pidib pidip pidip pdawww... Or something like that as it wrote each line. And then the paper feed. And sometimes it furiously printing in both directions.... http://everything2.com/title/D...
AC wrote: http://jens.mooseyard.com/2009... "I could have told the Wave people about what I'd learned, except I didn't know Wave existed until April (shortly before the public announcement), and even then I was just some guy lost in the crowd at the demos....
Part of the problem, in both cases, is that live typing is one of those Cool Demo Features that looks really awesome when showing off the app. Features like that can be dangerous because they are legitimately very useful during the app's gestation, when exciting demos are a key survival trait; but then they can't be removed later on because they're so well-known, even if they turn out to be useless. Sometimes these features aren't actually harmful to the user experience, they just make the code more complex and harder to maintain. Instant typing is both, unfortunately."
William Norris, the founder of the company behind PLATO, was ahead of his time in other ways, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... "He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner cities and disadvantaged communities."
To be clear, my comment is more directed to the implication from the poster's point that a "basic income" itself is a "con" (assuming that was part of what was intended). There could indeed be any number of specific problems with this specific cryptocurrency proposal, including privacy or identity theft issues as raised by other posters. Building in a basic income aspect is an interesting way to get publicity for a cryptocurrency, but as I said, a good currency is backed by a community constitution, which is going to imply checks and balances and various safeguards. If those are not in place here, like to prevent identity theft, than that could be a big problem.
However, as another comparison, LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems) systems have helped a lot of communities, and may treat LETS currency more as a lose account of favors owed than more what we think of as hard currency. http://www.lets-linkup.com/ "Let me start by saying that the generally accepted view by all LETS people is that a LETS point is not cash, or federal currency, and I agree. However, I do not feel comfortable viewing LETS points as an alternative currency with an equivalent value in cash. I prefer to interpret LETS points as being like LETS favours. That has always made trading more enjoyable for me. I love doing favours for members and they show genuine appreciation for the favour - in LETS points. It doesn't get any better than that! I view LETS more like a voluntary self-help group where like-minded people in a local community give their time and experience to help their fellow members and feel welcomed to ask for the same in return... just as they would from family and friends. But rather than do all this helping without any recording at all, keeping LETS accounts allows the group to keep track of the members' activities so they can balance their trading activities fairly, knowing that once their accounts are back to zero, they have given to the group just as much as they have received. Basically, it's just a matter of keeping score and nothing more."
Also, tell that to senior citizens in the USA who almost all get a what is essentially a basic income from Social Security. Most seniors have *not* paid full value into that relative to what they expect to get out of it, so it is not like a retirement investment plan (even if people pay a tax that goes towards it when they work for wages). Social Security in the USA is essentially an income redistribution system, originally based on ten young workers to one elderly person (original recipients had not paid into the system) and now at about three young workers per elderly person. Personally, I feel it is unfair that the elderly in the USA get Medicare and Social Security when everyone else does not and these days reflects age discrimination backed by the political power of the elderly in the USA. Many young parents, for example, have a very hard lot, often caught between caring for their young children and their own elderly parents, while also needing to hold down a full-time job with increasingly worse benefits. A basic income would make it possible for more young parents to spend more time with their own young children while also caring for their own parents. I feel the resolution to the age discrimination issue there is to make the two programs of Medicare and Social Security available to every US citizen without discrimination based on age. We can then talk about eventually expanding those programs to all residents, legal or not, and then looking at doing it globally.
See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi... "One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?..."
Anyway, even while I'm not especially a fan of crypto currencies (good currencies need to be backed by a social constitution controlling their production IMHO), I applaud the experiment in this direction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... "f.lux is a computer program developed by Michael and Lorna Herf. It adjusts a computer display's color temperature according to its location and time of day, based on a user specified set of longitude and latitude geographical coordinates, a ZIP Code, or a city name. The program was designed to reduce eye strain during nighttime use and to prevent disruption of normal sleep patterns."
Yes, there is absolutely no reason these LEDs should not be a redder color. Brilliant point!
Good point on a bttery safety tool see my comment above, and the other comment on the GravityLight.
In my opinion, if Medicare and Social Security were available to all from birth, the USA would be a much happier and fairer society.
Your point on doctors for the elderly connects with my previous post here mentioning Philip Greenspun's writing on why women avoid academic science careers. http://slashdot.org/comments.p... "What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory."
Still, even given that, the fact is that we spend very little on medical research relative to the total amount we spend on medicine. If we spent, say, 20% of our US$2+ trillion annual medical budget on medical research, that would be US$400 billion a year, which is a lot of researchers. Likely such an investment would be tremendously cost-effective at avoiding costs. But we spend about 4%, and much of that is on "me too" drugs, like a fifth version of Viagra or whatever. http://www.researchamerica.org...
BTW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... "A major flaw and vulnerability in biomedical research appears to be the hypercompetition for the resources and positions that are required to conduct science. The competition seems to suppress the creativity, cooperation, risk-taking, and original thinking required to make fundamental discoveries. Other consequences of today's highly pressured environment for research appear to be a substantial number of research publications whose results cannot be replicated, and perverse incentives in research funding that encourage grantee institutions to grow without making sufficient investments in their own faculty and facilities. Other risky trends include a decline in the share of key research grants going to younger scientists, as well as a steady rise in the age at which investigators receive their first funding."
From November: http://tech.slashdot.org/story... "Google's 10-year run as Firefox's default search engine is over. Yahoo wants more search traffic, and a deal with Mozilla will bring it. In a major departure for both Mozilla and Yahoo, Firefox's default search engine is switching from Google to Yahoo in the United States."
I agree with another comment that what you are experiencing is a consequence of supply relative to demand for academic labor. This reflects a "big crunch" in the words of Dr. David Goodstein from 1994, then vice-provost of Caltech. He testified to Congress about this then too. Essentially, US academia had been growing exponentially since around 1900, but that era of exponential growth stopped in the 1970s, yet the production of PhDs continued at an exponential rate. There are other consequences of this trend, including "creeping credentialism" in all areas of US American life, including the social need for a college degree (or even sometimes masters now) as screening for the most basic entry-level jobs. I feel one answer to the pyramid scheme nature of all this is a "basic income" for all, because then anyoen who wanted to research or teach could live like a present day graduate student, but without the new to kowtow to a specific academic hierarchy just to survive economically (publishing in prestigious journals or getting access to expensive lab equipment might be a different issue...)
From the Goodstein article: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d... "The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover, much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights sent a whole generation back to college transforming the United States from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education. Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education. The American academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and technology. The expanding academic world in 1950-1970 created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D.s, whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American corporations such as AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to create or expand their central research laboratories to solve technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal government itself established a network of excellent national laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities for aspiring scientists. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.
By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific
I've heard about for or five years. While this sounds like a good concept to save money and danger from kerosene lamps, what do people do then? Still, even with planned obsolescence, such systems may still be very cost-effective. But it seems to me there might be better battery technologies one could pick? If not, I hope some sort of battery replacement and recycling program is thought about.
More on a related larger movement of design "Design for the Other 90 Percent: Innovating for the World's Poor" http://miter.mit.edu/articlede...
Of course, EF Schumacher and the "Appropriate Technology" movement was doing this in various ways in the 1970s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... "Appropriate technology is an ideological movement (and its manifestations) originally articulated as intermediate technology by the economist Dr. Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher in his influential work, Small is Beautiful. Though the nuances of appropriate technology vary between fields and applications, it is generally recognized as encompassing technological choice and application that is small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled.[1] Both Schumacher and many modern-day proponents of appropriate technology also emphasize the technology as people-centered.[2]"
Another cheap way of getting some light indoors (but only during the day): http://www.nydailynews.com/new... "Brazilian mechanic creates light bulb using water, bleach and a bottle Alfredo Moser's cheap and environmentally friendly invention is picking up steam in developing nations around the world. The 'Moser lamp' was picked up by the Liter of Light campaign and is now brightening 140,000 homes in the Philippines."
BTW, extending the day using artificial light (which I'm not eager myself to give up) is still problematical in a few ways including for health reasons.
On "Spread the wealth, but don't do it for free", it's important to remember that much of the wealth we enjoy in the West is due to cultural ideas that originated in Africa and the East (even things like the concept of "zero"). A lot of key minerals come from poor countries as well, where any wealth from their extraction got concentrated in a few hands. And there is a brutal history of slavery and genocide and colonialism underlying much of the unfolding and spread of Western "civilization". Look at the history of any, say, any currently materially poor African country and you will likely find a land that probably had (for their time) wealthy kingdoms hundreds of years ago that were taken over by European powers with most of people then driven into poverty and/or slavery and then eventually carved up into countries not respecting tribal and cultural boundaries which contributed to later warfare. Entrepreneurs may need to charge for things to make sustainable businesses in today's economy, but there are complex economic and political issues underlying great wealth disparities.
The "Social Credit" idea is worth considering when accepting how so many things are essentially the common capital of all of human kind, and thus all humans in that sense have some claim on the fruits of anyone using that capital: 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 "cultural inheri
Wow, what a schooling story. Hope you can move past the scars eventually (Kung Fu Panda II has some interesting comments at the end about scars). With "zero tolerance" policies these days, I can expect similar things happen even more often now (but with less physical stuff).
You're right about the cost of home schooling; it has been a huge opportunity cost for our family. One part of the choice is also whether our kid gets attention when young vs. a college fund etc. when older. Also, there are a lot of single parent families. A basic income might be another part of the solution; John Holt wrote about that in this 1970s book "Escape from Childhood", In New York State, at an average of about US$20,000 per kid per year, a family of three is getting US$60K spent per year on it, yet I'd think many families would prefer the money and homeschooling or hiring private tutors or paying for private school somewhere. Homeschooling is generally difficult or even illegal in Western Europe, but at least in many countries there the money follows the kid, and parents can choose an alternative school they want their kids to go to and the money goes there. Contrast with the very successful Albany Free School instead being starved for funding and needing to scrape by including on previous real estate investments.
Lots of things have affected the family structure including cars and TV, but I agree the two-income family is a biggie. See also the book "The Two Income Trap" by Elizabeth Warren for more on that, and why there has been little net benefit (even a negative return in terms of precarity) for most working families. http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
"But on the computers, the best thing about them is that they let children go much more self-paced. Except, I usually find they block the 3rd graders from doing 4th grade work, even if their ability and time allows. As someone who never fit in the school time schedule, I would have loved something that let me progress as fast or slow as I wanted."
Decades ago, in public school, probably in third grade or so, I had a substitute teacher literally snatch a Boxcar Children series book out of my hands (which I had picked up from a shelf in the class room) saying I might be assigned to read it in the next grade so he did not want me reading it then. It wasn't ever assigned, and I never did get to finish it -- something about being in a mysterious castle... I can wonder if this was the one -- but it can't be as it was published many years later: http://books.google.com/books/...
To be fair though, my actual third grade teacher said it was OK for me to read ahead in the science text book, and I read most of it over a weekend or so. She then suggested to my parents they get some science-related booklets, which they did. So, I owe a lot of my early science education to Ms. Kivlen(sp?) as well as Lady Plowden and her collaborators: http://www.abebooks.com/book-s...
Also, while most math classwork bored me in school with repetitive rote work, one year there was a "programmed instruction" box of math problems where you did a card of problems, and depending on how you did, you would either get a similar card or skip ahead. I rapidly skipped along through that entire box and it was fun and enjoyable. So, such things are also possible just with paper systems. Sadly, that experience with such "programmed instruction" for math was not repeated in other years in school. Still, there were other teachers who I can give credit for letting me have some freedom to learn on my own in various areas (especially computers).
In some ways, not much has changed in many schools as far as schools and their use of digital educational materials. Some teachers are very helpful (like my third grade teacher or John Taylor Gatto), but some are not, and, in any case, the overall compulsory school system works against most individualized instruction because it is designed to mostly turn out a standardized product like canned hams (or compliant worker drones in this case for most kids).
Yet computer technology offers the promise of more, even if it is a promise not yet realized for most kids. I wrote a related essay here: http://patapata.sourceforge.ne... "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change....
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process...."
That's one reason we homeschool/unschool to better support more learner-directed inquiry. http://www.holtgws.com/wh
Thanks! I did not know about that David Brin's "Existence" work: "From a tribe of beleaguered dolphins to the highest mountain observatory, Existence asks the question: Are we alone in the universe? Does every bright new race stumble over the same pitfalls? The same, entrapping seven hundred ways to fail? Thrown into this maelstrom of worldwide shared experience and tension over human destiny, the Artifact is a game changer. A message in a bottle, an alien capsule that wants to communicate... but for good or ill? The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity."
Interesting idea: "Does every bright new race stumble over the same pitfalls? The same, entrapping seven hundred ways to fail?" I guess we can wonder about the overall indifference, malevolence, or benevolence of the universe (same as some eternal religious questions).
BTW, bacteria may be the most universal message. It looks like they may perhaps be hardy enough to cross light years of space while dormant, especially if embedded in some debris bounced into space from a meteor or asteroid striking a planet. As an example, there may be some meteorites of Martian origin that have fallen to earth; so imagine that on a galactic scale. Neverness is a sci-fi novel where there is some message embedded in DNA. Star Trek has that theme in one episode as well (explaining why almost all aliens look human-like). So, there may be some message already here in the bacterio-sphere. Maybe we're it?:-)
I learned MapReduce for use with CouchDB and it is a powerful technique even when not on parallel hardware -- although a bit of a conceptual shift.
Here is a group using MapReduce with Hadoop for image processing: http://hipi.cs.virginia.edu/ "HIPI is a library for Hadoop's MapReduce framework that provides an API for performing image processing tasks in a distributed computing environment. "
Linus wrote: "The only place where parallelism matters is in graphics or on the server side, where we already largely have it. Pushing it anywhere else is just pointless." But would Linus really think image processing (like for robots or self-driving cars or using Baxter to sort your kid's Legos) is not an important issue? Sounds a bit like "640K is enough memory for anyone". Failure of the imagination is all too common based on unfamiliarity with some problem domain. Although, to be frank, I thought 32K of RAM on a Commodore PET was more than enough memory for anyone, because I could not imagine writing a program that large at the time.:-)
Also, agent-based simulations or zone-based simulations can often use as much parallel hardware as you can throw at it, even if there may be occasional short synchronization steps. For example you could have a Minecraft-like game with thousands of active entities like wolves, zombies, pigs, and so on -- as well as processes like erosion or plant growth going on in multiple zones simultaneously. Game design could really change with millions of available general purpose cores. My wife and I created an algorithm for growing botanically accurate plants, but current games like Minecraft can't use it to grow each unique plant because it would be too computationally intensive if you had millions of unique plants all growing at the same time. https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Congrats on your luck/skill in working with Thinking Machines hardware like the CM2. Around 1984, when an psychology undergrad at Princeton interested in AI, I had developed some software called "Mex" for multiple execution where I ran up to 1000 simulated processors on an IBM mainframe under VMUTS. I was using it to help process some data from a robot vision system I had put together (which itself had three 6502 processors). I was really excited about the idea of linking together lots of 6502 processors. I applied for a job then at Thinking Machines but didn't get an offer. A sociology grad student I knew from then (Clifford Nass) got a job offer there (and that is part of why I applied there) but he didn't take the offer, which is kind of ironic. He's brilliant and innovative as his career shows, but not really a programmer or hardware guy, and not all that interested in AI that I knew of: http://adlininc.com/uxpioneers...
I'm shocked and saddened just now when checking what he is up to now to to see on Wikipedia that Cliff died recently of a heart attack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
What a big loss for Cliff's family as well as the world. And not that long after the sad loss of Professor Jim Beniger, who was an inspiration and good role model to both Cliff and myself in various ways.
I can see though how Thinking Machines could also have benefited from Cliff's cleverness in thinking about human/machine interaction related to control of a (then) new type of machine. Maybe they'd still be in business if Cliff had gone to work with them? And maybe, being associated with MIT, they did not need yet one more programmer or hardware person, no matter how much they were interested in parallel processing or had done their own projects already on it
The issue isn't "theism". The issue Einstein points to is the limits of "reason" because all reasoning is based on assumption and emotions and a choice of reasoning tools -- and none of those can be based on pure "reason". See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Granted, we can argue about whether the Judeo-Christian tradition is the best source of these (a weak point of what he said, although one can read his reference there as an example rather than prescriptive) -- or even which version of it given 100s of sects, many disagreeing about various things. But we can't avoid the issue of making assumptions or basing decisions ultimately on feelings (or, at least, feelings interacting with reason).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... "Iron Sky is a 2012 Finnish-Australian-German[4] comic science fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola and written by Johanna Sinisalo and Michael Kalesniko.[5][6] It tells the story of a group of Nazi Germans who, having been defeated in 1945, fled to the Moon where they built a space fleet to return in 2018 and conquer Earth."
We have only three years left to get ready!!!:-)
Seriously though, the Nazis show what can happen when soulless bureaucracy gets out of control... And modern schooling was invented in Prussia and made possible the Nazi war effort built on people unquestionably following horrific orders... http://johntaylorgatto.wordpre... "I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency.... A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence.... Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men -- but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."
And: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/... "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ao... "During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief. The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed. According to this conception, the sole function of education was to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school, as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that end exclusively.
One will probably find but rarely, if at all, the rationalistic standpoint expressed in such crass form; for any sensible man would see at once how one-sided is such a statement of the position. But it is just as well to state a thesis starkly and nakedly, if one wants to clear up one's mind as to its nature.
It is true that convictions can best be supported with experience and clear thinking. On this point one must agree unreservedly with the extreme rationalist. The weak point of his conception is, however, this, that those convictions which are necessary and determinant for our conduct and judgments cannot be found solely along this solid scientific way.
For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very ina
Yes, that is a great book by Karen Pryor! Inspired by her book, I once made a list of maybe two dozen other ways to deal with behavior issues, but I don't think I put it on the web. The last one was something like just accepting the undesired behavior as a recurring reminder that you have something good (a relationship) in your life.:-)
"Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent" http://www.amazon.com/Our-Babi... "New parents are faced with innumerable decisions to make regarding the best way to care for their baby, and, naturally, they often turn for guidance to friends and family members who have already raised children. But as scientists are discovering, much of the trusted advice that has been passed down through generations needs to be carefully reexamined.
A thought-provoking combination of practical parenting information and scientific analysis, Our Babies, Ourselves is the first book to explore why we raise our children the way we do--and to suggest that we reconsider our culture's traditional views on parenting.
In this ground-breaking book, anthropologist Meredith Small reveals her remarkable findings in the new science of ethnopediatrics. Professor Small joins pediatricians, child-development researchers, and anthropologists across the country who are studying to what extent the way we parent our infants is based on biological needs and to what extent it is based on culture--and how sometimes what is culturally dictated may not be what's best for babies.
Should an infant be encouraged to sleep alone? Is breast-feeding better than bottle-feeding, or is that just a myth of the nineties? How much time should pass before a mother picks up her crying infant? And how important is it really to a baby's development to talk and sing to him or her?
These are but a few of the important questions Small addresses, and the answers not only are surprising but may even change the way we raise our children."
John Holt and Pat Farenga are worth reading too, about "unschooling" as essentially "give your kids all the freedom you can stand, especially in following their own educational interests". http://www.johnholtgws.com/pat...
Although, I personally feel the more extreme form of "radical unschooling" as some (not all) practice it is like the libertarianism of parenting, emphasizing freedom over all other virtues... Kids are indeed "learning all the time" but the quality of what they are learning can matter too. Also, "supernormal stimuli" of certain media and certain foods may need to be avoided or limited for health reasons because to help kids avoid or recover from "the pleasure trap". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
Also related on Myers-Briggs for both parent and child to look at various matchups: http://www.motherstyles.com/
That page talks a lot about Authoritative, Authoritarian, Permissive and Neglectful styles. But the page goes into more types than that (including "attachment" parenting which may be close to the human historical norm within hunter/gatherer tribes where it sounds like a crying baby was rare).
My suggestion: https://www.newschallenge.org/... "When confronted with a health issue, many people turn to their doctor, the internet, or friends for advice. But then what do you and your family do with all the advice you receive? What do even health professionals do with all the often conflicting information out there when they research a patient's health issues? We want to create software that helps with that challenge by making it easier for individuals and communites to collect health information (from whatever public sources including the internet), organize it, prioritize it, reason about it, act on it, and feed back the results of action into a next iteration as a learning experience. "
To add to your list, more vegetables, fruits, and beans can help, too. See Dr. Fuhrman. He may have become too commercial and may also miss a few things (Salt vilified too much? Too low on iodine? A bit low on vitamin D? Discarding some psychological aspects? Overoptimizing a few things? Trusting too much in some studies that are still to mainstream? Ignoring some possible benefits from animal products? Ignoring genetic issues like difficulties synthesizing some things? Not enough emphasis on the microbiome?). But overall he gets a lot ("make the salad the main dish") and his approach is based on science studies -- even if there is a risk of how you interpret limited studies and conflicting studies.
Also see Dr. Weil on lifestyle issues (like stress, sleep, music, community, and so on) as well as herbal remedies.
And see Bluezones for community level issues like sidewalks and walking clubs.
Vitamin D from some source to make up for indoor living is essential too.
Anyway, I'm writing other software right now for my wife (related to her free Working with Stories book) but I hope I can use the infrastructure (JavaScript/Dojo/Node.js/Pointrel) to use for other things like such tools. Probably would be an excellent life-extension choice by Peter Thiel to fund time for several developers to work on such FOSS software though.:-)
Although, from the fist link: "Don't think of LETS points like dollars. Think of them as favours. LETS Favours.... The LETS group's function is to act as a bookkeeper for their members' activities; keeping record of these 'favours' and putting the members' accounts into debit or credit accordingly. An account that is in credit identifies a member who has given more favours than he has received, and an account that is in debit identifies a member who has received more favours than he has given. These credits have no value and cannot be exchanged for cash. Their only purpose is to keep track of each member's involvement in the group so they can aim to bring their accounts back to zero -- a sign of fair and equitable participation in the system...."
And: http://banknd.nd.gov/ "Welcome to Bank of North Dakota (BND). As the only state-owned bank in the nation, we act as a funding resource in partnership with other financial institutions, economic development groups and guaranty agencies."
Although they presumably don't issue currency except as debt like any other conventional bank. But one can wonder how far debt lending could go at he state level these days with Fed support.
See also on having adequate currency as the cause of the American Revolution (assuming it is true): "How Benjamin Franklin Caused the Revolutionary War" http://www.opednews.com/articl...
Jane Jacobs was big on cities having their own currencies. She especially values currency fluctuations between cities as markers of how well cities were doing processes like import replacement. She pointed out how national currencies could hurt most cities (while perhaps benefiting the capital city). Reading her work, I realized how the Euro was a big step backwards for most Europeans, especially in a computer age where translating currencies using current values (over a network) was a fairly easy problem to solve technically. The Euro shows the folly of trying to have a common currency without a common form of governance for the people who use it.
When I've thought about currencies, I eventually realized that a currency is implicitly a constitution. It's backed in a sense by an community and is only as strong as the governance of that community, which controls how much of the currency is issued and the official rules for exchange it. When a currency loses value relative to other currencies, it mostly reflects an assessment of the community or its governance that stands behind the currency as a medium of exchange. In that sense, the county currency idea fits a definable unit of governance -- the county.
As for getting back to the countryside with technology, my wife and I moved to the Adirondack park more than ten years ago. When we first arrived we had only dialup, but a couple years after that paid the cable company US$4000 to extend cable about a half mile to us so we could get broadband speeds. Money well spent as far as ROI. It was only computer networking that let us live in such a remote area and still be able to do consulting projects. And dialup speeds were getting more and more problematical, with people sending multi-megabyte files and asking us if we got them, and having to say, well, it will take a couple hours to download... I spent 2.5 years recently supporting NBCUniversal's broadcast operations and writing new software for them to con
Jim, thanks for the reply. It is a pleasure to be corresponding with someone with such a knowledge of computing history (having lived it). My first computer (other than playing with IBM punched cards and building my own circuits) was KIM-1 with 1K of memory in the late 1970s, and I've been working with them ever since. I started networked computing in high school in the 1970s on a TOPS-10/Lyrics DEC PDP-10 system on Long Island, even eventually getting a Commodore PET to dial in (but I could not afford as a teenager the US$10 an hour phone non-local charges -- probably US$40 an hour in today's money -- although at some point we got a local dial-in as I was leaving high school). I was later for a time on AppleLink and BIX and the Well and IGC, but still generally restricted by US$10 an hour long distance charges until the late 1990s. We perhaps both draw from many of the same pool of ideas and interests and likely even sci-fi stories informing our outlooks (even if they are not identical) -- although with my experiences lag yours by a decade or two, and I was never in the kind of communities doing the kind of really new work you were fortunate enough to be in. My father was a merchant mariner, then a machinist, then a manufacturing engineer, so I also has a somewhat more mechanical focus in some of my aspirations (like interest in self-replicating hardware leading to self-replicating space habitats, which overlaps seasteading and some other exponential ideas you talk about for environmental cleanup); but my mother's work as a social worker / welfare caseworker for twenty years and more also is an influence as to bigger picture issues. Due to that lag, compared to you, I also saw and lived in much more of the Personal Computer aspect of the industry compared to PLATO and (to me then unaffordable, even for two decades) computer networking, even if I did use networked computer early on in high school. I put some rambles below on ideas in your essay and other historical links, plus a big quote at the end from Bill Norris hat applies to the main topic of automation and jobs. Anyway, got to get back to "work" or I would make this better and shorter.:-)
=== Ramble mode on
I corresponded with Bill Norris briefly in the late 1980s (when my graduate advisor at Princeton suggested I talk to him), then again in the early 1990s. I had hoped to work with him somehow at his foundation developing software to support flexible manufacturing and information exchange, even hoping to move as a summer volunteer/intern to MN (he said he had no money to hire new staff). However, I met my wife around then and so those hopes ultimately fell apart. My own ideas on that became "OSCOMAK", but it has not really gone far, and it has been eclipsed by other ideas of lesser scope but better social networking. It's a shame he and I never worked together back then, as I feel it would have been a great match with my interests and abilities, and I would have learned so much from him. I can envy you a chance to bask in that environment.
Bill Norris sent me a copy of his biography as well as copies of many of the pamphlets he wrote for Control Data (like "back to the Countryside via Technology"). I scanned and OCR'd some of the pamphlets and had hoped to put them on the internet and we had some correspondence about that too, but the licensing issues remained unclear so I did not put them up. Glad someone else did though: http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedp...
Of Bill Norris' talks there, the most relevant there is this HBR story on robots taking all the jobs may be: "Technology and Full Employment [Nov. 1978]". I quote at length from one of them at the end. However, as much as I respect Bill Norris, and as much as what he said about full employment and technology may have been true in the 1970s, I feel it is a lot less true now that robotics, AI, and other forms of automation, along with better design, better materials, expanded infrastructure
"You will need me and other real humans to document your descent from valued individuals who provide useful services to those who suck resources from the economic totality."
LOL.:-) Good points, but the internet is already replacing *most* paid creative writing with viral essays and videos. What I mean by that is that is it possible for one creative writer to quickly reach millions of readers, but readers have only so much time. That is the power of automation as an amplifier. So, yes, we may indeed "need" one creative writer (or even a thousand) doing what you outline, but there are literally millions of people who want to be creative writers. That means 99.9%+ of potential creative writers can't make a living from it in the internet age. If even the New York Times is struggling, why should any specific writer expect things could work out financially?
Of course, one may point to hundreds of YouTube video creators or bloggers with millions of followers making tens of thousands of dollars from advertising -- but that model just does not scale. There just is not enough advertising revenue to go around. There is also not enough subscription revenue to go around. There are not enough eyeballs and free time to go around.
It's always been that way with a "star" model of success in the creative arts. It seems to me that most people (95% - 99%?) who make a living related to the arts do it by teaching their craft (like a public school music teacher or writing teacher or something similar). Then they do a little bit of creative stuff in their spare time.
Many other artists and writers have a spouse or parents who funds their time. For a personal example I just spent 2.5 years providing (paid) third-line technical support and software development services to NBCUniversal's broadcast operations while my wife worked (mostly unpaid) part-time (we also homeschool) on her free book on "Working With Stories". That book is ironically in part about getting communities to tell their own stories again instead of mostly accepting pre-packaged commercial offerings.:-) http://www.workingwithstories....
Before that, for years she was making most of the money for our family while I was writing stuff more (including "Post-Scarcity Princeton" and various free software) and doing more of the homeschooling. However, realistically, that was only possible because we both could command six-figure annual wages as professionals and were willing to accept some other compromises (smaller older house, many years without health insurance, etc.). Unless you are really, really frugal, and probably don't homeschool, that model probably won't work for most families without potentially two professional incomes of some sort (unless you have other funding like from parents or savings or investments).
However, in the past, like the 1950s in the USA, before the "two income trap" sprung, it was a lot more feasible, at least for a typical male breadwinner and female stay-at-home couple. http://www.motherjones.com/pol... "Two-income families are almost always worse off than their single-income counterparts were a generation ago, even though they pull in 75 percent more in income. The problem is that so many fixed costs are rising -- health care, child care, finding a good home -- that two-income families today actually have less discretionary money left over than those single-earner families did. As the authors write: "Our data show families in financial trouble are working hard, playing by the rules -- and the game is stacked against them.""
BTW, the "Two Income Trap" adds a new twist to this discussion, suggesting that job loss is a lot more devastating to most families now than it was in the 1950s. One reason is that the other spouse can't start working to pick up the slack because he or she is already working and they are dependent on both incomes. You als
Slashdot Mirror
pidib pidip pidip pdawww... Or something like that as it wrote each line. And then the paper feed. And sometimes it furiously printing in both directions....
http://everything2.com/title/D...
One on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Hard to explain to my kid that you needed lots of sheets of fanfold paper when you wanted to use "the computer".
AC wrote: http://jens.mooseyard.com/2009...
"I could have told the Wave people about what I'd learned, except I didn't know Wave existed until April (shortly before the public announcement), and even then I was just some guy lost in the crowd at the demos....
Part of the problem, in both cases, is that live typing is one of those Cool Demo Features that looks really awesome when showing off the app. Features like that can be dangerous because they are legitimately very useful during the app's gestation, when exciting demos are a key survival trait; but then they can't be removed later on because they're so well-known, even if they turn out to be useless. Sometimes these features aren't actually harmful to the user experience, they just make the code more complex and harder to maintain. Instant typing is both, unfortunately."
William Norris, the founder of the company behind PLATO, was ahead of his time in other ways, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner cities and disadvantaged communities."
See also:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedp...
http://www.amazon.com/William-...
To be clear, my comment is more directed to the implication from the poster's point that a "basic income" itself is a "con" (assuming that was part of what was intended). There could indeed be any number of specific problems with this specific cryptocurrency proposal, including privacy or identity theft issues as raised by other posters. Building in a basic income aspect is an interesting way to get publicity for a cryptocurrency, but as I said, a good currency is backed by a community constitution, which is going to imply checks and balances and various safeguards. If those are not in place here, like to prevent identity theft, than that could be a big problem.
However, as another comparison, LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems) systems have helped a lot of communities, and may treat LETS currency more as a lose account of favors owed than more what we think of as hard currency. ... just as they would from family and friends. But rather than do all this helping without any recording at all, keeping LETS accounts allows the group to keep track of the members' activities so they can balance their trading activities fairly, knowing that once their accounts are back to zero, they have given to the group just as much as they have received. Basically, it's just a matter of keeping score and nothing more."
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
"Let me start by saying that the generally accepted view by all LETS people is that a LETS point is not cash, or federal currency, and I agree. However, I do not feel comfortable viewing LETS points as an alternative currency with an equivalent value in cash. I prefer to interpret LETS points as being like LETS favours. That has always made trading more enjoyable for me. I love doing favours for members and they show genuine appreciation for the favour - in LETS points. It doesn't get any better than that! I view LETS more like a voluntary self-help group where like-minded people in a local community give their time and experience to help their fellow members and feel welcomed to ask for the same in return
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Also, tell that to senior citizens in the USA who almost all get a what is essentially a basic income from Social Security. Most seniors have *not* paid full value into that relative to what they expect to get out of it, so it is not like a retirement investment plan (even if people pay a tax that goes towards it when they work for wages). Social Security in the USA is essentially an income redistribution system, originally based on ten young workers to one elderly person (original recipients had not paid into the system) and now at about three young workers per elderly person. Personally, I feel it is unfair that the elderly in the USA get Medicare and Social Security when everyone else does not and these days reflects age discrimination backed by the political power of the elderly in the USA. Many young parents, for example, have a very hard lot, often caught between caring for their young children and their own elderly parents, while also needing to hold down a full-time job with increasingly worse benefits. A basic income would make it possible for more young parents to spend more time with their own young children while also caring for their own parents. I feel the resolution to the age discrimination issue there is to make the two programs of Medicare and Social Security available to every US citizen without discrimination based on age. We can then talk about eventually expanding those programs to all residents, legal or not, and then looking at doing it globally.
Arguments for a basic income include that, because governments have privatized almost all land, citizens have some right to the fruits of the land. Also, citizens have a claim to some of the fruits of the common inheritance of ideas and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
http://www.usbig.net/
http://www.livableincome.org/
See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi... ..."
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?
Anyway, even while I'm not especially a fan of crypto currencies (good currencies need to be backed by a social constitution controlling their production IMHO), I applaud the experiment in this direction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"f.lux is a computer program developed by Michael and Lorna Herf. It adjusts a computer display's color temperature according to its location and time of day, based on a user specified set of longitude and latitude geographical coordinates, a ZIP Code, or a city name. The program was designed to reduce eye strain during nighttime use and to prevent disruption of normal sleep patterns."
Yes, there is absolutely no reason these LEDs should not be a redder color. Brilliant point!
Good point on a bttery safety tool see my comment above, and the other comment on the GravityLight.
No battery needed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
In my opinion, if Medicare and Social Security were available to all from birth, the USA would be a much happier and fairer society.
Your point on doctors for the elderly connects with my previous post here mentioning Philip Greenspun's writing on why women avoid academic science careers.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory."
Still, even given that, the fact is that we spend very little on medical research relative to the total amount we spend on medicine. If we spent, say, 20% of our US$2+ trillion annual medical budget on medical research, that would be US$400 billion a year, which is a lot of researchers. Likely such an investment would be tremendously cost-effective at avoiding costs. But we spend about 4%, and much of that is on "me too" drugs, like a fifth version of Viagra or whatever.
http://www.researchamerica.org...
BTW:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"A major flaw and vulnerability in biomedical research appears to be the hypercompetition for the resources and positions that are required to conduct science. The competition seems to suppress the creativity, cooperation, risk-taking, and original thinking required to make fundamental discoveries. Other consequences of today's highly pressured environment for research appear to be a substantial number of research publications whose results cannot be replicated, and perverse incentives in research funding that encourage grantee institutions to grow without making sufficient investments in their own faculty and facilities. Other risky trends include a decline in the share of key research grants going to younger scientists, as well as a steady rise in the age at which investigators receive their first funding."
From November: http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
"Google's 10-year run as Firefox's default search engine is over. Yahoo wants more search traffic, and a deal with Mozilla will bring it. In a major departure for both Mozilla and Yahoo, Firefox's default search engine is switching from Google to Yahoo in the United States."
I agree with another comment that what you are experiencing is a consequence of supply relative to demand for academic labor. This reflects a "big crunch" in the words of Dr. David Goodstein from 1994, then vice-provost of Caltech. He testified to Congress about this then too. Essentially, US academia had been growing exponentially since around 1900, but that era of exponential growth stopped in the 1970s, yet the production of PhDs continued at an exponential rate. There are other consequences of this trend, including "creeping credentialism" in all areas of US American life, including the social need for a college degree (or even sometimes masters now) as screening for the most basic entry-level jobs. I feel one answer to the pyramid scheme nature of all this is a "basic income" for all, because then anyoen who wanted to research or teach could live like a present day graduate student, but without the new to kowtow to a specific academic hierarchy just to survive economically (publishing in prestigious journals or getting access to expensive lab equipment might be a different issue...)
From the Goodstein article:
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover, much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights sent a whole generation back to college transforming the United States from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education. Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education. The American academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and technology. The expanding academic world in 1950-1970 created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D.s, whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American corporations such as AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to create or expand their central research laboratories to solve technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal government itself established a network of excellent national laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities for aspiring scientists. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.
By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific
I've heard about for or five years. While this sounds like a good concept to save money and danger from kerosene lamps, what do people do then? Still, even with planned obsolescence, such systems may still be very cost-effective. But it seems to me there might be better battery technologies one could pick? If not, I hope some sort of battery replacement and recycling program is thought about.
More on a related larger movement of design
"Design for the Other 90 Percent: Innovating for the World's Poor"
http://miter.mit.edu/articlede...
Of course, EF Schumacher and the "Appropriate Technology" movement was doing this in various ways in the 1970s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"Appropriate technology is an ideological movement (and its manifestations) originally articulated as intermediate technology by the economist Dr. Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher in his influential work, Small is Beautiful. Though the nuances of appropriate technology vary between fields and applications, it is generally recognized as encompassing technological choice and application that is small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled.[1] Both Schumacher and many modern-day proponents of appropriate technology also emphasize the technology as people-centered.[2]"
A website in this area: http://www.appropedia.org/
Another organization (of many):
https://www.ncat.org/about-us/
Another cheap way of getting some light indoors (but only during the day):
http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
"Brazilian mechanic creates light bulb using water, bleach and a bottle
Alfredo Moser's cheap and environmentally friendly invention is picking up steam in developing nations around the world. The 'Moser lamp' was picked up by the Liter of Light campaign and is now brightening 140,000 homes in the Philippines."
BTW, extending the day using artificial light (which I'm not eager myself to give up) is still problematical in a few ways including for health reasons.
On "Spread the wealth, but don't do it for free", it's important to remember that much of the wealth we enjoy in the West is due to cultural ideas that originated in Africa and the East (even things like the concept of "zero"). A lot of key minerals come from poor countries as well, where any wealth from their extraction got concentrated in a few hands. And there is a brutal history of slavery and genocide and colonialism underlying much of the unfolding and spread of Western "civilization". Look at the history of any, say, any currently materially poor African country and you will likely find a land that probably had (for their time) wealthy kingdoms hundreds of years ago that were taken over by European powers with most of people then driven into poverty and/or slavery and then eventually carved up into countries not respecting tribal and cultural boundaries which contributed to later warfare. Entrepreneurs may need to charge for things to make sustainable businesses in today's economy, but there are complex economic and political issues underlying great wealth disparities.
The "Social Credit" idea is worth considering when accepting how so many things are essentially the common capital of all of human kind, and thus all humans in that sense have some claim on the fruits of anyone using that capital:
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 "cultural inheri
Wow, what a schooling story. Hope you can move past the scars eventually (Kung Fu Panda II has some interesting comments at the end about scars). With "zero tolerance" policies these days, I can expect similar things happen even more often now (but with less physical stuff).
You're right about the cost of home schooling; it has been a huge opportunity cost for our family. One part of the choice is also whether our kid gets attention when young vs. a college fund etc. when older. Also, there are a lot of single parent families. A basic income might be another part of the solution; John Holt wrote about that in this 1970s book "Escape from Childhood", In New York State, at an average of about US$20,000 per kid per year, a family of three is getting US$60K spent per year on it, yet I'd think many families would prefer the money and homeschooling or hiring private tutors or paying for private school somewhere. Homeschooling is generally difficult or even illegal in Western Europe, but at least in many countries there the money follows the kid, and parents can choose an alternative school they want their kids to go to and the money goes there. Contrast with the very successful Albany Free School instead being starved for funding and needing to scrape by including on previous real estate investments.
Lots of things have affected the family structure including cars and TV, but I agree the two-income family is a biggie. See also the book "The Two Income Trap" by Elizabeth Warren for more on that, and why there has been little net benefit (even a negative return in terms of precarity) for most working families.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
"But on the computers, the best thing about them is that they let children go much more self-paced. Except, I usually find they block the 3rd graders from doing 4th grade work, even if their ability and time allows. As someone who never fit in the school time schedule, I would have loved something that let me progress as fast or slow as I wanted."
Decades ago, in public school, probably in third grade or so, I had a substitute teacher literally snatch a Boxcar Children series book out of my hands (which I had picked up from a shelf in the class room) saying I might be assigned to read it in the next grade so he did not want me reading it then. It wasn't ever assigned, and I never did get to finish it -- something about being in a mysterious castle... I can wonder if this was the one -- but it can't be as it was published many years later:
http://books.google.com/books/...
To be fair though, my actual third grade teacher said it was OK for me to read ahead in the science text book, and I read most of it over a weekend or so. She then suggested to my parents they get some science-related booklets, which they did. So, I owe a lot of my early science education to Ms. Kivlen(sp?) as well as Lady Plowden and her collaborators:
http://www.abebooks.com/book-s...
Also, while most math classwork bored me in school with repetitive rote work, one year there was a "programmed instruction" box of math problems where you did a card of problems, and depending on how you did, you would either get a similar card or skip ahead. I rapidly skipped along through that entire box and it was fun and enjoyable. So, such things are also possible just with paper systems. Sadly, that experience with such "programmed instruction" for math was not repeated in other years in school. Still, there were other teachers who I can give credit for letting me have some freedom to learn on my own in various areas (especially computers).
In some ways, not much has changed in many schools as far as schools and their use of digital educational materials. Some teachers are very helpful (like my third grade teacher or John Taylor Gatto), but some are not, and, in any case, the overall compulsory school system works against most individualized instruction because it is designed to mostly turn out a standardized product like canned hams (or compliant worker drones in this case for most kids).
Yet computer technology offers the promise of more, even if it is a promise not yet realized for most kids. I wrote a related essay here: ... ..."
http://patapata.sourceforge.ne...
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process.
That's one reason we homeschool/unschool to better support more learner-directed inquiry.
http://www.holtgws.com/wh
Thanks! I did not know about that David Brin's "Existence" work: "From a tribe of beleaguered dolphins to the highest mountain observatory, Existence asks the question: Are we alone in the universe? Does every bright new race stumble over the same pitfalls? The same, entrapping seven hundred ways to fail? Thrown into this maelstrom of worldwide shared experience and tension over human destiny, the Artifact is a game changer. A message in a bottle, an alien capsule that wants to communicate ... but for good or ill? The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity."
Interesting idea: "Does every bright new race stumble over the same pitfalls? The same, entrapping seven hundred ways to fail?" I guess we can wonder about the overall indifference, malevolence, or benevolence of the universe (same as some eternal religious questions).
BTW, bacteria may be the most universal message. It looks like they may perhaps be hardy enough to cross light years of space while dormant, especially if embedded in some debris bounced into space from a meteor or asteroid striking a planet. As an example, there may be some meteorites of Martian origin that have fallen to earth; so imagine that on a galactic scale. Neverness is a sci-fi novel where there is some message embedded in DNA. Star Trek has that theme in one episode as well (explaining why almost all aliens look human-like). So, there may be some message already here in the bacterio-sphere. Maybe we're it? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
I learned MapReduce for use with CouchDB and it is a powerful technique even when not on parallel hardware -- although a bit of a conceptual shift.
Here is a group using MapReduce with Hadoop for image processing:
http://hipi.cs.virginia.edu/
"HIPI is a library for Hadoop's MapReduce framework that provides an API for performing image processing tasks in a distributed computing environment. "
Linus wrote: "The only place where parallelism matters is in graphics or on the server side, where we already largely have it. Pushing it anywhere else is just pointless." But would Linus really think image processing (like for robots or self-driving cars or using Baxter to sort your kid's Legos) is not an important issue? Sounds a bit like "640K is enough memory for anyone". Failure of the imagination is all too common based on unfamiliarity with some problem domain. Although, to be frank, I thought 32K of RAM on a Commodore PET was more than enough memory for anyone, because I could not imagine writing a program that large at the time. :-)
Also, agent-based simulations or zone-based simulations can often use as much parallel hardware as you can throw at it, even if there may be occasional short synchronization steps. For example you could have a Minecraft-like game with thousands of active entities like wolves, zombies, pigs, and so on -- as well as processes like erosion or plant growth going on in multiple zones simultaneously. Game design could really change with millions of available general purpose cores. My wife and I created an algorithm for growing botanically accurate plants, but current games like Minecraft can't use it to grow each unique plant because it would be too computationally intensive if you had millions of unique plants all growing at the same time.
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Congrats on your luck/skill in working with Thinking Machines hardware like the CM2. Around 1984, when an psychology undergrad at Princeton interested in AI, I had developed some software called "Mex" for multiple execution where I ran up to 1000 simulated processors on an IBM mainframe under VMUTS. I was using it to help process some data from a robot vision system I had put together (which itself had three 6502 processors). I was really excited about the idea of linking together lots of 6502 processors. I applied for a job then at Thinking Machines but didn't get an offer. A sociology grad student I knew from then (Clifford Nass) got a job offer there (and that is part of why I applied there) but he didn't take the offer, which is kind of ironic. He's brilliant and innovative as his career shows, but not really a programmer or hardware guy, and not all that interested in AI that I knew of:
http://adlininc.com/uxpioneers...
I'm shocked and saddened just now when checking what he is up to now to to see on Wikipedia that Cliff died recently of a heart attack:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
What a big loss for Cliff's family as well as the world. And not that long after the sad loss of Professor Jim Beniger, who was an inspiration and good role model to both Cliff and myself in various ways.
I can see though how Thinking Machines could also have benefited from Cliff's cleverness in thinking about human/machine interaction related to control of a (then) new type of machine. Maybe they'd still be in business if Cliff had gone to work with them? And maybe, being associated with MIT, they did not need yet one more programmer or hardware person, no matter how much they were interested in parallel processing or had done their own projects already on it
Mod parent up -- great point! Some sci-fi books have explored this theme, with both bad and good results. Two examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Anyone know more?
The issue isn't "theism". The issue Einstein points to is the limits of "reason" because all reasoning is based on assumption and emotions and a choice of reasoning tools -- and none of those can be based on pure "reason". See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Granted, we can argue about whether the Judeo-Christian tradition is the best source of these (a weak point of what he said, although one can read his reference there as an example rather than prescriptive) -- or even which version of it given 100s of sects, many disagreeing about various things. But we can't avoid the issue of making assumptions or basing decisions ultimately on feelings (or, at least, feelings interacting with reason).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"Iron Sky is a 2012 Finnish-Australian-German[4] comic science fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola and written by Johanna Sinisalo and Michael Kalesniko.[5][6] It tells the story of a group of Nazi Germans who, having been defeated in 1945, fled to the Moon where they built a space fleet to return in 2018 and conquer Earth."
We have only three years left to get ready!!! :-)
Seriously though, the Nazis show what can happen when soulless bureaucracy gets out of control... And modern schooling was invented in Prussia and made possible the Nazi war effort built on people unquestionably following horrific orders... ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. ... A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. ... Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men -- but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."
http://johntaylorgatto.wordpre...
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?
And:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ao...
"During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief. The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed. According to this conception, the sole function of education was to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school, as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that end exclusively.
One will probably find but rarely, if at all, the rationalistic standpoint expressed in such crass form; for any sensible man would see at once how one-sided is such a statement of the position. But it is just as well to state a thesis starkly and nakedly, if one wants to clear up one's mind as to its nature.
It is true that convictions can best be supported with experience and clear thinking. On this point one must agree unreservedly with the extreme rationalist. The weak point of his conception is, however, this, that those convictions which are necessary and determinant for our conduct and judgments cannot be found solely along this solid scientific way.
For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very ina
Yes, that is a great book by Karen Pryor! Inspired by her book, I once made a list of maybe two dozen other ways to deal with behavior issues, but I don't think I put it on the web. The last one was something like just accepting the undesired behavior as a recurring reminder that you have something good (a relationship) in your life. :-)
"Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent"
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Babi...
"New parents are faced with innumerable decisions to make regarding the best way to care for their baby, and, naturally, they often turn for guidance to friends and family members who have already raised children. But as scientists are discovering, much of the trusted advice that has been passed down through generations needs to be carefully reexamined.
A thought-provoking combination of practical parenting information and scientific analysis, Our Babies, Ourselves is the first book to explore why we raise our children the way we do--and to suggest that we reconsider our culture's traditional views on parenting.
In this ground-breaking book, anthropologist Meredith Small reveals her remarkable findings in the new science of ethnopediatrics. Professor Small joins pediatricians, child-development researchers, and anthropologists across the country who are studying to what extent the way we parent our infants is based on biological needs and to what extent it is based on culture--and how sometimes what is culturally dictated may not be what's best for babies.
Should an infant be encouraged to sleep alone? Is breast-feeding better than bottle-feeding, or is that just a myth of the nineties? How much time should pass before a mother picks up her crying infant? And how important is it really to a baby's development to talk and sing to him or her?
These are but a few of the important questions Small addresses, and the answers not only are surprising but may even change the way we raise our children."
John Holt and Pat Farenga are worth reading too, about "unschooling" as essentially "give your kids all the freedom you can stand, especially in following their own educational interests".
http://www.johnholtgws.com/pat...
Although, I personally feel the more extreme form of "radical unschooling" as some (not all) practice it is like the libertarianism of parenting, emphasizing freedom over all other virtues... Kids are indeed "learning all the time" but the quality of what they are learning can matter too. Also, "supernormal stimuli" of certain media and certain foods may need to be avoided or limited for health reasons because to help kids avoid or recover from "the pleasure trap".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
Also related on Myers-Briggs for both parent and child to look at various matchups:
http://www.motherstyles.com/
And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
That page talks a lot about Authoritative, Authoritarian, Permissive and Neglectful styles. But the page goes into more types than that (including "attachment" parenting which may be close to the human historical norm within hunter/gatherer tribes where it sounds like a crying baby was rare).
By the way, kids can be much more a discipline problem when fed junk, not fed enough fruits and vegetables, lacking in sunlight, lacking in good gut bacteria, lacking in exercise, overstressed by an early focus on academics instead of play, saturated by violent and sexualized media, and so on. See also:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/chil...
https://www.vitamindcouncil.or...
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/0...
http://www.chrismercogliano.co...
My suggestion: https://www.newschallenge.org/...
"When confronted with a health issue, many people turn to their doctor, the internet, or friends for advice. But then what do you and your family do with all the advice you receive? What do even health professionals do with all the often conflicting information out there when they research a patient's health issues? We want to create software that helps with that challenge by making it easier for individuals and communites to collect health information (from whatever public sources including the internet), organize it, prioritize it, reason about it, act on it, and feed back the results of action into a next iteration as a learning experience. "
To add to your list, more vegetables, fruits, and beans can help, too. See Dr. Fuhrman. He may have become too commercial and may also miss a few things (Salt vilified too much? Too low on iodine? A bit low on vitamin D? Discarding some psychological aspects? Overoptimizing a few things? Trusting too much in some studies that are still to mainstream? Ignoring some possible benefits from animal products? Ignoring genetic issues like difficulties synthesizing some things? Not enough emphasis on the microbiome?). But overall he gets a lot ("make the salad the main dish") and his approach is based on science studies -- even if there is a risk of how you interpret limited studies and conflicting studies.
Also see Dr. Weil on lifestyle issues (like stress, sleep, music, community, and so on) as well as herbal remedies.
And see Bluezones for community level issues like sidewalks and walking clubs.
Vitamin D from some source to make up for indoor living is essential too.
Anyway, I'm writing other software right now for my wife (related to her free Working with Stories book) but I hope I can use the infrastructure (JavaScript/Dojo/Node.js/Pointrel) to use for other things like such tools. Probably would be an excellent life-extension choice by Peter Thiel to fund time for several developers to work on such FOSS software though. :-)
Glad the Norris link was helpful. Still hope you check out the"Skills of Xanadu" links... Yeah, it's hard to know when to "barge" and when not to...
Your County Currency link was off, but I found this:
http://countycurrency.org/
Reminds me a bit of LETS:
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Although, from the fist link: "Don't think of LETS points like dollars. Think of them as favours. LETS Favours. ... The LETS group's function is to act as a bookkeeper for their members' activities; keeping record of these 'favours' and putting the members' accounts into debit or credit accordingly. An account that is in credit identifies a member who has given more favours than he has received, and an account that is in debit identifies a member who has received more favours than he has given. These credits have no value and cannot be exchanged for cash. Their only purpose is to keep track of each member's involvement in the group so they can aim to bring their accounts back to zero -- a sign of fair and equitable participation in the system. ..."
And:
http://banknd.nd.gov/
"Welcome to Bank of North Dakota (BND). As the only state-owned bank in the nation, we act as a funding resource in partnership with other financial institutions, economic development groups and guaranty agencies."
Although they presumably don't issue currency except as debt like any other conventional bank. But one can wonder how far debt lending could go at he state level these days with Fed support.
See also on having adequate currency as the cause of the American Revolution (assuming it is true):
"How Benjamin Franklin Caused the Revolutionary War"
http://www.opednews.com/articl...
Jane Jacobs was big on cities having their own currencies. She especially values currency fluctuations between cities as markers of how well cities were doing processes like import replacement. She pointed out how national currencies could hurt most cities (while perhaps benefiting the capital city). Reading her work, I realized how the Euro was a big step backwards for most Europeans, especially in a computer age where translating currencies using current values (over a network) was a fairly easy problem to solve technically. The Euro shows the folly of trying to have a common currency without a common form of governance for the people who use it.
When I've thought about currencies, I eventually realized that a currency is implicitly a constitution. It's backed in a sense by an community and is only as strong as the governance of that community, which controls how much of the currency is issued and the official rules for exchange it. When a currency loses value relative to other currencies, it mostly reflects an assessment of the community or its governance that stands behind the currency as a medium of exchange. In that sense, the county currency idea fits a definable unit of governance -- the county.
As for getting back to the countryside with technology, my wife and I moved to the Adirondack park more than ten years ago. When we first arrived we had only dialup, but a couple years after that paid the cable company US$4000 to extend cable about a half mile to us so we could get broadband speeds. Money well spent as far as ROI. It was only computer networking that let us live in such a remote area and still be able to do consulting projects. And dialup speeds were getting more and more problematical, with people sending multi-megabyte files and asking us if we got them, and having to say, well, it will take a couple hours to download... I spent 2.5 years recently supporting NBCUniversal's broadcast operations and writing new software for them to con
Jim, thanks for the reply. It is a pleasure to be corresponding with someone with such a knowledge of computing history (having lived it). My first computer (other than playing with IBM punched cards and building my own circuits) was KIM-1 with 1K of memory in the late 1970s, and I've been working with them ever since. I started networked computing in high school in the 1970s on a TOPS-10/Lyrics DEC PDP-10 system on Long Island, even eventually getting a Commodore PET to dial in (but I could not afford as a teenager the US$10 an hour phone non-local charges -- probably US$40 an hour in today's money -- although at some point we got a local dial-in as I was leaving high school). I was later for a time on AppleLink and BIX and the Well and IGC, but still generally restricted by US$10 an hour long distance charges until the late 1990s. We perhaps both draw from many of the same pool of ideas and interests and likely even sci-fi stories informing our outlooks (even if they are not identical) -- although with my experiences lag yours by a decade or two, and I was never in the kind of communities doing the kind of really new work you were fortunate enough to be in. My father was a merchant mariner, then a machinist, then a manufacturing engineer, so I also has a somewhat more mechanical focus in some of my aspirations (like interest in self-replicating hardware leading to self-replicating space habitats, which overlaps seasteading and some other exponential ideas you talk about for environmental cleanup); but my mother's work as a social worker / welfare caseworker for twenty years and more also is an influence as to bigger picture issues. Due to that lag, compared to you, I also saw and lived in much more of the Personal Computer aspect of the industry compared to PLATO and (to me then unaffordable, even for two decades) computer networking, even if I did use networked computer early on in high school. I put some rambles below on ideas in your essay and other historical links, plus a big quote at the end from Bill Norris hat applies to the main topic of automation and jobs. Anyway, got to get back to "work" or I would make this better and shorter. :-)
=== Ramble mode on
I corresponded with Bill Norris briefly in the late 1980s (when my graduate advisor at Princeton suggested I talk to him), then again in the early 1990s. I had hoped to work with him somehow at his foundation developing software to support flexible manufacturing and information exchange, even hoping to move as a summer volunteer/intern to MN (he said he had no money to hire new staff). However, I met my wife around then and so those hopes ultimately fell apart. My own ideas on that became "OSCOMAK", but it has not really gone far, and it has been eclipsed by other ideas of lesser scope but better social networking. It's a shame he and I never worked together back then, as I feel it would have been a great match with my interests and abilities, and I would have learned so much from him. I can envy you a chance to bask in that environment.
Bill Norris sent me a copy of his biography as well as copies of many of the pamphlets he wrote for Control Data (like "back to the Countryside via Technology"). I scanned and OCR'd some of the pamphlets and had hoped to put them on the internet and we had some correspondence about that too, but the licensing issues remained unclear so I did not put them up. Glad someone else did though:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedp...
Of Bill Norris' talks there, the most relevant there is this HBR story on robots taking all the jobs may be: "Technology and Full Employment [Nov. 1978]". I quote at length from one of them at the end. However, as much as I respect Bill Norris, and as much as what he said about full employment and technology may have been true in the 1970s, I feel it is a lot less true now that robotics, AI, and other forms of automation, along with better design, better materials, expanded infrastructure
"You will need me and other real humans to document your descent from valued individuals who provide useful services to those who suck resources from the economic totality."
LOL. :-) Good points, but the internet is already replacing *most* paid creative writing with viral essays and videos. What I mean by that is that is it possible for one creative writer to quickly reach millions of readers, but readers have only so much time. That is the power of automation as an amplifier. So, yes, we may indeed "need" one creative writer (or even a thousand) doing what you outline, but there are literally millions of people who want to be creative writers. That means 99.9%+ of potential creative writers can't make a living from it in the internet age. If even the New York Times is struggling, why should any specific writer expect things could work out financially?
Of course, one may point to hundreds of YouTube video creators or bloggers with millions of followers making tens of thousands of dollars from advertising -- but that model just does not scale. There just is not enough advertising revenue to go around. There is also not enough subscription revenue to go around. There are not enough eyeballs and free time to go around.
It's always been that way with a "star" model of success in the creative arts. It seems to me that most people (95% - 99%?) who make a living related to the arts do it by teaching their craft (like a public school music teacher or writing teacher or something similar). Then they do a little bit of creative stuff in their spare time.
Many other artists and writers have a spouse or parents who funds their time. For a personal example I just spent 2.5 years providing (paid) third-line technical support and software development services to NBCUniversal's broadcast operations while my wife worked (mostly unpaid) part-time (we also homeschool) on her free book on "Working With Stories". That book is ironically in part about getting communities to tell their own stories again instead of mostly accepting pre-packaged commercial offerings. :-)
http://www.workingwithstories....
Before that, for years she was making most of the money for our family while I was writing stuff more (including "Post-Scarcity Princeton" and various free software) and doing more of the homeschooling. However, realistically, that was only possible because we both could command six-figure annual wages as professionals and were willing to accept some other compromises (smaller older house, many years without health insurance, etc.). Unless you are really, really frugal, and probably don't homeschool, that model probably won't work for most families without potentially two professional incomes of some sort (unless you have other funding like from parents or savings or investments).
However, in the past, like the 1950s in the USA, before the "two income trap" sprung, it was a lot more feasible, at least for a typical male breadwinner and female stay-at-home couple.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
"Two-income families are almost always worse off than their single-income counterparts were a generation ago, even though they pull in 75 percent more in income. The problem is that so many fixed costs are rising -- health care, child care, finding a good home -- that two-income families today actually have less discretionary money left over than those single-earner families did. As the authors write: "Our data show families in financial trouble are working hard, playing by the rules -- and the game is stacked against them.""
BTW, the "Two Income Trap" adds a new twist to this discussion, suggesting that job loss is a lot more devastating to most families now than it was in the 1950s. One reason is that the other spouse can't start working to pick up the slack because he or she is already working and they are dependent on both incomes. You als