Security approaches: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic; Mutual vs. Unilateral.
How about decentralizing the "brittle power" system more in the first place, so you have "intrinsic security" so it degrades slowly under attack rather than rely heavily on "extrinsic security" through guards or passwords for controlling some central system? For example, renewables such as solar panels and fuel cells at each home would make energy production in a country difficult to interrupt intrinsically (assuming there was no single point of failure like automatic software upgrades of embedded controllers). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power """ Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. """
And while we're at it, how about a little "mutual security" too, instead of a "unilateral security" policy that as often as not seems to provoke attacks? From an interview with Morton Deutsch: http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430 """ Q: You're starting to see the analogy to international conflict, or intractable conflict on a larger scale? A: Yes. Well, I wrote a paper about preventing World War III. That was during the height of the cold war, I think I wrote it in 1982, it was called "The Presidential Address to the International Society to Political Psychology." And there I took the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union and characterized it as a malignant relationship, which had some of the characteristics that I was talking about with the couple. It was right for both the United States and the Soviet Union to think that the other was hostile, would undo it, would damage it, you know, all of these things. The relationship was a malignant one. They had to become aware of the malignancy, and the only way out really was recognizing that it's hurting, recognizing that there is a potential better way of relating. And that better way of relating involves having a sense that one can only have security if there's mutual security. And that's true in most relationships. That's particularly true to recognize groups that have had bitter strife where they've hurt each other. They have to deal with the problem of how to get to where they can live together. It may be ethnic groups within a given nation or community. They can only live together if they recognize that their own security is going to be dependent on the other person's security. So each person, each side, each group has to be interested in the welfare of the other. """
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
Money is a collective fantasy about rationing; how can we move beyond it? As Iain Banks wrote, money is a sign of poverty. James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" also envisioned a post-scarcity society that had moved beyond it.
From something I helped put together: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery "Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations."
The Tax Foundation suggests "Tax Freedom Day" in the USA falls roughly one third of the way through the year, meaning people in the USA work about one third of their time to pay their taxes. They say: "Five major categories of tax dominate the tax burden. Individual income taxes, both federal and state, require 38 days' work. Payroll taxes take another 27 days' work. Sales and excise taxes, mostly state and local, take 15 days to pay off. Corporate income taxes take 6 days, and property taxes take 12. Americans will log 4 more days to pay other miscellaneous taxes, most notably including motor vehicle license taxes and severance taxes, and about 1 day for estate taxes."
So you already are paying a lot of taxes. But what do you really get for it?
What the Tax Foundation leaves out are some other things that are funded by taxes in other countries like health care and road tolls and other user fee things like media production, the arts, and so on, where in the USA you are nickle-and-dimed for each thing or are forced to watch advertising everywhere. In Western Europe, these things are often free-to-the-user and without advertising. And in Western Europe, they don't see on third of every health care dollar disappear to paperwork costs like in the USA, so they can provide health care to everyone for less than it costs in the USA to provide health care to only some of the population.
So, even though people in some Western European countries may pay a little more up-front, they are not constantly hit with fees and as much advertising, and many services can be provided to all because they don't have the extra costs of guarding and paperwork (like with health care). And people there don't have the stress of knowing there is not much of a social safety net, like in the USA. Also, since everyone gets these benefits, there is not stigma of being on "Welfare" or "Medicaid" or "Food Stamps". However, even in Europe, there are different approaches, but in general, they all see welfare as something everyone is entitled to, not just the poor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_welfare_state http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_welfare_state
So, what do you get for taxes in the USA? A trillion dollar military budget that actually seems to be *increasing* terrorism and hatred against the USA like in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere (granted that has more to do with foreign policy and not our brave and dedicated young people)? A school system that dumbs-down kids (John Taylor Gatto)? A physical infrastructure of roads and bridges that falls apart? Little mass transit or good urban planning for walkable communities so you have to pay for a car for one or two cars or more per family plus fuel (so, another sort of tax in a way)? Building codes that don't require energy efficient new housing (so a lot more paycheck money goes to operating costs)? An energy system dependent on oil which is intrinsically insecure and coal that is very polluting and causes health problems? And on top of all this, there are few community centers except for creed-agreement-requiring churches?
So, if you are in the USA, you pay vast amounts of money for taxes already (probably at least half your income if you throw in these extra costs people in Western Europe don't pay out of pocket), and you get next to nothing for it as a taxpayer. On top of that, business is still highly regulated in the USA with a minimum wage, family and medical leave act, affirmative action, and a variety of other things that prevent business owners from running thing the way they want. So, that is sort of an extra tax, too.
Just because flying cars did not happen for everyone (there are some prototypes by the way), doesn't mean logically it makes sense to deny self-driving cars won't happen for most people. Safety concerns alone with an aging population who wants to stay mobile will drive their adoption. You can already buy Hondas in the UK that drive themselves on highways. "Honda Accord ADAS auto-pilot system takes the reins" http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/30/honda-accord-adas-auto-pilot-system-takes-the-reins/ "We've heard of radar assisted cruise control, that has certain luxury cars running at set speeds on the highway, but slows them down or speeds them up when they get too close to a car in front or behind. Well now Honda UK is taking it to another level with their Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS) that not only regulates your speed, but manages the turning, allowing you a full auto-pilot system for your Accord when you're out on the freeway. The Adaptive Cruise Control is your regular radar variety, but the Lane Keep Assist System keeps you headed in the right direction by using a camera on the rear-view mirror to watch the white lines and turn accordingly. Honda was quick to point out that their system isn't exactly set up for you to take a nap, since the ADAS system will beep every 10 seconds to make sure you're paying attention, requiring you to touch the steering wheel to inform the car you're still in charge, but we're sure someone is going manage an accident and an ensuing lawsuit or three out of this "convenience"."
So, your skepticism is way behind the reality of these things.
Note that compared to a century ago when many women and children worked in mines, mining is much more pleasant and already heavily automated (including the use of explosives to do the work of many people). Here is an NPR story on that: "Could Robots Replace Humans in Mines?" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12637032 "So far, the U.S. mining industry has shown little interest in funding such research. The robots are expensive and mining companies have little incentive to spend money developing and deploying them. Advances in other technology have already reduced the number of miners in the U.S. by more than two-thirds, compared with 40 years ago. Today, only about 100,000 people work in the coal-mining industry. Partly for that reason, and partly because of advances in safety, mining is not nearly as dangerous as it was in the in the past. Since 1990, fatalities have declined by 67 percent, and injuries by 51 percent, according to the National Mining Association."
So, they are not really trying very hard because humans are forced to do the jobs for money. But it could be mostly automated if we wanted to.
> "And, where will the necessities of modern life come from?"
Where does free software come from? Or music put under a Creative Commons license? Well, where that comes from, so can other things come from.
> "If people only do the work they want to do, who will do the dirty jobs?"
Seriously, what percentage of jobs are there that are "dirty"? 1%?
People who think they need to be done. Do you ever vacuum your house or take out the trash or clean up after dinner? If no one wants to do them, then we can either re-engineer the work to be fun, we can re-engineer it to not be needed, or we can re-engineer it to be automated.
If, for example, no one liked working on cars, we could probably re-engineer them to require less maintanence effort, or design them for automated maintenance by making them more modular. Electric cars may require much less maintenance, for example.
> "Who will collect the trash?"
Well, what about home recycling systems based on nanotech disassembly? Or what about robotic garbage trucks which pick up standard containers (see the DARPA Grand Challenge to see how trucks can drive themselves)?
Besides, why not just create a public logistics system for moving packages, where the same trucks or robotic vehicles or subway tubes that bring stuff to the homes take unwanted stuff away?
> "Who will work in the sewer plants?"
Well, John Todd developed biological sewage treatment plants that are pleasant greenhouses. Lots of people like working in nature. Just because you can force desperate people to work in today's chemical monstrosities of water treatment systems does not mean their are not alternatives. http://www.oceanarks.org/
> "Who will raise the crops and slaughter the animals?"
Most US crop land is used for animal production and people would be healthier with a mostly vegetarian diet. That would reduce the amount of people working in agriculture from about 1% to maybe 0.1% of the workforce. Lots of people like working with growing plants, especially with machines and robots to do the hard work. As for actually slaughtering the animals, people are learning how to grow meat in vats, so that won't be needed.
"Lab Meat: Tastes Like a Million Bucks" http://blog.peta.org/archives/2008/04/lab_meat_tastes.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat Not perfect yet, but closer every year. One by one, all these assumptions about scarcity and labor are becoming untrue.
> "Who will mine and smelt the ores?"
Even decades ago we had all the technology to do this almost entirely automatically much more safely. This has been resisted by unions who are stuck in the same economic paradigm you are endorsing.
> "Who will work on the assembly lines doing the same three things for hours on end?"
And we can design things to be easier to assemble and to recycle. Like in the South before the Civil War, or like in Ancient Greece, the presence of slaves, either formal slaves or wage slaves, reduces the motivation to build better tools and better processes.
> "Who will do anything, especially anything even slightly unpleasant, if they can sit around doing nothing and get the same return?"
People who sit around and do nothing are unhealthy and mentally ill. As James P. Hogan points out in "Voyage From Yesteryear", it is the collective responsibility of society to take care of such mentally ill people. The only reason people in the USA aspire to that is because our collective socie
What is "income"? What is "money"? Seriously? What is the value of pieces of paper with pictures of dead people on them? Or the meaning of a few numbers in a banking computer somewhere? What is the meaning of all that? Is that what you are working so hard for, to have a few bits flipped in a computer somewhere? Is that what you are asking for, for a few bits to be flipped with little effort on your part?:-) Why, in a world of so much abundance do you still have to work so hard? Industrial productivity has gone up several times since the 1940s. Why can't we all work a lot less, or some who want to work do it, and others who have other things to do (like raise children or be musicians) do that instead?
Related background:
"The Mythology of Wealth" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 """ Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a "leisure class". As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies - gods, the "great chain of being" etc. - are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new "rational" world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites.
That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology.
According to the new mythology, human beings are economic competitors. The "marketplace" is the new "Valhalla", where "economic man" frolics. The "market" we are told, contains its own "rationality". It rewards the efficient. It rewards that list of virtues George Will cites, like "thrift", "delayed gratification" and of course, "hard work". Free competition in the market place "rationally" selects the more "worthy" competitor. Thus, the wealthy are the superior competitors who have "earned" their elite status. If you haven't succeeded it can only be because of your "inferiority". """
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47 """ Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for the most part - who "have what it takes" to "make it". They believe that the difference between those who "make it" and those who don't is being "capable, intelligent and hardworking". Things like "having rich parents", "getting just plain lucky" or "being a crook" don't factor into the equation anywhere. No, American society is a natural hierarchy where the most capable are "rich beyond their wildest dreams", and the non-rich are chumps that just don't measure up. Only they are capable - some of them actually are - and they're not rich. Clearly, something is broken, preventing these wannabes who "have what it takes" from reaching materialist heaven. Now here's where it gets interesting. Since they "have what it takes", there must be somebody else to blame.... """
Why do trillions of dollars just given to bankers? What did they do to deserve that? Is this the system you are eager to defend? How much did you get of that? Nothing? Why?
Your comments might be more effective if you could focus on the ideas more than the person. I'm just the messenger here. Anyway, thanks again for participating in the gift economy.:-)
Well, are you lazy because you are leaching off of 5000 years (and more) of innovations made by our ancestors? Do you reinvent the science and technology from scratch when you want a new computer? At what point after all that hard work by so many will we be able to stop working so much?
Over the last 200 years, the US workforce has gone from about 90% farmers to about 1% farmers, using mostly machinery like tractors and harvesters. Over the last 50 years, the US workforce has gone from about 30% manufacturing workers to about 12% (with some imports, but much has been productivity increases). We now have massive and increasing unemployment. Industrial productivity continues to increase exponentially. Where are all these things that people need to be working at? Services? Robots are doing more and more, as is computer software, and most (not all) service jobs doing things like telemarketing or being a restaurant employee are not very good jobs. A relative handful of people maintaining Debian GNU/Linux are supplying software to billions. Technology is an amplifier. The whole nature of economics is changing.
What we have now is actually vast amounts of effort that go into non-productive activities because of the attitude you outline, where in the end a greater and greater percentage of effort goes into "guarding" rather than production. RIAA or SCO are great examples of this, with endless lawsuits trying to get income for some few and wasting everyone's time and energy. But much the same is true even these days about basic material things like cars. Here is something I wrote on why taxes would go *down* if everyone got a free luxury electric car, because of the savings on health care costs, pollution remediation, and war taxes: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
The "conventional wisdom" assumptions about work and income are out of date for the 21st century. Let alone they are *cruel* given people are homeless and hungry amidst so much abundance in the USA, and those numbers continue to grow. As is said at the third link below: "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."
You are voting against your own self-interest because of obsolete 20th century ideology. The age of one-for-one trade is coming to an end (even if there may always be aspects of trade in our society). We're in a new age of emerging abundance from advanced technology, one that makes possible aga
Roy Amara said "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
Ray Kurzweil says something similar: http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html """ I emphasize this point because it is the most important failure that would-be prognosticators make in considering future trends. Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this "historical exponential view" of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored). """
Wikipedia: A basic income is a proposed system of social security, that periodically provides each citizen with a sum of money that allows the receiver to participate in society with human dignity. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
In two to three years or so, the current generation of smart phones just coming out like the Google Droid will be discarded for something new, and those might make terrific cheap education platforms.
So, Droid is a more tempting platform to me for educational software than the OLPC and Sugar in that sense of a big market.:-)
Imagine, Google and Verizon could even make a promise now to customers -- buy your Droid through Verizon, and in two years, if you continue your cell phone plan, we will give you the latest Droid version and if you return the old one to a Verizon store, we'll send it to materially poor kids loaded with educational software that teaches them how to read, write, and do math. And with bluetooth, and WiFi, the Droid could even have some software that works along the lines that Sugar aspired to do, with kids collaborating together. What a deal -- and it might greatly boost current sales.:-) Maybe someone should forward this note to someone they know at Google or Verizon?:-) Seriously, what US teacher would not buy a Droid over an iPhone knowing it was going to teach some poor kid to read in two years? (Of course, Apple might eventually have to follow suit.:-) And that gives me and the rest of the free software developer world two years to write all that free software for those kids.:-) Of course, it might be nice if Google or Verizon helped some of those free software developers to write lots of cool stuff (millions of dollars in support for education software could just be considered part of their advertising budget). But it might happen even if they did not directly provide support, because a lot of developers might see the potential, as I did. And it might help Droid sales even now, for parents to hand their Droid to their kid who was learning to read or write or do arithmetic, and it would help the kid. Parents might even buy a Droid for all their kids, and think that in two years, those Droids would also go to materially poor nations. This project might even help boost the economic recovery in the USA. And of course, there are many Android devices beside the Droid, so all of those might benefit as well from educational software. And, the Android platform already runs well under almost any PC OS in emulation. So, any free software made for the Android will also run right now on any desktop or laptop, and likely that integration could be improved even more over time.
I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on the topic of the limits of intelligence in relation to evolution and survival about twenty five years ago ("Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, Model"). A lot depends on context. Also, how did these people cooperate? And what were their values, assumptions, and choices of tools of thought? What was their culture? Were they symbiotic with other species like dogs? Lots of specific issues. With that said, studies seem to indicate the human brain has been getting bigger over the last 5000 years or so. There may be plenty of value to intelligence in the right context. Whales and dolphins that have much bigger brains than humans seem pretty happy.:-)
While most day-to-day engineering is, as you say, a compromise between multiple priorities, I've been told by an IBM Research "Master Inventor" that really excellent engineering figures out a way to meet all the priorities without major compromise through some new insight (but such conceptual breakthroughs are rare).
Of course, a deeper issue is, what are our priorities, values, and assumptions, and how are we choosing them?:-)
I hope we go into future technological singularities with humane values at the front of our priorities, because otherwise, building things like military robots to enforce economic dogmas (usually linked to not letting people eat unless they work) is totally ironic. http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm Why not just build robots to do the work instead? The major challenge of the 21st century is overcoming the irony of the tools of abundance being used to create artificial scarcity (because the people directing the engineers are still preoccupied with perceived scarcity). A parody I wrote related to that:
"A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene" http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/32e8fc32c89c96bd?hl=en
I think many engineers spend too much time indoors with too little sunlight. They should be taking vitamin D to help ward of disease and mental illness: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
See also: "The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness" by Douglas J. Lisle and Alan Goldhamer: http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508 """ A wake-up call to even the most health conscious people, The Pleasure Trap boldy challenges conventional wisdom about sickness and unhappiness in today's contemporary culture, and offers groundbreaking solutions for achieving change. Authors Douglas Lisel, Ph.D., and Alan Goldhamer, D.C., provide a fascinating new perspective on how modern life can turn so many smart, savvy people into the unwitting saboteurs of their own well-being.
Inspired by stunning original research, comprehensive clinical studies, and their successes with thousands of patients, the authors construct a new paradigm for the psychology of health, offering fresh hope for anyone stuck in a self-destructive rut. Integrating principals of evolutionary biology with trailblazing, proactive strategies for wellness, they argue that people who are chronically overweight, sick and ailing, or junk food junkies aren't that way because they're lazy, undisciplined, or stuck with bad genes. The authors reveal that most are victims of a dilemma that harkens back to our prehistoric past-"the Pleasure Trap."
Drs. Lisle and Goldhamer then call upon their clinical experience, scientific investigations, and a recent revoution of understanding in human motivational psychology to provide you with solutions for the challenges of keeping on a healthful course-and how to make the most of your life. """
Basically, it is about progressive desensitization. In terms of food, fasting for a time can sometimes help reset our sense of what is a good amount of stimulation (the subtle taste of a carrot, the nuanced taste of other natural foods) and what is too much (too salty, too fatty, etc.).
Some 21st century economic ideas are mentioned here::-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery "Many people seem to have a piece of the answer to the economic puzzle of the 21st century, including about jobs. As the pieces are put together, emerging from a response to the 2007 global financial crisis, we may well eventually see a new synthesis moving beyond Keynesian economics, in a way that will have the same profound effect in the 21st century as Keynes' work had in the 20th century, although reflecting the changes since then, perhaps reflecting a positive psychology change in emphasis from focusing on managing scarcity to focusing on creating abundance."
Google conflicted on being a post-scarcity place
on
Google About Openness
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As I wrote about here, inspired by the Virgle April fools joke, I see Google as being conflicted about its identity in a world that could provide abundance for everyone if we made a post-scarcity ideological shift, but which currently does not because a scarcity ideology is still dominant:
"A Rant On Financial Obesity and an Ironic Disclosure " http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html """ Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet": http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too:-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness): http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there.:-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology?:-(... The fact is, there are far more than six *million* millionaire families in the USA who would never have to "work" another day in their lives if they were frugal (and so could work full time on space settlement or other worthwhile charitable free ends). http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_billionaire_next_door.htm There must just be a failure of imagination that keeps them from it. Or an excess of a certain capitalist religion shown on a libertarian-leaning college mailing list I am on (and usually disagreeing:-). Or a failure to be able to define "enough" and move beyond a fear of becoming poor. And the millionaires I've known or heard of who became suddenly wealthy generally are suddenly adrift in a life that has not prepared them for thinking about deep questions like what their values and priorities really are and why -- and working through that takes time which they often don't have as money runs away from them spent on trivialities of "their stillborn adult lives". And the stable millionaires who have slowly earned their wealth are often so enmeshed in the current order of things to make it hard to see beyond it (a current order which they may well have genuinely and sincerely tried to make better, like at Google, and even succeeded at doing so to an extent, within the bounds of Empire.)... Maybe the millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires (governments) out there should think on Spock's choice as capitalistic and militaristic irrational exuberance starts reentering the stratosphere (wars over food, water, arms, climate, and oil profits, and yes, blowback from terrorism). http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=globalization+blowback And actually do something besides compete and mak
An easy fix: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html "New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons"
"Former NFL star Dave Pear is sorry he ever played football" http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/jeff_pearlman/12/18/pear/ """ "I wish I never played football. I wish that more than anything. Every single day, I want to take back those years of my life..." The words are not subtle. They spit from Pear's mouth, with a blistering contempt normally reserved for drunk drivers. We are speaking via phone. I am in New York, sipping a hot chocolate, leaning back in a chair. My two young children are asleep. A Pretenders song, "2000 Miles," plays in the background. No worries, no complexities. Pear is sitting at his home in Seattle. His neck hurts. His hips hurt. His knees hurt. His feet hurt. When he wakes up in the morning, pain shoots through his body. When he goes to sleep at night, pain shoots through his body.... Be a man! Be tough! "Those last two years in Oakland were very, very difficult times," he says. "I was in pain 24 hours per day, and my employers failed to acknowledge my injury. Sure, I won a Super Bowl ring. But was it worth giving up my health for a piece of jewelry? No way. Those diamonds have lost their luster." Throughout North America, many of Pear's retired football brethren hear his words and scream, Amen! Conrad Dobler, the legendary Cardinals offensive lineman, is about to go through his 32nd knee surgery. Wally Chambers, the Chicago Bears' three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, spends much of his time in a wheelchair. Earl Campbell, the powder blue bowling ball, struggles to walk and underwent surgery to remove three large bone spurs. The list is both heartbreaking and never-ending -- one NFL player after another after another, debilitated either mentally, physically, or both. I'm currently working on a book that has led me to interview more than 150 former players. I'd say 60 percent experience blistering pain from a sport they last played two decades ago.
"And the NFL," Pear says, "doesn't care."
Hence, he is fighting back. Two years ago, Pear started a blog, davepear.com, with the intent of supporting hobbled NFL veterans and calling out the league's laughable disability policy.... """ http://davepear.com/blog/
From: "Liberatianism: Marxism of the Right" http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/ "The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments. "
Health and community are important too, but that article leaves out the government's role in promoting them too, befitting typical US conservatives.:-)
See also:
"MESHWORKS, HIERARCHIES AND INTERFACES" by Manuel de Landa http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm """ To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us. """
Another flavor, Noam Chomsky's, is "Libertarian Socialist" (which I mind less, and we may well see more and more of as we transition to a post-scarcity society): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
But, as Manuel de Landa suggests, we need concrete experiments to see what works well in different situations.
How do people feel about applications that are proprietary for three years and then released under the GPL? Id software did this (after five years) with Doom. I'm thinking of doing that with an application I am writing for Android.
Some alternative ideas are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery """ Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations. """
Solar panels replace hydrocarbons the same way fossil oil replaced whale oil for heating and lighting -- things change. You can produce as much electricity as you want with solar panels (or other renewable energy sources), and use some of that energy to make new panels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics#Energy_payback_time_and_energy_returned_on_energy_invested "Thin film technologies now have energy pay-back times in the range of 1-1.5 years (S.Europe).[70] With lifetimes of such systems of at least 30 years[citation needed], the EROEI is in the range of 10 to 30. They thus generate enough energy over their lifetimes to reproduce themselves many times (6-31 reproductions, the EROEI is a bit lower) depending on what type of material, balance of system (or BOS), and the geographic location of the system.[75]"
Also, by the way, some people think "fossil" oil is self-renewing (though even then, it is too polluting to use IMHO). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin "The abiogenic hypothesis argues that petroleum was formed from deep carbon deposits, perhaps dating to the formation of the Earth. The presence of methane on Saturn's moon Titan is cited as evidence supporting the formation of hydrocarbons without biology. Supporters of the abiogenic hypothesis suggest that a great deal more petroleum exists on Earth than commonly thought, and that petroleum may originate from carbon-bearing fluids that migrate upward from the mantle."
If you plot the exponential growth rate of renewable energy for the past few decades, within two to three decades, the world will be running mostly on renewables. And there is no sign of that exponential growth rate slowing, even with the recession/depression. Peak Oil is a non-issue in that sense -- even if our society will change, and should change, in various ways, because the true cost of fossil fuels between defense and pollution and corruption is enormous. http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461 It takes more electricity to make a gallon of gasoline than it would take for an electric car to go the same distance, so if we switched to electric cars, our electricity use would go down (and we would not need the oil at all). http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm Taxes would even go *down* if the US government gave luxury safe electric cars away to everyone: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en "This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. "
With energy and agriculture, you can grow feedstocks for industry on land or in the ocean to make plastics. Consider: http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/why-is-hemp-really-illegal/question-554401/ Is this true from the link? "Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fie
One other related item in the news today, but not on Vitamin D: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-celiac21-2009dec21,0,5395819.story """ Researchers at the Brisbane Princess Alexandra Hospital in Queensland, Australia, tested the effects of hookworm inoculation on 20 patients with celiac disease to see if it would blunt the immune response to gluten. In addition to hoping to provide relief for celiac patients, the researchers want to learn if this could be an effective therapy for inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn's disease.
The results have not been published, but when the Phase II trial was over and the patients were offered a medication that would kill the parasites, they all opted to keep their hookworms. """
The only significant value of resources in space is to use them in space (and maybe to send back information through their use). To use resources in space, we need to better understand manufacturing. Hydrocarbons being imported back to Earth? Solar panels are a lot easier, as are windmills and lots of other things. Even a large amount of energy use can have a minimal impact on the Earth with the right renewables. The biosphere captures and uses many times more energy than our industry and has for millions of years. Check out this, by the way:
"Jay Leno's 3D Printer Replaces Rusty Old Parts" http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/jay_leno_garage/4320759.html Also: "3d Printing multiple materials with Objet " http://www.feedingedge.co.uk/blog/2009/06/26/3d-printing-multiple-materials-with-objet/
3D printers are just an example, and also BTW they can be cost effective in short run productions, which more and more manufacturing is, essentially printing on demand to reduce inventory costs. Any institution like NASA than can make plans decades ahead should be able to see how that will continue to improve. Also, there are a variety of other flexible manufacturing techniques and ways that costs are falling on that. Not all the loss of manufacturing employment in the USA is offshoring -- some is genuinely because of improved production efficiency, which will only continue. Tools continue to get better and more flexible, so the huge capital costs you refer to are less and less of an issue. Decades ago a computer cost millions of dollars and had less power than an electronic greeting card you can buy in the store for a couple dollars. Are you saying other industries simply will not follow, given all we know now and that we have the internet to continue to improve things? Especially with nanotech picking up?
As far as energy and materials, as long as we do nearly 100% green energy like from solar panels and nearly 100% recycling, the volume does not matter that much; and if it is not nearly 100% sustainable, then we will bury ourselves in waste and pollution eventually anyway. Here is a government program at NIST already in that direction -- I'd suggest giving them US$400 million rather than spend it right now on another cruise to nowhere.
"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. These resources and methods require identification of dimensions, associated measurements and classification of information relevant to sustainable product design and manufacturing. Such a base of information is critical to product designers and manufacturing engineers so that they can incorporate sustainability in their efforts. Hence, the primary challenge is to develop requirements, formal models, and validation methods for sustainability-based and lifecycle information-based manufacturing that support interoperability among tools and standards for design, analysis, simulation, and lifecycle assessment and information management. """
Slashdot Mirror
Security approaches: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic; Mutual vs. Unilateral.
How about decentralizing the "brittle power" system more in the first place, so you have "intrinsic security" so it degrades slowly under attack rather than rely heavily on "extrinsic security" through guards or passwords for controlling some central system? For example, renewables such as solar panels and fuel cells at each home would make energy production in a country difficult to interrupt intrinsically (assuming there was no single point of failure like automatic software upgrades of embedded controllers).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"""
Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current.
"""
And while we're at it, how about a little "mutual security" too, instead of a "unilateral security" policy that as often as not seems to provoke attacks? From an interview with Morton Deutsch:
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
"""
Q: You're starting to see the analogy to international conflict, or intractable conflict on a larger scale?
A: Yes. Well, I wrote a paper about preventing World War III. That was during the height of the cold war, I think I wrote it in 1982, it was called "The Presidential Address to the International Society to Political Psychology." And there I took the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union and characterized it as a malignant relationship, which had some of the characteristics that I was talking about with the couple. It was right for both the United States and the Soviet Union to think that the other was hostile, would undo it, would damage it, you know, all of these things. The relationship was a malignant one. They had to become aware of the malignancy, and the only way out really was recognizing that it's hurting, recognizing that there is a potential better way of relating. And that better way of relating involves having a sense that one can only have security if there's mutual security. And that's true in most relationships. That's particularly true to recognize groups that have had bitter strife where they've hurt each other. They have to deal with the problem of how to get to where they can live together. It may be ethnic groups within a given nation or community. They can only live together if they recognize that their own security is going to be dependent on the other person's security. So each person, each side, each group has to be interested in the welfare of the other.
"""
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.
Money is a collective fantasy about rationing; how can we move beyond it? As Iain Banks wrote, money is a sign of poverty. James P. Hogan in "Voyage From Yesteryear" also envisioned a post-scarcity society that had moved beyond it.
The last time an big company recruiter sent me an inquiry, I sent back this link: :-)
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
The problem:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"School Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Some more links about moving beyond the need to work for pay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_economy
From something I helped put together:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
"Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations."
One more thought about this in relation to taxes.
The Tax Foundation suggests "Tax Freedom Day" in the USA falls roughly one third of the way through the year, meaning people in the USA work about one third of their time to pay their taxes. They say: "Five major categories of tax dominate the tax burden. Individual income taxes, both federal and state, require 38 days' work. Payroll taxes take another 27 days' work. Sales and excise taxes, mostly state and local, take 15 days to pay off. Corporate income taxes take 6 days, and property taxes take 12. Americans will log 4 more days to pay other miscellaneous taxes, most notably including motor vehicle license taxes and severance taxes, and about 1 day for estate taxes."
So you already are paying a lot of taxes. But what do you really get for it?
What the Tax Foundation leaves out are some other things that are funded by taxes in other countries like health care and road tolls and other user fee things like media production, the arts, and so on, where in the USA you are nickle-and-dimed for each thing or are forced to watch advertising everywhere. In Western Europe, these things are often free-to-the-user and without advertising. And in Western Europe, they don't see on third of every health care dollar disappear to paperwork costs like in the USA, so they can provide health care to everyone for less than it costs in the USA to provide health care to only some of the population.
So, even though people in some Western European countries may pay a little more up-front, they are not constantly hit with fees and as much advertising, and many services can be provided to all because they don't have the extra costs of guarding and paperwork (like with health care). And people there don't have the stress of knowing there is not much of a social safety net, like in the USA. Also, since everyone gets these benefits, there is not stigma of being on "Welfare" or "Medicaid" or "Food Stamps". However, even in Europe, there are different approaches, but in general, they all see welfare as something everyone is entitled to, not just the poor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_welfare_state
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_welfare_state
In the USA, the closest to a basic income is the Alaska Permanent Fund:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
So, what do you get for taxes in the USA? A trillion dollar military budget that actually seems to be *increasing* terrorism and hatred against the USA like in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere (granted that has more to do with foreign policy and not our brave and dedicated young people)? A school system that dumbs-down kids (John Taylor Gatto)? A physical infrastructure of roads and bridges that falls apart? Little mass transit or good urban planning for walkable communities so you have to pay for a car for one or two cars or more per family plus fuel (so, another sort of tax in a way)? Building codes that don't require energy efficient new housing (so a lot more paycheck money goes to operating costs)? An energy system dependent on oil which is intrinsically insecure and coal that is very polluting and causes health problems? And on top of all this, there are few community centers except for creed-agreement-requiring churches?
So, if you are in the USA, you pay vast amounts of money for taxes already (probably at least half your income if you throw in these extra costs people in Western Europe don't pay out of pocket), and you get next to nothing for it as a taxpayer. On top of that, business is still highly regulated in the USA with a minimum wage, family and medical leave act, affirmative action, and a variety of other things that prevent business owners from running thing the way they want. So, that is sort of an extra tax, too.
I'm glad you are asking for evidence. General evidence:
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
I mentioned robot garbage trucks as an alternative and cited the DARPA grand challenge as evidence such were possible. Just look at US military plans for self-driving vehicles for more predictions by hard-nosed people of what is likely to be around in ten years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#History
Just because flying cars did not happen for everyone (there are some prototypes by the way), doesn't mean logically it makes sense to deny self-driving cars won't happen for most people. Safety concerns alone with an aging population who wants to stay mobile will drive their adoption. You can already buy Hondas in the UK that drive themselves on highways.
"Honda Accord ADAS auto-pilot system takes the reins"
http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/30/honda-accord-adas-auto-pilot-system-takes-the-reins/
"We've heard of radar assisted cruise control, that has certain luxury cars running at set speeds on the highway, but slows them down or speeds them up when they get too close to a car in front or behind. Well now Honda UK is taking it to another level with their Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS) that not only regulates your speed, but manages the turning, allowing you a full auto-pilot system for your Accord when you're out on the freeway. The Adaptive Cruise Control is your regular radar variety, but the Lane Keep Assist System keeps you headed in the right direction by using a camera on the rear-view mirror to watch the white lines and turn accordingly. Honda was quick to point out that their system isn't exactly set up for you to take a nap, since the ADAS system will beep every 10 seconds to make sure you're paying attention, requiring you to touch the steering wheel to inform the car you're still in charge, but we're sure someone is going manage an accident and an ensuing lawsuit or three out of this "convenience"."
So, your skepticism is way behind the reality of these things.
Note that compared to a century ago when many women and children worked in mines, mining is much more pleasant and already heavily automated (including the use of explosives to do the work of many people). Here is an NPR story on that:
"Could Robots Replace Humans in Mines?"
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12637032
"So far, the U.S. mining industry has shown little interest in funding such research. The robots are expensive and mining companies have little incentive to spend money developing and deploying them. Advances in other technology have already reduced the number of miners in the U.S. by more than two-thirds, compared with 40 years ago. Today, only about 100,000 people work in the coal-mining industry. Partly for that reason, and partly because of advances in safety, mining is not nearly as dangerous as it was in the in the past. Since 1990, fatalities have declined by 67 percent, and injuries by 51 percent, according to the National Mining Association."
So, they are not really trying very hard because humans are forced to do the jobs for money. But it could be mostly automated if we wanted to.
As for robotic material handling systems, there are plenty of them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWsMdN7HMuA
> "And, where will the necessities of modern life come from?"
Where does free software come from? Or music put under a Creative Commons license? Well, where that comes from, so can other things come from.
> "If people only do the work they want to do, who will do the dirty jobs?"
Seriously, what percentage of jobs are there that are "dirty"? 1%?
People who think they need to be done. Do you ever vacuum your house or take out the trash or clean up after dinner? If no one wants to do them, then we can either re-engineer the work to be fun, we can re-engineer it to not be needed, or we can re-engineer it to be automated.
If, for example, no one liked working on cars, we could probably re-engineer them to require less maintanence effort, or design them for automated maintenance by making them more modular. Electric cars may require much less maintenance, for example.
> "Who will collect the trash?"
Well, what about home recycling systems based on nanotech disassembly? Or what about robotic garbage trucks which pick up standard containers (see the DARPA Grand Challenge to see how trucks can drive themselves)?
Besides, why not just create a public logistics system for moving packages, where the same trucks or robotic vehicles or subway tubes that bring stuff to the homes take unwanted stuff away?
> "Who will work in the sewer plants?"
Well, John Todd developed biological sewage treatment plants that are pleasant greenhouses. Lots of people like working in nature. Just because you can force desperate people to work in today's chemical monstrosities of water treatment systems does not mean their are not alternatives.
http://www.oceanarks.org/
> "Who will raise the crops and slaughter the animals?"
Most US crop land is used for animal production and people would be healthier with a mostly vegetarian diet. That would reduce the amount of people working in agriculture from about 1% to maybe 0.1% of the workforce. Lots of people like working with growing plants, especially with machines and robots to do the hard work. As for actually slaughtering the animals, people are learning how to grow meat in vats, so that won't be needed.
"Lab Meat: Tastes Like a Million Bucks"
http://blog.peta.org/archives/2008/04/lab_meat_tastes.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat
Not perfect yet, but closer every year. One by one, all these assumptions about scarcity and labor are becoming untrue.
> "Who will mine and smelt the ores?"
Even decades ago we had all the technology to do this almost entirely automatically much more safely. This has been resisted by unions who are stuck in the same economic paradigm you are endorsing.
> "Who will work on the assembly lines doing the same three things for hours on end?"
Robots. Also, you can print things fully assembled with 3D printers.
"Jay Leno's 3D Printer Replaces Rusty Old Parts"
http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/jay_leno_garage/4320759.html
And we can design things to be easier to assemble and to recycle. Like in the South before the Civil War, or like in Ancient Greece, the presence of slaves, either formal slaves or wage slaves, reduces the motivation to build better tools and better processes.
> "Who will do anything, especially anything even slightly unpleasant, if they can sit around doing nothing and get the same return?"
People who sit around and do nothing are unhealthy and mentally ill. As James P. Hogan points out in "Voyage From Yesteryear", it is the collective responsibility of society to take care of such mentally ill people. The only reason people in the USA aspire to that is because our collective socie
What is "income"? What is "money"? Seriously? What is the value of pieces of paper with pictures of dead people on them? Or the meaning of a few numbers in a banking computer somewhere? What is the meaning of all that? Is that what you are working so hard for, to have a few bits flipped in a computer somewhere? Is that what you are asking for, for a few bits to be flipped with little effort on your part? :-) Why, in a world of so much abundance do you still have to work so hard? Industrial productivity has gone up several times since the 1940s. Why can't we all work a lot less, or some who want to work do it, and others who have other things to do (like raise children or be musicians) do that instead?
Related background:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"""
Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a "leisure class". As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies - gods, the "great chain of being" etc. - are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new "rational" world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites.
That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology.
According to the new mythology, human beings are economic competitors. The "marketplace" is the new "Valhalla", where "economic man" frolics. The "market" we are told, contains its own "rationality". It rewards the efficient. It rewards that list of virtues George Will cites, like "thrift", "delayed gratification" and of course, "hard work". Free competition in the market place "rationally" selects the more "worthy" competitor. Thus, the wealthy are the superior competitors who have "earned" their elite status. If you haven't succeeded it can only be because of your "inferiority".
"""
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's" ...
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"""
Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for the most part - who "have what it takes" to "make it". They believe that the difference between those who "make it" and those who don't is being "capable, intelligent and hardworking". Things like "having rich parents", "getting just plain lucky" or "being a crook" don't factor into the equation anywhere. No, American society is a natural hierarchy where the most capable are "rich beyond their wildest dreams", and the non-rich are chumps that just don't measure up. Only they are capable - some of them actually are - and they're not rich. Clearly, something is broken, preventing these wannabes who "have what it takes" from reaching materialist heaven. Now here's where it gets interesting. Since they "have what it takes", there must be somebody else to blame.
"""
Why do trillions of dollars just given to bankers? What did they do to deserve that? Is this the system you are eager to defend? How much did you get of that? Nothing? Why?
Your comments might be more effective if you could focus on the ideas more than the person. I'm just the messenger here. Anyway, thanks again for participating in the gift economy. :-)
Well, are you lazy because you are leaching off of 5000 years (and more) of innovations made by our ancestors? Do you reinvent the science and technology from scratch when you want a new computer? At what point after all that hard work by so many will we be able to stop working so much?
Over the last 200 years, the US workforce has gone from about 90% farmers to about 1% farmers, using mostly machinery like tractors and harvesters. Over the last 50 years, the US workforce has gone from about 30% manufacturing workers to about 12% (with some imports, but much has been productivity increases). We now have massive and increasing unemployment. Industrial productivity continues to increase exponentially. Where are all these things that people need to be working at? Services? Robots are doing more and more, as is computer software, and most (not all) service jobs doing things like telemarketing or being a restaurant employee are not very good jobs. A relative handful of people maintaining Debian GNU/Linux are supplying software to billions. Technology is an amplifier. The whole nature of economics is changing.
What we have now is actually vast amounts of effort that go into non-productive activities because of the attitude you outline, where in the end a greater and greater percentage of effort goes into "guarding" rather than production. RIAA or SCO are great examples of this, with endless lawsuits trying to get income for some few and wasting everyone's time and energy. But much the same is true even these days about basic material things like cars. Here is something I wrote on why taxes would go *down* if everyone got a free luxury electric car, because of the savings on health care costs, pollution remediation, and war taxes:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
The "conventional wisdom" assumptions about work and income are out of date for the 21st century. Let alone they are *cruel* given people are homeless and hungry amidst so much abundance in the USA, and those numbers continue to grow. As is said at the third link below: "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."
Related:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
Two by me on why robots are changing the nature of employment:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004216.html
Here is something I wrote on why even *millionaires* would be better off with a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
You are voting against your own self-interest because of obsolete 20th century ideology. The age of one-for-one trade is coming to an end (even if there may always be aspects of trade in our society). We're in a new age of emerging abundance from advanced technology, one that makes possible aga
Roy Amara said "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
Ray Kurzweil says something similar:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html
"""
I emphasize this point because it is the most important failure that would-be prognosticators make in considering future trends. Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this "historical exponential view" of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).
"""
Wikipedia: A basic income is a proposed system of social security, that periodically provides each citizen with a sum of money that allows the receiver to participate in society with human dignity. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
Some ideas here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
In two to three years or so, the current generation of smart phones just coming out like the Google Droid will be discarded for something new, and those might make terrific cheap education platforms.
So, Droid is a more tempting platform to me for educational software than the OLPC and Sugar in that sense of a big market. :-)
Imagine, Google and Verizon could even make a promise now to customers -- buy your Droid through Verizon, and in two years, if you continue your cell phone plan, we will give you the latest Droid version and if you return the old one to a Verizon store, we'll send it to materially poor kids loaded with educational software that teaches them how to read, write, and do math. And with bluetooth, and WiFi, the Droid could even have some software that works along the lines that Sugar aspired to do, with kids collaborating together. What a deal -- and it might greatly boost current sales. :-) Maybe someone should forward this note to someone they know at Google or Verizon? :-) Seriously, what US teacher would not buy a Droid over an iPhone knowing it was going to teach some poor kid to read in two years? (Of course, Apple might eventually have to follow suit. :-) And that gives me and the rest of the free software developer world two years to write all that free software for those kids. :-) Of course, it might be nice if Google or Verizon helped some of those free software developers to write lots of cool stuff (millions of dollars in support for education software could just be considered part of their advertising budget). But it might happen even if they did not directly provide support, because a lot of developers might see the potential, as I did. And it might help Droid sales even now, for parents to hand their Droid to their kid who was learning to read or write or do arithmetic, and it would help the kid. Parents might even buy a Droid for all their kids, and think that in two years, those Droids would also go to materially poor nations. This project might even help boost the economic recovery in the USA. And of course, there are many Android devices beside the Droid, so all of those might benefit as well from educational software. And, the Android platform already runs well under almost any PC OS in emulation. So, any free software made for the Android will also run right now on any desktop or laptop, and likely that integration could be improved even more over time.
And the internal competition did them in? :-)
I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on the topic of the limits of intelligence in relation to evolution and survival about twenty five years ago ("Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, Model"). A lot depends on context. Also, how did these people cooperate? And what were their values, assumptions, and choices of tools of thought? What was their culture? Were they symbiotic with other species like dogs? Lots of specific issues. With that said, studies seem to indicate the human brain has been getting bigger over the last 5000 years or so. There may be plenty of value to intelligence in the right context. Whales and dolphins that have much bigger brains than humans seem pretty happy. :-)
While most day-to-day engineering is, as you say, a compromise between multiple priorities, I've been told by an IBM Research "Master Inventor" that really excellent engineering figures out a way to meet all the priorities without major compromise through some new insight (but such conceptual breakthroughs are rare).
Of course, a deeper issue is, what are our priorities, values, and assumptions, and how are we choosing them? :-)
I hope we go into future technological singularities with humane values at the front of our priorities, because otherwise, building things like military robots to enforce economic dogmas (usually linked to not letting people eat unless they work) is totally ironic.
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Why not just build robots to do the work instead? The major challenge of the 21st century is overcoming the irony of the tools of abundance being used to create artificial scarcity (because the people directing the engineers are still preoccupied with perceived scarcity). A parody I wrote related to that:
"A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/32e8fc32c89c96bd?hl=en
I think many engineers spend too much time indoors with too little sunlight. They should be taking vitamin D to help ward of disease and mental illness:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"On the Plane - The Fifth Element"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vv0u8Ruz58
See also: "The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness" by Douglas J. Lisle
and Alan Goldhamer:
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
"""
A wake-up call to even the most health conscious people, The Pleasure Trap boldy challenges conventional wisdom about sickness and unhappiness in today's contemporary culture, and offers groundbreaking solutions for achieving change. Authors Douglas Lisel, Ph.D., and Alan Goldhamer, D.C., provide a fascinating new perspective on how modern life can turn so many smart, savvy people into the unwitting saboteurs of their own well-being.
Inspired by stunning original research, comprehensive clinical studies, and their successes with thousands of patients, the authors construct a new paradigm for the psychology of health, offering fresh hope for anyone stuck in a self-destructive rut. Integrating principals of evolutionary biology with trailblazing, proactive strategies for wellness, they argue that people who are chronically overweight, sick and ailing, or junk food junkies aren't that way because they're lazy, undisciplined, or stuck with bad genes. The authors reveal that most are victims of a dilemma that harkens back to our prehistoric past-"the Pleasure Trap."
Drs. Lisle and Goldhamer then call upon their clinical experience, scientific investigations, and a recent revoution of understanding in human motivational psychology to provide you with solutions for the challenges of keeping on a healthful course-and how to make the most of your life.
"""
More here:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
Basically, it is about progressive desensitization. In terms of food, fasting for a time can sometimes help reset our sense of what is a good amount of stimulation (the subtle taste of a carrot, the nuanced taste of other natural foods) and what is too much (too salty, too fatty, etc.).
Some 21st century economic ideas are mentioned here: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
"Many people seem to have a piece of the answer to the economic puzzle of the 21st century, including about jobs. As the pieces are put together, emerging from a response to the 2007 global financial crisis, we may well eventually see a new synthesis moving beyond Keynesian economics, in a way that will have the same profound effect in the 21st century as Keynes' work had in the 20th century, although reflecting the changes since then, perhaps reflecting a positive psychology change in emphasis from focusing on managing scarcity to focusing on creating abundance."
As I wrote about here, inspired by the Virgle April fools joke, I see Google as being conflicted about its identity in a world that could provide abundance for everyone if we made a post-scarcity ideological shift, but which currently does not because a scarcity ideology is still dominant: :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness): :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( ... :-). Or a failure to be able to define "enough" and move beyond a fear of becoming poor. And the millionaires I've known or heard of who became suddenly wealthy generally are suddenly adrift in a life that has not prepared them for thinking about deep questions like what their values and priorities really are and why -- and working through that takes time which they often don't have as money runs away from them spent on trivialities of "their stillborn adult lives". And the stable millionaires who have slowly earned their wealth are often so enmeshed in the current order of things to make it hard to see beyond it (a current order which they may well have genuinely and sincerely tried to make better, like at Google, and even succeeded at doing so to an extent, within the bounds of Empire.) ...
"A Rant On Financial Obesity and an Ironic Disclosure "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"""
Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there.
The fact is, there are far more than six *million* millionaire families in the USA who would never have to "work" another day in their lives if they were frugal (and so could work full time on space settlement or other worthwhile charitable free ends).
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_billionaire_next_door.htm
There must just be a failure of imagination that keeps them from it. Or an excess of a certain capitalist religion shown on a libertarian-leaning college mailing list I am on (and usually disagreeing
Maybe the millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires (governments) out there should think on Spock's choice as capitalistic and militaristic irrational exuberance starts reentering the stratosphere (wars over food, water, arms, climate, and oil profits, and yes, blowback from terrorism).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=globalization+blowback
And actually do something besides compete and mak
http://www.unschooling.com/
Lots of links on how and why schooling has failed:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
More:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
An easy fix: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
"Former NFL star Dave Pear is sorry he ever played football" ..." ... ...
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/jeff_pearlman/12/18/pear/
"""
"I wish I never played football. I wish that more than anything. Every single day, I want to take back those years of my life
The words are not subtle. They spit from Pear's mouth, with a blistering contempt normally reserved for drunk drivers. We are speaking via phone. I am in New York, sipping a hot chocolate, leaning back in a chair. My two young children are asleep. A Pretenders song, "2000 Miles," plays in the background. No worries, no complexities. Pear is sitting at his home in Seattle. His neck hurts. His hips hurt. His knees hurt. His feet hurt. When he wakes up in the morning, pain shoots through his body. When he goes to sleep at night, pain shoots through his body.
Be a man! Be tough! "Those last two years in Oakland were very, very difficult times," he says. "I was in pain 24 hours per day, and my employers failed to acknowledge my injury. Sure, I won a Super Bowl ring. But was it worth giving up my health for a piece of jewelry? No way. Those diamonds have lost their luster."
Throughout North America, many of Pear's retired football brethren hear his words and scream, Amen! Conrad Dobler, the legendary Cardinals offensive lineman, is about to go through his 32nd knee surgery. Wally Chambers, the Chicago Bears' three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, spends much of his time in a wheelchair. Earl Campbell, the powder blue bowling ball, struggles to walk and underwent surgery to remove three large bone spurs. The list is both heartbreaking and never-ending -- one NFL player after another after another, debilitated either mentally, physically, or both. I'm currently working on a book that has led me to interview more than 150 former players. I'd say 60 percent experience blistering pain from a sport they last played two decades ago.
"And the NFL," Pear says, "doesn't care."
Hence, he is fighting back. Two years ago, Pear started a blog, davepear.com, with the intent of supporting hobbled NFL veterans and calling out the league's laughable disability policy.
"""
http://davepear.com/blog/
From: "Liberatianism: Marxism of the Right"
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments. "
Health and community are important too, but that article leaves out the government's role in promoting them too, befitting typical US conservatives. :-)
See also:
"MESHWORKS, HIERARCHIES AND INTERFACES" by Manuel de Landa
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"""
To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us.
"""
Most US libertarians could be termed "Propertarian Liberatrians".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propertarian
Another flavor, Noam Chomsky's, is "Libertarian Socialist" (which I mind less, and we may well see more and more of as we transition to a post-scarcity society):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
But, as Manuel de Landa suggests, we need concrete experiments to see what works well in different situations.
How do people feel about applications that are proprietary for three years and then released under the GPL? Id software did this (after five years) with Doom. I'm thinking of doing that with an application I am writing for Android.
Some alternative ideas are here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
"""
Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightforward way to keep the current scarcity-based economic system going in the face of the "threat" of abundance (and limited demand) resulting in a related jobless recovery is to use things like endless low-level war, perpetual schooling, expanded prisons, increased competition, and excessive bureaucracy to provide any amount of make-work jobs to soak up the abundance from high-technology (as well as to take any amount of people off the streets in various ways). That seems to be the main path that the USA and other countries have been going down so far, perhaps unintentionally. Alternatively, there are a range of other options to chose from, whether moving towards a gift economy, a resource-based economy, a basic income economy, or strong local communitarian economies, and to some extent, the USA and other countries have also been pursuing these options as well, but in a less coherent way. Ultimately, the approaches taken to move beyond a jobless recovery (either by creating jobs or by learning to live happily without them) involves political choices that will reflect national and global values, priorities, identities, and aspirations.
"""
Solar panels replace hydrocarbons the same way fossil oil replaced whale oil for heating and lighting -- things change. You can produce as much electricity as you want with solar panels (or other renewable energy sources), and use some of that energy to make new panels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics#Energy_payback_time_and_energy_returned_on_energy_invested
"Thin film technologies now have energy pay-back times in the range of 1-1.5 years (S.Europe).[70] With lifetimes of such systems of at least 30 years[citation needed], the EROEI is in the range of 10 to 30. They thus generate enough energy over their lifetimes to reproduce themselves many times (6-31 reproductions, the EROEI is a bit lower) depending on what type of material, balance of system (or BOS), and the geographic location of the system.[75]"
Also, by the way, some people think "fossil" oil is self-renewing (though even then, it is too polluting to use IMHO).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
"The abiogenic hypothesis argues that petroleum was formed from deep carbon deposits, perhaps dating to the formation of the Earth. The presence of methane on Saturn's moon Titan is cited as evidence supporting the formation of hydrocarbons without biology. Supporters of the abiogenic hypothesis suggest that a great deal more petroleum exists on Earth than commonly thought, and that petroleum may originate from carbon-bearing fluids that migrate upward from the mantle."
If you plot the exponential growth rate of renewable energy for the past few decades, within two to three decades, the world will be running mostly on renewables. And there is no sign of that exponential growth rate slowing, even with the recession/depression. Peak Oil is a non-issue in that sense -- even if our society will change, and should change, in various ways, because the true cost of fossil fuels between defense and pollution and corruption is enormous.
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
It takes more electricity to make a gallon of gasoline than it would take for an electric car to go the same distance, so if we switched to electric cars, our electricity use would go down (and we would not need the oil at all).
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
Taxes would even go *down* if the US government gave luxury safe electric cars away to everyone:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. "
With energy and agriculture, you can grow feedstocks for industry on land or in the ocean to make plastics. Consider:
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/why-is-hemp-really-illegal/question-554401/
Is this true from the link? "Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fie
One other related item in the news today, but not on Vitamin D:
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-celiac21-2009dec21,0,5395819.story
"""
Researchers at the Brisbane Princess Alexandra Hospital in Queensland, Australia, tested the effects of hookworm inoculation on 20 patients with celiac disease to see if it would blunt the immune response to gluten. In addition to hoping to provide relief for celiac patients, the researchers want to learn if this could be an effective therapy for inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn's disease.
The results have not been published, but when the Phase II trial was over and the patients were offered a medication that would kill the parasites, they all opted to keep their hookworms.
"""
The only significant value of resources in space is to use them in space (and maybe to send back information through their use). To use resources in space, we need to better understand manufacturing. Hydrocarbons being imported back to Earth? Solar panels are a lot easier, as are windmills and lots of other things. Even a large amount of energy use can have a minimal impact on the Earth with the right renewables. The biosphere captures and uses many times more energy than our industry and has for millions of years. Check out this, by the way:
"Jay Leno's 3D Printer Replaces Rusty Old Parts"
http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/jay_leno_garage/4320759.html
Also:
"3d Printing multiple materials with Objet "
http://www.feedingedge.co.uk/blog/2009/06/26/3d-printing-multiple-materials-with-objet/
3D printers are just an example, and also BTW they can be cost effective in short run productions, which more and more manufacturing is, essentially printing on demand to reduce inventory costs. Any institution like NASA than can make plans decades ahead should be able to see how that will continue to improve. Also, there are a variety of other flexible manufacturing techniques and ways that costs are falling on that. Not all the loss of manufacturing employment in the USA is offshoring -- some is genuinely because of improved production efficiency, which will only continue. Tools continue to get better and more flexible, so the huge capital costs you refer to are less and less of an issue. Decades ago a computer cost millions of dollars and had less power than an electronic greeting card you can buy in the store for a couple dollars. Are you saying other industries simply will not follow, given all we know now and that we have the internet to continue to improve things? Especially with nanotech picking up?
As far as energy and materials, as long as we do nearly 100% green energy like from solar panels and nearly 100% recycling, the volume does not matter that much; and if it is not nearly 100% sustainable, then we will bury ourselves in waste and pollution eventually anyway. Here is a government program at NIST already in that direction -- I'd suggest giving them US$400 million rather than spend it right now on another cruise to nowhere.
"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. These resources and methods require identification of dimensions, associated measurements and classification of information relevant to sustainable product design and manufacturing. Such a base of information is critical to product designers and manufacturing engineers so that they can incorporate sustainability in their efforts. Hence, the primary challenge is to develop requirements, formal models, and validation methods for sustainability-based and lifecycle information-based manufacturing that support interoperability among tools and standards for design, analysis, simulation, and lifecycle assessment and information management.
"""