My essay: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... "This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals."
An example I have there: ---- Let us contrast two candidates with different very backgrounds and ask which one would get a security clearance. Which of the two would be hired to create the social and technical systems to define US National Security?
The first candidate is a woman performance artist currently couchsurfing near New York City's Greenwich Village. She has a messed up credit history, suffers from depression, has been on psychological medication, had a terrible childhood, and has had multiple friendships and has slept with people from a variety of foreign nations who she met in NYC. She even spent a few months living in the Middle East protesting various US-related policies. She was arrested once for smoking marijuana in public outside a nightclub. She is outraged by domestic violations of privacy rights in the USA and would never submit to a security clearance screening involving lots of prying questions (if only to protect her friends). Still, she has "been there" and understands what it means to be poor and also understands what it means to see the world from multiple points of view (including the downtrodden). To her, the invasion of Iraq was an obviously stupid thing to do and she was arrested for protesting before the invasion, too. Well, it does not take much imagination to assume she would be denied a security clearance, not that she would probably ever consider a job that requires applying for one.
The second candidate is a woman with a PhD in mathematics and a master's and bachelors degree in public policy from an Ivy League university (paid for by her professional parents). She has never known a day of hunger or homelessness in her life, has excellent credit, is very emotionally stable in the past (although the limits of that have never really been tested), has never felt a need to escape from her life using drugs, and has married a reliable accountant (himself a third generation American). She thinks that a job working at the Pentagon is worth just about any sacrifice to preserve a superior US way of life (plus, she feels she and her family and friends have nothing to hide). Well, it would seem there is probably a good chance such a person would get a security clearance, even if her polygraph readings jumped when she confessed that she has in the past purchased "fair trade" coffee that came from South America and also drives a Toyota Prius that her parents gave her as a birthday present last year.
Ten years go by and our successful second candidate has risen to a position where she is assisting in using highly mathematical Operations Research to define US defense policy and weapons systems priorities to protect against those she sincerely feels "hate us because we are free". Do you feel safer as a result? Do you really think she could do as effective a job in thinking about security threats and opportunities relative to general US interests as the other woman who would never qualify for a security clearance?
As for our first candidate, perhaps she becomes a Volvo-driving soccer mom with three kids in Portland, Oregon, a successful author, and married to an organic grocery store manager, to give her story a reasonably happy ending in mainstream terms?:-)
But here is a deep question implicitly raised by Scott Page's writings. Do you think the two women, working together, along with others, might be able to do a better job at improving US national security out of their diversity of skills and experiences than either one working alone? What sort of social environment or workplace setting would it take to make that possible?
"I hope someone else remembers this article and still has the link?"
Related, By Bob Black from 1985: http://www.whywork.org/rethink... "I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."
I have a list of alternatives collected here, some positive like a basic income or a gift economy, some negative like more prisons, more schooling, and more war: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a... "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Having programmed for about 30 years, including with Smalltalk, I'm fairly convinced that 99%+ of software (including most computer languages and libraries) is redundant clutter and that most programmers (usually unintentionally) are just making life harder for all the other programmers (with adhoc code, generally which is not very good). By extension, 99%+ of programmers are redundant, too.:-) This great waste is also driven in part by issues about secrecy and copyrights and going up learning curves -- plus a lot of programmers enjoy reinventing the wheel. For example, why did we need Open Office Writer and Microsoft Word and AbiWord and WordPerfect and WriteNow and MacWrite and TeXShop and Emacs and vi and so on for who knows how many word processors and editors when they all so almost exactly the same thing? Why do we even need so many CPU instruction sets? Wasn't the orthogonal 6809 set a great one that could have been scaled up instead of x86? Why did we need DOS and BIOS when we had Forth? Why did we need Windows NT or even Linux when we had the far superior QNX way before either of them? Does C++ really need so many incompatible string libraries? Does JavaScript need so many different module libraries each with different ways of loading modules or looking up a DOM node? And in many ways, the IBM System 370 with VM and related portable-in-a-virtual-hardware-sense languages had all of these beat. Why do we need so many web browsers all slightly incompatible and extended in different ways? Why do we need a relational database engine other than PostgreSQL and maybe SQLite?
The problem is getting everyone to agree on what 1% (or less) of software to keep and standardize on, since everyone is going to defend their version of some application or language, or not want to slightly adjust their business processes to use a standard (but extensible) accounting package and so on. So, in practice, like with life on Earth, we get a huge diversity of options. There may be security benefits to avoiding a software monoculture of course, but that is not really why we have so much redundancy.
Java is a prime example of a completely unneeded language given VisualWorks Smalltalk -- unfortunately ParcPlace refused to give Sun reasonable licensing terms when Sun wanted to use it for set top boxes, and so Oak/Green got the go ahead that became Java. Over the years, Java basically got more and more of Smalltalk's features (including Just In Time compiling and generational garbage collection) until it is not half-bad. But Java was still a huge waste and a cause of great amounts of needless suffering compared to everyone just switching to Smalltalk, even with its flaws: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...
PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, and so on -- all pointless, really. The previosuly existing C, Smalltalk, and Scheme languages would have been good enough for everything they all do -- at least, that which, say, Erlang could not handle. But instead I had to learn most of those languages and related libraries to keep up -- which was often fun, but still a waste of time for the most part compared to just using better existing tools like C, Smalltalk, and Scheme and a few good libraries. Yes each of those could have been improved (C with fixed size types and better strings, Smalltalk with optional typing and better modules, Scheme with better libraries) -- but that would have been far easier than creating new language ecosystems. PHP obviously is by far the worst of the bunch -- yet it now runs so much of the web (often badly, being such an inconsistent mish-mosh of a language).
All that said, programming can be fun. I don't begrudge people making new languages and libraries as experiments or for the inherent joy of it. A lot of good ideas may come out of it, so there is R&D value in the diversity of experiments. Also, it is good in a democracy dependent on technology if more people know
Googling on your drone suggestion: http://e360.yale.edu/mobile/fe... "Zondlo recently developed a methane sensor mounted on a remote-controlled aircraft built at the University of Texas at Dallas. In October, the aircraft was used to quantify emission rates from well pads and a compressor station in the Barnett Shale region. Zondlo has been partnering with other groups that fly drones over fracking areas to detect leaks.
Robert B. Jackson, an ecologist and energy expert at Duke University, also has been testing drones to detect fugitive methane emissions. The main drawback, he says, is the payload. "Carrying a big camera or methane sensor, a drone might be able to stay in the air for 30 minutes," says Jackson. "It's difficult to screen a shale play with that kind of time."
Engineers are trying to develop lighter sensors that will allow drones to stay in the air longer. "I'm very bullish long-term on using drones to measure leaks," Jackson said. "Are we there yet right now? No."
In the Pinedale Anticline natural gas field in Wyoming, Shane Murphy and Robert Field of the University of Wyoming recently outfitted a Mercedes Sprinter van with a mass spectrometer and other high-powered scientific instruments to measure volatile organic compounds and methane. When combined with meteorological instrumentation and sophisticated software, these technologies can detect methane plumes and quantify emission rates from specific sources -- all from inside the van. The equipment records readings every half-second, which allows it to be used on the move. "This approach can cover a lot of ground," Field said."
And also: http://www.reuters.com/article... "No pilot was required when the Aeryon Scout took off into the leaden skies of Alaska to inspect a stretch of oil pipeline. The miniature aircraft was guided by an engineer on the ground, armed only with a tablet computer. The 20-minute test flight, conducted by BP Plc last fall, was a glimpse of a future where oil and gas companies in the Arctic can rely on unmanned aircraft to detect pipeline faults, at a fraction of the cost of piloted helicopter flights."
Also (see page 3): http://www.seattlepi.com/local... "Though the project has a modest half-million-dollar budget, the goal is to develop and field test a portable low-cost instrument that can measure gas odor in parts-per-billion quantities and "replace the human nose for leak detection," according to the study prospectus.
When the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration launched the project with industry financial support in 2010, it said it would be completed in September of this year. Recent changes in the federal agency's research program could delay projects currently underway, according to a transcript of an Aug. 2 meeting between federal research officials and technical advisors.
The federal government is also working on pipeline surveillance devices, which would search for leaks, including another cooperative research project launched by the federal government to mount a gas detection device on a pilot-less flying drone.
Until these devices are proven, however, experts say the industry will heavily rely on the gas customer's nose, which is not all that reassuring."
At CMU 25 years ago, I was part of a small group led by Red Whitaker where we discussed making robots that rove through gas pipelines to inspect them from the inside. So, that's another option, too, although putting anything inside a pipeline has its own risks.
Of course, if electricity gets cheaper (like from hot or cold fusion or cheaper solar panels), natural gas demand may fall quickly. But whether that leads to less leaks in the s
Yes, it is true -- we thought computers, AI, and robots would liberate us, but instead they are being used to spy on us, to micromanage us, and to force us to work like robots or else.
On depression and such, look into vitamin D deficiency, eating more fruits & vegetables, and getting more Omega 3s. Also, look into a treadmill workstation or a standing desk to help with ergonomics and joint pain.
Good luck! Hope you can find some way to make your work more meaningful -- even if just by practicing skills you can use on other projects in your spare time, like perhaps to make free software the world really needs?
Maybe contact this Dutch guy (in Toronto at the moment though) for some good ideas of stuff that really needs doing, including with Squeak: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/cdeg...
"My understanding of your underlying premise, that cultures where people are happy and some aren't downtrodden must be exterminated, rings true."
I'm not sure I'd go that far.:-) It is more like Western capitalist-oriented culture over the past several hundred years has a history of not valuing cultural diversity in favor of taking the physical stuff other people have or exploiting their physical labor. Yet something like the US Constitution being inspired in part by the Iroquois Confederacy (see Benjamin Franklin) is really a much bigger transfer of wealth, and in a way that does not deplete the giver... Too bad we did not also back then embrace the Iroquois idea that women essentially should be the only ones who can vote -- although generally only for men they knew from birth.:-)
However that valuing of diversity in the USA is changing. See for example: "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...
And even though I can say so many comments about SETI are ironic and so on, if I look back on my youth and watching Star Trek or Space 1999 and such, or reading lots of sci-fi books with aliens including about "Darkover" or set where "The Word for World is Forest", I can see how it may be easier at first to get some people in Western culture to accept the idea of space aliens than to accept people from other countries (like from the USSR for a US American of those times). So, in that sense, discussions about SETI may be a step towards more acceptance of other cultures on Earth. And that is a good thing. Maybe if we can have a child-like compassion for "E.T.", there is still still hope.
Thanks for the other examples though. I'm thinking there are three kinds of madness/insanity: * a private madness that messes up our lives and those around us locally (and we all have this to some degree with out foibles and addictions and ignorances and imbalances so on) * a public madness where people make a big deal out of the way they are (some talk show hosts) and that way might hurt many others via promoting selfishness or war * an expansive cultural madness where the Borg-like culture seeks to overwrite everything around it with its own way (although in the Borg's defense, at least they claimed to add a culture's distinctiveness to the Borg collective as a form of growth, which can not be said the same of so many mainstream economists...)
It't that third type of widespread madness that is the biggest problem (e.g. WWII Germany and Japan, but there are many other examples closer to home). The villain in Aliens vs. Monsters is a good example. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt08... "Gallaxhar: Humans of Earth, I come in peace. You need not fear me, I mean you no harm. However, it is important to note that most of you will not survive the next 24 hours. The few of you that do survive will be enslaved and experimented upon. You should, in no way, take any of this personally. It's just business. So to recap, I come in peace, I mean you no harm, and you all will die. Gallaxhar out."
Or also: "Gallaxhar: Now I can finally rebuild my civilization. Any thought on where I can set up shop? Your planet, perhaps? Susan Murphy: You keep your slimy tentacles off my planet... Gallaxhar: [Grabs Susan with one of his tentacles] Or what? If you wanted to stop me, you should have done it when you possessed the quantonium. Now you're nothing. Susan Murphy: There are innocent people down there who didn't do anything! Gallaxhar: [Throws Susan down to the ground] Bah! There were innocent people in my home planet when it was destroyed. Susan Murphy: Look, I'm sorry your planet was destroyed. Gallaxhar: Oh, don't be. I was the one who destroyed it."
The other reply (by AC) suggesting enlightened cultures may be protecting the Earth from less enlightened individuals in their own cultures may well be true...
All true, and a great article. Still, I already bought a couple Kyocera Hydro water-proof cell Android Smartphones for $50 or so each, and hardware costs are falling fast, so it is not clear that OS footprint matters much in the USA, although maybe in Africa and China and India it still does.
And Mozilla could also develop democracy-empowering apps and standards on top of that XPCOM platform for everyone, including ones for collective civic sensemaking and a semantic desktop like I talk about here: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
If I was leading Mozilla, that is what I would have focused more on. Firefox OS on a Smartphone or elsewhere is a great idea in theory, but seems like a nonstarter in practice as far as *extensive* adoption in the Western world (even if I myself might buy a phone with Firefox OS on it preferentially for FOSS and privacy reasons). Google succeeded against iOS with mobile phones from nothing to 80% Smartphone market share in a few years because Google had deep pockets and a lot of good will at the time and was at the beginning of an exponentially growing marketplace. Mozilla may have the good will (although not at the scale Google had then among consumers) but it does not have the deep pockets. It also faces an entrenched mobile Smartphone landscape at this point with Android. Plus it does not have a compelling broad service offering like Google had with search and gmail to go with the phone (so people will just use Firefox OS to use Google Search, Gmail and Maps?). What money Mozilla has is almost entirely coming from Google (about a billion dollars total over the last few years), where only about a million a year is in individual donations. While there is a lot a few sharp developers could do if funded with even just a million dollars in donations a year, if Google pulls the plug on Mozilla's funding if Firefox OS were to even hint of being a successor for any other reason, where does that leave Firefox OS? Probably not stuff I should be saying in public given I just applied for a "Software Engineer, Platform" job at Mozilla, but what the hey.:-) http://careers.mozilla.org/en-...
I love the Mozilla mission of FOSS software to support open standards (with the exception I feel Mozilla made a big mistake on not backing WebSQL built on SQLite as a defacto standard). However, getting people to *install* anything as an uphill battle, let alone buy anything. That's a big reason web-browser-hosted software is winning over the desktop and why I'm moving more of what I do in that direction. Even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls moved that way with the "Lively Kernel" because they could not get many people to download Squeak. And getting people to install a full OS is an even bigger battle. Plus there are other groups making alternative phone platforms (Ubuntu, Android forks, WebOS from HP, more). So, given limited funding available for FOSS web stuff, and also given Mozilla has other great initiatives worthy of more support including "Webmaker," it is sad to see so much Mozilla resources and mental bandwidth go into something like Firefox OS that seems unlikely to gain much traction given the computing landscape we now have. And instead, the core Mozilla applications like Firefox and Thunderbird languish relatively speaking as far as bug fixes and innovation. The biggest change just recently with Firefox is it looks more like Chrome... As a "lazy" d
Just to add to the possibility of unlikelihood of other space civilizations, with quadrillions of totally empty universes...
Great analysis.
All that said, we just don't know the odds of alternatives within out universe. And we may be living in a computer simulation (like Minecraft?) with parameters set to generate either one or trillions of different space civilizations.
Although given how hardy bacteria are, it would not surprise me if our solar system had been inoculated by bacteria from far away.
A big irony of all this SETI stuff is that so many people act like finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe with a different culture or technology elsewhere would be a big deal, whereas we in the USA and also globally are so busy killing off whales, elephants, octopods, and people of different countries and religions for various short-term economic or xenophobic reasons... And our culture also have a history of ignoring great technologies like Smalltalk or QNX. Comments on SETI are often just some weird mix of irony, hypocrisy, and blindness... Not to say I have not been guilty of such myself sometimes...
Someone in another post talked about a popular fantasy that some alien technology would solve all our problems, but is that true? As Bucky Fuller said in the 1960s, and is only more true now, we have more than enough resources and technology to make life pleasant for everyone on Earth (well, except haters and greeders maybe). Eat more vegetables and fruits, get out in the sunshine and walk in nature, hang out with other people locally, sleep well, do good work, and so on are the basics for a healthy happy life (see "BlueZones"). People in the USA can see much happier and healthier people in Europe or Canada if they bothered to look, but US politics in general can't admit that. Can you imagine what the US political parties (either left or right) would say about some happier healthier more prosperous space civilization that was more communal? Or that had different sex roles? Or had different religious rituals? Or whatever?
Example of the kind of nonsense people in the USA would start spouting in talk-radio: "Yeah, those red-skinned aliens live 100,000 years each in perfect health traveling the universe if they want in FTL ships that can print anything they want in 3D, but it's an unhappy 10,000 years because they have high taxes and have a different notion of God/Universe and different rituals. We need to help these backward aliens come to know our loving God (by torture if need be) and how to vote correctly to give all their money to wealthy Earthlings who will create good jobs for all of them. Their medical care system sucks because they don't have private sick care insurance to deliver medicine by board-certified entrepreneurial MDs and the health care facilities and testing labs the MDs own and so the alien's million-year old political obviously will surely be insolvent soon. Anyone who explores or advocates their ways is an alien-sympathizer traitor, guilty of treason, and needs to be imprisoned or re-educated. Anyone who harbors an alien is guilty of aiding terrorists because these aliens want to destroy our way of life. For our citizens' own protection, we will not issue passports to anyone dumb enough to want to go visit them and anyone attempting to board an alien vessel will be shot out of our boundless compassion. The aliens are obviously here to corrupt our morality and sap the ardor of the hard-working minimum-wage-paid American to cause the USA to collapse. These aliens in their crappy ZPE-powered FTL ships obviously want to steal our fossil fuel coal, oil, and natural gas. We need to increase out military spending to counter this alien threat, and it is sensible to take simple precautions like a first-strike with nukes and plagues on the alien homeworld using stolen alien spaceships to keep this alien menace at bay. Better dead than Red."
For this playing out historically in North America centuries ago to "R
From my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... ==== Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all....
"... Or do you support the notion of everyone being able to legal own a 20 Megaton nuke? Because that's the sort of firepower you really need to oppose the US government;..."
Just wanted to point out in reply that in a democracy, people oppose the government in terms of existing laws all the time through voting, lawsuits, campaign donations, jury nullification, running for office, civil disobedience, writing to their congress person, moving, innovation that changes perceived economic imperatives, performance art, publishing books, writing newspaper editorials, buying different products, eating differently (like eating less energy/water-intensive meat despite government subsidies for it), creating new organizations as examples, fostering alternative communities, contributing to internal political pressures when working with government, and so on. These could be considered variations on the "boxes" of democracy: soap box (publishing), ballot box (voting), mail box (writing legislators), band box / pizza box (community), lunch box (eating and purchasing politically as I see it; social safety net as originally defined), jury box (jury nullification by voting not-guilty because the law is wrong), moving box (between states or between countries) -- all available before the ammo box. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Other countries oppose the USA all the time as well via the international laws, tariffs, subsidizing local industries, currency manipulations, making choices about whether to trade in dollars, setting standards of imported products, forming their own cartels (like OPEC), educating their own populace, investing in their own infrastructure, making stuff for the USA cheaply to make the USA dependent on the other country and to obtain its business and technological secrets, setting examples of alternative practices as successes, and so on. See also Noam Chomsky on "The Threat of a Good Example": http://www.thirdworldtraveler....
As Isaac Asimov had a character (Salvor Hardin) say, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
And for a true-life example, consider Leon Shenandoah: http://pathwayofpeace.blogspot... "We are the spiritual energy that is thousands time stronger than nuclear energy. Our energy in the combined will of all people with the spirit of the Natural World, to be of one body, one heart and one mind for peace."
Or as I quote about him here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d... "Warriors are held up as heroes. They are praised for their gallantry, exalted for their conquests, and used as symbols to inspire patriotism. Monuments are built for them as reminders of past victories and to prepare citizens for the next campaign. Leon Shenandoah was no warrior, yet no warrior could stand up against his power. He carried no weapons, used no harsh rhetoric, and made no demands. His strength was in gentleness. When he spoke, those around him listened. His words were always soft, his kindness evident. He was a spiritual man."
I don't feel US gun culture or politics is likely to change anytime soon. The USA is what it is with a certain cultural momentum. And personally I feel if the USA took care of its economic and mental health issues better (like a basic income and medicare for all) the amount of gun violence would go down. Improving the environment helps too, given lead levels have been linked to violence: http://www.motherjones.com/env...
But what really bothers me is US gun owners who vote for politicians (of any party) who put i
H1Bs directly reduce wages of technical employees, plus they also displace local contractors who otherwise get much higher hourly rates than employees generally due to the short term nature of the projects and higher skill levels and so on. Even if there is not a lump of labor, there is such a thing as a fixed budget at any point in time.
The US created just about zero net new jobs in the last decade while the population and the GDP grew. So, output is increasing in a 21st century economy while labor stays fixed or declines as a percent of the population.
On top of that, it doesn't matter how much labor is needed if it can be done more cheaply by robots and AIs. And before such replace human workers entirely, they will let a few workers do the work of many, thus increasing unemployment,
The real future of work is to make it play and pleasant. See Bob Black and EF Schumacher:
Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink... "What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."
Schumacher: http://www.centerforneweconomi... "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
For some comic relief see also the 1950s story "The Midas Plague" where only the very wealthy were allowed to have full-time jobs and work overtime and live in small homes, while everyone else was limited to part-time jobs as best or unemployment and forced consumption of mansions and massive amounts of food and consumer goods at worst.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Personally, I think we also need better tools for collective sensemaking about important public and private issues, like I led a workshop on here: http://barcamp.org/w/page/4722...
They overlap and interact in unexpected ways, along with the theft economy and the subsistence economy. OpenSSL is a prime example of these overlaps and the complexities of trying to manage all that socially. Should the planned government economy make the code work via tax-supported staff of a government agency? Should businesses exchange money for more development work and support services specific to their needs? Should more developers just donate their time or individuals donate their funds to make OpenSSL work better? What mix makes sense? Especially for software of such global importance?
I talk about the interaction of those five types of economic transactions in general in a youtube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://groups.google.com/d/ms... "This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."
http://gamearchitect.net/Artic... By Kyle Wilson ""Software is hard," reads the quote from Donald Knuth that opens Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code. The 400 pages that follow examine why: Why is software in a never-ending state of crisis? Why do most projects end up horribly over-budget or cancelled or both? Why can't we ship code without bugs? Why, everyone asks, can't we build software the same way we build bridges?... But the nature of software is that the problems are always different. You never have to solve the exact problem that someone's solved before, because if software already existed that solved your need, you wouldn't have to write it. Writing software is expensive. Copying software is cheap. Scott Rosenberg coins this as Rosenberg's Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. The corollary is, The only software that's worth making is software that does something new."
See also the book http://www.dreamingincode.com/ by Scott Rosenberg: "Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software sets out to understand why, through the story of one software project -- Mitch Kapor's Chandler, an ambitious, open-source effort to rethink the world of e-mail and scheduling. I spent three years following the work of the Chandler developers as they scaled programming peaks and slogged through software swamps. In Dreaming in Code I tell their stories."
I doubt it mentions how I wrote to the Chandler Project early on about using ideas like triples from my Pointrel project but did not get much of a reply...:-) Still my own project has been ongoing for decades. It's surprisingly difficult just to store and synchronize versions of data in useful ways when faced with uncertainties about future needs.
My latest attempt of many, many: https://github.com/pdfernhout/... "This stores snippets of HTML entered in a text area in a local IndexedDB database in your browser. These snippets can be displayed in a list below the edit box. TiddlyWiki was a bit of an inspiration for that list display. This is intended to support "bootstrapping" more a more complex system, such as Doug Engelbart worked toward to support a co-evolution of tools, knowledge, community, and processes."
Git is remarkable in that way in fitting into current practices of using hierarchical files changed by desktop tools. Still, it misses a lot as far as references to data items that can be exchanged globally (needing longer hashes), or dealing with large binary files (constantly rechecking stuff, but with workarounds), or dealing with rapid collaboration by several people such as to create shared drawings. But it is still awesome as far as it goes.
"Dat" is another up-and-coming approach I wish well, started by Max Ogden: http://www.knightfoundation.or... http://dat-data.com/ "Dat seeks to increase the traction of the open data movement by developing better tools for collaboration."
http://remineralize.org/ "Better soil, better food, better planet.... We see a future of thriving farms and gardens producing healthy, nutrient-dense food in great abundance. We see exuberant forests returned to a state of grandeur not seen in centuries, silently sequestering the carbon dioxide that so threatens our planet today. We see a stable climate and a cleaner, healthier environment. We see all of this being possible through the simple and effective process of soil remineralization."
You are right that much of today's organic industry has become co-dependent on conventional livestock farms to use the manure for fertilizer to make up for what is removed from the soil. And returning human waste back to the soil has not proven that workable in the USA because sewage sludge is often contaminated with heavy metals or prescription drugs.That is a big difference from the "Farmers Of Forty Centuries" in China with cleaner sewage back then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
From: http://remineralize.org/histor... ---- Benefits of Remineralization * Provides slow, natural release of elements and trace minerals. * Increases the nutrient intake of plants. * Increases yields and gives higher brix reading. * Rebalances soil pH. * Increases earthworm activity and the growth of microorganisms. * Builds humus complex. * Prevents soil erosion. * Increases the storage capacity of the soil. * Increases resistance to insects, disease, frost, and drought. * Produces more nutritious crops. * Enhances flavor in crops. * Decreases dependence on fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
Soil Remineralization (SR) creates fertile soils by returning minerals to the soil in much the same way that the Earth does: during an Ice Age, glaciers crush rock onto the Earth's soil mantle, and winds blow the dust in the form of loess all over the globe. Volcanoes erupt, spewing forth minerals from deep within the Earth, and rushing rivers form mineral-rich alluvial deposits.
Within silicate rocks is a broad spectrum of up to one hundred minerals and trace elements necessary for the well-being of all life and the creation of fertile soils. Glacial moraine or mixtures of single rock types can be applied to soils to create a sustainable and superior alternative to the use of ultimately harmful chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
SR has been shown in scientific studies to achieve fourfold increases in agricultural and forestry (wood volume) yields and to produce both immediate and long-term benefits from a single application.
Hundreds of thousands of tons of appropriate rock dust for soil and forest regeneration are stockpiled by the gravel and stone industry. ---
I hope more people learn about this.
On the topic of this article on meat alternatives, about seventeen years ago I wrote a letter to a person I had met who was trying to raise fund for some kind of recreational complex in Des Moines, Iowa. His family was a producer of equipment for meat grinding. Inspired by the work of Jon Robbins and "Diet for a New America" and EarthSave back then, I suggested in the letter he consider adapting the technology to make meat substitutes, which I told him was a growing industry. Never heard back from him. See also: http://johnrobbins.info/
http://www.businessweek.com/st... http://www.groklaw.net/article... http://www.basicallytech.com/b... http://www.digitalresearch.biz... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."
Yet, consider what came from Chuck Moore of pre-Bayh-Dole true academic traditions of MIT & Stanford and then internal support in manufacturing and then supporting government-funded Astronomical research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... http://www.colorforth.com/HOPL... "NRAO, 1971... NRAO appreciated what I had wrought. They had an arrangement with a consulting firm to identify spin-off technology. The issue of patenting Forth was discussed at length. But since software patents were controversial and might involve the Supreme Court, NRAO declined to pursue the matter. Whereupon, rights reverted to me. I don't think ideas should be patentable. Hindsight agrees that Forth's only chance lay in the public domain. Where it has flourished."
Kildall, Moore, and Kay/Ingalls all got the idea of virtual machines (with their own ways). Lisp-ers may have got a bit of that too.
We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO. http://philip.greenspun.com/bg... http://www.complex.com/tech/20...
But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyright
From Dr. David Goodstein, 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... "In the meantime, the real crisis that is coming has started to produce a number of symptoms, some alarming and some merely curious. One of these is what I like to call The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. The paradox is this: as a lingering result of the golden age, we still have the finest scientists in the world in the United States. But we also have the worst science education in the industrialized world. There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore, roughly 95% of the American public is consistently found to be scientifically illiterate by any rational standard. How can we possibly have arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists? That is what I mean by The Paradox of the Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates.
The question of how we educate our young in science lies close to the heart of the issues we have been discussing. The observation that, for hundreds of years the number of scientists had been growing exponentially means, quite simply, that the rate at which we produced scientists has always been proportional to the number of scientists that already existed. We have already seen how that process works at the final stage of education, where each professor in a research university turns out 15 Ph.D's, most of those wanting to become research professors and turn out 15 more Ph.D's.
Recently, however, a vastly different picture of science education has been put forth and has come to be widely accepted. It is the metaphor of the pipeline. The idea is that our young people start out as a torrent of eager, curious minds anxious to learn about the world, but as they pass through the various grades of schooling, that eagerness and curiosity is somehow squandered, fewer and fewer of them showing any interest in science, until at the end of the line, nothing is left but a mere trickle of Ph.D's. Thus, our entire system of education is seen to be a leaky pipeline, badly in need of repairs. The leakage problem is seen as particularly severe with regard to women and minorities, but the pipeline metaphor applies to all. I think the pipeline metaphor came first out of the National Science Foundation, which keeps careful track of science workforce statistics (at least that's where I first heard it). As the NSF points out with particular urgency, women and minorities will make up the majority of our working people in future years. If we don't figure out a way to keep them in the pipeline, where will our future scientists come from?
I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows
Leafy greens especially are really important to preventing many diseases. Cabbage is a fairly cheap one. You can steam the cabbage while cooking the rice. Dandelions are a terrific source of healthy greens (if they have not been sprayed with weedkiller etc.). It's crazy that people have been taught to hate healthy Dandelions.
Our stainless steel "Miracle" rice cooker with a steamer attachment was one of our best kitchen investments ($70) as it does not have Teflon as most rice cookers do, but we worked up to it from cheaper Teflon ones.
Without good food, the mind and body can go into a downward spiral of low energy and depression -- thus a cycle of poverty. Hunter/gathers are more than 100 different types of food over the course of a year. Getting calories in not enough -- you need micronutrients too, and that means a diversity of foods -- but they don't have to be expensive foods.
Of course, so many sick care schemes (Medicaid, Medicare, "health" insurance) will pay for expensive drugs and surgeries but won;t pay for good food to avoid drugs and surgeries. It doesn't help that stressed-out people tend to bulk up on calories as an ages old survival mechanism, not knowing where the next meal may be coming from. This is all made worse by US farm policy: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.... "Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that weâ(TM)re supposed to eat less of."
Watch out for additives in bullion that might cause headaches and such. Lots of bad headaches could make it hard to keep a job or graduate from college.
Beans are also cheaper to buy dried than canned -- except you need to know how to prepare them and have a place to cook them and the electricity or gas too cook them, which together may not be possible for many students.
People need a healthy source of fat, too -- something lacking in what you outline. The brain is mostly fat, so it is no wonder on low fat (or poor fat) diets that people can get messed up mentally. Nuts can be one, but they tend to be expensive and they may be lacking in Omegas 3s. Eggs might be a good cheap choice of fat including some Omega-3s for many people; some other sources: http://www.self.com/blogs/flas...
Eating vegetarian in general is healthier and cheaper. So is buying the right things in bulk, maybe splitting big purchases with others.
We also got a lot of value from a $100 blender to do smoothies from frozen fruit -- but that is beyond very cheap (although still cheaper and much healthier than a carton of ice cream).
Still, something like a "basic income" may be a needed as a general solution to poverty. The problem with a lot of frugal advice is that it forces people to take on various risks (like health risks of lack of vegetables, or safety risk of a cheap car, or assault risk in a bad neighborhood, and so on). Or it entails doing a lot of time consuming things that prevent more productive activities. Your advice though is very time-saving and practical, which is why I like it (except for quibbles on some of the above points as far as long-term living).
"What sucks is we're so much more productive, you'd think we'd be working less. But why the hell would we give anything to anyone if they didn't 'work' for it?"
If inheriting property is a legitimate idea, what about all of humanity inheriting our collective know how and so being entitled to some of the fruits of our global productivity? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization...."
From my essay discussing excellence vs. elitism & privilege: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post... ---- So, the question becomes, how do we go about getting the whole world both accepted into Princeton and also with full tenured Professorships (researchy ones without teaching duties except as desired?:-) And maybe with robots to do anything people did not want to do? This is just intended as a humorous example, of course. I'm not suggesting Princeton would run the world of the future or that everyone would really have Princeton faculty ID cards and parking stickers. Still, that's a thought.:-) That motel for scholars, The Institute For Advanced Study, is already a bit like this (no required teaching duties), so it's an even better model.:-) http://www.ias.edu/about/missi...
But you might object, who will run the kitchens, repair the roofs, plant Prospect Garden, and so forth? Essentially, who will be the Morlocks to support and maybe eat the Eloi on staff?:-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Well, that's where this analogy breaks down, although one could perhaps imagine robots as the Morlocks (maybe without the whole eating PU staff for fuel thing). http://www.wired.com/gadgets/m...
"A prototype robot capable of hunting down over 100 slugs an hour and using their rotting bodies to generate electricity is being developed by engineers at the University of West England's Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory."
So, for the rest of this essay, I'll assume the "scarcity" world (at least in the USA) currently works more like, say, G. William Domhoff suggests: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whor... http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whor...
"Q: So, who does rule America?
A: The owners and managers of large income-producing properties; i.e., corporations, banks, and agri-businesses. But they have plenty of help from the managers and experts they hire.... I will try to demonstrate how rule by the wealthy few is possible despite free speech, regular elections, and organized opposition:
* "The rich" coalesce into a social upper class that has developed institutions by which the children of its members are socialized into an upper-class worldview, and newly wealthy people are assimilated.
* Members of this upper class control corporations, which have been the primary mechanisms for generating and holding wealth in the United States for upwards of 150 years now.
* There exists a network of nonprofit organizations through which members of the upper class and hired corporate leaders not yet in the upper class shape policy debates in the United States.
* Members of the upper class, with the help of their high-level employees in profit and nonprofit institutions, are able to dominate the federal government in Washington.
* The rich, and corporate leaders, nonetheless claim to be relatively powerless.
* Working people have less power than in many other
I set up a treadmill desk several years ago, with a regular treadmill, with a board across the hand holds for a keyboard (bungie cords and a wooden stick to hold up the board), facing a wall with adjustable shelves that I put LCD monitors on. I use a track ball instead of a mouse. I really like the setup, even if I may end using it less that I thought and otherwise alternating between standing or sitting on a tall stool. I had some intermittent problems with the treadmill motor early on that made it hard to use and requiring repairs and kind of broke me out of the habit of using it regularly.
I never go much beyond 1.5 mph on it, and more often slower (even 0.5 mph). I probably have never used it for more than four hours in one day or much more than 2-3 miles. Still, when I am using it frequently, I've found walking outside for long distances to be much easier. I can't imagine any research saying it is the same healthwise as a sitting desk -- unless it was by chair manufacturers.:-) Dr. Levine's work at the Mayo is what inspired me to try it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
One advantage of a treadmill desk over a standing desk is that you keep your legs moving more so blood is less likely to pool in your legs.
However, I can see that it is not for everyone. I put one together for my wife but she had trouble typing reliably while walking and so just ran it while on calls or watching videos. Otherwise she mainly uses it as a standing desk or also sitting on a tall stool. She would probably have been happier with just keeping the standing desk setup she was using before the treadmill (since you don't have to get up onto an elevated treadmill surface to use those and have more flexibility where you position it).
For mine, I feel like there have been times it has contributed towards knee strain. I think that may be due in part to the limit of treadmills as unnatural walking experiences? One other downside to getting one was that I felt I was exercising more so I walked less outdoors. That probably contributed towards vitamin D deficiency (correctable with supplements, but you have to know to do that). Overall though it has been a good thing,
While it depends on what I'm doing, I also find that walking on the treadmill can actually contribute to my concentration.
To really understand a lot of projects to the point where a developer can make substantial contributions often takes a substantial investment of time by a developer. So some combination of full-time employment in the area, government grants, a basic income, or gifts of some sort are required for experienced developers to have substantial time to look at source code. It's true some developers have time to do it as a hobby, and others might have time as students. But to really dig into complex code and keep at it for a substantial period of time require, in US society at least, generally requires some kind of external support (even if just a spouse who earns money). This issue is not helped by the fragmentation of many software projects via forks, the competition between similar FOSS projects, and the proliferation of languages and not-very-good standards which all chew up vast amounts of developer time.
Of course, some people, like Bill Gates, who was born with a substantial trust fund have inherited the wealth needed to allow them to develop free software the rest of their life. However, for good or bad, he did not pursue that choice. "How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates" http://philip.greenspun.com/bg... "William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."
A substantial "basic income" equivalent to US Social Security from birth would, in a sense, make everyone a millionaire overnight and give them the time they need to pursue public benefit projects, whether doing code review or raising children well. Linux in part is a result of Finland's generous support for students like Linus. http://www.linfo.org/linus.htm... "Torvalds thus decided to create a new operating system from scratch that was based on both MINIX and UNIX. It is unlikely that he was fully aware of the tremendous amount of work that would be necessary, and it is even far less likely that he could have envisioned the effects that his decision would have both on his life and on the rest of the world. Because university education in Finland is free and there was little pressure to graduate within four years, Torvalds decided to take a break and devote his full attention to his project."
Slashdot Mirror
My essay: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals."
An example I have there:
----
Let us contrast two candidates with different very backgrounds and ask which one would get a security clearance. Which of the two would be hired to create the social and technical systems to define US National Security?
The first candidate is a woman performance artist currently couchsurfing near New York City's Greenwich Village. She has a messed up credit history, suffers from depression, has been on psychological medication, had a terrible childhood, and has had multiple friendships and has slept with people from a variety of foreign nations who she met in NYC. She even spent a few months living in the Middle East protesting various US-related policies. She was arrested once for smoking marijuana in public outside a nightclub. She is outraged by domestic violations of privacy rights in the USA and would never submit to a security clearance screening involving lots of prying questions (if only to protect her friends). Still, she has "been there" and understands what it means to be poor and also understands what it means to see the world from multiple points of view (including the downtrodden). To her, the invasion of Iraq was an obviously stupid thing to do and she was arrested for protesting before the invasion, too. Well, it does not take much imagination to assume she would be denied a security clearance, not that she would probably ever consider a job that requires applying for one.
The second candidate is a woman with a PhD in mathematics and a master's and bachelors degree in public policy from an Ivy League university (paid for by her professional parents). She has never known a day of hunger or homelessness in her life, has excellent credit, is very emotionally stable in the past (although the limits of that have never really been tested), has never felt a need to escape from her life using drugs, and has married a reliable accountant (himself a third generation American). She thinks that a job working at the Pentagon is worth just about any sacrifice to preserve a superior US way of life (plus, she feels she and her family and friends have nothing to hide). Well, it would seem there is probably a good chance such a person would get a security clearance, even if her polygraph readings jumped when she confessed that she has in the past purchased "fair trade" coffee that came from South America and also drives a Toyota Prius that her parents gave her as a birthday present last year.
Ten years go by and our successful second candidate has risen to a position where she is assisting in using highly mathematical Operations Research to define US defense policy and weapons systems priorities to protect against those she sincerely feels "hate us because we are free". Do you feel safer as a result? Do you really think she could do as effective a job in thinking about security threats and opportunities relative to general US interests as the other woman who would never qualify for a security clearance?
As for our first candidate, perhaps she becomes a Volvo-driving soccer mom with three kids in Portland, Oregon, a successful author, and married to an organic grocery store manager, to give her story a reasonably happy ending in mainstream terms? :-)
But here is a deep question implicitly raised by Scott Page's writings. Do you think the two women, working together, along with others, might be able to do a better job at improving US national security out of their diversity of skills and experiences than either one working alone? What sort of social environment or workplace setting would it take to make that possible?
"I hope someone else remembers this article and still has the link?"
Related, By Bob Black from 1985: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."
I have a list of alternatives collected here, some positive like a basic income or a gift economy, some negative like more prisons, more schooling, and more war: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Having programmed for about 30 years, including with Smalltalk, I'm fairly convinced that 99%+ of software (including most computer languages and libraries) is redundant clutter and that most programmers (usually unintentionally) are just making life harder for all the other programmers (with adhoc code, generally which is not very good). By extension, 99%+ of programmers are redundant, too. :-) This great waste is also driven in part by issues about secrecy and copyrights and going up learning curves -- plus a lot of programmers enjoy reinventing the wheel. For example, why did we need Open Office Writer and Microsoft Word and AbiWord and WordPerfect and WriteNow and MacWrite and TeXShop and Emacs and vi and so on for who knows how many word processors and editors when they all so almost exactly the same thing? Why do we even need so many CPU instruction sets? Wasn't the orthogonal 6809 set a great one that could have been scaled up instead of x86? Why did we need DOS and BIOS when we had Forth? Why did we need Windows NT or even Linux when we had the far superior QNX way before either of them? Does C++ really need so many incompatible string libraries? Does JavaScript need so many different module libraries each with different ways of loading modules or looking up a DOM node? And in many ways, the IBM System 370 with VM and related portable-in-a-virtual-hardware-sense languages had all of these beat. Why do we need so many web browsers all slightly incompatible and extended in different ways? Why do we need a relational database engine other than PostgreSQL and maybe SQLite?
The problem is getting everyone to agree on what 1% (or less) of software to keep and standardize on, since everyone is going to defend their version of some application or language, or not want to slightly adjust their business processes to use a standard (but extensible) accounting package and so on. So, in practice, like with life on Earth, we get a huge diversity of options. There may be security benefits to avoiding a software monoculture of course, but that is not really why we have so much redundancy.
Java is a prime example of a completely unneeded language given VisualWorks Smalltalk -- unfortunately ParcPlace refused to give Sun reasonable licensing terms when Sun wanted to use it for set top boxes, and so Oak/Green got the go ahead that became Java. Over the years, Java basically got more and more of Smalltalk's features (including Just In Time compiling and generational garbage collection) until it is not half-bad. But Java was still a huge waste and a cause of great amounts of needless suffering compared to everyone just switching to Smalltalk, even with its flaws:
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...
PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, and so on -- all pointless, really. The previosuly existing C, Smalltalk, and Scheme languages would have been good enough for everything they all do -- at least, that which, say, Erlang could not handle. But instead I had to learn most of those languages and related libraries to keep up -- which was often fun, but still a waste of time for the most part compared to just using better existing tools like C, Smalltalk, and Scheme and a few good libraries. Yes each of those could have been improved (C with fixed size types and better strings, Smalltalk with optional typing and better modules, Scheme with better libraries) -- but that would have been far easier than creating new language ecosystems. PHP obviously is by far the worst of the bunch -- yet it now runs so much of the web (often badly, being such an inconsistent mish-mosh of a language).
All that said, programming can be fun. I don't begrudge people making new languages and libraries as experiments or for the inherent joy of it. A lot of good ideas may come out of it, so there is R&D value in the diversity of experiments. Also, it is good in a democracy dependent on technology if more people know
Googling on your drone suggestion: http://e360.yale.edu/mobile/fe...
"Zondlo recently developed a methane sensor mounted on a remote-controlled aircraft built at the University of Texas at Dallas. In October, the aircraft was used to quantify emission rates from well pads and a compressor station in the Barnett Shale region. Zondlo has been partnering with other groups that fly drones over fracking areas to detect leaks.
Robert B. Jackson, an ecologist and energy expert at Duke University, also has been testing drones to detect fugitive methane emissions. The main drawback, he says, is the payload. "Carrying a big camera or methane sensor, a drone might be able to stay in the air for 30 minutes," says Jackson. "It's difficult to screen a shale play with that kind of time."
Engineers are trying to develop lighter sensors that will allow drones to stay in the air longer. "I'm very bullish long-term on using drones to measure leaks," Jackson said. "Are we there yet right now? No."
In the Pinedale Anticline natural gas field in Wyoming, Shane Murphy and Robert Field of the University of Wyoming recently outfitted a Mercedes Sprinter van with a mass spectrometer and other high-powered scientific instruments to measure volatile organic compounds and methane. When combined with meteorological instrumentation and sophisticated software, these technologies can detect methane plumes and quantify emission rates from specific sources -- all from inside the van. The equipment records readings every half-second, which allows it to be used on the move. "This approach can cover a lot of ground," Field said."
And also:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
"No pilot was required when the Aeryon Scout took off into the leaden skies of Alaska to inspect a stretch of oil pipeline. The miniature aircraft was guided by an engineer on the ground, armed only with a tablet computer. The 20-minute test flight, conducted by BP Plc last fall, was a glimpse of a future where oil and gas companies in the Arctic can rely on unmanned aircraft to detect pipeline faults, at a fraction of the cost of piloted helicopter flights."
Also (see page 3):
http://www.seattlepi.com/local...
"Though the project has a modest half-million-dollar budget, the goal is to develop and field test a portable low-cost instrument that can measure gas odor in parts-per-billion quantities and "replace the human nose for leak detection," according to the study prospectus.
When the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration launched the project with industry financial support in 2010, it said it would be completed in September of this year. Recent changes in the federal agency's research program could delay projects currently underway, according to a transcript of an Aug. 2 meeting between federal research officials and technical advisors.
The federal government is also working on pipeline surveillance devices, which would search for leaks, including another cooperative research project launched by the federal government to mount a gas detection device on a pilot-less flying drone.
Until these devices are proven, however, experts say the industry will heavily rely on the gas customer's nose, which is not all that reassuring."
At CMU 25 years ago, I was part of a small group led by Red Whitaker where we discussed making robots that rove through gas pipelines to inspect them from the inside. So, that's another option, too, although putting anything inside a pipeline has its own risks.
Of course, if electricity gets cheaper (like from hot or cold fusion or cheaper solar panels), natural gas demand may fall quickly. But whether that leads to less leaks in the s
without a work requirement: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
Yes, it is true -- we thought computers, AI, and robots would liberate us, but instead they are being used to spy on us, to micromanage us, and to force us to work like robots or else.
On depression and such, look into vitamin D deficiency, eating more fruits & vegetables, and getting more Omega 3s. Also, look into a treadmill workstation or a standing desk to help with ergonomics and joint pain.
Good luck! Hope you can find some way to make your work more meaningful -- even if just by practicing skills you can use on other projects in your spare time, like perhaps to make free software the world really needs?
Maybe contact this Dutch guy (in Toronto at the moment though) for some good ideas of stuff that really needs doing, including with Squeak:
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/cdeg...
"My understanding of your underlying premise, that cultures where people are happy and some aren't downtrodden must be exterminated, rings true."
I'm not sure I'd go that far. :-) It is more like Western capitalist-oriented culture over the past several hundred years has a history of not valuing cultural diversity in favor of taking the physical stuff other people have or exploiting their physical labor. Yet something like the US Constitution being inspired in part by the Iroquois Confederacy (see Benjamin Franklin) is really a much bigger transfer of wealth, and in a way that does not deplete the giver... Too bad we did not also back then embrace the Iroquois idea that women essentially should be the only ones who can vote -- although generally only for men they knew from birth. :-)
However that valuing of diversity in the USA is changing. See for example:
"The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...
And even though I can say so many comments about SETI are ironic and so on, if I look back on my youth and watching Star Trek or Space 1999 and such, or reading lots of sci-fi books with aliens including about "Darkover" or set where "The Word for World is Forest", I can see how it may be easier at first to get some people in Western culture to accept the idea of space aliens than to accept people from other countries (like from the USSR for a US American of those times). So, in that sense, discussions about SETI may be a step towards more acceptance of other cultures on Earth. And that is a good thing. Maybe if we can have a child-like compassion for "E.T.", there is still still hope.
Thanks for the other examples though. I'm thinking there are three kinds of madness/insanity:
* a private madness that messes up our lives and those around us locally (and we all have this to some degree with out foibles and addictions and ignorances and imbalances so on)
* a public madness where people make a big deal out of the way they are (some talk show hosts) and that way might hurt many others via promoting selfishness or war
* an expansive cultural madness where the Borg-like culture seeks to overwrite everything around it with its own way (although in the Borg's defense, at least they claimed to add a culture's distinctiveness to the Borg collective as a form of growth, which can not be said the same of so many mainstream economists...)
It't that third type of widespread madness that is the biggest problem (e.g. WWII Germany and Japan, but there are many other examples closer to home). The villain in Aliens vs. Monsters is a good example.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt08...
"Gallaxhar: Humans of Earth, I come in peace. You need not fear me, I mean you no harm. However, it is important to note that most of you will not survive the next 24 hours. The few of you that do survive will be enslaved and experimented upon. You should, in no way, take any of this personally. It's just business. So to recap, I come in peace, I mean you no harm, and you all will die. Gallaxhar out."
Or also:
"Gallaxhar: Now I can finally rebuild my civilization. Any thought on where I can set up shop? Your planet, perhaps?
Susan Murphy: You keep your slimy tentacles off my planet...
Gallaxhar: [Grabs Susan with one of his tentacles] Or what? If you wanted to stop me, you should have done it when you possessed the quantonium. Now you're nothing.
Susan Murphy: There are innocent people down there who didn't do anything!
Gallaxhar: [Throws Susan down to the ground] Bah! There were innocent people in my home planet when it was destroyed.
Susan Murphy: Look, I'm sorry your planet was destroyed.
Gallaxhar: Oh, don't be. I was the one who destroyed it."
The other reply (by AC) suggesting enlightened cultures may be protecting the Earth from less enlightened individuals in their own cultures may well be true...
All true, and a great article. Still, I already bought a couple Kyocera Hydro water-proof cell Android Smartphones for $50 or so each, and hardware costs are falling fast, so it is not clear that OS footprint matters much in the USA, although maybe in Africa and China and India it still does.
That said, Mozilla could instead have focused on its XPCOM technology to ride above the OS in a cross-platform way (somewhat like VIsualWorks Smalltalk or now Qt or some others):
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
And Mozilla could also develop democracy-empowering apps and standards on top of that XPCOM platform for everyone, including ones for collective civic sensemaking and a semantic desktop like I talk about here:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
If I was leading Mozilla, that is what I would have focused more on. Firefox OS on a Smartphone or elsewhere is a great idea in theory, but seems like a nonstarter in practice as far as *extensive* adoption in the Western world (even if I myself might buy a phone with Firefox OS on it preferentially for FOSS and privacy reasons). Google succeeded against iOS with mobile phones from nothing to 80% Smartphone market share in a few years because Google had deep pockets and a lot of good will at the time and was at the beginning of an exponentially growing marketplace. Mozilla may have the good will (although not at the scale Google had then among consumers) but it does not have the deep pockets. It also faces an entrenched mobile Smartphone landscape at this point with Android. Plus it does not have a compelling broad service offering like Google had with search and gmail to go with the phone (so people will just use Firefox OS to use Google Search, Gmail and Maps?). What money Mozilla has is almost entirely coming from Google (about a billion dollars total over the last few years), where only about a million a year is in individual donations. While there is a lot a few sharp developers could do if funded with even just a million dollars in donations a year, if Google pulls the plug on Mozilla's funding if Firefox OS were to even hint of being a successor for any other reason, where does that leave Firefox OS? Probably not stuff I should be saying in public given I just applied for a "Software Engineer, Platform" job at Mozilla, but what the hey. :-)
http://careers.mozilla.org/en-...
I love the Mozilla mission of FOSS software to support open standards (with the exception I feel Mozilla made a big mistake on not backing WebSQL built on SQLite as a defacto standard). However, getting people to *install* anything as an uphill battle, let alone buy anything. That's a big reason web-browser-hosted software is winning over the desktop and why I'm moving more of what I do in that direction. Even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls moved that way with the "Lively Kernel" because they could not get many people to download Squeak. And getting people to install a full OS is an even bigger battle. Plus there are other groups making alternative phone platforms (Ubuntu, Android forks, WebOS from HP, more). So, given limited funding available for FOSS web stuff, and also given Mozilla has other great initiatives worthy of more support including "Webmaker," it is sad to see so much Mozilla resources and mental bandwidth go into something like Firefox OS that seems unlikely to gain much traction given the computing landscape we now have. And instead, the core Mozilla applications like Firefox and Thunderbird languish relatively speaking as far as bug fixes and innovation. The biggest change just recently with Firefox is it looks more like Chrome... As a "lazy" d
... in a multiverse to generate one Earth?
Just to add to the possibility of unlikelihood of other space civilizations, with quadrillions of totally empty universes...
Great analysis.
All that said, we just don't know the odds of alternatives within out universe. And we may be living in a computer simulation (like Minecraft?) with parameters set to generate either one or trillions of different space civilizations.
Although given how hardy bacteria are, it would not surprise me if our solar system had been inoculated by bacteria from far away.
A big irony of all this SETI stuff is that so many people act like finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe with a different culture or technology elsewhere would be a big deal, whereas we in the USA and also globally are so busy killing off whales, elephants, octopods, and people of different countries and religions for various short-term economic or xenophobic reasons... And our culture also have a history of ignoring great technologies like Smalltalk or QNX. Comments on SETI are often just some weird mix of irony, hypocrisy, and blindness... Not to say I have not been guilty of such myself sometimes...
Someone in another post talked about a popular fantasy that some alien technology would solve all our problems, but is that true? As Bucky Fuller said in the 1960s, and is only more true now, we have more than enough resources and technology to make life pleasant for everyone on Earth (well, except haters and greeders maybe). Eat more vegetables and fruits, get out in the sunshine and walk in nature, hang out with other people locally, sleep well, do good work, and so on are the basics for a healthy happy life (see "BlueZones"). People in the USA can see much happier and healthier people in Europe or Canada if they bothered to look, but US politics in general can't admit that. Can you imagine what the US political parties (either left or right) would say about some happier healthier more prosperous space civilization that was more communal? Or that had different sex roles? Or had different religious rituals? Or whatever?
Example of the kind of nonsense people in the USA would start spouting in talk-radio: "Yeah, those red-skinned aliens live 100,000 years each in perfect health traveling the universe if they want in FTL ships that can print anything they want in 3D, but it's an unhappy 10,000 years because they have high taxes and have a different notion of God/Universe and different rituals. We need to help these backward aliens come to know our loving God (by torture if need be) and how to vote correctly to give all their money to wealthy Earthlings who will create good jobs for all of them. Their medical care system sucks because they don't have private sick care insurance to deliver medicine by board-certified entrepreneurial MDs and the health care facilities and testing labs the MDs own and so the alien's million-year old political obviously will surely be insolvent soon. Anyone who explores or advocates their ways is an alien-sympathizer traitor, guilty of treason, and needs to be imprisoned or re-educated. Anyone who harbors an alien is guilty of aiding terrorists because these aliens want to destroy our way of life. For our citizens' own protection, we will not issue passports to anyone dumb enough to want to go visit them and anyone attempting to board an alien vessel will be shot out of our boundless compassion. The aliens are obviously here to corrupt our morality and sap the ardor of the hard-working minimum-wage-paid American to cause the USA to collapse. These aliens in their crappy ZPE-powered FTL ships obviously want to steal our fossil fuel coal, oil, and natural gas. We need to increase out military spending to counter this alien threat, and it is sensible to take simple precautions like a first-strike with nukes and plagues on the alien homeworld using stolen alien spaceships to keep this alien menace at bay. Better dead than Red."
For this playing out historically in North America centuries ago to "R
From my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
====
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
"... Or do you support the notion of everyone being able to legal own a 20 Megaton nuke? Because that's the sort of firepower you really need to oppose the US government; ..."
Just wanted to point out in reply that in a democracy, people oppose the government in terms of existing laws all the time through voting, lawsuits, campaign donations, jury nullification, running for office, civil disobedience, writing to their congress person, moving, innovation that changes perceived economic imperatives, performance art, publishing books, writing newspaper editorials, buying different products, eating differently (like eating less energy/water-intensive meat despite government subsidies for it), creating new organizations as examples, fostering alternative communities, contributing to internal political pressures when working with government, and so on. These could be considered variations on the "boxes" of democracy: soap box (publishing), ballot box (voting), mail box (writing legislators), band box / pizza box (community), lunch box (eating and purchasing politically as I see it; social safety net as originally defined), jury box (jury nullification by voting not-guilty because the law is wrong), moving box (between states or between countries) -- all available before the ammo box.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Other countries oppose the USA all the time as well via the international laws, tariffs, subsidizing local industries, currency manipulations, making choices about whether to trade in dollars, setting standards of imported products, forming their own cartels (like OPEC), educating their own populace, investing in their own infrastructure, making stuff for the USA cheaply to make the USA dependent on the other country and to obtain its business and technological secrets, setting examples of alternative practices as successes, and so on. See also Noam Chomsky on "The Threat of a Good Example":
http://www.thirdworldtraveler....
As Isaac Asimov had a character (Salvor Hardin) say, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
And for a true-life example, consider Leon Shenandoah:
http://pathwayofpeace.blogspot...
"We are the spiritual energy that is thousands time stronger than nuclear energy. Our energy in the combined will of all people with the spirit of the Natural World, to be of one body, one heart and one mind for peace."
Or as I quote about him here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
"Warriors are held up as heroes. They are praised for their gallantry, exalted for their conquests, and used as symbols to inspire patriotism. Monuments are built for them as reminders of past victories and to prepare citizens for the next campaign. Leon Shenandoah was no warrior, yet no warrior could stand up against his power. He carried no weapons, used no harsh rhetoric, and made no demands. His strength was in gentleness. When he spoke, those around him listened. His words were always soft, his kindness evident. He was a spiritual man."
I don't feel US gun culture or politics is likely to change anytime soon. The USA is what it is with a certain cultural momentum. And personally I feel if the USA took care of its economic and mental health issues better (like a basic income and medicare for all) the amount of gun violence would go down. Improving the environment helps too, given lead levels have been linked to violence:
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
But what really bothers me is US gun owners who vote for politicians (of any party) who put i
... due to the law of diminishing returns... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
H1Bs directly reduce wages of technical employees, plus they also displace local contractors who otherwise get much higher hourly rates than employees generally due to the short term nature of the projects and higher skill levels and so on. Even if there is not a lump of labor, there is such a thing as a fixed budget at any point in time.
The US created just about zero net new jobs in the last decade while the population and the GDP grew. So, output is increasing in a 21st century economy while labor stays fixed or declines as a percent of the population.
On top of that, it doesn't matter how much labor is needed if it can be done more cheaply by robots and AIs. And before such replace human workers entirely, they will let a few workers do the work of many, thus increasing unemployment,
There are many possible "solutions" to this situation being tried, which I catalog here:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
The real future of work is to make it play and pleasant. See Bob Black and EF Schumacher:
Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."
Schumacher: http://www.centerforneweconomi...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
The 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon depicts a society powered by mobile computing that has realized both these objectives (especially the first).
http://books.google.com/books?...
https://archive.org/details/pr...
For some comic relief see also the 1950s story "The Midas Plague" where only the very wealthy were allowed to have full-time jobs and work overtime and live in small homes, while everyone else was limited to part-time jobs as best or unemployment and forced consumption of mansions and massive amounts of food and consumer goods at worst..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Hadn't heard of the delegated voting idea before. Very interesting!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Personally, I think we also need better tools for collective sensemaking about important public and private issues, like I led a workshop on here:
http://barcamp.org/w/page/4722...
Thanks for the insightful reply. I'll continue to think on it -- especially you last example. :-)
They overlap and interact in unexpected ways, along with the theft economy and the subsistence economy. OpenSSL is a prime example of these overlaps and the complexities of trying to manage all that socially. Should the planned government economy make the code work via tax-supported staff of a government agency? Should businesses exchange money for more development work and support services specific to their needs? Should more developers just donate their time or individuals donate their funds to make OpenSSL work better? What mix makes sense? Especially for software of such global importance?
I talk about the interaction of those five types of economic transactions in general in a youtube video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://groups.google.com/d/ms...
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."
http://gamearchitect.net/Artic... By Kyle Wilson ... But the nature of software is that the problems are always different. You never have to solve the exact problem that someone's solved before, because if software already existed that solved your need, you wouldn't have to write it. Writing software is expensive. Copying software is cheap. Scott Rosenberg coins this as Rosenberg's Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. The corollary is, The only software that's worth making is software that does something new."
""Software is hard," reads the quote from Donald Knuth that opens Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code. The 400 pages that follow examine why: Why is software in a never-ending state of crisis? Why do most projects end up horribly over-budget or cancelled or both? Why can't we ship code without bugs? Why, everyone asks, can't we build software the same way we build bridges?
See also the book http://www.dreamingincode.com/ by Scott Rosenberg:
"Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software sets out to understand why, through the story of one software project -- Mitch Kapor's Chandler, an ambitious, open-source effort to rethink the world of e-mail and scheduling. I spent three years following the work of the Chandler developers as they scaled programming peaks and slogged through software swamps. In Dreaming in Code I tell their stories."
I doubt it mentions how I wrote to the Chandler Project early on about using ideas like triples from my Pointrel project but did not get much of a reply... :-) Still my own project has been ongoing for decades. It's surprisingly difficult just to store and synchronize versions of data in useful ways when faced with uncertainties about future needs.
My latest attempt of many, many:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
"This stores snippets of HTML entered in a text area in a local IndexedDB database in your browser. These snippets can be displayed in a list below the edit box. TiddlyWiki was a bit of an inspiration for that list display. This is intended to support "bootstrapping" more a more complex system, such as Doug Engelbart worked toward to support a co-evolution of tools, knowledge, community, and processes."
Git is remarkable in that way in fitting into current practices of using hierarchical files changed by desktop tools. Still, it misses a lot as far as references to data items that can be exchanged globally (needing longer hashes), or dealing with large binary files (constantly rechecking stuff, but with workarounds), or dealing with rapid collaboration by several people such as to create shared drawings. But it is still awesome as far as it goes.
"Dat" is another up-and-coming approach I wish well, started by Max Ogden:
http://www.knightfoundation.or...
http://dat-data.com/
"Dat seeks to increase the traction of the open data movement by developing better tools for collaboration."
Sorry for the typos in the title -- fixed above.
http://remineralize.org/
"Better soil, better food, better planet.... We see a future of thriving farms and gardens producing healthy, nutrient-dense food in great abundance. We see exuberant forests returned to a state of grandeur not seen in centuries, silently sequestering the carbon dioxide that so threatens our planet today. We see a stable climate and a cleaner, healthier environment. We see all of this being possible through the simple and effective process of soil remineralization."
You are right that much of today's organic industry has become co-dependent on conventional livestock farms to use the manure for fertilizer to make up for what is removed from the soil. And returning human waste back to the soil has not proven that workable in the USA because sewage sludge is often contaminated with heavy metals or prescription drugs.That is a big difference from the "Farmers Of Forty Centuries" in China with cleaner sewage back then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Also related:
http://water.epa.gov/polwaste/...
http://www.epa.gov/agriculture...
http://www.globalecotechnics.c...
http://www.oceanarksint.org/
From: http://remineralize.org/histor...
----
Benefits of Remineralization
* Provides slow, natural release of elements and trace minerals.
* Increases the nutrient intake of plants.
* Increases yields and gives higher brix reading.
* Rebalances soil pH.
* Increases earthworm activity and the growth of microorganisms.
* Builds humus complex.
* Prevents soil erosion.
* Increases the storage capacity of the soil.
* Increases resistance to insects, disease, frost, and drought.
* Produces more nutritious crops.
* Enhances flavor in crops.
* Decreases dependence on fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
Soil Remineralization (SR) creates fertile soils by returning minerals to the soil in much the same way that the Earth does: during an Ice Age, glaciers crush rock onto the Earth's soil mantle, and winds blow the dust in the form of loess all over the globe. Volcanoes erupt, spewing forth minerals from deep within the Earth, and rushing rivers form mineral-rich alluvial deposits.
Within silicate rocks is a broad spectrum of up to one hundred minerals and trace elements necessary for the well-being of all life and the creation of fertile soils. Glacial moraine or mixtures of single rock types can be applied to soils to create a sustainable and superior alternative to the use of ultimately harmful chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
SR has been shown in scientific studies to achieve fourfold increases in agricultural and forestry (wood volume) yields and to produce both immediate and long-term benefits from a single application.
Hundreds of thousands of tons of appropriate rock dust for soil and forest regeneration are stockpiled by the gravel and stone industry.
---
I hope more people learn about this.
On the topic of this article on meat alternatives, about seventeen years ago I wrote a letter to a person I had met who was trying to raise fund for some kind of recreational complex in Des Moines, Iowa. His family was a producer of equipment for meat grinding. Inspired by the work of Jon Robbins and "Diet for a New America" and EarthSave back then, I suggested in the letter he consider adapting the technology to make meat substitutes, which I told him was a growing industry. Never heard back from him. See also:
http://johnrobbins.info/
Glad to see peop
http://www.businessweek.com/st...
http://www.groklaw.net/article...
http://www.basicallytech.com/b...
http://www.digitalresearch.biz...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
"The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."
Yet, consider what came from Chuck Moore of pre-Bayh-Dole true academic traditions of MIT & Stanford and then internal support in manufacturing and then supporting government-funded Astronomical research: ... NRAO appreciated what I had wrought. They had an arrangement with a consulting firm to identify spin-off technology. The issue of patenting Forth was discussed at length. But since software patents were controversial and might involve the Supreme Court, NRAO declined to pursue the matter. Whereupon, rights reverted to me. I don't think ideas should be patentable. Hindsight agrees that Forth's only chance lay in the public domain. Where it has flourished."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://www.colorforth.com/HOPL...
"NRAO, 1971
Forth still can be a great BIOS and command line system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Although IBM deserves credit for popularizing the VM idea with System 360 and then VM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
Smalltalk by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others was a another great option.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Kildall, Moore, and Kay/Ingalls all got the idea of virtual machines (with their own ways). Lisp-ers may have got a bit of that too.
We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO.
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
http://www.complex.com/tech/20...
But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyright
From Dr. David Goodstein, 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"In the meantime, the real crisis that is coming has started to produce a number of symptoms, some alarming and some merely curious. One of these is what I like to call The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. The paradox is this: as a lingering result of the golden age, we still have the finest scientists in the world in the United States. But we also have the worst science education in the industrialized world. There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore, roughly 95% of the American public is consistently found to be scientifically illiterate by any rational standard. How can we possibly have arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists? That is what I mean by The Paradox of the Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates.
The question of how we educate our young in science lies close to the heart of the issues we have been discussing. The observation that, for hundreds of years the number of scientists had been growing exponentially means, quite simply, that the rate at which we produced scientists has always been proportional to the number of scientists that already existed. We have already seen how that process works at the final stage of education, where each professor in a research university turns out 15 Ph.D's, most of those wanting to become research professors and turn out 15 more Ph.D's.
Recently, however, a vastly different picture of science education has been put forth and has come to be widely accepted. It is the metaphor of the pipeline. The idea is that our young people start out as a torrent of eager, curious minds anxious to learn about the world, but as they pass through the various grades of schooling, that eagerness and curiosity is somehow squandered, fewer and fewer of them showing any interest in science, until at the end of the line, nothing is left but a mere trickle of Ph.D's. Thus, our entire system of education is seen to be a leaky pipeline, badly in need of repairs. The leakage problem is seen as particularly severe with regard to women and minorities, but the pipeline metaphor applies to all. I think the pipeline metaphor came first out of the National Science Foundation, which keeps careful track of science workforce statistics (at least that's where I first heard it). As the NSF points out with particular urgency, women and minorities will make up the majority of our working people in future years. If we don't figure out a way to keep them in the pipeline, where will our future scientists come from?
I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows
http://frugalliving.about.com/...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
Leafy greens especially are really important to preventing many diseases. Cabbage is a fairly cheap one. You can steam the cabbage while cooking the rice. Dandelions are a terrific source of healthy greens (if they have not been sprayed with weedkiller etc.). It's crazy that people have been taught to hate healthy Dandelions.
Our stainless steel "Miracle" rice cooker with a steamer attachment was one of our best kitchen investments ($70) as it does not have Teflon as most rice cookers do, but we worked up to it from cheaper Teflon ones.
Without good food, the mind and body can go into a downward spiral of low energy and depression -- thus a cycle of poverty. Hunter/gathers are more than 100 different types of food over the course of a year. Getting calories in not enough -- you need micronutrients too, and that means a diversity of foods -- but they don't have to be expensive foods.
Of course, so many sick care schemes (Medicaid, Medicare, "health" insurance) will pay for expensive drugs and surgeries but won;t pay for good food to avoid drugs and surgeries. It doesn't help that stressed-out people tend to bulk up on calories as an ages old survival mechanism, not knowing where the next meal may be coming from. This is all made worse by US farm policy:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes....
"Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that weâ(TM)re supposed to eat less of."
Watch out for additives in bullion that might cause headaches and such. Lots of bad headaches could make it hard to keep a job or graduate from college.
Beans are also cheaper to buy dried than canned -- except you need to know how to prepare them and have a place to cook them and the electricity or gas too cook them, which together may not be possible for many students.
People need a healthy source of fat, too -- something lacking in what you outline. The brain is mostly fat, so it is no wonder on low fat (or poor fat) diets that people can get messed up mentally. Nuts can be one, but they tend to be expensive and they may be lacking in Omegas 3s. Eggs might be a good cheap choice of fat including some Omega-3s for many people; some other sources:
http://www.self.com/blogs/flas...
Eating vegetarian in general is healthier and cheaper. So is buying the right things in bulk, maybe splitting big purchases with others.
We also got a lot of value from a $100 blender to do smoothies from frozen fruit -- but that is beyond very cheap (although still cheaper and much healthier than a carton of ice cream).
Still, something like a "basic income" may be a needed as a general solution to poverty. The problem with a lot of frugal advice is that it forces people to take on various risks (like health risks of lack of vegetables, or safety risk of a cheap car, or assault risk in a bad neighborhood, and so on). Or it entails doing a lot of time consuming things that prevent more productive activities. Your advice though is very time-saving and practical, which is why I like it (except for quibbles on some of the above points as far as long-term living).
"What sucks is we're so much more productive, you'd think we'd be working less. But why the hell would we give anything to anyone if they didn't 'work' for it?"
If inheriting property is a legitimate idea, what about all of humanity inheriting our collective know how and so being entitled to some of the fruits of our global productivity? ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization.
One way to implement that:
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
From my essay discussing excellence vs. elitism & privilege: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post... :-) And maybe with robots to do anything people did not want to do? This is just intended as a humorous example, of course. I'm not suggesting Princeton would run the world of the future or that everyone would really have Princeton faculty ID cards and parking stickers. Still, that's a thought. :-) That motel for scholars, The Institute For Advanced Study, is already a bit like this (no required teaching duties), so it's an even better model. :-)
----
So, the question becomes, how do we go about getting the whole world both accepted into Princeton and also with full tenured Professorships (researchy ones without teaching duties except as desired?
http://www.ias.edu/about/missi...
But you might object, who will run the kitchens, repair the roofs, plant Prospect Garden, and so forth? Essentially, who will be the Morlocks to support and maybe eat the Eloi on staff? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Well, that's where this analogy breaks down, although one could perhaps imagine robots as the Morlocks (maybe without the whole eating PU staff for fuel thing).
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/m...
"A prototype robot capable of hunting down over 100 slugs an hour and using their rotting bodies to generate electricity is being developed by engineers at the University of West England's Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory."
So, for the rest of this essay, I'll assume the "scarcity" world (at least in the USA) currently works more like, say, G. William Domhoff suggests: ... I will try to demonstrate how rule by the wealthy few is possible despite free speech, regular elections, and organized opposition:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whor...
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whor...
"Q: So, who does rule America?
A: The owners and managers of large income-producing properties; i.e., corporations, banks, and agri-businesses. But they have plenty of help from the managers and experts they hire.
* "The rich" coalesce into a social upper class that has developed institutions by which the children of its members are socialized into an upper-class worldview, and newly wealthy people are assimilated.
* Members of this upper class control corporations, which have been the primary mechanisms for generating and holding wealth in the United States for upwards of 150 years now.
* There exists a network of nonprofit organizations through which members of the upper class and hired corporate leaders not yet in the upper class shape policy debates in the United States.
* Members of the upper class, with the help of their high-level employees in profit and nonprofit institutions, are able to dominate the federal government in Washington.
* The rich, and corporate leaders, nonetheless claim to be relatively powerless.
* Working people have less power than in many other
I set up a treadmill desk several years ago, with a regular treadmill, with a board across the hand holds for a keyboard (bungie cords and a wooden stick to hold up the board), facing a wall with adjustable shelves that I put LCD monitors on. I use a track ball instead of a mouse. I really like the setup, even if I may end using it less that I thought and otherwise alternating between standing or sitting on a tall stool. I had some intermittent problems with the treadmill motor early on that made it hard to use and requiring repairs and kind of broke me out of the habit of using it regularly.
I never go much beyond 1.5 mph on it, and more often slower (even 0.5 mph). I probably have never used it for more than four hours in one day or much more than 2-3 miles. Still, when I am using it frequently, I've found walking outside for long distances to be much easier. I can't imagine any research saying it is the same healthwise as a sitting desk -- unless it was by chair manufacturers. :-)
Dr. Levine's work at the Mayo is what inspired me to try it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
One advantage of a treadmill desk over a standing desk is that you keep your legs moving more so blood is less likely to pool in your legs.
However, I can see that it is not for everyone. I put one together for my wife but she had trouble typing reliably while walking and so just ran it while on calls or watching videos. Otherwise she mainly uses it as a standing desk or also sitting on a tall stool. She would probably have been happier with just keeping the standing desk setup she was using before the treadmill (since you don't have to get up onto an elevated treadmill surface to use those and have more flexibility where you position it).
For mine, I feel like there have been times it has contributed towards knee strain. I think that may be due in part to the limit of treadmills as unnatural walking experiences? One other downside to getting one was that I felt I was exercising more so I walked less outdoors. That probably contributed towards vitamin D deficiency (correctable with supplements, but you have to know to do that). Overall though it has been a good thing,
While it depends on what I'm doing, I also find that walking on the treadmill can actually contribute to my concentration.
To really understand a lot of projects to the point where a developer can make substantial contributions often takes a substantial investment of time by a developer. So some combination of full-time employment in the area, government grants, a basic income, or gifts of some sort are required for experienced developers to have substantial time to look at source code. It's true some developers have time to do it as a hobby, and others might have time as students. But to really dig into complex code and keep at it for a substantial period of time require, in US society at least, generally requires some kind of external support (even if just a spouse who earns money). This issue is not helped by the fragmentation of many software projects via forks, the competition between similar FOSS projects, and the proliferation of languages and not-very-good standards which all chew up vast amounts of developer time.
Of course, some people, like Bill Gates, who was born with a substantial trust fund have inherited the wealth needed to allow them to develop free software the rest of their life. However, for good or bad, he did not pursue that choice.
"How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates"
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."
A substantial "basic income" equivalent to US Social Security from birth would, in a sense, make everyone a millionaire overnight and give them the time they need to pursue public benefit projects, whether doing code review or raising children well. Linux in part is a result of Finland's generous support for students like Linus.
http://www.linfo.org/linus.htm...
"Torvalds thus decided to create a new operating system from scratch that was based on both MINIX and UNIX. It is unlikely that he was fully aware of the tremendous amount of work that would be necessary, and it is even far less likely that he could have envisioned the effects that his decision would have both on his life and on the rest of the world. Because university education in Finland is free and there was little pressure to graduate within four years, Torvalds decided to take a break and devote his full attention to his project."