I've become more and more enamored of the idea of a "basic income" which would be essentially extending Social Security in the USA to everyone in the country (and eventually globally) regardless of need or age. The same for Medicare. It seems to me that is an easy first step for a market system to continue to function, and after that we will likely see further transformations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://www.basicincome.org/bien/ http://www.usbig.net/
It's heartening to think the US Congress almost passed one under Richard Nixon. So it is not like the idea is politically impossible. And several other countries and communities have been experimenting with it recently.
We can assume "Automation" and "Good_Design" are increasing, which tends to reduce the need for "Jobs", all other things being equal. Mainstream economics suggests "Demand" is essentially infinite -- that is, if people have two cars, they want four cars, and if they have four cars, they want one hundred cars parked in their driveway, and then even that won't be enough, they will want a thousand cars, a million cars. Clearly, stated that way, mainstream economics sounds absurd, because people only have so much time and attention they will devote to acquiring cars. So, if "Demand" is ultimately limited once most people meet their basic needs for food, water, shelter, information, and some consumer items ("the best things in life are free or cheap"), or at least "Demand" is rising less quickly than improvements in productivity "(Automation * Good_Design)", then the number of paying "Jobs" will go towards zero. And as there are less "Jobs", and so more competition for them, the remaining "Jobs" will get paid less and have worse working conditions.
"War" can increase jobs by destroying any stockpiled goods or existing infrastructure, requiring more goods and infrastructure, or vast stockpiles of military might intended no never be used, but "War" has become too terrible to contemplate even as stockpiles of war materials beg to be used, and in any case, building a *need* for "War" into an economic system seems inelegant and unethical, especially when "War" can so easily mean Armageddon these days.
The above is the equation I would suggest is more worth exploring these days than the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" one. That simple equation is IMHO key to understanding the next twenty years of our society, especially with the emergence of more capable robots. It would be worthwhile to plot the number of jobs over time for all sorts of assumptions of curves of demand and curves of automation and better design. One could also add in some demographic aspects of changing population sizes which I have left out for simplicity, as well ais issues of how well the market economy is functioning in terms of currency flows and hording and inflation/deflation. Remember, in the next twenty years, none of the resource constraints Peak Oilers worry about are likely to be huge, but nonetheless, the equation above might show jobs trending low enough to create
That's a good question. The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop system is more decentralized because you generally store a repository locally, even if you may share a copy of it somehow with others via a server. So, while a central server could be useful for sharing, if that server is down, you still have the data, and can share it in other ways (even copying repositories on USB keys). So, it is more like git or mercurial in that sense. Still, at some point, yes you could talk about theory, as in, if you ran a local server, and it updated another server, than a server based solution might seem the same as a decentralized one. But in practice, one may see a big difference of by default having all the data locally. (There is also an option to not keep a local copy of the data, too, just for completeness, so it doesn't force using only one approach.) There are also some possibilities that are harder to explain, where basically you can have multiple repositories in different locations open at once and do combined things with them.
By the way, "will be released as open source" is not the same as free and open source.:-)
"There is simply no model right now that supports the free distribution of movies that cost $140 million to make and would additional require huge amounts of bandwidth to distribute."
True, but a lot of people are now watching five minute shorts made by their peers for youtube instead. So, times change. And some people are even making much longer things for youtube or other venues.
Forth can be a nice compromise between assembly and C for those who want to learn how the machine works, and then move onto something like Java because it is cross-platform and the JVM can support a variety of languages. Still, I like your list. For me it was something like (starting about thirty years ago): * Electronics, Digital Circuits * Machine Code (just the numbers even if they had mnemonics) * Basic * Mixed Basic and Machine Code * Forth * Assembly (as in, having an assembler) * C * Lisp * Smalltalk * C++ (With some smatterings of Pascal and JCL and text processing stuff in there, even Occam). After that it was lots of other stuff, Python, etc. I agree that learning how the machine works is the basis of confidence as a programmer, even if there is another set of issues about managing complexity that can show up pretty fast.
Forth is also good for helping people learn one approach to managing complexity. "Joy" is a more modern version of Forth, although all Forths suffer from not doing enough to intrinsically document intent with good variable names, so it is more a stepping stone. If there was only one language someone would learn, a good Smalltalk (Squeak-as-we-wish-it-not-as-it-is) could be a nice choice too, combining aspects of to-the-metal programming and high level constructs and a good IDE.
The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop (I've worked on) is intended to be something like this, but in Java and more decentralized. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
Pandemic means spread, not severity. Dr. Mercola suggests concerns about the swine flu may be overblown. See: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/04/29/Swine-Flu.aspx "To put things into perspective, malaria kills 3,000 people EVERY DAY, and it's considered "a health problem"... But of course, there are no fancy vaccines for malaria that can rake in billions of dollars in a short amount of time... As of June 12, 2009, 74 countries have officially reported 29,669 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infection and only 145 deaths in the ENTIRE world from this illness. The United States has had 13217 confirmed cases, and 27 deaths. Mexico has had less cases but still has the majority of the deaths at 108.... BUT to keep this in perspective the regular flu, not the swine flu, has killed 13,000 in the US since January. But there is strong support that these types of figures are grossly exaggerated to increase vaccine sales. However, the fact remains that the regular flu at this point in time is FAR more dangerous than the swine flu and were you worried about the regular flu before the media started talking this up?"
The central idea is that we get desensitized to the varied nuances of plain food by eating a lot of stuff that is very salty, sugary, fatty, or in other ways intense. Once we are desensitized, eating foods that are not so good for us brings us no more pleasure than we used to get from plainer food. The book talks about ways to get back to a more basic diet with more vegetables and fruits and complex carbohydrates. The book also talks about fasting as a way to reset your expectations of food. Fasting is a complex subject that one should learn a lot about before trying, especially for anyone loaded up on toxics from a Standard American Diet, perhaps requiring building up to longer fasts; you can also look up "Eat Stop Eat" as an alternative to longer fasts. One simple tip from the book is to prepare meals that either have veggies and carbohydrates, or veggies and meat, but never meat and carbohydrates at the same meal. One thing this book does not talk about is how different there might be different body types with different nutritional needs (Dr. Mercola has written about this).
By the way, of course you know this, but allergies can be symptoms of different underlying issues (including stuff like Lyme disease). Omega-3s (fish oil) may help with the joint pains, although again they could be related so something like Lyme. Chinese herbs, Yoga, and so on can help with that too -- a good book to explore is "Healing Lyme" by Stephen Harrod Buhner. http://www.amazon.com/Healing-Lyme-Prevention-Borreliosis-Coinfections/dp/0970869630 These things can all interact.
Good luck to you and your wife. I know how hard it can be to deal with extra pounds.
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html """ Executive summary: Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. """
So, US military policy about nuclear war has been wrong for fifty years. The cost of losing even one city is too big to imagine, too big to bear. So, we need a different way forward. We need a different vision of national security than unilateral dominance; we need a national security policy that is based on global mutual security.
We set up two of treadmill workstations for our home offices (Horizon T95). We run them at 0.5 mile per hour to 1.0 mph. I can walk for hours while surfing the web or typing emails. Programming is a little harder while walking though, depending on the programming task. The doctor (James Levine) who made some of the first workstation presumably is just doing reading and text writing with it.
We set up a shelf on a wall above the treadmill for multiple LCD monitors. We switched to trackballs. We use a one inch square cross-section yard stick across the treadmill handles to support a board attached to the treadmill by two U-shaped brackets. The only big problem is the optical encoder on my T95 is making noise, and while I keep fixing it by hand, a complex plastic part is just warped and needs to be replaced (which means either finding the warranty paperwork, or buying a 3D printer and laser scanner.:-) The other treadmill has not had that problem -- I think one of them was just made slightly different so it is more sensitive to a plastic bracket drooping a little over time.
Anyway, it really works. We bought tall stools, so we can alternate sitting, standing, and walking. The main idea is that walking is better than standing for the legs and knees, because the knee and leg is adapted more for continuous movement than for supporting weight in one place. Still, either standing for a long time or walking a little unnaturally on a treadmill can be hard on the knees, especially if they are weak already for some reason. Supposedly the treadmill platform is designed with different zones for landing and walking, but with a keyboard, you are shifted a little back on it, so possibly the zones don't work out as well. For some people, it may make a difference in comfort if you walk barefoot, in slippers, or in shoes. Also, stepping on and off a treadmill can be a hazard, especially if you have a dog in the way.:-) Integrated office designs can have drop floors that put the treadmill at floor height, not elevated.
We have had a couple wired headsets broken though, from stepping on the cable while walking. Wireless headsets is probably a better idea as far as that goes.
I think using a treadmill while at the computer has helped me lose weight, have more stamina, and have better posture. So, overall, a big win. It's nice to look down at the console after doing a long task and realize you have walked a mile or two.
Still, a lot of people get hurt lugging 250 pound treadmills up stairs, so best to keep it on a first floor or a place with elevators -- which can limit placement of a home office.
Now, that is a very inflammatory subject title, so let me explain what I mean.
I was glad to see a previous comment referencing John Taylor Gatto. I do not see Gatto's name in the PDF document. Neither do I see John Holt's name. The fact is, the purpose of "schooling" (which is not the same as "education", and you would expect a mathematician to be more precise in a use of terms) is precisely to do what the mathematician decries at the end: "And there you have it. A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds-- a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun."
Education in the USA will not improve until people like this mathematician accept that what he said is the intentional purpose of schooling in all subjects for almost all children. See things like:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto, NYS Teacher of the Year http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt or:
"The Big Crunch" by Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost Caltech http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html or:
"Growing Without Schooling" about John Holt's work, including failed attempts to reform schools http://www.holtgws.com/
At this point, it is people like Paul Lockhart who are the problem. People who think school is about education, when it is about socialization in a certain way intended for the most part to produce compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and mindless consumers. School is for fish. Curriculums are race tracks. And "class rooms" are literally to build social classes through selective breeding by genetics. Those are the origins of all those terms, at least according to Gatto, and, again, you would expect a mathematician to be precise about the origins and use of terminology.
With all that said, of course Paul Lockhart is right about how to improve mathematics education. But, it will never work within a Prussian-derived school system with no interest in truly educating children, despite every person who works at a school calling themselves an educator, and despite the truth that most of the people in schools might be fine educators if given the chance and a few years of untraining of their bad habits.
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and... Resistance" http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
Anyway, sorry to be so harsh on you, Paul. Read "Disciplined Minds" and start building a social network to help you and them and others break out of the prison around you:
"Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives" http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
The good news is, you have already taken the first step of getting out of the prison others have forced you to build for yourself.
"No external power" was required for the solution to extract water from air in the Slashdot article I linked to. Amory Lovins and others have shown even thirty years ago how renewables and energy efficiency could supply all our energy needs. But even with global climate change from burning coal, there is plenty of resources to go around to relocate everyone from rising sea levels if we wanted to, including building them new homes, even on artificial islands. All these issues are besides the point that the solutions exist and we have plenty of resources to implement them. For example, people starve in this world despite the fact that there is plenty of food per capita and US farmers are paid not to grow more. The issues are all about ideology and politics, or in other words, a scarcity of post-scarcity thinking.:-) But that is slowly changing, while at the same time our technology continues to improve exponentially.
But the reason the current economic system is set up by an elite to concentrate resources for themselves is because the elite is still obsessed with scarcity... There is no technical reason the factories of the USA and Europe could not be devoted to producing consumer goods for materially poor countries instead of weapons like landmines. Same resources. Same people. Same destinations. Different mindsets.
But personally I prefer solar and other renewable based solutions, in part because nuclear is hard to manage by scarcity-obsessed people who engage in things like coverups and pollution. Renewables are easier to manage in that sense as we transition to a post-scarcity economy.
If we use atomic power for more peaceful ends than harmful (like in medicine, or for structural analysis with x-rays), it is precisely because of aspects of the collective human heart that Einstein referred to. A lot of people out there are trying. But it might have been hard to imagine that in the 1940s. Examples are in this book: "Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming" http://www.blessedunrest.com/ "Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide."
Slashdot itself is an example of this phenomenon; in the Slashdot case, rather than using computers to target and kill supposed "enemies" using flying robots, post-scarcity computer technology is being used to support dialogue creating a learning community which is empowering people to make life-affirming changes in the world, to make more of the world into friends. The best way to get rid of an "enemy" is to become friends.
As another comment suggest, producing water is easy if you have power. Last week there was a "post-scarcity" way talked about on slashdot relying on cleverness:
"Frank Herbert's Moisture Traps May Be a Reality " http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/09/2058241 "In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune,' Frank Herbert envisioned the Fremen collecting water from the air via moisture traps and dew collectors. Science Daily reprints a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, where scientists working with colleagues from Logos Innovationen have developed a closed-loop and self-sustaining method, no external power required, for teasing the humidity out of desert air and into potable water."
Ask yourself, why are you saying there is a water problem when this article was here last week? Could it be true for almost everything else, too? Energy? Mining? Recycling? Medicine? Education? And so on? There is so much happening out there by so many people: http://www.blessedunrest.com/ "Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another."
The technology is not enough though. It only makes easier the task of social movements. There is enough to go around now, and there has always been as a globe for thousands of years. But it is easier to think about sharing abundance when there is more of it.
It is interesting you should raise that issue, since the historic problems of the Middle East are a prime example of post-scarcity technology wielded for scarcity ends and creating endless disasters. Powerful (potentially post-scarcity) social bureaucracies like Britain and the United Nations were used by scarcity-oriented thinkers to carve up that section of the world into arbitrary parcels with little attention to the local history and inevitable conflicts, mainly for scarcity-oriented reasons (narrowly selfish for the politicians or narrowly selfish for the states). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Middle_East
Imagine, say, Israel as a place where anyone could move from anywhere in the world, regardless of ethnicity, genetics, or religion, and receive a guaranteed basic income of US$1000 a month. Something like that using advanced technology is envisioned for Australia by Marshall Brain here (towards the end): http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm How much fighting would there have been in the Middle East then?
The biggest issue of the 21st century is post-scarcity technology wielded by people still preoccupied with fighting over perceived scarcity.
Nuclear power, biotech, AI, robotics, nanotech, the internet, and social bureaucracy -- each of these technologies could make the earth a paradise if developed for humane ends.
Albert Einstein said: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
The same is true for robotics, biotech, and the rest. Even smart networked watches.:-)
I wrote on that here:
"Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) Licensing issues" http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/da82d9fd52265dbc?hl=en "So basically, SME is using post-scarcity charitable dollars and tax exemptions to finance the creation and distribution of artificial scarcity of manufacturing information, which otherwise they could put up for free for all on their website.... To be blunt, I feel it is unethical for a tax-exempt non-profit to withhold 17000 papers on manufacturing from easy global distribution, just so some current staff can make money for future activities by creating artificial scarcity. That is 20th century ethical reasoning, now outdated by easy distribution via the internet at no incremental cost (I'm sure there are many places like Ibiblio or Archive.org who would host them for free if bandwidth was an issue). And making things "members only" doesn't really solve it, and I'd expect even members can't redistribute content or make derivative works without special permission. "
From stuff I wrote around 2001: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
That was an interesting insight, to question how open science really is in practice, based on the practical difficulty of accessing information, even now.
By the way, on the Bastille day part, just a reminder from:
"Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence" http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html "Studies of social movements in the United States also show that the necessary social disruption has to be created through the principled use of strategic nonviolence. Any form of violence, whether property damage or physical battles with opponents and police, will turn off the great majority of Americans and bring down overwhelming police and military repression."
But there are a few deeper issues. Goodstein, for example, talks about general elitist issues in education.
Another I add is another interpretation of what it means as you suggest that the number of physicists exceeded "demand" (in a classical economics sense), since is that not just another way of saying the number of physicists exceeded what those with money were willing to pay for? And most of the problems the world faces (like starvation or river blindness or pollution or human rights issues) are not of urgent interest to many of those with serious money, who are often busy amusing themselves to death? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death Or alternatively fighting to stay financially obese. Or alternatively, want do do good, but are so locked into a narrow competitive mindset they think the world will be saved by spreading competitive capitalism everywhere, like Iraq? This a broad failure of morality and ethics in our society, cultivated in part by a cult of consumerism linked to a malfunctioning industrial control system.
Here is the reason that everyone who wants to study physics in this potentially abundant world can not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis.... The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
We need to transition in general to a post-scarcity society moving beyond rationing the basics (perhaps a guaranteed basic income like social security for everyone would be a start). Right now, the post-scarcity technologies physicists and engineers (and even poets and novelists) have provided us with (like biotech, nuclear tech, nanotech, robotics, AI, advertising, the internet, and so on) are being wielded by people preoccupied with a scarcity worldview. That is a terribly dangerous situation, that people have the power to create and destroy so rapidly and so extensively, but many with that power do not see there are other options to
Slashdot Mirror
I've become more and more enamored of the idea of a "basic income" which would be essentially extending Social Security in the USA to everyone in the country (and eventually globally) regardless of need or age. The same for Medicare. It seems to me that is an easy first step for a market system to continue to function, and after that we will likely see further transformations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.usbig.net/
It's heartening to think the US Congress almost passed one under Richard Nixon. So it is not like the idea is politically impossible. And several other countries and communities have been experimenting with it recently.
A simple equation:
Jobs = (Demand - (Stockpiled_Supply - War)) / (Automation * Good_Design)
We can assume "Automation" and "Good_Design" are increasing, which tends to reduce the need for "Jobs", all other things being equal. Mainstream economics suggests "Demand" is essentially infinite -- that is, if people have two cars, they want four cars, and if they have four cars, they want one hundred cars parked in their driveway, and then even that won't be enough, they will want a thousand cars, a million cars. Clearly, stated that way, mainstream economics sounds absurd, because people only have so much time and attention they will devote to acquiring cars. So, if "Demand" is ultimately limited once most people meet their basic needs for food, water, shelter, information, and some consumer items ("the best things in life are free or cheap"), or at least "Demand" is rising less quickly than improvements in productivity "(Automation * Good_Design)", then the number of paying "Jobs" will go towards zero. And as there are less "Jobs", and so more competition for them, the remaining "Jobs" will get paid less and have worse working conditions.
The absence of good "Jobs" creates a crisis in a society that only allows people with jobs to direct the market and take goods from it (thus, the unemployed will starve, or riot, or be on unrelated small and depressing welfare payments, see Marshall Brain's Manna or described in the Triple Revolution memorandum).
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"War" can increase jobs by destroying any stockpiled goods or existing infrastructure, requiring more goods and infrastructure, or vast stockpiles of military might intended no never be used, but "War" has become too terrible to contemplate even as stockpiles of war materials beg to be used, and in any case, building a *need* for "War" into an economic system seems inelegant and unethical, especially when "War" can so easily mean Armageddon these days.
The above is the equation I would suggest is more worth exploring these days than the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" one. That simple equation is IMHO key to understanding the next twenty years of our society, especially with the emergence of more capable robots. It would be worthwhile to plot the number of jobs over time for all sorts of assumptions of curves of demand and curves of automation and better design. One could also add in some demographic aspects of changing population sizes which I have left out for simplicity, as well ais issues of how well the market economy is functioning in terms of currency flows and hording and inflation/deflation. Remember, in the next twenty years, none of the resource constraints Peak Oilers worry about are likely to be huge, but nonetheless, the equation above might show jobs trending low enough to create
Actually, cursive is slower than printing. John Holt looked at that. Cursive is just another timewaster the schooling system foists on kids.
That's a good question. The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop system is more decentralized because you generally store a repository locally, even if you may share a copy of it somehow with others via a server. So, while a central server could be useful for sharing, if that server is down, you still have the data, and can share it in other ways (even copying repositories on USB keys). So, it is more like git or mercurial in that sense. Still, at some point, yes you could talk about theory, as in, if you ran a local server, and it updated another server, than a server based solution might seem the same as a decentralized one. But in practice, one may see a big difference of by default having all the data locally. (There is also an option to not keep a local copy of the data, too, just for completeness, so it doesn't force using only one approach.) There are also some possibilities that are harder to explain, where basically you can have multiple repositories in different locations open at once and do combined things with them.
By the way, "will be released as open source" is not the same as free and open source. :-)
"There is simply no model right now that supports the free distribution of movies that cost $140 million to make and would additional require huge amounts of bandwidth to distribute."
True, but a lot of people are now watching five minute shorts made by their peers for youtube instead. So, times change. And some people are even making much longer things for youtube or other venues.
Forth can be a nice compromise between assembly and C for those who want to learn how the machine works, and then move onto something like Java because it is cross-platform and the JVM can support a variety of languages. Still, I like your list. For me it was something like (starting about thirty years ago):
* Electronics, Digital Circuits
* Machine Code (just the numbers even if they had mnemonics)
* Basic
* Mixed Basic and Machine Code
* Forth
* Assembly (as in, having an assembler)
* C
* Lisp
* Smalltalk
* C++
(With some smatterings of Pascal and JCL and text processing stuff in there, even Occam).
After that it was lots of other stuff, Python, etc. I agree that learning how the machine works is the basis of confidence as a programmer, even if there is another set of issues about managing complexity that can show up pretty fast.
Forth is also good for helping people learn one approach to managing complexity. "Joy" is a more modern version of Forth, although all Forths suffer from not doing enough to intrinsically document intent with good variable names, so it is more a stepping stone. If there was only one language someone would learn, a good Smalltalk (Squeak-as-we-wish-it-not-as-it-is) could be a nice choice too, combining aspects of to-the-metal programming and high level constructs and a good IDE.
The Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop (I've worked on) is intended to be something like this, but in Java and more decentralized.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
NEPOMUK is another such social semantic desktop system.
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/
Pandemic means spread, not severity. Dr. Mercola suggests concerns about the swine flu may be overblown. See: ... As of June 12, 2009, 74 countries have officially reported 29,669 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infection and only 145 deaths in the ENTIRE world from this illness. The United States has had 13217 confirmed cases, and 27 deaths. Mexico has had less cases but still has the majority of the deaths at 108. ... BUT to keep this in perspective the regular flu, not the swine flu, has killed 13,000 in the US since January. But there is strong support that these types of figures are grossly exaggerated to increase vaccine sales. However, the fact remains that the regular flu at this point in time is FAR more dangerous than the swine flu and were you worried about the regular flu before the media started talking this up?"
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/04/29/Swine-Flu.aspx
"To put things into perspective, malaria kills 3,000 people EVERY DAY, and it's considered "a health problem"... But of course, there are no fancy vaccines for malaria that can rake in billions of dollars in a short amount of time
This book might help:
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness" by Douglas J. Lisle
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
The central idea is that we get desensitized to the varied nuances of plain food by eating a lot of stuff that is very salty, sugary, fatty, or in other ways intense. Once we are desensitized, eating foods that are not so good for us brings us no more pleasure than we used to get from plainer food. The book talks about ways to get back to a more basic diet with more vegetables and fruits and complex carbohydrates. The book also talks about fasting as a way to reset your expectations of food. Fasting is a complex subject that one should learn a lot about before trying, especially for anyone loaded up on toxics from a Standard American Diet, perhaps requiring building up to longer fasts; you can also look up "Eat Stop Eat" as an alternative to longer fasts. One simple tip from the book is to prepare meals that either have veggies and carbohydrates, or veggies and meat, but never meat and carbohydrates at the same meal. One thing this book does not talk about is how different there might be different body types with different nutritional needs (Dr. Mercola has written about this).
By the way, of course you know this, but allergies can be symptoms of different underlying issues (including stuff like Lyme disease). Omega-3s (fish oil) may help with the joint pains, although again they could be related so something like Lyme. Chinese herbs, Yoga, and so on can help with that too -- a good book to explore is "Healing Lyme" by Stephen Harrod Buhner.
http://www.amazon.com/Healing-Lyme-Prevention-Borreliosis-Coinfections/dp/0970869630
These things can all interact.
Good luck to you and your wife. I know how hard it can be to deal with extra pounds.
From:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"""
Executive summary: Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations.
"""
"The U.S. no longer has to worry about nuclear war? Probably. "
The USA is terrified right now that just one nuclear bomb will be used by someone in a US city. Because of that terror, the USA is willing to change its entire structure of civil liberties (like allow broad wiretapping without warrants). The terror of just one bomb. Why did we then build about 70,000 of them?
http://www.brookings.edu/projects/archive/nucweapons/50.aspx
http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_atomic_audit.html
So, US military policy about nuclear war has been wrong for fifty years. The cost of losing even one city is too big to imagine, too big to bear. So, we need a different way forward. We need a different vision of national security than unilateral dominance; we need a national security policy that is based on global mutual security.
As Einstein said, with the release of the power of the atom, everything has changed but our thinking. We need a "global mindshift":
http://www.global-mindshift.org/discover/viewMeme.asp?resourceID=239
See also:
http://mayoresearch.mayo.edu/levine_lab/
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/71000.php
We set up two of treadmill workstations for our home offices (Horizon T95). We run them at 0.5 mile per hour to 1.0 mph. I can walk for hours while surfing the web or typing emails. Programming is a little harder while walking though, depending on the programming task. The doctor (James Levine) who made some of the first workstation presumably is just doing reading and text writing with it.
We set up a shelf on a wall above the treadmill for multiple LCD monitors. We switched to trackballs. We use a one inch square cross-section yard stick across the treadmill handles to support a board attached to the treadmill by two U-shaped brackets. The only big problem is the optical encoder on my T95 is making noise, and while I keep fixing it by hand, a complex plastic part is just warped and needs to be replaced (which means either finding the warranty paperwork, or buying a 3D printer and laser scanner. :-) The other treadmill has not had that problem -- I think one of them was just made slightly different so it is more sensitive to a plastic bracket drooping a little over time.
Anyway, it really works. We bought tall stools, so we can alternate sitting, standing, and walking. The main idea is that walking is better than standing for the legs and knees, because the knee and leg is adapted more for continuous movement than for supporting weight in one place. Still, either standing for a long time or walking a little unnaturally on a treadmill can be hard on the knees, especially if they are weak already for some reason. Supposedly the treadmill platform is designed with different zones for landing and walking, but with a keyboard, you are shifted a little back on it, so possibly the zones don't work out as well. For some people, it may make a difference in comfort if you walk barefoot, in slippers, or in shoes. Also, stepping on and off a treadmill can be a hazard, especially if you have a dog in the way. :-) Integrated office designs can have drop floors that put the treadmill at floor height, not elevated.
We have had a couple wired headsets broken though, from stepping on the cable while walking. Wireless headsets is probably a better idea as far as that goes.
I think using a treadmill while at the computer has helped me lose weight, have more stamina, and have better posture. So, overall, a big win. It's nice to look down at the console after doing a long task and realize you have walked a mile or two.
Still, a lot of people get hurt lugging 250 pound treadmills up stairs, so best to keep it on a first floor or a place with elevators -- which can limit placement of a home office.
But if it is for a project for money, you might find this brings tears to your eyes:
"Code Monkey"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA
If so, rethink your working situation if you can. If not, well, things could be worse. You could have no job and bills to pay.
Lots of great suggestions here, BTW.
Now, that is a very inflammatory subject title, so let me explain what I mean.
I was glad to see a previous comment referencing John Taylor Gatto. I do not see Gatto's name in the PDF document. Neither do I see John Holt's name. The fact is, the purpose of "schooling" (which is not the same as "education", and you would expect a mathematician to be more precise in a use of terms) is precisely to do what the mathematician decries at the end: "And there you have it. A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds-- a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun."
Education in the USA will not improve until people like this mathematician accept that what he said is the intentional purpose of schooling in all subjects for almost all children. See things like:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto, NYS Teacher of the Year
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
or:
"The Big Crunch" by Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
or:
"Growing Without Schooling" about John Holt's work, including failed attempts to reform schools
http://www.holtgws.com/
At this point, it is people like Paul Lockhart who are the problem. People who think school is about education, when it is about socialization in a certain way intended for the most part to produce compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and mindless consumers. School is for fish. Curriculums are race tracks. And "class rooms" are literally to build social classes through selective breeding by genetics. Those are the origins of all those terms, at least according to Gatto, and, again, you would expect a mathematician to be precise about the origins and use of terminology.
With all that said, of course Paul Lockhart is right about how to improve mathematics education. But, it will never work within a Prussian-derived school system with no interest in truly educating children, despite every person who works at a school calling themselves an educator, and despite the truth that most of the people in schools might be fine educators if given the chance and a few years of untraining of their bad habits. ... Resistance"
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
Anyway, sorry to be so harsh on you, Paul. Read "Disciplined Minds" and start building a social network to help you and them and others break out of the prison around you:
"Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives"
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
The good news is, you have already taken the first step of getting out of the prison others have forced you to build for yourself.
"No external power" was required for the solution to extract water from air in the Slashdot article I linked to. Amory Lovins and others have shown even thirty years ago how renewables and energy efficiency could supply all our energy needs. But even with global climate change from burning coal, there is plenty of resources to go around to relocate everyone from rising sea levels if we wanted to, including building them new homes, even on artificial islands. All these issues are besides the point that the solutions exist and we have plenty of resources to implement them. For example, people starve in this world despite the fact that there is plenty of food per capita and US farmers are paid not to grow more. The issues are all about ideology and politics, or in other words, a scarcity of post-scarcity thinking. :-) But that is slowly changing, while at the same time our technology continues to improve exponentially.
But the reason the current economic system is set up by an elite to concentrate resources for themselves is because the elite is still obsessed with scarcity... There is no technical reason the factories of the USA and Europe could not be devoted to producing consumer goods for materially poor countries instead of weapons like landmines. Same resources. Same people. Same destinations. Different mindsets.
There is plenty of Helium-3 on the moon down the road:
http://www.nuenergy.org/alt/maglich.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
But personally I prefer solar and other renewable based solutions, in part because nuclear is hard to manage by scarcity-obsessed people who engage in things like coverups and pollution. Renewables are easier to manage in that sense as we transition to a post-scarcity economy.
If we use atomic power for more peaceful ends than harmful (like in medicine, or for structural analysis with x-rays), it is precisely because of aspects of the collective human heart that Einstein referred to. A lot of people out there are trying. But it might have been hard to imagine that in the 1940s. Examples are in this book:
"Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming"
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice.
From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide."
Slashdot itself is an example of this phenomenon; in the Slashdot case, rather than using computers to target and kill supposed "enemies" using flying robots, post-scarcity computer technology is being used to support dialogue creating a learning community which is empowering people to make life-affirming changes in the world, to make more of the world into friends. The best way to get rid of an "enemy" is to become friends.
As another comment suggest, producing water is easy if you have power. Last week there was a "post-scarcity" way talked about on slashdot relying on cleverness:
"Frank Herbert's Moisture Traps May Be a Reality "
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/06/09/2058241
"In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune,' Frank Herbert envisioned the Fremen collecting water from the air via moisture traps and dew collectors. Science Daily reprints a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, where scientists working with colleagues from Logos Innovationen have developed a closed-loop and self-sustaining method, no external power required, for teasing the humidity out of desert air and into potable water."
Ask yourself, why are you saying there is a water problem when this article was here last week? Could it be true for almost everything else, too? Energy? Mining? Recycling? Medicine? Education? And so on? There is so much happening out there by so many people:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another."
The technology is not enough though. It only makes easier the task of social movements. There is enough to go around now, and there has always been as a globe for thousands of years. But it is easier to think about sharing abundance when there is more of it.
It is interesting you should raise that issue, since the historic problems of the Middle East are a prime example of post-scarcity technology wielded for scarcity ends and creating endless disasters. Powerful (potentially post-scarcity) social bureaucracies like Britain and the United Nations were used by scarcity-oriented thinkers to carve up that section of the world into arbitrary parcels with little attention to the local history and inevitable conflicts, mainly for scarcity-oriented reasons (narrowly selfish for the politicians or narrowly selfish for the states).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Middle_East
Imagine, say, Israel as a place where anyone could move from anywhere in the world, regardless of ethnicity, genetics, or religion, and receive a guaranteed basic income of US$1000 a month. Something like that using advanced technology is envisioned for Australia by Marshall Brain here (towards the end):
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
How much fighting would there have been in the Middle East then?
I agree people can have a sentimental and historical attachment to the land, and that can often be a good thing, but as far as land itself goes, we know enough now to build cities in the oceans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_island
And even space:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill
The biggest issue of the 21st century is post-scarcity technology wielded by people still preoccupied with fighting over perceived scarcity.
Nuclear power, biotech, AI, robotics, nanotech, the internet, and social bureaucracy -- each of these technologies could make the earth a paradise if developed for humane ends.
Albert Einstein said: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
The same is true for robotics, biotech, and the rest. Even smart networked watches. :-)
I wrote on that here: ...
"Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) Licensing issues"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/da82d9fd52265dbc?hl=en
"So basically, SME is using post-scarcity charitable dollars and tax
exemptions to finance the creation and distribution of artificial scarcity
of manufacturing information, which otherwise they could put up for free for
all on their website.
To be blunt, I feel it is unethical for a tax-exempt non-profit to withhold
17000 papers on manufacturing from easy global distribution, just so some
current staff can make money for future activities by creating artificial
scarcity. That is 20th century ethical reasoning, now outdated by easy
distribution via the internet at no incremental cost (I'm sure there are
many places like Ibiblio or Archive.org who would host them for free if
bandwidth was an issue). And making things "members only" doesn't really
solve it, and I'd expect even members can't redistribute content or make
derivative works without special permission. "
From stuff I wrote around 2001:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary
copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it
results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of
helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little
cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through
charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence,
with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by
the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become,
perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up
to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by
requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and
donations."
That was an interesting insight, to question how open science really is in practice, based on the practical difficulty of accessing information, even now.
By the way, on the Bastille day part, just a reminder from:
"Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence"
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
"Studies of social movements in the United States also show that the necessary social disruption has to be created through the principled use of strategic nonviolence. Any form of violence, whether property damage or physical battles with opponents and police, will turn off the great majority of Americans and bring down overwhelming police and military repression."
One of the biggest problems is that the money that is being spent by the US government (and foundations) for basic research is being less effective because of a misguided notion that research results are worthless unless they are exclusively owned by someone and turned into a proprietary business in a narrow way. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
Your suggestion sounds like a variation of this physicists suggestion:
"The Big Crunch"
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
But there are a few deeper issues. Goodstein, for example, talks about general elitist issues in education.
Another I add is another interpretation of what it means as you suggest that the number of physicists exceeded "demand" (in a classical economics sense), since is that not just another way of saying the number of physicists exceeded what those with money were willing to pay for? And most of the problems the world faces (like starvation or river blindness or pollution or human rights issues) are not of urgent interest to many of those with serious money, who are often busy amusing themselves to death?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Or alternatively fighting to stay financially obese. Or alternatively, want do do good, but are so locked into a narrow competitive mindset they think the world will be saved by spreading competitive capitalism everywhere, like Iraq? This a broad failure of morality and ethics in our society, cultivated in part by a cult of consumerism linked to a malfunctioning industrial control system.
Here is the reason that everyone who wants to study physics in this potentially abundant world can not: ... The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand--for granting the right to consume--now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis.
We need to transition in general to a post-scarcity society moving beyond rationing the basics (perhaps a guaranteed basic income like social security for everyone would be a start). Right now, the post-scarcity technologies physicists and engineers (and even poets and novelists) have provided us with (like biotech, nuclear tech, nanotech, robotics, AI, advertising, the internet, and so on) are being wielded by people preoccupied with a scarcity worldview. That is a terribly dangerous situation, that people have the power to create and destroy so rapidly and so extensively, but many with that power do not see there are other options to
That was written 15 years ago, and not much has changed.
Well, it has perhaps gotten worse...