Enjoyed your informative post from the trenches, thanks! Especially your point about teacher incentives. You get what you measure -- so, as you imply, if you incentivize teachers to dumb down kids faster and better, that's what you'll get more of.
As for what you can do in the short-term, it's tough. If you walk away, your (virtually adopted) kids will suffer. And you'll lose your income in a tough economy.. And one less voice for change in the system will be lost. But it's a painful situation if you care about what you do (although you run a high risk of burnout). Don't know what to advise, but at least you are not alone!:-)
AC wrote: "We've lost the arms race for content over presentation in this medium. Pages with perhaps a kilobyte of text take over a megabyte to download and 10 seconds to render. Firefox is mortally wounded. Safari and Opera are hobbled. Chrome is a trojan horse. Guys, I think the Gopher people were right."
This is a very insightful AC post. That is a big part part of why for the last week (since hearing about the Thunderbird uncertainty) as a sprint, I've been working towards a webapp / server called Twirlip as a proof-of-concept for a server version of Thunderbird. The idea is to support the same functionality as Thunderbird (and more) but use standard Firefox as the client loading a Thunderbird-like webapp from a local Node.js server. The project repository is currently here: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
The sprint is not "blessed" by Mozilla or the Thunderbird Council at the moment. It is just my own take on things and to demonstrate what is possible. And given I just blew all our cash/credit writing another FOSS project (NarraFirma, a webapp in TypeScript/Mithril/D3 with Node.js and WordPress backends) over the past year or so, financially, this is so stupid for me to be doing right now instead of finding a paying job.:-)
That said, the leader of the Thunderbird Council (Kent James) suggested in September considering making Thunderbird into a webapp, so the idea is not completely new, or presumably unwelcome as a proof-of-concept demo: "Future Planning: Thunderbird as a Web App" https://mail.mozilla.org/piper... "As we are discussing our future, both in relation to radical changes expected in the Mozilla platform, and our need to express where we are going to potential partners and donors, we need to discuss and agree on some big-picture issues. One of those was end-to-end encryption that we discussed recently. I want to discuss here our future platform, and how it related to users and their needs. tl;dr Thunderbird over the next 3 years needs to convert to being a web app that can run on any browser that supports ES6 Javascript and HTML5. (web app does not imply cloud-based, only that the underlying platform is js/html)."
I've used Thunderbird for over a decade, and have a million messages in it totaling over 15 GB (mainly from a bunch of mailing lists). I know of others who have 50 GB in it. So, I'm obviously concerned about its future.
All that said, there is no immediate reason to panic. Thunderbird still works well for what it does.
In looking into this issue though, maintaining Thunderbird is apparently difficult though because the codebase includes a copy of Firefox, which bloats the source code by 20X or more up to about a gigabyte of mostly C++.Any security patch to Firefox needs to be evaluated and then likely integrated into Thunderbird to keep it secure. That may be the biggest issue -- and it is worse now that Mozilla has essentially defunded Thunderbird over the last few years to make it a "community" project, so synergy has been lost with the Firefox development team. (SeaMonkey, formerly the Mozilla application suite, is in the same boat and uses essentially the same codebase.) Thunderbird itself also has a lot of XUL to define UI functionality, but Mozilla has deprecated XUL (not reasonably, but there are consequences) creating an obvious future maintenance issue of sizable proportions. Thunderbird plugins likewise are written with XUL. So, while Thunderbird can be maintained, given that codebase and the size and the need to closely track Firefox, maintenance is hard and probably not a lot of fun (given the C++ and XUL) as a legacy thing.
The title says the main idea, but here are some more details in my usual rambling style...:-)
== More details (and should be better/conciser, but headache plus other stuff to do)
When you wake up in the early morning before sunrise, you may feel you need to turn on a lightbulb to get around safely otherwise in the dark. That lightbulb seems blindingly bright -- so bright you can't look at it. You need that lightbulb though. Then, hours later, after the sun is up, you may forget the lightbulb is even on -- it is bright everywhere, and the bulb hardly stands out. Is that the story of Slashdot? As well as the story of many other tech innovations and communities and individuals (perhaps even myself)? These tools, communities, and individuals help bootstrap something greater and then just fade into the background.
As a different analogy, each year, seeds produce the next generation of plants that produce more seeds, but generations later, who thinks of (or thanks) the seeds from years ago that made everything possible? It remains important for our own mental health to be thankful for the past generations that made our life possible (an idea very strong in some Native American culture, and even made into politics by C. H. Douglas and Social Credit) -- but it is perhaps too much to expect direct gratitude for our own contributions. "We do what we must because we can"?:-) Or maybe because we "should". Or even just because it was "fun" (a preference for fun perhaps shaped by millions of years of evolution and selection for survival). Sure, some people get remembered and celebrated because they won some commercial popularity contest (Edison, Gates, Jobs), but most just get mostly forgotten (Steinmetz/Tesla, Kildall, Wozniak/Wayne). Even Doug Engelbart's obituary did not even get a full open article on the Slashdot home page, just a title line (and I and others complained about that at the time). People like Peter H. Huyck & Nellie W. Kremenak (who wrote the very insightful "Design & Memory: Computer Programming in the 20th Century" in 1980) get essentially no mention, as does William Kent (who wrote "Data & Reality" in 1978). I'm continually amazed how little mention Smalltalk (Kay, Ingalls, Goldberg, etc.) gets these days -- it seems almost entirely forgotten, even if Java and now JavaScript is step-by-step reinventing most of it (often badly) -- even as the Smalltalk community struggles on, and when I squint just right, I see the web as a Smalltalk image Theodore Sturgeon envisioned ubiquitous mobile networked wearable nanotech-built computing in the 1950s in "The Skills of Xanadu", which inspired Ted Nelson and other technologists (myself included), but who remembers him for that? Chuck Moore (Forth) and James Martin (everything IT) likewise are near forgotten at this point, as far as their name coming up much in discussion. Even Clifford Berry and John Vincent Atanassoff are pretty much forgotten, even given their Atanasoffâ"Berry Computer (ABC) the main reasons digital computing was not burdened with core patents early on. And those are just a few I know who are public or published figures. And that does not include the people like high school teachers Jack Woelfel, Joe Maurer, David Gray, or many others (including my father) who made a big difference in my own personal computing education (but few others would ever hear of outside of where I grew up).
I can also look at old computer magazines and catalogs from decades ago and see so much diversity of hardware ideas before the PC monoculture took over. Still, as Manuel De Landa said, uniformity at one level can promote diversity at another. A lot of different software has been built on the Windows/Intel hardware/OS monoculture. Hardware and OS diversity seems also to be going up again with Smartphones and Chromebooks. Although again, with lots of soon to be forgotten developers -- even if it may mean a lot to the developer and their local community and successors that they did what they did. An
And a major reason people want to control other people is... getting needed resources.:-)
Of course, since "needed resources" for some people can include specific mates (who need to be impressed or dominated or whatever), there is complexity there. James P. Hogan talks about the issue of achieving status in a post-scarcity economy in his 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
But, while prestige and status of a country relative to other countries is a cause of war (including to deter aggression), the personal level of status is rarely the reason entire nations are convinced into going to war. That is true even if personal status among leaders may have something to do with why leaders try to convince their countries to foolishly go to war.
For example, in this survey of the causes of war in 2008, every one except the top one of "ideological change" essentially comes down to control of resources. "Why wars happen" http://www.economist.com/node/...
And I'd suggest even "ideological change" most often has a strong component of access to resources in order to manage them in specific ways (for example, having enough territory to implement some vision of some form of law or politics).
Anyway, this is a complex topic. There are many lists of reasons on why wars happen. I'm trying to say that issues of perceived scarcity drive a lot of them. Also, scarcity-thinking also often keeps people on a treadmill where they never seem to have time to learn about alternative ways of handling conflict than knee-jerk violence. And then further, fighting over perceived scarcity with super powerful tools of abundance (like computer code that can cause billions of potentially useful things to happen all at once across the world) is what creates the biggest current risks (like nuclear war). Without these tools of abundance like computers, communications, nanotech, biotech, nuclear power, advanced materials, rocketry, and so on, we would not be worried about the end of the human race by just some few people in one small area throwing rocks at each other.
As I wrote here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... " Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all....
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's s
Interesting read, thanks! So true, you comments reflect the adage "taxes are the price we pay for civilization..." And also, capitalism tends toward privatizing gains and socializing costs...
If you see my other posts above though, I am not concerned about the technology to feed the world even without the Haber process (and perhaps better without it). As at this link, we have the technology through organic farming: "Can Organic Farming Feed Us All?" http://www.worldwatch.org/node...
Whether we have the political will is a different issue, with so many vested interests in the current synthetic-chemical-based agricultural system.
Another aspect of this craziness: http://www.seriouseats.com/200... "The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
But yes, "night soil" could only be part of a system. But there are other parts, as mentioned in a section quoted at the end.
I don't know about England specifically, or later years, but this says: "Population and Economy : From Hunger to Modern Economic Growth" https://books.google.com/books... "According to official Chinese statistics, by the middle of the 18 century, population density was already over 500 people per cultivated sq. km (see Liang 1980: 400, 546). While these numbers are undoubtedly exaggerated owning to under-registration of cultivated acreage (ho 1995), the contrast with 18th-cent. Europe, where 1 sq. km of cultivated acreage supported 70 people, is quite extreme (see Braudel 1981a: 56-64)."
Much of China is just not that cultivated because of mountains and deserts and such (especially in the West).
Organic agriculture is indeed information and labor intensive -- which is why robotics will revolutionize it -- including robots to pick specific insects off of plants.
On fertilizer loss, see: http://www.wri.org/our-work/pr... "Between 1960 and 1990, global use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer increased more than sevenfold, while phosphorus use more than tripled. Studies have shown that fertilizers are often applied in excess of crop needs (MA 2005). The excess nutrients are lost through volatilization (when nitrogen vaporizes in the atmosphere in the form of ammonia), surface runoff (Figure 2), and leaching to groundwater. On average, about 20 percent of nitrogen fertilizer is lost through surface runoff or leaching into groundwater (MA 2005). Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and nitrogen in manure that is spread on fields is also subject to volatilization. Under some conditions, up to 60 percent of the nitrogen applied to crops can be lost to the atmosphere by volatilization (University of Delaware Cooperative Extension 2009); more commonly, volatilization losses are 40 percent or less (MA 2005). A portion of the volatilized ammonia is redeposited in waterways through atmospheric deposition. Phosphorus, which binds to the soil, is generally lost through soil erosion from agricultural lands."
Comparisons to medicine... Don't get me started.:-) Doctors typically have only a few hours of education about nutrition over the course of several years of study, yet poor nutrition is the root of most Western disease. So, the whole medical community is (profitably for itself) misdirecting its efforts as far as priorities. Sure there is much alternative medicine that is bogus, but the parts based on nutritional research (e.g. Dr. Fuhrman's work) is quite good overall. Yet it is not mainstream. What is mainstream is stuff like "stents", which studies actually show are mostly worthless. For example: http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra... "The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions. Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive
It's in part a cycle -- land to humans to waste to land. Only in part as nitrogen can oxidize to go back to the air, so it needs to get fixed again by bacteria.
"Very little fertilizer is lost in modern agriculture in relative terms."
First, 40% of food in the USA is wasted. So, all that fertilizer is wasted. Food produced closer to home might not incur so much waste. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
But that is not what I meant. This is what I meant: http://www.scientificamerican.... "Fertilizer Runoff Overwhelms Streams and Rivers--Creating Vast "Dead Zones" The nation's waterways are brimming with excess nitrogen from fertilizer--and plans to boost biofuel production threaten to aggravate an already serious situation"
"Pathogens are not a problem, they are outcompeted by soil bacteria during composting."
Composting doesn't always get everything, as compost piles have edges and heat zones, and all that depends on careful management. Also, compost is contaminated by chemicals people dispose in the waste stream (chemicals from home darkrooms used to be a big issue) and also pharmaceuticals flushed down toilets.
"China's population grew 3 _times_ during the last century virtually without increasing the land use, because of the fertilizers and pesticides."
The fact that China's population may now need more inputs given growth in the last century since the Haber process does nothing to invalidate that they managed large (but not quite so large) populations for 3900 years before that without the Haber process. What that shows is that alternatives have worked. China is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. If they could do it, it shows the US could do it and other countries could do it.
"Still won't work. You'll need livestock for manure (to concentrate nitrogen and other nutrients). "
I agree that much current "organic agriculture" is dependent on livestock manure from conventional farming which is based mostly on feeding conventionally farmed grain (not pasture grass) to animals, and so there is a big nitrogen input there. That said, given a change in land uses patterns (especially away from agriculture), and with more nutrient recycling, and with intercropping and crop rotations and ground up rock dust, likely we could feed the planet well without the Haber process. I'll admit it would be good to back that with more numbers.
"Unlike you, I actually helped to grow my own food (lean years after the USSR collapse) so I appreciate the amount labor required for that."
I'm sorry you had to go through that involuntarily due to crazy geopolitics and economics that cause that crisis. Still, you can't compare what you presumably had to do with limited tools and limited materials and limited information in a (probably) limited climate on impoverished soils with what is really possible with good tools, abundant materials, abundant information, in a good climate on well prepared soils.
Still, how do you know what foods I've grown or what I've studied?
"And I also worked with the Great Evil (Monsanto) on actual modern agriculture to appreciate the difference."
I see. I'll try not to assume that context might explain a lot.:-) Still, at the very least, it may be something like how someone who works with Microsoft products a lot might never think that open source software is possible or even better sometimes? Have you studied organic agriculture? Have you read Wid
Respectfully, I suggest you research these issues further to avoid spreading confusion on them.
For example, while humans don't fix nitrogen, human waste contains a lot of nitrogen from food that is eaten. For example, by one calculation http://www.agriculturesnetwork... "Roughly estimated, at least 800 million kg nitrogen, 400 million kg phosphate and 500 million kg potash can be annually acquired from night soil produced in urban areas. This is equivalent to some 4 million tonnes of commercial fertiliser, which is about 4% of all commercial fertiliser used throughout the country."
Considering how much fertilizer is wasted in modern systems, you can see that this was a big deal in China as part of a closed cycle including other techniques to restore soil fertility. Granted there are other issues with pathogens and contamination from "night soil", but nonetheless, China is an example of doing wihout the Haber process for 4000 years and still supporting big populations by other means.
Historically, rotational field cropping has also been used to replenish the soil. Also, intercropping can boost nitrogen levels in intensive agriculture; "Intercropping with nitrogen-fixing crops leads to increased maize yields, says study" http://www.enn.com/agriculture... "Results show that while mono cropping practices produce a high yield crop, it is not the sustainable solution in the long run. Instead, the research suggests that by strategically combining small doses of inorganic fertilizer through an intercropping system, maize yields will be more stable and will not only increase, but will lead to other ecosystem services like soil stability, water storage capacity and overall fertility. "
Integrated agricultural systems such as involving water from fish ponds and such can also increase nitrogen in agriculture..
I've cited sources for my points, including how excessive nitrogen fertilizer causes micronutrient loss. While nitrogen is often a limiting nutrient, the point is that it can displace other nutrients very easily, causing other issues. Beyond clay, organic matter also holds onto micronutrients. This is one reason "organic" farming focuses on building up the organic matter content of soils to increase nutrient holding capacity. "Feed the soil and keep it healthy for healthy plants" is the motto there. By contrast, conventional agriculture essentially uses the soil to prop up plants, and tends to produce lush green growth with excessive nitrogen, but the plants are otherwise weak and unhealthy and susceptible to disease. There are other broader problems from excess nitrogen too: http://www.vision.org/visionme...
Please cite sources etc. substantiating your various points especially disagreeing with the loss of micronutrients (which is basic chemistry, if usually ignored in mainstream agriculture which tends to maximize empty calories) in order for this to be a more productive dialog.
Here's the bottom line on at least US agriculture. Almost everything grown just goes to feed animals, and eating too many animal products is bad for people's health, as is eating too many refined grains (another big part of the rest of US agriculture). So really, all this discussion about fertilizer in that sense is besides the point in many ways. See: http://www.westernwatersheds.o... "Cropland- About 349 million acres in the U.S. are planted for crops. This is the equivalent of about four states the size of Montana. Four crops -- feeder corn (80 million acres), soybeans (75 million acres), alfalfa hay (61 million acres) and wheat (62 million acres) -- make up 80 percent of total crop acreage. All but wheat are prima
China has been doing it for Millennia; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... "In 1909, American agronomist F.H. King toured China, Korea and Japan, studying traditional fertilization, tillage and general farming practices. He wrote his observations and findings in Farmers of Forty Centuries, Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan (1911, published shortly after his death by his wife, Carrie Baker King; numerous facsimile reprintings, including Courier Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-43609-8, and Rodale Press, ISBN 0-87857-867-6). King lived in an era preceding synthetic nitrogen fertilizer production and before the use of the internal combustion engine for farm machinery, yet he was profoundly interested in the challenge of farming the same soils in a 'permanent' manner, hence his interest in the agricultural practices of ancient cultures. In recent years, his book became an important organic farming reference."
"Night soil" was part of the answer -- recycling human waste back to the fields. We have modern versions of composting toilets like the Clivus Multrum that can do much the same in a more sanitary way.
Conventional "slow release" fertilizers are generally different than ground up rock dust. See this site for what is possible: http://remineralize.org/
On micronutrients, most people in agriculture don't understand this, so it is not a surprise you don't either. I'd suggest you read Widdowson's book. It is basic chemistry. Essentially, the clay and organic matter in soil has only so much holding capacity for nutrients released by the slow decay of rocks and the faster decay of organic matter. If you flood that capacity with nitrogenous compounds, statistically you end up with a lot of nitrogen and very little of everything else. There is another process that also goes on related to reducing the soil's holding capacity as the pH drops and clay particles change their electric charge. Thus your plants don't have access to micronutrients they need to make plant defense compounds and so they are weak and sickly and need additional protection like by synthetic pesticides and such. If Haber had spent more time studying agricultural chemistry instead of figuring out how to kill people, he might have learned this and then come up with better solutions. See this diagram on page 11 of Widdowson's book for more details: http://books.google.com/books?...
True to some extent, but imagination and innovation can create resources where there were none before. Trees grow wood mostly just from CO2 in the air and water. Germany has plenty of those. Many new materials are essentially plastic or carbon fiber. Germany could have invented all that with chemistry instead of going to war. That it did not is a failure of the German imagination back then.
Right now, the state-of-the-art in Germany for a new home is not to even need a furnace: "No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in 'Passive Houses'" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12... "DARMSTADT, Germany â" From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace. "
Other things I've written about that, including another "Downfall" parody where Hitler rails against abundance and open source and productive imaginative engineers::-) http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Granite can be melted into building material and also separated into a variety of elements. Seawater has just about every element in it and Germany has access to the sea. It may be more profitable to get something like aluminum from a specific ore abundant in it, but with the right technology and enough energy (like from fusion power), you can get pretty much any element anywhere on the planet. Ignoring what is possibly now or soon with nanotechnology, here are the basic chemical paths proposed around 1980 for use in turning lunar ore (basically granite) into a variety of materials: "Flowsheet and process equations for the HF acid-leach process" http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/...
So, Germany could (in theory) have done that all instead of launching two world wars for "lebensraum" and access to foreign materials -- if it had invested more in the chemistry of production than the chemistry of destruction.
Germany does have some limited iron production, BTW; but not much. However, Germany probably also has a lot more as-yet-undiscovered ores and such in mountains and underground (like perhaps a mile or two down). They are just harder to find or get to than ones that are obvious from the surface. But if Germany had made more of an effort, including creation of better technologies for prospecting for ores, maybe it would have found various ores at home? Also, while I'm not a big fan of seabed mining for environmental reasons, that is another possibility, and in any case, they show the possibility of finding new resources by looking deep within the earth: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07... "Mr. Dettweiler has now turned from recovering lost treasures to prospecting for natural ones that litter the seabed: craggy deposits rich in gold and silver, copper and cobalt, lead and zinc. A new understanding of marine geology has led to the discovery of hundreds of these unexpected ore bodies, known as massive sulfides because of their sulfurous nature."
Also, I've read that one reason Germany did so much for so long militarily in WWII (as imports were cut off) was that it put in place an intensive recycling program. Ignoring the holocaust and forced labor parts of it, it showed what was possible (discussed I think in the book "Other Homes and Garbage". As you imply, right now the automotive industry has become a net producer of metal from car recycling. But, even granted the industry needed some meta
A basic income is like social security payments every month regardless of your age or whether you work. A minimum wage is the smallest amount an employer can pay you if you work. The two are completely different things, even though both benefit the poor in different ways. A basic income benefits (almost) everyone though, regardless of your wage.
Despite the AC post that is a sibling of this suggesting both a basic income and a minimum wage are needed, I tend to agree with the grandparent poster who suggests that with a basic income we can dispense with a minimum wage and other similar protections in exchange. A basic income is far, far better than a minimum wage. Economically, a minimum wage is only going to accelerate the automation of most jobs as well. That may not be a bad thing by itself, but automation is bad for many people without a basic income when people need a job to survive in our society.
That's one of the appeals of a basic to conservatives, and a reason something like a basic income was passed by the US House (but failed barely in the Senate) around 1970 in the USA. It was defeated in part by some liberal Senators thinking the proposal was not good enough (also with some conservative opposition), and sadly it has not come up again significantly since. Senator Daniel Moynihan wrote a book about the politics of a basic income back then.
With a basic income, most people can be more choosy about where they work, which is going to put pressure on companies to voluntarily adhere to better labor standards. Should that be a problem in practice, other labor protections could be revisited -- and a working populace with a basic income would have more time for political engagement about all that. Frankly, the benefits of the basic income politically for most people are probably one reason it has been back-burnered for so long.
However, that said, I also feel universal health care (at a minimum, Medicare for all) should also be part of any basic income program -- along with other health care reforms (like Andrew Weil or Joel Fuhrman or Blue Zones talk about) to focus more on prevention especially through good nutrition as well as things like promoting exercise, social interactions, music, meditation or similar, yoga or similar, and so on.
The reason why these questions of economics and a basic income and jobs and health care and so forth all matter in the context of chemical weapons of mass destruction is that whether countries go to war often hinges on all these factors. Socio-economic factors often drive war, for multiple reasons, including war is a convenient way to get a populace distracted from focusing on other domestic economic failings of leadership. A populace that is reasonably happy as-is may be less likely to support war for things like "lebensraum" or "oil profits" or whatever. And if citizens are not kept busy with make work, they would have more time to participate in the democratic process as well as educate themselves about current issues including war profiteering and the true cost of war. Citizens would also have more time to invent the next breakthrough to further prosperity, whether hot or cold fusion, useful domestic robots powered by free and open source software, new information management tools, innovative new products and materials by observing nature like how we got Velcro, and so on. They of course also would have more money on a regular basis (regardless of the ups and down of "employment") to actually purchase products produced locally. That might mean business (guided by steady-state non-expansive economic theory based on reliable demand given a basic income) might have less incentive to look abroad for "markets" and so to foster a militarism that enforces the openness of such markets at gunpoint (as with, say, the Opium war of the USA and Britain and such again China to force acceptance of Western-supplied narcotics into China, or with various more recent US interventions abroad related to oil profits or natural gas profits).
That song, "Peter Paul and Mary: Because All Men Are Brothers", reminds me of the new movie "Senn" which we watched last night. Specifically, the PPM lyrics of: "My brother's fears are my fears, yellow white and brown. My brother's tears are my tears the whole wide world around."
"Senn" is an impressive movie, especially considering it was produced supposedly for only US$15000. That goes to show what modern technology and an internet-connected gift economy can do nowadays. http://sennition.com/
This is a bit of a spoiler, but the connection is because of a key aspect of the movie's plot relates to humans' feeling each others emotions and how that changes how they behave, especially in a corporate context.
Which also reminds me of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... "In addition, Iacoboni has argued that mirror neurons are the neural basis of the human capacity for emotions such as empathy."
And some people labelled sociopaths or psychopaths may not have much of these feelings or may feel them more selectively. "Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch" http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
Yet many of our corporate and political leaders at these point may fit that description...
And what do you do with various criminals who often engage in psychopathic behavior? And by whose definitions? Put your "brother" in jail?
And in a big city, given out current economic paradigm, people may also need to learn to switch off or decrease empathy in some way just to survive thousands of interpersonal encounters an hour when walking down the street...
On this plane of existence, there seems to be a complexity of human (and other) life existing in practice at a middle ground between chaos and stasis, competition and cooperation, fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, and so on. http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
The Lathe of Heaven (as another spoiler) has a section where the protagonist wishes for "world peace", and it is accomplished by the appearance of an alien invasion of the moon, which unites all humanity in opposition... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
So, while we should be careful what we wish for, and things are complex, still, there are so many possible environmental menaces that more cooperation is in order, IMHO. But it is never quite so simple as "all men are brothers". After all, sadly, even "brothers" sometimes fight each other like in the US Civil War.
Still, our culture may shape how competition or aggression is expressed or channeled into more positive directions. Like Mr. Fred Rogers' sings: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" As with Haber, a chemist can figure out a way to feed billions of people with nitrogenous fertilizer, or they can figure out how to kill large numbers of people with poison gas, or, in Haber's case, a chemist can even do both. The irony is that Haber's doing the first (to feed people) made doing the second (to kill people) unnecessary -- except that politics has taken a century to catch up with the potential of his (and others') inventions.
Likewise, even now, imagine what we could have had if the USA had invested three trillion US dollars on fusion energy research and better batteries and solar panels and energy efficiency -- instead of incurring that much and more on the Iraq war. Carter had the right idea, but he was not re-elected, even though (or perhaps because) he said: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ... "We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of f
Haber created a way to feed billions of people via nitrogen fertilizers(*), but then Haber supports a war based in large part on the idea there is not enough to go around and people need to steal each others land... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Sad to read Haber's first wife, who disapproved of Haber's poison gas work, committed suicide right after the first use of her husband's poison gas in war. Guess when something like that happens you either change or you embrace cognitive dissonance and dig in even further... See: "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts" http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes... "Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception -- how it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it."
(*) This is ignoring we now know ground-up rock dust and legumes etc. can do that too -- see: http://remineralize.org/ Also, excess nitrogen displaces other vital micronutrients which is why organic farming practices using things like slow-acting rock dust produce healthier plants and probably healthier people. See: "Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach" http://www.amazon.com/Towards-... "This book explains the use of an ecological way of farming, with modern practical applications, to make the fullest use of land resources and the best utilization of available capital and labour. In analyzing the vital relationship between soil, plant, animal and man, the author discusses the best care of land itself, its components, grassland management and the most efficient use of crops to maximize yield, food quality and profitability without the extensive use of chemicals and without damaging the ecology. Widdowson also covers the holistic approach to animal farming, the welfare and health of poultry, cattle, sheep and goats, their nutritional needs through the various stages of their lives, and the best way to balance their diets."
That is why I feel the point in my sig is so essential for everyone to understand it the 21st century (although it has always been important, but gets increasingly important as our technology gets increasingly powerful): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
I guess it depends on how much everyone learns from history or example. Of course, it's been joked that those who study history are condemned to watch others repeat it...:-( http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
Those changes to Germany came from the values of a 1930s/1940s USA. http://www.salon.com/2010/08/2... "How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
But, sadly, that USA and its values effectively no longer exist 70-80 years later. Today's USA has different values -- some are better (less racism and sexism overall, more respect for the environment), others are worse (less respect for workers, the "two-income trap", policies that promote a greater rich/poor divide, and more meddling in other nation's affairs which may produce profits for some connected few but produces huge costs for the whole USA let along the disrupted countries).
The real issue may be, like Gandhi is claimed to have said when asked by a journalist: "What do you think of Western civilization?", he said, "I think it would be a good idea." http://quoteinvestigator.com/2...
At this point, as US citizen, I'm much more concerned about what the US government does both abroad and at home (including stuff like supporting a repressive Saudi Arabia, other actions abroad that make terrorist blowback more likely, domestic cage-like "free speech zones", domestic rulings saying border patrols can operate in a constitution-ignoring way up to 100 miles inland, etc.) -- than what people in the Middle East cradle of civilization do. And I remain always aware there are large numbers of nuclear weapons still ready to fly on short notice... http://politics.slashdot.org/s... http://www.salon.com/2015/01/2...
So, what will it take to civilize the USA? A basic income might be a start...
And for another part of that picture, from a US Major General Smedley Butler: http://www.ratical.org/ratvill... "WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill r
Chemical weapons are ironic because any country capable of producing them like WWI Germany is capable of using chemistry instead of produce material abundance for the world. Instead, it is ironic and tragic when people decide to use such tools of abundance from a scarcity mindset, killing other humans out of fear of competition for material things (and so snuffing out much diverse human imagination which might eventually produce even more abundance). Other paths are possible; look at how much a modern day Germany produces mainly from within its own borders through using innovation and well-compensated laborers.
As an example, and with its own problems, the Raspberry Pi has proved "good enough" for a lot of embedded companies, who just accept various tradeoffs to code in Python (or whatever) under Linux. In ten years, such hardware will be even cheaper and even better, and may have even better RTOS support: http://pebblebay.com/raspberry...
Likewise and even more so for the truly free and open source Beagleboard family: http://beagleboard.org/
What a far cry from the Kim-1 with 1K of memory I bought as a kid (with my father's help) for probably 50X in current dollars what a Rapsberry Pi or Beagleboard costs and supplies about 1GB memory. We even had to build the power supply ourselves.:-)
This is not to disagree with what you are saying right now. I know how hard and important all that work can be. But if better tools eventually let fewer engineers produce more projects in the same time, and cheaper hardware means less constraints, and other standards change expectations so customers know to work within them, than the need for managing such complexity (including the human side) may go down. Granted with a rising increase in an internet of things and robotics, embedded work may well still increase in demand for a decade or two until better standards come to dominate the field and change the nature of so many embedded tasks. So, for anyone already well enmeshed int he embedded field, it may well be a good gig for the next decade or two.
Anyway, for fun, to go through your list (a bit tongue in cheek, so not completely serous answers):
"First of all the robot would have to sit in meetings with the customer understanding what the customer wants, telling him what can't be done and outlining alternative solutions in dumbed down language the customer understands. It should tell the customer if some of his choices will raise the cost (Yes, in theory the hardware can do X but the current drivers can't)."
This can be replaced in part by a web interface where the customer clicks on options and the software tells them if the combination is allowed.
"It would have to write an offer listing everything that the customer wants to have implemented but worded so he can't expect more for his money. It has to be worded so that sales people and management understand enough to agree to the price written at the bottom."
Again, web backend generates this based on web interface choices.
"It needs to understand all documentation provided by the customer and it needs to be able to find more. It also needs to know who it can ask for an undocumented detail. Currently documentation includes data sheets, Doxygen like API descriptions, articles, standards, schematics, forum discussions, RCS commit messages, source code, and books but there will probably be a new form designed to be understood by machines. It is also useful to remember everything the customer said even if it might turn out to be wrong."
This could be mostly replaced by machine-readable standards as you suggest.
"It has to know sources of errors. Documentation can have errors. There can be errors in the design of the hardware. The hardware might be faulty (f.ex. bad solder joints) and you need to know what will destroy the hardware (no you can't configure that GPIO to output a low value). It has to fix simple errors itself (yes, I did have to solder some jumper wires and pull up resistors in the past few years). If it can't fix the error, it has to discuss the problem with someone who can. If the problem won't be fixed (no we won't spin a new SoC revision for you) software workarounds have to be devised and the pros and cons have to be discussed with the customer. To be able to find errors, it has to know about software and hardware debugging techniques (printf debugging, Gdb, Valgrind, JTAG, oscilloscope probing,...)."
Bad hardware becomes so cheap it is discarded. Twenty years ago O
I agree software now is a mess. I program in JavaScript for deployability, but it too is a mess, and much harder to work with than Smalltalk or even Java or Clipper. HyperCard was another great system for its time. Greed harmed several of these languages, Smalltalk and HyperCard especially, but even Java by keeping it proprietary for so long.
Ironically, compared to the article's suggestion, it seems the more code we have, the more programmers we need to keep up with it.:-) On economics, one might otherwise expect that the more infrastructure code there is, the less workers you need to build more of it. Otherwise, in general, I agree with C. H. Douglas that we benefit by building on the work of previous generations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."
As I see it though, we probably have about 99X+ more programmers than we need already, as far as core infrastructure.:-) For example, why did we need JavaScript when Smalltalk was a perfectly fine language that was better in many ways? How many accounting software packages do we really need? How many word processors? How many CAD tools? How many plugins do we need to just work around problems produced by endless similar formats? Do we really need so many image formats or audio formats (driven in part by patents)? Most programs out there are essentially needless variations on basic themes. Just like most new pharmaceuticals (90%) are "me too" drugs for rich people's problems.
Much of what programmers do in practice is (perhaps unintentionally) make work for each other. It may well be worse than the legal profession in that sense (where lawyers make work for each other or create or encourage conflicts). A lot of that comes from the nature of capitalism and competition vs. alternative economic forms based more on cooperation. Programmers typically can't freely share code or specs with others in different businesses, so everyone is always re-inventing the wheel and reverse engineering data structures and data formats and communications protocols, which create a proliferation of slightly different code bases with different edge cases.
For another example, why do we really need so many web browser engines? Also, why could not some web standards body accept Sqlite as the defacto web browser data storage engine because there were not "multiple implementations"? A shared public codebase is often the best standard. Like Alan Kay says, any textual standard of more than five lines is ambiguous. On that Sqlite issue, see: http://diveintohtml5.info/stor... "All of which brings us to the following disclaimer, currently residing at the top of the Web SQL Database specification: "This specification has reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path. Until another implementor is interested in implementing this spec, the description of the SQL dialect has been left as simply a reference to Sqlite, which isn't acceptable for a standard. ""
Instead of that well engineered Sqlite library, we now get a half-baked "IndexedDB" standard as Firefox refuses to support Web SQL as Sqlite even though Sqlite is already baked into the F
What motivates people is autonomy, increasing mastery, and a sense of purpose. See Dan Pink's talk: "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us " https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Or look at the writing of Alfie Kohn: http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic... http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic... http://www.alfiekohn.org/punis... http://www.shareintl.org/archi... " "We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life." These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."
Progress or "advancement" in what direction is another good question to ask yourself. Is it a good idea to more quickly advance off a cliff? For example, the World Wide Web might have been a much better place and the web browser might have been a much better tool if not for all the effort various groups have put into undermining web standards for private gain (for example, Microsoft in the early years). The problem with a lot of competition is it encourages people to use power (including political power) to private gains while socializing costs, and that can be very costly and unpleasant overall for a community. Once can have *diversity* without explicit *competition*. What it takes is something like a basic income, easy subsistence production, free-or-cheap-to-the-user planned infrastructure, or some other means of ensuring people have the time and resources to create.
If our culture was as aggressive as the Romans, maybe the Earth would be a nuclear wasteland by now? Although, as "I, Claudius" suggests, a lot of Roman aggression was turned in on itself at some point, with political murders including of the leaders who might otherwise have made Rome a better place. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... "During the prosperous reign of Augustus, he is plagued by personal losses as his favored heirs, Marcellus, Marcus Agrippa, Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar, die at varying points. Claudius reveals that these untimely deaths are all the machinations of Augustus' cold wife Livia, who seeks to make her son Tiberius succeed Augustus.... As Tiberius becomes more hated, he increasingly relies on his Praetorian Captain Sejanus who is able to make Tiberius fear Germanicus' wife Agrippina and his own son Castor. Sejanus secretly plots with Livilla to usurp the monarchy by poisoning Castor and beginning to remove any ally of Agrippina and her sons.... Caligula soon loses his mind, after recovering from
If we did not have weapons based on the tools of abundance like nuclear bombs as a result of harnessing abundant nuclear energy, aggression out-of-control would not be such a big global issue and threat (even if aggression could always be a local issue). Ironically, harnessing nuclear power and other forms of advanced technology that could produce abundance (including abundant destruction) like robots and new materials has removed the reasons for much aggression over material goods, but we still are stuck in our old mindset emphasizing aggression as a way to deal with material scarcity. So, for example, we are ready to use nuclear energy in the form of nuclear weapons delivered by robotic cruise missiles whose batteries were charged by solar panels to fight over oil fields on the other side of the planet from us -- instead of using nuclear energy (or robot-constructed solar panels or whatever) to generate power locally. Image what the 21st century could have been like without two Word Wars if 1910s and 1930s Germany had worked towards breakthroughs in solar power and energy efficiency and agricultural efficiency instead of trying to steal someone else's coal and land. Now Germany focuses inward on innovation and efficiency and is peaceful and the economic powerhouse of the European Union.
I wrote about this broad issue at length here: "Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)" http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... "The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue...."
All that said, cooperation within groups has also been a key trait of human beings. "No contest: the case against competition" http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
But it is true that humans tend to have in group cooperation and out-group competition, something E.O. Wilson has written about. And human mating rituals also often revolve around proving something to stand out from the crowd, like James P. Hogan touches on in "Voyage From Yesteryear" depicting a culture where people compete by demonstrating excellence in some area. So, again, the biggest issue is not aggression or competition itself, but how those impulses are culturally directed. As. Mr. Fred Rogers' sang: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" That is the question.
BTW, bacteria are actually the dominant species on this planet,:-) and we forge
You can enter the below short JavaScript script in the text box, and then push the "View Below" button to create a new div for the window which will pop up the alert as part of displaying itself.
<script>
alert("hello");
</script>
If you enter a Data ID for the text and a User ID for yourself (can be almost anything) and click "Store" you will store that text in the web browser's local storage.
I wrote that about a year ago. It works under Firefox on Mac OS 10.6. It may not work as well elsewhere; for example Firefox under Win7 didn't work for some reasons when I tried it yesterday (but probably a minor error to fix). I do not know how it will perform on most mobile systems, but again, in theory, it should work or otherwise be relatively easy to fix. Here is the source code with more information: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
You can also enter any HTML you want there, like to create buttons or divs or anything you want. Examples can be loaded by imported the text below into the editor using "Import and Merge" and then you can click "List all IDs" and select an item like "polar clock" to view it below (that example is a graphical clock, written by someone else using D3): https://raw.githubusercontent....
A different approach to doing something like that if you are willing to host a NodeJS server somewhere is this other code I wrote: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
However, if you go that route, there are quite a few web services that support remote coding through the browser on hosted platforms. For example, "Cloud 9": https://c9.io/
Slashdot Mirror
See: https://archive.org/details/Th...
And: http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
More links on how schooling is not about education, and how schooling is a form of (prison-like) adoption:
http://p2pfoundation.net/John_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Check out John Holt, too. That's all a big reason we homeschool/unschool.
More links: http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Enjoyed your informative post from the trenches, thanks! Especially your point about teacher incentives. You get what you measure -- so, as you imply, if you incentivize teachers to dumb down kids faster and better, that's what you'll get more of.
Long term, I feel a basic income may be part of the answer:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
As for what you can do in the short-term, it's tough. If you walk away, your (virtually adopted) kids will suffer. And you'll lose your income in a tough economy.. And one less voice for change in the system will be lost. But it's a painful situation if you care about what you do (although you run a high risk of burnout). Don't know what to advise, but at least you are not alone! :-)
AC wrote: "We've lost the arms race for content over presentation in this medium. Pages with perhaps a kilobyte of text take over a megabyte to download and 10 seconds to render. Firefox is mortally wounded. Safari and Opera are hobbled. Chrome is a trojan horse. Guys, I think the Gopher people were right."
This is a very insightful AC post. That is a big part part of why for the last week (since hearing about the Thunderbird uncertainty) as a sprint, I've been working towards a webapp / server called Twirlip as a proof-of-concept for a server version of Thunderbird. The idea is to support the same functionality as Thunderbird (and more) but use standard Firefox as the client loading a Thunderbird-like webapp from a local Node.js server. The project repository is currently here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
The sprint is not "blessed" by Mozilla or the Thunderbird Council at the moment. It is just my own take on things and to demonstrate what is possible. And given I just blew all our cash/credit writing another FOSS project (NarraFirma, a webapp in TypeScript/Mithril/D3 with Node.js and WordPress backends) over the past year or so, financially, this is so stupid for me to be doing right now instead of finding a paying job. :-)
That said, the leader of the Thunderbird Council (Kent James) suggested in September considering making Thunderbird into a webapp, so the idea is not completely new, or presumably unwelcome as a proof-of-concept demo:
"Future Planning: Thunderbird as a Web App"
https://mail.mozilla.org/piper...
"As we are discussing our future, both in relation to radical changes expected in the Mozilla platform, and our need to express where we are going to potential partners and donors, we need to discuss and agree on some big-picture issues. One of those was end-to-end encryption that we discussed recently. I want to discuss here our future platform, and how it related to users and their needs.
tl;dr Thunderbird over the next 3 years needs to convert to being a web app that can run on any browser that supports ES6 Javascript and HTML5. (web app does not imply cloud-based, only that the underlying platform is js/html)."
Here is an update on my last week's progress sent to the Thunderbird Planning list.
https://mail.mozilla.org/piper...
I've used Thunderbird for over a decade, and have a million messages in it totaling over 15 GB (mainly from a bunch of mailing lists). I know of others who have 50 GB in it. So, I'm obviously concerned about its future.
All that said, there is no immediate reason to panic. Thunderbird still works well for what it does.
In looking into this issue though, maintaining Thunderbird is apparently difficult though because the codebase includes a copy of Firefox, which bloats the source code by 20X or more up to about a gigabyte of mostly C++.Any security patch to Firefox needs to be evaluated and then likely integrated into Thunderbird to keep it secure. That may be the biggest issue -- and it is worse now that Mozilla has essentially defunded Thunderbird over the last few years to make it a "community" project, so synergy has been lost with the Firefox development team. (SeaMonkey, formerly the Mozilla application suite, is in the same boat and uses essentially the same codebase.) Thunderbird itself also has a lot of XUL to define UI functionality, but Mozilla has deprecated XUL (not reasonably, but there are consequences) creating an obvious future maintenance issue of sizable proportions. Thunderbird plugins likewise are written with XUL. So, while Thunderbird can be maintained, given that codebase and the size and the need to closely track Firefox, maintenance is hard and probably not a lot of fun (given the C++ and XUL) as a legacy thing.
As others have said, this i
The title says the main idea, but here are some more details in my usual rambling style... :-)
== More details (and should be better/conciser, but headache plus other stuff to do)
When you wake up in the early morning before sunrise, you may feel you need to turn on a lightbulb to get around safely otherwise in the dark. That lightbulb seems blindingly bright -- so bright you can't look at it. You need that lightbulb though. Then, hours later, after the sun is up, you may forget the lightbulb is even on -- it is bright everywhere, and the bulb hardly stands out. Is that the story of Slashdot? As well as the story of many other tech innovations and communities and individuals (perhaps even myself)? These tools, communities, and individuals help bootstrap something greater and then just fade into the background.
As a different analogy, each year, seeds produce the next generation of plants that produce more seeds, but generations later, who thinks of (or thanks) the seeds from years ago that made everything possible? It remains important for our own mental health to be thankful for the past generations that made our life possible (an idea very strong in some Native American culture, and even made into politics by C. H. Douglas and Social Credit) -- but it is perhaps too much to expect direct gratitude for our own contributions. "We do what we must because we can"? :-) Or maybe because we "should". Or even just because it was "fun" (a preference for fun perhaps shaped by millions of years of evolution and selection for survival). Sure, some people get remembered and celebrated because they won some commercial popularity contest (Edison, Gates, Jobs), but most just get mostly forgotten (Steinmetz/Tesla, Kildall, Wozniak/Wayne). Even Doug Engelbart's obituary did not even get a full open article on the Slashdot home page, just a title line (and I and others complained about that at the time). People like Peter H. Huyck & Nellie W. Kremenak (who wrote the very insightful "Design & Memory: Computer Programming in the 20th Century" in 1980) get essentially no mention, as does William Kent (who wrote "Data & Reality" in 1978). I'm continually amazed how little mention Smalltalk (Kay, Ingalls, Goldberg, etc.) gets these days -- it seems almost entirely forgotten, even if Java and now JavaScript is step-by-step reinventing most of it (often badly) -- even as the Smalltalk community struggles on, and when I squint just right, I see the web as a Smalltalk image Theodore Sturgeon envisioned ubiquitous mobile networked wearable nanotech-built computing in the 1950s in "The Skills of Xanadu", which inspired Ted Nelson and other technologists (myself included), but who remembers him for that? Chuck Moore (Forth) and James Martin (everything IT) likewise are near forgotten at this point, as far as their name coming up much in discussion. Even Clifford Berry and John Vincent Atanassoff are pretty much forgotten, even given their Atanasoffâ"Berry Computer (ABC) the main reasons digital computing was not burdened with core patents early on. And those are just a few I know who are public or published figures. And that does not include the people like high school teachers Jack Woelfel, Joe Maurer, David Gray, or many others (including my father) who made a big difference in my own personal computing education (but few others would ever hear of outside of where I grew up).
I can also look at old computer magazines and catalogs from decades ago and see so much diversity of hardware ideas before the PC monoculture took over. Still, as Manuel De Landa said, uniformity at one level can promote diversity at another. A lot of different software has been built on the Windows/Intel hardware/OS monoculture. Hardware and OS diversity seems also to be going up again with Smartphones and Chromebooks. Although again, with lots of soon to be forgotten developers -- even if it may mean a lot to the developer and their local community and successors that they did what they did. An
And a major reason people want to control other people is... getting needed resources. :-)
Of course, since "needed resources" for some people can include specific mates (who need to be impressed or dominated or whatever), there is complexity there. James P. Hogan talks about the issue of achieving status in a post-scarcity economy in his 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
But, while prestige and status of a country relative to other countries is a cause of war (including to deter aggression), the personal level of status is rarely the reason entire nations are convinced into going to war. That is true even if personal status among leaders may have something to do with why leaders try to convince their countries to foolishly go to war.
For example, in this survey of the causes of war in 2008, every one except the top one of "ideological change" essentially comes down to control of resources.
"Why wars happen"
http://www.economist.com/node/...
And I'd suggest even "ideological change" most often has a strong component of access to resources in order to manage them in specific ways (for example, having enough territory to implement some vision of some form of law or politics).
Anyway, this is a complex topic. There are many lists of reasons on why wars happen. I'm trying to say that issues of perceived scarcity drive a lot of them. Also, scarcity-thinking also often keeps people on a treadmill where they never seem to have time to learn about alternative ways of handling conflict than knee-jerk violence. And then further, fighting over perceived scarcity with super powerful tools of abundance (like computer code that can cause billions of potentially useful things to happen all at once across the world) is what creates the biggest current risks (like nuclear war). Without these tools of abundance like computers, communications, nanotech, biotech, nuclear power, advanced materials, rocketry, and so on, we would not be worried about the end of the human race by just some few people in one small area throwing rocks at each other.
As I wrote here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... ...
" Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's s
Yeah...
Interesting read, thanks! So true, you comments reflect the adage "taxes are the price we pay for civilization..." And also, capitalism tends toward privatizing gains and socializing costs...
If you see my other posts above though, I am not concerned about the technology to feed the world even without the Haber process (and perhaps better without it). As at this link, we have the technology through organic farming:
"Can Organic Farming Feed Us All?"
http://www.worldwatch.org/node...
Whether we have the political will is a different issue, with so many vested interests in the current synthetic-chemical-based agricultural system.
Another aspect of this craziness:
http://www.seriouseats.com/200...
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
Human waste includes urine, which is part of "night soil".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
But yes, "night soil" could only be part of a system. But there are other parts, as mentioned in a section quoted at the end.
I don't know about England specifically, or later years, but this says:
"Population and Economy : From Hunger to Modern Economic Growth"
https://books.google.com/books...
"According to official Chinese statistics, by the middle of the 18 century, population density was already over 500 people per cultivated sq. km (see Liang 1980: 400, 546). While these numbers are undoubtedly exaggerated owning to under-registration of cultivated acreage (ho 1995), the contrast with 18th-cent. Europe, where 1 sq. km of cultivated acreage supported 70 people, is quite extreme (see Braudel 1981a: 56-64)."
Much of China is just not that cultivated because of mountains and deserts and such (especially in the West).
Organic agriculture is indeed information and labor intensive -- which is why robotics will revolutionize it -- including robots to pick specific insects off of plants.
On fertilizer loss, see:
http://www.wri.org/our-work/pr...
"Between 1960 and 1990, global use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer increased more than sevenfold, while phosphorus use more than tripled. Studies have shown that fertilizers are often applied in excess of crop needs (MA 2005). The excess nutrients are lost through volatilization (when nitrogen vaporizes in the atmosphere in the form of ammonia), surface runoff (Figure 2), and leaching to groundwater. On average, about 20 percent of nitrogen fertilizer is lost through surface runoff or leaching into groundwater (MA 2005). Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and nitrogen in manure that is spread on fields is also subject to volatilization. Under some conditions, up to 60 percent of the nitrogen applied to crops can be lost to the atmosphere by volatilization (University of Delaware Cooperative Extension 2009); more commonly, volatilization losses are 40 percent or less (MA 2005). A portion of the volatilized ammonia is redeposited in waterways through atmospheric deposition. Phosphorus, which binds to the soil, is generally lost through soil erosion from agricultural lands."
Comparisons to medicine... Don't get me started. :-) Doctors typically have only a few hours of education about nutrition over the course of several years of study, yet poor nutrition is the root of most Western disease. So, the whole medical community is (profitably for itself) misdirecting its efforts as far as priorities. Sure there is much alternative medicine that is bogus, but the parts based on nutritional research (e.g. Dr. Fuhrman's work) is quite good overall. Yet it is not mainstream. What is mainstream is stuff like "stents", which studies actually show are mostly worthless. For example:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions. Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive
Typo: "especially away from agriculture" should be "especially away from livestock agriculture"
"And where does nitrogen in food come from?"
It's in part a cycle -- land to humans to waste to land. Only in part as nitrogen can oxidize to go back to the air, so it needs to get fixed again by bacteria.
"Very little fertilizer is lost in modern agriculture in relative terms."
First, 40% of food in the USA is wasted. So, all that fertilizer is wasted. Food produced closer to home might not incur so much waste.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
But that is not what I meant. This is what I meant:
http://www.scientificamerican....
"Fertilizer Runoff Overwhelms Streams and Rivers--Creating Vast "Dead Zones"
The nation's waterways are brimming with excess nitrogen from fertilizer--and plans to boost biofuel production threaten to aggravate an already serious situation"
"Pathogens are not a problem, they are outcompeted by soil bacteria during composting."
Composting doesn't always get everything, as compost piles have edges and heat zones, and all that depends on careful management. Also, compost is contaminated by chemicals people dispose in the waste stream (chemicals from home darkrooms used to be a big issue) and also pharmaceuticals flushed down toilets.
"China's population grew 3 _times_ during the last century virtually without increasing the land use, because of the fertilizers and pesticides."
The fact that China's population may now need more inputs given growth in the last century since the Haber process does nothing to invalidate that they managed large (but not quite so large) populations for 3900 years before that without the Haber process. What that shows is that alternatives have worked. China is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. If they could do it, it shows the US could do it and other countries could do it.
"Still won't work. You'll need livestock for manure (to concentrate nitrogen and other nutrients). "
I agree that much current "organic agriculture" is dependent on livestock manure from conventional farming which is based mostly on feeding conventionally farmed grain (not pasture grass) to animals, and so there is a big nitrogen input there. That said, given a change in land uses patterns (especially away from agriculture), and with more nutrient recycling, and with intercropping and crop rotations and ground up rock dust, likely we could feed the planet well without the Haber process. I'll admit it would be good to back that with more numbers.
"And agricultural robots are a pipe dream."
Did you do the slightest research on them?
"Are agricultural robots ready? 27 companies profiled"
http://robohub.org/are-agricul...
"Unlike you, I actually helped to grow my own food (lean years after the USSR collapse) so I appreciate the amount labor required for that."
I'm sorry you had to go through that involuntarily due to crazy geopolitics and economics that cause that crisis. Still, you can't compare what you presumably had to do with limited tools and limited materials and limited information in a (probably) limited climate on impoverished soils with what is really possible with good tools, abundant materials, abundant information, in a good climate on well prepared soils.
Still, how do you know what foods I've grown or what I've studied?
"And I also worked with the Great Evil (Monsanto) on actual modern agriculture to appreciate the difference."
I see. I'll try not to assume that context might explain a lot. :-) Still, at the very least, it may be something like how someone who works with Microsoft products a lot might never think that open source software is possible or even better sometimes? Have you studied organic agriculture? Have you read Wid
Respectfully, I suggest you research these issues further to avoid spreading confusion on them.
For example, while humans don't fix nitrogen, human waste contains a lot of nitrogen from food that is eaten. For example, by one calculation
http://www.agriculturesnetwork...
"Roughly estimated, at least 800 million kg nitrogen, 400 million kg phosphate and 500 million kg potash can be annually acquired from night soil produced in urban areas. This is equivalent to some 4 million tonnes of commercial fertiliser, which is about 4% of all commercial fertiliser used throughout the country."
Considering how much fertilizer is wasted in modern systems, you can see that this was a big deal in China as part of a closed cycle including other techniques to restore soil fertility. Granted there are other issues with pathogens and contamination from "night soil", but nonetheless, China is an example of doing wihout the Haber process for 4000 years and still supporting big populations by other means.
Historically, rotational field cropping has also been used to replenish the soil. Also, intercropping can boost nitrogen levels in intensive agriculture;
"Intercropping with nitrogen-fixing crops leads to increased maize yields, says study"
http://www.enn.com/agriculture...
"Results show that while mono cropping practices produce a high yield crop, it is not the sustainable solution in the long run. Instead, the research suggests that by strategically combining small doses of inorganic fertilizer through an intercropping system, maize yields will be more stable and will not only increase, but will lead to other ecosystem services like soil stability, water storage capacity and overall fertility. "
Integrated agricultural systems such as involving water from fish ponds and such can also increase nitrogen in agriculture..
I've cited sources for my points, including how excessive nitrogen fertilizer causes micronutrient loss. While nitrogen is often a limiting nutrient, the point is that it can displace other nutrients very easily, causing other issues. Beyond clay, organic matter also holds onto micronutrients. This is one reason "organic" farming focuses on building up the organic matter content of soils to increase nutrient holding capacity. "Feed the soil and keep it healthy for healthy plants" is the motto there. By contrast, conventional agriculture essentially uses the soil to prop up plants, and tends to produce lush green growth with excessive nitrogen, but the plants are otherwise weak and unhealthy and susceptible to disease. There are other broader problems from excess nitrogen too:
http://www.vision.org/visionme...
Please cite sources etc. substantiating your various points especially disagreeing with the loss of micronutrients (which is basic chemistry, if usually ignored in mainstream agriculture which tends to maximize empty calories) in order for this to be a more productive dialog.
Here's the bottom line on at least US agriculture. Almost everything grown just goes to feed animals, and eating too many animal products is bad for people's health, as is eating too many refined grains (another big part of the rest of US agriculture). So really, all this discussion about fertilizer in that sense is besides the point in many ways. See:
http://www.westernwatersheds.o...
"Cropland- About 349 million acres in the U.S. are planted for crops. This is the equivalent of about four states the size of Montana. Four crops -- feeder corn (80 million acres), soybeans (75 million acres), alfalfa hay (61 million acres) and wheat (62 million acres) -- make up 80 percent of total crop acreage. All but wheat are prima
China has been doing it for Millennia; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"In 1909, American agronomist F.H. King toured China, Korea and Japan, studying traditional fertilization, tillage and general farming practices. He wrote his observations and findings in Farmers of Forty Centuries, Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan (1911, published shortly after his death by his wife, Carrie Baker King; numerous facsimile reprintings, including Courier Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-43609-8, and Rodale Press, ISBN 0-87857-867-6). King lived in an era preceding synthetic nitrogen fertilizer production and before the use of the internal combustion engine for farm machinery, yet he was profoundly interested in the challenge of farming the same soils in a 'permanent' manner, hence his interest in the agricultural practices of ancient cultures. In recent years, his book became an important organic farming reference."
"Night soil" was part of the answer -- recycling human waste back to the fields. We have modern versions of composting toilets like the Clivus Multrum that can do much the same in a more sanitary way.
Conventional "slow release" fertilizers are generally different than ground up rock dust. See this site for what is possible:
http://remineralize.org/
On micronutrients, most people in agriculture don't understand this, so it is not a surprise you don't either. I'd suggest you read Widdowson's book. It is basic chemistry. Essentially, the clay and organic matter in soil has only so much holding capacity for nutrients released by the slow decay of rocks and the faster decay of organic matter. If you flood that capacity with nitrogenous compounds, statistically you end up with a lot of nitrogen and very little of everything else. There is another process that also goes on related to reducing the soil's holding capacity as the pH drops and clay particles change their electric charge. Thus your plants don't have access to micronutrients they need to make plant defense compounds and so they are weak and sickly and need additional protection like by synthetic pesticides and such. If Haber had spent more time studying agricultural chemistry instead of figuring out how to kill people, he might have learned this and then come up with better solutions. See this diagram on page 11 of Widdowson's book for more details:
http://books.google.com/books?...
True to some extent, but imagination and innovation can create resources where there were none before. Trees grow wood mostly just from CO2 in the air and water. Germany has plenty of those. Many new materials are essentially plastic or carbon fiber. Germany could have invented all that with chemistry instead of going to war. That it did not is a failure of the German imagination back then.
Right now, the state-of-the-art in Germany for a new home is not to even need a furnace:
"No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in 'Passive Houses'"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12...
"DARMSTADT, Germany â" From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace. "
Other things I've written about that, including another "Downfall" parody where Hitler rails against abundance and open source and productive imaginative engineers: :-)
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Granite can be melted into building material and also separated into a variety of elements. Seawater has just about every element in it and Germany has access to the sea. It may be more profitable to get something like aluminum from a specific ore abundant in it, but with the right technology and enough energy (like from fusion power), you can get pretty much any element anywhere on the planet. Ignoring what is possibly now or soon with nanotechnology, here are the basic chemical paths proposed around 1980 for use in turning lunar ore (basically granite) into a variety of materials:
"Flowsheet and process equations for the HF acid-leach process"
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/...
So, Germany could (in theory) have done that all instead of launching two world wars for "lebensraum" and access to foreign materials -- if it had invested more in the chemistry of production than the chemistry of destruction.
Germany does have some limited iron production, BTW; but not much. However, Germany probably also has a lot more as-yet-undiscovered ores and such in mountains and underground (like perhaps a mile or two down). They are just harder to find or get to than ones that are obvious from the surface. But if Germany had made more of an effort, including creation of better technologies for prospecting for ores, maybe it would have found various ores at home? Also, while I'm not a big fan of seabed mining for environmental reasons, that is another possibility, and in any case, they show the possibility of finding new resources by looking deep within the earth:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...
"Mr. Dettweiler has now turned from recovering lost treasures to prospecting for natural ones that litter the seabed: craggy deposits rich in gold and silver, copper and cobalt, lead and zinc. A new understanding of marine geology has led to the discovery of hundreds of these unexpected ore bodies, known as massive sulfides because of their sulfurous nature."
Also, I've read that one reason Germany did so much for so long militarily in WWII (as imports were cut off) was that it put in place an intensive recycling program. Ignoring the holocaust and forced labor parts of it, it showed what was possible (discussed I think in the book "Other Homes and Garbage". As you imply, right now the automotive industry has become a net producer of metal from car recycling. But, even granted the industry needed some meta
A basic income is like social security payments every month regardless of your age or whether you work. A minimum wage is the smallest amount an employer can pay you if you work. The two are completely different things, even though both benefit the poor in different ways. A basic income benefits (almost) everyone though, regardless of your wage.
Despite the AC post that is a sibling of this suggesting both a basic income and a minimum wage are needed, I tend to agree with the grandparent poster who suggests that with a basic income we can dispense with a minimum wage and other similar protections in exchange. A basic income is far, far better than a minimum wage. Economically, a minimum wage is only going to accelerate the automation of most jobs as well. That may not be a bad thing by itself, but automation is bad for many people without a basic income when people need a job to survive in our society.
That's one of the appeals of a basic to conservatives, and a reason something like a basic income was passed by the US House (but failed barely in the Senate) around 1970 in the USA. It was defeated in part by some liberal Senators thinking the proposal was not good enough (also with some conservative opposition), and sadly it has not come up again significantly since. Senator Daniel Moynihan wrote a book about the politics of a basic income back then.
With a basic income, most people can be more choosy about where they work, which is going to put pressure on companies to voluntarily adhere to better labor standards. Should that be a problem in practice, other labor protections could be revisited -- and a working populace with a basic income would have more time for political engagement about all that. Frankly, the benefits of the basic income politically for most people are probably one reason it has been back-burnered for so long.
However, that said, I also feel universal health care (at a minimum, Medicare for all) should also be part of any basic income program -- along with other health care reforms (like Andrew Weil or Joel Fuhrman or Blue Zones talk about) to focus more on prevention especially through good nutrition as well as things like promoting exercise, social interactions, music, meditation or similar, yoga or similar, and so on.
The reason why these questions of economics and a basic income and jobs and health care and so forth all matter in the context of chemical weapons of mass destruction is that whether countries go to war often hinges on all these factors. Socio-economic factors often drive war, for multiple reasons, including war is a convenient way to get a populace distracted from focusing on other domestic economic failings of leadership. A populace that is reasonably happy as-is may be less likely to support war for things like "lebensraum" or "oil profits" or whatever. And if citizens are not kept busy with make work, they would have more time to participate in the democratic process as well as educate themselves about current issues including war profiteering and the true cost of war. Citizens would also have more time to invent the next breakthrough to further prosperity, whether hot or cold fusion, useful domestic robots powered by free and open source software, new information management tools, innovative new products and materials by observing nature like how we got Velcro, and so on. They of course also would have more money on a regular basis (regardless of the ups and down of "employment") to actually purchase products produced locally. That might mean business (guided by steady-state non-expansive economic theory based on reliable demand given a basic income) might have less incentive to look abroad for "markets" and so to foster a militarism that enforces the openness of such markets at gunpoint (as with, say, the Opium war of the USA and Britain and such again China to force acceptance of Western-supplied narcotics into China, or with various more recent US interventions abroad related to oil profits or natural gas profits).
http://someonewhocares.org/hos...
That song, "Peter Paul and Mary: Because All Men Are Brothers", reminds me of the new movie "Senn" which we watched last night. Specifically, the PPM lyrics of: "My brother's fears are my fears, yellow white and brown. My brother's tears are my tears the whole wide world around."
"Senn" is an impressive movie, especially considering it was produced supposedly for only US$15000. That goes to show what modern technology and an internet-connected gift economy can do nowadays.
http://sennition.com/
This is a bit of a spoiler, but the connection is because of a key aspect of the movie's plot relates to humans' feeling each others emotions and how that changes how they behave, especially in a corporate context.
Which also reminds me of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"In addition, Iacoboni has argued that mirror neurons are the neural basis of the human capacity for emotions such as empathy."
And some people labelled sociopaths or psychopaths may not have much of these feelings or may feel them more selectively.
"Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch"
http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
Yet many of our corporate and political leaders at these point may fit that description...
And what do you do with various criminals who often engage in psychopathic behavior? And by whose definitions? Put your "brother" in jail?
And in a big city, given out current economic paradigm, people may also need to learn to switch off or decrease empathy in some way just to survive thousands of interpersonal encounters an hour when walking down the street...
On this plane of existence, there seems to be a complexity of human (and other) life existing in practice at a middle ground between chaos and stasis, competition and cooperation, fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, and so on.
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
The Lathe of Heaven (as another spoiler) has a section where the protagonist wishes for "world peace", and it is accomplished by the appearance of an alien invasion of the moon, which unites all humanity in opposition...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
So, while we should be careful what we wish for, and things are complex, still, there are so many possible environmental menaces that more cooperation is in order, IMHO. But it is never quite so simple as "all men are brothers". After all, sadly, even "brothers" sometimes fight each other like in the US Civil War.
Still, our culture may shape how competition or aggression is expressed or channeled into more positive directions. Like Mr. Fred Rogers' sings: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" As with Haber, a chemist can figure out a way to feed billions of people with nitrogenous fertilizer, or they can figure out how to kill large numbers of people with poison gas, or, in Haber's case, a chemist can even do both. The irony is that Haber's doing the first (to feed people) made doing the second (to kill people) unnecessary -- except that politics has taken a century to catch up with the potential of his (and others') inventions.
Likewise, even now, imagine what we could have had if the USA had invested three trillion US dollars on fusion energy research and better batteries and solar panels and energy efficiency -- instead of incurring that much and more on the Iraq war. Carter had the right idea, but he was not re-elected, even though (or perhaps because) he said:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of f
Haber created a way to feed billions of people via nitrogen fertilizers(*), but then Haber supports a war based in large part on the idea there is not enough to go around and people need to steal each others land...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Sad to read Haber's first wife, who disapproved of Haber's poison gas work, committed suicide right after the first use of her husband's poison gas in war. Guess when something like that happens you either change or you embrace cognitive dissonance and dig in even further... See:
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts"
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes...
"Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception -- how it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it."
(*) This is ignoring we now know ground-up rock dust and legumes etc. can do that too -- see: http://remineralize.org/ Also, excess nitrogen displaces other vital micronutrients which is why organic farming practices using things like slow-acting rock dust produce healthier plants and probably healthier people. See:
"Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach"
http://www.amazon.com/Towards-...
"This book explains the use of an ecological way of farming, with modern practical applications, to make the fullest use of land resources and the best utilization of available capital and labour. In analyzing the vital relationship between soil, plant, animal and man, the author discusses the best care of land itself, its components, grassland management and the most efficient use of crops to maximize yield, food quality and profitability without the extensive use of chemicals and without damaging the ecology. Widdowson also covers the holistic approach to animal farming, the welfare and health of poultry, cattle, sheep and goats, their nutritional needs through the various stages of their lives, and the best way to balance their diets."
That is why I feel the point in my sig is so essential for everyone to understand it the 21st century (although it has always been important, but gets increasingly important as our technology gets increasingly powerful): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
I guess it depends on how much everyone learns from history or example. Of course, it's been joked that those who study history are condemned to watch others repeat it... :-(
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
Those changes to Germany came from the values of a 1930s/1940s USA.
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/2...
"How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
But, sadly, that USA and its values effectively no longer exist 70-80 years later. Today's USA has different values -- some are better (less racism and sexism overall, more respect for the environment), others are worse (less respect for workers, the "two-income trap", policies that promote a greater rich/poor divide, and more meddling in other nation's affairs which may produce profits for some connected few but produces huge costs for the whole USA let along the disrupted countries).
The real issue may be, like Gandhi is claimed to have said when asked by a journalist: "What do you think of Western civilization?", he said, "I think it would be a good idea."
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2...
At this point, as US citizen, I'm much more concerned about what the US government does both abroad and at home (including stuff like supporting a repressive Saudi Arabia, other actions abroad that make terrorist blowback more likely, domestic cage-like "free speech zones", domestic rulings saying border patrols can operate in a constitution-ignoring way up to 100 miles inland, etc.) -- than what people in the Middle East cradle of civilization do. And I remain always aware there are large numbers of nuclear weapons still ready to fly on short notice...
http://politics.slashdot.org/s...
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/2...
So, what will it take to civilize the USA? A basic income might be a start...
A Pete Seeger song, likewise covered by Peter, Paul and Mary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.metrolyrics.com/whe...
====
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young girls gone?
Gone for husbands everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the husbands gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the husbands gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the husbands gone?
Gone for soldiers everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers, everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
===
See also on the Bob Dylan backstory for "Blowing in the Wind": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://www.npr.org/2000/10/21/...
And for another part of that picture, from a US Major General Smedley Butler :
http://www.ratical.org/ratvill...
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill r
Chemical weapons are ironic because any country capable of producing them like WWI Germany is capable of using chemistry instead of produce material abundance for the world. Instead, it is ironic and tragic when people decide to use such tools of abundance from a scarcity mindset, killing other humans out of fear of competition for material things (and so snuffing out much diverse human imagination which might eventually produce even more abundance). Other paths are possible; look at how much a modern day Germany produces mainly from within its own borders through using innovation and well-compensated laborers.
More on that theme by me: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
As an example, and with its own problems, the Raspberry Pi has proved "good enough" for a lot of embedded companies, who just accept various tradeoffs to code in Python (or whatever) under Linux. In ten years, such hardware will be even cheaper and even better, and may have even better RTOS support:
http://pebblebay.com/raspberry...
Likewise and even more so for the truly free and open source Beagleboard family:
http://beagleboard.org/
What a far cry from the Kim-1 with 1K of memory I bought as a kid (with my father's help) for probably 50X in current dollars what a Rapsberry Pi or Beagleboard costs and supplies about 1GB memory. We even had to build the power supply ourselves. :-)
This is not to disagree with what you are saying right now. I know how hard and important all that work can be. But if better tools eventually let fewer engineers produce more projects in the same time, and cheaper hardware means less constraints, and other standards change expectations so customers know to work within them, than the need for managing such complexity (including the human side) may go down. Granted with a rising increase in an internet of things and robotics, embedded work may well still increase in demand for a decade or two until better standards come to dominate the field and change the nature of so many embedded tasks. So, for anyone already well enmeshed int he embedded field, it may well be a good gig for the next decade or two.
Anyway, for fun, to go through your list (a bit tongue in cheek, so not completely serous answers):
"First of all the robot would have to sit in meetings with the customer understanding what the customer wants, telling him what can't be done and outlining alternative solutions in dumbed down language the customer understands. It should tell the customer if some of his choices will raise the cost (Yes, in theory the hardware can do X but the current drivers can't)."
This can be replaced in part by a web interface where the customer clicks on options and the software tells them if the combination is allowed.
"It would have to write an offer listing everything that the customer wants to have implemented but worded so he can't expect more for his money. It has to be worded so that sales people and management understand enough to agree to the price written at the bottom."
Again, web backend generates this based on web interface choices.
"It needs to understand all documentation provided by the customer and it needs to be able to find more. It also needs to know who it can ask for an undocumented detail. Currently documentation includes data sheets, Doxygen like API descriptions, articles, standards, schematics, forum discussions, RCS commit messages, source code, and books but there will probably be a new form designed to be understood by machines. It is also useful to remember everything the customer said even if it might turn out to be wrong."
This could be mostly replaced by machine-readable standards as you suggest.
"It has to know sources of errors. Documentation can have errors. There can be errors in the design of the hardware. The hardware might be faulty (f.ex. bad solder joints) and you need to know what will destroy the hardware (no you can't configure that GPIO to output a low value). It has to fix simple errors itself (yes, I did have to solder some jumper wires and pull up resistors in the past few years). If it can't fix the error, it has to discuss the problem with someone who can. If the problem won't be fixed (no we won't spin a new SoC revision for you) software workarounds have to be devised and the pros and cons have to be discussed with the customer. To be able to find errors, it has to know about software and hardware debugging techniques (printf debugging, Gdb, Valgrind, JTAG, oscilloscope probing, ...)."
Bad hardware becomes so cheap it is discarded. Twenty years ago O
I agree software now is a mess. I program in JavaScript for deployability, but it too is a mess, and much harder to work with than Smalltalk or even Java or Clipper. HyperCard was another great system for its time. Greed harmed several of these languages, Smalltalk and HyperCard especially, but even Java by keeping it proprietary for so long.
Ironically, compared to the article's suggestion, it seems the more code we have, the more programmers we need to keep up with it. :-) On economics, one might otherwise expect that the more infrastructure code there is, the less workers you need to build more of it. Otherwise, in general, I agree with C. H. Douglas that we benefit by building on the work of previous generations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."
As I see it though, we probably have about 99X+ more programmers than we need already, as far as core infrastructure. :-) For example, why did we need JavaScript when Smalltalk was a perfectly fine language that was better in many ways? How many accounting software packages do we really need? How many word processors? How many CAD tools? How many plugins do we need to just work around problems produced by endless similar formats? Do we really need so many image formats or audio formats (driven in part by patents)? Most programs out there are essentially needless variations on basic themes. Just like most new pharmaceuticals (90%) are "me too" drugs for rich people's problems.
Much of what programmers do in practice is (perhaps unintentionally) make work for each other. It may well be worse than the legal profession in that sense (where lawyers make work for each other or create or encourage conflicts). A lot of that comes from the nature of capitalism and competition vs. alternative economic forms based more on cooperation. Programmers typically can't freely share code or specs with others in different businesses, so everyone is always re-inventing the wheel and reverse engineering data structures and data formats and communications protocols, which create a proliferation of slightly different code bases with different edge cases.
For another example, why do we really need so many web browser engines? Also, why could not some web standards body accept Sqlite as the defacto web browser data storage engine because there were not "multiple implementations"? A shared public codebase is often the best standard. Like Alan Kay says, any textual standard of more than five lines is ambiguous. On that Sqlite issue, see:
http://diveintohtml5.info/stor...
"All of which brings us to the following disclaimer, currently residing at the top of the Web SQL Database specification: "This specification has reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path. Until another implementor is interested in implementing this spec, the description of the SQL dialect has been left as simply a reference to Sqlite, which isn't acceptable for a standard. ""
Instead of that well engineered Sqlite library, we now get a half-baked "IndexedDB" standard as Firefox refuses to support Web SQL as Sqlite even though Sqlite is already baked into the F
What motivates people is autonomy, increasing mastery, and a sense of purpose. See Dan Pink's talk:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Or look at the writing of Alfie Kohn:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/punis...
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
" "We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."
Progress or "advancement" in what direction is another good question to ask yourself. Is it a good idea to more quickly advance off a cliff? For example, the World Wide Web might have been a much better place and the web browser might have been a much better tool if not for all the effort various groups have put into undermining web standards for private gain (for example, Microsoft in the early years). The problem with a lot of competition is it encourages people to use power (including political power) to private gains while socializing costs, and that can be very costly and unpleasant overall for a community. Once can have *diversity* without explicit *competition*. What it takes is something like a basic income, easy subsistence production, free-or-cheap-to-the-user planned infrastructure, or some other means of ensuring people have the time and resources to create.
If our culture was as aggressive as the Romans, maybe the Earth would be a nuclear wasteland by now? Although, as "I, Claudius" suggests, a lot of Roman aggression was turned in on itself at some point, with political murders including of the leaders who might otherwise have made Rome a better place. ... As Tiberius becomes more hated, he increasingly relies on his Praetorian Captain Sejanus who is able to make Tiberius fear Germanicus' wife Agrippina and his own son Castor. Sejanus secretly plots with Livilla to usurp the monarchy by poisoning Castor and beginning to remove any ally of Agrippina and her sons. ... Caligula soon loses his mind, after recovering from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"During the prosperous reign of Augustus, he is plagued by personal losses as his favored heirs, Marcellus, Marcus Agrippa, Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar, die at varying points. Claudius reveals that these untimely deaths are all the machinations of Augustus' cold wife Livia, who seeks to make her son Tiberius succeed Augustus.
If we did not have weapons based on the tools of abundance like nuclear bombs as a result of harnessing abundant nuclear energy, aggression out-of-control would not be such a big global issue and threat (even if aggression could always be a local issue). Ironically, harnessing nuclear power and other forms of advanced technology that could produce abundance (including abundant destruction) like robots and new materials has removed the reasons for much aggression over material goods, but we still are stuck in our old mindset emphasizing aggression as a way to deal with material scarcity. So, for example, we are ready to use nuclear energy in the form of nuclear weapons delivered by robotic cruise missiles whose batteries were charged by solar panels to fight over oil fields on the other side of the planet from us -- instead of using nuclear energy (or robot-constructed solar panels or whatever) to generate power locally. Image what the 21st century could have been like without two Word Wars if 1910s and 1930s Germany had worked towards breakthroughs in solar power and energy efficiency and agricultural efficiency instead of trying to steal someone else's coal and land. Now Germany focuses inward on innovation and efficiency and is peaceful and the economic powerhouse of the European Union.
I wrote about this broad issue at length here: ..."
"Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)"
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
That's the big issue as I mention in my sig, and it plays out in other ways including with food, media, addiction, and so on as human traits adapted evolutionarily for scarcity cause difficulties when confronted with some sorts of modern abundance.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-...
http://www.nancycarlssonpaige....
http://dianeelevin.com/sosexys...
All that said, cooperation within groups has also been a key trait of human beings.
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...
But it is true that humans tend to have in group cooperation and out-group competition, something E.O. Wilson has written about. And human mating rituals also often revolve around proving something to stand out from the crowd, like James P. Hogan touches on in "Voyage From Yesteryear" depicting a culture where people compete by demonstrating excellence in some area. So, again, the biggest issue is not aggression or competition itself, but how those impulses are culturally directed. As. Mr. Fred Rogers' sang: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" That is the question.
BTW, bacteria are actually the dominant species on this planet, :-) and we forge
Try this: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/P...
You can enter the below short JavaScript script in the text box, and then push the "View Below" button to create a new div for the window which will pop up the alert as part of displaying itself.
<script>
alert("hello");
</script>
If you enter a Data ID for the text and a User ID for yourself (can be almost anything) and click "Store" you will store that text in the web browser's local storage.
I wrote that about a year ago. It works under Firefox on Mac OS 10.6. It may not work as well elsewhere; for example Firefox under Win7 didn't work for some reasons when I tried it yesterday (but probably a minor error to fix). I do not know how it will perform on most mobile systems, but again, in theory, it should work or otherwise be relatively easy to fix. Here is the source code with more information:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
You can also enter any HTML you want there, like to create buttons or divs or anything you want. Examples can be loaded by imported the text below into the editor using "Import and Merge" and then you can click "List all IDs" and select an item like "polar clock" to view it below (that example is a graphical clock, written by someone else using D3):
https://raw.githubusercontent....
A different approach to doing something like that if you are willing to host a NodeJS server somewhere is this other code I wrote:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
However, if you go that route, there are quite a few web services that support remote coding through the browser on hosted platforms. For example, "Cloud 9":
https://c9.io/