The biggest problem here is ignoring that there are different types of transactions in a community, which include subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft (as discussed on my own website). Selling eyeballs to advertisers to fund a website is primarily an exchange economy transaction. But, as with putting up holiday lights just to make the darkness cheery, there can be gift giving involved in an action (even with a substantial power bill for the lights). You put up lights this year in one place, someone else puts up lights some other year somewhere else, and we all (in theory) enjoy the spectacle. Or, like many towns have tax-funded street lights for safety and convenience, government agencies like NOAA can put up useful websites about the weather with hazardous weather alerts, or NASA can put up useful websites about space science. People can also put up personal websites with journals or "How To" documents just because they are useful or interesting to themselves and their family (subsistence) and accept that it is OK if others look at them.
About a dozen years ago, I read somewhere on Philip Greenspun's website (on making websites), a comment to the effect that, if people announce they are getting a cat, or learning to play the piano, or taking vegetarian cooking lessons, people very rarely ask, how are you going to make money at that? But when people start a website, that seems to be the first question other people ask.
Of course, things have changes a bit now that so many people use Facebook or similar instead of just hosting their own website. It's ironic, since it is so cheap to host your own content now on a paid website (US$5 per month for a cheap one?) or even free on GitHub pages and similar. Or you can get a FreedomBox-like "wall wart" server (in theory) that just serves content through your ISP (in theory, since many ISP's prohibit servers on personal accounts).
I plan another comment related to the Pointrel software ideas I've been working on (including a social semantic desktop) and how it overlaps the ideas discussed in the BitTorrent Project Maelstrom to have distributed content. My work is still in flux (and may never succeed perhaps), as are other options like FreedomBox or Maelstrom which are works in progress. But the point is, more options are emerging for creating and distributing content and we may, at some point, get away from centralized servers and back to the older model where people had local copies of books and papers or went to local libraries for copies of such. The model of the web right now is like than expecting that every time someone wanted to read something of some sort they visit the office of the person who wrote it. And if that person's office door is closed, you can't read it. We can do better as a society. Yes, people can make copies like of Wikipedia pages, but the context is lost and the copies are hard to manage. We could hopefully do better.
However, it is fair to ask how people can survive physically and financially in the 21st century. I feel a basic income for everyone in the USA (not just people over 65 on "Social Security") and other countries too could be part of the answer to that, and that such a world would be overall a better place with more creativity and more subsistence production and more gift giving and healthier participation by citizens in government planning -- and with less theft by "clickfraud" or other means. However, even without a basic income, the "git economy" aspect of the internet has saved me a lot of money and trouble, from people generally freely sharing advice (including links to free software) on personal blogs (or on an advertising supported site like Slashdot). I hope my own contributions as part of that informational gift economy will prove worthwhile and useful at least to some people here and there.
... you can't organize a mass political movement or broad cultural change by hiding what you are doing. You need to convince people to believe in a cause and be willing to commit resources to support it. And overall that requires broad mass communications and engaging more and more people, any one of whom could report you to "authorities". Successful broad change in a democracy is going to be focused on legal & non-violent means to change public opinion. Encryption is generally about hiding communications and their contents, which is the opposite of what you need to be doing to make large scale social change.
Encryption to ensure security is like the same argument for personal handgun ownership. While you can make arguments for such things and personal protection as individual solutions, neither do much by themselves to change the societal culture (including changing spending policies and laws) to make the community healthier and safer. An emphasis on such shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the core social problems that confront us related to building healthier communities around shared values.
Encrypted communications also don't help much when the person you are communicating with forwards everything to someone you don't know. And as an XKCD comic shows, a pipe wrench can defeat most encryption fairly straightforwardly. Encrypted communications can also be compromised in practice any number of ways, which then leaves you with a false sense of security and depending on something you should not be trusting. So, not only is a focus on encryption misleading, it is dangerous.
Sure, encryption may enhance privacy and in that sense affect a balance of power between individual and state, and it is useful for protecting commercial transactions against criminals. It has its place. But that place is not at the heart of making social change of the kind we need for the 21st century -- which I feel relate more to making the most of abundant modern technology despite a culture and habits of mind adapted for scarcity.
Or as I've said elsewhere: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d... "As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card tabulators] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete....
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intellig
That is a great historical link, thanks! And that leads to this other on West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, for two Supreme Court decisions that lead up to the Great Depression and then its resolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... "West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of minimum wage legislation enacted by the State of Washington, overturning an earlier decision in Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923). The decision is usually regarded as having ended the Lochner era, a period in American legal history during which the Supreme Court tended to invalidate legislation aimed at regulating business.[1]"
So, ultimately, the whole thing is self-defeating in general. Crunch times may be one thing, but on a regular basis, productivity declines even as people look busy.
One example: http://www.inc.com/jessica-sti... "The most essential thing to know about the 40-hour work-week is that, while it was the unions that pushed it, business leaders ultimately went along with it because their own data convinced them this was a solid, hard-nosed business decision....
Evan Robinson, a software engineer with a long interest in programmer productivity (full disclosure: our shared last name is not a coincidence) summarized this history in a white paper he wrote for the International Game Developers' Association in 2005. The original paper contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week. 'Throughout the '30s, '40s and '50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds,' writes Robinson; 'and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.'
What these studies showed, over and over, was that industrial workers have eight good, reliable hours a day in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day."
With software, it is so easy to introduce a bug when you are tired or distracted (one reason team programming often saves money). A bug (especially a conceptual one) might be very expensive to debug down the road, especially if it makes its way to production. How many times have programmers spent days chasing a bug that was a one line fix? So, it may well be the case that longer hours mean *negative* productivity and higher costs for the extra hours worked past 40 per week even when the employee is not paid for the hours.
There is another complicating factor. Big companies in the 1970s such as HP or IBM invested in actually training employees, creating the pool of workers that Silicon Valley drew from initially. Investing in employee training is now rare, due in part due to little loyalty on either side of the employee/employer relationship in many companies. So, given that the tech industry moves so fast, where does the training time come from (including to read Slashdot:-)? Ideally, training should happen during those 40 hours. But in practice, many people working in IT have to keep current on their own time.
Yet training produces many benefits: http://www.psychologicalscienc... "A new study from a team of European researchers found that job training may also be a good strategy for companies looking to hire and retain top talent. When workers felt like they had received better job training options, they were also more likely to report a greater sense of commitment to their employer.
For the study, psychological scientists Rita Fontinha, Maria Jose Chambel, and Nele De Cuyper looked at IT outsourcers in Portugal-who must constantly update their skills in order to keep up with the fast pace of new technology. The researchers hypothesized that when people were happy with the training opportunities their employer provided, they would be more motivated to reciprocate with an enhanced sense of loyalty to the company.
This kind of informal balance of expectations between employees and management is known as a "psychological contract." When workers feel that their employer has fulfilled their obligations under the psychological contract, they're more motivated to uphold their
Thanks for the link, AC: http://www.economist.com/blogs... "Working hours: Get a life... The Greeks are some of the most hardworking in the OECD, putting in over 2,000 hours a year on average. Germans, on the other hand, are comparative slackers, working about 1,400 hours each year. But German productivity is about 70% higher.... So maybe we should be more self-critical about how much we work. Working less may make us more productive. And, as Russell argued, working less will guarantee âoehappiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia"."
Interesting comments there like on work culture in South Korea, and I've just read the first couple comments of hundreds...
And if so, should not empathy extend throughout all levels of a learning organization, including between managers and subordinates? Everyone is learning stuff all the time, including about cultural changes. Firing someone rather than trying to understand the situation and the individual's motives more first and whether change is needed or possible does not seem "empathic". Perhaps that is the kind of thing you tend to learn after many years of experience being a parent or other long-term caregiver (including a long-term manager or mentor) when you see someone learn and grow and change over a long time?
Plus, as other comments suggest here, there is an assumption in this blog post that may ignore the possibility the issue was about consolidating minor changes rather than having them as individual commits. If this issue was deemed by enough of the community to be important, maybe a more systematic patch would indeed be in order? One tiny change is not much work, but it may set a bad precedent?
Also, it is not empathic to coworkers and the rest of a company and community depending on someone to fire that person without notice without reasonable review or attempts at remediation for a less than egregious offense (contrast with, say, someone accused of physically assaulting a coworker). The issue there is proportion and risk/harm assessment.
So, the response of "we would have fired him" seems too extreme in multiple ways.
I am all for meaningful diversity in workgroups, like discussed in this book: "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...
However, the problem with some of these "politically correct" initiatives or statements which seem on the surface to be helpful to promote "diversity" is that they can actually make workspaces more stressful for *everyone*. Someone can bully with the rules (or their interpretation) just as much, or more, than with a fist... Here is a website by psychologist Izzy Kalman that explores some issues related to bullying and truly creating happy productive workplaces by *really* emphasizing empathy and forgiveness and growth and free speech: http://bullies2buddies.com/
Just think about it -- does everyone at Joyent now need to be afraid of getting fired if they check the word "he" into the codebase, even by accident? Or maybe by saying "he" accidentally as a meeting? There are potential unintended consequences of creating a different sort of hostile workplace climate, like many US schools are finding out these days as a result of "zero tolerance" policies (like biting a cracker at lunch to make it shaped like a gun can get you in deep deep trouble).
For reference, here is what makes for happy productive creative workplaces in general (Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose): "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates people" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Anyway, these are all complex issues about language, sex, management, control, gender roles, cultural change, recruitment, productivity, norms, and more. They are tricky to talk about or write about without seeming uncaring or inept because of various assumptions people make about the context or the people involved -- and the fact that none of us are "perfect" (and that perfection can be in the eye of the beholder based on priorities). It is sad to see such great software get mired in them. But I guess they are p
"The scourge of Open Source disguised as choice.."
All too true too often. And the failure of the Linux Desktop to gain traction is a prime example of that (other than finally essentially via the Chromebook).
That said, "Stigmergy" is a way that large structures (like the FOSS landscape?) can get built by entities following relatively simple local rules. For example, termites build big complex mounds by getting excited when they see other termites having accomplished something small but interesting (creating an arch). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... http://www.evolutionofcomputin...
See especially: http://journal.media-culture.o... "Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.... Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent upon stigmergy."
Although in the termite case, they are increasingly joining together their separate actions vs. splitting apart the community in the NodeJS case. Maybe this is more akin to how a new generation of termite "queens" and their consorts takes to the air and finds a new place to create a new mound?
In any case, as a software developer moving into using NodeJS (and JavaScript in general) for new projects, this is not the sort of new I really want to hear. That is because it seems, in the short term, to increase risk (including from dilution of effort and community). In the long term I can, of course, be cautiously hopeful that the social and organizational issues will get worked through one way or another.
Fortunately, and why I like the JavaScript ecosystem even as I find JavaScript the language awkward to work with,there are many possible JavaScript containers to run stuff in. Here are a couple more for the server:
http://nodyn.io/ "Nodyn is a Node.js compatible framework, running on the JVM powered by the DynJS Javascript runtime"
http://ringojs.org/ "Ringo is a CommonJS-based JavaScript runtime written in Java and based on the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript engine. It takes a pragmatical and non-dogmatic stance on things like I/O paradigms. Blocking and asynchronous I/O both have their strengths and weaknesses in different areas."
So, in the Stigmergic sense, the idea of JavaScript everywhere (including on the server) is taking off as all us little FOSS termites get excited about the idea and work together on various arches. And with ways to compile C to code that can run efficiently on a JavaScript runtime, I wonder f we will see more and more adoption of JavaScript containers and further improvements in them.
While divisions of this look painful, when you step back and look at the landscape of millions of software developers who like to develop software (sometimes in different styles or with different emphases) this kind of forking is inevitable.
Reflecting on this though, I started shifting from Python around the time that the "Benevolent Dictator for Life" Guido van Rossum created a new (somewhat) backwardly-incompatible version of Python (3) while the community kept pushing support for the old one. Perl faced a similar issue with a new version going to version 6. I'm sympathetic to that dilemma for the original authors, but those are, to a lesser extent, and maybe with less drama, other examples of these sorts of tensions of priorities and individual vs. community control regarding priorities and future directions.
We probably need to develop much better understanding of what makes a FOSS project a success (in terms of community dynamics) and how it can stay a success despite trying to fix up early design choices.
Sometimes workarounds can keep things together for a time, like how JSLint/JSHint and "use strict" i
I was reading "Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization" by Spencer Wells this morning. He makes the point that hunter/gatherers tend to walk away from social conflicts, whereas people in large militaristic agricultural hierarchies instead tend to end up fighting wars for resources as they see no other alternatives. I had a lot of youthful optimism in the 1970s stemming in part from the US space program and many space-related TV shows (Thunderbirds, Star Trek, Space: 1999, Lost In Space). To be potentially capable of the military conquest of the planet Earth, a country probably has to be of the scale of WWII Germany or the USA -- having about 5% of the planet's population and land. So that means, ignoring moral aspects and such, the maximum return on military investment for Empire can be at most about 20 to 1 relative to the total resources (including people) you are starting with and essentially gambling. By contrast, investments in Research & Development, such as the space program like with Orion or new energy sources like hot or cold fusion or dirt-cheap solar PV or whatever have the potential to produce much greater returns than 20:1 on investment. Imagine if the USA had poured the cost of the Iraq war (three or more trillion US$ at this point) into fusion research. We might have 1000X as much cheap less-polluting energy to use (including for space launches) than we have now. Increasing human capability to get into space and live there in self-replicating space habitats potentially could produce another 1000X or more return in land area to live in. Even as 100 trillion dollars to make the first such self-replicating space habitat, the ROI is so much higher than that of preparing to fight a global war of empire-building.
Maybe we can see a return to other ideas, like those from back when NASA overall was more optimistic under Carter? "Advanced Automation for Space Missions" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/... "This document is the final report of a study on the feasability of using machine intelligence, including automation and robotics, in future space missions. The 10-week study was conducted during the summer of 1980 by 18 educators from universities throughout the United States who worked with 15 NASA program engineers. The specific study objectives were to identify and analyze several representative missions that would require extensive applications of machine intelligence, and then to identify technologies that must be developed to accomplish these types of missions. This study was sponsored jointly by NASA, through the Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology and the Office of University Affairs, and by the American Society for Engineering Education as part of their continuing program of summer study faculty fellowships. Co-hosts for the study were the NASA Ames Research Center and the University of Santa Clara, where the study was carried out. Project co-directors were James E. Long of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Timothy J. Healy of the University of Santa Clara."
There are probably nuances here regarding how much of the country is at risk in such a military gamble and so on, as well as the value of military investments for deterrence (how much is enough?), but that is the broad brush picture I've always seen based on that early optimism. And given that a supervolcano like Toba (mentioned by Spencer Wells as killing of most humans about 70,000 years ago) or a pandemic (like Ebola) could wipe out most people (from a decade long winter and a new ice age), it seems investments in cooperation to develop productive innovations including space habitats has a much better risk/reward ratio than most military investments which ultimately still don't secure you against supervolcanos or plagues and similar things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
While it has sometimes been called "The Conquest of Space", it is a very d
What great news to wake up to! Hoping for many more optimism-promoting successes like this on the road to humans living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal or lunar ores.
BTW, that PBS NewsHour Orion article led me to another PBS NewsHour article which formed the basis of my most recent "optimistic" Slashdot story submission on how restoring 1970s overtime regulations could boost the US economy: http://slashdot.org/submission...
With a stronger economy, maybe there would be even more demand for space-related ventures of all sorts?
I wonder if the reply counts as a good enough "reputable source" to update the Wikipedia article on the Tipping Point?
I was also glad to see two questions mentioning automation issues (one referencing a basic income). Maybe we'll see a new book on that as Malcolm Gladwell explores those issues more in depth?
Yes, I was surprised this article was collapsed on the main page. The potential for problems if bacteria start eating through common plastics is enormous.
I went through this around 2007-2008 when after running Debian as a desktop for about five years on two desktops, my wife and I got tired of the breakage with every major update. While I was willing to put up with more, my wife got tired of me spending a few hours trying to sort things out on her desktop with every update -- often basic things like graphics driver stuff in a multi-monitor setup. Power savings never worked (I gave up on it).
What often drove updates was wanting to use the latest version of Eclipse or Firefox or other applications. My wife went first, going to a Mac Pro, and I followed about a year later. We're still using that hardware, although upgraded in various ways (memory, drives, graphics cards and monitors).
That said, Linux is everywhere and those years of working with it all the time have been very useful in maintaining servers (including in VirtualBox) and embedded hardware (NAS, routers, media, other) which generally face less updates that desktops. I feel Linux settled down to stability a couple years after that (driven in part by Ubuntu's widespread adoption) -- although it sounds like instability has picked up again. I feel that in general about FOSS -- maybe the old guard is getting bored or old or tired or busy or burned out and new people move to web stuff?
Of course now, my wife's Mac Pro from 2007 is not supported for an upgrade past Snow Leopard. Mine is, but I'm not sure if it is worth it yet. But, more and more, software coming out has a minimum of later versions. And there are no more Snow Leopard updates. And my wife's machine has a sporadic kernel panic or something once every few weeks or so. And mine has also been doing some lockups, although not recently after resetting the PRAM.
There were some big disappointments leaving Debian. I liked cut-and-paste under Linux where selecting something put it in the copy buffer. Mac is harder, including weirdness about having to menu click within the selected text to pull up a copy menu. Apt get was great (when stuff was compatible) and a sad loss to not have. Also, Mac's GUI design with a single global menu is just *terrible* on a multi-monitor setup, especially if the monitors are different heights; having a menu per application window like Linux makes so much more sense. I also don't like the fact that I could easily (without copyright concerns) virtualize old Linux setups, but you can't really do that with Mac OS X -- in that sense, all my work feels "contaminated" by copyright issues. That said, Apple Time Machine "just works" as a backup solution (ignoring the risks of having a plugged in backup hard drive in a worst case).
Just saying, there are other options; whether we pursue them is a different story. Google's non-search activities (like Google Apps, Chromium, other Google Lab stuff) generally only make significant financial sense to the company in the context of their search business, so breaking up Google means those spinoff businesses would probably immediately go bankrupt.
What was really wrong with an AT&T that funded Bell Labs and created UNIX with government-mandated 5% or so of revenue to be spent on (free and open source) R&D like was the case with AT&T? As someone once said, Bell Labs was funded by people dropping dimes into boxes across the country. Telephone costs have changed in the USA since the breakup, *but* it is not really clear how much of that had to do with the "baby bells" and competition and how much had to do with Moore's law an an exponential reduction in computing costs per MIP that made packet switching (even in the home) so much cheaper.
See: "The End of AT&T: Ma Bell may be gone, but its innovations are everywhere" http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/... "It's 1974. Platform shoes are the height of urban fashion. Disco is just getting into full stride. The Watergate scandal has paralyzed the U.S. government. The new Porsche 911 Turbo helps car lovers at the Paris motor show briefly forget the recent Arab oil embargo. And the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. is far and away the largest corporation in the world.
AT&T's US $26 billion in revenues--the equivalent of $82 billion today--represents 1.4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. The next-largest enterprise, sprawling General Motors Corp., is a third its size, dwarfed by AT&T's $75 billion in assets, more than 100 million customers, and nearly a million employees.
AT&T was a corporate Goliath that seemed as immutable as Gibraltar. And yet now, only 30 years later, the colossus is no more. Of the many events that contributed to the company's long decline, a crucial one took place in the autumn of that year. On 20 November 1974, the U.S. Department of Justice filed the antitrust suit that would end a decade later with the breakup of AT&T and its network, the Bell System, into seven regional carriers, the Baby Bells. AT&T retained its long-distance service, along with Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., its legendary research arm, and the Western Electric Co., its manufacturing subsidiary. From that point on, the company had plenty of ups and downs. It started new businesses, spun off divisions, and acquired and sold companies. But in the end it succumbed. Now AT&T is gone....
Should we mourn the loss? The easy answer is no. Telephone providers abound nowadays. AT&T's services continue to exist and could be easily replaced if they didn't.
But that easy answer ignores AT&T's unparalleled history of research and innovation. During the company's heyday, from 1925 to the mid-1980s, Bell Labs brought us inventions and discoveries that changed the way we live and broadened our understanding of the universe. How many companies can make such a claim?
The oft-repeated list of Bell Labs innovations features many of the milestone developments of the 20th century, including the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, fiber optics, and satellite communications. Few doubt that AT&T's R&D machine was among the greatest ever. But few realize that its innovations, paradoxically, contributed to the downfall of its parent. And now, through a series of events during the past three decades, this remarkable R&D engine has run out of steam....
The funding came in large part from what was essentially a built-in "R&D tax" on telephone service. Every time we picked up the phone to place a long-distance call half a century ago, a few pennies of every dollar--a dollar wo
Whatever makes sense with your skills, resources, and connections... These alternatives are there to provide the seeds for a next generation. They can be things like non-profits, for-profits, hobbies, community organizations, libraries, social networks, barter exchanges, citizens groups focused on one important local issue like a better library or better infrastructure of some sort, a movement for a basic income, LETS systems, or whatever. A healthy society has a good mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned transactions. If you think the system is out of balance, then create or support counterbalancing forces (in a legal, healthy, and optimistic way). Tiny non-profits across the USA are suffering from lack of leadership and members as TV and the internet and dual-income families soak up all the otherwise spare volunteer time. The "old" USA from a century or so ago had those strong traditions of a mix of all those things, and such a mix is at the root of "Democracy" IMHO.
I used to think Debian provided one example of alternative governance, although lately mostly bad news on that front regarding the systemd issue. Hopefully it will move past that and become stronger through some self-reflection.
Search on "Michael Rupert Evolution" on his "From the Wilderness" site for some related interesting reading where he tried to move to another country and it didn't work out (an extreme case, and I dismiss his worries about "Peak Oil" as overblown, but he had some insights there about building where you are now and are connected).
http://www.theamericanconserva... "This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments."
I would add "community" and "health" as public goods government should also help support.
BTW, to underscore the point that charity only tends to work well in communities where people are well known to each other (either that or an abstract gifte economy like JP Hogan wrote about), see: "Switzerland's shame: The children used as cheap farm labour" http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi... "Gogniat, his brother and two sisters were "contract children" or verdingkinder as they are known in Switzerland. The practice of using children as cheap labour on farms and in homes began in the 1850s and it continued into the second half of the 20th Century. Historian Loretta Seglias says children were taken away for "economic reasons most of the time⦠up until World War Two Switzerland was not a wealthy country, and a lot of the people were poor". Agriculture was not mechanised and so farms needed child labour.
If a child became orphaned, a parent was unmarried, there was fear of neglect, or you had the misfortune to be poor, the communities would intervene. Authorities tried to find the cheapest way to look after these children, so they took them out of their families and placed them in foster families....
The extent to which these children were treated as commodities is demonstrated by the fact that there are cases even in the early 20th Century where they were herded into a village square and sold at public auction....
"Children didn't know what was happening to them, why they were taken away, why they couldn't go home, see their parents, why they were being abused and no-one believed them," she says.
"The other thing is the lack of love. Being in a family where you are not part of the family, you are just there for working." And it left a devastating mark for the rest of the children's lives. Some have huge psychological problems, difficulties with getting involved with others and their own families. For others it was too much to bear. Some committed suicide after such a childhood.
Social workers did make visits. David Gogniat says his family had no telephone, so when a social worker called a house in the v
"You are personally going to migrate your employer's systems because you personally do not like something, something every single major distro is moving too, and the top kernel developers are already using?"
No, AC, he said he is going to migrate his *personal* systems and those of an apparent volunteer organization he is affiliated with. Read more carefully next time before launching into the personal insults...
"Ben Franklin and others who owned printers realized that copyright didn't apply to them, so they promptly began making copies of everything - books, sheet music, etc."
I had know that for much of US history there was no respect for foreign copyrights (from other countries). I never saw anyone connect this to Ben Franklin's success before. Interesting!
I agree we may well see cheap compact nuclear fission reactors in the 2020s like from Hyperion., Also, it is a sad truth that we could build much safer reactors if engineers had been asked to prioritize safety over other things (Freeman Dyson's TRIGA design being one example) and if the USA has not focused on a Uranium nuclear cycle that intentionally could be easily weaponized (instead of Thorium).
Still I'd expect solar will actually continue to fall in price by the 2020s too. It would not surprise me if PV was in the 15 cent per watt range by 2030 (or even less) other things remaining constant. Consider how "cheap" used "solar collectors" in terms of tree leaves are in the Fall in the USA. Solar panels potentially could be printed as cheaply as aluminum foil using advanced nanomaterials and special inks.
We haven't really seen anything like the amount of research in PV we will probably see when it reaches grid parity everywhere and people really invest in it in a huge way equivalent to previous investments in fossil fuel production and research. Some people (myself included) have been predicting this turning point for a long time, and it has been dismissed and ignored. It is easy to say PV progress will never get to grid parity until it actually happens. That has been true even though the trends for decades show a clear line towards zero cost (no doubt it will go asymptotic at some point to just be dirt cheap though).
Unfortunately, in our short-term-oriented society in the USA, until PV is cheaper than the grid it is only a niche thing for special circumstances or motivated environmentally-minded people. That has been what has been funding it as only a relative trickle of investment. Once PV is cheaper than the grid, assuming a good solution to energy storage exists (fuel cells with nickle-metal hydride storage, Lithium ion batteries, molten salt batteries, compressed air, or something else), it will be economically foolish to use anything else to generate power than PV. And then, sometime after the stampede, we will see enormous sums of money flow into PV research and production. Electric utilities may collapse all over the place as his happens because grid power becomes too pricey once the cost of delivery exceeds the cost of on-site production. Except for the value of their right of ways as internet conduits, and maybe the value of their copper wires, I would guess that most utilities if properly accounted for, given decommissioning costs and outstanding long-term debt in sunk costs, most utilities may well have a negative net worth right now given any forecast that includes these trends.
Personally, I still think it possible that hot fusion or cold fusion will displace PV (as well as nuclear fusion) in the near future. Those could potentially be really really cheap. Even if fission gets cheaper and better (including potentially as small batteries), I don't see it could compete with workable fusion (and probably neither could PV for most applications).
We'll likely also see energy efficiency increase greatly. The current best construction in Europe is to build passive solar superinsulated houses without furnaces; search on "no furnace house".
I'd love to see the solar roadways thing work out... Or even just for parking lots or driveways. http://www.solarroadways.com/
Still, as I said elsewhere, the same reasons PV s getting cheaper (cheaper computing leading to cheaper collaboration and better designs by cheaper modeling and newer materials and so on) are the same sorts of reasons we will also see much cheaper nuclear power. Of course, there are other trends that all interact with that as well... A post by me from 2000: "[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?" http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
In the Tipping Point you advance the argument that it was better policing against minor infractions that reduced crime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... "Economist Steven Levitt and Malcolm Gladwell have a running dispute about whether the fall in New York City's crime rate can be attributed to the actions of the police department and "Fixing Broken Windows" (as claimed in The Tipping Point). In Freakonomics, Levitt attributes the decrease in crime to two primary factors: 1) a drastic increase in the number of police officers trained and deployed on the streets and hiring Raymond W. Kelly as police commissioner (thanks to the efforts of former mayor David Dinkins) and 2) a decrease in the number of unwanted children made possible by Roe v. Wade, causing crime to drop nationally in all major cities -- "[e]ven in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad policing"."
However, it looks like the drop in crime is most closely correlated with the fall in environmental lead (mostly from reducing the used of leaded gasoline). Since other places have seen their crime rate fall without drastic changes in policing, what do you think of the lead and crime connection? See also: "America's Real Criminal Element: Lead; New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing. " http://www.motherjones.com/env...
http://www.seedsavers.org/ "Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit organization dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds. Since 1975, our members have been passing on our garden heritage by collecting and distributing thousands of samples of rare garden seeds to other gardeners. "
Looks like we turned down the wrong path a few decades ago...
When Lessig argued "Eldred vs. Ashcroft" there was some point where the justices said, essentially, well no one has ever complained about copyright extensions before in terms of that being a taking something of value from the public (breaking the previous bargain struck at the time the work was produced), so extensions must be OK. That was probably not true, but Lessig did not have much of an answer for that. My memory of that may be a bit fuzzy, but I think that was the gist of an important point in the case as far as precedent.
More craziness and the law regarding the "owners" of so many copyrights these days: http://www.ratical.org/corpora... " In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court's taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution.
Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of arguement in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that:
"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does."
The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that:
"The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.
The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery -- a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts. "
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest problem here is ignoring that there are different types of transactions in a community, which include subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft (as discussed on my own website). Selling eyeballs to advertisers to fund a website is primarily an exchange economy transaction. But, as with putting up holiday lights just to make the darkness cheery, there can be gift giving involved in an action (even with a substantial power bill for the lights). You put up lights this year in one place, someone else puts up lights some other year somewhere else, and we all (in theory) enjoy the spectacle. Or, like many towns have tax-funded street lights for safety and convenience, government agencies like NOAA can put up useful websites about the weather with hazardous weather alerts, or NASA can put up useful websites about space science. People can also put up personal websites with journals or "How To" documents just because they are useful or interesting to themselves and their family (subsistence) and accept that it is OK if others look at them.
About a dozen years ago, I read somewhere on Philip Greenspun's website (on making websites), a comment to the effect that, if people announce they are getting a cat, or learning to play the piano, or taking vegetarian cooking lessons, people very rarely ask, how are you going to make money at that? But when people start a website, that seems to be the first question other people ask.
Of course, things have changes a bit now that so many people use Facebook or similar instead of just hosting their own website. It's ironic, since it is so cheap to host your own content now on a paid website (US$5 per month for a cheap one?) or even free on GitHub pages and similar. Or you can get a FreedomBox-like "wall wart" server (in theory) that just serves content through your ISP (in theory, since many ISP's prohibit servers on personal accounts).
I plan another comment related to the Pointrel software ideas I've been working on (including a social semantic desktop) and how it overlaps the ideas discussed in the BitTorrent Project Maelstrom to have distributed content. My work is still in flux (and may never succeed perhaps), as are other options like FreedomBox or Maelstrom which are works in progress. But the point is, more options are emerging for creating and distributing content and we may, at some point, get away from centralized servers and back to the older model where people had local copies of books and papers or went to local libraries for copies of such. The model of the web right now is like than expecting that every time someone wanted to read something of some sort they visit the office of the person who wrote it. And if that person's office door is closed, you can't read it. We can do better as a society. Yes, people can make copies like of Wikipedia pages, but the context is lost and the copies are hard to manage. We could hopefully do better.
However, it is fair to ask how people can survive physically and financially in the 21st century. I feel a basic income for everyone in the USA (not just people over 65 on "Social Security") and other countries too could be part of the answer to that, and that such a world would be overall a better place with more creativity and more subsistence production and more gift giving and healthier participation by citizens in government planning -- and with less theft by "clickfraud" or other means. However, even without a basic income, the "git economy" aspect of the internet has saved me a lot of money and trouble, from people generally freely sharing advice (including links to free software) on personal blogs (or on an advertising supported site like Slashdot). I hope my own contributions as part of that informational gift economy will prove worthwhile and useful at least to some people here and there.
... you can't organize a mass political movement or broad cultural change by hiding what you are doing. You need to convince people to believe in a cause and be willing to commit resources to support it. And overall that requires broad mass communications and engaging more and more people, any one of whom could report you to "authorities". Successful broad change in a democracy is going to be focused on legal & non-violent means to change public opinion. Encryption is generally about hiding communications and their contents, which is the opposite of what you need to be doing to make large scale social change.
Encryption to ensure security is like the same argument for personal handgun ownership. While you can make arguments for such things and personal protection as individual solutions, neither do much by themselves to change the societal culture (including changing spending policies and laws) to make the community healthier and safer. An emphasis on such shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the core social problems that confront us related to building healthier communities around shared values.
Encrypted communications also don't help much when the person you are communicating with forwards everything to someone you don't know. And as an XKCD comic shows, a pipe wrench can defeat most encryption fairly straightforwardly. Encrypted communications can also be compromised in practice any number of ways, which then leaves you with a false sense of security and depending on something you should not be trusting. So, not only is a focus on encryption misleading, it is dangerous.
Sure, encryption may enhance privacy and in that sense affect a balance of power between individual and state, and it is useful for protecting commercial transactions against criminals. It has its place. But that place is not at the heart of making social change of the kind we need for the 21st century -- which I feel relate more to making the most of abundant modern technology despite a culture and habits of mind adapted for scarcity.
Or as I've said elsewhere: ...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
"As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card tabulators] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intellig
That is a great historical link, thanks! And that leads to this other on West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, for two Supreme Court decisions that lead up to the Great Depression and then its resolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of minimum wage legislation enacted by the State of Washington, overturning an earlier decision in Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923). The decision is usually regarded as having ended the Lochner era, a period in American legal history during which the Supreme Court tended to invalidate legislation aimed at regulating business.[1]"
So, ultimately, the whole thing is self-defeating in general. Crunch times may be one thing, but on a regular basis, productivity declines even as people look busy.
One example:
http://www.inc.com/jessica-sti...
"The most essential thing to know about the 40-hour work-week is that, while it was the unions that pushed it, business leaders ultimately went along with it because their own data convinced them this was a solid, hard-nosed business decision....
Evan Robinson, a software engineer with a long interest in programmer productivity (full disclosure: our shared last name is not a coincidence) summarized this history in a white paper he wrote for the International Game Developers' Association in 2005. The original paper contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week. 'Throughout the '30s, '40s and '50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds,' writes Robinson; 'and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.'
What these studies showed, over and over, was that industrial workers have eight good, reliable hours a day in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day."
With software, it is so easy to introduce a bug when you are tired or distracted (one reason team programming often saves money). A bug (especially a conceptual one) might be very expensive to debug down the road, especially if it makes its way to production. How many times have programmers spent days chasing a bug that was a one line fix? So, it may well be the case that longer hours mean *negative* productivity and higher costs for the extra hours worked past 40 per week even when the employee is not paid for the hours.
There is another complicating factor. Big companies in the 1970s such as HP or IBM invested in actually training employees, creating the pool of workers that Silicon Valley drew from initially. Investing in employee training is now rare, due in part due to little loyalty on either side of the employee/employer relationship in many companies. So, given that the tech industry moves so fast, where does the training time come from (including to read Slashdot :-)? Ideally, training should happen during those 40 hours. But in practice, many people working in IT have to keep current on their own time.
Yet training produces many benefits:
http://www.psychologicalscienc...
"A new study from a team of European researchers found that job training may also be a good strategy for companies looking to hire and retain top talent. When workers felt like they had received better job training options, they were also more likely to report a greater sense of commitment to their employer.
For the study, psychological scientists Rita Fontinha, Maria Jose Chambel, and Nele De Cuyper looked at IT outsourcers in Portugal-who must constantly update their skills in order to keep up with the fast pace of new technology. The researchers hypothesized that when people were happy with the training opportunities their employer provided, they would be more motivated to reciprocate with an enhanced sense of loyalty to the company.
This kind of informal balance of expectations between employees and management is known as a "psychological contract." When workers feel that their employer has fulfilled their obligations under the psychological contract, they're more motivated to uphold their
Thanks for the link, AC: http://www.economist.com/blogs... ... The Greeks are some of the most hardworking in the OECD, putting in over 2,000 hours a year on average. Germans, on the other hand, are comparative slackers, working about 1,400 hours each year. But German productivity is about 70% higher. ... So maybe we should be more self-critical about how much we work. Working less may make us more productive. And, as Russell argued, working less will guarantee âoehappiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia"."
"Working hours: Get a life
Interesting comments there like on work culture in South Korea, and I've just read the first couple comments of hundreds...
I especially liked the link to "empathy is a core engineering value" though: http://www.listbox.com/member/...
Linked from: https://www.joyent.com/blog/th...
And if so, should not empathy extend throughout all levels of a learning organization, including between managers and subordinates? Everyone is learning stuff all the time, including about cultural changes. Firing someone rather than trying to understand the situation and the individual's motives more first and whether change is needed or possible does not seem "empathic". Perhaps that is the kind of thing you tend to learn after many years of experience being a parent or other long-term caregiver (including a long-term manager or mentor) when you see someone learn and grow and change over a long time?
Plus, as other comments suggest here, there is an assumption in this blog post that may ignore the possibility the issue was about consolidating minor changes rather than having them as individual commits. If this issue was deemed by enough of the community to be important, maybe a more systematic patch would indeed be in order? One tiny change is not much work, but it may set a bad precedent?
Also, it is not empathic to coworkers and the rest of a company and community depending on someone to fire that person without notice without reasonable review or attempts at remediation for a less than egregious offense (contrast with, say, someone accused of physically assaulting a coworker). The issue there is proportion and risk/harm assessment.
So, the response of "we would have fired him" seems too extreme in multiple ways.
I am all for meaningful diversity in workgroups, like discussed in this book:
"The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...
However, the problem with some of these "politically correct" initiatives or statements which seem on the surface to be helpful to promote "diversity" is that they can actually make workspaces more stressful for *everyone*. Someone can bully with the rules (or their interpretation) just as much, or more, than with a fist... Here is a website by psychologist Izzy Kalman that explores some issues related to bullying and truly creating happy productive workplaces by *really* emphasizing empathy and forgiveness and growth and free speech:
http://bullies2buddies.com/
Just think about it -- does everyone at Joyent now need to be afraid of getting fired if they check the word "he" into the codebase, even by accident? Or maybe by saying "he" accidentally as a meeting? There are potential unintended consequences of creating a different sort of hostile workplace climate, like many US schools are finding out these days as a result of "zero tolerance" policies (like biting a cracker at lunch to make it shaped like a gun can get you in deep deep trouble).
For reference, here is what makes for happy productive creative workplaces in general (Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose):
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates people"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Anyway, these are all complex issues about language, sex, management, control, gender roles, cultural change, recruitment, productivity, norms, and more. They are tricky to talk about or write about without seeming uncaring or inept because of various assumptions people make about the context or the people involved -- and the fact that none of us are "perfect" (and that perfection can be in the eye of the beholder based on priorities). It is sad to see such great software get mired in them. But I guess they are p
"The scourge of Open Source disguised as choice.."
All too true too often. And the failure of the Linux Desktop to gain traction is a prime example of that (other than finally essentially via the Chromebook).
That said, "Stigmergy" is a way that large structures (like the FOSS landscape?) can get built by entities following relatively simple local rules. For example, termites build big complex mounds by getting excited when they see other termites having accomplished something small but interesting (creating an arch).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.evolutionofcomputin...
See especially: ... Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent upon stigmergy."
http://journal.media-culture.o...
"Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.
Although in the termite case, they are increasingly joining together their separate actions vs. splitting apart the community in the NodeJS case. Maybe this is more akin to how a new generation of termite "queens" and their consorts takes to the air and finds a new place to create a new mound?
In any case, as a software developer moving into using NodeJS (and JavaScript in general) for new projects, this is not the sort of new I really want to hear. That is because it seems, in the short term, to increase risk (including from dilution of effort and community). In the long term I can, of course, be cautiously hopeful that the social and organizational issues will get worked through one way or another.
Fortunately, and why I like the JavaScript ecosystem even as I find JavaScript the language awkward to work with,there are many possible JavaScript containers to run stuff in. Here are a couple more for the server:
http://nodyn.io/
"Nodyn is a Node.js compatible framework, running on the JVM powered by the DynJS Javascript runtime"
http://ringojs.org/
"Ringo is a CommonJS-based JavaScript runtime written in Java and based on the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript engine. It takes a pragmatical and non-dogmatic stance on things like I/O paradigms. Blocking and asynchronous I/O both have their strengths and weaknesses in different areas."
So, in the Stigmergic sense, the idea of JavaScript everywhere (including on the server) is taking off as all us little FOSS termites get excited about the idea and work together on various arches. And with ways to compile C to code that can run efficiently on a JavaScript runtime, I wonder f we will see more and more adoption of JavaScript containers and further improvements in them.
While divisions of this look painful, when you step back and look at the landscape of millions of software developers who like to develop software (sometimes in different styles or with different emphases) this kind of forking is inevitable.
Reflecting on this though, I started shifting from Python around the time that the "Benevolent Dictator for Life" Guido van Rossum created a new (somewhat) backwardly-incompatible version of Python (3) while the community kept pushing support for the old one. Perl faced a similar issue with a new version going to version 6. I'm sympathetic to that dilemma for the original authors, but those are, to a lesser extent, and maybe with less drama, other examples of these sorts of tensions of priorities and individual vs. community control regarding priorities and future directions.
We probably need to develop much better understanding of what makes a FOSS project a success (in terms of community dynamics) and how it can stay a success despite trying to fix up early design choices.
Sometimes workarounds can keep things together for a time, like how JSLint/JSHint and "use strict" i
I was reading "Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization" by Spencer Wells this morning. He makes the point that hunter/gatherers tend to walk away from social conflicts, whereas people in large militaristic agricultural hierarchies instead tend to end up fighting wars for resources as they see no other alternatives. I had a lot of youthful optimism in the 1970s stemming in part from the US space program and many space-related TV shows (Thunderbirds, Star Trek, Space: 1999, Lost In Space). To be potentially capable of the military conquest of the planet Earth, a country probably has to be of the scale of WWII Germany or the USA -- having about 5% of the planet's population and land. So that means, ignoring moral aspects and such, the maximum return on military investment for Empire can be at most about 20 to 1 relative to the total resources (including people) you are starting with and essentially gambling. By contrast, investments in Research & Development, such as the space program like with Orion or new energy sources like hot or cold fusion or dirt-cheap solar PV or whatever have the potential to produce much greater returns than 20:1 on investment. Imagine if the USA had poured the cost of the Iraq war (three or more trillion US$ at this point) into fusion research. We might have 1000X as much cheap less-polluting energy to use (including for space launches) than we have now. Increasing human capability to get into space and live there in self-replicating space habitats potentially could produce another 1000X or more return in land area to live in. Even as 100 trillion dollars to make the first such self-replicating space habitat, the ROI is so much higher than that of preparing to fight a global war of empire-building.
Maybe we can see a return to other ideas, like those from back when NASA overall was more optimistic under Carter?
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions"
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/...
"This document is the final report of a study on the feasability of using machine intelligence, including automation and robotics, in future space missions. The 10-week study was conducted during the summer of 1980 by 18 educators from universities throughout the United States who worked with 15 NASA program engineers. The specific study objectives were to identify and analyze several representative missions that would require extensive applications of machine intelligence, and then to identify technologies that must be developed to accomplish these types of missions. This study was sponsored jointly by NASA, through the Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology and the Office of University Affairs, and by the American Society for Engineering Education as part of their continuing program of summer study faculty fellowships. Co-hosts for the study were the NASA Ames Research Center and the University of Santa Clara, where the study was carried out. Project co-directors were James E. Long of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Timothy J. Healy of the University of Santa Clara."
There are probably nuances here regarding how much of the country is at risk in such a military gamble and so on, as well as the value of military investments for deterrence (how much is enough?), but that is the broad brush picture I've always seen based on that early optimism. And given that a supervolcano like Toba (mentioned by Spencer Wells as killing of most humans about 70,000 years ago) or a pandemic (like Ebola) could wipe out most people (from a decade long winter and a new ice age), it seems investments in cooperation to develop productive innovations including space habitats has a much better risk/reward ratio than most military investments which ultimately still don't secure you against supervolcanos or plagues and similar things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
While it has sometimes been called "The Conquest of Space", it is a very d
What great news to wake up to! Hoping for many more optimism-promoting successes like this on the road to humans living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal or lunar ores.
Here is a PBS NewsHour video with launch footage:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/up...
BTW, that PBS NewsHour Orion article led me to another PBS NewsHour article which formed the basis of my most recent "optimistic" Slashdot story submission on how restoring 1970s overtime regulations could boost the US economy:
http://slashdot.org/submission...
With a stronger economy, maybe there would be even more demand for space-related ventures of all sorts?
I wonder if the reply counts as a good enough "reputable source" to update the Wikipedia article on the Tipping Point?
I was also glad to see two questions mentioning automation issues (one referencing a basic income). Maybe we'll see a new book on that as Malcolm Gladwell explores those issues more in depth?
"In 2027 the Hawking speech synthesizer becomes self-aware and destroys the human race."
Wish I had mod points to mod this ironically funny!!! http://slashdot.org/story/14/1...
Yes, I was surprised this article was collapsed on the main page. The potential for problems if bacteria start eating through common plastics is enormous.
I went through this around 2007-2008 when after running Debian as a desktop for about five years on two desktops, my wife and I got tired of the breakage with every major update. While I was willing to put up with more, my wife got tired of me spending a few hours trying to sort things out on her desktop with every update -- often basic things like graphics driver stuff in a multi-monitor setup. Power savings never worked (I gave up on it).
What often drove updates was wanting to use the latest version of Eclipse or Firefox or other applications. My wife went first, going to a Mac Pro, and I followed about a year later. We're still using that hardware, although upgraded in various ways (memory, drives, graphics cards and monitors).
That said, Linux is everywhere and those years of working with it all the time have been very useful in maintaining servers (including in VirtualBox) and embedded hardware (NAS, routers, media, other) which generally face less updates that desktops. I feel Linux settled down to stability a couple years after that (driven in part by Ubuntu's widespread adoption) -- although it sounds like instability has picked up again. I feel that in general about FOSS -- maybe the old guard is getting bored or old or tired or busy or burned out and new people move to web stuff?
Of course now, my wife's Mac Pro from 2007 is not supported for an upgrade past Snow Leopard. Mine is, but I'm not sure if it is worth it yet. But, more and more, software coming out has a minimum of later versions. And there are no more Snow Leopard updates. And my wife's machine has a sporadic kernel panic or something once every few weeks or so. And mine has also been doing some lockups, although not recently after resetting the PRAM.
There were some big disappointments leaving Debian. I liked cut-and-paste under Linux where selecting something put it in the copy buffer. Mac is harder, including weirdness about having to menu click within the selected text to pull up a copy menu. Apt get was great (when stuff was compatible) and a sad loss to not have. Also, Mac's GUI design with a single global menu is just *terrible* on a multi-monitor setup, especially if the monitors are different heights; having a menu per application window like Linux makes so much more sense. I also don't like the fact that I could easily (without copyright concerns) virtualize old Linux setups, but you can't really do that with Mac OS X -- in that sense, all my work feels "contaminated" by copyright issues. That said, Apple Time Machine "just works" as a backup solution (ignoring the risks of having a plugged in backup hard drive in a worst case).
Just saying, there are other options; whether we pursue them is a different story. Google's non-search activities (like Google Apps, Chromium, other Google Lab stuff) generally only make significant financial sense to the company in the context of their search business, so breaking up Google means those spinoff businesses would probably immediately go bankrupt.
What was really wrong with an AT&T that funded Bell Labs and created UNIX with government-mandated 5% or so of revenue to be spent on (free and open source) R&D like was the case with AT&T? As someone once said, Bell Labs was funded by people dropping dimes into boxes across the country. Telephone costs have changed in the USA since the breakup, *but* it is not really clear how much of that had to do with the "baby bells" and competition and how much had to do with Moore's law an an exponential reduction in computing costs per MIP that made packet switching (even in the home) so much cheaper.
See: ... ...
"The End of AT&T: Ma Bell may be gone, but its innovations are everywhere"
http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/...
"It's 1974. Platform shoes are the height of urban fashion. Disco is just getting into full stride. The Watergate scandal has paralyzed the U.S. government. The new Porsche 911 Turbo helps car lovers at the Paris motor show briefly forget the recent Arab oil embargo. And the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. is far and away the largest corporation in the world.
AT&T's US $26 billion in revenues--the equivalent of $82 billion today--represents 1.4 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. The next-largest enterprise, sprawling General Motors Corp., is a third its size, dwarfed by AT&T's $75 billion in assets, more than 100 million customers, and nearly a million employees.
AT&T was a corporate Goliath that seemed as immutable as Gibraltar. And yet now, only 30 years later, the colossus is no more. Of the many events that contributed to the company's long decline, a crucial one took place in the autumn of that year. On 20 November 1974, the U.S. Department of Justice filed the antitrust suit that would end a decade later with the breakup of AT&T and its network, the Bell System, into seven regional carriers, the Baby Bells. AT&T retained its long-distance service, along with Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., its legendary research arm, and the Western Electric Co., its manufacturing subsidiary. From that point on, the company had plenty of ups and downs. It started new businesses, spun off divisions, and acquired and sold companies. But in the end it succumbed. Now AT&T is gone.
Should we mourn the loss? The easy answer is no. Telephone providers abound nowadays. AT&T's services continue to exist and could be easily replaced if they didn't.
But that easy answer ignores AT&T's unparalleled history of research and innovation. During the company's heyday, from 1925 to the mid-1980s, Bell Labs brought us inventions and discoveries that changed the way we live and broadened our understanding of the universe. How many companies can make such a claim?
The oft-repeated list of Bell Labs innovations features many of the milestone developments of the 20th century, including the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, fiber optics, and satellite communications. Few doubt that AT&T's R&D machine was among the greatest ever. But few realize that its innovations, paradoxically, contributed to the downfall of its parent. And now, through a series of events during the past three decades, this remarkable R&D engine has run out of steam.
The funding came in large part from what was essentially a built-in "R&D tax" on telephone service. Every time we picked up the phone to place a long-distance call half a century ago, a few pennies of every dollar--a dollar wo
Whatever makes sense with your skills, resources, and connections... These alternatives are there to provide the seeds for a next generation. They can be things like non-profits, for-profits, hobbies, community organizations, libraries, social networks, barter exchanges, citizens groups focused on one important local issue like a better library or better infrastructure of some sort, a movement for a basic income, LETS systems, or whatever. A healthy society has a good mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned transactions. If you think the system is out of balance, then create or support counterbalancing forces (in a legal, healthy, and optimistic way). Tiny non-profits across the USA are suffering from lack of leadership and members as TV and the internet and dual-income families soak up all the otherwise spare volunteer time. The "old" USA from a century or so ago had those strong traditions of a mix of all those things, and such a mix is at the root of "Democracy" IMHO.
I used to think Debian provided one example of alternative governance, although lately mostly bad news on that front regarding the systemd issue. Hopefully it will move past that and become stronger through some self-reflection.
Search on "Michael Rupert Evolution" on his "From the Wilderness" site for some related interesting reading where he tried to move to another country and it didn't work out (an extreme case, and I dismiss his worries about "Peak Oil" as overblown, but he had some insights there about building where you are now and are connected).
http://www.theamericanconserva...
"This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments."
I would add "community" and "health" as public goods government should also help support.
BTW, to underscore the point that charity only tends to work well in communities where people are well known to each other (either that or an abstract gifte economy like JP Hogan wrote about), see: ... ...
"Switzerland's shame: The children used as cheap farm labour"
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
"Gogniat, his brother and two sisters were "contract children" or verdingkinder as they are known in Switzerland. The practice of using children as cheap labour on farms and in homes began in the 1850s and it continued into the second half of the 20th Century. Historian Loretta Seglias says children were taken away for "economic reasons most of the time⦠up until World War Two Switzerland was not a wealthy country, and a lot of the people were poor". Agriculture was not mechanised and so farms needed child labour.
If a child became orphaned, a parent was unmarried, there was fear of neglect, or you had the misfortune to be poor, the communities would intervene. Authorities tried to find the cheapest way to look after these children, so they took them out of their families and placed them in foster families.
The extent to which these children were treated as commodities is demonstrated by the fact that there are cases even in the early 20th Century where they were herded into a village square and sold at public auction.
"Children didn't know what was happening to them, why they were taken away, why they couldn't go home, see their parents, why they were being abused and no-one believed them," she says.
"The other thing is the lack of love. Being in a family where you are not part of the family, you are just there for working." And it left a devastating mark for the rest of the children's lives. Some have huge psychological problems, difficulties with getting involved with others and their own families. For others it was too much to bear. Some committed suicide after such a childhood.
Social workers did make visits. David Gogniat says his family had no telephone, so when a social worker called a house in the v
Thanks for a thought provoking post from a broad historical perspective!
"You are personally going to migrate your employer's systems because you personally do not like something, something every single major distro is moving too, and the top kernel developers are already using?"
No, AC, he said he is going to migrate his *personal* systems and those of an apparent volunteer organization he is affiliated with. Read more carefully next time before launching into the personal insults...
"Ben Franklin and others who owned printers realized that copyright didn't apply to them, so they promptly began making copies of everything - books, sheet music, etc."
I had know that for much of US history there was no respect for foreign copyrights (from other countries). I never saw anyone connect this to Ben Franklin's success before. Interesting!
Now that I look:
"Benjamin Franklin, Copyright Pirate"
http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/...
And:
"Benjamin Franklin, the first IP pirate?"
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
I agree we may well see cheap compact nuclear fission reactors in the 2020s like from Hyperion., Also, it is a sad truth that we could build much safer reactors if engineers had been asked to prioritize safety over other things (Freeman Dyson's TRIGA design being one example) and if the USA has not focused on a Uranium nuclear cycle that intentionally could be easily weaponized (instead of Thorium).
Still I'd expect solar will actually continue to fall in price by the 2020s too. It would not surprise me if PV was in the 15 cent per watt range by 2030 (or even less) other things remaining constant. Consider how "cheap" used "solar collectors" in terms of tree leaves are in the Fall in the USA. Solar panels potentially could be printed as cheaply as aluminum foil using advanced nanomaterials and special inks.
We haven't really seen anything like the amount of research in PV we will probably see when it reaches grid parity everywhere and people really invest in it in a huge way equivalent to previous investments in fossil fuel production and research. Some people (myself included) have been predicting this turning point for a long time, and it has been dismissed and ignored. It is easy to say PV progress will never get to grid parity until it actually happens. That has been true even though the trends for decades show a clear line towards zero cost (no doubt it will go asymptotic at some point to just be dirt cheap though).
Unfortunately, in our short-term-oriented society in the USA, until PV is cheaper than the grid it is only a niche thing for special circumstances or motivated environmentally-minded people. That has been what has been funding it as only a relative trickle of investment. Once PV is cheaper than the grid, assuming a good solution to energy storage exists (fuel cells with nickle-metal hydride storage, Lithium ion batteries, molten salt batteries, compressed air, or something else), it will be economically foolish to use anything else to generate power than PV. And then, sometime after the stampede, we will see enormous sums of money flow into PV research and production. Electric utilities may collapse all over the place as his happens because grid power becomes too pricey once the cost of delivery exceeds the cost of on-site production. Except for the value of their right of ways as internet conduits, and maybe the value of their copper wires, I would guess that most utilities if properly accounted for, given decommissioning costs and outstanding long-term debt in sunk costs, most utilities may well have a negative net worth right now given any forecast that includes these trends.
Personally, I still think it possible that hot fusion or cold fusion will displace PV (as well as nuclear fusion) in the near future. Those could potentially be really really cheap. Even if fission gets cheaper and better (including potentially as small batteries), I don't see it could compete with workable fusion (and probably neither could PV for most applications).
We'll likely also see energy efficiency increase greatly. The current best construction in Europe is to build passive solar superinsulated houses without furnaces; search on "no furnace house".
I'd love to see the solar roadways thing work out... Or even just for parking lots or driveways.
http://www.solarroadways.com/
Still, as I said elsewhere, the same reasons PV s getting cheaper (cheaper computing leading to cheaper collaboration and better designs by cheaper modeling and newer materials and so on) are the same sorts of reasons we will also see much cheaper nuclear power. Of course, there are other trends that all interact with that as well... A post by me from 2000:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
In the Tipping Point you advance the argument that it was better policing against minor infractions that reduced crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Economist Steven Levitt and Malcolm Gladwell have a running dispute about whether the fall in New York City's crime rate can be attributed to the actions of the police department and "Fixing Broken Windows" (as claimed in The Tipping Point). In Freakonomics, Levitt attributes the decrease in crime to two primary factors: 1) a drastic increase in the number of police officers trained and deployed on the streets and hiring Raymond W. Kelly as police commissioner (thanks to the efforts of former mayor David Dinkins) and 2) a decrease in the number of unwanted children made possible by Roe v. Wade, causing crime to drop nationally in all major cities -- "[e]ven in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad policing"."
However, it looks like the drop in crime is most closely correlated with the fall in environmental lead (mostly from reducing the used of leaded gasoline). Since other places have seen their crime rate fall without drastic changes in policing, what do you think of the lead and crime connection? See also:
"America's Real Criminal Element: Lead; New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing. "
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
I've been thinking about translating it to JavaScript...
Thanks for being an (indirect) inspiration, Raymond. Hope you are on to even better things!
http://www.seedsavers.org/ "Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit organization dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds. Since 1975, our members have been passing on our garden heritage by collecting and distributing thousands of samples of rare garden seeds to other gardeners. "
Looks like we turned down the wrong path a few decades ago...
When Lessig argued "Eldred vs. Ashcroft" there was some point where the justices said, essentially, well no one has ever complained about copyright extensions before in terms of that being a taking something of value from the public (breaking the previous bargain struck at the time the work was produced), so extensions must be OK. That was probably not true, but Lessig did not have much of an answer for that. My memory of that may be a bit fuzzy, but I think that was the gist of an important point in the case as far as precedent.
More craziness and the law regarding the "owners" of so many copyrights these days:
http://www.ratical.org/corpora...
" In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court's taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution.
Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of arguement in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that:
"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does."
The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that:
"The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.
The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery -- a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts. "
http://www.alibaba.com/product...
"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed. (William Gibson)"
What a revolution for global education (similar to the OLPC hope)!