Nothing was meant to suggest your particular non-profit was in any way unethical; just that the term "non-profit" doesn't mean much anymore. The only really formal definition of "non-profit" or "not for profit" is a corporation whose profits are not given to owners (like the board) -- the profits are just spent in other ways -- given to employees as salaries or to users in terms of lower fees or invested in new ventures or given to other non-profits (or sometimes unrelated individuals).
Top lawyers are now billing $1000 or more an hour: http://www.abajournal.com/news/top_lawyers_bill_10 00_an_hour/ The formal results of their work (funded mostly by private clients) are almost all publicly available as the records of court proceedings. The law itself is almost entirely in the public domain. So, lawyers get paid vast amounts of money for helping clients craft client-specific solutions using their knowledge of the public domain. Why aren't more programmers doing this in terms of code? And then most lawyers will turn around to those same clients and say everything related to code needs to be kept secret or proprietary. There is a ironical double-standard here isn't there?
Why then should programmers or their products be kept in (legal) chains, regardless of who pays for them? But it is exceptionally more ironic when the money is public dollars -- it is a bad bargain for the public.
Here is one lawyer who has gone rogue and is giving out the legal profession's deepest secrets::-)
"The Mythology of Wealth" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 "Property and money are as mythological as Zeus. The first thing they teach you in law school - and I mean the first thing - is that "property" is a collection of legal rights. They are mental abstractions. They were created in more or less their present form in the middle ages by common law judges. They include things like "alienability" or the right to sell your rights, "inheritability" or the right to pass your rights to your heirs. They include the right to exclude other people from a defined section of planet earth. They include the right to subdivide or alienate less than all of your rights. For example, a person who holds "title" to a house, can "lease" it - that is he can convey the right to "possess" the land for a defined period of time, while he retains his rights that last "forever". He only has that right, because the law gives it to him.... So, how are these "property rights" created? That's easy. They are created the same way all mythological realities are created - with a little "mumbo jumbo".... It's all incantation and ritual that creates, transfers, modifies and extinguishes "rights". These rights are created by words uttered by the priests of the law. In fact there is an entire structure and system of pieces of paper with "magic words" written on them that create, transfer, modify and extinguish these rights. There is a hierarchy of these rights. Contracts rights are "private" rights created by individuals. Property rights are rights to the exclusive control
No one (even Greenpeace) is saying potentially toxic materials are not involved or other risks (including people falling off of roofs). It's just that they are orders of magnitude less than for running, say, a coal plant for thirty years to make the same amount of power. Here is a US government source which says essentially the same thing: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/man_pro_implicat ions.html "Because manufacturers use a wide variety of processes to make PV cells, a wide range of chemicals--some of them toxic or hazardous--are employed in PV cell production. In terms of worker safety and health, simple protective and administrative measures can be used effectively to protect those who produce PV systems. In terms of the environment, the PV production process produces small amounts of waste materials, but this is minimal relative to the emissions from conventional energy sources.... Most of today's PV cells consist of crystalline or multicrystalline silicon. Silica particles can be released in the mining and refining stage, but these present a hazard only to workers--one that can easily be avoided. Silicon PV module production can include fluorine, chlorine, nitrates, isopropanol, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, silica particles, and solvents. According to a report from Utrecht University, "Estimated air emission is maximally 0.16 [kilograms of fluorine] and 430 [kilograms of chlorine] per [1000 megawatt-hours] of electricity supplied by PV modules, which is orders of magnitude smaller than the corresponding emissions of a coal plant."... Although crystalline silicon is the primary material used today to produce PV cells, a growing number of PV products are being produced from other materials.... "
And all this is without even a lot of effort invested (compared to the hundreds of billions spent annually on conventional solutions). Overall, limiting pollution will only get better per unit as production increases and new manufacturing ideas come along (like using vegetable dyes or plastics for PV panels and so on).
Who benefits from FUD being spread about solar power?
I was referring to engineering timescales, not technical feasibility. Technically, you are right, we could build big things in space sooner if we made a *huge* international effort. But any large engineering project like just one big dam tends to take at least four or five years, and that's on Earth. Add in the political issues and problems unique to space and twenty years seems quick to me for any significant number of space power systems. Maybe you could have one built in a ten year time-frame, like another International Space Station (although it's been more than ten years since the current version was announced (1993) and that thing still isn't fully done is it?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_S tation#Origins Still, as computing and technology get more capable, maybe we'll see surprising developments as we approach the singularity -- like being able to launch a small "seed" that does all the construction work via robotics and AI using space resources from the Moon or Near Earth Asteroids.:-) That's the kind of thing a billionaire could fund as a single launch -- if we had the plans for that seed.:-) http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout 2001_web.html "The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."
So what does that prove? Lots of "non profits" use predatory practices or exist to serve self-dealing boards or employees; many for-profits have laudable business practices and goals (Google to an extent).
Why not have half as many jobs doing truly free work as twice as many whose intellectual labor ends up bound in chains? Doesn't it matter to you that you likely can't ever touch stuff you worked on there anymore -- given that public dollars (your taxes) were consumed to make it?
Maybe a "subsidy" publishing model made sense in the dead tree age, when it cost lots to make results available via printed media and was hard to collaborate in a fine-grained way, but in the internet age, anything can be copied cheaply and documents can be developed by multiple authors simultaneously. Why create artificial scarcity? And why prop up an economy based on artificial scarcity which is likely largely going away as, say, 3D printers become more common? http://www.reprap.org/ From there: "The promise of advanced fabrication technology that can copy itself is a truly remarkable concept with far reaching implications."
- Sir James Dyson, 17 April 2007. "[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment..."
- James Randerson on the front page of The Guardian on November 25, 2006. "Money is a sign of poverty."
- Iain M. Banks, 1987.
Actually, if you look at your electric bill, chances are somewhere of 1/3 to 1/2 the cost is for *transmission* of the power, not the production of it (e.g. all the utility crews doing preemptive tree trimming or fixing power lines after storms). So, even if solar space power was *free*, it would likely still be more expensive to get it to homes than to have cheap local solar panels on your roof in the next decade or so (if dropping price trends continue as this article predicts). And significant space solar power is still 20 to 30 years away even if we started now. Still, we need a better energy storage system that is lower maintenance than batteries -- and that is currently still a weakpoint, but laptops and electric cars are driving a lot of research into energy storage technology. So, space power will likely never be cost effective for any common terrestrial use, and Gerry O'Neill's ideas of Solar Space Satellites (SPS) driving an economic expansion in space are outdated at this point. Of course, once we are in space for other reasons, then setting up some solar space satellites may make sense, as a niche thing beamed directly to factories or to produce synthetic fuels or to power laser launch facilities for space craft. I think there are lots of good reasons to go into space -- liberty, sightseeing, spirituality, fun, challenge, access to continuous cheap solar energy to use *in* space (not on Earth), and so on. I wish space advocates could give up on pushing O'Neill's outdated SPS vision and put their emotional energy elsewhere.:-) He is still right that space is a much better place for an industrial civilization than a planetary surface (ultimately, easier access to solar energy and asteroidal materials and room to expand).
"The environmental impact and the safety risk of solar cells are infinitesimally small compared to conventional sources of energy like coal, oil, gas or atomic energy. With the latter, the danger is global (emission of carbon-dioxide) and longterm (for example the problems of disposal of nuclear energy). This is regarding regular operation already. If we think about solar panels running for 30 years that don't produce any pollutants, the environmental damage is obviously kept very limited.
The process of production for solar cells is well developed and tested. From the chemical and toxin point of view, even a mass-production of solar cells will not implicate any significant environmental or health problems."
Computers are increasing by a factor of about 1000X in performance per price per decade. 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?pr intable=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..)
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/ho w-much-info-2003/internet.htm ) See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte for MB, GB, TB, PB, EB series and their meaning DISK: 300GB --> 300PB (which is 300,000 TB) For reference, a DVD movie uncompressed is about 5GB. Note that, according to: http://elegans.uky.edu/blog/?p=49 300 TB would allow you to record your entire life in video for 16hr/day for 100 years at 500MB/hr. So you could do that for 1000 people on just your own $3000 2027AD personal computer. Or you could just perhaps store the interesting bits of life video for perhaps a hundred thousand people or so. Needless to say,
Except that most really good stuff is a labor of love and has been made available for free -- ranging from the alphabet through the number zero to mathematical proofs and much web content (including Slashdot and other community sites). Consider:
"Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
Food and shelter used to be free for the taking and making -- except enclosure acts promulgated by rich and powerful people took away the commons and privatized it. (Well, population pressure changed things too, but there remain vast tracts of only sparsely occupied land.) Shortly we will be able to print things in 3D for cheap or free, just like we now can print in 2D for cheap or free.
The history of the USA is essentially the history of violation of copyrights and patents and trade secrets. The early colonies recognized not foreign copyrights and so copied all the British books for free, and all the early designs for industrial mills were taken from the British -- clandestinely as the British had instituted a death penalty for stealing mill secrets. Further ironically the British in turn had stolen technology from China -- silkworms which were illegally smuggled out in a hollow walking cane. It is when a country becomes dominant that copyrights and patents are heavily enforced -- otherwise they generally hurt both the common person and the elite as they attempt to shut those at the edges away from productive ideas.
Are you narrowly defining "work"? Why let people claim, say, novels as totally their own even if they draw on centuries old folk tales and use an alphabet and lexicon created by a collaborative effort of generations? Why ignore the costs and risk from pollution and nuclear war hanging over the heads of everyone in the world produced overall by a related economic system based on competition and an (enforced) scarcity world view in an abundant universe? Why ignore the chilling effects and legal costs imposed on society (including imprisonment of people who share) when society receives no value back for what are now effectively indefinite copyrights? The brgain with the public -- copyright for a limited time in exchange for works returning to the public domain -- has been broken.
Your post is a great example of making information available for free. Why did you do it if not for immediate gain?
"In later books a human scientist named Zinder developed a technology that allowed a human-built AI named Obie to remotely interface with the Well of Souls and change local regions of reality without initially realizing that this is how the reality-manipulations were being done. Zinder and Obie were ultimately lost but human governments later reconstructed part of his research and developed the Zinder Nullifier, a weapon that simply "blanked" the region of space it was targeted at. The Nullifiers were a vital weapon in winning a war of species survival against extragalactic invaders, but when a Nullifier was accidentally used to erase itself from existence it caused an unrecoverable error in the Well of Soul's programming. An expanding region of the universe began going blank and the Well of Souls ultimately had to be rebooted to prevent it from being irreversibly damaged, causing the Universe to end and be recreated."
More Money versus A Conspiracy Against Ourselves
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Failing Our Geniuses
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One of the most important things Gatto does is to distinguish between "Education" and "Schooling".
The hardest thing to understand about schooling, Gatto suggests, is that schools are not *failing* at their original purpose but are actually *succeeding* at creating dumbed down and easily "class"-ified people. So, for example, when people note that more money spent on schools does not produce smarter kids, the issue isn't that schools are not working, but instead it is that schools are actually working all the better for the more money. It just isn't the point of schools to produce "educated" people (even if that is what school administrators or school teachers might claim is the point of schooling, and perhaps even genuinely believe themselves). The big issue is just that the original purpose of schools, intended to produce an industrial utopia by turning children into the adult robots 19th century industry needed, is no longer very relevant to the information age or a world where universal abundance is possible (say, via *real* robots automating away those assembly line jobs) or even moving beyond the notion of "work" altogether.
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985 http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
Gatto maintains that public (and most private) school as we know it is a state-oriented social institution originating in Prussia designed specifically to produce mainly uncritical consumers, compliant workers, and obedient soldiers, and that it is out of step with the needs of an information age society which thrives on diversity and creativity (as well as out-of-step with the needs of the individual).
See, for example:
"A Conspiracy Against Ourselves" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.ht m "Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that students go mad trying to escape it."
This idea that schools need a complete overhaul is now becoming somewhat mainstream, see for example the title of this article:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over" http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l but unfortunately the solutions proposed (like longer universal kindergarten) are still coming from those with industrial power (the "captains" of industry again, but now the IT industry:-) and wanting cheap laborers (but now, cheap and compliant intellectual laborers).
The "Gifted Label": http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18l.htm "And American schools tend, fundamentally, to mistrust students. One way to deal with danger from the middle and bottom of the evolutionary order is to buy off the people's natural leaders. Instead of killing Zapata, smart money deals Zapata in for his share. We've seen this principle as it downloaded into "gifted and talented" classrooms from the lofty abstractions of Pareto and Mosca. Now it's time to regard those de-fanged "gifted" children grown up, waiting at the trough like the others. What do they in their turn have to teach anyone?"
The entire academic pyramid scheme leading to the PhD: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result.... Lederman's point is that American science is being stifled by the failure of the government to put enough money into it.... However, although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again.... [The] issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch. The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think tho
"if you spend more energy creating a solar cell than you get out of it in its usefull life, that's a no-brainer. It sounds good but the net is not."
That may have once been true, but it isn't true now in many cases.
See for example: http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solarp an/pvpayback.htm "The above summary shows that energy payback times for modules incorporating thick silicon cells are, at worst, of the order of six to seven years and possibly less than three years. Since warranty periods of 20 years are routinely offered on such modules[ ] it is clear that the embodied energy should be easily recovered."
Things may be worse if the cells are not used efficiently, of course.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#Solar_cell s_and_energy_payback "In the 1990s, when silicon cells were twice as thick, efficiencies 30% lower than today and lifetimes shorter, it may well have cost more energy to make a cell than it could generate in a lifetime. The energy payback time of a modern photovoltaic module is anywhere from 1 to 20 years (usually under five)[9] depending on the type and where it is used (see net energy gain). This means solar cells can be net energy producers, meaning they generate more energy over their lifetime than the energy expended in producing them.[10][11].[12]"
This area of technology will only continue to improve (especially as several variants of solar cells use technologies similar to computer chip fabrication and printing). I use this site to track some of the progress: http://www.solarbuzz.com/
In any case it's not a study looking between cultures, but across one specific culture. And global studies of happiness show many "poorer" countries overall reporting greater happiness.
"Nigeria tops happiness survey" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3157570.st m "Nigeria has the highest percentage of happy people followed by Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico, while Russia, Armenia and Romania have the fewest. But factors that make people happy may vary from one country to the next with personal success and self-expression being seen as the most important in the US, while in Japan, fulfilling the expectations of family and society is valued more highly. "
"Generation F*cked: How Britain is Eating Its Young" http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generatio n_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html "The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates."
First off, I do not have the lifetime of training "Nanook" had to survive in one of the harshest climates on earth (the Arctic); nor do I have the social relationships with others with similar training needed to have backup and essential sociality. Nor do I have the tools. Nor do I, as a product of the USA, have Nanook's expectations of what a "good life" means -- you can see that in the movie where his wife puts blubber or oil in her hair to look pretty by her standards and the missionary is repulsed by the slimy look. (Even though living a life in western society might make me dissatisfied with a certain older way of life, for someone living that way of life without ever having western notions, they might be still happier overall than someone entranced and used to glitz -- so that does not prove who was happier -- look at the Amish who overall seem pretty happy). And even if I did have all those things, much of that Arctic land has been claimed (the USSR is even claiming more of it as we speak), so what was easily possible 10000 years ago is not easily possible now.
My point isn't to glamorize that life, which did have many difficulties. It is also a life style which is impossible today because of the large populations which require high productivity per acre for agricultural lands, and the militarized bureaucracies which claim every good square inch of ground. But if we don't understand where we have been as a species, how can we really understand where we might want to do in the future? In many ways, if we move to free software, cheap solar panels, and self-replicating 3D printers (and maybe even self-replicating space habitats), than we can achieve the best parts of such a hunter/gather lifestyle while leaving behind many of the bad parts. That's why I stay involved with the computer and technology -- and I think there is little other realistic choice; the way forward is not a simple return to the past -- but the way forward may be illuminated by better understanding the past. If you read a story like Marshall Brain's "Manna" http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm you will see there are at least two ways forward -- a future where the benefits of technology go mainly to a few and the rest are imprisoned or exterminated (essentially, the history of much of agricultural bureaucracies wiping hunter/gatherers off much of the land) or a future where the benefits (and types) of technology are adapted for most (or all) people. Looking back on hunter/gather societies and the freedoms and free time they had, one can have hope for a future for most people in the second direction -- essentially we as a species have already spent thousands of years being that way anyway. As the original article suggests, are we very different now via evolution? And even if some of us are, can we not all be happier in a world with more leisure and less work, where we pick fruit out of our Star Trek matter replicators instead of off the trees? And my point -- that StarTrek future is more a return to the way things used to *feel* then something entirely new.
Sahlins argues that hunter/gathers only spend a few hours per day on finding food and the rest in socializing. Just think about lions -- how much time to they spend hunting as opposed to lying around or taking care of cubs? Or horses or cows -- do they seem to be unhappily "working" when they are grazing? http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
You also left out people who are hungry because of the intervention of capitalist societies now (Iraq) or in the past (much of Africa, also much of North America).
A sabertooth tiger seems much more manageable by comparison, doesn't it? Especially when approached by a village of people.
I don't think life expectancy past age five was all that different (that brings down the "average" even if most people past age five lived into their fifties or sixties). Many of us now just get an extra decade or two of frailness and senility tacked on the end, part of it bedbound in a nursing home.
Nice quote at the end. Personally, we can't go back and still have big populations, and people get used to the new toys. But I am responding so much on this thread because without understanding where people have been, I think it is harder to see what we want to get out of technology to bring us full circle back to the leisure and meaning and relative freedom which many people had many thousands of years ago. Likely, so much of what it used to mean to be human (and part of a village or tribe) has been forgotten and propagandized -- some for the good, but also some for the bad.
I used to think this. As I said in another comment, the reason there is so much starvation in, say, Africa has to do more with the legacy of European colonization destroying a hunter/gatherer and substance agriculture lifestyles (including by head taxers -- pay the tax or they'll kill or enslave you basically, and the only way to get money to pay the tax is to work all year on some European plantation).
Also, food aid via imported food destroys indigenous agricultural systems economically -- an Ethiopian example:
"Does International Food Aid Harm the Poor?" http://www.nber.org/digest/mar05/w11048.html "To carry out their study, Levinsohn and McMillan merge data from two nationally representative surveys and create a data set of 8,212 urban and 8,308 rural Ethiopian households.... Levinsohn and McMillan estimate that, in the absence of food aid, the price of wheat in Ethiopia would be $295 per metric ton, compared to an actual price of $193 per metric ton in 1999. On average, the authors conclude, "the loss in consumer surplus works out to roughly 37 US dollars per household per year for households that consume wheat and the gain in producer surplus works out to roughly 157 US dollars per household per year for households that sell wheat." In a nation such as Ethiopia, where the poverty line is about $132 per year, the impact is therefore substantial."
You're right through that changes in population technology have big effects -- including driving people to change their lifestyles to continue to produce enough food for everyone. I hope that as we continue to invent cheaper solar panels and cheaper and more versatile 3D printers that we'll be able to eliminate a lot of "work" http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html and have a lifestyle which uses technology but feels a lot more like the best of hunter/gatherer society. See the ending of this story called "Manna": http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm Also, we could support trillions of people in space habitats built out of asteroidal ore and powered by sunlight. http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/settle.htm
"Poverty here is not relative-poverty, it's empty-belly-poverty."
According to Sahlins, such empty-belly poverty pretty much did not exist for most hunter/gathers most of the time. There is a lot of food in the wild for people if there are not many people and if you know where to find it throughout the year. See the movie "Walkabout". And finding and preparing that food is something that ancient cultures would do as easily as we drive cars or play computer games. The reason there is so much starvation in, say, Africa has to do more with the legacy of European colonization destroying a hunter/gatherer and substance agriculture lifestyles (including by head taxers -- pay the tax or they'll kill or enslave you basically, and the only way to get money to pay the tax is to work all year on some European plantation)..
You're right in that agriculture can support more people per acre, that's one reason hunter/gathers -- whose very success lead to rising populations -- were forced off the land and agricultural societies and their militarized bureaucracies and further rising populations extended their domains. Judging from skeleton size though, nutrition got worse after the move to agriculture many thousands of years ago and only in this century do skeletons match the height of the ones of old. That suggests those agricultural lives were much more unpleasant with more disease and more suffering (and a lot more work than 40hrs/week, and including slavery and taxes -- how did the Pyramids get built?). Most improvements in lifespan are in the last century, and they are mostly due to improved sanitation (so, clean water and sewers, not medicine). And, for hunter/gathers with low population density, sanitation was not much of an issue compared to what it is in a big city. As to lifespan, it is claimed to be low, but only because infant mortality is claimed to be high and near 50%, so even accepting those claims, if hunter/gatherers live past age five most will live into their 50s and 60s or more.
Who said they were necessarily eco-friendly? The Hunter/Gatherer lifestyle does not scale to todays' population sizes (at least, until we get cheap solar panels and 3D printers); that' s one of the reasons it isn't around much anymore. Still, just because it doesn't scale, it still might have been nicer for the people who lived it 50000 years ago than a standard mainstream US life centered around watching actors or animation on the tube (assuming you survived past age five).
Why don't I live that way? For much the same reason I don't move from the USA to, say, the Netherlands, even though it is rated as pretty much the number one place to live in the world for families.
"U.S. on List of UNICEF's Worst Countries for Kids" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=7407245
"Why Dutch women don't get depressed" http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/06/news/happy. php Unless you are born and raised in a place or time or way of life, you are always an outsider. You will never have the easy fluid interactions and skills and human relationships a native to that time and place has. To live in the wilderness well also takes a village. And almost all land in the world of any value as far as wildlife or edible plants has been claimed by one militarized bureaucracy or another, and they tax it. That's what drove most hunter/gatherers off their land and out of their way of life. If the **AA groups succeed in pushing "Trusted Computing" down everyone's throat with lobbying dollars and legal firepower to their own profit, does that mean everyone will be happier? http://www.lafkon.net/tc/ So too, if militarized bureaucracies destroyed the hunting/gathering way of life, does that mean people living in them are happier? Might may historically make right, but it doesn't necessarily make happiness.
Have you tried it? Maybe you'd actually like it.:-)
Also, that life expectancy issue is more complex; if you lived past age five, chances are you would make it to fifty or sixty or more.
And probably you'd have grown up in an earth-rooted (Pagan) religion which did not make many people feel bad about themselves much of the time or incite them into religious wars.
I feel that Wikipedia article is biased (there's a lot more evidence than that -- see for example the average height of skeletons before and after agriculture). It's likely biased for the same reason almost all of the replies sound the same drumbeat -- people want to believe life is better now and all the suffering they experience (including years of boredom and terror in schools) or the painful uncertainty from possible biowarfare or nuclear warfare is somehow justified.
As for "Nanook" -- in the movie, it showed the clash of the old ways -- tracking a Polar bear for days after hurting it, and the newer ways -- using a gun. It's true hunter/gatherers are often wiped out by guns. But it is also true that the **AA societies have the money and legal power to hurt grandmas on the internet -- so what? Does that prove the **AA are creating a better world for everyone with a happier way of life based on "Trusted Computing" http://www.lafkon.net/tc/ (other than perhaps for themselves)? So someone starved two years later -- so what -- he died in the context of a clash of cultures -- where the militarized one was forcing him onto worse and worse land. You can see the same things in the fate of most of the Native Peoples of the USA -- doesn't prove they were less happy, just perhaps that Europeans were more vicious and greedy (and is that the basis of happiness, especially if that viciousness and greed turns into global warfare?)
Laziness is good in many ways -- it conserves energy. Perhaps ancient peoples had it so good they had no desperate need to invent complex technology (including agriculture and industry) to deal with rising populations form the success of the lazy hunter/gatherer lifestyle? Plus, they knew a lot more about living in the wild easily -- knowledge that has been lost or just takes years of practice to apply -- like being able to see at a glance, say, how you can make a good enough shelter against the rain by dragging just one fallen branch between two well situated trees -- whereas now we would think we needed to purchase, carry, set up, and take down a tent -- a lot more work.
I felt the same way when first encountering this idea; but as the Sahlins article shows, even in arid conditions, people who know a climate can find a lot to eat. Hunting for such knowledgeable people is essentially the same as going to the supermarket today, perhaps even easier as no car or storage is involved -- here are some berries, yum, yum, there's a rabbit, pop, slice, skin, dinner -- and with a fluid effortlessness from years of practice from birth people growign up now can't even imagine (thus many of these comments). See for example the movie "Walkabout" for the difference between people who don't know how to easily survive in a wild area and those who do. As for parasites, yes they are a problem (though there are alternative solutions including better immune systems people back then may have had -- and less Chrohns disease and other autoimmune system disorders from having an immune system tuned to expect parasites and turning on itself when there are none.) As for wild animals, look how much slashdotters love playign WoW and other combat games -- to a group of hunters, these animals were challenges, but approachable ones. How else were large predators (like the saber tooth tiger and the cave bear) basically wiped out worldwide? It's amazing what people can accomplish even with simple tools.
I felt the same way when first encountering this idea; but lifespans back then for people who lived after the age of five were similar to that of most people in the world today (perhaps a decade or two shorter than in the USA). What's different (if anything) is lower infant mortality now, so more people live past age five now. So, back then, if everyone lived to sixty after age five, but 50% of people didn't make it that far, then we get an "average" lifespan of thirty But, even then, the infant mortality figures of say 50000 years ago are still a lot of guesswork, and it is possible some anthropologists desiring to paint a good picture of life in the 1930s or so of then current living conditions had motivations to cook the figures.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing was meant to suggest your particular non-profit was in any way unethical; just that the term "non-profit" doesn't mean much anymore. The only really formal definition of "non-profit" or "not for profit" is a corporation whose profits are not given to owners (like the board) -- the profits are just spent in other ways -- given to employees as salaries or to users in terms of lower fees or invested in new ventures or given to other non-profits (or sometimes unrelated individuals).
:-) ... So, how are these "property rights" created? That's easy. They are created the same way all mythological realities are created - with a little "mumbo jumbo". ... It's all incantation and ritual that creates, transfers, modifies and extinguishes "rights". These rights are created by words uttered by the priests of the law. In fact there is an entire structure and system of pieces of paper with "magic words" written on them that create, transfer, modify and extinguish these rights. There is a hierarchy of these rights. Contracts rights are "private" rights created by individuals. Property rights are rights to the exclusive control
Top lawyers are now billing $1000 or more an hour:
http://www.abajournal.com/news/top_lawyers_bill_10 00_an_hour/
The formal results of their work (funded mostly by private clients) are almost all publicly available as the records of court proceedings. The law itself is almost entirely in the public domain. So, lawyers get paid vast amounts of money for helping clients craft client-specific solutions using their knowledge of the public domain. Why aren't more programmers doing this in terms of code?
And then most lawyers will turn around to those same clients and say everything related to code needs to be kept secret or proprietary. There is a ironical double-standard here isn't there?
Why then should programmers or their products be kept in (legal) chains, regardless of who pays for them?
But it is exceptionally more ironic when the money is public dollars -- it is a bad bargain for the public.
Ultimately it has to do with "power". And that balance is changing. It's one thing to have to deal with the system as it is to survive in it; it's another thing to like it and promote it as you seemeed to me to be doing here. Contrasting viewpoints:
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
"Buddhist Economics" by E. F. Schumacher
http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economic s/english.html
Here is one lawyer who has gone rogue and is giving out the legal profession's deepest secrets:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"Property and money are as mythological as Zeus. The first thing they teach you in law school - and I mean the first thing - is that "property" is a collection of legal rights. They are mental abstractions. They were created in more or less their present form in the middle ages by common law judges. They include things like "alienability" or the right to sell your rights, "inheritability" or the right to pass your rights to your heirs. They include the right to exclude other people from a defined section of planet earth. They include the right to subdivide or alienate less than all of your rights. For example, a person who holds "title" to a house, can "lease" it - that is he can convey the right to "possess" the land for a defined period of time, while he retains his rights that last "forever". He only has that right, because the law gives it to him.
No one (even Greenpeace) is saying potentially toxic materials are not involved or other risks (including people falling off of roofs). It's just that they are orders of magnitude less than for running, say, a coal plant for thirty years to make the same amount of power.t ions.html ... Most of today's PV cells consist of crystalline or multicrystalline silicon. Silica particles can be released in the mining and refining stage, but these present a hazard only to workers--one that can easily be avoided. Silicon PV module production can include fluorine, chlorine, nitrates, isopropanol, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, silica particles, and solvents. According to a report from Utrecht University, "Estimated air emission is maximally 0.16 [kilograms of fluorine] and 430 [kilograms of chlorine] per [1000 megawatt-hours] of electricity supplied by PV modules, which is orders of magnitude smaller than the corresponding emissions of a coal plant." ... Although crystalline silicon is the primary material used today to produce PV cells, a growing number of PV products are being produced from other materials. ... "
Here is a US government source which says essentially the same thing:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/man_pro_implica
"Because manufacturers use a wide variety of processes to make PV cells, a wide range of chemicals--some of them toxic or hazardous--are employed in PV cell production. In terms of worker safety and health, simple protective and administrative measures can be used effectively to protect those who produce PV systems. In terms of the environment, the PV production process produces small amounts of waste materials, but this is minimal relative to the emissions from conventional energy sources.
And all this is without even a lot of effort invested (compared to the hundreds of billions spent annually on conventional solutions). Overall, limiting pollution will only get better per unit as production increases and new manufacturing ideas come along (like using vegetable dyes or plastics for PV panels and so on).
Who benefits from FUD being spread about solar power?
I was referring to engineering timescales, not technical feasibility. Technically, you are right, we could build big things in space sooner if we made a *huge* international effort. But any large engineering project like just one big dam tends to take at least four or five years, and that's on Earth. Add in the political issues and problems unique to space and twenty years seems quick to me for any significant number of space power systems. Maybe you could have one built in a ten year time-frame, like another International Space Station (although it's been more than ten years since the current version was announced (1993) and that thing still isn't fully done is it?)S tation#Origins :-) That's the kind of thing a billionaire could fund as a single launch -- if we had the plans for that seed. :-)t 2001_web.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_
Still, as computing and technology get more capable, maybe we'll see surprising developments as we approach the singularity -- like being able to launch a small "seed" that does all the construction work via robotics and AI using space resources from the Moon or Near Earth Asteroids.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhou
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."
"And since we were non-profit..."
So what does that prove? Lots of "non profits" use predatory practices or exist to serve self-dealing boards or employees; many for-profits have laudable business practices and goals (Google to an extent).
Why not have half as many jobs doing truly free work as twice as many whose intellectual labor ends up bound in chains? Doesn't it matter to you that you likely can't ever touch stuff you worked on there anymore -- given that public dollars (your taxes) were consumed to make it?
Maybe a "subsidy" publishing model made sense in the dead tree age, when it cost lots to make results available via printed media and was hard to collaborate in a fine-grained way, but in the internet age, anything can be copied cheaply and documents can be developed by multiple authors simultaneously. Why create artificial scarcity? And why prop up an economy based on artificial scarcity which is likely largely going away as, say, 3D printers become more common?
http://www.reprap.org/
From there: "The promise of advanced fabrication technology that can copy itself is a truly remarkable concept with far reaching implications."
- Sir James Dyson, 17 April 2007.
"[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment..."
- James Randerson on the front page of The Guardian on November 25, 2006.
"Money is a sign of poverty."
- Iain M. Banks, 1987.
Actually, if you look at your electric bill, chances are somewhere of 1/3 to 1/2 the cost is for *transmission* of the power, not the production of it (e.g. all the utility crews doing preemptive tree trimming or fixing power lines after storms). So, even if solar space power was *free*, it would likely still be more expensive to get it to homes than to have cheap local solar panels on your roof in the next decade or so (if dropping price trends continue as this article predicts). And significant space solar power is still 20 to 30 years away even if we started now. Still, we need a better energy storage system that is lower maintenance than batteries -- and that is currently still a weakpoint, but laptops and electric cars are driving a lot of research into energy storage technology. So, space power will likely never be cost effective for any common terrestrial use, and Gerry O'Neill's ideas of Solar Space Satellites (SPS) driving an economic expansion in space are outdated at this point. Of course, once we are in space for other reasons, then setting up some solar space satellites may make sense, as a niche thing beamed directly to factories or to produce synthetic fuels or to power laser launch facilities for space craft. I think there are lots of good reasons to go into space -- liberty, sightseeing, spirituality, fun, challenge, access to continuous cheap solar energy to use *in* space (not on Earth), and so on. I wish space advocates could give up on pushing O'Neill's outdated SPS vision and put their emotional energy elsewhere. :-) He is still right that space is a much better place for an industrial civilization than a planetary surface (ultimately, easier access to solar energy and asteroidal materials and room to expand).
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/solargen/a bout-solar-energy/solar-electricity/production-and -recycling
"The environmental impact and the safety risk of solar cells are infinitesimally small compared to conventional sources of energy like coal, oil, gas or atomic energy. With the latter, the danger is global (emission of carbon-dioxide) and longterm (for example the problems of disposal of nuclear energy). This is regarding regular operation already. If we think about solar panels running for 30 years that don't produce any pollutants, the environmental damage is obviously kept very limited.
The process of production for solar cells is well developed and tested. From the chemical and toxin point of view, even a mass-production of solar cells will not implicate any significant environmental or health problems."
Where is your counter evidence?
Computers are increasing by a factor of about 1000X in performance per
price per decade. 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?pr intable=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..)
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/ho w-much-info-2003/internet.htm
)
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
for MB, GB, TB, PB, EB series and their meaning
DISK: 300GB --> 300PB (which is 300,000 TB)
For reference, a DVD movie uncompressed is about 5GB.
Note that, according to:
http://elegans.uky.edu/blog/?p=49
300 TB would allow you to record your entire life in video for 16hr/day
for 100 years at 500MB/hr. So you could do that for 1000 people on just
your own $3000 2027AD personal computer. Or you could just perhaps store
the interesting bits of life video for perhaps a hundred thousand people
or so. Needless to say,
Except that most really good stuff is a labor of love and has been made available for free -- ranging from the alphabet through the number zero to mathematical proofs and much web content (including Slashdot and other community sites). Consider:
"Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
Food and shelter used to be free for the taking and making -- except enclosure acts promulgated by rich and powerful people took away the commons and privatized it. (Well, population pressure changed things too, but there remain vast tracts of only sparsely occupied land.) Shortly we will be able to print things in 3D for cheap or free, just like we now can print in 2D for cheap or free.
The history of the USA is essentially the history of violation of copyrights and patents and trade secrets. The early colonies recognized not foreign copyrights and so copied all the British books for free, and all the early designs for industrial mills were taken from the British -- clandestinely as the British had instituted a death penalty for stealing mill secrets. Further ironically the British in turn had stolen technology from China -- silkworms which were illegally smuggled out in a hollow walking cane.
It is when a country becomes dominant that copyrights and patents are heavily enforced -- otherwise they generally hurt both the common person and the elite as they attempt to shut those at the edges away from productive ideas.
Are you narrowly defining "work"? Why let people claim, say, novels as totally their own even if they draw on centuries old folk tales and use an alphabet and lexicon created by a collaborative effort of generations? Why ignore the costs and risk from pollution and nuclear war hanging over the heads of everyone in the world produced overall by a related economic system based on competition and an (enforced) scarcity world view in an abundant universe? Why ignore the chilling effects and legal costs imposed on society (including imprisonment of people who share) when society receives no value back for what are now effectively indefinite copyrights? The brgain with the public -- copyright for a limited time in exchange for works returning to the public domain -- has been broken.
Your post is a great example of making information available for free. Why did you do it if not for immediate gain?
From Jack L. Chalker's _Well World_ series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_L._Chalker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_World
SPOILER AHEAD
"In later books a human scientist named Zinder developed a technology that allowed a human-built AI named Obie to remotely interface with the Well of Souls and change local regions of reality without initially realizing that this is how the reality-manipulations were being done. Zinder and Obie were ultimately lost but human governments later reconstructed part of his research and developed the Zinder Nullifier, a weapon that simply "blanked" the region of space it was targeted at. The Nullifiers were a vital weapon in winning a war of species survival against extragalactic invaders, but when a Nullifier was accidentally used to erase itself from existence it caused an unrecoverable error in the Well of Soul's programming. An expanding region of the universe began going blank and the Well of Souls ultimately had to be rebooted to prevent it from being irreversibly damaged, causing the Universe to end and be recreated."
John Taylor Gatto explains in his book (online) why putting more money into the system will not change things:
:-) and wanting cheap
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
One of the most important things Gatto does is to distinguish between
"Education" and "Schooling".
The hardest thing to understand about schooling, Gatto suggests, is that
schools are not *failing* at their original purpose but are actually
*succeeding* at creating dumbed down and easily "class"-ified people.
So, for example, when people note that more money spent on schools does not
produce smarter kids, the issue isn't that schools are not working, but
instead it is that schools are actually working all the better for the more
money. It just isn't the point of schools to produce "educated" people (even
if that is what school administrators or school teachers might claim is the
point of schooling, and perhaps even genuinely believe themselves).
The big issue is just that the original purpose of schools, intended to
produce an industrial utopia by turning children into the adult robots 19th
century industry needed, is no longer very relevant to the information age
or a world where universal abundance is possible (say, via *real* robots
automating away those assembly line jobs) or even moving beyond the notion
of "work" altogether.
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
Gatto maintains that public (and most private) school as we know it
is a state-oriented social institution originating in Prussia
designed specifically to produce mainly uncritical
consumers, compliant workers, and obedient soldiers, and that it is out of
step with the needs of an information age society which thrives on diversity
and creativity (as well as out-of-step with the needs of the individual).
See, for example:
"A Conspiracy Against Ourselves"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc5.ht m
"Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this school thing as a
conspiracy, even though the project is indeed riddled with petty
conspirators. It was and is a fully rational transaction in which all of us
play a part. We trade the liberty of our kids and our free will for a secure
social order and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain in which most of
us agree to become as children ourselves, under the same tutelage which
holds the young, in exchange for food, entertainment, and safety. The
difficulty is that the contract fixes the goal of human life so low that
students go mad trying to escape it."
This idea that schools need a complete overhaul is now becoming somewhat
mainstream, see for example the title of this article:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l
but unfortunately the solutions proposed (like longer universal
kindergarten) are still coming from those with industrial power (the
"captains" of industry again, but now the IT industry
laborers (but now, cheap and compliant intellectual laborers).
Another take on this issue from a different perspective:
"Sustainable Education" By Jerry Mintz
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsl etterid=21&articleid=195
"Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long
overdue. It is moving in the
The "Gifted Label":
... Lederman's point is that American science is being stifled by the failure of the government to put enough money into it. ... However, although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. ... [The] issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch. The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists. ... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think tho
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18l.htm
"And American schools tend, fundamentally, to mistrust students. One way to deal with danger from the middle and bottom of the evolutionary order is to buy off the people's natural leaders. Instead of killing Zapata, smart money deals Zapata in for his share. We've seen this principle as it downloaded into "gifted and talented" classrooms from the lofty abstractions of Pareto and Mosca. Now it's time to regard those de-fanged "gifted" children grown up, waiting at the trough like the others. What do they in their turn have to teach anyone?"
The entire academic pyramid scheme leading to the PhD:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result.
"if you spend more energy creating a solar cell than you get out of it in its usefull life, that's a no-brainer. It sounds good but the net is not."
p an/pvpayback.htm
l s_and_energy_payback .[12]"
That may have once been true, but it isn't true now in many cases.
See for example:
http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solar
"The above summary shows that energy payback times for modules incorporating thick silicon cells are, at worst, of the order of six to seven years and possibly less than three years. Since warranty periods of 20 years are routinely offered on such modules[ ] it is clear that the embodied energy should be easily recovered."
Things may be worse if the cells are not used efficiently, of course.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#Solar_cel
"In the 1990s, when silicon cells were twice as thick, efficiencies 30% lower than today and lifetimes shorter, it may well have cost more energy to make a cell than it could generate in a lifetime. The energy payback time of a modern photovoltaic module is anywhere from 1 to 20 years (usually under five)[9] depending on the type and where it is used (see net energy gain). This means solar cells can be net energy producers, meaning they generate more energy over their lifetime than the energy expended in producing them.[10][11]
This area of technology will only continue to improve (especially as several variants of solar cells use technologies similar to computer chip fabrication and printing). I use this site to track some of the progress:
http://www.solarbuzz.com/
And that study also says it decreases with urbanization. Perhaps "nature deficit disorder"?/ Louv/index.html
t m
o n_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/06/02
In any case it's not a study looking between cultures, but across one specific culture. And global studies of happiness show many "poorer" countries overall reporting greater happiness.
"Nigeria tops happiness survey"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3157570.s
"Nigeria has the highest percentage of happy people followed by Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico, while Russia, Armenia and Romania have the fewest. But factors that make people happy may vary from one country to the next with personal success and self-expression being seen as the most important in the US, while in Japan, fulfilling the expectations of family and society is valued more highly. "
"Generation F*cked: How Britain is Eating Its Young"
http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generati
"The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates."
First off, I do not have the lifetime of training "Nanook" had to survive in one of the harshest climates on earth (the Arctic); nor do I have the social relationships with others with similar training needed to have backup and essential sociality. Nor do I have the tools. Nor do I, as a product of the USA, have Nanook's expectations of what a "good life" means -- you can see that in the movie where his wife puts blubber or oil in her hair to look pretty by her standards and the missionary is repulsed by the slimy look. (Even though living a life in western society might make me dissatisfied with a certain older way of life, for someone living that way of life without ever having western notions, they might be still happier overall than someone entranced and used to glitz -- so that does not prove who was happier -- look at the Amish who overall seem pretty happy). And even if I did have all those things, much of that Arctic land has been claimed (the USSR is even claiming more of it as we speak), so what was easily possible 10000 years ago is not easily possible now.
My point isn't to glamorize that life, which did have many difficulties. It is also a life style which is impossible today because of the large populations which require high productivity per acre for agricultural lands, and the militarized bureaucracies which claim every good square inch of ground. But if we don't understand where we have been as a species, how can we really understand where we might want to do in the future? In many ways, if we move to free software, cheap solar panels, and self-replicating 3D printers (and maybe even self-replicating space habitats), than we can achieve the best parts of such a hunter/gather lifestyle while leaving behind many of the bad parts. That's why I stay involved with the computer and technology -- and I think there is little other realistic choice; the way forward is not a simple return to the past -- but the way forward may be illuminated by better understanding the past. If you read a story like Marshall Brain's "Manna"
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
you will see there are at least two ways forward -- a future where the benefits of technology go mainly to a few and the rest are imprisoned or exterminated (essentially, the history of much of agricultural bureaucracies wiping hunter/gatherers off much of the land) or a future where the benefits (and types) of technology are adapted for most (or all) people. Looking back on hunter/gather societies and the freedoms and free time they had, one can have hope for a future for most people in the second direction -- essentially we as a species have already spent thousands of years being that way anyway. As the original article suggests, are we very different now via evolution? And even if some of us are, can we not all be happier in a world with more leisure and less work, where we pick fruit out of our Star Trek matter replicators instead of off the trees? And my point -- that StarTrek future is more a return to the way things used to *feel* then something entirely new.
Sahlins argues that hunter/gathers only spend a few hours per day on finding food and the rest in socializing. Just think about lions -- how much time to they spend hunting as opposed to lying around or taking care of cubs? Or horses or cows -- do they seem to be unhappily "working" when they are grazing?o n.html
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/aboliti
You also left out people who are hungry because of the intervention of capitalist societies now (Iraq) or in the past (much of Africa, also much of North America).
Except we have different predators now -- nanotech particles,3 915.stmo nal.html
"Office printers 'are health risk'"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/692
**AA and "Trusted Computing",
http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
bureaucracies which use robots with guns,
"First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq"
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/08/httpwwwnati
Fox News, compulsory schooling,
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
and so on. Think of modern day humans like early small mammals and big multinational corporations as dinosarus made up of eating such small mammals.
A sabertooth tiger seems much more manageable by comparison, doesn't it? Especially when approached by a village of people.
I don't think life expectancy past age five was all that different (that brings down the "average" even if most people past age five lived into their fifties or sixties). Many of us now just get an extra decade or two of frailness and senility tacked on the end, part of it bedbound in a nursing home.
Nice quote at the end. Personally, we can't go back and still have big populations, and people get used to the new toys. But I am responding so much on this thread because without understanding where people have been, I think it is harder to see what we want to get out of technology to bring us full circle back to the leisure and meaning and relative freedom which many people had many thousands of years ago. Likely, so much of what it used to mean to be human (and part of a village or tribe) has been forgotten and propagandized -- some for the good, but also some for the bad.
I used to think this. As I said in another comment, the reason there is so much starvation in, say, Africa has to do more with the legacy of European colonization destroying a hunter/gatherer and substance agriculture lifestyles (including by head taxers -- pay the tax or they'll kill or enslave you basically, and the only way to get money to pay the tax is to work all year on some European plantation).
... Levinsohn and McMillan estimate that, in the absence of food aid, the price of wheat in Ethiopia would be $295 per metric ton, compared to an actual price of $193 per metric ton in 1999. On average, the authors conclude, "the loss in consumer surplus works out to roughly 37 US dollars per household per year for households that consume wheat and the gain in producer surplus works out to roughly 157 US dollars per household per year for households that sell wheat." In a nation such as Ethiopia, where the poverty line is about $132 per year, the impact is therefore substantial."
o n.html
Also, food aid via imported food destroys indigenous agricultural systems economically -- an Ethiopian example:
"Does International Food Aid Harm the Poor?"
http://www.nber.org/digest/mar05/w11048.html
"To carry out their study, Levinsohn and McMillan merge data from two nationally representative surveys and create a data set of 8,212 urban and 8,308 rural Ethiopian households.
You're right through that changes in population technology have big effects -- including driving people to change their lifestyles to continue to produce enough food for everyone. I hope that as we continue to invent cheaper solar panels and cheaper and more versatile 3D printers that we'll be able to eliminate a lot of "work"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/aboliti
and have a lifestyle which uses technology but feels a lot more like the best of hunter/gatherer society. See the ending of this story called "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Also, we could support trillions of people in space habitats built out of asteroidal ore and powered by sunlight.
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/settle.htm
"Poverty here is not relative-poverty, it's empty-belly-poverty."
According to Sahlins, such empty-belly poverty pretty much did not exist for most hunter/gathers most of the time. There is a lot of food in the wild for people if there are not many people and if you know where to find it throughout the year. See the movie "Walkabout". And finding and preparing that food is something that ancient cultures would do as easily as we drive cars or play computer games. The reason there is so much starvation in, say, Africa has to do more with the legacy of European colonization destroying a hunter/gatherer and substance agriculture lifestyles (including by head taxers -- pay the tax or they'll kill or enslave you basically, and the only way to get money to pay the tax is to work all year on some European plantation)..
You're right in that agriculture can support more people per acre, that's one reason hunter/gathers -- whose very success lead to rising populations -- were forced off the land and agricultural societies and their militarized bureaucracies and further rising populations extended their domains. Judging from skeleton size though, nutrition got worse after the move to agriculture many thousands of years ago and only in this century do skeletons match the height of the ones of old. That suggests those agricultural lives were much more unpleasant with more disease and more suffering (and a lot more work than 40hrs/week, and including slavery and taxes -- how did the Pyramids get built?). Most improvements in lifespan are in the last century, and they are mostly due to improved sanitation (so, clean water and sewers, not medicine). And, for hunter/gathers with low population density, sanitation was not much of an issue compared to what it is in a big city.
As to lifespan, it is claimed to be low, but only because infant mortality is claimed to be high and near 50%, so even accepting those claims, if hunter/gatherers live past age five most will live into their 50s and 60s or more.
Who said they were necessarily eco-friendly? The Hunter/Gatherer lifestyle does not scale to todays' population sizes (at least, until we get cheap solar panels and 3D printers); that' s one of the reasons it isn't around much anymore. Still, just because it doesn't scale, it still might have been nicer for the people who lived it 50000 years ago than a standard mainstream US life centered around watching actors or animation on the tube (assuming you survived past age five).
y Id=7407245. php
Why don't I live that way? For much the same reason I don't move from the USA to, say, the Netherlands, even though it is rated as pretty much the number one place to live in the world for families.
"U.S. on List of UNICEF's Worst Countries for Kids"
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
"Why Dutch women don't get depressed"
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/06/news/happy
Unless you are born and raised in a place or time or way of life, you are always an outsider. You will never have the easy fluid interactions and skills and human relationships a native to that time and place has. To live in the wilderness well also takes a village. And almost all land in the world of any value as far as wildlife or edible plants has been claimed by one militarized bureaucracy or another, and they tax it. That's what drove most hunter/gatherers off their land and out of their way of life. If the **AA groups succeed in pushing "Trusted Computing" down everyone's throat with lobbying dollars and legal firepower to their own profit, does that mean everyone will be happier?
http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
So too, if militarized bureaucracies destroyed the hunting/gathering way of life, does that mean people living in them are happier? Might may historically make right, but it doesn't necessarily make happiness.
Have you tried it? Maybe you'd actually like it. :-)
Also, that life expectancy issue is more complex; if you lived past age five, chances are you would make it to fifty or sixty or more.
And probably you'd have grown up in an earth-rooted (Pagan) religion which did not make many people feel bad about themselves much of the time or incite them into religious wars.
I feel that Wikipedia article is biased (there's a lot more evidence than that -- see for example the average height of skeletons before and after agriculture). It's likely biased for the same reason almost all of the replies sound the same drumbeat -- people want to believe life is better now and all the suffering they experience (including years of boredom and terror in schools) or the painful uncertainty from possible biowarfare or nuclear warfare is somehow justified.
As for "Nanook" -- in the movie, it showed the clash of the old ways -- tracking a Polar bear for days after hurting it, and the newer ways -- using a gun. It's true hunter/gatherers are often wiped out by guns. But it is also true that the **AA societies have the money and legal power to hurt grandmas on the internet -- so what? Does that prove the **AA are creating a better world for everyone with a happier way of life based on "Trusted Computing" http://www.lafkon.net/tc/ (other than perhaps for themselves)? So someone starved two years later -- so what -- he died in the context of a clash of cultures -- where the militarized one was forcing him onto worse and worse land. You can see the same things in the fate of most of the Native Peoples of the USA -- doesn't prove they were less happy, just perhaps that Europeans were more vicious and greedy (and is that the basis of happiness, especially if that viciousness and greed turns into global warfare?)
Laziness is good in many ways -- it conserves energy. Perhaps ancient peoples had it so good they had no desperate need to invent complex technology (including agriculture and industry) to deal with rising populations form the success of the lazy hunter/gatherer lifestyle? Plus, they knew a lot more about living in the wild easily -- knowledge that has been lost or just takes years of practice to apply -- like being able to see at a glance, say, how you can make a good enough shelter against the rain by dragging just one fallen branch between two well situated trees -- whereas now we would think we needed to purchase, carry, set up, and take down a tent -- a lot more work.
I felt the same way when first encountering this idea; but as the Sahlins article shows, even in arid conditions, people who know a climate can find a lot to eat. Hunting for such knowledgeable people is essentially the same as going to the supermarket today, perhaps even easier as no car or storage is involved -- here are some berries, yum, yum, there's a rabbit, pop, slice, skin, dinner -- and with a fluid effortlessness from years of practice from birth people growign up now can't even imagine (thus many of these comments). See for example the movie "Walkabout" for the difference between people who don't know how to easily survive in a wild area and those who do. As for parasites, yes they are a problem (though there are alternative solutions including better immune systems people back then may have had -- and less Chrohns disease and other autoimmune system disorders from having an immune system tuned to expect parasites and turning on itself when there are none.) As for wild animals, look how much slashdotters love playign WoW and other combat games -- to a group of hunters, these animals were challenges, but approachable ones. How else were large predators (like the saber tooth tiger and the cave bear) basically wiped out worldwide? It's amazing what people can accomplish even with simple tools.
I felt the same way when first encountering this idea; but lifespans back then for people who lived after the age of five were similar to that of most people in the world today (perhaps a decade or two shorter than in the USA). What's different (if anything) is lower infant mortality now, so more people live past age five now. So, back then, if everyone lived to sixty after age five, but 50% of people didn't make it that far, then we get an "average" lifespan of thirty But, even then, the infant mortality figures of say 50000 years ago are still a lot of guesswork, and it is possible some anthropologists desiring to paint a good picture of life in the 1930s or so of then current living conditions had motivations to cook the figures.