http://www.amazon.com/Biologic... "Homosexuality in its myriad forms has been scientifically documented in more than 450 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, and other animals worldwide. Biological Exuberance is the first comprehensive account of the subject, bringing together accurate, accessible, and nonsensationalized information. Drawing upon a rich body of zoological research spanning more than two centuries, Bruce Bagemihl shows that animals engage in all types of nonreproductive sexual behavior. Sexual and gender expression in the animal world displays exuberant variety, including same-sex courtship, pair-bonding, sex, and co-parenting--even instances of lifelong homosexual bonding in species that do not have lifelong heterosexual bonding.
Part 1, "A Polysexual, Polygendered World," begins with a survey of homosexuality, transgender, and nonreproductive heterosexuality in animals and then delves into the broader implications of these findings, including a valuable perspective on human diversity. Bagemihl also examines the hidden assumptions behind the way biologists look at natural systems and suggests a fresh perspective based on the synthesis of contemporary scientific insights with traditional knowledge from indigenous cultures.
Part 2, "A Wondrous Bestiary," profiles more than 190 species in which scientific observers have noted homosexual or transgender behavior. Each profile is a verbal and visual "snapshot" of one or more closely related bird or mammal species, containing all the documentation required to support the author's often controversial conclusions.
Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, filled with fascinating facts and astonishing descriptions of animal behavior, Biological Exuberance is a landmark book that will change forever how we look at nature."
Basically, for decades, even centuries, wildlife biologists have been making assumptions about the sexes of animals based on their interactions -- either than or consciously suppressing the data that shows homosexuality in the wild.
Of course, just because animals do something has never been a conclusive argument for why humans should do it, because humans are moral beings and make choices (a point my Ecology&Evolution Prof. Larry Slobodkin made in a course of philosophy and ecology/evolution). But love is so often rare and fleeting in this life, why go out of our way to make it more difficult for some people? Was the world really better off because of what was done to Alan Turing after he helped Britain survive WWII? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
And: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi... "Paul Vasey's research in Samoa has focused on a theory called kin selection or the "helper in the nest" hypothesis. The idea is that gay people compensate for their lack of children by promoting the reproductive fitness of brothers or sisters, contributing money or performing other uncle-like activities such as babysitting or tutoring. Some of the gay person's genetic code is shared with nieces and nephews and so, the theory goes, the genes which code for sexual orientation still get passed down.... Vasey speculates that part of the reason the fa'afafine are more attentive to their nephews and nieces is their acceptance in Samoan culture compared to gay men in the West and Japan ("You can't help your kin if they've rejected you"). But he also believes th
According to Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me... "Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. "
So, for example, if some centrally planned bureaucracy (say the USA in the 1930s) decides to have a nation-wide arts program, then you might see a lot of creativity there. http://americanart.si.edu/exhi... "In 1934, Americans grappled with an economic situation that feels all too familiar today. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration created the Public Works of Art Project--the first federal government program to support the arts nationally. Federal officials in the 1930s understood how essential art was to sustaining America's spirit. Artists from across the United States who participated in the program, which lasted only six months from mid-December 1933 to June 1934, were encouraged to depict "the American Scene." The Public Works of Art Project not only paid artists to embellish public buildings, but also provided them with a sense of pride in serving their country. They painted regional, recognizable subjects--ranging from portraits to cityscapes and images of city life to landscapes and depictions of rural life--that reminded the public of quintessential American values such as hard work, community and optimism."
Or other ways: http://newdeal.feri.org/nchs/l... "Activity in the arts was one aspect of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Established in April 1935 and directed by Harry Hopkins, its purpose was to provide socially useful work for the unemployed. WPA programs included the construction of public buildings such as schools, hospitals and courthouses; highways; recreational facilities such as athletic fields and parks and playgrounds; and conservation facilities such as fish hatcheries and bird sanctuaries. In addition four WPA arts projects ("Federal One") were established. "Federal One" not only provided work for artists, writers, musicians, and actors but nurtured young men and women who were embarking on a career in the arts during the Great Depression. Writers and artists such as Ralph Ellison and J
With AI, robotics, and other automation, goods and services can be delivered with minimal involvement of human labor. This breaks a fundamental assumption of mainstream capitalism that the right to consume will be fairly evenly distributed to labor which will compromise a big enough percentage of the population for the system to work. As more and more human labor is replaced by capital, we have seen flat wages and, worse, increasing competition by desperate labor against other labor, driving wages for new hires down (in some cases to zero or below to try to gamble serving an unpaid internship in the hope to eventually get a job).
Also, as in the case of Microsoft, and assuming you don't include copyrights or patents in your "monopolies" you don't want government to grant, companies can create bad standards that prosper via social effects (natural monopolies?). Microsoft has done enormous damage to society by imposing bad standards on us (like sabotaging web standards, including things like Java and JavaScript and aspects of HTML) and disrupting competitors with various deals with manufacturers from their market power. Even for a local bagel shop, one could imagine ways that market power and advertising and social connections and control of employees and becoming enmeshed in local civic life as a gathering place and even covert actions against competitors could be used to all reinforce each other, even if the bagels are pretty bad tasting. My point is that business success via market power does not necessarily equate to the best deal or best product for the purchaser along various criterion.
Also, you generally can't buy either community or health from a big box store. So there are huge limits to what capitalism can achieve regarding issues that affect much of people's day-to-day happiness.
That said, I agree with you that corruption may be a bigger issue than wealth disparity. We could try a few things: * get rid of patents and copyrights (or limit them severely) to remove corrupting monopoly power * provide a basic income to every resident so everyone has a right to consume and small businesses could have more predictable demand and there would be less need for employment protection laws * vastly increased transparency in government decision making, especially by both local and internet-powered discussions, of which this story of secret trade agreements is a prime anti-example; to an extent, in theory, elected officials provide a way to separate rewarding good decision makers for public capital (by rel-election) from concentrating private wealth that could be used for consumption (however, the need for expensive re-election campaigns distorts that via pandering to wealthy donors as a form of legalized corruption) * expanding the US the house of representatives to thousands of representatives (back to the original founders intent before the size was fixed: "The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand...") to dilute the power of concentrated wealth to influence government, and reinstating the rule that senators are appointed by state legislatures: "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote." * Up-front pricing of products and services based on their true lifecycle costs (including recycling, risks, pollution, and so on); for example cars using gasoline should have pollution costs priced in and also the cost of maintaining a US military presence abroad to defend long oil supply lines, and electricity from US Midwest coal-powered plants should be priced to include acid rain and mercury pollution on the US East Coast, and prices of financial products like derivatives should include a risk cost of total market failure if they all unwind badly at once, and so on. * Probably various other similar things
Another issue is that capitalism only works well when there is roughly equal information and capital and purchasing power be
The rollout of holocaust 2.0 will use Facebook to roundup political opponents, dissidents and the like."
Sadly, all too likely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation is a book by investigative journalist Edwin Black which details the business dealings of the American-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German and other European subsidiaries with the government of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and the years of World War II. In the book Black outlines the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide through generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data.[1]"
Thus I wrote, in the true spirit of "never forget": http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d... "Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). 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 some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., 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 equipment] 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."
"What kind of people are these that use vulgar, profane language in these posts. Personally, such people's critiques should be ignored and consigned to the local sewage inlet. A very sad comment on contemporary society."
Just as a guess, putting any person-to-person (mis)communication or personality aspects aside, I think a lot of programmers are frustrated with the state-of-the-art in programming. Examples include the proliferation of JavaScript despite its needlessly confusing warts and missing pieces (same and worse for PHP), Java not fulfilling its promise of ease of installation with lots of versions despite stealing Smalltalk's thunder and having vast amounts of money poured into it, C++ being so confusing and easy to shoot yourself in the foot with, a huge proliferation of half-finished languages, Python and Perl splitting with major new not-backwardly-compatible versions, version, a proliferation of mostly similar FOSS licenses and yet incompatibly-licensed code you can't legally use or distribute together, too many buggy libraries that do almost the same thing and much of what you want but have somewhat different bugs, entrenched awkward "scripting" languages with low performance and are not really much easier to use than other languages for anything substantial or that needs to be maintained or debugged, lack of good documentation for so many projects, badly written software that is hard to understand yet does useful things, lack of tests, vast amounts of computing power in hardware but seeing it frittered away or not being able to easily access it or it being wasted on supporting huge amounts of duplicated inefficient code including likely several different interpreters, library dependency hell, bit rot including of FOSS contributions getting left behind, layer upon layer of abstraction ignoring more abstraction can't solve the issue of too much abstraction, confusing conflict-of-interest marketing information to sort through, data encoded in proprietary or unusual formats and so hard to use, a proliferation of confusing or intentionally limited "standards", the frequent ignorance of the history of programming among programmers who have not lived it, and so on.
For anyone who has programmed for decades and seen what it felt like to use Forth, Smalltalk, BASIC on a C64, or even an assembly language monitor, there is some huge mismatch these days between what we *feel* should be possible and the systems we are in practice forced to work with these days either for economic reasons or reasons of trying to get incremental changes adopted. Notice I said "feel should be possible", so it is a feeling or aspiration -- whether it is reasonable expectation is another issue.
That frustration may express itself as profanity when a programmer see resources (including just getting a Slashdot discussion going) going to new projects that don't seem to really address or acknowledge these fundamental issues. Worse, new projects that don't recognize these issues may just be adding further to all the confusion and complexity (yet another syntax to learn and guess at for ambiguities, yet another lack of documentation, yet another maybe great library that is effectively unusable because of the complex interdependencies or choices about context like desktop vs. web, etc.).
Contrast with Alan Kay's Fundamentals of New Computing (FONC) project which at least acknowledges some of these issues even if it may not fully deliver on all or even many of them (and I have my own criticisms on stuff FONC has ignored). https://mail.python.org/piperm... https://www.mail-archive.com/f...
I 've suggested it's possible Linus Torvald's profanity also has some of the same roots of frustration at overwhelming complexity and harder-to-manage risks because of it: "[fonc] Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug - Slashdot"
Thanks for the reply, especially explaining "locally" (I was starting to wonder afterwards if it indeed was about 3D transformations not variables). Interesting point on commas vs. parens for clarity; I'll have to think about that.
Could not easily find a Google ref for "Buddda".:-)
On JavaScript, it is a frustrating language to work with, with several major design flaws. I'm using it right now for a mid-size project (dozens of pages in a single-page app, collecting 500+ different pieces of data, using Dojo) and it is painful and dragging on (even in just Java, it would have been done much faster). But, inspired in part by Dan Ingall's work on the Lively Kernel, plus what many other peopel say and do who all agree how badly JavaScript sucks, the fact that it runs (in theory) everywhere with one click is the big win. The URL is the biggest innovation there. As I've said before, if it does not have (or run from) a URL it is broken.
Check out where the implementer of Smalltalk (Dan Ingalls) is doing now (very dynamic JavaScript): http://www.lively-kernel.org/
Perhaps the fairest thing to say about JavaScript though is: https://news.ycombinator.com/i... "[JavaScript] is actually a very strong language with a few very well known warts (like every other language on the planet has). The problem is that people try to use it as if it were Ruby, PHP, Python, Java. One can do that, but just know that it is an exercise in futility. It will cause frustration and one will come to the conclusion that JavaScript sucks when in fact, it is just that most people don't really take the time to _understand_ JavaScript."
A big issue with JavaScript in practice for simulation (typical to go with 3D) though is that, by default, it is essentially single-threaded (yes, other things are possible with webworkers and separate processes and such, but not in practice for most users). Having spent years debugging subtle issues with Java threading in a huge real-time-ish high-visibility high-availability app, I'm not fully sure that's a bad thing though.:-)
BTW, I think there are lots of value to making a big project FOSS, but rapidly getting contributors to do major changes right away (like a move to a web browser via JavaScript and emscripten) is generally not one of them. The big win is often when being free and available brings in small polishing changes and add-ons and also, if the software is written in a modular way to begin with, getting major new modules as part of an ecosystem -- as well as getting broader adoption by being free and open to increase demand for the core developers' other services and related books and training and other addons and so on. In practice, the learning curve for any major project is just too high for a casual use to make a significant core change, and even if they do, the core maintainers may reject the change or make other changes separately that cause bitrot in the change. If emscripten would just run on the core code, maybe someone would try it. But my guess is it require some code changes to the C++, changes to XL as mentioned elsewhere to output JavaScript, other changes to work with OpenGL as you mention on the page, and some JavaScript glue code to have an app, so non-trivial enough that few people will try it as a first thing (unless maybe they already have used emscripten several times). With an expected big effort, then the question is, what is the payoff for taking the risk? That payoff is going to be much bigger for the original authors probably than for some ra
I like expandable languages (although they can suffer from developer confusion reading new constructs and now knowing what they do, depending on how easy it is to go to the source of the new construct, which is why I like Smalltalk's keyword approach integrated with its code browser). When I made another comment above about creating an ANTLR grammar for Tao3D to make it more portable, I did not realize you had created XL and it underlies much of the Tao3D language. So, I'd suggest instead you could add a new backend for XL so it can output JavaScript (ideally in asm.js format). Then, if you could compile your C++ to asm.js with emscripten, with a little bit of JavaScript framework magic, you might quickly have a version of TaoJS that runs in a web browser.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/allte... "He says it was as if "we removed the PowerPoint slide, and like a big glass barrier was removed between the speaker and the audience. "The communication became a lot more two-way instead of just the speaker speaking at length for 15, 20 minutes. The audience really started to come alive, to look up from their laptop computers and actually start participating in the discussion, which is what we were really trying to foster.""
That said, I still think more tools for empowering people to more easily make educational 3D presentations and such is a good thing. I think the long-term potential of something like Tao3D could be along those lines. Of course, there is already Alice and some other similar things: http://www.alice.org/index.php "Using an innovative programming environment to support the creation of 3D animations, the Alice Project provides tools and materials for teaching and learning computational thinking, problem solving, and computer programming across a spectrum of ages and grade levels."
Although, I don't think Alice runs in a web browser, and it Tao3D moved to run in a browser that might be interesting (although it does not now).
I looked at the link you mentioned in another post: http://www.taodyne.com/shop/de... "Taodyne's current technology is written in C++. It uses Qt for the user interface, and OpenGL for the drawing code. It also uses other components that might be a bit difficult to adapt to a web environment, notably LLVM. We can think of a few possible strategies to adapt this technology to the web:..."
Here is an example: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/... "Mozilla and Epic Games have showed the power of the Web as a platform for gaming by porting Unreal Engine 3 to the Web and showcasing Epic Citadel, using asm.js, a supercharged subset of JavaScript pioneered by Mozilla. In less than 12 months, optimizations have increased the performance of Web applications using asm.js from 40% to within 67% of native, and we expect it to get even faster. This performance opens up new opportunities for giving users an astonishing and delightful experience, from within their choice of Web browser. Any modern browser can run asm.js content, but specific optimizations currently present only in Firefox, ensure the most consistent and smooth experience. "This technology has reached a point where games users can jump into via a Web link are now almost indistinguishable from ones they might have had to wait to download and install," said Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering at Mozilla. "Using Emscripten to cross-compile C and C++ into asm.js, developers can run their games at near-native speeds, so they can approach the Web as they would any other platform.""
You could also help Chrome improve its asm.js speed and get at least two major browser to have better 3D support, which would help everyone. Why not ask Google for some funding to do that, building on what you have so far? Good luck!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... "Control structures do not have special syntax in Smalltalk. They are instead implemented as messages sent to objects."
Smalltalk still has one of the best programming syntaxes, IMHO because it clearly tags each argument in a complex message like "widget placeAtX: 10 y: 20.". And Smalltalk is gradually being reinvented piece by piece ranging from things like the Java JVM to things like JavaScript's object literals and JSON, e.g. the Smalltalk looking: {x: 10, y: 20}. As another comment pointed out, Forth, Joy, Lisp and other languages also support this in various ways (Lisp very painfully compared to the others via hard-to-write macros).
Also, why do people keep making new languages with new syntax (generally with poor to missing error messages, debuggers, IDEs, documentation, and libraries) when we would so much more benefit from improved FOSS libraries for existing ones? I'd be a lot more excited about Tao if it was a JavaScript library that just supported some special format INI files. It seems like Tao has some impressive libraries for real time graphics that would be nice for anyone to use. Why hide the library for most users behind some new syntax? Most of the hard work must have been creating the library I would guess?
Of course, I know the answer to that.:-) Writing new programming languages is fun, and I have done it before myself more than once. I still have some more ideas I'd like to try out, like to take Smalltalk and have it use C-like comments and string and have a different (hopefully faster) approach to dispatching messages. And to some extent, every major programming problem we solve requires writing a sort of mini-language in terms of function names and such to define a problem space and possible solutions.
It's sad that we got stuck with JavaScript and all its warts just because someone had to rewrite Scheme from scratch with a C syntax in two weeks to stick it in an early browser. Brendan Eich made an unfortunate choice about default variable scope and not including modules from the start based on the idea it would only be for small one page scripts (plus various other warts and complexities like relating to closures and variable scopes, variable hoisting, and so on).
Looking at a bit of the Tao overview video on SourceForge, it looks like variables don't need to be declared (ick!). Also, requiring "locally" seems to imply that it has one of the worst "features/bugs" of JavaScript design for default globals? Or maybe I did not understand "locally". The main aspects of the language (like what is a code block, what is an argument) don't seem clear at first glance to me, perhaps because of various keywords being defined or seeing commas some places and not others?
I find the use of a comma without inner parentheses interesting for functions and arguments, where the comma in a sense is doing what Smalltalk keyword colons are doing. Still, it misses labelling arguments like Smalltalk, and why not drop the commas and just have all arguments separated by spaces and instead require nested expressions to be surrounded by parentheses if you are going in that direction? For example: "translate -500 100 (10 + x)"
I like the clean looking syntax without semicolons at the end of lines. I'm assuming it uses indentation after a comma to define code blocks? Although maybe not, since I only see that at the top level? So, some interesting ideas and I wish it well. It it ran on JavaScript, maybe I'd try it today...
If you're the author, despite any criticism above (just half-baked opinions from watching the video for a few minutes on-and-off while writing this), I'd still encourage you to keep moving forwards with it. Looks like a lot of fun! And it is exploring some new ideas and the library looks amazing. There is no question popular computer languages (Java, JavaScript, C++) have many warts and someday it would be great to have better langua
According to a Nobel scientist quoted here: http://www.naturalnews.com/047... "In voicing support for Christie's quarantine, Dr. Beutler -- current director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas -- told the website, "I favor it," adding, "I favor it, because it's not entirely clear that they can't transmit the disease." He was referring to currently asymptomatic healthcare worker Kaci Hickox, a Doctors Without Borders nurse who recently returned to New Jersey after treating patients in Sierra Leone and was quarantined in the state for 65 hours. She was eventually taken to her home state of Maine.
"It may not be absolutely true that those without symptoms can't transmit the disease, because we don't have the numbers to back that up," Dr. Beutler continued in his NJ.com interview. "It could be people develop significant viremia [where viruses enter the bloodstream and gain access to the rest of the body], and become able to transmit the disease before they have a fever, even.
"People may have said that without symptoms you can't transmit Ebola. I'm not sure about that being 100 percent true. There's a lot of variation with viruses," he added."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
The site seems notable for its comprehensiveness. I also though it would be great if Lindsay Books would have put copies of everything online for free (like via Archive.org) before it shut down, since most of what it had sold were reprints of content now in the public domain. I'm assuming the site in the article may have much the same stuff? http://www.lindsaybks.com/
While a related project by me hasn't really got going strongly yet, the OSCOMAK project was a hope to organize all this sort of info and more to let people design whatever individual or community infrastructure they wanted. From pages linked here put up around 2000: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... "The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas.
As the internet has grown, it has enabled collaborative work which has created many success stories, including Linux, Python, GCC, Squeak and other projects. We want to harness that power and apply it to organizing technological knowledge in concert with many interested individuals.
The main project goal is to develop an on-line library of technology ideas, techniques, and tools, including a range from high-tech processes like plastics to medium-tech like ceramic houses to low-tech like spinning wheels. Also included will be biotechnology processes, like perennial agriculture, companion planting, sheep farming, and eventually cloning and DNA synthesis.
One process to be included is a way to convert the high-tech computerized library to a low-tech paper one as desired. Key to the whole endeavor will be to present everything in a how-to fashion. Also needed is a way to map out and simulate the interrelations of processes; for instance, sheep raising requires veterinarians, antibiotics, feed, fencing, and shears; shears require a blacksmith, metal, and a furnace. This latter feature also would be used to keep track of the product flows into, out of, and within a community's entire economy."
Been plodding along on this idea for a couple decades, but still not much to show... But, still a bit...
Our garden simulator from 1997 was part of this -- to help people learn how to grow their own food in an efficient and sustainable way. http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
My hopes for this go back to the 1980s and before, even envisioning something like the world wide web to support it: http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
No doubt many personal failings and distraction have contributed to my limited progress -- especially the distraction of trying to create better software tools for distributed knowledge sharing and programming like the Pointrel system and PataPapa.
None-the-less, there is also an aspect to which the current economic order is not too keen on such work. As is suggested by John Taylor Gatto: https://web.archive.org/web/20... "Iâ(TM)ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately sub
From: http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-... ---- "The EPA had done a variety of tests on this organism, all of which indicated that it would not be toxic to humans or animals. They were only a few weeks away from releasing these bacteria into the wild, when Michael Holmes, a graduate student at the University of Oregon, came looking for an interesting thing to study for his doctoral thesis."
Under the direction of his academic advisor, Elaine Ingham, Holmes elected to do his thesis on the effects of this genetically engineered KP on plants, something which had not occurred to the EPA, as it was not required for the release of new genetically modified organisms, Lawton notes in his Acres USA expose.
Holmes study revealed, after testing samples of plants growing in sterile soil, soil with regular KP and soil with genetically engineered KP, that no plants in the latter soil were growing as the alcohol produced by the bacteria had killed them all.
At the time, Lawton notes, the EPA was envisioning that farmers would use these bacteria in a kind of fermenting process to convert plant material into a mixture of 17% alcohol and 83% mineral sludge, which could be poured off into the soil and reused.
"If that had occurred, the genetically engineered KP could have colonized the entire planet over the course of several years, turning all of the soil where it grew into barren dirt."
Ingham said that problem was and still is that the EPA only looks at the immediate impact of new genetically modified organisms on animals, and does not take into account the larger impact on the ecosystem as a whole. That approach can work to a limited extent when working with chemicals, which can break down and dissipate over time. But living organisms have the ability to procreate and overwhelm the natural ecosystem.
To answer your question, see my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi... "One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?...
Now, let's continue to look at this from a millionaire's point of view. The streets might be a lot happier. The families would not be struggling as much, and so the kids would be happier. Why should a millionaire care about other people's happiness? Well, there are obviously moral reasons. But ignoring them, in general, communities would be safer. There would be less resentment towards the rich, who after all, were making this all possible. Nobody would be so poor they had nothing to lose by committing an assault to steal a walled or break into a home. (Assuming drugs were legal, and regulated, there would be less addicts doing property crimes for habits.)
There might be a much larger variety of goods and services for millionaires to choose from, given every unique person had some money so the market heard their needs and even whims. The money would keep flowing, especially because there would be no transaction taxes to slow it down. Entrepreneurial millionaires would be in a good position to benefit from all this demand, creating companies to satisfy all these needs that the market was now listening to.
With all artists, writers, inventors, programmers, and so on freed from the need to worry about earning a daily living, the digital world would blossom with an endless array of free music, free images, free idea, and the physical world would be beautified with free artworks and the streets would be livened with free street productions and plays. So, the millionaire's remaining wealth would go farther, with less entertainment that needs to be paid for. Basically, millionaires would be benefiting, like everyone else, from a robust peer economy and gift economy.
On a personal level, there would be a lot less desire for people to marry millionaires just for the money. For some ugly or nasty millionaires, this might be a hardship. But for most, this would actually be a blessing. They would be less likely to be taken advantage of by social climbers or fortune hunters. Millionaires would have to worry less about their kids being taken advantage of too. With a basic income, there would be a lot less desire by people to marry for money. So, a certain social problem would be greatly reduced in the lives of millionaires. There might still be some of this, but the overall situation would improve greatly.
Similarly, there would likely be less kidnapping. For potential kidnappers or other criminals, when you get $2000 a month in income already, why risk being thrown in jail where your income goes to the upkeep of your prison and you lose your chance of making your own decisions as to how to spend it? While there would still be crimes of passion, total money-related crime might drop way down.
Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full.
Just pointing out the info -- making no claims about the validity of any of it. In general, the peswiki is a big collection of similar claims. Of course, only one of them needs to be true to change the world significantly.
Here is something posted to the peswiki myself, previously sent to Rossi about why he should open source his eCat rather than try to make money off it (assuming it actually works as suggested): http://peswiki.com/index.php/O... "The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had (subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think about the socioeconomic implications of their invention in causing a permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where money does not matter very much anymore."
http://www.denverpost.com/news... "They harden themselves to survive inside prison, guards said in recent interviews. Then they find they can't snap out of it at the end of the day. Some seethe to themselves. Others commit suicide. Depression, alcoholism, domestic violence and heart attacks are common. And entire communities suffer.... Prison work "bleeds over into your private life. You go into restaurants, you sit with your back to the wall. You want to see all the entrances and exits, and you notice if somebody is carrying something bulky. You can't turn these skills off," said Matthew von Hobe, 50, a former manager at the four-prison federal complex in Florence. He knows of two colleagues who committed suicide."
So, like you imply, looks like a tough road to rehabilitation for many prison guards...
Good to see so many comments mentioning the lead connection to violent crime. There are nutritional connections too. "Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat: Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour" http://www.theguardian.com/pol...
The problem is, of course, the prison is one of the main social safety nets in the USA, and also that putting people in prison boosts the employment rate (jobs for guards, prisoners off the unemployment roles). We need to rethink our economy, like with a basic income that a person does not get while incarcerated?
Also related to show how bad it could get: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... "The "kids for cash" scandal unfolded in 2008 over judicial kickbacks at the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were accused of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit juvenile facilities, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh sentences on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of inmates in the detention centers."
Here is am excerpt from a related satire by me regarding expanding prisons for copyright violators that I sent to the US DOJ a dozen years ago in response to a slashdot article, but sadly sometimes it seems people may be taking it more as a blueprint than a cautionary tale::-( http://www.pdfernhout.net/micr... """ My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary....
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why wou
My suggestion for a "Game Changing" project is that NASA (possibly in partnership with NIST) could coordinate a global effort towards designing and deploying self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore (developed under free and open source non-proprietary licenses as progress towards "open manufacturing").
NASA showed the basic technological feasibility of this with work in the late 1970s on space habitats, and also in a 1980 study called "Advanced Automation for Space Missions".
In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on Earth due to long supply lines and the inaccessibility of key manufacturing data (because it is considered proprietary) is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space. Addressing such fragility would have immediate benefits to improve intrinsic and mutual security globally, and would help humanity survive in the face of plagues, wars, global climate change, asteroid strikes, earthquakes, and whatever other disasters might strike unexpectedly. As the loss of New Orleans showed, Mother Nature remains a formidable adversary even when people are not fighting amongst themselves over perceived scarce resources.
A NASA-coordinated effort to organize manufacturing information and use it to design such habitats (or seeds that would grow such habitats), as well as improve the state-of-the-art in collaboration software, could thus help meet needs both currently on Earth and in the future in space.
Nothing NASA is doing now compares with this at all in terms of gaining the excitement and participation of the world's technologists and technically-minded youth, given this project would have the scale of the entire FOSS movement applied to manufacturing (and simulation). Achieving this goal of a self-replicating space habitat could justify literally trillions of dollars in effort to create a technological infrastructure that could support quadrillions of human lives in space, making nonsense of current worries of "Limits to Growth" or "Peak Oil" or "Overpopulation" or whatever else.
While NASA could coordinate this effort, many other organizations including NIST (and its SLIM program), DARPA, universities, and manufacturers globally could also participate in this effort.
As a whole, this project would help increase US security as a sort of public outreach by helping the global security community transcend ironic and outdated visions of what security means, given that so much abundance is possible through modern technology and this NASA effort would demonstrate that:
"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism "
So, much of the premise of differential rewards to spur innovation is flawed (even though it does apply to some extent for hard manual labor not involving much creativity). What Dan Pink says motivates people most to work in creative innovative directions is a sense of purpose, a sense of autonomy, and an increasing sense of mastery.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... "The book argues that there are "pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption".[5] It claims that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.[1] The book contains graphs that are available online.[6]"
And see also, on how the logic of diminishing returns in economics got replaced by the concept of "Pareto efficient": "Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal" http://www.amazon.com/Economic...
You made a good presentation of the roots of the better ideas behind capitalism. But somehow along the way, as power accumulated and corrupted our main social institutions in the USA and elsewhere, those ideas got stretched into neoliberalism... Here is a conceptual video on what happens as those neoliberal ideas expand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
For some comic relief (and a bit more insight), the first novel in a futuristic sci-fi series featuring cybertanks fighting against neoliberalism (especially in the third novel in the series started by the Chronicles of Old Guy by Timothy Gawne): http://www.amazon.com/The-Chro...
As long as we have an economy based mostly on exchange and capitalism, and as automation takes more and more jobs, it seems like we would need a basic income to make the system more humane and also keep it going by creating demand. So, to do that, we can just reduce the age of the first Social Security payment from age 65 to age 0, and fund that via taxes and fees royalties on use of government assets (like the Alaska Permanent Fund) and so on. However, long term, as I say on my website, we will likely see a mix of advanced subsistence production (3D printers, solar cells, Mr. Fusion), an expanded gift economy (FOSS, Freecycle), better democratic planning (like via the internet), and an exchange economy softened by a basic income.
You might find the intro of this book of interest (just noticed it today) as it talks about the conflict between scarcity and post-scarcity ideas, including market failures and market-based solutions: http://books.google.com/books?... "Sustainable Growth in a Post-Scarcity World: Consumption, Demand, and the Poverty Penalty -- by Philip Sadler"
IMHO, universities have an implicit moral obligation (including "in loco parentis") to be candid and as accurate as possible with their students about things like career prospects; that they fail to do so as evidenced by this issue is problematical whatever the reasons (including "selection bias" that you only see relatively successful academics working in universities and the advice they give may have worked for them decades ago but may not be very useful either now or for other personality types).
If you look at other countries like in Western Europe, there is not as much of a conflict between being reasonable "successful" in a field and having a family and hobbies and such. Example: http://www.salon.com/2010/08/2... "Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?... But even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours â" the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life.... In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare.... How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans...."
Various studies show that overwork does not make people more productive in the long term. Lots of things suffer -- including creativity. Overwork in the USA is a cultural pathology. BTW, it is also problematical to try to motivate the best creative work via rewards: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
As for technological innovation, there is a lot of discussion related to that by people like Langdon Winner and E.F. Schumacher (including related to "appropriate technology"). Just look at how US federal dollars went as subsidies via land grand colleges to big agriculture research vs. small farm research. Why were research funds for decades going into ever bigger mechanized harvesting operations and related plant varieties (the tasteless tomato) instead of multi-purpose flexible agricultural robotics useful for small farms and heirloom seeds? Why is funding "Seed Savers" heirloom seed production (seeds with a variety of natural resistance and good nutrition) or remineralizing US soils via ground up rock dust not one of the USA's top defense priorities vs. defending long supply lines of imported oil used to create monocultures propped up in dead soil doused in petro-chemical-derived synthetic fertilizers and pesticides? http://www.seedsavers.org/ http://remineralize.org/
Markets may be good at producing certain types of abundance, but in the absence of political oversight, markets are pro
swb's comment is insightful too. The best reason to go into space is because we are happy on Earth and want to grow that happiness further.
That said, it is not unreasonable to want a distributed population for reasons of backup and resiliency, as well as reasons for new perspectives/exploration/innovation. Humans run simulations to learn things, and space habitats may develop a variety of approaches to things that are new and useful.
Also, as human technological power grows, the Earth becomes ever smaller and the stakes for a global mistake (e.g. bioweapon, nuclear war) get every higher -- even as we should do what we can to reduce and contain those risks as appropriate.
Less of some types of carbs, yes, but more other stuff too: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "Excess weight interferes with insulin's functions, and is the primary risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes. Therefore the most effective treatment for type 2 diabetes is significant weight loss. However, the primary mode of treatment by physicians today is glucose-lowering medication. These medications give a false sense of security, providing implicit permission to continue the same disease-causing diet and lifestyle that allowed diabetes to develop in the first place. Many of these medications promote weight gain -- making the patient more diabetic; most importantly, these medications do not prevent diabetes from progressing and causing complications.... The key to diabetes reversal is superior nutrition and exercise. It may take a little extra effort, but avoiding the tragic complications of diabetes and a premature death is well worth it. My diabetes-reversal diet is vegetable-based with a high nutrient to calorie ratio, containing lots of greens and beans, other non-starchy vegetables, (such as mushrooms, eggplant, tomatoes and onions), raw nuts and seeds, and limited fresh fruit with no sweeteners or white flour products. When diabetics eat in this style, they lose their excess weight -- the cause of their diabetes -- quickly and easily, reducing or eliminating their need for medications and they also flood the body with disease-protective and healing micronutrients and phytochemicals that aid the body's recovery and self-repair mechanism."
For Type II diabetics, such a diet with weight loss brings the body's ability to respond to glucose in line with the remaining capacity to make it as needed. Exercise that builds more muscles and that is done when sugar is spiking can also help in managing glucose levels.
For Type I diabetics however, where the body can't produce much glucose at all if any, this improved diet/exercise is not enough, even if it can improve the situation some what as far as reducing complications. For Type I diabetics, this sort of breakthrough with stem cells, if it works, would be truly amazing.
Sometimes type I diabetics are really misdiagnosed type II, and vice versa, so there is a small level of confusion here where sometimes diet works when you would not expect etc..
BTW, vitamin D deficiency (from lack of natural sunlight) may be involved with the autoimmune response that could cause type I diabetes or perhaps make type II worse.
The deeper issue is that our brains and microbiomes are adapted for a scarcity of refined carbs, and we struggle with the abundance of cheap ones: http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra... "Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means
Slashdot Mirror
Who knew...
http://www.amazon.com/Biologic...
"Homosexuality in its myriad forms has been scientifically documented in more than 450 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, and other animals worldwide. Biological Exuberance is the first comprehensive account of the subject, bringing together accurate, accessible, and nonsensationalized information. Drawing upon a rich body of zoological research spanning more than two centuries, Bruce Bagemihl shows that animals engage in all types of nonreproductive sexual behavior. Sexual and gender expression in the animal world displays exuberant variety, including same-sex courtship, pair-bonding, sex, and co-parenting--even instances of lifelong homosexual bonding in species that do not have lifelong heterosexual bonding.
Part 1, "A Polysexual, Polygendered World," begins with a survey of homosexuality, transgender, and nonreproductive heterosexuality in animals and then delves into the broader implications of these findings, including a valuable perspective on human diversity. Bagemihl also examines the hidden assumptions behind the way biologists look at natural systems and suggests a fresh perspective based on the synthesis of contemporary scientific insights with traditional knowledge from indigenous cultures.
Part 2, "A Wondrous Bestiary," profiles more than 190 species in which scientific observers have noted homosexual or transgender behavior. Each profile is a verbal and visual "snapshot" of one or more closely related bird or mammal species, containing all the documentation required to support the author's often controversial conclusions.
Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, filled with fascinating facts and astonishing descriptions of animal behavior, Biological Exuberance is a landmark book that will change forever how we look at nature."
Basically, for decades, even centuries, wildlife biologists have been making assumptions about the sexes of animals based on their interactions -- either than or consciously suppressing the data that shows homosexuality in the wild.
Of course, just because animals do something has never been a conclusive argument for why humans should do it, because humans are moral beings and make choices (a point my Ecology&Evolution Prof. Larry Slobodkin made in a course of philosophy and ecology/evolution). But love is so often rare and fleeting in this life, why go out of our way to make it more difficult for some people? Was the world really better off because of what was done to Alan Turing after he helped Britain survive WWII?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
See also for references to some studies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
More discussion (which mentions the page you site):
"Is Sexual Orientation Determined at Birth?"
http://borngay.procon.org/view...
And: ... Vasey speculates that part of the reason the fa'afafine are more attentive to their nephews and nieces is their acceptance in Samoan culture compared to gay men in the West and Japan ("You can't help your kin if they've rejected you"). But he also believes th
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
"Paul Vasey's research in Samoa has focused on a theory called kin selection or the "helper in the nest" hypothesis. The idea is that gay people compensate for their lack of children by promoting the reproductive fitness of brothers or sisters, contributing money or performing other uncle-like activities such as babysitting or tutoring. Some of the gay person's genetic code is shared with nieces and nephews and so, the theory goes, the genes which code for sexual orientation still get passed down.
According to Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. "
So, for example, if some centrally planned bureaucracy (say the USA in the 1930s) decides to have a nation-wide arts program, then you might see a lot of creativity there.
http://americanart.si.edu/exhi...
"In 1934, Americans grappled with an economic situation that feels all too familiar today. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration created the Public Works of Art Project--the first federal government program to support the arts nationally. Federal officials in the 1930s understood how essential art was to sustaining America's spirit. Artists from across the United States who participated in the program, which lasted only six months from mid-December 1933 to June 1934, were encouraged to depict "the American Scene." The Public Works of Art Project not only paid artists to embellish public buildings, but also provided them with a sense of pride in serving their country. They painted regional, recognizable subjects--ranging from portraits to cityscapes and images of city life to landscapes and depictions of rural life--that reminded the public of quintessential American values such as hard work, community and optimism."
Or about photography:
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.o...
Or other ways:
http://newdeal.feri.org/nchs/l...
"Activity in the arts was one aspect of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Established in April 1935 and directed by Harry Hopkins, its purpose was to provide socially useful work for the unemployed. WPA programs included the construction of public buildings such as schools, hospitals and courthouses; highways; recreational facilities such as athletic fields and parks and playgrounds; and conservation facilities such as fish hatcheries and bird sanctuaries. In addition four WPA arts projects ("Federal One") were established. "Federal One" not only provided work for artists, writers, musicians, and actors but nurtured young men and women who were embarking on a career in the arts during the Great Depression. Writers and artists such as Ralph Ellison and J
With AI, robotics, and other automation, goods and services can be delivered with minimal involvement of human labor. This breaks a fundamental assumption of mainstream capitalism that the right to consume will be fairly evenly distributed to labor which will compromise a big enough percentage of the population for the system to work. As more and more human labor is replaced by capital, we have seen flat wages and, worse, increasing competition by desperate labor against other labor, driving wages for new hires down (in some cases to zero or below to try to gamble serving an unpaid internship in the hope to eventually get a job).
Also, as in the case of Microsoft, and assuming you don't include copyrights or patents in your "monopolies" you don't want government to grant, companies can create bad standards that prosper via social effects (natural monopolies?). Microsoft has done enormous damage to society by imposing bad standards on us (like sabotaging web standards, including things like Java and JavaScript and aspects of HTML) and disrupting competitors with various deals with manufacturers from their market power. Even for a local bagel shop, one could imagine ways that market power and advertising and social connections and control of employees and becoming enmeshed in local civic life as a gathering place and even covert actions against competitors could be used to all reinforce each other, even if the bagels are pretty bad tasting. My point is that business success via market power does not necessarily equate to the best deal or best product for the purchaser along various criterion.
Also, you generally can't buy either community or health from a big box store. So there are huge limits to what capitalism can achieve regarding issues that affect much of people's day-to-day happiness.
That said, I agree with you that corruption may be a bigger issue than wealth disparity. We could try a few things:
* get rid of patents and copyrights (or limit them severely) to remove corrupting monopoly power
* provide a basic income to every resident so everyone has a right to consume and small businesses could have more predictable demand and there would be less need for employment protection laws
* vastly increased transparency in government decision making, especially by both local and internet-powered discussions, of which this story of secret trade agreements is a prime anti-example; to an extent, in theory, elected officials provide a way to separate rewarding good decision makers for public capital (by rel-election) from concentrating private wealth that could be used for consumption (however, the need for expensive re-election campaigns distorts that via pandering to wealthy donors as a form of legalized corruption)
* expanding the US the house of representatives to thousands of representatives (back to the original founders intent before the size was fixed: "The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand...") to dilute the power of concentrated wealth to influence government, and reinstating the rule that senators are appointed by state legislatures: "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote."
* Up-front pricing of products and services based on their true lifecycle costs (including recycling, risks, pollution, and so on); for example cars using gasoline should have pollution costs priced in and also the cost of maintaining a US military presence abroad to defend long oil supply lines, and electricity from US Midwest coal-powered plants should be priced to include acid rain and mercury pollution on the US East Coast, and prices of financial products like derivatives should include a risk cost of total market failure if they all unwind badly at once, and so on.
* Probably various other similar things
Another issue is that capitalism only works well when there is roughly equal information and capital and purchasing power be
The rollout of holocaust 2.0 will use Facebook to roundup political opponents, dissidents and the like."
Sadly, all too likely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation is a book by investigative journalist Edwin Black which details the business dealings of the American-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German and other European subsidiaries with the government of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and the years of World War II. In the book Black outlines the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide through generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data.[1]"
Thus I wrote, in the true spirit of "never forget":
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). 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 some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., 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 equipment] 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."
"What kind of people are these that use vulgar, profane language in these posts. Personally, such people's critiques should be ignored and consigned to the local sewage inlet. A very sad comment on contemporary society."
Just as a guess, putting any person-to-person (mis)communication or personality aspects aside, I think a lot of programmers are frustrated with the state-of-the-art in programming. Examples include the proliferation of JavaScript despite its needlessly confusing warts and missing pieces (same and worse for PHP), Java not fulfilling its promise of ease of installation with lots of versions despite stealing Smalltalk's thunder and having vast amounts of money poured into it, C++ being so confusing and easy to shoot yourself in the foot with, a huge proliferation of half-finished languages, Python and Perl splitting with major new not-backwardly-compatible versions, version, a proliferation of mostly similar FOSS licenses and yet incompatibly-licensed code you can't legally use or distribute together, too many buggy libraries that do almost the same thing and much of what you want but have somewhat different bugs, entrenched awkward "scripting" languages with low performance and are not really much easier to use than other languages for anything substantial or that needs to be maintained or debugged, lack of good documentation for so many projects, badly written software that is hard to understand yet does useful things, lack of tests, vast amounts of computing power in hardware but seeing it frittered away or not being able to easily access it or it being wasted on supporting huge amounts of duplicated inefficient code including likely several different interpreters, library dependency hell, bit rot including of FOSS contributions getting left behind, layer upon layer of abstraction ignoring more abstraction can't solve the issue of too much abstraction, confusing conflict-of-interest marketing information to sort through, data encoded in proprietary or unusual formats and so hard to use, a proliferation of confusing or intentionally limited "standards", the frequent ignorance of the history of programming among programmers who have not lived it, and so on.
For anyone who has programmed for decades and seen what it felt like to use Forth, Smalltalk, BASIC on a C64, or even an assembly language monitor, there is some huge mismatch these days between what we *feel* should be possible and the systems we are in practice forced to work with these days either for economic reasons or reasons of trying to get incremental changes adopted. Notice I said "feel should be possible", so it is a feeling or aspiration -- whether it is reasonable expectation is another issue.
That frustration may express itself as profanity when a programmer see resources (including just getting a Slashdot discussion going) going to new projects that don't seem to really address or acknowledge these fundamental issues. Worse, new projects that don't recognize these issues may just be adding further to all the confusion and complexity (yet another syntax to learn and guess at for ambiguities, yet another lack of documentation, yet another maybe great library that is effectively unusable because of the complex interdependencies or choices about context like desktop vs. web, etc.).
Contrast with Alan Kay's Fundamentals of New Computing (FONC) project which at least acknowledges some of these issues even if it may not fully deliver on all or even many of them (and I have my own criticisms on stuff FONC has ignored).
https://mail.python.org/piperm...
https://www.mail-archive.com/f...
I 've suggested it's possible Linus Torvald's profanity also has some of the same roots of frustration at overwhelming complexity and harder-to-manage risks because of it:
"[fonc] Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug - Slashdot"
Thanks for the reply, especially explaining "locally" (I was starting to wonder afterwards if it indeed was about 3D transformations not variables). Interesting point on commas vs. parens for clarity; I'll have to think about that.
Could not easily find a Google ref for "Buddda". :-)
On JavaScript, it is a frustrating language to work with, with several major design flaws. I'm using it right now for a mid-size project (dozens of pages in a single-page app, collecting 500+ different pieces of data, using Dojo) and it is painful and dragging on (even in just Java, it would have been done much faster). But, inspired in part by Dan Ingall's work on the Lively Kernel, plus what many other peopel say and do who all agree how badly JavaScript sucks, the fact that it runs (in theory) everywhere with one click is the big win. The URL is the biggest innovation there. As I've said before, if it does not have (or run from) a URL it is broken.
Everyone agrees JavaScript sucks:
https://www.google.com/search?...
There are many such things on the web:
"Why JavaScript Sucks And You Should Use It Everywhere"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
It mentions asm.js, BTW.
Check out where the implementer of Smalltalk (Dan Ingalls) is doing now (very dynamic JavaScript): http://www.lively-kernel.org/
Perhaps the fairest thing to say about JavaScript though is:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
"[JavaScript] is actually a very strong language with a few very well known warts (like every other language on the planet has). The problem is that people try to use it as if it were Ruby, PHP, Python, Java. One can do that, but just know that it is an exercise in futility. It will cause frustration and one will come to the conclusion that JavaScript sucks when in fact, it is just that most people don't really take the time to _understand_ JavaScript."
A big issue with JavaScript in practice for simulation (typical to go with 3D) though is that, by default, it is essentially single-threaded (yes, other things are possible with webworkers and separate processes and such, but not in practice for most users). Having spent years debugging subtle issues with Java threading in a huge real-time-ish high-visibility high-availability app, I'm not fully sure that's a bad thing though. :-)
BTW, I think there are lots of value to making a big project FOSS, but rapidly getting contributors to do major changes right away (like a move to a web browser via JavaScript and emscripten) is generally not one of them. The big win is often when being free and available brings in small polishing changes and add-ons and also, if the software is written in a modular way to begin with, getting major new modules as part of an ecosystem -- as well as getting broader adoption by being free and open to increase demand for the core developers' other services and related books and training and other addons and so on. In practice, the learning curve for any major project is just too high for a casual use to make a significant core change, and even if they do, the core maintainers may reject the change or make other changes separately that cause bitrot in the change. If emscripten would just run on the core code, maybe someone would try it. But my guess is it require some code changes to the C++, changes to XL as mentioned elsewhere to output JavaScript, other changes to work with OpenGL as you mention on the page, and some JavaScript glue code to have an app, so non-trivial enough that few people will try it as a first thing (unless maybe they already have used emscripten several times). With an expected big effort, then the question is, what is the payoff for taking the risk? That payoff is going to be much bigger for the original authors probably than for some ra
A thread started by me in 2000 to comp.lang.lisp: https://groups.google.com/foru...
A site on indentational Lisp by someone else: http://readable.sourceforge.ne...
http://xlr.sourceforge.net/
I like expandable languages (although they can suffer from developer confusion reading new constructs and now knowing what they do, depending on how easy it is to go to the source of the new construct, which is why I like Smalltalk's keyword approach integrated with its code browser). When I made another comment above about creating an ANTLR grammar for Tao3D to make it more portable, I did not realize you had created XL and it underlies much of the Tao3D language. So, I'd suggest instead you could add a new backend for XL so it can output JavaScript (ideally in asm.js format). Then, if you could compile your C++ to asm.js with emscripten, with a little bit of JavaScript framework magic, you might quickly have a version of TaoJS that runs in a web browser.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/allte...
"He says it was as if "we removed the PowerPoint slide, and like a big glass barrier was removed between the speaker and the audience. "The communication became a lot more two-way instead of just the speaker speaking at length for 15, 20 minutes. The audience really started to come alive, to look up from their laptop computers and actually start participating in the discussion, which is what we were really trying to foster.""
That said, I still think more tools for empowering people to more easily make educational 3D presentations and such is a good thing. I think the long-term potential of something like Tao3D could be along those lines. Of course, there is already Alice and some other similar things:
http://www.alice.org/index.php
"Using an innovative programming environment to support the creation of 3D animations, the Alice Project provides tools and materials for teaching and learning computational thinking, problem solving, and computer programming across a spectrum of ages and grade levels."
Although, I don't think Alice runs in a web browser, and it Tao3D moved to run in a browser that might be interesting (although it does not now).
I looked at the link you mentioned in another post: http://www.taodyne.com/shop/de... ..."
"Taodyne's current technology is written in C++. It uses Qt for the user interface, and OpenGL for the drawing code. It also uses other components that might be a bit difficult to adapt to a web environment, notably LLVM. We can think of a few possible strategies to adapt this technology to the web:
For a port to the web, you could try asm.js and emscriptem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Here is an example:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/...
"Mozilla and Epic Games have showed the power of the Web as a platform for gaming by porting Unreal Engine 3 to the Web and showcasing Epic Citadel, using asm.js, a supercharged subset of JavaScript pioneered by Mozilla. In less than 12 months, optimizations have increased the performance of Web applications using asm.js from 40% to within 67% of native, and we expect it to get even faster. This performance opens up new opportunities for giving users an astonishing and delightful experience, from within their choice of Web browser. Any modern browser can run asm.js content, but specific optimizations currently present only in Firefox, ensure the most consistent and smooth experience. "This technology has reached a point where games users can jump into via a Web link are now almost indistinguishable from ones they might have had to wait to download and install," said Brendan Eich, CTO and SVP of Engineering at Mozilla. "Using Emscripten to cross-compile C and C++ into asm.js, developers can run their games at near-native speeds, so they can approach the Web as they would any other platform.""
You could also help Chrome improve its asm.js speed and get at least two major browser to have better 3D support, which would help everyone. Why not ask Google for some funding to do that, building on what you have so far? Good luck!!!
"Oh darn, you're right! Let me upgrade my trollbot.
$ sudo apt-get upgrade systemd
There we go, much bett
KERNEL PANIC"
LOL!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Control structures do not have special syntax in Smalltalk. They are instead implemented as messages sent to objects."
Smalltalk still has one of the best programming syntaxes, IMHO because it clearly tags each argument in a complex message like "widget placeAtX: 10 y: 20.". And Smalltalk is gradually being reinvented piece by piece ranging from things like the Java JVM to things like JavaScript's object literals and JSON, e.g. the Smalltalk looking: {x: 10, y: 20}. As another comment pointed out, Forth, Joy, Lisp and other languages also support this in various ways (Lisp very painfully compared to the others via hard-to-write macros).
Also, why do people keep making new languages with new syntax (generally with poor to missing error messages, debuggers, IDEs, documentation, and libraries) when we would so much more benefit from improved FOSS libraries for existing ones? I'd be a lot more excited about Tao if it was a JavaScript library that just supported some special format INI files. It seems like Tao has some impressive libraries for real time graphics that would be nice for anyone to use. Why hide the library for most users behind some new syntax? Most of the hard work must have been creating the library I would guess?
Of course, I know the answer to that. :-) Writing new programming languages is fun, and I have done it before myself more than once. I still have some more ideas I'd like to try out, like to take Smalltalk and have it use C-like comments and string and have a different (hopefully faster) approach to dispatching messages. And to some extent, every major programming problem we solve requires writing a sort of mini-language in terms of function names and such to define a problem space and possible solutions.
It's sad that we got stuck with JavaScript and all its warts just because someone had to rewrite Scheme from scratch with a C syntax in two weeks to stick it in an early browser. Brendan Eich made an unfortunate choice about default variable scope and not including modules from the start based on the idea it would only be for small one page scripts (plus various other warts and complexities like relating to closures and variable scopes, variable hoisting, and so on).
Looking at a bit of the Tao overview video on SourceForge, it looks like variables don't need to be declared (ick!). Also, requiring "locally" seems to imply that it has one of the worst "features/bugs" of JavaScript design for default globals? Or maybe I did not understand "locally". The main aspects of the language (like what is a code block, what is an argument) don't seem clear at first glance to me, perhaps because of various keywords being defined or seeing commas some places and not others?
I find the use of a comma without inner parentheses interesting for functions and arguments, where the comma in a sense is doing what Smalltalk keyword colons are doing. Still, it misses labelling arguments like Smalltalk, and why not drop the commas and just have all arguments separated by spaces and instead require nested expressions to be surrounded by parentheses if you are going in that direction? For example: "translate -500 100 (10 + x)"
I like the clean looking syntax without semicolons at the end of lines. I'm assuming it uses indentation after a comma to define code blocks? Although maybe not, since I only see that at the top level? So, some interesting ideas and I wish it well. It it ran on JavaScript, maybe I'd try it today...
If you're the author, despite any criticism above (just half-baked opinions from watching the video for a few minutes on-and-off while writing this), I'd still encourage you to keep moving forwards with it. Looks like a lot of fun! And it is exploring some new ideas and the library looks amazing. There is no question popular computer languages (Java, JavaScript, C++) have many warts and someday it would be great to have better langua
According to a Nobel scientist quoted here: http://www.naturalnews.com/047...
"In voicing support for Christie's quarantine, Dr. Beutler -- current director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas -- told the website, "I favor it," adding, "I favor it, because it's not entirely clear that they can't transmit the disease." He was referring to currently asymptomatic healthcare worker Kaci Hickox, a Doctors Without Borders nurse who recently returned to New Jersey after treating patients in Sierra Leone and was quarantined in the state for 65 hours. She was eventually taken to her home state of Maine.
"It may not be absolutely true that those without symptoms can't transmit the disease, because we don't have the numbers to back that up," Dr. Beutler continued in his NJ.com interview. "It could be people develop significant viremia [where viruses enter the bloodstream and gain access to the rest of the body], and become able to transmit the disease before they have a fever, even.
"People may have said that without symptoms you can't transmit Ebola. I'm not sure about that being 100 percent true. There's a lot of variation with viruses," he added."
Also apparently sneezing can potentially spread Ebola for several feet and it can live on surfaces for days:
http://www.naturalnews.com/047...
http://www.naturalnews.com/047...
Ways to decontaminate with robotics UV:
http://www.naturalnews.com/047...
Some suggest vitamin C may help:
https://www.patrickholford.com...
Others disagree: http://scienceblogs.com/insole...
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
The site seems notable for its comprehensiveness. I also though it would be great if Lindsay Books would have put copies of everything online for free (like via Archive.org) before it shut down, since most of what it had sold were reprints of content now in the public domain. I'm assuming the site in the article may have much the same stuff?
http://www.lindsaybks.com/
While a related project by me hasn't really got going strongly yet, the OSCOMAK project was a hope to organize all this sort of info and more to let people design whatever individual or community infrastructure they wanted. From pages linked here put up around 2000:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas.
As the internet has grown, it has enabled collaborative work which has created many success stories, including Linux, Python, GCC, Squeak and other projects. We want to harness that power and apply it to organizing technological knowledge in concert with many interested individuals.
The main project goal is to develop an on-line library of technology ideas, techniques, and tools, including a range from high-tech processes like plastics to medium-tech like ceramic houses to low-tech like spinning wheels. Also included will be biotechnology processes, like perennial agriculture, companion planting, sheep farming, and eventually cloning and DNA synthesis.
One process to be included is a way to convert the high-tech computerized library to a low-tech paper one as desired. Key to the whole endeavor will be to present everything in a how-to fashion. Also needed is a way to map out and simulate the interrelations of processes; for instance, sheep raising requires veterinarians, antibiotics, feed, fencing, and shears; shears require a blacksmith, metal, and a furnace. This latter feature also would be used to keep track of the product flows into, out of, and within a community's entire economy."
Been plodding along on this idea for a couple decades, but still not much to show... But, still a bit...
Our garden simulator from 1997 was part of this -- to help people learn how to grow their own food in an efficient and sustainable way.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
My hopes for this go back to the 1980s and before, even envisioning something like the world wide web to support it:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
No doubt many personal failings and distraction have contributed to my limited progress -- especially the distraction of trying to create better software tools for distributed knowledge sharing and programming like the Pointrel system and PataPapa.
None-the-less, there is also an aspect to which the current economic order is not too keen on such work. As is suggested by John Taylor Gatto:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Iâ(TM)ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately sub
From: http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-...
----
"The EPA had done a variety of tests on this organism, all of which indicated that it would not be toxic to humans or animals. They were only a few weeks away from releasing these bacteria into the wild, when Michael Holmes, a graduate student at the University of Oregon, came looking for an interesting thing to study for his doctoral thesis."
Under the direction of his academic advisor, Elaine Ingham, Holmes elected to do his thesis on the effects of this genetically engineered KP on plants, something which had not occurred to the EPA, as it was not required for the release of new genetically modified organisms, Lawton notes in his Acres USA expose.
Holmes study revealed, after testing samples of plants growing in sterile soil, soil with regular KP and soil with genetically engineered KP, that no plants in the latter soil were growing as the alcohol produced by the bacteria had killed them all.
At the time, Lawton notes, the EPA was envisioning that farmers would use these bacteria in a kind of fermenting process to convert plant material into a mixture of 17% alcohol and 83% mineral sludge, which could be poured off into the soil and reused.
"If that had occurred, the genetically engineered KP could have colonized the entire planet over the course of several years, turning all of the soil where it grew into barren dirt."
Ingham said that problem was and still is that the EPA only looks at the immediate impact of new genetically modified organisms on animals, and does not take into account the larger impact on the ecosystem as a whole. That approach can work to a limited extent when working with chemicals, which can break down and dissipate over time. But living organisms have the ability to procreate and overwhelm the natural ecosystem.
To answer your question, see my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi... ...
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?
Now, let's continue to look at this from a millionaire's point of view. The streets might be a lot happier. The families would not be struggling as much, and so the kids would be happier. Why should a millionaire care about other people's happiness? Well, there are obviously moral reasons. But ignoring them, in general, communities would be safer. There would be less resentment towards the rich, who after all, were making this all possible. Nobody would be so poor they had nothing to lose by committing an assault to steal a walled or break into a home. (Assuming drugs were legal, and regulated, there would be less addicts doing property crimes for habits.)
There might be a much larger variety of goods and services for millionaires to choose from, given every unique person had some money so the market heard their needs and even whims. The money would keep flowing, especially because there would be no transaction taxes to slow it down. Entrepreneurial millionaires would be in a good position to benefit from all this demand, creating companies to satisfy all these needs that the market was now listening to.
With all artists, writers, inventors, programmers, and so on freed from the need to worry about earning a daily living, the digital world would blossom with an endless array of free music, free images, free idea, and the physical world would be beautified with free artworks and the streets would be livened with free street productions and plays. So, the millionaire's remaining wealth would go farther, with less entertainment that needs to be paid for. Basically, millionaires would be benefiting, like everyone else, from a robust peer economy and gift economy.
On a personal level, there would be a lot less desire for people to marry millionaires just for the money. For some ugly or nasty millionaires, this might be a hardship. But for most, this would actually be a blessing. They would be less likely to be taken advantage of by social climbers or fortune hunters. Millionaires would have to worry less about their kids being taken advantage of too. With a basic income, there would be a lot less desire by people to marry for money. So, a certain social problem would be greatly reduced in the lives of millionaires. There might still be some of this, but the overall situation would improve greatly.
Similarly, there would likely be less kidnapping. For potential kidnappers or other criminals, when you get $2000 a month in income already, why risk being thrown in jail where your income goes to the upkeep of your prison and you lose your chance of making your own decisions as to how to spend it? While there would still be crimes of passion, total money-related crime might drop way down.
Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full.
For more background on WITTS, see: http://peswiki.com/index.php/D...
Or also an open source version of one of those idea by a different group: http://peswiki.com/index.php/O...
Just pointing out the info -- making no claims about the validity of any of it. In general, the peswiki is a big collection of similar claims. Of course, only one of them needs to be true to change the world significantly.
Here is something posted to the peswiki myself, previously sent to Rossi about why he should open source his eCat rather than try to make money off it (assuming it actually works as suggested):
http://peswiki.com/index.php/O...
"The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had (subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think about the socioeconomic implications of their invention in causing a permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where money does not matter very much anymore."
http://www.denverpost.com/news... ... Prison work "bleeds over into your private life. You go into restaurants, you sit with your back to the wall. You want to see all the entrances and exits, and you notice if somebody is carrying something bulky. You can't turn these skills off," said Matthew von Hobe, 50, a former manager at the four-prison federal complex in Florence. He knows of two colleagues who committed suicide."
"They harden themselves to survive inside prison, guards said in recent interviews. Then they find they can't snap out of it at the end of the day. Some seethe to themselves. Others commit suicide. Depression, alcoholism, domestic violence and heart attacks are common. And entire communities suffer.
So, like you imply, looks like a tough road to rehabilitation for many prison guards...
Good to see so many comments mentioning the lead connection to violent crime. There are nutritional connections too.
"Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat: Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour"
http://www.theguardian.com/pol...
The problem is, of course, the prison is one of the main social safety nets in the USA, and also that putting people in prison boosts the employment rate (jobs for guards, prisoners off the unemployment roles). We need to rethink our economy, like with a basic income that a person does not get while incarcerated?
Also related to show how bad it could get:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
"The "kids for cash" scandal unfolded in 2008 over judicial kickbacks at the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were accused of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit juvenile facilities, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh sentences on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of inmates in the detention centers."
Here is am excerpt from a related satire by me regarding expanding prisons for copyright violators that I sent to the US DOJ a dozen years ago in response to a slashdot article, but sadly sometimes it seems people may be taking it more as a blueprint than a cautionary tale: :-( ...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/micr...
"""
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why wou
4 years ago: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
From there:
My suggestion for a "Game Changing" project is that NASA (possibly in partnership with NIST) could coordinate a global effort towards designing and deploying self-replicating space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore (developed under free and open source non-proprietary licenses as progress towards "open manufacturing").
NASA showed the basic technological feasibility of this with work in the late 1970s on space habitats, and also in a 1980 study called "Advanced Automation for Space Missions".
In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on Earth due to long supply lines and the inaccessibility of key manufacturing data (because it is considered proprietary) is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space. Addressing such fragility would have immediate benefits to improve intrinsic and mutual security globally, and would help humanity survive in the face of plagues, wars, global climate change, asteroid strikes, earthquakes, and whatever other disasters might strike unexpectedly. As the loss of New Orleans showed, Mother Nature remains a formidable adversary even when people are not fighting amongst themselves over perceived scarce resources.
A NASA-coordinated effort to organize manufacturing information and use it to design such habitats (or seeds that would grow such habitats), as well as improve the state-of-the-art in collaboration software, could thus help meet needs both currently on Earth and in the future in space.
Nothing NASA is doing now compares with this at all in terms of gaining the excitement and participation of the world's technologists and technically-minded youth, given this project would have the scale of the entire FOSS movement applied to manufacturing (and simulation). Achieving this goal of a self-replicating space habitat could justify literally trillions of dollars in effort to create a technological infrastructure that could support quadrillions of human lives in space, making nonsense of current worries of "Limits to Growth" or "Peak Oil" or "Overpopulation" or whatever else.
While NASA could coordinate this effort, many other organizations including NIST (and its SLIM program), DARPA, universities, and manufacturers globally could also participate in this effort.
As a whole, this project would help increase US security as a sort of public outreach by helping the global security community transcend ironic and outdated visions of what security means, given that so much abundance is possible through modern technology and this NASA effort would demonstrate that:
"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
See here for more details:
http://groups.google.com/group...?
This effort could also be done in conjunction with this other proposal I made:
"Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA "
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
See Dan Pink's presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
So, much of the premise of differential rewards to spur innovation is flawed (even though it does apply to some extent for hard manual labor not involving much creativity). What Dan Pink says motivates people most to work in creative innovative directions is a sense of purpose, a sense of autonomy, and an increasing sense of mastery.
Also on that theme by Alfie Kohn:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books...
http://www.amazon.com/No-Conte...
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The book argues that there are "pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption".[5] It claims that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.[1] The book contains graphs that are available online.[6]"
And see also, on how the logic of diminishing returns in economics got replaced by the concept of "Pareto efficient":
"Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal"
http://www.amazon.com/Economic...
Also on the social dynamics and mythology related to all this: http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
You made a good presentation of the roots of the better ideas behind capitalism. But somehow along the way, as power accumulated and corrupted our main social institutions in the USA and elsewhere, those ideas got stretched into neoliberalism... Here is a conceptual video on what happens as those neoliberal ideas expand:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
For some comic relief (and a bit more insight), the first novel in a futuristic sci-fi series featuring cybertanks fighting against neoliberalism (especially in the third novel in the series started by the Chronicles of Old Guy by Timothy Gawne):
http://www.amazon.com/The-Chro...
As long as we have an economy based mostly on exchange and capitalism, and as automation takes more and more jobs, it seems like we would need a basic income to make the system more humane and also keep it going by creating demand. So, to do that, we can just reduce the age of the first Social Security payment from age 65 to age 0, and fund that via taxes and fees royalties on use of government assets (like the Alaska Permanent Fund) and so on. However, long term, as I say on my website, we will likely see a mix of advanced subsistence production (3D printers, solar cells, Mr. Fusion), an expanded gift economy (FOSS, Freecycle), better democratic planning (like via the internet), and an exchange economy softened by a basic income.
You might find the intro of this book of interest (just noticed it today) as it talks about the conflict between scarcity and post-scarcity ideas, including market failures and market-based solutions: http://books.google.com/books?...
"Sustainable Growth in a Post-Scarcity World: Consumption, Demand, and the Poverty Penalty -- by Philip Sadler"
IMHO, universities have an implicit moral obligation (including "in loco parentis") to be candid and as accurate as possible with their students about things like career prospects; that they fail to do so as evidenced by this issue is problematical whatever the reasons (including "selection bias" that you only see relatively successful academics working in universities and the advice they give may have worked for them decades ago but may not be very useful either now or for other personality types).
If you look at other countries like in Western Europe, there is not as much of a conflict between being reasonable "successful" in a field and having a family and hobbies and such. Example: http://www.salon.com/2010/08/2... ... But even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours â" the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life. ... In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. ... How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans. ..."
"Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?
Various studies show that overwork does not make people more productive in the long term. Lots of things suffer -- including creativity. Overwork in the USA is a cultural pathology. BTW, it is also problematical to try to motivate the best creative work via rewards:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
As for technological innovation, there is a lot of discussion related to that by people like Langdon Winner and E.F. Schumacher (including related to "appropriate technology"). Just look at how US federal dollars went as subsidies via land grand colleges to big agriculture research vs. small farm research. Why were research funds for decades going into ever bigger mechanized harvesting operations and related plant varieties (the tasteless tomato) instead of multi-purpose flexible agricultural robotics useful for small farms and heirloom seeds? Why is funding "Seed Savers" heirloom seed production (seeds with a variety of natural resistance and good nutrition) or remineralizing US soils via ground up rock dust not one of the USA's top defense priorities vs. defending long supply lines of imported oil used to create monocultures propped up in dead soil doused in petro-chemical-derived synthetic fertilizers and pesticides?
http://www.seedsavers.org/
http://remineralize.org/
Markets may be good at producing certain types of abundance, but in the absence of political oversight, markets are pro
swb's comment is insightful too. The best reason to go into space is because we are happy on Earth and want to grow that happiness further.
That said, it is not unreasonable to want a distributed population for reasons of backup and resiliency, as well as reasons for new perspectives/exploration/innovation. Humans run simulations to learn things, and space habitats may develop a variety of approaches to things that are new and useful.
Also, as human technological power grows, the Earth becomes ever smaller and the stakes for a global mistake (e.g. bioweapon, nuclear war) get every higher -- even as we should do what we can to reduce and contain those risks as appropriate.
See also:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/K...
"A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle forever."
NASA should have been doing these sort of hab missions decades ago IMHO. Better late than never!
Less of some types of carbs, yes, but more other stuff too: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... ...
"Excess weight interferes with insulin's functions, and is the primary risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes. Therefore the most effective treatment for type 2 diabetes is significant weight loss. However, the primary mode of treatment by physicians today is glucose-lowering medication. These medications give a false sense of security, providing implicit permission to continue the same disease-causing diet and lifestyle that allowed diabetes to develop in the first place. Many of these medications promote weight gain -- making the patient more diabetic; most importantly, these medications do not prevent diabetes from progressing and causing complications.
The key to diabetes reversal is superior nutrition and exercise. It may take a little extra effort, but avoiding the tragic complications of diabetes and a premature death is well worth it. My diabetes-reversal diet is vegetable-based with a high nutrient to calorie ratio, containing lots of greens and beans, other non-starchy vegetables, (such as mushrooms, eggplant, tomatoes and onions), raw nuts and seeds, and limited fresh fruit with no sweeteners or white flour products. When diabetics eat in this style, they lose their excess weight -- the cause of their diabetes -- quickly and easily, reducing or eliminating their need for medications and they also flood the body with disease-protective and healing micronutrients and phytochemicals that aid the body's recovery and self-repair mechanism."
For Type II diabetics, such a diet with weight loss brings the body's ability to respond to glucose in line with the remaining capacity to make it as needed. Exercise that builds more muscles and that is done when sugar is spiking can also help in managing glucose levels.
For Type I diabetics however, where the body can't produce much glucose at all if any, this improved diet/exercise is not enough, even if it can improve the situation some what as far as reducing complications. For Type I diabetics, this sort of breakthrough with stem cells, if it works, would be truly amazing.
Sometimes type I diabetics are really misdiagnosed type II, and vice versa, so there is a small level of confusion here where sometimes diet works when you would not expect etc..
BTW, vitamin D deficiency (from lack of natural sunlight) may be involved with the autoimmune response that could cause type I diabetes or perhaps make type II worse.
More from Furhman:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.amazon.com/The-End-...
More from others:
http://www.rawfor30days.com/
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...
https://www.drmcdougall.com/he...
http://articles.mercola.com/si...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/hea...
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/0...
The deeper issue is that our brains and microbiomes are adapted for a scarcity of refined carbs, and we struggle with the abundance of cheap ones:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means