned their research efforts to studying this new science of why we parent our children the way we do. Each culture, and often each family, offers advice and directives on the right and wrong way to raise and care for infants, from feeding, interaction, emotional support, sleeping, and more. Yet scientists are finding that what we are taught is the right way to parent our children is based on nothing more than cultural directives-and may even run directly counter to a baby's biological needs. Should a child be encouraged to sleep alone from an early age, as parents do here in the U.S.? Is breastfeeding better than bottlefeeding, or is that just the myth of the '90s? How frequently should children be nursed-or does it matter? Do children in all cultures develop colic? How do mothers in different cultures respond to a crying baby? And how important to our infants' ultimate development is it to talk, sing, and interact with them? These are but a few of the questions Meredith Small, through the research emerging from this new science, answers-and the answers are not only surprising, but may even change the way that we think and go about raising our children. Written for general audiences and parents alike, Our Babies, Ourselves shows what makes us bring up our kids the way we do-and what is actually best for babies. """
From a review there: "A look at the not-so-new idea that how babies eat, sleep, and cry is determined by the culture into which they are born -- including a subtext that the ever-evolving parenting mode in the US may still not be all that baby-friendly. "
What are people trying to accomplish with attending lectures and taking notes that can not be done in other ways, like watching videos or reading books? Learning by working on problem sets, or better, real world problems, drawing on digital materials you search through and read as you need (on-demand learning) seems more appropriate these days.
Widespread vitamin D deficiency may be causing autism, both directly through damage and indirectly in impairing the bodies ability to deal with heavy metals and other toxins in vaccines as well as the environment. See:
"New Harvard Paper on Autism" http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/new-harvard-paper-on-autism.shtml And:
"Vitamin D and the Brain" http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/vit-D-and-brain.shtml """ Vitamin D's role in increasing glutathione levels may explain the link between mercury and other heavy metals, oxidative stress, and autism. For example, activated vitamin D lessens heavy metal induced oxidative injuries in rat brain. The primary route for brain toxicity of most heavy metals is through depletion of glutathione. Besides its function as a master antioxidant, glutathione acts as a chelating (binding) agent to remove heavy metals such as mercury. Autistic individuals have difficulty excreting heavy metals like mercury. If brain levels of activated vitamin D are too low to employ glutathione properly, and thus unable to remove heavy metals, they may be damaged by heavy metal loads normal children easily excrete. That is, the mercury in Thiomerosol vaccines may have injured vitamin D deficient children while normal children would have easily bound the mercury and excreted it. These studies offer further hope that sun-exposure or vitamin D supplements may help autistic children by increasing glutathione and removing heavy metals. Not only do we have more clues that vitamin D is involved in autism, the vitamin D theory just did something else: it explained two other theories of autism, the mercury accumulation theory and the oxidative stress theory. [Lin AM, Chen KB, Chao PL. Antioxidative effect of vitamin D3 on zinc-induced oxidative stress in CNS. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2005 Aug;1053:319–29. Valko M, Morris H, Cronin MT. Metals, toxicity and oxidative stress. Curr Med Chem. 2005;12(10):1161–208.] """
But that is not to disagree with your main point.:-) Even as now that drumbeat is that because one doctor who did one study was publicly discredited, that somehow proves all vaccines are "safe and effective" in all ways. But it is easy to get behind the curve on some issue, especially when there is big money involved. Vitamin D supplements could help save literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year in global health care costs (between preventing some of cancer, mental illness, heart disease, autism, and so on). Sunshine is free, and supplements are cheap. But then who loses out?
Could correlations with cellphone use or WiFi be better explained by correlations with being indoors a lot (or in the car a lot) and so becoming vitamin D deficient?
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/research.shtml "An inability to tan is the number one risk factor for melanoma. Those who tan easily or who have darker skin are far less likely to develop the disease. A new theory is that melanoma is actually caused by sunlight (vitamin D) deficiency and that safe sun exposure actually helps prevent the deadly disease."
So, the body takes something that might be dangerous (UVB) and uses it to help be healthy in that case (Vitamin D). In general, the same is true of its use of oxygen, which is a deadly poison to anaerobic bacteria. With that said, some poisonous things are just poisonous.
I responded to some of this in a parallel item, but since you said you spent so much time on it, I'll reply in more detail on these points.
You wrote: "Capitalism = Market distributes wealth; Marxism = Power brokers distribute wealth"
OK, to begin with, from Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02052010.html """ The truth is that markets are a social institution. Their efficiency depends on the rules that govern the behavior of people in markets. When free market economists talk about markets deciding this or that, they are reifying a social institution and ascribing to it decision-making power. But, of course, markets do not act or make decisions. People act and make decisions, and markets reflect the decisions and actions of people.
The entire debate over regulation is misconstrued. It is not the market, an efficient social institution, which is regulated. What is regulated is the behavior of people in markets. If you want good results from markets, good regulation of human behavior is a requirement.
The market is like a computer. Garbage in, garbage out.
If people who use markets are not regulated, they issue fraudulent financial instruments. They leverage assets with absurd amounts of debt. They market their instruments with fraudulent investment grade ratings. They deal themselves aces.
Did Greenspan not know this? Was he a victim of a theory or an enabler of greed unleashed by the absence of regulation?
The failure to regulate financial markets has produced enormous losses to all Americans except the super-rich. But the U.S. government is guilty of an even greater failure. Washington has not only permitted but also encouraged the unemployment of its citizens by enabling greed-driven corporations to send American jobs abroad in order to maximize profits for CEOs' bonuses, shareholders, and Wall Street.
As Ralph Gomory has made clear, economic theory has been shattered because there is no longer any connection between the profits of American companies and the welfare of Americans. The profits of American companies are derived from the cheap labor in offshored locations and are at the expense of the American work force. """
Do such profitable actions have merit or not in your eye?
In order to survive and prosper as a country and a planet, we need to regulate the behavior of people in markets. We also need to regulate the concentration of wealth that can result from markets, because, since it takes money to make money, the free market playing field becomes increasingly unfair without progressive taxes. That is why the 1940s and 1950s, with progressive taxation up to a marginal 91%) saw such a huge boom in general prosperity in the USA, even as we were shipping a lot of production abroad for then worthless IOUs.
A too big rich/poor divide also cause the market to fail (like now) as more and more fiat dollars are moved by the rich from the physical economy to the casino economy of speculation (whether on land or other assets or usually just financial instruments).
"Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s
People drawing trillions of dollars out of the physical economy to speculate on derivatives or currency moves is the same as if the stuffed it under their mattresses as far as the physical economy is concerned. That's a big reason there is not much money for investment in physical things (oh, yes, there is billions of dolla
Could all mass and energy in the universe have come from random fluctuations nearby a big black hole? I don't understand why the generation of pairs of particles does not produce no net effect on the black hole (so, no evaporation) if matter and antimatter pairs created by vacuum fluctuation quantum events have one or the other fall into the black hole at the same rate? If there was a preference for antimatter from the created pair to go into black holes, that might explain the existence of the material universe.:-) And all the anti-matter to balance the matter created from the vacuum is safely tucked away inside one or more big black holes. (A tiny asymmetry of anti-matter being having a teeny bit more gravity than the same amount of matter might explain that, or if some type of anti-particle attracted anti-particles more than particles, that might also explain that.)
Thanks for your other replies. Sorry to hear about your ex-girlfriend's negative spiral. Certainly her case should show how wealth has diminishing returns for most people, and things like physical health, mental health, and community become better investments by society at some point than just producing more stuff and and isolated indoors lifestyle to go with that? Some ways past that:
"Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy" http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
"Vitamin D and Depression" http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671
You continue to evade some key points I have made. The most important is that, as Einstein said, there is no objective way to decide what we want to do without considering values and priorities and related assumptions, which are things that stem for essentially a religious impulse. http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
There are more links in the sidebar. Why do we have to build an entire society and economy around forcing people to clean other people's toilets when we can build robots to do it, or build better toilets that clean themselves? And the same extends to any disagreeable task you can name -- we can either build a robot to do it at this point, redesign the process so it does not need to be done, redesign the process so it is fun, decide it is not as important as we thought, or figure out some equitable way to share the disagreeable parts. But you still seem fixated on this issue that people have to be motivated to do stuff. Healthy humans do stuff because that is what healthy humans do. Granted, between school, TV, authoritarian workplaces, lack of sunlight, broken communities, and so on, most US Americans are not very healthy, as reflected in the skyrocketing depression rates at ever earlier ages, and also as reflected by a growing rich/poor divide that split our society into three classes -- those with no need to work, those who work too much, and those who can't get jobs at all.
As was said in 1964, http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
That is what you are ignoring, as are most of the other believers in essentially mainstream economics. The "Midas Plague" is totally changing the nature of economics, and the choice are essentially to waste all that productivity to keep a scarcity-based economic model working or to broadly
I should have quoted a little more from that section on Brazil and the basic income (even as I think we will move beyond a currency system almost entirely at some point): http://www.sacc-ct.org.za/suplicy.html """ It is relevant to notice that Lula's plan says: "The minimum income that our government proposes must be seen as a step towards the implementation - when the fiscal conditions are proper - of a citizen's basic income." I have made much effort among the PT economists and then at the National Encounter of the party held in December 2001, in Recife, to have this principle included in the party's platform. However, it is realistic to say that it is not yet fully assimilated by all its members, including our main economists and not even, at least in the way I hope that he will briefly be doing it, by our presidential candidate. I must say, however that Lula defends the minimum income program today much better than in his previews 1989, 1994 and 1998 campaigns as well as much better than any other presidential candidate.
In recent political rallies of this presidential campaign Lula often refers to the most important issue that worries the Brazilians nowadays, the question of how to create employment opportunities. Normally he says that nothing gives more pride to a man or a woman than to work and to receive what is needed for his survival with dignity. He also says that in a Brazil of our dreams no mayor of any city will have to distribute a basket of basic goods or a minimum income to poor families. Therefore, everyone should have the right to a job with a decent wage. The economic policies should have this objective in mind.
Should a minimum income be seen as demeaning to a person? In no way, specially if we understand it, with Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice (1795), that it should be seen not as a charity, but as a right. Everyone must have the right to be a partner of the common property of a nation and of the earth. Therefore I renew my proposal that you are now really deciding to rename BIEN as the Basic Income Earth Network.
Even more important to understand, mainly to a developing country of Latin America, Africa or Asia is that the introduction of a well-designed citizen's basic income is compatible with making the economy more competitive. Since the developed countries today have several forms of earned income tax credit, family tax credit, and minimum income schemes this means that in each one of those nations the community has decided to raise enough taxes or funds to complement the workers wage so that they may attain an income level that is above a certain poverty level. Those instruments allow greater freedom for the worker - a greater bargaining power since they don't need to accept any economic activity to survive. At the same time the firms know that the workers have a supplement in the form of a tax credit or a minimum income. Would this mean that the minimum income would be helping a higher degree of exploitation of the worker? In fact, it is clear to see that from the worker's point of view it is quite better to have the existence of the minimum income that will give him a better bargaining position but not only that. If it is true that firms will also hire more workers because of the existence of the minimum income or tax credit programs what will be the final effect in the labor market? An increase in the demand for workers and therefore an increase in wages, as clearly shown by Samuel Britain in Capitalism with a human face (1965). """
"1. Let me try to illustrate the problem another way: From Google: World GDP: $60.6 Trillion World Population: 6.7 billion If we confiscated all the wealth in the world and divided it up amongst us all that would be: $9,045 per person The poverty line for a 1 person household is: $10,830 If we redistributed all the wealth in the world we would all live below the poverty line."
Nor is GDP a good indicator of total wealth. Total wealth would include the biosphere, all ideas, all land, the moon, all genetic information, everyone's skills, all buildings, and so on.
Also, US$10,000 a year would go really far in India or China or parts of Africa (you'd live more like a US millionaire, assuming you were the only one with that, which you wouldn't be if everyone got it), so it does not account for wage differentials or living cost differentials. The first big problem here is confusing levels of reality. I talk about that here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html """ Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
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 decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system. """
So, when talking about rethinking economics, it is easy to get confused about what currency is or what would happen if we moved it around differently. As Douglas Adams wrote: "This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most
"1. We do not live in a world of abundance, fusion and self replicating machines do not exist."
Corn, dogs, and trees are self-replicating machines. Taken as a whole, most cities are self-replicating machines. So, we have long had that technology, even as better technology might make things easier. We do have fusion energy, it's called the sun.:-)
Well, unless you believe in the alternative plausible theory that the Sun is essentially a lump of iron (or neutronium) and the energy is produced by gravitational forces an other things::-) http://www.spacedaily.com/news/iron-02b.html
In any case, objectively, the Earth receives 10,000 times as much solar energy each day as our civilization uses, and we have more geothermal resources, and there is lots more energy and matter in space.
"2. The solution you propose (neo-Marxism) idealizes man, it ignores the fact that man is selfish, greedy, and competitive."
First, why do you call it neo-Marxism? Is anything involving cooperation Marxist?
Second, while it is true that some people are sometimes selfish, greedy, and competitive, that is not the sum total of all human behavior. One big change with advancing technology is it is ever easier for a very few altruistic people to take care of the rest of the people who are lazy unless they get direct material rewards. So, for example, it only takes 1% of the US workforce to grow all the food the US needs. It really only takes a few percent of the workforce right not to produce most of the goods people really need (granted some people want more). And most services are optional or probably not needed as they are just related to guarding. So, we already live in a world of abundance where maybe an altruistic 5% could produce everything everyone needed. But our economy is not organized that way overall, even if you may see it in spots here and there like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux.
"3. Marxism has had 150 years to prove itself and has failed at each and every implementation."
It depends what you consider a failure. I consider being rated as second from bottom of industrialized countries for child well-being a massive failure, and that's where the USA is. I consider massive brainwashing by compulsory education dumbing people down as Gatto suggests due to an attempt to realize a 19th century vision of a captalistic factory-based utopia a massive failure, but that's what the USA has. By what right do you call that a success? Likewise, even if we have not blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, or killed ourselves off with weaponized plagues, the fact that the USA has chosen to run that risk shows a failure of the imagination. Now the USA is building lots of military robots to enforce a social order built around forcing people to work, instead of building robots to do the work. How is that a success? The USSR may have lost the Cold War, but IMHO so did the USA.
So, what countries would you hold up as a success for individual success? Until about a year ago, Iceland was touted as the success model of meritocracy and independent initiative. Now the entire country is bankrupt (or whatever is the right term for that). Conservatives aren't so busy touting Icelandic model anymore.
This is more what I see:
"A Just Cause A Just War" http://www.progressive.org/zinnjuly09.html
"In Search of Morale: Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?"
I agree with your point about the need for analysis first (basically, simulation), as I said in this reply to another poster: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1531702&cid=30977230 But with that said, a lot of analysis involves a co-evolution of tools and designs and the community, as Doug Engelbart talked about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart So, there is a lot of value to considering the whole system at once and iterating on it in a free and open source way. This is sort of like the Wikipedia software co-evolving with the content and the user community (although it had a proprietary start at first). Clay Shirky talks about some of these coevolution ideas too: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html But even more than what you outline, it seems a group of four people with some funding might have the most leverage creating a critical mass of information about space habitation to the point where thousands of others were helping on a voluntary basis.
The parent poster is very informative, and practical, although misses the open source point as a cultural thing, as well as does not discuss the issue of open standards, which may be even more important than open source for a big project (since with open standards, you can at least replace tools over time).
Also, since much work related to rocketry is considered some form of munitions, that is another stumbling block. Although hopefully OpenLuna can avoid most of those issues and focus on the habitat aspect?
But there is one other aspect that is even more important than CAD, and this is simulation and related standards for storing that data connected to simulations. And there are all sorts of simulation tools emphasizing all sorts of different things at all sorts of different levels of detail. And there are all sorts of very interesting simulations that can be made about how to make things that have both on-Earth benefits and advance the cause of making space habitats.
Take for example these ideas for the US National Institute of Standards And Technologies:
"Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing" 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. To document and monitor these changes, US industry will require key resources and methods that will enable it to measure sustainability along several dimensions (such as carbon foot print, energy accounting and recyclability of materials) allowing accurate assessment of status and progress."
That is exactly the kind of information you need in designing a space habitat too, whether on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, or even anywhere on Earth (like under the sea, or in Antarctica, or in the desert).
Over the last ten years this paper I co-wrote for the Space Studies Institute conference on space manufacturing has gone from unimaginable to mostly obsolete, now that so many people are doing open source design.:-)
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems" http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
But, one big issue to consider is to save design costs, you ideally need a good simulation framework for doing virtual testing of concepts. And to do detailed simulations, you ideally might need millions of people to donate spare CPU cycles. If you can get to the point where you can launch an automated seed factory to the moon that would then build infrastructure, all you would need is a billion dollars to build it and launch it (which hundreds of individuals could swing today). But to get to that point you need a credible design. Getting that design together, with as much virtual testing as possible, is something that could productively occupy many people for years, and the best value for a small group might be to put together enough seed information to make the equivalent (maybe not web based) of a Wikipedia of space habitation and open manufacturing information. Three fizzled attempts by me in those directions from years gone by (roughly two, ten, and twenty years ago, respectively): http://www.oscomak.net/ http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
James P. Hogan, the sci-fi writer, has been a big inspiration to me, especially with these with two books:
"What will determine the hierarchy when money is disposed?"
That's what James P. Hogan goes into at length in the 1982 sci-fi book, Voyage From Yesteryear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear "Since the availability of power from fusion reactors and cheap automated labor has enabled them to develop a post-scarcity economy, they do not use money as a means of exchange, nor do they recognize material possessions as symbols of status. Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of one's social standing - resources that cannot be counterfeited or hoarded, and must be put to use if they are to be acknowledged. As a result, the competitive drive that fuels capitalist financial systems has filled the colony with the products of decades of incredible artistic and technical talent, and there are no widespread hierarchies. No one person or group of people can know everything, so no one person or group of people is expected to speak for all. They have no centralized authorities; some would say they have no government at all."
In one interchange in the book, it is made clear that people there think what humans aspire to on Earth, to make a bunch of money and then sit on their behinds or just do frivolous recreational things, would be considered mental illness there, and further, such a mentally ill person would be taken care of by that society by giving them every material thing they wanted. Stuff was so easy to come by there, with robots making most stuff, and with cheap energy (they had fusion power in the story, but solar and wind and geothermal etc. can also provide more than what we need).
And that society does have a meritocracy of sorts, but the difference is that is not a strict hierarchy, but instead a complex and fluid mix of hierarchies and meshworks (see de Landa), http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm where competence is recognized in very small local hierarchies about single issues within a gift economy framework. If you think about aspects of how, say, Debian GNU/Linux works, or some other open source projects taken as a whole across the entire community, there are some similarities.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization" http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202
But, even while there is meritocracy in the society James P. Hogan depicts, again, there is neither fiat dollar money as we know it, nor credentials, nor titles, nor formal government, nor a lot of other things we accept as "normal". They do this by assessing each others competence in different areas with skills they have learned from birth. So, not really a "popularity" contest.
Now, that is just a fictional world. Debian is at least real. The key issue is that as less and less labor is needed, a variety of different possibilities open up for organizing society. So, it only takes in the USA about 1% of the workforce for farming using air conditioned tractors with stereo systems vs. 90% for farming with horses 200 years ago; 12% and dropping for manufacturing with CNC machines and design software versus 30% for manufacturing with hand-operated drill presses and the same thing I predict will happen for many services (addressing vitamin D deficiency may potentially cut medical care costs by 30% or more).
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum" http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
The fact is, much of accumulation of money is precisely about winning a popularity contest. Granted, often times the contest is rigged -- so, for example, I read that the oil companies and car companies and tire companies got together t
A simulation I developed around 1987 had 2D robots that duplicated themselves from a sea of parts. They would build themselves up and then cut themselves apart to make two copies. To my knowledge, it was the first 2D simulation of self-replicating robots from a sea of parts. The first time it worked, one robot started canibalizing the other to build itself up again. I had to add a sense of "smell" to stop robots from taking parts from their offspring. As another poster referenced, Philip K. Dick's point on identity in 1953 was very prescient: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety "Dick said of the story: "My grand theme -- who is human and who only appears (masquerading) as human? -- emerges most fully. Unless we can individually and collectively be certain of the answer to this question, we face what is, in my view, the most serious problem possible. Without answering it adequately, we cannot even be certain of our own selves. I cannot even know myself, let alone you. So I keep working on this theme; to me nothing is as important a question. And the answer comes very hard.""
However, those robots were not evolving. I presented a talk on that simulation at a workshop on AI and Simulation in 1988 in Minnesota, saying how hard easy it was to make robots that were destructive, but how much harder it would be to make them cooperative. A major from DARPA literally patted me on the back and told me to "keep up the good work". To his credit, I'm not sure which aspect (destructive or cooperative) he was talking about working on.:-) But I left that field around that time for several reasons (including concerns about military funding and use of this stuff, but also that it seemed like we knew enough to destroy ourselves with this stuff but not enough to make it something wonderful). At the same workshop someone presented something on a simulation of organisms with neural networks that learned different behaviors. A professor I took a course from at SUNY Stony Brook has done some interesting stuff on evolution and communications with simple organisms: http://www.stonybrook.edu/philosophy//faculty/pgrim/pgrim_publications.html Anyway, in the quarter century almost since then, what I have learned is that the greatest challenge of the 21st century is the tools of abundance like self-replicating robots (or nanotech, biotech, nuclear energy, networking, bureaucracy, and others things) in the hands of those still preoccupied with fighting over percieved scarcity, or worse, creating artificial scarcity. What could be more ironic than using nuclear missiles to fight over Earthly oil fields, when the same sorts of techology and organizations could let us build space habitats and big renewable energy complexes (or nuclear power too). What is more ironic than building killer robots to enforce social norms related to forcing people to sell their labor doing repetitive work in order to gain the right to consume, rather than just build robots to do the work? Anyway, it won't be the robots that kill us off. It will be the unexamined irony.:-)
Just to follow up on my other post, on example suggesting flu in the Tropics (and I can wonder about some other tropical diseases) is more common in the rainy season with high humidity:
"Do the tropics have a flu season?" http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/03/do_the_tropics_have_a_flu_seas.php "The scientific literature is full of specialized papers that on their face would seem to be of little interest. Here's a title like that: "Prevalence and seasonality of influenza-like illness in children, Nicaragua, 2005-2007" (Gordon et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 2009 Mar). http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/15/3/pdfs/08-0238.pdf Over 4000 Nicaraguan children, aged 2 to 11 years old and living in the capital of Managua were followed for 2 years, April 2005 to April 2007 and observed for development of ILI (influenza-like illness). We know a lot about influenza in major industrialized countries in the northern and southern temperate zones, but very little about the epidemiology of seasonal influenza in tropical regions. Is the pattern of the disease in these populations the same as in temperate climes? Is there a lot of flu or just a low level? Is it still seasonal influenza? The US and Europe have recently set up surveillance systems that help answer these questions but most countries don't have those resources."
So, understanding more about the effects of vitamin D deficiency may very well help a lot of people in the Tropics directly, much more than vaccinations, since adequate vitamin D is cheap to treat with, and that single thing might prevent a variety of illnesses, not just communicable ones, but also cancer, depression, heart disease, dementia, and so on.
Also, while it is often said people catch the cold and the flu because we are indoors more in the winter (or the rainy season), in the USA most people are indoors around others much of the time, between work, school, and malls. So, that explanation has limited value.
And vitamin D deficiency also impairs the bodies ability to deal with heavy metals, making vaccines harder to process that contain heavy metals (and causing seemingly random problems in those who are most vitamin D deficient and have an impaired ability to deal with heavy metals that don't show up in people getting enough sunshine?). Likewise, vitamin D deficiency impairs immune response (both potentially too little and too much), making vaccines less effective and more dangerous. So, there are lots of reasons to study this, even for those who still believe in the value of most vaccines.
Another comment on this:
"Flu is Vitamin D Deficiency Disease" http://thehealthyhomeeconomist.blogspot.com/2010/01/flu-is-vitamin-d-deficiency-disease.html """ Why does the government push dangerous and untested vaccines on the public for the prevention of flu when it is so easy to prevent it with adequate blood levels of vitamin D? The answer is always the almighty dollar. Follow the green and you know why this simple flu prevention strategy is completely ignored. I personally haven't had the flu in over 8 years since I was informed of the critical role of vitamin D in preventing illness and have worked to keep my vitamin D blood levels adequate. In fact, I am so unafraid of the flu that I would be comfortable in a room full of swine flu patients with no mask! Fact is, you are not going to "catch" the flu if your vitamin D blood levels are normal any more than a sail
That's a good point. However, think about the consequences to materially poorer nations of industrialized nations armed with nuclear weapons controlled by people with widespread mental illness due to vitamin D deficiency. Or, what about depressed and unbalanced world bankers making crazy financial policies effecting poor countries? http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
And what of people from poor countries who go live abroad in the North to send back money, but then get vitamin D deficient?
And what of health care researchers who are less productive because they are vitamin D deficient?
Also, even in materially poorer nations at the equator, you can be vitamin D deficient if you need to work indoors all day at a low wage job, or even if you are a professional, like a doctor or bureaucraty, who works indoors all day. So, even poor countries may be facing this problem.
Also, even in poor countries near the equator, there is often a rainy season when people spend a lot of time indoors and may become vitamin D deficient (that is when flus and colds tend to strike in tropical areas, in the rainy season, which shows what bunk the common explanation for getting more colds and flus in the winter in the USA is, suggested due to "dry air" in the winter, but then why do people in the tropics get the flu when the air is 100% humidity endlessly).
It's true that a sedentary lifestyle plays a role, especially as people like most slashdotters like myself have made it ever more interesting to be inside with computer media. But, there is specific medical advice (well intended, but harmful) by dermatologists to avoid the sun. It might have not been bad if dermatologist had said, and also you need to take 5000 IU D3 daily and have your blood tested regularly to make up for not being in the sun. But they did not. So, are dematologists all liable for such advice?
Anyway, this vitamin D issue is really a global one, with a much bigger impact than any vaccine, even a vaccine for malaria, as bad as that problem is. Of course, like all things, different people may get the immediate costs and benefits of different health approaches. And no doubt some few people will be harmed by too much vitamin D (even if it is much fewer than commonly thought, but that's why a blood test is a good idea if you supplement):
"The Truth About Vitamin D Toxicity" http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml
But it is such a big issue, more should be done IMHO. Vitamin D deficiency is just a widespread epidemic that is a consequence of and indoors and sun-avoiding lifestyle centered around technology. It is the thing every slashdotter should be aware of at least for themselves and their family.
First off, I have to agree that humans have hierarchical aspects and impressing the opposite sex is always going to be an issue. But James P. Hogan suggests in Voyage From Yesteryear that there are other ways to do that. How about a male impressing women with how compassionate he is? Or how funny? Anyway, different women are impressed by different things (there is a whole ecology and evolution literature on this). So, anyway, there is no doubt a lot of truth to your last point as a statement of fact.
But, what do we do with the facts? There, values come into play. As Albert Einstein said: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm """ For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. If one were to take that goal out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind.
There is no room in this for the divinization of a nation, of a class, let alone of an individual. Are we not all children of one father, as it is said in religious language? Indeed, even the divinization of humanity, as an abstract totality, would not be in the spirit of that
There are lots of solutions rather than kill off people or prevent them from being born when there is so much abundance for everyone these days through modern technology. You want to stop suffering? Break the link between a right-to-consume and being able to sell your labor on a market where automation and better design is removing good jobs every day, like people said would be a problem even back in 1964: http://educationanddemocra
Populations are collapsing in industrialized countries, and there is room for quadrillions of people in space habitats, as I outline here: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004174.html """ The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.
We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essentially had the specific technological ideas in the 1970s we needed to do that, even given refinements since then. So, a focus on zero or negative population growth for the human race as a whole right now, as opposed to just limiting the population currently on Earth (which might be sensible, even though I think we could easily grow 10X on Earth), has created a "Peak Population" crisis that we didn't need to have for 1000 years when we filled up the solar system (and by then, we would have better technology and better social ideology to deal with changing demographics of moving from a triangle to a square of population by age).
Sure, let's set a population target for some carrying capacity on Earth the same way the health and fire departments limit the maximum number of people in a restaurant. But, you don't limit the human population of a city (or the solar system) the same way you limit the number of people that can safely be in a restaurant (the Earth). That is ultimately the mistake that gloomsters like Catton make -- they confuse the two, mostly IMHO from lack of imagination, but also because some profit from artificial scarcity, as well, as in Catton's case, the hypocrisy of having four children while telling everyone else to have less. """
One of the reasons people want to have less children in industrialized countries is that they are family unfriendly. The US is rated the second to worst industrialized country to be a child, and the UK is worst: http://web.archive.org/web/20080119001830/http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html ""The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""
And here is a book outlining the social problems of industrialized countries and their mental health services and why much of industrialized populations are mentally ill:
Might save a trillion dollars a year in health care costs. Especially for indoors-mainly slashdoters: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml Technology stock implications here: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/14046/What_Vitamin_D_Means_to_Your_Technology_Profits.html "The scientific consensus that has held sway for four decades regarding both exposure to the sun and vitamin D has collapsed. What has emerged in place of the old settled science is the knowledge that most people in America are seriously vitamin D deficient or insufficient. The same is true for Canada and Europe, and the implications are staggering. Simply put, unless you are one of the few people with optimal serum D levels, such as lifeguards and roofers in South Florida, you can cut your risks from most major diseases by 50 to 80 percent. All you have to do is get enough D. This also means we can significantly reduce healthcare costs by taking a few simple steps.... Behind the scenes even as I write today, the NIH is looking for a face-saving way to change positions on vitamin D without taking too much blame for having resisted those who have urged reassessment for decades."
I just posted these links in another reply, but as a computer person, you might like this story about computing and freedom from the early 1950s that inspired people like Ted Nelson (of Xanadu hypertext fame -- he said he had forgotten the story title and author until I reminded of it one time I went to a talk by him around 1999, even though he used Xanadu as the name of his software):
"The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon in the book "And Now the News" http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
Except schooling is not the gateway to the hierarchy, it is a way to keep people down, see John Taylor Gatto. And we already have a meritocracy, it is the meritocracy of heredity and sometimes luck and sometimes some other things. Besides, what is the proper way to judge "merit"? Are people who bust their assess running a bagel shop franchise and make a million dollars but neglect their families more worthy than people who spend a lot of time raising well-adjusted children? There is more to valuing worth than dollars.
How does the US have a "higher standard of living" when it is such an unhappy place for many and it is the second worst place to be a child according to the UN report mentioned in that archived article? Standard of living in what sense? Having piles of stuff? There is a lot more to happiness than piles of stuff. That is, when one gets beyond the dogmas, at least a good part of many progressive religious traditions.
The problem with metrics is you get what you measure, and it is hard to measure some really important things like love or caring. That's the problem with any technocratic system. Who gets to set the values of the system? Someone like, say, Jacques Fresco of the Venus Project (well worth looking up if you are in Florida) suggests those values and metrices are essentially self-evident or can be picked scientifically, but Albert Einstein suggests differently: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm """ For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. """
Slashdot Mirror
School is often boring for many people. Is this study proof that compulsory schooling is bad for most people's health?
See also:
"The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" also by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"The Three Boxes of Life and How to Get Out of Them: An Introduction to Life/Work Planning" by Richard N. Bolles (also writes "What Color is Your Parachute")
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Boxes-Life-How-Them/dp/0913668583
Other links:
"College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
Keeping babies in cages is frowned on by most other societies, according to anthropologist Meredith Small:
"Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent"
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Babies-Ourselves-Biology-Culture/dp/0385483627
http://books.google.com/books?id=925HAAAAMAAJ
"""
"In the winter of 1995, in a dimly lit room in Atlanta, Georgia, I witnessed a birth. Not the birth of a baby, but of a new science, ethnopediatrics." Thus begins Meredith Small's new, groundbreaking book on the study of parents and infants across cultures and the way different caretaking styes affect the health, well-being, and survival of infants. Pediatricians, child development researchers, and anthropologists today have turned their research efforts to studying this new science of why we parent our children the way we do. Each culture, and often each family, offers advice and directives on the right and wrong way to raise and care for infants, from feeding, interaction, emotional support, sleeping, and more. Yet scientists are finding that what we are taught is the right way to parent our children is based on nothing more than cultural directives-and may even run directly counter to a baby's biological needs. Should a child be encouraged to sleep alone from an early age, as parents do here in the U.S.? Is breastfeeding better than bottlefeeding, or is that just the myth of the '90s? How frequently should children be nursed-or does it matter? Do children in all cultures develop colic? How do mothers in different cultures respond to a crying baby? And how important to our infants' ultimate development is it to talk, sing, and interact with them? These are but a few of the questions Meredith Small, through the research emerging from this new science, answers-and the answers are not only surprising, but may even change the way that we think and go about raising our children. Written for general audiences and parents alike, Our Babies, Ourselves shows what makes us bring up our kids the way we do-and what is actually best for babies.
"""
From a review there: "A look at the not-so-new idea that how babies eat, sleep, and cry is determined by the culture into which they are born -- including a subtext that the ever-evolving parenting mode in the US may still not be all that baby-friendly. "
Also related:
http://www.google.com/search?q=attachment+parenting
http://www.google.com/search?q=cosleeping
http://www.google.com/search?q=extended+breastfeeding
http://www.google.com/search?q=continuum+concept
http://www.google.com/search?q=crib+cage
http://www.google.com/search?q=unschooling
http://www.google.com/search?q=free+range+children
What are people trying to accomplish with attending lectures and taking notes that can not be done in other ways, like watching videos or reading books? Learning by working on problem sets, or better, real world problems, drawing on digital materials you search through and read as you need (on-demand learning) seems more appropriate these days.
An essay by me on this, about the poor use of technology by schools because schools are using an obsolete social paradigm:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
Here are lots more of my writings organizing collections of links and ideas about college issues in general:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
It's been know since the 1930s:
http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v05n03.shtml
Treatment:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
This may be an especially big problem these days in pediatric dentistry, as kids spend more and more time indoors.
Widespread vitamin D deficiency may be causing autism, both directly through damage and indirectly in impairing the bodies ability to deal with heavy metals and other toxins in vaccines as well as the environment. See:
"New Harvard Paper on Autism"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/new-harvard-paper-on-autism.shtml
And:
"Vitamin D and the Brain"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/vit-D-and-brain.shtml
"""
Vitamin D's role in increasing glutathione levels may explain the link between mercury and other heavy metals, oxidative stress, and autism. For example, activated vitamin D lessens heavy metal induced oxidative injuries in rat brain. The primary route for brain toxicity of most heavy metals is through depletion of glutathione. Besides its function as a master antioxidant, glutathione acts as a chelating (binding) agent to remove heavy metals such as mercury. Autistic individuals have difficulty excreting heavy metals like mercury. If brain levels of activated vitamin D are too low to employ glutathione properly, and thus unable to remove heavy metals, they may be damaged by heavy metal loads normal children easily excrete. That is, the mercury in Thiomerosol vaccines may have injured vitamin D deficient children while normal children would have easily bound the mercury and excreted it. These studies offer further hope that sun-exposure or vitamin D supplements may help autistic children by increasing glutathione and removing heavy metals. Not only do we have more clues that vitamin D is involved in autism, the vitamin D theory just did something else: it explained two other theories of autism, the mercury accumulation theory and the oxidative stress theory. [Lin AM, Chen KB, Chao PL. Antioxidative effect of vitamin D3 on zinc-induced oxidative stress in CNS. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2005 Aug;1053:319–29. Valko M, Morris H, Cronin MT. Metals, toxicity and oxidative stress. Curr Med Chem. 2005;12(10):1161–208.]
"""
Also related:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/the-black-community.shtml
But that is not to disagree with your main point. :-) Even as now that drumbeat is that because one doctor who did one study was publicly discredited, that somehow proves all vaccines are "safe and effective" in all ways. But it is easy to get behind the curve on some issue, especially when there is big money involved. Vitamin D supplements could help save literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year in global health care costs (between preventing some of cancer, mental illness, heart disease, autism, and so on). Sunshine is free, and supplements are cheap. But then who loses out?
By the way, if you spend a lot of time indoors at computers, see this:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Could correlations with cellphone use or WiFi be better explained by correlations with being indoors a lot (or in the car a lot) and so becoming vitamin D deficient?
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/research.shtml
"An inability to tan is the number one risk factor for melanoma. Those who tan easily or who have darker skin are far less likely to develop the disease. A new theory is that melanoma is actually caused by sunlight (vitamin D) deficiency and that safe sun exposure actually helps prevent the deadly disease."
So, the body takes something that might be dangerous (UVB) and uses it to help be healthy in that case (Vitamin D). In general, the same is true of its use of oxygen, which is a deadly poison to anaerobic bacteria. With that said, some poisonous things are just poisonous.
See also, if you spend a lot of time indoors, how to help prevent lots of diseases that stem from vitamin D deficiency:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
I responded to some of this in a parallel item, but since you said you spent so much time on it, I'll reply in more detail on these points.
You wrote: "Capitalism = Market distributes wealth; Marxism = Power brokers distribute wealth"
OK, to begin with, from Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02052010.html
"""
The truth is that markets are a social institution. Their efficiency depends on the rules that govern the behavior of people in markets. When free market economists talk about markets deciding this or that, they are reifying a social institution and ascribing to it decision-making power. But, of course, markets do not act or make decisions. People act and make decisions, and markets reflect the decisions and actions of people.
The entire debate over regulation is misconstrued. It is not the market, an efficient social institution, which is regulated. What is regulated is the behavior of people in markets. If you want good results from markets, good regulation of human behavior is a requirement.
The market is like a computer. Garbage in, garbage out.
If people who use markets are not regulated, they issue fraudulent financial instruments. They leverage assets with absurd amounts of debt. They market their instruments with fraudulent investment grade ratings. They deal themselves aces.
Did Greenspan not know this? Was he a victim of a theory or an enabler of greed unleashed by the absence of regulation?
The failure to regulate financial markets has produced enormous losses to all Americans except the super-rich. But the U.S. government is guilty of an even greater failure. Washington has not only permitted but also encouraged the unemployment of its citizens by enabling greed-driven corporations to send American jobs abroad in order to maximize profits for CEOs' bonuses, shareholders, and Wall Street.
As Ralph Gomory has made clear, economic theory has been shattered because there is no longer any connection between the profits of American companies and the welfare of Americans. The profits of American companies are derived from the cheap labor in offshored locations and are at the expense of the American work force.
"""
Do such profitable actions have merit or not in your eye?
Here is Greenspan on this:
"Greenspan Destroys Deregulation in 16 Seconds"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAH-o7oEiyY&feature=related
In order to survive and prosper as a country and a planet, we need to regulate the behavior of people in markets. We also need to regulate the concentration of wealth that can result from markets, because, since it takes money to make money, the free market playing field becomes increasingly unfair without progressive taxes. That is why the 1940s and 1950s, with progressive taxation up to a marginal 91%) saw such a huge boom in general prosperity in the USA, even as we were shipping a lot of production abroad for then worthless IOUs.
A too big rich/poor divide also cause the market to fail (like now) as more and more fiat dollars are moved by the rich from the physical economy to the casino economy of speculation (whether on land or other assets or usually just financial instruments).
"Money as Debt II Promises Unleashed"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s
People drawing trillions of dollars out of the physical economy to speculate on derivatives or currency moves is the same as if the stuffed it under their mattresses as far as the physical economy is concerned. That's a big reason there is not much money for investment in physical things (oh, yes, there is billions of dolla
They want their energy back. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
Could all mass and energy in the universe have come from random fluctuations nearby a big black hole? I don't understand why the generation of pairs of particles does not produce no net effect on the black hole (so, no evaporation) if matter and antimatter pairs created by vacuum fluctuation quantum events have one or the other fall into the black hole at the same rate? If there was a preference for antimatter from the created pair to go into black holes, that might explain the existence of the material universe. :-) And all the anti-matter to balance the matter created from the vacuum is safely tucked away inside one or more big black holes. (A tiny asymmetry of anti-matter being having a teeny bit more gravity than the same amount of matter might explain that, or if some type of anti-particle attracted anti-particles more than particles, that might also explain that.)
Thanks for your other replies. Sorry to hear about your ex-girlfriend's negative spiral. Certainly her case should show how wealth has diminishing returns for most people, and things like physical health, mental health, and community become better investments by society at some point than just producing more stuff and and isolated indoors lifestyle to go with that? Some ways past that:
"Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy"
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
"Vitamin D and Depression"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals"
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671
You continue to evade some key points I have made. The most important is that, as Einstein said, there is no objective way to decide what we want to do without considering values and priorities and related assumptions, which are things that stem for essentially a religious impulse.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
By the way, a toilet cleaning robot (not that it looks that well worked out):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9vaqsd1iP4
Here is a better idea, that, using better design, makes a toilet into more of a self-cleaning appliance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcpZgp23nzM&NR=1
There are more links in the sidebar. Why do we have to build an entire society and economy around forcing people to clean other people's toilets when we can build robots to do it, or build better toilets that clean themselves? And the same extends to any disagreeable task you can name -- we can either build a robot to do it at this point, redesign the process so it does not need to be done, redesign the process so it is fun, decide it is not as important as we thought, or figure out some equitable way to share the disagreeable parts. But you still seem fixated on this issue that people have to be motivated to do stuff. Healthy humans do stuff because that is what healthy humans do. Granted, between school, TV, authoritarian workplaces, lack of sunlight, broken communities, and so on, most US Americans are not very healthy, as reflected in the skyrocketing depression rates at ever earlier ages, and also as reflected by a growing rich/poor divide that split our society into three classes -- those with no need to work, those who work too much, and those who can't get jobs at all.
As was said in 1964,
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
That is what you are ignoring, as are most of the other believers in essentially mainstream economics. The "Midas Plague" is totally changing the nature of economics, and the choice are essentially to waste all that productivity to keep a scarcity-based economic model working or to broadly
I should have quoted a little more from that section on Brazil and the basic income (even as I think we will move beyond a currency system almost entirely at some point):
http://www.sacc-ct.org.za/suplicy.html
"""
It is relevant to notice that Lula's plan says: "The minimum income that our government proposes must be seen as a step towards the implementation - when the fiscal conditions are proper - of a citizen's basic income." I have made much effort among the PT economists and then at the National Encounter of the party held in December 2001, in Recife, to have this principle included in the party's platform. However, it is realistic to say that it is not yet fully assimilated by all its members, including our main economists and not even, at least in the way I hope that he will briefly be doing it, by our presidential candidate. I must say, however that Lula defends the minimum income program today much better than in his previews 1989, 1994 and 1998 campaigns as well as much better than any other presidential candidate.
In recent political rallies of this presidential campaign Lula often refers to the most important issue that worries the Brazilians nowadays, the question of how to create employment opportunities. Normally he says that nothing gives more pride to a man or a woman than to work and to receive what is needed for his survival with dignity. He also says that in a Brazil of our dreams no mayor of any city will have to distribute a basket of basic goods or a minimum income to poor families. Therefore, everyone should have the right to a job with a decent wage. The economic policies should have this objective in mind.
Should a minimum income be seen as demeaning to a person? In no way, specially if we understand it, with Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice (1795), that it should be seen not as a charity, but as a right. Everyone must have the right to be a partner of the common property of a nation and of the earth. Therefore I renew my proposal that you are now really deciding to rename BIEN as the Basic Income Earth Network.
Even more important to understand, mainly to a developing country of Latin America, Africa or Asia is that the introduction of a well-designed citizen's basic income is compatible with making the economy more competitive. Since the developed countries today have several forms of earned income tax credit, family tax credit, and minimum income schemes this means that in each one of those nations the community has decided to raise enough taxes or funds to complement the workers wage so that they may attain an income level that is above a certain poverty level. Those instruments allow greater freedom for the worker - a greater bargaining power since they don't need to accept any economic activity to survive. At the same time the firms know that the workers have a supplement in the form of a tax credit or a minimum income. Would this mean that the minimum income would be helping a higher degree of exploitation of the worker? In fact, it is clear to see that from the worker's point of view it is quite better to have the existence of the minimum income that will give him a better bargaining position but not only that. If it is true that firms will also hire more workers because of the existence of the minimum income or tax credit programs what will be the final effect in the labor market? An increase in the demand for workers and therefore an increase in wages, as clearly shown by Samuel Britain in Capitalism with a human face (1965).
"""
Anyway, as I reflect more on this, I am reminded of this phrase which is, it is true, was popularized by Karl Marx:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_need
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs) is a slogan popular
"1. Let me try to illustrate the problem another way:
From Google:
World GDP: $60.6 Trillion
World Population: 6.7 billion
If we confiscated all the wealth in the world and divided it up amongst us all that would be:
$9,045 per person
The poverty line for a 1 person household is:
$10,830
If we redistributed all the wealth in the world we would all live below the poverty line."
Several problems there.
GDP is just annual production measured in currency. It is not a good indicator of true progress:
http://www.rprogress.org/index.htm
Nor is GDP a good indicator of total wealth. Total wealth would include the biosphere, all ideas, all land, the moon, all genetic information, everyone's skills, all buildings, and so on.
Also, US$10,000 a year would go really far in India or China or parts of Africa (you'd live more like a US millionaire, assuming you were the only one with that, which you wouldn't be if everyone got it), so it does not account for wage differentials or living cost differentials. The first big problem here is confusing levels of reality. I talk about that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"""
Here is a sample meta-theoretical framework PU economists no doubt could vastly improve on if they turned their minds to it. Consider three levels of nested perspectives on the same economic reality -- physical items, decision makers, and emergent properties of decision maker interactions. (Three levels of being or consciousness is a common theme in philosophical writings, usually rock, plant, and animal, or plant, animal, and human.)
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 decision makers may invent theories about how to control each other using various approaches like internet communication standards, ration unit tokens like fiat dollars, physical kanban tokens, narratives in emails, and so on. What the most useful theories are for controlling groups of decision makers is an interesting question, but I will not explore it in depth. But I will pointing out that complex system dynamics at this third level of perspective can emerge whether control involves fiat dollars, "kanban" tokens, centralized or distributed optimization based on perceived or predicted demand patterns, human-to-human discussions, something else entirely, or a diverse collection of all these things. And I will also point out that one should never confuse the reality of the physical system being controlled for the control signals (money, spoken words, kanban cards, internet packet contents, etc.) being passed around in the control system.
"""
So, when talking about rethinking economics, it is easy to get confused about what currency is or what would happen if we moved it around differently. As Douglas Adams wrote: "This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most
"1. We do not live in a world of abundance, fusion and self replicating machines do not exist."
Corn, dogs, and trees are self-replicating machines. Taken as a whole, most cities are self-replicating machines. So, we have long had that technology, even as better technology might make things easier. We do have fusion energy, it's called the sun. :-)
Well, unless you believe in the alternative plausible theory that the Sun is essentially a lump of iron (or neutronium) and the energy is produced by gravitational forces an other things: :-)
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/iron-02b.html
In any case, objectively, the Earth receives 10,000 times as much solar energy each day as our civilization uses, and we have more geothermal resources, and there is lots more energy and matter in space.
"2. The solution you propose (neo-Marxism) idealizes man, it ignores the fact that man is selfish, greedy, and competitive."
First, why do you call it neo-Marxism? Is anything involving cooperation Marxist?
Second, while it is true that some people are sometimes selfish, greedy, and competitive, that is not the sum total of all human behavior. One big change with advancing technology is it is ever easier for a very few altruistic people to take care of the rest of the people who are lazy unless they get direct material rewards. So, for example, it only takes 1% of the US workforce to grow all the food the US needs. It really only takes a few percent of the workforce right not to produce most of the goods people really need (granted some people want more). And most services are optional or probably not needed as they are just related to guarding. So, we already live in a world of abundance where maybe an altruistic 5% could produce everything everyone needed. But our economy is not organized that way overall, even if you may see it in spots here and there like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux.
"3. Marxism has had 150 years to prove itself and has failed at each and every implementation."
I don't know; Cuba weathered it's Peak Oil crisis pretty well, all things considered.
"Can the West cultivate ideas from Cuba's 'Special Period'?"
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/03/29/eco.cubaagriculture/index.html
It depends what you consider a failure. I consider being rated as second from bottom of industrialized countries for child well-being a massive failure, and that's where the USA is. I consider massive brainwashing by compulsory education dumbing people down as Gatto suggests due to an attempt to realize a 19th century vision of a captalistic factory-based utopia a massive failure, but that's what the USA has. By what right do you call that a success? Likewise, even if we have not blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, or killed ourselves off with weaponized plagues, the fact that the USA has chosen to run that risk shows a failure of the imagination. Now the USA is building lots of military robots to enforce a social order built around forcing people to work, instead of building robots to do the work. How is that a success? The USSR may have lost the Cold War, but IMHO so did the USA.
So, what countries would you hold up as a success for individual success? Until about a year ago, Iceland was touted as the success model of meritocracy and independent initiative. Now the entire country is bankrupt (or whatever is the right term for that). Conservatives aren't so busy touting Icelandic model anymore.
This is more what I see:
"A Just Cause A Just War"
http://www.progressive.org/zinnjuly09.html
"In Search of Morale: Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?"
I agree with your point about the need for analysis first (basically, simulation), as I said in this reply to another poster:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1531702&cid=30977230
But with that said, a lot of analysis involves a co-evolution of tools and designs and the community, as Doug Engelbart talked about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
So, there is a lot of value to considering the whole system at once and iterating on it in a free and open source way. This is sort of like the Wikipedia software co-evolving with the content and the user community (although it had a proprietary start at first). Clay Shirky talks about some of these coevolution ideas too:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
But even more than what you outline, it seems a group of four people with some funding might have the most leverage creating a critical mass of information about space habitation to the point where thousands of others were helping on a voluntary basis.
The parent poster is very informative, and practical, although misses the open source point as a cultural thing, as well as does not discuss the issue of open standards, which may be even more important than open source for a big project (since with open standards, you can at least replace tools over time).
Also, since much work related to rocketry is considered some form of munitions, that is another stumbling block. Although hopefully OpenLuna can avoid most of those issues and focus on the habitat aspect?
But there is one other aspect that is even more important than CAD, and this is simulation and related standards for storing that data connected to simulations. And there are all sorts of simulation tools emphasizing all sorts of different things at all sorts of different levels of detail. And there are all sorts of very interesting simulations that can be made about how to make things that have both on-Earth benefits and advance the cause of making space habitats.
Take for example these ideas for the US National Institute of Standards And Technologies:
"Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing"
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. To document and monitor these changes, US industry will require key resources and methods that will enable it to measure sustainability along several dimensions (such as carbon foot print, energy accounting and recyclability of materials) allowing accurate assessment of status and progress."
That is exactly the kind of information you need in designing a space habitat too, whether on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, or even anywhere on Earth (like under the sea, or in Antarctica, or in the desert).
Over the last ten years this paper I co-wrote for the Space Studies Institute conference on space manufacturing has gone from unimaginable to mostly obsolete, now that so many people are doing open source design. :-)
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
But, one big issue to consider is to save design costs, you ideally need a good simulation framework for doing virtual testing of concepts. And to do detailed simulations, you ideally might need millions of people to donate spare CPU cycles. If you can get to the point where you can launch an automated seed factory to the moon that would then build infrastructure, all you would need is a billion dollars to build it and launch it (which hundreds of individuals could swing today). But to get to that point you need a credible design. Getting that design together, with as much virtual testing as possible, is something that could productively occupy many people for years, and the best value for a small group might be to put together enough seed information to make the equivalent (maybe not web based) of a Wikipedia of space habitation and open manufacturing information. Three fizzled attempts by me in those directions from years gone by (roughly two, ten, and twenty years ago, respectively):
http://www.oscomak.net/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
James P. Hogan, the sci-fi writer, has been a big inspiration to me, especially with these with two books:
"What will determine the hierarchy when money is disposed?"
That's what James P. Hogan goes into at length in the 1982 sci-fi book, Voyage From Yesteryear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
"Since the availability of power from fusion reactors and cheap automated labor has enabled them to develop a post-scarcity economy, they do not use money as a means of exchange, nor do they recognize material possessions as symbols of status. Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of one's social standing - resources that cannot be counterfeited or hoarded, and must be put to use if they are to be acknowledged. As a result, the competitive drive that fuels capitalist financial systems has filled the colony with the products of decades of incredible artistic and technical talent, and there are no widespread hierarchies. No one person or group of people can know everything, so no one person or group of people is expected to speak for all. They have no centralized authorities; some would say they have no government at all."
In one interchange in the book, it is made clear that people there think what humans aspire to on Earth, to make a bunch of money and then sit on their behinds or just do frivolous recreational things, would be considered mental illness there, and further, such a mentally ill person would be taken care of by that society by giving them every material thing they wanted. Stuff was so easy to come by there, with robots making most stuff, and with cheap energy (they had fusion power in the story, but solar and wind and geothermal etc. can also provide more than what we need).
And that society does have a meritocracy of sorts, but the difference is that is not a strict hierarchy, but instead a complex and fluid mix of hierarchies and meshworks (see de Landa),
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
where competence is recognized in very small local hierarchies about single issues within a gift economy framework. If you think about aspects of how, say, Debian GNU/Linux works, or some other open source projects taken as a whole across the entire community, there are some similarities.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202
But, even while there is meritocracy in the society James P. Hogan depicts, again, there is neither fiat dollar money as we know it, nor credentials, nor titles, nor formal government, nor a lot of other things we accept as "normal". They do this by assessing each others competence in different areas with skills they have learned from birth. So, not really a "popularity" contest.
Now, that is just a fictional world. Debian is at least real. The key issue is that as less and less labor is needed, a variety of different possibilities open up for organizing society. So, it only takes in the USA about 1% of the workforce for farming using air conditioned tractors with stereo systems vs. 90% for farming with horses 200 years ago; 12% and dropping for manufacturing with CNC machines and design software versus 30% for manufacturing with hand-operated drill presses and the same thing I predict will happen for many services (addressing vitamin D deficiency may potentially cut medical care costs by 30% or more).
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
The fact is, much of accumulation of money is precisely about winning a popularity contest. Granted, often times the contest is rigged -- so, for example, I read that the oil companies and car companies and tire companies got together t
A simulation I developed around 1987 had 2D robots that duplicated themselves from a sea of parts. They would build themselves up and then cut themselves apart to make two copies. To my knowledge, it was the first 2D simulation of self-replicating robots from a sea of parts. The first time it worked, one robot started canibalizing the other to build itself up again. I had to add a sense of "smell" to stop robots from taking parts from their offspring. As another poster referenced, Philip K. Dick's point on identity in 1953 was very prescient:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety
"Dick said of the story: "My grand theme -- who is human and who only appears (masquerading) as human? -- emerges most fully. Unless we can individually and collectively be certain of the answer to this question, we face what is, in my view, the most serious problem possible. Without answering it adequately, we cannot even be certain of our own selves. I cannot even know myself, let alone you. So I keep working on this theme; to me nothing is as important a question. And the answer comes very hard.""
However, those robots were not evolving. I presented a talk on that simulation at a workshop on AI and Simulation in 1988 in Minnesota, saying how hard easy it was to make robots that were destructive, but how much harder it would be to make them cooperative. A major from DARPA literally patted me on the back and told me to "keep up the good work". To his credit, I'm not sure which aspect (destructive or cooperative) he was talking about working on. :-) But I left that field around that time for several reasons (including concerns about military funding and use of this stuff, but also that it seemed like we knew enough to destroy ourselves with this stuff but not enough to make it something wonderful). At the same workshop someone presented something on a simulation of organisms with neural networks that learned different behaviors. A professor I took a course from at SUNY Stony Brook has done some interesting stuff on evolution and communications with simple organisms: :-)
http://www.stonybrook.edu/philosophy//faculty/pgrim/pgrim_publications.html
Anyway, in the quarter century almost since then, what I have learned is that the greatest challenge of the 21st century is the tools of abundance like self-replicating robots (or nanotech, biotech, nuclear energy, networking, bureaucracy, and others things) in the hands of those still preoccupied with fighting over percieved scarcity, or worse, creating artificial scarcity. What could be more ironic than using nuclear missiles to fight over Earthly oil fields, when the same sorts of techology and organizations could let us build space habitats and big renewable energy complexes (or nuclear power too). What is more ironic than building killer robots to enforce social norms related to forcing people to sell their labor doing repetitive work in order to gain the right to consume, rather than just build robots to do the work? Anyway, it won't be the robots that kill us off. It will be the unexamined irony.
Just to follow up on my other post, on example suggesting flu in the Tropics (and I can wonder about some other tropical diseases) is more common in the rainy season with high humidity:
"Do the tropics have a flu season?"
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/03/do_the_tropics_have_a_flu_seas.php
"The scientific literature is full of specialized papers that on their face would seem to be of little interest. Here's a title like that: "Prevalence and seasonality of influenza-like illness in children, Nicaragua, 2005-2007" (Gordon et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 2009 Mar).
http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/15/3/pdfs/08-0238.pdf
Over 4000 Nicaraguan children, aged 2 to 11 years old and living in the capital of Managua were followed for 2 years, April 2005 to April 2007 and observed for development of ILI (influenza-like illness). We know a lot about influenza in major industrialized countries in the northern and southern temperate zones, but very little about the epidemiology of seasonal influenza in tropical regions. Is the pattern of the disease in these populations the same as in temperate climes? Is there a lot of flu or just a low level? Is it still seasonal influenza? The US and Europe have recently set up surveillance systems that help answer these questions but most countries don't have those resources."
So, understanding more about the effects of vitamin D deficiency may very well help a lot of people in the Tropics directly, much more than vaccinations, since adequate vitamin D is cheap to treat with, and that single thing might prevent a variety of illnesses, not just communicable ones, but also cancer, depression, heart disease, dementia, and so on.
Lots of sources here about vitamin D and influenza though:
http://www.google.com/custom?q=influenza&sitesearch=vitamindcouncil.org&sa=Search
Also, while it is often said people catch the cold and the flu because we are indoors more in the winter (or the rainy season), in the USA most people are indoors around others much of the time, between work, school, and malls. So, that explanation has limited value.
And vitamin D deficiency also impairs the bodies ability to deal with heavy metals, making vaccines harder to process that contain heavy metals (and causing seemingly random problems in those who are most vitamin D deficient and have an impaired ability to deal with heavy metals that don't show up in people getting enough sunshine?). Likewise, vitamin D deficiency impairs immune response (both potentially too little and too much), making vaccines less effective and more dangerous. So, there are lots of reasons to study this, even for those who still believe in the value of most vaccines.
Another comment on this:
"Flu is Vitamin D Deficiency Disease"
http://thehealthyhomeeconomist.blogspot.com/2010/01/flu-is-vitamin-d-deficiency-disease.html
"""
Why does the government push dangerous and untested vaccines on the public for the prevention of flu when it is so easy to prevent it with adequate blood levels of vitamin D? The answer is always the almighty dollar. Follow the green and you know why this simple flu prevention strategy is completely ignored. I personally haven't had the flu in over 8 years since I was informed of the critical role of vitamin D in preventing illness and have worked to keep my vitamin D blood levels adequate. In fact, I am so unafraid of the flu that I would be comfortable in a room full of swine flu patients with no mask! Fact is, you are not going to "catch" the flu if your vitamin D blood levels are normal any more than a sail
That's a good point. However, think about the consequences to materially poorer nations of industrialized nations armed with nuclear weapons controlled by people with widespread mental illness due to vitamin D deficiency. Or, what about depressed and unbalanced world bankers making crazy financial policies effecting poor countries?
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/mentalIllness.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
And what of people from poor countries who go live abroad in the North to send back money, but then get vitamin D deficient?
And what of health care researchers who are less productive because they are vitamin D deficient?
Also, even in materially poorer nations at the equator, you can be vitamin D deficient if you need to work indoors all day at a low wage job, or even if you are a professional, like a doctor or bureaucraty, who works indoors all day. So, even poor countries may be facing this problem.
Also, even in poor countries near the equator, there is often a rainy season when people spend a lot of time indoors and may become vitamin D deficient (that is when flus and colds tend to strike in tropical areas, in the rainy season, which shows what bunk the common explanation for getting more colds and flus in the winter in the USA is, suggested due to "dry air" in the winter, but then why do people in the tropics get the flu when the air is 100% humidity endlessly).
It's true that a sedentary lifestyle plays a role, especially as people like most slashdotters like myself have made it ever more interesting to be inside with computer media. But, there is specific medical advice (well intended, but harmful) by dermatologists to avoid the sun. It might have not been bad if dermatologist had said, and also you need to take 5000 IU D3 daily and have your blood tested regularly to make up for not being in the sun. But they did not. So, are dematologists all liable for such advice?
Anyway, this vitamin D issue is really a global one, with a much bigger impact than any vaccine, even a vaccine for malaria, as bad as that problem is. Of course, like all things, different people may get the immediate costs and benefits of different health approaches. And no doubt some few people will be harmed by too much vitamin D (even if it is much fewer than commonly thought, but that's why a blood test is a good idea if you supplement):
"The Truth About Vitamin D Toxicity"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml
Luckily, there are some grassroots campaigns about these issues:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/
And many individual efforts:
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html
But it is such a big issue, more should be done IMHO. Vitamin D deficiency is just a widespread epidemic that is a consequence of and indoors and sun-avoiding lifestyle centered around technology. It is the thing every slashdotter should be aware of at least for themselves and their family.
First off, I have to agree that humans have hierarchical aspects and impressing the opposite sex is always going to be an issue. But James P. Hogan suggests in Voyage From Yesteryear that there are other ways to do that. How about a male impressing women with how compassionate he is? Or how funny? Anyway, different women are impressed by different things (there is a whole ecology and evolution literature on this). So, anyway, there is no doubt a lot of truth to your last point as a statement of fact.
But, what do we do with the facts? There, values come into play. As Albert Einstein said:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"""
For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. If one were to take that goal out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind.
There is no room in this for the divinization of a nation, of a class, let alone of an individual. Are we not all children of one father, as it is said in religious language? Indeed, even the divinization of humanity, as an abstract totality, would not be in the spirit of that
Places with huge problems also tend to have legacies of intervention by foreign governments and foreign corporations. The Earth has no resource limitation problems in the long term:
"Earth's carrying capacity and Catton"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html
But, with robots on the way, it's easy to see why many think life is cheap because masses of human labor are no longer needed for the earlier exploitation:
"Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year future...)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
That is the deeper problem we need to address as a society, how to move past the irony of having all these tools of abundance but people using them to make artificial scarcity. We need to stop using military robots to enforce a culture of work on humans and instead make robots to do the work. We need to stop building nuclear missiles to fight over oil wells on Earth and instead use the same basic technologies to produce power or make accessible resources in space (I'm a renewable energy fan more than nuclear though). Here are some other ways to move past that irony:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.michaeljournal.org/lesson1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://www.freecycle.org/
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/free_matter_economy?page=0%2C1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_printing
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C (Surviving America's Depression Epidemic)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.honestfoodguide.org/
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
There are lots of solutions rather than kill off people or prevent them from being born when there is so much abundance for everyone these days through modern technology. You want to stop suffering? Break the link between a right-to-consume and being able to sell your labor on a market where automation and better design is removing good jobs every day, like people said would be a problem even back in 1964:
http://educationanddemocra
Populations are collapsing in industrialized countries, and there is room for quadrillions of people in space habitats, as I outline here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004174.html
"""
The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy
So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.
We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essentially had the specific technological ideas in the 1970s we needed to do that, even given refinements since then. So, a focus on zero or negative population growth for the human race as a whole right now, as opposed to just limiting the population currently on Earth (which might be sensible, even though I think we could easily grow 10X on Earth), has created a "Peak Population" crisis that we didn't need to have for 1000 years when we filled up the solar system (and by then, we would have better technology and better social ideology to deal with changing demographics of moving from a triangle to a square of population by age).
Sure, let's set a population target for some carrying capacity on Earth the same way the health and fire departments limit the maximum number of people in a restaurant. But, you don't limit the human population of a city (or the solar system) the same way you limit the number of people that can safely be in a restaurant (the Earth). That is ultimately the mistake that gloomsters like Catton make -- they confuse the two, mostly IMHO from lack of imagination, but also because some profit from artificial scarcity, as well, as in Catton's case, the hypocrisy of having four children while telling everyone else to have less.
"""
One of the reasons people want to have less children in industrialized countries is that they are family unfriendly. The US is rated the second to worst industrialized country to be a child, and the UK is worst:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080119001830/http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
""The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""
Although, as I say elsewhere, people not getting enough sunshine and vitamin D3 from being indoors a lot may have a role to play in that too:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml
And here is a book outlining the social problems of industrialized countries and their mental health services and why much of industrialized populations are mentally ill:
Might save a trillion dollars a year in health care costs. Especially for indoors-mainly slashdoters: ... Behind the scenes even as I write today, the NIH is looking for a face-saving way to change positions on vitamin D without taking too much blame for having resisted those who have urged reassessment for decades."
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Technology stock implications here:
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/14046/What_Vitamin_D_Means_to_Your_Technology_Profits.html
"The scientific consensus that has held sway for four decades regarding both exposure to the sun and vitamin D has collapsed. What has emerged in place of the old settled science is the knowledge that most people in America are seriously vitamin D deficient or insufficient. The same is true for Canada and Europe, and the implications are staggering. Simply put, unless you are one of the few people with optimal serum D levels, such as lifeguards and roofers in South Florida, you can cut your risks from most major diseases by 50 to 80 percent. All you have to do is get enough D. This also means we can significantly reduce healthcare costs by taking a few simple steps.
I just posted these links in another reply, but as a computer person, you might like this story about computing and freedom from the early 1950s that inspired people like Ted Nelson (of Xanadu hypertext fame -- he said he had forgotten the story title and author until I reminded of it one time I went to a talk by him around 1999, even though he used Xanadu as the name of his software):
"The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon in the book "And Now the News"
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
A comment on it here in the context of larger trends in computing and society:
"Transrealist fiction: writing in the slipstream of science" By Damien Broderick
http://books.google.com/books?id=SdwbFx9Dz8EC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA123
Theodore Sturgeon's introduction to it with comments about freedom:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA361
(Though I'm not sure the other story someone else mentions there is really connected to it?)
Thanks for the reference. I hope to look at it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan
You might like this story about computing and freedom:
"The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon in the book "And Now the News"
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1
A comment on it here:
"Transrealist fiction: writing in the slipstream of science" By Damien Broderick
http://books.google.com/books?id=SdwbFx9Dz8EC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA123
Theodore Sturgeon's introduction to it:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA361
Except schooling is not the gateway to the hierarchy, it is a way to keep people down, see John Taylor Gatto. And we already have a meritocracy, it is the meritocracy of heredity and sometimes luck and sometimes some other things. Besides, what is the proper way to judge "merit"? Are people who bust their assess running a bagel shop franchise and make a million dollars but neglect their families more worthy than people who spend a lot of time raising well-adjusted children? There is more to valuing worth than dollars.
How does the US have a "higher standard of living" when it is such an unhappy place for many and it is the second worst place to be a child according to the UN report mentioned in that archived article? Standard of living in what sense? Having piles of stuff? There is a lot more to happiness than piles of stuff. That is, when one gets beyond the dogmas, at least a good part of many progressive religious traditions.
The problem with metrics is you get what you measure, and it is hard to measure some really important things like love or caring. That's the problem with any technocratic system. Who gets to set the values of the system? Someone like, say, Jacques Fresco of the Venus Project (well worth looking up if you are in Florida) suggests those values and metrices are essentially self-evident or can be picked scientifically, but Albert Einstein suggests differently:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"""
For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
"""
That's the one point where