I'm sorry that the truth is not as empowering as what you choose to believe, but unfortunately that's a general feature of reality.
Thanks for all your comments (whether we agree on everything or not).
To try to leave things on a positive note, here is are a couple of links to research on the mind-body connection as it relates to the immune system. On the history of the development of the field of psychoneuroimmunology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoneuroimmunology From: http://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V59N3/feature2.html "Can your mental state influence your susceptibility to disease? Much of the scientific evidence that this is so has been coming out of the [Rochester] University Medical Center department headed by neurobiologist David Felten....The mind isn't restricted to curing, however; we have always sensed that human thoughts can kill as well as mend. Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon, for instance, in investigating deaths by voodoo in the 1940s concluded that humans could indeed die from "the fatal power of the imagination working through unmitigated terror." It was not until the 1970s, however, that documented evidence of a physiological link between the mind and body was firmly established. One of the earliest such came from a study of rodents in labs at the University Medical Center, and led to the development of a new, hybrid field of study now known as psychoneuroimmunology, generally (and mercifully) shortened to "PNI." PNI is now a highly rated specialty of the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at Rochester, the department headed since 1995 by David Felten. Felten, who also holds the Kilian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Professorship, is recognized as one of the leading researchers in the field. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," he is the unassuming wearer of numerous other laurels, including--in addition to a dozen or so teaching awards ("Teaching is my passion," he says)--two nominations for the Albert Lasker Award for Medical Research (sometimes the precursor to a Nobel), and, most recently, the Norman Cousins Award in Mind-Body Health given by the Fetzer Foundation.... Using special fluorescent stains to trace nerves to various bodily locations, including bone marrow, lymph nodes, and the spleen, the Felten team had discovered a network of nerves leading to blood vessels as well as cells of the immune system. The researchers also found nerves in the thymus and spleen terminating near clusters of lymphocytes, macrophages, and mast cells, all of which help control immune function. There it was, the mind-body connection--clear evidence that the brain has the ability to send signals to immune-system cells. Granny was right, after all.... "The University Medical Center is now viewed by many as the primary site for the study of brain behavior and immunology," Felten says. "And not only are we in the forefront of research, but we teach our doctors and nurses to treat patients as human beings, not just as slices of anatomy. I never heard the word 'healing' the whole time I was a medical student; here we don't just dismiss it that way.... "There is so much left to find out--we are nowhere near identifying all the players. And we have no idea," he says, in zestful anticipation of surprises yet to come, "what might be out there lying around the next corner.""
And on a practical basis, yoga and laughter are two good ways to help improve immune function: http://www.lolyoga.com/therapeutic-benefits.php "Oliver Wendell Holmes Dr. Lee Berk and fellow researcher Dr. Stanley Tan of Loma Linda University in California have been studying the effects of laughter on the immune system. To date their published studies have shown that laughing lowers
Seriously, if there's one thing you take away from this discussion, do not allow anyone you care about to give birth at home. It's just not worth the risk.
Check out:
"Outcomes of planned home births with certified professional midwives: large prospective study in North America" http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/330/7505/1416 "Planned home birth for low risk women in North America using certified professional midwives was associated with lower rates of medical intervention but similar intrapartum and neonatal mortality to that of low risk hospital births in the United States."
Or, less official, but I am getting lazy here as we drift off-topic: http://www.willothewisp.org/html/home_birth.html "Let us set one myth to rest right away. A hospital is NOT the safest place for most women to give birth, in fact many studies have shown that mother and infant mortality rates are much lower in those countries that pursue a policy of encouraging home birth. While some very high risk pregnancies most certainly do not to happen inside the hospital all low risk and nearly all medium risk births can take place in the safety and comfort of a woman's own home, and as long as she is supported by a professional midwife service mortality rates will be lower than those for the same birth taking place inside hospitals.In the Netherlands nationally 45% and rising of births happen in the home, with most of the remainder taking place in local birth clinics and a minority in hospitals. In the USA and Canada only 0.9 per cent of women gave birth at home in 1991 (some of them unplanned), compared with 1.7 per cent in Britain. The argument against home birth focuses on the fact that it may subject mother and/or baby to avoidable risks and that even in seemingly healthy, normal pregnancies things can go wrong at the last minute. However birth cannot be made risk free, it is a risky time for both mother and child, but it should always be kept in mind that it is still a Natural process. Experience shows that most emergency birthing situations can be handled by a well trained midwife / birth attendant at home or that transfer to hospital can be arranged in time to avoid risks to mother or baby. In Holland Midwives carry some emergency equipment and will arrange for speedy transfer to hospital if needed. Of course Holland is a highly urbanised country and hospital care is rarely more than just a few minutes away....In fact, study after study conducted on the issue has shown that for healthy women with low- to moderate-risk pregnancies, giving birth in a hospital is actually less safe than giving birth at home with a trained midwife. So perhaps this is a major factor in the mortality rates. A particularly large Dutch study so comprehensively endorsed home birth for low risk and even many medium risk mothers that the the declined in home birth has been arrested and is now march towards 50%. A great many studies throughout the westernized world support these findings. No study has ever proven hospital birth to be safer than planned, midwife-attended homebirth.... The familiar comfort of home makes it the safest birthplace for healthy, low-risk women. In the safety of their own homes, women are less likely to experience complications of labor, such as hypertension and muconium staining, which may be brought on by stress. The freedom to move about as desired decreases both length of labor and the need for pain medications, therefore lowering the risk of maternal exhaustion, fetal distress, and caesarean section. Whereas a woman's home usually contains only microbes to which she and her baby are immune due to daily exposure, where as hospitals are full of disease-causing microbes, many of which are resistant to most antibiotics.... We have conducted trials and studies all over Holland, but here I w
It's true that dirt and germs are everywhere, but serious infectious disease is really caused by an extremely, extremely small subset of those, and the primary factor determining whether or not you get sick is your exposure to the pathogen.
I'll certainly mostly agree to the first two clauses of what you write, but as to the last part as to "primary" factors, then how do doctors survive their first year of work around sick people?:-) Clearly the picture is much more complex than "exposure leads to disease".
For example, in general, most (though not all) doctors are wealthier and better nourished than average, and come from similarly successful mothers. Could this not have something to do with improved disease resistance? It certainly is unlikely to be vaccinations, since as a general rule from what I read medical personel are one of the least vaccinated of all populations.:-) For example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=16320981&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google "RESULTS: Among vaccine nonrecipients, doubts about the efficacy and necessity of influenza immunization were prevalent and more often reported by nurses than physicians (75% vs 41%, P =.002; and 55% vs 23%, P =.001, respectively). Physicians more often than nurses reported lack of time as a reason for not receiving influenza vaccination (23% vs 5%, P =.01). After intervention, the immunization rate of HCWs increased from 19% to 24% (P =.03). The immunization rate of physicians increased from 43% to 64% (P =.004). No change was noted among nurses (13% vs 14%) and other HCWs (16% vs 16%)."
Note that 24% overall rate after arm-twisting is for pediatric healthcare workers in a university children's hospital.:-) And I'd love to know what those 36% of doctors who skip getting a flu shot were thinking... Aren't they likely to be exposed to a flu and give it to their pediatric patients? Are they all criminally negligent? Or maybe not?:-)
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here--if you think the mother's immunity is permanently passed on to the child, you're simply mistaken, that's a temporary phenomenon.
Just to clear this up, and granted no one understand the exact details yet, but as I now understand it, a nursing mother's immune system is always scanning the environment for threats. Generally, the mother is exposed to a pathogen at the same time her child is. Her milk adjusts itself to provide various types of substances which may help the child's immune system learn to recognize and defeat this threat. At the very least, these substances always provide an extra defensive boost to ease the burden on the child's own defenses, allowing the child's immune system to overcome a weakened threat which might otherwise kill the child, and thus the child acquires permanent immunity. This entire process may also typically take several years; however in most societies nursing does extend for several years (WHO recommends three years I think). This immune system learning is passed on generation to generation, mother to daughter. This only works if the pathogen remains at a low level in the environment so the mother's immune system can be challenged by it and help the child's. So we are talking about more than specific antibodies being passed on just temporarily. We are talking about knowledge about immunity being passed from generation to generation by a complex process, as long as the pathogen persists in the environment.
Vaccination (and also formula use or short term breastfeeding) breaks this cycle of passing on immunological knowledge from mother to daughter, and at best provides partial immunity usually requiring booster shots. And once a pathogen's frequency is driven down so low that it is not encountered during nursing, this knowledge of how to defeat it can not be passed on that way (and yet, as you point out, with airplanes an outbreak from a normally very low level almost extinct pathogen can easily spread worldwide, especially if a minor mutation makes it more virulent somehow). Also, presumably, a vaccinated mother can not mount the same level of defense to a pathogen as a mother who encountered the real thing.
Of course, if a mother gives birth in a hostile biological environment like a hospital, with many possible threats the mother's immune system has never experienced before, then the mother's immune system is going to be delayed in a response. That's one reason why a place like the Netherlands, with about 30% home births, has a lower infant mortality than the USA (only higher risk births are suggested to go to hospital). A home may actually be far dirtier than a hospital, but the mother's immune system already knows the home's dirt and so can easily assist the newborn in learning about it.:-)
Now one might legitimately argue it is better to have none of the pathogen in the environment, and this is perhaps accomplished best through vaccinations, and the benefits outweigh the costs. But I feel that is an issue one can discuss, especially for each specific pathogen, rather than assume the ideal amount of a pathogen is zero (given that there always are some pathogens out there, evolving away). For good or bad, the human body is tuned to expect a certain level of challenge. Until people understand systematically know to change that tuning, having some infections may be better than having none (assuming they are not really bad infections). Obviously, this is acknowledged already for the benefits of physical or mental exercise. Part of the controversy about vaccination hinges on whether the vaccine provides overall a good form of exercise for the immune system. But people have similar argument over, say, isometrics versus free weights, or scrabble versus poker, for which provide a better boost to brawn or brain. But only for vaccination do we have the layers of religious overtones.
Anyway, when was the last time you heard a US pediatrician pushing an on-the-fence Mom to nurse for three y
You're correct, I'm ignoring that [ethical] aspect of it. I agree that there are lots of interesting issues there, and I don't necessarily disagree with you on those--I disagree with you on the immunological aspects of your argument, which contain factual errors. [snip] I don't understand...why do you think I should disagree with absolutely everything you have to say?
Factual errors or not, my main point is there is room here for discussion, which is why any unrebutted points suggest there is room for debate. But 95% or more of the comments in this topic are more of a cultish party-line flavor that there is no room for discussion. That is why I am posting. One may well argue that for any individual or even a society that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the drawbacks, but that is not the sort of informed discussion most of the posts here are participating in (present company excepted of course).
I don't recall seeing a youtube video on vaccination before, but prompted by this topic I looked at a few. To simplify, this main topic is mostly about the difference between, for example, these two youtube videos.
This one:
"House MD - Baby vaccination" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsK7Jt-xma4 shows the party-line. Blond woman (video code == ditzy) who is also nursing (which in the USA does not encourage respect, and the doctor's attitude and comment "yummy" reflects that) just flippantly says she is not vaccinating, and she is essentially told by unshaven doctor (video code == obviously hard working and who has seen it all) that her baby will end up in a coffin if she does not vaccinate. That presumably is the sort of video which is not "harmful" information by the standards of the original study, i.e. vaccination is good, nursing is questionable.
Then there is by contrast this (as part of a larger series):
"Vaccination: The Hidden Truth part 1 of 9" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4liEqjG2bc where a young man talks painfully of his child's apparent adverse reaction to vaccination and, among others, mainly an older woman (actually a geologist?) goes through chart after chart showing how various statistical data (including graphs of disease mortality dropping off before vaccination introduced) do not support all the claims the establishment makes and the drawbacks of vaccination may outweigh the benefits. Looking her up on Wikipedia, some people disagree with her claims, but even if all here conclusions were not accurate, there seems at least some room for questioning there (no one ever seems to dispute the overall rate of infectious disease dropping even before vaccination, or that it also dropped in other countries without vaccination for various specific diseases).
Where is the truth? To one side? Or in the middle? I think there is room for some debate there, but neither the premise of the original story or the comments here on slashdot mainly reflect room for discussion. And ultimately, that is bad for scientific progress. In the 1950s formula was touted by doctors as better than mother's milk. X-Rays were great for examining kids' feet to determine size shoes. DES was great for preventing miscarriages. And Polio vaccine (unknowingly contaminated with Simian Virus 40) was called safe and effective. Fifty years later how many of these things do we still believe?
(If I can make the time, I'll try to respond separately to some of the other good points you raise.)
First, note how there are some major issues I raised which you ignore (like attributing improvements in health mostly to sanitation and better nutrition instead of vaccination, or pointing out the vast conflict-of-interests in the system). Like most people promoting vaccination, you have chosen to focus on other less critical issues from a social-investment point of view. You also ignore the whole ethical side of the issue, which is my main concern -- and strangely enough is not yet a concern of most slashdotters, which is very ironic as many here run GNU/Linux precisely for ethical concerns (i.e. the ethical problems of putting one for-profit closed-source un-free US company in charge of the world's desktop computing infrastructure, comparable to putting a few for-profit closed-source un-free pharmaceutical companies in charge of world health).
For what it's worth, I was in an graduate program in Ecology and Evolution. From what I understand from that, much of the practice of immunology (though not all the theory) completely ignores that field and aspects of predator-prey co-evolution. Viruses can evolve very quickly -- which is one reason HIV is so hard to address. Much of vaccination just addresses the low hanging fruit, while potentially creating huge problems down the road. This is the same as with the use of agricultural pesticides which wipe out normal predator-prey cycles in the environment and often lead to larger boom-bust cycles and ever larger pesticide applications for pesticide-optimized crops which are ever weaker in natural immunity. People are only now coming in the USA to accept what a problem the evolution of bacteria can cause in relation to the overuse of antibiotics (like in agricultural feeds), which eventually may culminate in a return to 1930s-style bacteriophage therapy (which uses evolution in medicine in real-time to make a cure). And there are emerging viral respiratory disease which are becoming more common as HiB, for example, diminishes; just think of it, have you heard recently of any drastic drop in infant mortality in the USA?
You cite an intro book in immunology, but just looking at the table of contents http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=imm.TOC&depth=2 it ignores the very issues you argue against -- evolution of pathogens (beyond a mention of evolution in the afterword), collective community memory of disease passed on from mother-to-child (the point being to assist the child while they develop their own natural immunity to a variety of things), and other aspects of immunity -- including the mind-body connection which a more typical path of infection may interact with versus injections (which you apparently just dismiss without understanding, but clearly at least the placebo effect exists). I'll agree the human body is exposed to lots of pathogens on a routine basis -- however, it remains unknown how the immune system will function as you burden it with even more "just in case". And that burden includes in an odd persistent injectable way the by-products like carried-along animal viruses randomly present in the growth medium.
You do have a good point about the increasing challenges of today's society. But on the other hand, it is undermined by your argument we are already exposed to lots of pathogens in the natural world. So which is it?:-) I feel if you think deeply about this contradiction in your rebuttal you may come to some new insights about the nature of the vaccination debate.
The bottom line is that immunization the way it is done today is "just in case" medicine with has all sorts of problematical ethical issues (which are mostly ignored by the medical community and apparently most of the slashdot community). And it has shaded into a religious argument, including the assumption that anyone who disagrees is evil and stupid. One can make similar ethical arguments against "just in case" schooling by the way -- it's
Thanks for the datapoint. Perhaps the one I tried was looser; it clearly flexed at not much of a push. I'd still prefer related parts of a drive not to move at all.:-)
While I agree with your general sentiment about lawsuits and "consumer grade" pricing, here is something to try when the drive is off:-) Do your drives wobble or flex if you press a little on the tower part? By that I mean, can you make the tower part rock a little side-to-side while the base is still sitting flat on a surface -- kind of like the two parts are not attached very solidly? (Obviously, don't try to push real hard to the point of breakage, just use a slight press, looking for any relative movement between tower and base.) The one I had did flex like that, and this seemed problematical when it was on a computer case with some small fan vibration. I'm curious if this is a general problem or just specific to the (failed) unit I got. From looking at the device, it seems more like a general design flaw -- attempting to make the base a replaceable module but not making the connection solid enough. It seems the design would amplify any vibrations of anything it was sitting on -- compared to a big boxy upright drives like the newer WD ones or enclosures that just lay flat. Again, try it with the drive off so you don't risk messing it up. Despite any other issues, that wobbliness issue alone seems like a major design flaw. Maybe the one I tried was just manufactured badly?
I bought two of these drives (500GB) a couple months ago. I tried that fix on one (turned off standby spin-down via sdparm), but ultimately the drive failed in about a week (possibly from heat, but I also needed to plug and unplug it when running as the power switch was not responding properly). And despite any five year warranties, who is going to send a failed drive with all your data off to who-knows-where? Years ago, back when drives cost $1000 for 1GB, I did that twice -- once the manufacturer sent my fixed drive back to a different person, and another time they sent it to an old address. There is another issue with the drives, which is that the tower part is not very solidly attached to the base, so it is wobbly (hard to believe, but the connection of the base to the tower drive section seemed very loose on the one I tried -- in general that whole two-part design seems questionable to me from a ruggedness standpoint). The power button is very confusing too -- it barely moves (maybe its capacitance based?) and does not always seem to work as I might expect it to (which may also have lead to the failure, when I pulled the plug on it). I returned the other one unopened. Someday I might put the first in an external enclosure and see if it works at all (some people online report success with that, although it entails physically breaking the case to get the drive out from what I read), but even if it does I will never trust it. I would recommend avoiding these drives for anyone based on the wobbly design alone. Despite the warranty and previously liking Seagate (before they bought Maxtor), I've moved back to Western Digital drives and others -- at least WD drives just sit there without potentially wobbling if you put them on a computer case with the slightest vibration. They definitely look cool in operation with the glowing stripe, but it seems this iteration put style way before function.
JayaJan Pharmaceutical Research in India was one of the companies with which Merck had a contract to test Gardasil. Like most of the industry, Merck increasingly outsources its clinical trials to Contract Research Organizations (CROs) in areas of the world where trial subjects are plentiful, operating costs are low, and regulations lax.
Some $285 million worth of clinical trials are outsourced to CROs in India, according to biopeer.com. These CROs are a booming $15 billion industry whose revenues are rising at 15 percent a year.
"CROs are known for their speed and efficiency; they can complete a clinical trial in two-thirds the time a drug company can, shaving months off the process and offering $120 million to $150 million in increased revenue per drug." Sam Bidwell an executive with Quintiles a U.S.-based CRO told Nature. "Of the top 30 best-selling drugs, we've touched every one."
Critics point out that CROs can come with built-in problems. Conflicts of interest can arise when CROs are paid royalties only after a drug is approved rather than being paid a set fee that is independent of how safe or effective the drug turns out to be. Problems can also arise because CROs know that favorable findings mean that research into a test drug will continue, and they may also believe that results that please the hiring corporation can lead to future contracts. "[C]ompanies know that the farther the compound moves through the research cycle, the more money they can raise," Nature reported.
Merck spokesperson Amy Rose refused say how many trials Merck contracted to CROs or what percentage of the Gardasil subjects these contractors recruited in the Third World. She also refused to specify how, or even if, the company oversees CROs.
Many consumers assume that the FDA carefully monitors CROs. But the agency hobbled by under-funding, politicization, and dependence on industry fees has few resources to assess foreign trials and relies on drug companies. """
Also: "New Scientist estimates that Gardasil will save "around 1,200 lives. This is an unequivocally desirable outcome, but at $800 million per year, the cost of saving each life will be over $650,000. If the goal is to save lives, there are more cost-effective ways of doing so." They include spreading public health measures including low-cost, readily available Pap testing to the non-white, poorer populations that now die in disproportionate numbers of cervical cancer."
In regard to all the replies you will see here, they discount several key issues, including: * Diseases evolve, so today's vaccinations may not work against tomorrow's illnesses, and even when they are effective, other diseases may take the same ecological space (thus the proliferation of new vaccinations, while the old ones remain on the schedule just in case), * It is not clear just how many pathogens a human immune system can be sensitized to without collapsing, * Vaccines are not side effect free, they have been linked to lots of things even when prepared and dispensed directly. * When improperly administered (injected directly into the bloodstream by mistake) there can be other hazards. * Most vaccinations (unlike natural immunity) wear off in a decade or so (even if they are at all effective) -- this requires "booster shots" ad-infinitum to keep resistance. * The previous way many people developed immunity was by extended nursing and low levels of infections in populations, where the mother's immune system scanned for threats and passed antibodies onto children to help them deal with threats, conferring life long immunity. Vaccines break this cycle of "software" memory. Pediatricians promote shots but when was the last time you heard one recommend nursing to age three or four like most of humanity has done historically? * For many disease, improved sanitation and better nutrition have been reducing them greatly -- anyone hear of a "scarlet fever" vaccine, yet it has dropped along with all the rest (in part also by improved treatments). * Whether vaccines work or not, there is a vast conflict-of-interest in the entire vaccine industry and its regulatory body (fox guarding the hen house) which has been long standing and is poorly addressed.
A fundamental aspect of medicine is to treat the individual and to "do no harm". Vaccines attempt to treat the population. Many diseases (though not all) take mostly the weak and sickly and badly nourished -- who are most at risk of serious complications but who also should have numerous other interventions in their lives (think health insurance and a social safety net). The whole premise of vaccine -- treat everyone in case a few are at risk -- is itself ethically problematical. An alternative emphasis is to come up with better ways to treat illnesses when they occur.
Another aspect is to accept that compulsory education is a primary vector of disease transmission and shut it down for that reason alone (beyond all the other good ones).:-) One can also think heavily about the profit motive to reduce apparent childhood illnesses (so parents don't have to stop work) but potentially produce long term consequences like autoimmune disorders and cancers where others pay the cost.
Anyone hear of Simian Virus 40 (SV40) contamination in polio vaccinations given to about 100 million US Americans? http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/cancer/default.htm Can't happen again? The Amish produce many of the vaccines used in the USA (cultures in eggs which they keep) -- yet ironically enough they avoid vaccines themselves usually.
The state getting involved in forcing medical procedures on people "for their own potential long term good" is just a huge can of worms.
Modern vaccination schedules entail approaching 200 different batches of produced materials to be injected in a person's lifetime (if you include annual flu shots, and assume booster shots on a decade schedule) each of which bypass the body's normal mechanisms for developing immunity for many infectious disease (general first response in the tonsils, moving from there). Doesn't that general idea just bother people? But then a lot of people run Windows.
Also, each batch may be very different, and even if one tests safe, there may be "hot lots" and other issues as production continually changes to cheaper approaches, with conflict-of-interest oversight.
Like _No Contest: The case against competition_. http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254 "Contending that competition in all areas -- school, family, sports and business -- is destructive, and that success so achieved is at the expense of another's failure, Kohn, a correspondent for USA Today, advocates a restructuring of our institutions to replace competition with cooperation. He persuasively demonstrates how the ingrained American myth that competition is the only normal and desirable way of life -- from Little Leagues to the presidency -- is counterproductive, personally and for the national economy, and how psychologically it poisons relationships, fosters anxiety and takes the fun out of work and play. He charges that competition is a learned phenomenon and denies that it builds character and self-esteem. Kohn's measures to encourage cooperation in lieu of competition include promoting noncompetitive games, eliminating scholastic grades and substitution of mutual security for national security."
What the glorification of violence and competition may do is supply a justification for a small number of people to have most of the wealth in society though a form of "Social Darwinism".
If the rest of the culture is very messed up (obsessed with competition and violence) then it is hard to raise a kid who is not. For that, google also on: "Alfie Kohn". http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=alfie+kohn
SUPERIORITY "When the war opened we had no doubt of our ultimate victory. The combined fleets of our allies greatly exceeded in number and armament those which the enemy could muster against us. We were sure we could maintain this superiority. Our belief proved, alas, to be only too well founded . .."
The introduction claimed it is (was?) required reading at MIT.
More from: http://www.somefantastic.us/NRYSF_Reviews/Military_SF.html "Perhaps the most fascinating story in the collection is Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority." Even though the story is a half-century old, and the oldest in the collection, it may have the most modern relevance of any story in the book. As in "The Scapegoat," the story is told from the viewpoint of a group finding itself in a war with an enemy of vastly inferior technology. Yet, because of the reliance on such high-tech weaponry, which is hard to produce in mass, and the continual attempt to make the weapons even more high-tech, the superior force ends up losing the war, thus making the reader consider what truly is important in maintaining superiority. While reading the story, it's hard not to think of the U. S. military and its reliance on extremely expensive, high-tech weaponry that takes time to produce. In fact, towards the end of the U. N. military intervention in Bosnia, the U. S. military started to report shortages of the missiles needed to equip our long-range fighters. Maybe the American leaders can find a useful lesson in this story when considering the new missile defense plan. "
"War Games" was a silly movie, but even with "Superiority", the conclusion remains true: sometimes the only way to win is not to play. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law....
I'm proud to say that the U.S. is now the undisputed world leader in per capita imprisonment, another example of how my administration is keeping us on top. Why just the other day I had the U.N. building in New York City locked down when delegates there started talking about prisoner civil rights. Such trash talk should not be permitted on our soil. It should be obvious that anyone found smoking marijuana, copying CDs, or talking about the law without paying should face a death penalty from AIDS contracted through prison rapes -- that extra deterrent make the system function more smoothly and helps keep honest people honest. That's also why I support the initiative to triple the standard law author's royalty which criminals pay for each law they violate, because the longer we keep such criminals behind bars, especially now that bankruptcy is also a crime, the better for all of us. That's also why I support the new initiative to make all crimes related to discussing laws in private have a mandatory life sentence without parole. Mandatory lifetime imprisonment is good for the economy as it will help keep AIDS for spreading out of the prison system and will keep felons like those so called fair users from competing with honest royalty paying Americans for an inexplicably ever shrinking number of jobs....
Would you mind clarifying where his logic is bad? He points out how much work is needless (except to preserve the work and rationing-based system), how much other work can be reorganized to be fun, and how the remaining drudgery work could likely be mostly automated.
Because you want more than the minimum, and are willing to sacrifice your free time to do so, does that mean everyone else should be forced to work too?
From the related links I posted, human beings (hunters and gatherers) once spent most of their time doing non-survival stuff, like helping others, playing music, traveling, visiting friends, spending time with one's own children (instead of outsourcing that to nannies or schools or daycare), just staring at the sky and thinking or having a spiritual experience, and even just getting a good night's sleep. Perhaps you are discounting the value of free time? Those are usually pleasurable activities which many people in the USA no longer have much time for. The novel _Momo_ by Michael Ende is somewhat related to this theme.
Besides, if 5% or 3% is way to low, then how about 10%? Is that enough for you? Survival X 2? The point is to open a discussion on the fact that we are making choices -- value choices -- in how we spend our time and in what we strive to make and in how we organize ourselves (including what risks are acceptable, like the risk or world war over resources we may use more of than we need). And also to think about the law of diminishing returns on having more stuff and less time. Sure, maybe the optimum point for most people likely isn't the bare minimum. But it is also equally unlikely to be the extreme maximum. So where and how do we find a balance point? One perhaps radically different from what we have now? And then, what of the benefits of free time? More free software? More research? More innovative ideas, like self-replicating space habitats that could provide living space in high style for trillions of people, but we are too busy right now making snowmobiles and being programmed to consume by TV to think about?
For another take on this you might find more readable, consider E.F. Schumacher's "Buddhist economics": http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economics/english.html From there: "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
"If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population then people really wouldn't have to work anymore because let's be honest, not everyone works just because they want money, there are lots of people who would continue working because they were passionate about their jobs. What we need to do is get rid of the boring mundane jobs that no one wants."
Insightful, but we reached that point decades ago.
See:
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985 http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html "I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."
Of course, we actually had such a life as hunter/gatherers (ignoring some of the downsides there). Essentially, when there was a small human population relative to the size fo the planet., food was abundant relative to the number of people, so it was very easy to acquire. http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
And here is the great tragedy of the Americas: http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty "The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."
Thankfully via the GPL and some inspiration (RepRap), those abundant days may come again: http://reprap.org/ "RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer
Legally yes. On a practical basis, with dual income families bidding up the price of housing, cars, and services, it is hard for 95% of families in the US to get by on just one income for any length of time. Not impossible -- but the radical lifestyle shift is hard to make. That is why home schooling poses little direct threat to the compulsory schooling monopoly.
Almost all these replies miss the deeper point. School itself models bullying -- an authority figure up front all the time who can do almost anything they please they please with your time and attention -- including inflicting the torture of years of boredom.
From: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm """ Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.
Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine.
Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.
I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.
In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:
1. Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.
2. Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.
3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's apartment from Jane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.
4. All the above.
You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?
If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?
Actually, the increase is more like a doubling every 1.5 years, which is about seven cycles in ten years, or more like 128X. But the rate of increase itself has been increasing too. Price has also been dropping. This makes effectively a 1000X increase in price/performance per decade at the current rates.
By the time any toddler of today is finishing graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade) multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm (The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!) According to that last link, those AI computers had about 1 MIPS processing power. (And it's a funny idea Hans Moravec had, and I think correct, that only for the last decade or so has AI been taking advantage of faster desktop CPUs going beyond 1 MIPS..)
At lower previous rates, over 30 years, we see a million times improvement. As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro. http://www.apple.com/macpro/ Then --> Now (approximate increase) CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such). (somewhere in x100000 to x1000000) RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000) Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000) And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation). Some other considerations: Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit, but its still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there, producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance) Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple, since quality has changed so much).
So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a million times faster than today's: CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster, though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and processing power) RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet in RAM, see: http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm ) See also:
Even Bill Gates had that sort of parent-assisted and grand-parent start: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ "[His grandfather] established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "
"William Henry Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell were among Seattle's social and financial elite. Bill Gates, Jr. was a prominent corporate lawyer while Mary Maxwell was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell. She was also on the national board of United Way, along with John Opel, the chief executive officer of IBM who approved the inclusion of MS/DOS with the original IBM PC."
How modern economics had become bunk was pretty much worked out by 1964 and sent as a letter to then President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964. If anything things have gotten worse since then, with economic productivity increasing several time but real wages stagnating. See the signatories list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution The text of the letter here: http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm A key excerpt: "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 general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.... There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. 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."
One key idea in that "The Seven Laws of Money" book is a corollary to the first law: http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Commerce/RATNA/june2.html
The first law is: "Do it! Money will come when you are doing the right thing." but the corollary is "The world does not owe you a living".
From my own experience, trying to run a business is a whole set of skills which are completely different from doing engineering. They are not necessarily incompatible, but they are rare in the same person and require changing mental paradigms (successful business owners need to be focused on immediate markets, cash flow, return on investment, ownership, and so on). Personally, I know I'd have been a lot better off in life (as well as the projects I and my wife worked on would have been more successful as communities) if I had treated them as a serious hobby, not as a business (or, alternatively thought of them as a very long term business where the investment would span decades and so I could expect no immediate return on capital investment). For one thing, we could more easily have collaborated with others. Take 3D printing, for example -- try to build a business in it and you are all alone and fighting against the established vendors. Do it as a serious hobby, and you could work closely with, say, the RepRap project. http://reprap.org/
Still, there is nothing wrong with right livelihood. Many people work full time doing stuff like solar panel installations or working in university research labs.
Also, my limited understanding of the Australian culture was it was common for people to save up money and take a six month trip, and then go back to work after that. Why not six months spent helping, say, the RepRap project?
Anyway, I'm not saying what is right for you. I can't. I can just say to try to think differently about the situation. Ultimately we are talking about a future where there is little correlation between work and income because computers and automation (and 3D printing) make so much that the problem is more getting rid of stuff than making it. Almost no current business model makes sense after such fundamental change of economic climate, a return to an (once hunter/gathere) assumption of prosperity for all instead of an (agricultural) assumption of scarcity for all. This is a tidal wave of change which some think the forces that be (e.g. RIAA, Disney, others) have been actively holding back for decades. People were describing this change even more than forty years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/F
Inspired by Manuel de Landa's writings, http://t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm I think the world needs both meshworks and hierarchies, but the hierarchies have the upper hand right now so we need more meshworks to balance.
Some ideas: Solar power -- like better PV panels or hot water heaters, literally decentralizing the power infrastructure (after production) Wireless mesh networking -- like in OLPC, decentralizing the information infrastructure Home gardening literacy and simulation -- decentralizing the food production infrastructure 3D printing -- like RepRap, decentralizing the production industry Free and Open Source software -- like Debian, decentralizing the copyright industry
Think along those lines for whatever works with your skills and local conditions.
You might like this link, which relates abstractly to what you said: http://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."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry that the truth is not as empowering as what you choose to believe, but unfortunately that's a general feature of reality.
...The mind isn't restricted to curing, however; we have always sensed that human thoughts can kill as well as mend. Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon, for instance, in investigating deaths by voodoo in the 1940s concluded that humans could indeed die from "the fatal power of the imagination working through unmitigated terror." It was not until the 1970s, however, that documented evidence of a physiological link between the mind and body was firmly established. One of the earliest such came from a study of rodents in labs at the University Medical Center, and led to the development of a new, hybrid field of study now known as psychoneuroimmunology, generally (and mercifully) shortened to "PNI." PNI is now a highly rated specialty of the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at Rochester, the department headed since 1995 by David Felten. Felten, who also holds the Kilian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Professorship, is recognized as one of the leading researchers in the field. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," he is the unassuming wearer of numerous other laurels, including--in addition to a dozen or so teaching awards ("Teaching is my passion," he says)--two nominations for the Albert Lasker Award for Medical Research (sometimes the precursor to a Nobel), and, most recently, the Norman Cousins Award in Mind-Body Health given by the Fetzer Foundation. ... Using special fluorescent stains to trace nerves to various bodily locations, including bone marrow, lymph nodes, and the spleen, the Felten team had discovered a network of nerves leading to blood vessels as well as cells of the immune system. The researchers also found nerves in the thymus and spleen terminating near clusters of lymphocytes, macrophages, and mast cells, all of which help control immune function. There it was, the mind-body connection--clear evidence that the brain has the ability to send signals to immune-system cells. Granny was right, after all. ... "The University Medical Center is now viewed by many as the primary site for the study of brain behavior and immunology," Felten says. "And not only are we in the forefront of research, but we teach our doctors and nurses to treat patients as human beings, not just as slices of anatomy. I never heard the word 'healing' the whole time I was a medical student; here we don't just dismiss it that way. ... "There is so much left to find out--we are nowhere near identifying all the players. And we have no idea," he says, in zestful anticipation of surprises yet to come, "what might be out there lying around the next corner.""
Thanks for all your comments (whether we agree on everything or not).
To try to leave things on a positive note, here is are a couple of links to research on the mind-body connection as it relates to the immune system. On the history of the development of the field of psychoneuroimmunology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoneuroimmunology
From:
http://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V59N3/feature2.html
"Can your mental state influence your susceptibility to disease? Much of the scientific evidence that this is so has been coming out of the [Rochester] University Medical Center department headed by neurobiologist David Felten.
And on a practical basis, yoga and laughter are two good ways to help improve immune function:
http://www.lolyoga.com/therapeutic-benefits.php
"Oliver Wendell Holmes Dr. Lee Berk and fellow researcher Dr. Stanley Tan of Loma Linda University in California have been studying the effects of laughter on the immune system. To date their published studies have shown that laughing lowers
Seriously, if there's one thing you take away from this discussion, do not allow anyone you care about to give birth at home. It's just not worth the risk.
...In fact, study after study conducted on the issue has shown that for healthy women with low- to moderate-risk pregnancies, giving birth in a hospital is actually less safe than giving birth at home with a trained midwife. So perhaps this is a major factor in the mortality rates. A particularly large Dutch study so comprehensively endorsed home birth for low risk and even many medium risk mothers that the the declined in home birth has been arrested and is now march towards 50%. A great many studies throughout the westernized world support these findings. No study has ever proven hospital birth to be safer than planned, midwife-attended homebirth. ... The familiar comfort of home makes it the safest birthplace for healthy, low-risk women. In the safety of their own homes, women are less likely to experience complications of labor, such as hypertension and muconium staining, which may be brought on by stress. The freedom to move about as desired decreases both length of labor and the need for pain medications, therefore lowering the risk of maternal exhaustion, fetal distress, and caesarean section. Whereas a woman's home usually contains only microbes to which she and her baby are immune due to daily exposure, where as hospitals are full of disease-causing microbes, many of which are resistant to most antibiotics. ... We have conducted trials and studies all over Holland, but here I w
Check out:
"Outcomes of planned home births with certified professional midwives: large prospective study in North America"
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/330/7505/1416
"Planned home birth for low risk women in North America using certified professional midwives was associated with lower rates of medical intervention but similar intrapartum and neonatal mortality to that of low risk hospital births in the United States."
Or, less official, but I am getting lazy here as we drift off-topic:
http://www.willothewisp.org/html/home_birth.html
"Let us set one myth to rest right away. A hospital is NOT the safest place for most women to give birth, in fact many studies have shown that mother and infant mortality rates are much lower in those countries that pursue a policy of encouraging home birth. While some very high risk pregnancies most certainly do not to happen inside the hospital all low risk and nearly all medium risk births can take place in the safety and comfort of a woman's own home, and as long as she is supported by a professional midwife service mortality rates will be lower than those for the same birth taking place inside hospitals.In the Netherlands nationally 45% and rising of births happen in the home, with most of the remainder taking place in local birth clinics and a minority in hospitals. In the USA and Canada only 0.9 per cent of women gave birth at home in 1991 (some of them unplanned), compared with 1.7 per cent in Britain. The argument against home birth focuses on the fact that it may subject mother and/or baby to avoidable risks and that even in seemingly healthy, normal pregnancies things can go wrong at the last minute. However birth cannot be made risk free, it is a risky time for both mother and child, but it should always be kept in mind that it is still a Natural process. Experience shows that most emergency birthing situations can be handled by a well trained midwife / birth attendant at home or that transfer to hospital can be arranged in time to avoid risks to mother or baby. In Holland Midwives carry some emergency equipment and will arrange for speedy transfer to hospital if needed. Of course Holland is a highly urbanised country and hospital care is rarely more than just a few minutes away.
It's true that dirt and germs are everywhere, but serious infectious disease is really caused by an extremely, extremely small subset of those, and the primary factor determining whether or not you get sick is your exposure to the pathogen.
:-) Clearly the picture is much more complex than "exposure leads to disease".
:-) For example: .002; and 55% vs 23%, P = .001, respectively). Physicians more often than nurses reported lack of time as a reason for not receiving influenza vaccination (23% vs 5%, P = .01). After intervention, the immunization rate of HCWs increased from 19% to 24% (P = .03). The immunization rate of physicians increased from 43% to 64% (P = .004). No change was noted among nurses (13% vs 14%) and other HCWs (16% vs 16%)."
:-) And I'd love to know what those 36% of doctors who skip getting a flu shot were thinking... Aren't they likely to be exposed to a flu and give it to their pediatric patients? Are they all criminally negligent? Or maybe not? :-)
I'll certainly mostly agree to the first two clauses of what you write, but as to the last part as to "primary" factors, then how do doctors survive their first year of work around sick people?
For example, in general, most (though not all) doctors are wealthier and better nourished than average, and come from similarly successful mothers. Could this not have something to do with improved disease resistance? It certainly is unlikely to be vaccinations, since as a general rule from what I read medical personel are one of the least vaccinated of all populations.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=16320981&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google
"RESULTS: Among vaccine nonrecipients, doubts about the efficacy and necessity of influenza immunization were prevalent and more often reported by nurses than physicians (75% vs 41%, P =
Note that 24% overall rate after arm-twisting is for pediatric healthcare workers in a university children's hospital.
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here--if you think the mother's immunity is permanently passed on to the child, you're simply mistaken, that's a temporary phenomenon.
:-)
Just to clear this up, and granted no one understand the exact details yet, but as I now understand it, a nursing mother's immune system is always scanning the environment for threats. Generally, the mother is exposed to a pathogen at the same time her child is. Her milk adjusts itself to provide various types of substances which may help the child's immune system learn to recognize and defeat this threat. At the very least, these substances always provide an extra defensive boost to ease the burden on the child's own defenses, allowing the child's immune system to overcome a weakened threat which might otherwise kill the child, and thus the child acquires permanent immunity. This entire process may also typically take several years; however in most societies nursing does extend for several years (WHO recommends three years I think). This immune system learning is passed on generation to generation, mother to daughter. This only works if the pathogen remains at a low level in the environment so the mother's immune system can be challenged by it and help the child's. So we are talking about more than specific antibodies being passed on just temporarily. We are talking about knowledge about immunity being passed from generation to generation by a complex process, as long as the pathogen persists in the environment.
Vaccination (and also formula use or short term breastfeeding) breaks this cycle of passing on immunological knowledge from mother to daughter, and at best provides partial immunity usually requiring booster shots. And once a pathogen's frequency is driven down so low that it is not encountered during nursing, this knowledge of how to defeat it can not be passed on that way (and yet, as you point out, with airplanes an outbreak from a normally very low level almost extinct pathogen can easily spread worldwide, especially if a minor mutation makes it more virulent somehow). Also, presumably, a vaccinated mother can not mount the same level of defense to a pathogen as a mother who encountered the real thing.
Of course, if a mother gives birth in a hostile biological environment like a hospital, with many possible threats the mother's immune system has never experienced before, then the mother's immune system is going to be delayed in a response. That's one reason why a place like the Netherlands, with about 30% home births, has a lower infant mortality than the USA (only higher risk births are suggested to go to hospital). A home may actually be far dirtier than a hospital, but the mother's immune system already knows the home's dirt and so can easily assist the newborn in learning about it.
Now one might legitimately argue it is better to have none of the pathogen in the environment, and this is perhaps accomplished best through vaccinations, and the benefits outweigh the costs. But I feel that is an issue one can discuss, especially for each specific pathogen, rather than assume the ideal amount of a pathogen is zero (given that there always are some pathogens out there, evolving away). For good or bad, the human body is tuned to expect a certain level of challenge. Until people understand systematically know to change that tuning, having some infections may be better than having none (assuming they are not really bad infections). Obviously, this is acknowledged already for the benefits of physical or mental exercise. Part of the controversy about vaccination hinges on whether the vaccine provides overall a good form of exercise for the immune system. But people have similar argument over, say, isometrics versus free weights, or scrabble versus poker, for which provide a better boost to brawn or brain. But only for vaccination do we have the layers of religious overtones.
Anyway, when was the last time you heard a US pediatrician pushing an on-the-fence Mom to nurse for three y
You're correct, I'm ignoring that [ethical] aspect of it. I agree that there are lots of interesting issues there, and I don't necessarily disagree with you on those--I disagree with you on the immunological aspects of your argument, which contain factual errors. [snip] I don't understand...why do you think I should disagree with absolutely everything you have to say?
Factual errors or not, my main point is there is room here for discussion, which is why any unrebutted points suggest there is room for debate. But 95% or more of the comments in this topic are more of a cultish party-line flavor that there is no room for discussion. That is why I am posting. One may well argue that for any individual or even a society that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the drawbacks, but that is not the sort of informed discussion most of the posts here are participating in (present company excepted of course).
I don't recall seeing a youtube video on vaccination before, but prompted by this topic I looked at a few. To simplify, this main topic is mostly about the difference between, for example, these two youtube videos.
This one:
"House MD - Baby vaccination"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsK7Jt-xma4
shows the party-line. Blond woman (video code == ditzy) who is also nursing (which in the USA does not encourage respect, and the doctor's attitude and comment "yummy" reflects that) just flippantly says she is not vaccinating, and she is essentially told by unshaven doctor (video code == obviously hard working and who has seen it all) that her baby will end up in a coffin if she does not vaccinate. That presumably is the sort of video which is not "harmful" information by the standards of the original study, i.e. vaccination is good, nursing is questionable.
Then there is by contrast this (as part of a larger series):
"Vaccination: The Hidden Truth part 1 of 9"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4liEqjG2bc
where a young man talks painfully of his child's apparent adverse reaction to vaccination and, among others, mainly an older woman (actually a geologist?) goes through chart after chart showing how various statistical data (including graphs of disease mortality dropping off before vaccination introduced) do not support all the claims the establishment makes and the drawbacks of vaccination may outweigh the benefits. Looking her up on Wikipedia, some people disagree with her claims, but even if all here conclusions were not accurate, there seems at least some room for questioning there (no one ever seems to dispute the overall rate of infectious disease dropping even before vaccination, or that it also dropped in other countries without vaccination for various specific diseases).
Where is the truth? To one side? Or in the middle? I think there is room for some debate there, but neither the premise of the original story or the comments here on slashdot mainly reflect room for discussion. And ultimately, that is bad for scientific progress. In the 1950s formula was touted by doctors as better than mother's milk. X-Rays were great for examining kids' feet to determine size shoes. DES was great for preventing miscarriages. And Polio vaccine (unknowingly contaminated with Simian Virus 40) was called safe and effective. Fifty years later how many of these things do we still believe?
(If I can make the time, I'll try to respond separately to some of the other good points you raise.)
First, note how there are some major issues I raised which you ignore (like attributing improvements in health mostly to sanitation and better nutrition instead of vaccination, or pointing out the vast conflict-of-interests in the system). Like most people promoting vaccination, you have chosen to focus on other less critical issues from a social-investment point of view. You also ignore the whole ethical side of the issue, which is my main concern -- and strangely enough is not yet a concern of most slashdotters, which is very ironic as many here run GNU/Linux precisely for ethical concerns (i.e. the ethical problems of putting one for-profit closed-source un-free US company in charge of the world's desktop computing infrastructure, comparable to putting a few for-profit closed-source un-free pharmaceutical companies in charge of world health).
:-) I feel if you think deeply about this contradiction in your rebuttal you may come to some new insights about the nature of the vaccination debate.
For what it's worth, I was in an graduate program in Ecology and Evolution. From what I understand from that, much of the practice of immunology (though not all the theory) completely ignores that field and aspects of predator-prey co-evolution. Viruses can evolve very quickly -- which is one reason HIV is so hard to address. Much of vaccination just addresses the low hanging fruit, while potentially creating huge problems down the road. This is the same as with the use of agricultural pesticides which wipe out normal predator-prey cycles in the environment and often lead to larger boom-bust cycles and ever larger pesticide applications for pesticide-optimized crops which are ever weaker in natural immunity. People are only now coming in the USA to accept what a problem the evolution of bacteria can cause in relation to the overuse of antibiotics (like in agricultural feeds), which eventually may culminate in a return to 1930s-style bacteriophage therapy (which uses evolution in medicine in real-time to make a cure). And there are emerging viral respiratory disease which are becoming more common as HiB, for example, diminishes; just think of it, have you heard recently of any drastic drop in infant mortality in the USA?
You cite an intro book in immunology, but just looking at the table of contents
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=imm.TOC&depth=2
it ignores the very issues you argue against -- evolution of pathogens (beyond a mention of evolution in the afterword), collective community memory of disease passed on from mother-to-child (the point being to assist the child while they develop their own natural immunity to a variety of things), and other aspects of immunity -- including the mind-body connection which a more typical path of infection may interact with versus injections (which you apparently just dismiss without understanding, but clearly at least the placebo effect exists). I'll agree the human body is exposed to lots of pathogens on a routine basis -- however, it remains unknown how the immune system will function as you burden it with even more "just in case". And that burden includes in an odd persistent injectable way the by-products like carried-along animal viruses randomly present in the growth medium.
You do have a good point about the increasing challenges of today's society. But on the other hand, it is undermined by your argument we are already exposed to lots of pathogens in the natural world. So which is it?
The bottom line is that immunization the way it is done today is "just in case" medicine with has all sorts of problematical ethical issues (which are mostly ignored by the medical community and apparently most of the slashdot community). And it has shaded into a religious argument, including the assumption that anyone who disagrees is evil and stupid. One can make similar ethical arguments against "just in case" schooling by the way -- it's
Thanks for the datapoint. Perhaps the one I tried was looser; it clearly flexed at not much of a push. I'd still prefer related parts of a drive not to move at all. :-)
While I agree with your general sentiment about lawsuits and "consumer grade" pricing, here is something to try when the drive is off :-) Do your drives wobble or flex if you press a little on the tower part? By that I mean, can you make the tower part rock a little side-to-side while the base is still sitting flat on a surface -- kind of like the two parts are not attached very solidly? (Obviously, don't try to push real hard to the point of breakage, just use a slight press, looking for any relative movement between tower and base.) The one I had did flex like that, and this seemed problematical when it was on a computer case with some small fan vibration. I'm curious if this is a general problem or just specific to the (failed) unit I got. From looking at the device, it seems more like a general design flaw -- attempting to make the base a replaceable module but not making the connection solid enough. It seems the design would amplify any vibrations of anything it was sitting on -- compared to a big boxy upright drives like the newer WD ones or enclosures that just lay flat. Again, try it with the drive off so you don't risk messing it up. Despite any other issues, that wobbliness issue alone seems like a major design flaw. Maybe the one I tried was just manufactured badly?
I bought two of these drives (500GB) a couple months ago. I tried that fix on one (turned off standby spin-down via sdparm), but ultimately the drive failed in about a week (possibly from heat, but I also needed to plug and unplug it when running as the power switch was not responding properly). And despite any five year warranties, who is going to send a failed drive with all your data off to who-knows-where? Years ago, back when drives cost $1000 for 1GB, I did that twice -- once the manufacturer sent my fixed drive back to a different person, and another time they sent it to an old address. There is another issue with the drives, which is that the tower part is not very solidly attached to the base, so it is wobbly (hard to believe, but the connection of the base to the tower drive section seemed very loose on the one I tried -- in general that whole two-part design seems questionable to me from a ruggedness standpoint). The power button is very confusing too -- it barely moves (maybe its capacitance based?) and does not always seem to work as I might expect it to (which may also have lead to the failure, when I pulled the plug on it). I returned the other one unopened. Someday I might put the first in an external enclosure and see if it works at all (some people online report success with that, although it entails physically breaking the case to get the drive out from what I read), but even if it does I will never trust it. I would recommend avoiding these drives for anyone based on the wobbly design alone. Despite the warranty and previously liking Seagate (before they bought Maxtor), I've moved back to Western Digital drives and others -- at least WD drives just sit there without potentially wobbling if you put them on a computer case with the slightest vibration. They definitely look cool in operation with the glowing stripe, but it seems this iteration put style way before function.
Before trying Gardasil, you might want to look at this:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14401
Excerpt:
"""
Testing in the Third World
JayaJan Pharmaceutical Research in India was one of the companies with which Merck had a contract to test Gardasil. Like most of the industry, Merck increasingly outsources its clinical trials to Contract Research Organizations (CROs) in areas of the world where trial subjects are plentiful, operating costs are low, and regulations lax.
Some $285 million worth of clinical trials are outsourced to CROs in India, according to biopeer.com. These CROs are a booming $15 billion industry whose revenues are rising at 15 percent a year.
"CROs are known for their speed and efficiency; they can complete a clinical trial in two-thirds the time a drug company can, shaving months off the process and offering $120 million to $150 million in increased revenue per drug." Sam Bidwell an executive with Quintiles a U.S.-based CRO told Nature. "Of the top 30 best-selling drugs, we've touched every one."
Critics point out that CROs can come with built-in problems. Conflicts of interest can arise when CROs are paid royalties only after a drug is approved rather than being paid a set fee that is independent of how safe or effective the drug turns out to be. Problems can also arise because CROs know that favorable findings mean that research into a test drug will continue, and they may also believe that results that please the hiring corporation can lead to future contracts. "[C]ompanies know that the farther the compound moves through the research cycle, the more money they can raise," Nature reported.
Merck spokesperson Amy Rose refused say how many trials Merck contracted to CROs or what percentage of the Gardasil subjects these contractors recruited in the Third World. She also refused to specify how, or even if, the company oversees CROs.
Many consumers assume that the FDA carefully monitors CROs. But the agency hobbled by under-funding, politicization, and dependence on industry fees has few resources to assess foreign trials and relies on drug companies.
"""
Also:
"New Scientist estimates that Gardasil will save "around 1,200 lives. This is an unequivocally desirable outcome, but at $800 million per year, the cost of saving each life will be over $650,000. If the goal is to save lives, there are more cost-effective ways of doing so." They include spreading public health measures including low-cost, readily available Pap testing to the non-white, poorer populations that now die in disproportionate numbers of cervical cancer."
In regard to all the replies you will see here, they discount several key issues, including:
:-) One can also think heavily about the profit motive to reduce apparent childhood illnesses (so parents don't have to stop work) but potentially produce long term consequences like autoimmune disorders and cancers where others pay the cost.
* Diseases evolve, so today's vaccinations may not work against tomorrow's illnesses, and even when they are effective, other diseases may take the same ecological space (thus the proliferation of new vaccinations, while the old ones remain on the schedule just in case),
* It is not clear just how many pathogens a human immune system can be sensitized to without collapsing,
* Vaccines are not side effect free, they have been linked to lots of things even when prepared and dispensed directly.
* When improperly administered (injected directly into the bloodstream by mistake) there can be other hazards.
* Most vaccinations (unlike natural immunity) wear off in a decade or so (even if they are at all effective) -- this requires "booster shots" ad-infinitum to keep resistance.
* The previous way many people developed immunity was by extended nursing and low levels of infections in populations, where the mother's immune system scanned for threats and passed antibodies onto children to help them deal with threats, conferring life long immunity. Vaccines break this cycle of "software" memory. Pediatricians promote shots but when was the last time you heard one recommend nursing to age three or four like most of humanity has done historically?
* For many disease, improved sanitation and better nutrition have been reducing them greatly -- anyone hear of a "scarlet fever" vaccine, yet it has dropped along with all the rest (in part also by improved treatments).
* Whether vaccines work or not, there is a vast conflict-of-interest in the entire vaccine industry and its regulatory body (fox guarding the hen house) which has been long standing and is poorly addressed.
A fundamental aspect of medicine is to treat the individual and to "do no harm". Vaccines attempt to treat the population. Many diseases (though not all) take mostly the weak and sickly and badly nourished -- who are most at risk of serious complications but who also should have numerous other interventions in their lives (think health insurance and a social safety net). The whole premise of vaccine -- treat everyone in case a few are at risk -- is itself ethically problematical. An alternative emphasis is to come up with better ways to treat illnesses when they occur.
Another aspect is to accept that compulsory education is a primary vector of disease transmission and shut it down for that reason alone (beyond all the other good ones).
Anyone hear of Simian Virus 40 (SV40) contamination in polio vaccinations given to about 100 million US Americans?
http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/cancer/default.htm
Can't happen again? The Amish produce many of the vaccines used in the USA (cultures in eggs which they keep) -- yet ironically enough they avoid vaccines themselves usually.
The state getting involved in forcing medical procedures on people "for their own potential long term good" is just a huge can of worms.
Modern vaccination schedules entail approaching 200 different batches of produced materials to be injected in a person's lifetime (if you include annual flu shots, and assume booster shots on a decade schedule) each of which bypass the body's normal mechanisms for developing immunity for many infectious disease (general first response in the tonsils, moving from there). Doesn't that general idea just bother people? But then a lot of people run Windows.
Also, each batch may be very different, and even if one tests safe, there may be "hot lots" and other issues as production continually changes to cheaper approaches, with conflict-of-interest oversight.
"Controlled and focussed aggression and competition are at the heart of our survival as a species and our great works of civilization."
Not really. See the writings of "Alfie Kohn".
http://www.alfiekohn.org/
Like _No Contest: The case against competition_.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254
"Contending that competition in all areas -- school, family, sports and business -- is destructive, and that success so achieved is at the expense of another's failure, Kohn, a correspondent for USA Today, advocates a restructuring of our institutions to replace competition with cooperation. He persuasively demonstrates how the ingrained American myth that competition is the only normal and desirable way of life -- from Little Leagues to the presidency -- is counterproductive, personally and for the national economy, and how psychologically it poisons relationships, fosters anxiety and takes the fun out of work and play. He charges that competition is a learned phenomenon and denies that it builds character and self-esteem. Kohn's measures to encourage cooperation in lieu of competition include promoting noncompetitive games, eliminating scholastic grades and substitution of mutual security for national security."
What the glorification of violence and competition may do is supply a justification for a small number of people to have most of the wealth in society though a form of "Social Darwinism".
On parents teaching their own, google on: "unschooling".
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=unschooling
But agreed, there are many influences.
If the rest of the culture is very messed up (obsessed with competition and violence) then it is hard to raise a kid who is not.
For that, google also on: "Alfie Kohn".
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=alfie+kohn
http://www.amazon.com/Expedition-Earth-Arthur-C-Clarke/dp/0345430735
."
SUPERIORITY
"When the war opened we had no doubt of our ultimate victory. The combined fleets of our allies greatly exceeded in number and armament those which the enemy could muster against us. We were sure we could maintain this superiority. Our belief proved, alas, to be only too well founded . .
The introduction claimed it is (was?) required reading at MIT.
More from:
http://www.somefantastic.us/NRYSF_Reviews/Military_SF.html
"Perhaps the most fascinating story in the collection is Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority." Even though the story is a half-century old, and the oldest in the collection, it may have the most modern relevance of any story in the book. As in "The Scapegoat," the story is told from the viewpoint of a group finding itself in a war with an enemy of vastly inferior technology. Yet, because of the reliance on such high-tech weaponry, which is hard to produce in mass, and the continual attempt to make the weapons even more high-tech, the superior force ends up losing the war, thus making the reader consider what truly is important in maintaining superiority. While reading the story, it's hard not to think of the U. S. military and its reliance on extremely expensive, high-tech weaponry that takes time to produce. In fact, towards the end of the U. N. military intervention in Bosnia, the U. S. military started to report shortages of the missiles needed to equip our long-range fighters. Maybe the American leaders can find a useful lesson in this story when considering the new missile defense plan. "
"War Games" was a silly movie, but even with "Superiority", the conclusion remains true: sometimes the only way to win is not to play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace
Considering the talk about increasing enforcement of criminal penalties,
...
...
here is a partial excerpt from:
"Microslaw satire"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33107&cid=3582999
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by
the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American
views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to
assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary.
The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially
just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software
and media content has long been privatized to great economic success.
Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws
banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our
economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must
I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster,
that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has
confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to
release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates,
music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low
levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry
was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned
and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these
successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a
similar approach to law.
I'm proud to say that the U.S. is now the undisputed world leader in per
capita imprisonment, another example of how my administration is keeping
us on top. Why just the other day I had the U.N. building in New York
City locked down when delegates there started talking about prisoner
civil rights. Such trash talk should not be permitted on our soil. It
should be obvious that anyone found smoking marijuana, copying CDs, or
talking about the law without paying should face a death penalty from
AIDS contracted through prison rapes -- that extra deterrent make the
system function more smoothly and helps keep honest people honest.
That's also why I support the initiative to triple the standard law
author's royalty which criminals pay for each law they violate, because
the longer we keep such criminals behind bars, especially now that
bankruptcy is also a crime, the better for all of us. That's also why I
support the new initiative to make all crimes related to discussing laws
in private have a mandatory life sentence without parole. Mandatory
lifetime imprisonment is good for the economy as it will help keep AIDS
for spreading out of the prison system and will keep felons like those
so called fair users from competing with honest royalty paying
Americans for an inexplicably ever shrinking number of jobs.
Would you mind clarifying where his logic is bad? He points out how much work is needless (except to preserve the work and rationing-based system), how much other work can be reorganized to be fun, and how the remaining drudgery work could likely be mostly automated.
Because you want more than the minimum, and are willing to sacrifice your free time to do so, does that mean everyone else should be forced to work too?
From the related links I posted, human beings (hunters and gatherers) once spent most of their time doing non-survival stuff, like helping others, playing music, traveling, visiting friends, spending time with one's own children (instead of outsourcing that to nannies or schools or daycare), just staring at the sky and thinking or having a spiritual experience, and even just getting a good night's sleep. Perhaps you are discounting the value of free time? Those are usually pleasurable activities which many people in the USA no longer have much time for. The novel _Momo_ by Michael Ende is somewhat related to this theme.
Besides, if 5% or 3% is way to low, then how about 10%? Is that enough for you? Survival X 2? The point is to open a discussion on the fact that we are making choices -- value choices -- in how we spend our time and in what we strive to make and in how we organize ourselves (including what risks are acceptable, like the risk or world war over resources we may use more of than we need). And also to think about the law of diminishing returns on having more stuff and less time. Sure, maybe the optimum point for most people likely isn't the bare minimum. But it is also equally unlikely to be the extreme maximum. So where and how do we find a balance point? One perhaps radically different from what we have now? And then, what of the benefits of free time? More free software? More research? More innovative ideas, like self-replicating space habitats that could provide living space in high style for trillions of people, but we are too busy right now making snowmobiles and being programmed to consume by TV to think about?
For another take on this you might find more readable, consider E.F. Schumacher's "Buddhist economics":
http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
From there: "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
"If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population then people really wouldn't have to work anymore because let's be honest, not everyone works just because they want money, there are lots of people who would continue working because they were passionate about their jobs. What we need to do is get rid of the boring mundane jobs that no one wants."
Insightful, but we reached that point decades ago.
See:
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."
And:
"The Triple Revolution: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights" sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Of course, we actually had such a life as hunter/gatherers (ignoring some of the downsides there). Essentially, when there was a small human population relative to the size fo the planet., food was abundant relative to the number of people, so it was very easy to acquire.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
And here is the great tragedy of the Americas:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."
Thankfully via the GPL and some inspiration (RepRap), those abundant days may come again:
http://reprap.org/
"RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer
Legally yes. On a practical basis, with dual income families bidding up the price of housing, cars, and services, it is hard for 95% of families in the US to get by on just one income for any length of time. Not impossible -- but the radical lifestyle shift is hard to make. That is why home schooling poses little direct threat to the compulsory schooling monopoly.
Almost all these replies miss the deeper point. School itself models bullying -- an authority figure up front all the time who can do almost anything they please they please with your time and attention -- including inflicting the torture of years of boredom.
From:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
"""
Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.
Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine.
Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.
I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.
In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:
1. Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.
2. Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.
3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's apartment from Jane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.
4. All the above.
You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?
If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?
One thing you do know is how unlik
The hopeful social outcome of all this increase in productivity was talked about as far back as 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
in a letter sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964 called "The Triple Revolution".
Actually, the increase is more like a doubling every 1.5 years, which is about seven cycles in ten years, or more like 128X. But the rate of increase itself has been increasing too. Price has also been dropping. This makes effectively a 1000X increase in price/performance per decade at the current rates.
By the time any toddler of today is finishing graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade) multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
(The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!) According to that last link, those AI computers had about 1 MIPS processing power. (And it's a funny idea Hans Moravec had, and I think correct, that only for the last decade or so has AI been taking advantage of faster desktop CPUs going beyond 1 MIPS..)
At lower previous rates, over 30 years, we see a million times improvement. As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Then --> Now (approximate increase)
CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such). (somewhere in x100000 to x1000000)
RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000)
Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000)
And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation). Some other considerations:
Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit, but its still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there, producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance)
Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple, since quality has changed so much).
So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a million times faster than today's:
CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster, though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and processing power)
RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet in RAM, see:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm )
See also:
Even Bill Gates had that sort of parent-assisted and grand-parent start:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"[His grandfather] established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "
"William Henry Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell were among Seattle's social and financial elite. Bill Gates, Jr. was a prominent corporate lawyer while Mary Maxwell was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell. She was also on the national board of United Way, along with John Opel, the chief executive officer of IBM who approved the inclusion of MS/DOS with the original IBM PC."
How modern economics had become bunk was pretty much worked out by 1964 and sent as a letter to then President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964. If anything things have gotten worse since then, with economic productivity increasing several time but real wages stagnating. See the signatories list here: ... ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
The text of the letter here:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
A key excerpt:
"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 general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. 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."
Everyone's situation is unique. Some general references:
"Honest Business" by Michael Phillips
http://www.amazon.com/Honest-Business-Shambhala-Pocket-Editions/dp/1570621799
and:
"The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Money-Shambhala-Pocket-Classics/dp/1570622779
"The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips (Author), Salli Rasberry
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Laws-Money-Michael-Phillips/dp/0931425417
(I think the first is a slimmed down and improved version of the second...)
One key idea in that "The Seven Laws of Money" book is a corollary to the first law:
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Commerce/RATNA/june2.html
The first law is: "Do it! Money will come when you are doing the right thing."
but the corollary is "The world does not owe you a living".
One way to make budget ends meet is to reduce expenses. Lower expenses means more flexibility.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=voluntary+simplicity
From my own experience, trying to run a business is a whole set of skills which are completely different from doing engineering. They are not necessarily incompatible, but they are rare in the same person and require changing mental paradigms (successful business owners need to be focused on immediate markets, cash flow, return on investment, ownership, and so on). Personally, I know I'd have been a lot better off in life (as well as the projects I and my wife worked on would have been more successful as communities) if I had treated them as a serious hobby, not as a business (or, alternatively thought of them as a very long term business where the investment would span decades and so I could expect no immediate return on capital investment). For one thing, we could more easily have collaborated with others. Take 3D printing, for example -- try to build a business in it and you are all alone and fighting against the established vendors. Do it as a serious hobby, and you could work closely with, say, the RepRap project. http://reprap.org/
Still, there is nothing wrong with right livelihood. Many people work full time doing stuff like solar panel installations or working in university research labs.
Also, my limited understanding of the Australian culture was it was common for people to save up money and take a six month trip, and then go back to work after that. Why not six months spent helping, say, the RepRap project?
Anyway, I'm not saying what is right for you. I can't. I can just say to try to think differently about the situation. Ultimately we are talking about a future where there is little correlation between work and income because computers and automation (and 3D printing) make so much that the problem is more getting rid of stuff than making it. Almost no current business model makes sense after such fundamental change of economic climate, a return to an (once hunter/gathere) assumption of prosperity for all instead of an (agricultural) assumption of scarcity for all. This is a tidal wave of change which some think the forces that be (e.g. RIAA, Disney, others) have been actively holding back for decades. People were describing this change even more than forty years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/F
Inspired by Manuel de Landa's writings,
http://t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
I think the world needs both meshworks and hierarchies, but the hierarchies have the upper hand right now so we need more meshworks to balance.
Some ideas:
Solar power -- like better PV panels or hot water heaters, literally decentralizing the power infrastructure (after production)
Wireless mesh networking -- like in OLPC, decentralizing the information infrastructure
Home gardening literacy and simulation -- decentralizing the food production infrastructure
3D printing -- like RepRap, decentralizing the production industry
Free and Open Source software -- like Debian, decentralizing the copyright industry
Think along those lines for whatever works with your skills and local conditions.
Then of course there is David Brin's approach (make all surveillance cameras publicly accessible, including ones in police rooms):
http://www.davidbrin.com/privacyarticles.html
See also this related story:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Thanks for the interesting reply.
You might like this link, which relates abstractly to what you said:
http://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."
More related stuff on that web page. Or here:
http://www.mediamatic.net/article-5914-en.html