Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.
Copyrights were originally monopolies granted "for a limited time" with the notion that the costs they imposed on society would be repaid by the work moving into the public domain after that limited time. That bargain has effectively been broken because the terms are so long (and likely will be in perpetuity in the U.S.A. given the recent Supreme Court decision). Yet, copyrights still pose a cost on society. There must be courts to dispute them, police to enforce them. There must be prisons to hold the millions of copyright offenders. Like no one in the 1960s would imagine a million U.S. citizens behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s, it is possible that there may be a million U.S. citizens behind bars in the 2010s for copyright violations as the "War on Those Who Share" gets underway. There must be an information superhighway to transport these works, and standards for disseminating them. Authors of derivative works must spend time researching whether a work is already in the public domain, or locating all the related rights holders if it is not. Extensions of the principle of copyright to cover the ideas in the work such as characters or plot lines or other structures make it ever more costly to create new non-infringing works. Many new or derived works are not created because of these chilling effects, which is a hidden cost of copyrights. People in developing nations or others who cannot pay use fees for copyrighted works are deprived of education or enjoyment when such a deprivation does not directly benefit anyone. So, given all these indirect costs of granting copyright monopolies, society is justified in imposing a financial cost on copyright holders to rebalance the copyright bargain.
Real estate is typically taxed at a small percentage of an assessed value. If the taxes are not paid, the real estate essentially becomes owned by society. Note that these annual property taxes are in addition to any fees for recording deed transfers, liens, title searches, and such.
Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax payments.
This approach could include a digital archive of all copyrighted works. Essentially, upon initial registration of a self-assessed value, a rights holder would be required to send in a digital copy of the work. This copy would be used to determine rights holders for works by means of a digital search. Any work not in this database would be presumed public domain. If the annual tax were not paid, th
I like your point on principles over interests. One other reckless aspect of US military doctrine is a push for absolute military superiority over all potential adversaries at all times while ignoring how if everyone adopted that policy we will see an endless destructive arms race ensuring insecurity for everyone. An alternative is to focus on mutual security through having friends and agreements and intrinsic security through having resilient hardened decentralized infrastructure and an educated capable affluent populace. One difficulty is that those saner solutions are at odds with having a few financially obese people becoming even more financially obese through profits from the war racket and other monopolistic centralized rackets on the backs of uniformed disempowered impoverished workers and consumers -- and so there is fierce well-funded opposition to true security for the USA (whether physical security or information security or progressive taxes or universal healthcare or a social safety net other than prison).
As I wrote in this 2010 essay on rethinking security principles in the 21st century: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism" 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....
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....
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....
Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. The people serving the USA in uniform are some of the most idealistic, brave, and altru
While the Earth may have its limits for any specific combination of human culture and technology, there is room for quadrillions of humans in self-replicating space habitats throughout the solar system. Jeff Bezos' take on that: https://www.space.com/37572-je...
And on current USA human culture and politics and economics: https://www.westernwatersheds.... "By far the greatest impact on the American landscape comes not from urbanization but rather from agriculture. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farming and ranching are responsible for 68 percent of all species endangerment in the United States. Agriculture is the largest consumer of water, particularly in the West. Most water developments would not exist were it not for the demand created by irrigated agriculture. If ultimate causes and not proximate causes for species extinction are considered, agricultural impacts would even be higher. Yet scant attention is paid by academicians, environmentalists, recreationists and the general public to agriculture's role in habitat fragmentation, species endangerment and declining water quality. The ironic aspect of this head-in-the sand approach to land use is that most agriculture is completely unnecessary to feed the nation. The great bulk of agricultural production goes toward forage production used primarily by livestock. A small shift in our diet away from meat could have a tremendous impact on the ground in terms of freeing up lands for restoration and wildlife habitat. It would also reduce the poisoning of our streams and groundwater with pesticides and other residue of modern agricultural practices."
Consider, "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" https://healthesolutions.com/s... "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac? In a classic case of contradictory government policy the pyramids in this graphic clearly show the inverse relationship between federal government agriculture subsidies and federal nutrition recommendations. The chart was put together by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, but its figures still, alas, look quite relevant. Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that weâ(TM)re supposed to eat less of."
Maybe this 2012 study is part of the reason for revising ocean biomass downwards -- that we previously sampled highly productive areas but most of the ocean is not that productive? https://phys.org/news/2012-08-... "According to previous estimates, about one thousand billion tons of carbon is stored in living organisms, of which 30 percent is in single-cell microbes in the ocean floor and 55 percent reside in land plants. The researchers have now revised the number downward. Instead of 300 billion tons of carbon in subseafloor microbes, they estimate these organisms contain only about 4 billion tons. This reduces the total amount of carbon stored in living organisms by about one-third. "Previous estimates of microbial biomass in the ocean sediments were hindered by a limited number of sample locations preferentially located in near-shore, high-productivity regions," explained Rob Pockalny, URI associate marine research scientist. "With support from the National Science Foundation, we were able to obtain samples from the middle of the Pacific Ocean in some of the lowest productivity regions in the ocean.""
It references a 2002 book: "The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change".
So, while this topic is very important, I'm not sure what in the study is actually "news"? Maybe the low percentage of ocean biomass (which I feel is hard to believe)?
That's a good question. The best I see so far from a quick search is satisfaction survey results posted on the website with a lot of "very helpful" results ( https://bullies2buddies.com/do... ) and a decade-old pilot study that shows negligible results from a brief training ( https://www.psychologytoday.co... ). One confounding factor obvious from the pilot study is that kids undergoing the Bullies to Buddies training are less likely to report incidents -- meaning ideally the evaluation should be done other than by self-reports. I agree it would be good to have more recent and more extensive studies of the Bullies to Buddies program. You are right to point to AA as an example of a social movement not being backed by evidence and perhaps pushing out other better options for many people.
Ultimately, there are quite a few "knobs" one could theoretically tweak to reduce bullying in schools, including: * educate the Victim (Bullies to Buddies or a different approach) * educate the Bully (most bully training materials) * educate the Bystander (also, most bully training materials) * educate the Adults -- Teachers/Administrators/Parents * general custom emotion coaching for every kid (like say done at the Albany Free School http://www.albanyfreeschool.or... ), * make it possible for the victim to walk away (e.g. more alternative education options including freeschooling and homeschooling) * make the environment more interesting and less stressful so kids have many other things to do than taunt each other * change the nature of the schooling system and teaching so it does not itself model authotarianism/bullying e.g. John Taylor Gatto's writings like (http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=11375) * de-emphasize competition and promote cooperation (like Alfie Kohn suggests https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont... ) or pursue other ways of reducing needless stress in school like eliminating homework ( https://www.alfiekohn.org/dwh/ ) and grades ( https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti... ) * improve nutrition for everyone ("Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat (Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behavior" https://www.theguardian.com/po... ) * reduce the stress on families by progressive economics (better-paying jobs, basic income, universal health insurance, bugger tax credits to families with children, and so on) * other?
A lot of people have the same reaction -- but in the right situation the advice can work to break the feedback cycle where bullies are rewarded for their bullying. From one Amazon review: "When my son was in sixth grade he was being bullied at school. He was miserable - didn't want to go to school, and would cry as he walked to school in the morning. Although the principal recommended that parents report incidents of bullying so that they could deal with it, our son refused, saying that getting adults involved "would only make things worse". So we decided to use the Bullies to Buddies program, which doesn't require adult intervention - it simply teaches kids how not to be victims. All I can say is - it worked like a charm. In three weeks time, our son went from miserable to running out the door in the morning with a smile on his face - and it may sound corny, but to our utter amazement his "bully" turned into a "buddy" - they started hanging out together! That never would have happened if we had contacted the school or the other parents involved. I also like the concepts this program teaches kids - to solve their own problems, and not place so much importance on what other people say - ideas that will serve them well through their whole lives. I know this is a somewhat controversial program because it doesn't focus on the bully at all - it's up to the "victim" to change his or her behavior. But as a parent, I'm more interested in what works than in psychological theories or school policies. If your child has a problem with bullying, this program is worth considering."
That does not sound like a kid who will be on a lifetime of antidepressants to me.
It's about time. People like MDs. Joel Fuhrman, Dean Ornish, John McDougall, Mark Hyman, and also Douglas Lisle, Ph.D. and Alan Goldhamer , D.C. have been saying this for decades. It's just crazy that health insurance or Medicare will pay $50K for a heart operation but won;t help people eat right to avoid the operation.
For example: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "CVD is ultimately caused by oxidative stress and inflammation that leads to damaged arteries. With an intake of low nutrient, pro-inflammatory foods high in saturated and trans fat, as well as refined carbohydrates, cholesterol plaques begin to line the inner endothelial layer of the arteries. Other elements of excessive animal product intake also contribute, such as the iron and carnitine in meat and too much animal protein in general. These growing plaques can block the arteries and even rupture and promote a clot, causing rapid occlusion of the vessels. The same disease-promoting diet most Americans consume results in high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, insulin resistance, and obesity, all of which further contribute to an inflammatory environment that promotes atherosclerosis. Tobacco use, stress, sedentary lifestyle, poor sleep quality, and certain medications also increase risk of CVD. A Nutritarian diet, exercise, and tobacco cessation can remove plaque and reverse or eliminate the risk of CVD, as it has done in thousands of those following a Nutritarian diet worldwide."
This also shows how interwoven healthcare is with all other aspects of our society like culture and easy availability of healthy foods and other aspects of healthy like moderate exercise.. BlueZones addresses some of that bigger picture: https://www.bluezones.com/
AC wrote: "cheap loans and massive debt are the foundation of the inertia that is the US economy"
And the reason for that is because in the USA the gains for increased productivity have gone to shareholders instead of workers due to decades of flat real wages -- and then the shareholders loan the money to the workers to keep the economy going (until perhaps the house of cards collapses due to unrepayable debts). See Richard Wolff and "Capitalism Hits the Fan". https://youtu.be/0HTkEBIoxBA?t...
The real issue is the resulting wealth inequality, which affects not only healthcare but many other aspects of US American society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If the USA would reinstate overtime pay rules for *all* worker -- and further if workers could claim the same percent of productivity they got in the 1950s -- that would go a long way towards resolving the worst of wealth inequality. https://it.slashdot.org/story/...
From the website: "What the [Golden Rule] really means is, We should be nice to people even when they are mean to us.... The [Golden Rule] is the therefore the ultimate empowerment. It is the solution to being a victim. A victim reacts. A victim's behavior is therefore controlled by the bully. But in order to not be a victim, we must act independently of the bully's actions. We treat them like friends even when they treat us like enemies. And that way we end up controlling them."
Essentially, from a cybernetic perspective, Bullies to Buddies treats bullying as a positive feedback cycle between bully's taunts and victim's responses/rewards and trains victims in how to reduce the amplification of that cycle -- including through the use of humor. Doesn't work in all situations (e.g. the bully is just crazy) but is intended for run-of-the-mill bullying.
Why train the victim and not the bully? Because the victim is more motivated to change.
Some of the instructional videos are quite amusing as Izzy Kalman demonstrates the escalating cycle and the alternative.
...who was a New York Teacher Of The Year: http://www.informationliberati... "Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community. "
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "In the United States, the school-to-prison pipeline (SPP), also known as the school-to-prison link or the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track, is the disproportionate tendency of minors and young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds to become incarcerated, because of increasingly harsh school and municipal policies. Many experts have credited factors such as school disturbance laws, zero tolerance policies and practices, and an increase in police in schools in creating the pipeline. This has become a hot topic of debate in discussions surrounding educational disciplinary policies as media coverage of youth violence and mass incarceration has grown during the early 21st century."
Howard Zinn talks about a possible revolt of the guards: http://www.historyisaweapon.co... "However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls."
And here is the inequitable financial reality of that system given wealth is control under capitalism: "Wealth Inequality in America" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I wonder if the problem as seen by the ruling class may be that techies have their hands on the key infrastructure of modern society (including banking infrastructure)? If US techies were really well-off (e.g. all millionaires), techies might have some time and energy for creating alternatives. So, best to keep them down by making them insecure by importing cheap labor rather than train US Americans and provide them higher salaries, more benefits, and more equity. Techies may think they are doing well because they are doing better than the average US American -- but what they are paid in general does not reflect how key their contributions are these days to the digital infrastructure of control and surveillance.
I remember back in the 1990s when independent contractors got 2X to 3X what regular employees did. The H1Bs, even at prevailing wages for employees, also greatly undermined the earnings for contractors too. Many H1Bs don't really replace employees as much as they replace contractors.
I agree with your point "computer security is a necessary response to the realities of a more interconnected world." That said, in many cases, I feel the deeper issue is, as in my sig, the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I write about those ironies in regards to militarism here: http://pdfernhout.net/recogniz... "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."
But if we think about computer network security and bad actors, many (not all) bad actors are in it for the money. The ironic aspect is that the power of computing tools make is easy for a few people to make a lot of trouble for many people. So, a few people send spam email to make money for themselves which then makes it hard for others to use email to create abundance for all. Or a few people spam wikis to make money for themselves in turn making wikis harder to use by others to create abundance for all. Or a few people crack into other types of knowledge sharing sites again to make money for themselves making it harder for scientists and engineers to do collaborative work. Or a few people inject malware into ads to make money for themselves which makes it harder for other people to learn new information from the web they might use to build a better world.
These sorts of socially costly bad actions reflect a narrow view of self (selfishness) and/or also short-term thinking.
I just started reading Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" novel that touches on some of these ideas of technology as an amplifier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I forget where I first read this, but an economist wrote that the cost of doing business goes up greatly when there is less trust. If we had to harden all the power lines and phone lines and then armor all our cars and bar all our windows and so on, daily life would get a lot more expensive. One can see those sorts of costs rising in places where social order breaks down.
In physical day-to-day dealings in, say, much of the USA or Western Europe, we don't worry too much about copper thieves stealing power lines or stealing phone lines or doing other similar sorts of behavior because there is a certain level of trust making relatively insecure installations possible. That level of trust has arisen from a level of shared abundance. Trust also comes indirectly because there are also laws (backed by police and courts), norms (backed by neighbors), and effort costs that discourage most people from being anti-social in such ways. Lessig in Code 2.0 writes on ways human behavior is shaped by a mix of such rules, norms, and prices.
Or, as in the example you provide, trust may be more feasible in smaller groups where everyone knows each other and can see fairly easily what is going on.
So, I can wonder if computer networks will not settle down until we have better laws, norms, and prices governing their use. That is harder given, as with "interconnected", the fact that human actions across networks typically cross multiple legal jurisdictions and cultures and identity of actors is often hard to assess. Broad trust on the internet encouraged by laws, norms, and prices may be harder to foster these days -- even though in the early days of the internet, where most internet nodes were academic or military or government and reflected institutional norms, and where network connectio
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York public schoolteacher who taught for thirty years and won multiple awards for his teaching. However, constant harassment by unhelpful administrations plus his own frustrations with what he came to realize were the inherent systemic deficiencies of our `public' schools led him to resign; he now is a school-choice activist who writes and speaks against our compulsory, government-run school system.
THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION is a freewheeling investigation into the real - as opposed to the `official' - history of schooling, focused on the U.S. but with examinations of other historical examples for the purposes of comparing and contrasting, as well as for tracing where ideas and concepts related to education originated. You will discover things you were never told in the official version, things that will, at times, surprise, disgust, and scare you. You will also be introduced to the little-known historiography of the the darker side of the construction of compulsory government schooling.
In the final analysis, Gatto believes that compulsory, government-run schooling is inherently destructive to true education, the cultivation of self-reliance, and indeed to individualism - which used to be a defining element of the American character. The true purpose of our public school system in reality has more to do with control than it does with learning. This does not mean that rank-and-file teachers, principals, and even superintendents believe they are making students dumber, more conformist, less self-reliant, less capable of genuine analytical, independent thought, and more easily controlled; most people involved in the system no doubt believe that they are trying their best to really teach their students. However, the system itself (which Gatto often characterizes as a complex web) ensures that its real purpose is served, despite the efforts of individual reformers within it - that true democracy is rendered unworkable even as the trappings of democracy are allegedly bolstered. Seen in this light, these institutions that produce barely literate, dependent, conformist, incomplete individuals full of emotional and psychological problems, who lack real knowledge (and whose capacity for acquiring such is deliberately weakened or eliminated), and who are just `educated' enough to pay their taxes and buy the latest products, are not, in fact, failing schools - on the contrary, if we are to believe Gatto's analysis, they are performing their designated function PERFECTLY. That purpose is to mold people in such a way as to make them more easily controlled by corporations and the state (a clear-cut example of how, contrary to popular myth, the interests of big business and those of big government more often than not coincide.)
Though the organization of the book is somewhat haphazard, this book is compulsively readable to any critical thinker with an open mind to consider what's REALLY wrong with our school system (and, no, it's nothing so simple as a shortage of funds or a lack of `accountability' -- the real problems are deeper, philosophical, and systemic.) The book is absolutely riveting, and the country would be better off if more citizens read it and demanded real change to the system.
Gatto's book deserves five stars because it dares to speak the truth.
From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons."
Someone accidentally wiping your developer-mode Chromebook is a valid concern. But you can reflash the firmware with something like MrChromebox's Firmware Utility Script to prevent that. I did that on the Acer 15" Chromebook I am using to write this post. It now runs GalliumOS (based on Xubuntu) and applications like Visual Studio Code and Minecraft. See: https://wiki.galliumos.org/Ins...
I did replace the flash memory with a 128GB module -- but that isn't strictly necessary. More details on all that in my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
For under $400 total with the new drive plus some of my time, I am happy with it as my main personal machine these days for web browsing and some FOSS development. A centered trackpad with a 15" screen is otherwise a hard combination to find at the low end since so many companies add a numeric pad and offset the trackpad for terrible in-lap ergonomics. It's obviously not a MacBook Pro (which I use in my day job), and I do miss a backlit keyboard and a retina display, but it is a heck of a lot cheaper.
Probably the biggest limitation is you can't run Windows-only games or anything requiring intensive graphics processing. Steam's remote streaming from a desktop does work but is laggy.
It is also true that if you update the firmware you are out of the Google security ecosystem -- with both good and bad implications. So for the casual user, plain ChromeOS is probably a better choice (ignoring Google privacy issues). And web services like Cloud9 IDE can do a lot. And many of the latest Chrombooks can run Android apps.
And I can see why security professionals going to conferences would prefer the stock ChromeOS firmware and being able to powerwash back to a known good install -- with their data is stored elsewhere on the network.
Here is an explanation from 1994 by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech, who testified to Congress on this back then, whose "The Big Crunch" essay concludes: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d... "Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever."
And see also "Disciplined Minds" from 2000 about some other consequences: http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society."
Or Philip Greenspun from 2006: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca... "This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
Or the Village Voice from 2004 about how it is even worse in the humanities than sci/tech grad school: https://web.archive.org/web/20... "Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document le
On poor quality clothing: "Used clothes: Why is worldwide demand declining?" http://www.bbc.com/news/busine... "Manufacturers know that customers are more interested in low prices than durability, because they increasingly expect to wear their clothes just a few times and throw them away. "So the quality's not as good, so when our customers get [an item] they're not getting two or three hundred wears out of it - they know it's only going to be a couple of uses," he says. That means, according to Fee Gilfeather, head of marketing for Oxfam's trading division, "more [clothing] is getting incinerated than there used to be.""
Also on that: https://www.bloomberg.com/view... "For decades, the donation bin has offered consumers in rich countries a guilt-free way to unload their old clothing. In a virtuous and profitable cycle, a global network of traders would collect these garments, grade them, and transport them around the world to be recycled, worn again, or turned into rags and stuffing.
Now that cycle is breaking down. Fashion trends are accelerating, new clothes are becoming as cheap as used ones, and poor countries are turning their backs on the secondhand trade. Without significant changes in the way that clothes are made and marketed, this could add up to an environmental disaster in the making."
I agree that we could be a lot happier with less stuff. It's an abundance mindset though -- to stop feeling the need to hoard.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose needs and desires were few relative to their skills and the abundance of nature relative to their populations lived more in that mindset of abundance: http://www.primitivism.com/ori... "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times....
Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an [institution]. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger in. creases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
For example: http://marcinequenzer.com/crea... FIELD OF PLENTY "The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Brin argues that it will be good for society if the powers of surveillance are shared with the citizenry, allowing "sousveillance" or "viewing from below," enabling the public to watch the watchers. According to Brin, this only continues the same trend promoted by Adam Smith, John Locke, the US Constitutionalists and the western enlightenment, who held that any elite (whether commercial, governmental, or aristocratic) should experience constraints upon its power. And there is no power-equalizer greater than knowledge."
From the article: "The notion that individual data should require a requester to also provide their own data is both equitable and intuitive -- the only remaining question is how to make it work."
Right now, I live on the US East Coast but work remotely with a group on the US West coast. I am trying to keep "California" time to be available to the rest of the group -- which is shifted by three hours. So I tend to start work around noon or a bit earlier and work to around 8 pm (20:00) or so (often a bit later).
I also usually do my best focused work in the morning, sometimes starting as early as 6 or 7 am -- so that is one downside as far as work productivity (but an upside to other things I do).
So, on the plus side, I get a lot of morning time to do what I want -- and it is high quality time. On the downside, it is always dark at the end of the day.
I also tend to treat around 3 pm to 4 pm as a sort of lunch hour since that is California lunch. I sometimes walk the dog then.
Even after more than a year of this schedule, the shift still is a bit strange feeling to me.
Fortunately, my wife and kid are night owls, so this actually brings me more in sync with their schedule in a way. But since I am working later, I don't otherwise get to spend as much evening time with them. And I'm a lot more worn out at the end of a day when I do finish work.
I used to go to sleep around an hour or two before midnight. Now I usually go to sleep around midnight or 1 am. That is a big change for me. And it may be reducing my total sleep time some.
I can't imagine trying to bridge 6+ hours between Europe and the USA though. That would be like me starting at 3 pm and working to midnight. I might be able to do it, but it would be really strange and I don't know how long I could keep that schedule up.
My wife as a night own has the opposite challenge from you because she often works with people in Europe. It is tough on her as a night owl and very disruptive of her sleep to get up for a 9 am meeting with someone in Europe. She might do well in your situation. I tell her she has to get more clients for her consulting in California instead of Europe. Either that or (purely theoretically) we should move to East Aisa to make her schedule easier with clients so she could chat with European clients in her afternoon and evening -- but then my schedule difference would be terrible.
This web page says are early morning "larks" (10%), people in the middle called "hummingbirds" (70%), and then "night owls" (20%). They have some tips on trying to adapt to different schedules from your preferred one. "Are You a Lark, an Owl, or a Hummingbird?" https://www.nasw.org/users/lla...
If you are by any chance a "lark", a big shift forward is going to be much harder than if you are a "humming bird" or "night owl".
Good sleep is very important to forming memories. Lack of sleep also affects neurotransmitter production and sensitivity.
The light from screens is disruptive to sleep if you are staring at screens late at night. That can be improved a bit by wearing glasses that block blue light or by using a utility program like f.lux which makes computer screens redder in the evening.
Taking vitamin D3 supplements can help mitigate some of the heath problems of lack of sunlight exposure.
Eating better (whole foods, mostly plants -- with enough omega-3s, B vitamins, and iodine, and other good stuff) can help with mental functioning too. See "the Whole Foods Diet" book for more ideas on that.
Also, being out-of-sync timewise by several hours with the rest of your local society is going to be worst for a young unmarried person otherwise actively doing a lot of social events. Same with any work-from-home situation that is more socially isolating.
The time shift may not make quite as bad socially when you have family around you. That said, if we did not homeschool with a flexible schedule, and my wife and kid were not night owls, I can see how even just a three hour timeshift would be more isolating from family. And six hours would be very hard.
Still, sometimes other options are possible. I used
I totally get what you are saying. I work from home right now and have found modern open plan or even cubicle-based office spaces to be very distracting from concentrating on programming. People who do focused intellectual work need an office with a door that closes (one thing Microsoft got right in the early days). Ironically, managers who are always talking to others and are out and about tend to be the ones who get offices these days. And especially the offices with windows (putting workers in office space without windows is illegal in some other countries like Switzerland).
One place I worked an insurance company with cubicles mixes with uncubicled desks), the guy at the desk behind me (we were back-to-back), working in another group, had just had a house built -- and was on the phone constantly with contractors. Very distracting. Though I learned a bit about house building. Then I got moved to a different desk as the group I was in consolidated its office space usage. In that company, having one of your cubicle panels replaced by glass was a sign of promotion to management rank. My new desk was just on the other side of a corridor from the project lead's cubicle -- which had just had a glass panel installed so he was literally staring at my back all day (as well as the backs of a couple other developers). I would have preferred the previous desk over that situation even with the chatter. You try to do your best anyway, but it all takes its toll on concentration and being in the flow.
One lab I worked in, the third lab I was in at IBM Research, a very loud computer with a squealing hard drive got put right next to my work space for a while. I complained about it, but to not much good. That noise made it very hard to concentrate. I've had tinnitus ever since too -- though it is hard to blame tinnitus on one specific event. Possibly that was the last straw in a series of noise exposures from my youth inclduing early work in a Princeton robotics lab where we noisily cut styrofoam with an industrial robot (and should have been wearing ear protection but usually did not).
That said, a diet of whole foods, mostly plants, has lots of health benefits -- although Paleo leaves out healthy grains and has too much meat and fat to be that healthy (see the book "The Whole Foods Diet"). Exercise whether Crossfit or just less extreme going for good walks is also a great health booster. Spirituality and community also has proven health benefits. And lots of studies show that Turmeric in Curry also has great health benefits. So, your coworkers are all tapped into different aspects of health.
I also very much enjoyed having lunch with coworkers and learning from them. For example, that project lead was into gardening and even made his own delicious salsa. Another person sitting near my at the insurance company told me (when this was not common popular knowledge in the mid 1990s) about how real wages had been flat in the USA already for decades. And I learned a lot at lunch listening to stories about IBM Research history from my supervisor working in a different lab there.
I also later "worked from home" for a year for that previously mentioned insurance company. But that seemed only feasible within that organization where essentially no one worked from home because I had been a contractor onsite earlier for a year. And I would go in for meetings once a month or so. That was before cheap good laptops, and while the project went well, I can see how otherwise things might have been even better if I would have gone in once a week or so to work there and have lunch with people. In the meantime we had moved from where I could walk to work in ten minutes to where I had a 45 minute drive plus often-challenging parking to get there, so getting there was a bunch harder -- but not as hard a commute as other places I would work later even as it seemed daunting at the time.
So, while as a programmer, I'd make the same choice you would of working from home, I can see there is also a potential loss there of lea
Informative post I mostly agree with, thanks! Many people don't yet get that if AI or other automation can make people twice as productive, there goes half the jobs. And the jobs may not get replaced with other jobs if there is limited demand for various reasons like a law of diminishing returns.
But, there are other alternatives to retraining for surviving with a diminishing number of jobs. I collected about options here, some good, some bad: 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."
Sounds like you have a fun job, so I am surprised you would want to end up a fat blob confined to a chair like in Wall-e? For example, the job of raising happy, healthy, capable children can take just about all the time parents can put into it and then some. You could let a robot (or nanny) do that, but then you would be missing out on the relationship. And then there is volunteerism and so on.
And see also Bob Black on how most "work" these days is totally useless anyway: https://web.archive.org/web/20... "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."
And see also "The Skills of Xanadu" and "Buddhist Economics" for similar alternative perspectives on work as play and work as growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Humanity constructs advanced military spacecraft, but the ships learn to think for themselves. They kill their crews by disengaging the life support systems. However, they keep a small number of humans alive for repairs they cannot do themselves."
Slashdot Mirror
I got the idea from someone's Slashdot sig maybe around 2002 or so saying something like, "if it is intellectual property, shouldn't it be taxed"?
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
What is the social justification for such a tax?
Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.
Copyrights were originally monopolies granted "for a limited time" with the notion that the costs they imposed on society would be repaid by the work moving into the public domain after that limited time. That bargain has effectively been broken because the terms are so long (and likely will be in perpetuity in the U.S.A. given the recent Supreme Court decision). Yet, copyrights still pose a cost on society. There must be courts to dispute them, police to enforce them. There must be prisons to hold the millions of copyright offenders. Like no one in the 1960s would imagine a million U.S. citizens behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s, it is possible that there may be a million U.S. citizens behind bars in the 2010s for copyright violations as the "War on Those Who Share" gets underway. There must be an information superhighway to transport these works, and standards for disseminating them. Authors of derivative works must spend time researching whether a work is already in the public domain, or locating all the related rights holders if it is not. Extensions of the principle of copyright to cover the ideas in the work such as characters or plot lines or other structures make it ever more costly to create new non-infringing works. Many new or derived works are not created because of these chilling effects, which is a hidden cost of copyrights. People in developing nations or others who cannot pay use fees for copyrighted works are deprived of education or enjoyment when such a deprivation does not directly benefit anyone. So, given all these indirect costs of granting copyright monopolies, society is justified in imposing a financial cost on copyright holders to rebalance the copyright bargain.
Real estate is typically taxed at a small percentage of an assessed value. If the taxes are not paid, the real estate essentially becomes owned by society. Note that these annual property taxes are in addition to any fees for recording deed transfers, liens, title searches, and such.
Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax payments.
This approach could include a digital archive of all copyrighted works. Essentially, upon initial registration of a self-assessed value, a rights holder would be required to send in a digital copy of the work. This copy would be used to determine rights holders for works by means of a digital search. Any work not in this database would be presumed public domain. If the annual tax were not paid, th
I like your point on principles over interests. One other reckless aspect of US military doctrine is a push for absolute military superiority over all potential adversaries at all times while ignoring how if everyone adopted that policy we will see an endless destructive arms race ensuring insecurity for everyone. An alternative is to focus on mutual security through having friends and agreements and intrinsic security through having resilient hardened decentralized infrastructure and an educated capable affluent populace. One difficulty is that those saner solutions are at odds with having a few financially obese people becoming even more financially obese through profits from the war racket and other monopolistic centralized rackets on the backs of uniformed disempowered impoverished workers and consumers -- and so there is fierce well-funded opposition to true security for the USA (whether physical security or information security or progressive taxes or universal healthcare or a social safety net other than prison).
As I wrote in this 2010 essay on rethinking security principles in the 21st century: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism" ... ... ...
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.
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.
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.
Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. The people serving the USA in uniform are some of the most idealistic, brave, and altru
https://overpopulationisamyth....
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
http://www.businessinsider.com... (see: "Part Two: Advanced Economies That Will Shrivel And Die")
While the Earth may have its limits for any specific combination of human culture and technology, there is room for quadrillions of humans in self-replicating space habitats throughout the solar system. Jeff Bezos' take on that:
https://www.space.com/37572-je...
And on current USA human culture and politics and economics:
https://www.westernwatersheds....
"By far the greatest impact on the American landscape comes not from urbanization but rather from agriculture. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farming and ranching are responsible for 68 percent of all species endangerment in the United States. Agriculture is the largest consumer of water, particularly in the West. Most water developments would not exist were it not for the demand created by irrigated agriculture. If ultimate causes and not proximate causes for species extinction are considered, agricultural impacts would even be higher. Yet scant attention is paid by academicians, environmentalists, recreationists and the general public to agriculture's role in habitat fragmentation, species endangerment and declining water quality. The ironic aspect of this head-in-the sand approach to land use is that most agriculture is completely unnecessary to feed the nation. The great bulk of agricultural production goes toward forage production used primarily by livestock. A small shift in our diet away from meat could have a tremendous impact on the ground in terms of freeing up lands for restoration and wildlife habitat. It would also reduce the poisoning of our streams and groundwater with pesticides and other residue of modern agricultural practices."
Consider, "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?"
https://healthesolutions.com/s...
"Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac? In a classic case of contradictory government policy the pyramids in this graphic clearly show the inverse relationship between federal government agriculture subsidies and federal nutrition recommendations. The chart was put together by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, but its figures still, alas, look quite relevant. Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that weâ(TM)re supposed to eat less of."
Maybe this 2012 study is part of the reason for revising ocean biomass downwards -- that we previously sampled highly productive areas but most of the ocean is not that productive?
https://phys.org/news/2012-08-...
"According to previous estimates, about one thousand billion tons of carbon is stored in living organisms, of which 30 percent is in single-cell microbes in the ocean floor and 55 percent reside in land plants. The researchers have now revised the number downward. Instead of 300 billion tons of carbon in subseafloor microbes, they estimate these organisms contain only about 4 billion tons. This reduces the total amount of carbon stored in living organisms by about one-third. "Previous estimates of microbial biomass in the ocean sediments were hindered by a limited number of sample locations preferentially located in near-shore, high-productivity regions," explained Rob Pockalny, URI associate marine research scientist. "With support from the National Science Foundation, we were able to obtain samples from the middle of the Pacific Ocean in some of the lowest productivity regions in the ocean.""
Earth's Land Mammals by Weight: https://xkcd.com/1338/
Explained: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...
It references a 2002 book: "The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change".
So, while this topic is very important, I'm not sure what in the study is actually "news"? Maybe the low percentage of ocean biomass (which I feel is hard to believe)?
That's a good question. The best I see so far from a quick search is satisfaction survey results posted on the website with a lot of "very helpful" results ( https://bullies2buddies.com/do... ) and a decade-old pilot study that shows negligible results from a brief training ( https://www.psychologytoday.co... ). One confounding factor obvious from the pilot study is that kids undergoing the Bullies to Buddies training are less likely to report incidents -- meaning ideally the evaluation should be done other than by self-reports. I agree it would be good to have more recent and more extensive studies of the Bullies to Buddies program. You are right to point to AA as an example of a social movement not being backed by evidence and perhaps pushing out other better options for many people.
Ultimately, there are quite a few "knobs" one could theoretically tweak to reduce bullying in schools, including:
* educate the Victim (Bullies to Buddies or a different approach)
* educate the Bully (most bully training materials)
* educate the Bystander (also, most bully training materials)
* educate the Adults -- Teachers/Administrators/Parents
* general custom emotion coaching for every kid (like say done at the Albany Free School http://www.albanyfreeschool.or... ),
* make it possible for the victim to walk away (e.g. more alternative education options including freeschooling and homeschooling)
* make the environment more interesting and less stressful so kids have many other things to do than taunt each other
* change the nature of the schooling system and teaching so it does not itself model authotarianism/bullying e.g. John Taylor Gatto's writings like (http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=11375)
* de-emphasize competition and promote cooperation (like Alfie Kohn suggests https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont... ) or pursue other ways of reducing needless stress in school like eliminating homework ( https://www.alfiekohn.org/dwh/ ) and grades ( https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti... )
* improve nutrition for everyone ("Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat (Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behavior" https://www.theguardian.com/po... )
* reduce the stress on families by progressive economics (better-paying jobs, basic income, universal health insurance, bugger tax credits to families with children, and so on)
* other?
https://www.grassrootshealth.n...
And for decades the recommended supplementation level has been too low.
A lot of people have the same reaction -- but in the right situation the advice can work to break the feedback cycle where bullies are rewarded for their bullying. From one Amazon review: "When my son was in sixth grade he was being bullied at school. He was miserable - didn't want to go to school, and would cry as he walked to school in the morning. Although the principal recommended that parents report incidents of bullying so that they could deal with it, our son refused, saying that getting adults involved "would only make things worse". So we decided to use the Bullies to Buddies program, which doesn't require adult intervention - it simply teaches kids how not to be victims. All I can say is - it worked like a charm. In three weeks time, our son went from miserable to running out the door in the morning with a smile on his face - and it may sound corny, but to our utter amazement his "bully" turned into a "buddy" - they started hanging out together! That never would have happened if we had contacted the school or the other parents involved. I also like the concepts this program teaches kids - to solve their own problems, and not place so much importance on what other people say - ideas that will serve them well through their whole lives. I know this is a somewhat controversial program because it doesn't focus on the bully at all - it's up to the "victim" to change his or her behavior. But as a parent, I'm more interested in what works than in psychological theories or school policies. If your child has a problem with bullying, this program is worth considering."
That does not sound like a kid who will be on a lifetime of antidepressants to me.
It's about time. People like MDs. Joel Fuhrman, Dean Ornish, John McDougall, Mark Hyman, and also Douglas Lisle, Ph.D. and Alan Goldhamer , D.C. have been saying this for decades. It's just crazy that health insurance or Medicare will pay $50K for a heart operation but won;t help people eat right to avoid the operation.
For example: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"CVD is ultimately caused by oxidative stress and inflammation that leads to damaged arteries. With an intake of low nutrient, pro-inflammatory foods high in saturated and trans fat, as well as refined carbohydrates, cholesterol plaques begin to line the inner endothelial layer of the arteries. Other elements of excessive animal product intake also contribute, such as the iron and carnitine in meat and too much animal protein in general. These growing plaques can block the arteries and even rupture and promote a clot, causing rapid occlusion of the vessels. The same disease-promoting diet most Americans consume results in high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, insulin resistance, and obesity, all of which further contribute to an inflammatory environment that promotes atherosclerosis. Tobacco use, stress, sedentary lifestyle, poor sleep quality, and certain medications also increase risk of CVD. A Nutritarian diet, exercise, and tobacco cessation can remove plaque and reverse or eliminate the risk of CVD, as it has done in thousands of those following a Nutritarian diet worldwide."
Another aspect of this is resetting taste preferences to escape the pleasure trap of supernormal stimuli:
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This also shows how interwoven healthcare is with all other aspects of our society like culture and easy availability of healthy foods and other aspects of healthy like moderate exercise.. BlueZones addresses some of that bigger picture: https://www.bluezones.com/
AC wrote: "cheap loans and massive debt are the foundation of the inertia that is the US economy"
And the reason for that is because in the USA the gains for increased productivity have gone to shareholders instead of workers due to decades of flat real wages -- and then the shareholders loan the money to the workers to keep the economy going (until perhaps the house of cards collapses due to unrepayable debts). See Richard Wolff and "Capitalism Hits the Fan". https://youtu.be/0HTkEBIoxBA?t...
The real issue is the resulting wealth inequality, which affects not only healthcare but many other aspects of US American society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If the USA would reinstate overtime pay rules for *all* worker -- and further if workers could claim the same percent of productivity they got in the 1950s -- that would go a long way towards resolving the worst of wealth inequality.
https://it.slashdot.org/story/...
Maybe of interest: https://bullies2buddies.com/
From the website: "What the [Golden Rule] really means is, We should be nice to people even when they are mean to us. ... The [Golden Rule] is the therefore the ultimate empowerment. It is the solution to being a victim. A victim reacts. A victim's behavior is therefore controlled by the bully. But in order to not be a victim, we must act independently of the bully's actions. We treat them like friends even when they treat us like enemies. And that way we end up controlling them."
Essentially, from a cybernetic perspective, Bullies to Buddies treats bullying as a positive feedback cycle between bully's taunts and victim's responses/rewards and trains victims in how to reduce the amplification of that cycle -- including through the use of humor. Doesn't work in all situations (e.g. the bully is just crazy) but is intended for run-of-the-mill bullying.
Why train the victim and not the bully? Because the victim is more motivated to change.
Some of the instructional videos are quite amusing as Izzy Kalman demonstrates the escalating cycle and the alternative.
He also explains how these techniques can be beneficial in the workplace and in marriages.
https://bullies2buddies.com/re...
...who was a New York Teacher Of The Year: http://www.informationliberati...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community. "
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In the United States, the school-to-prison pipeline (SPP), also known as the school-to-prison link or the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track, is the disproportionate tendency of minors and young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds to become incarcerated, because of increasingly harsh school and municipal policies. Many experts have credited factors such as school disturbance laws, zero tolerance policies and practices, and an increase in police in schools in creating the pipeline. This has become a hot topic of debate in discussions surrounding educational disciplinary policies as media coverage of youth violence and mass incarceration has grown during the early 21st century."
Howard Zinn talks about a possible revolt of the guards: http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls."
And here is the inequitable financial reality of that system given wealth is control under capitalism:
"Wealth Inequality in America"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I wonder if the problem as seen by the ruling class may be that techies have their hands on the key infrastructure of modern society (including banking infrastructure)? If US techies were really well-off (e.g. all millionaires), techies might have some time and energy for creating alternatives. So, best to keep them down by making them insecure by importing cheap labor rather than train US Americans and provide them higher salaries, more benefits, and more equity. Techies may think they are doing well because they are doing better than the average US American -- but what they are paid in general does not reflect how key their contributions are these days to the digital infrastructure of control and surveillance.
I remember back in the 1990s when independent contractors got 2X to 3X what regular employees did. The H1Bs, even at prevailing wages for employees, also greatly undermined the earnings for contractors too. Many H1Bs don't really replace employees as much as they replace contractors.
I agree with your point "computer security is a necessary response to the realities of a more interconnected world." That said, in many cases, I feel the deeper issue is, as in my sig, the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I write about those ironies in regards to militarism here: http://pdfernhout.net/recogniz...
"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."
But if we think about computer network security and bad actors, many (not all) bad actors are in it for the money. The ironic aspect is that the power of computing tools make is easy for a few people to make a lot of trouble for many people. So, a few people send spam email to make money for themselves which then makes it hard for others to use email to create abundance for all. Or a few people spam wikis to make money for themselves in turn making wikis harder to use by others to create abundance for all. Or a few people crack into other types of knowledge sharing sites again to make money for themselves making it harder for scientists and engineers to do collaborative work. Or a few people inject malware into ads to make money for themselves which makes it harder for other people to learn new information from the web they might use to build a better world.
These sorts of socially costly bad actions reflect a narrow view of self (selfishness) and/or also short-term thinking.
I just started reading Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" novel that touches on some of these ideas of technology as an amplifier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I forget where I first read this, but an economist wrote that the cost of doing business goes up greatly when there is less trust. If we had to harden all the power lines and phone lines and then armor all our cars and bar all our windows and so on, daily life would get a lot more expensive. One can see those sorts of costs rising in places where social order breaks down.
In physical day-to-day dealings in, say, much of the USA or Western Europe, we don't worry too much about copper thieves stealing power lines or stealing phone lines or doing other similar sorts of behavior because there is a certain level of trust making relatively insecure installations possible. That level of trust has arisen from a level of shared abundance. Trust also comes indirectly because there are also laws (backed by police and courts), norms (backed by neighbors), and effort costs that discourage most people from being anti-social in such ways. Lessig in Code 2.0 writes on ways human behavior is shaped by a mix of such rules, norms, and prices.
Or, as in the example you provide, trust may be more feasible in smaller groups where everyone knows each other and can see fairly easily what is going on.
So, I can wonder if computer networks will not settle down until we have better laws, norms, and prices governing their use. That is harder given, as with "interconnected", the fact that human actions across networks typically cross multiple legal jurisdictions and cultures and identity of actors is often hard to assess. Broad trust on the internet encouraged by laws, norms, and prices may be harder to foster these days -- even though in the early days of the internet, where most internet nodes were academic or military or government and reflected institutional norms, and where network connectio
by John Taylor Gatto: https://archive.org/details/Th...
From the summary:
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York public schoolteacher who taught for thirty years and won multiple awards for his teaching. However, constant harassment by unhelpful administrations plus his own frustrations with what he came to realize were the inherent systemic deficiencies of our `public' schools led him to resign; he now is a school-choice activist who writes and speaks against our compulsory, government-run school system.
THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION is a freewheeling investigation into the real - as opposed to the `official' - history of schooling, focused on the U.S. but with examinations of other historical examples for the purposes of comparing and contrasting, as well as for tracing where ideas and concepts related to education originated. You will discover things you were never told in the official version, things that will, at times, surprise, disgust, and scare you. You will also be introduced to the little-known historiography of the the darker side of the construction of compulsory government schooling.
In the final analysis, Gatto believes that compulsory, government-run schooling is inherently destructive to true education, the cultivation of self-reliance, and indeed to individualism - which used to be a defining element of the American character. The true purpose of our public school system in reality has more to do with control than it does with learning. This does not mean that rank-and-file teachers, principals, and even superintendents believe they are making students dumber, more conformist, less self-reliant, less capable of genuine analytical, independent thought, and more easily controlled; most people involved in the system no doubt believe that they are trying their best to really teach their students. However, the system itself (which Gatto often characterizes as a complex web) ensures that its real purpose is served, despite the efforts of individual reformers within it - that true democracy is rendered unworkable even as the trappings of democracy are allegedly bolstered. Seen in this light, these institutions that produce barely literate, dependent, conformist, incomplete individuals full of emotional and psychological problems, who lack real knowledge (and whose capacity for acquiring such is deliberately weakened or eliminated), and who are just `educated' enough to pay their taxes and buy the latest products, are not, in fact, failing schools - on the contrary, if we are to believe Gatto's analysis, they are performing their designated function PERFECTLY. That purpose is to mold people in such a way as to make them more easily controlled by corporations and the state (a clear-cut example of how, contrary to popular myth, the interests of big business and those of big government more often than not coincide.)
Though the organization of the book is somewhat haphazard, this book is compulsively readable to any critical thinker with an open mind to consider what's REALLY wrong with our school system (and, no, it's nothing so simple as a shortage of funds or a lack of `accountability' -- the real problems are deeper, philosophical, and systemic.) The book is absolutely riveting, and the country would be better off if more citizens read it and demanded real change to the system.
Gatto's book deserves five stars because it dares to speak the truth.
From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons."
Someone accidentally wiping your developer-mode Chromebook is a valid concern. But you can reflash the firmware with something like MrChromebox's Firmware Utility Script to prevent that. I did that on the Acer 15" Chromebook I am using to write this post. It now runs GalliumOS (based on Xubuntu) and applications like Visual Studio Code and Minecraft. See: https://wiki.galliumos.org/Ins...
I did replace the flash memory with a 128GB module -- but that isn't strictly necessary. More details on all that in my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
For under $400 total with the new drive plus some of my time, I am happy with it as my main personal machine these days for web browsing and some FOSS development. A centered trackpad with a 15" screen is otherwise a hard combination to find at the low end since so many companies add a numeric pad and offset the trackpad for terrible in-lap ergonomics. It's obviously not a MacBook Pro (which I use in my day job), and I do miss a backlit keyboard and a retina display, but it is a heck of a lot cheaper.
Probably the biggest limitation is you can't run Windows-only games or anything requiring intensive graphics processing. Steam's remote streaming from a desktop does work but is laggy.
It is also true that if you update the firmware you are out of the Google security ecosystem -- with both good and bad implications. So for the casual user, plain ChromeOS is probably a better choice (ignoring Google privacy issues). And web services like Cloud9 IDE can do a lot. And many of the latest Chrombooks can run Android apps.
And I can see why security professionals going to conferences would prefer the stock ChromeOS firmware and being able to powerwash back to a known good install -- with their data is stored elsewhere on the network.
Here is an explanation from 1994 by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech, who testified to Congress on this back then, whose "The Big Crunch" essay concludes: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever."
And see also "Disciplined Minds" from 2000 about some other consequences: http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society."
Or Philip Greenspun from 2006: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
Or the Village Voice from 2004 about how it is even worse in the humanities than sci/tech grad school:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document le
Thanks -- yes, let's hope for the best!
On poor quality clothing:
"Used clothes: Why is worldwide demand declining?"
http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...
"Manufacturers know that customers are more interested in low prices than durability, because they increasingly expect to wear their clothes just a few times and throw them away. "So the quality's not as good, so when our customers get [an item] they're not getting two or three hundred wears out of it - they know it's only going to be a couple of uses," he says. That means, according to Fee Gilfeather, head of marketing for Oxfam's trading division, "more [clothing] is getting incinerated than there used to be.""
Also on that:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view...
"For decades, the donation bin has offered consumers in rich countries a guilt-free way to unload their old clothing. In a virtuous and profitable cycle, a global network of traders would collect these garments, grade them, and transport them around the world to be recycled, worn again, or turned into rags and stuffing.
Now that cycle is breaking down. Fashion trends are accelerating, new clothes are becoming as cheap as used ones, and poor countries are turning their backs on the secondhand trade. Without significant changes in the way that clothes are made and marketed, this could add up to an environmental disaster in the making."
I agree that we could be a lot happier with less stuff. It's an abundance mindset though -- to stop feeling the need to hoard.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose needs and desires were few relative to their skills and the abundance of nature relative to their populations lived more in that mindset of abundance: ...
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.
Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an [institution]. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger in. creases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
For example:
http://marcinequenzer.com/crea... FIELD OF PLENTY
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Brin argues that it will be good for society if the powers of surveillance are shared with the citizenry, allowing "sousveillance" or "viewing from below," enabling the public to watch the watchers. According to Brin, this only continues the same trend promoted by Adam Smith, John Locke, the US Constitutionalists and the western enlightenment, who held that any elite (whether commercial, governmental, or aristocratic) should experience constraints upon its power. And there is no power-equalizer greater than knowledge."
From the article: "The notion that individual data should require a requester to also provide their own data is both equitable and intuitive -- the only remaining question is how to make it work."
Right now, I live on the US East Coast but work remotely with a group on the US West coast. I am trying to keep "California" time to be available to the rest of the group -- which is shifted by three hours. So I tend to start work around noon or a bit earlier and work to around 8 pm (20:00) or so (often a bit later).
I also usually do my best focused work in the morning, sometimes starting as early as 6 or 7 am -- so that is one downside as far as work productivity (but an upside to other things I do).
So, on the plus side, I get a lot of morning time to do what I want -- and it is high quality time. On the downside, it is always dark at the end of the day.
I also tend to treat around 3 pm to 4 pm as a sort of lunch hour since that is California lunch. I sometimes walk the dog then.
Even after more than a year of this schedule, the shift still is a bit strange feeling to me.
Fortunately, my wife and kid are night owls, so this actually brings me more in sync with their schedule in a way. But since I am working later, I don't otherwise get to spend as much evening time with them. And I'm a lot more worn out at the end of a day when I do finish work.
I used to go to sleep around an hour or two before midnight. Now I usually go to sleep around midnight or 1 am. That is a big change for me. And it may be reducing my total sleep time some.
I can't imagine trying to bridge 6+ hours between Europe and the USA though. That would be like me starting at 3 pm and working to midnight. I might be able to do it, but it would be really strange and I don't know how long I could keep that schedule up.
My wife as a night own has the opposite challenge from you because she often works with people in Europe. It is tough on her as a night owl and very disruptive of her sleep to get up for a 9 am meeting with someone in Europe. She might do well in your situation. I tell her she has to get more clients for her consulting in California instead of Europe. Either that or (purely theoretically) we should move to East Aisa to make her schedule easier with clients so she could chat with European clients in her afternoon and evening -- but then my schedule difference would be terrible.
This web page says are early morning "larks" (10%), people in the middle called "hummingbirds" (70%), and then "night owls" (20%). They have some tips on trying to adapt to different schedules from your preferred one.
"Are You a Lark, an Owl, or a Hummingbird?"
https://www.nasw.org/users/lla...
If you are by any chance a "lark", a big shift forward is going to be much harder than if you are a "humming bird" or "night owl".
Good sleep is very important to forming memories. Lack of sleep also affects neurotransmitter production and sensitivity.
The light from screens is disruptive to sleep if you are staring at screens late at night. That can be improved a bit by wearing glasses that block blue light or by using a utility program like f.lux which makes computer screens redder in the evening.
Taking vitamin D3 supplements can help mitigate some of the heath problems of lack of sunlight exposure.
Eating better (whole foods, mostly plants -- with enough omega-3s, B vitamins, and iodine, and other good stuff) can help with mental functioning too. See "the Whole Foods Diet" book for more ideas on that.
Also, being out-of-sync timewise by several hours with the rest of your local society is going to be worst for a young unmarried person otherwise actively doing a lot of social events. Same with any work-from-home situation that is more socially isolating.
The time shift may not make quite as bad socially when you have family around you. That said, if we did not homeschool with a flexible schedule, and my wife and kid were not night owls, I can see how even just a three hour timeshift would be more isolating from family. And six hours would be very hard.
Still, sometimes other options are possible. I used
I totally get what you are saying. I work from home right now and have found modern open plan or even cubicle-based office spaces to be very distracting from concentrating on programming. People who do focused intellectual work need an office with a door that closes (one thing Microsoft got right in the early days). Ironically, managers who are always talking to others and are out and about tend to be the ones who get offices these days. And especially the offices with windows (putting workers in office space without windows is illegal in some other countries like Switzerland).
One place I worked an insurance company with cubicles mixes with uncubicled desks), the guy at the desk behind me (we were back-to-back), working in another group, had just had a house built -- and was on the phone constantly with contractors. Very distracting. Though I learned a bit about house building. Then I got moved to a different desk as the group I was in consolidated its office space usage. In that company, having one of your cubicle panels replaced by glass was a sign of promotion to management rank. My new desk was just on the other side of a corridor from the project lead's cubicle -- which had just had a glass panel installed so he was literally staring at my back all day (as well as the backs of a couple other developers). I would have preferred the previous desk over that situation even with the chatter. You try to do your best anyway, but it all takes its toll on concentration and being in the flow.
One lab I worked in, the third lab I was in at IBM Research, a very loud computer with a squealing hard drive got put right next to my work space for a while. I complained about it, but to not much good. That noise made it very hard to concentrate. I've had tinnitus ever since too -- though it is hard to blame tinnitus on one specific event. Possibly that was the last straw in a series of noise exposures from my youth inclduing early work in a Princeton robotics lab where we noisily cut styrofoam with an industrial robot (and should have been wearing ear protection but usually did not).
That said, a diet of whole foods, mostly plants, has lots of health benefits -- although Paleo leaves out healthy grains and has too much meat and fat to be that healthy (see the book "The Whole Foods Diet"). Exercise whether Crossfit or just less extreme going for good walks is also a great health booster. Spirituality and community also has proven health benefits. And lots of studies show that Turmeric in Curry also has great health benefits. So, your coworkers are all tapped into different aspects of health.
I also very much enjoyed having lunch with coworkers and learning from them. For example, that project lead was into gardening and even made his own delicious salsa. Another person sitting near my at the insurance company told me (when this was not common popular knowledge in the mid 1990s) about how real wages had been flat in the USA already for decades. And I learned a lot at lunch listening to stories about IBM Research history from my supervisor working in a different lab there.
I also later "worked from home" for a year for that previously mentioned insurance company. But that seemed only feasible within that organization where essentially no one worked from home because I had been a contractor onsite earlier for a year. And I would go in for meetings once a month or so. That was before cheap good laptops, and while the project went well, I can see how otherwise things might have been even better if I would have gone in once a week or so to work there and have lunch with people. In the meantime we had moved from where I could walk to work in ten minutes to where I had a 45 minute drive plus often-challenging parking to get there, so getting there was a bunch harder -- but not as hard a commute as other places I would work later even as it seemed daunting at the time.
So, while as a programmer, I'd make the same choice you would of working from home, I can see there is also a potential loss there of lea
On working at Automattic on WordPress: http://scottberkun.com/yearwit...
Informative post I mostly agree with, thanks! Many people don't yet get that if AI or other automation can make people twice as productive, there goes half the jobs. And the jobs may not get replaced with other jobs if there is limited demand for various reasons like a law of diminishing returns.
But, there are other alternatives to retraining for surviving with a diminishing number of jobs. I collected about options here, some good, some bad:
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."
Sounds like you have a fun job, so I am surprised you would want to end up a fat blob confined to a chair like in Wall-e? For example, the job of raising happy, healthy, capable children can take just about all the time parents can put into it and then some. You could let a robot (or nanny) do that, but then you would be missing out on the relationship. And then there is volunteerism and so on.
See also on escaping "The Pleasure Trap":
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
And see also Bob Black on how most "work" these days is totally useless anyway:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"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."
And see also "The Skills of Xanadu" and "Buddhist Economics" for similar alternative perspectives on work as play and work as growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Humanity constructs advanced military spacecraft, but the ships learn to think for themselves. They kill their crews by disengaging the life support systems. However, they keep a small number of humans alive for repairs they cannot do themselves."