A video I put together a couple years ago for a Kickstarter project, but did not proceed with, thinking Kickstarter is not a great match for funding open source software (as opposed to projects where people get something tangible -- although I liked your user ID suggestion): http://twirlip.com/
Anyway, I'd like to see the Slashdot community (and the world) move towards a more distributed model of knowledge sharing instead of towards just another website. Essentially, it would be a model where users posted content to shared archives (like in response to a discussion topic). The archives would be RESTful systems that mostly just accepted and served content files and perhaps provided some indexing. All the presentation would be done in the web browser via JavaScript-powered tools (now that you can compile C to JavaScript and run it fast, anything is possible in the browser). The content objects could be tagged in such a way that further posts could reference the previous posts moderate them up and down, or refine them into new posts, or link concept maps or hierarchies to ideas in specific posts. In some ways similar to Slashdot, the application used to read the content could check digital signatures for content (done using public key cryptography) to calculate valid mod point usage and to give priority to posts from "friends" or others who were deemed by the user (or other trusted users) to be non-trolls. Copyright licensing for posts (such as Creative Commons) could be specified in digital form. Still lots of things to be worked out for a fully distributed system. In the end, a specific community might still have some central database of users and karma and public keys hosted by some community-approved group organized by some official non-profit constitution, but at least the content would be replicated everywhere and available for local processing in creative ways. That distributed nature would reduce the risk of all the content being lost in another "Iron Mountain"-like scenario.
"Your citations include a single internist who has no scientific research to back up his claims and is widely regarded as a quack and a website which stuck 'As seen on CNN' on it's home page, both of which are trying to sell weight loss solutions."
That said, let us look as the site you dismiss based on it saying the related doctor (Dr. Esselsytn) has been on CNN: http://www.heartattackproof.co... "Former President Bill Clinton on CNN credits Dr. Esselstyn with helping him regain his health."
Another quack? Bill Clinton is an example of how improvement is possible by changing what we eat.
I think you've also missed my point that we try to regulate the wrong things. For example, if everyone has a basic income (social security from birth) people would have more time for home cooking. Or, if we subsidized fruits and vegetables instead of meat, dairy, and grains, again we might have a much healthier populace. See: http://www.seriouseats.com/200... "The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
Also, if US Americans got European-length vacations, they might get more outdoor activity in the sunshine, which might improve their health by exercise and vitamin D. As well as being less stressed and have more time for learning about cooking and health and doing gardening.
Anyway, good luck in your own continuing researches into improving health. You make a good point on how surveys on happiness across the decades might be biased by social expectations; I can hope you are right in this case!
From: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy... "The copyright system developed along with the printing press. In the age of the printing press, it was unfeasible for an ordinary reader to copy a book. Copying a book required a printing press, and ordinary readers did not have one. What's more, copying in this way was absurdly expensive unless many copies were made--which means, in effect, that only a publisher could copy a book economically.
So when the public traded to publishers the freedom to copy books, they were selling something which they could not use. Trading something you cannot use for something useful and helpful is always good deal. Therefore, copyright was uncontroversial in the age of the printing press, precisely because it did not restrict anything the reading public might commonly do.
But the age of the printing press is gradually ending. The xerox machine and the audio and video tape began the change; digital information technology brings it to fruition. These advances make it possible for ordinary people, not just publishers with specialized equipment, to copy. And they do!
Once copying is a useful and practical activity for ordinary people, they are no longer so willing to give up the freedom to do it. They want to keep this freedom and exercise it instead of trading it away. The copyright bargain that we have is no longer a good deal for the public, and it is time to revise it--time for the law to recognize the public benefit that comes from making and sharing copies.
With this analysis, we see why rejection of the old copyright bargain is not based on supposing that the Internet is ineffably unique. The Internet is relevant because it facilitates copying and sharing of writings by ordinary readers. The easier it is to copy and share, the more useful it becomes, and the more copyright as it stands now becomes a bad deal."
See also: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/... "Something strange and dangerous is happening in copyright law. Under the US Constitution, copyright exists to benefit users--those who read books, listen to music, watch movies, or run software--not for the sake of publishers or authors. Yet even as people tend increasingly to reject and disobey the copyright restrictions imposed on them "for their own benefit," the US government is adding more restrictions, and trying to frighten the public into obedience with harsh new penalties.
How did copyright policies come to be diametrically opposed to their stated purpose? And how can we bring them back into alignment with that purpose? To understand, we should start by looking at the root of United States copyright law: the US Constitution....
The copyright bargain places the public first: benefit for the reading public is an end in itself; benefits (if any) for publishers are just a means toward that end. Readers' interests and publishers' interests are thus qualitatively unequal in priority. The first step in misinterpreting the purpose of copyright is the elevation of the publishers to the same level of importance as the readers....
The second mistake in copyright policy consists of adopting the goal of maximizing--not just increasing--the number of published works. The erroneous concept of "striking a balance" elevated the publishers to parity with the readers; this second error places them far above the readers.
Diminishing returns applies to copyright just as to any other purchase. The first freedoms we should trade away are those we miss the least, and whose sacrifice gives the largest encouragement to publication. As we trade additional freedoms that cut closer to home, we find that each trade is a bigger sacrifice than the last, while bringing a smaller increment in literary activity. Well before the increment becomes zero,
I would agree that it can be a difficult path to walk sometimes in our society -- especially when the entire family does not make the change at once, and so essentially keeps re-infecting each other with bad eating habits by bringing junk food into the house. The battle of the "bulge" is generally lost or won in the supermarket, since food brought in to the home is pretty much guaranteed to be eaten in reverse order of healthfulness. As Paul Graham said in his essay: http://paulgraham.com/addictio... "Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
How can talking about better urban planning be a "fantasy"? Communities can improve themselves. See for example, Albert Lea, MN: http://www.bluezones.com/progr... "Our team of experts Dan Burden, Dr. Brian Wansink, and Dr. Leslie Lytle, empowered the community to make a few small lifestyle and environmental changes. Citizens improved in four areas: eating better, becoming more active, connecting with one another and finding a greater sense of purpose, and reaped the positive benefits of revitalizing their bodies, their spirits and their town. The community made a variety of changes including adding workplace wellness policies, revised restaurant menu and vending machine offerings, community gardens, walking clubs, walking school buses and new hiking trails. Community Successes * Life expectancy increased an average of 3.1 years * Participants lost a collective 12,000 pounds * An average 21% drop in absenteeism by key employers * City employees showed a 40% decrease in health care costs"
Many cities in Europe have zoning policies that encourage walk-ability and discourage sprawl that leads to automobile dependency.
Also, for your other comments, it sounds to me like you're mostly just being pessimistic without really looking at alternatives such as I've outlined. We may lack the political will to improve ourselves, but for the most part, we collectively know how if we wanted to. Much of the stuff I've outlined is about moving forward. For example, with dish washing machines, high-powered blending machines, ceramic knives, improved heating devices and pots, home grocery delivery in many areas, YouTube example videos, and so on, home cooking is probably a lot easier than it has even been. And that is even before talking about the potential for home gardening robots and home cooking robots. Or even purchased prepared meals that are just prepared *better*.
As for women specifically, compared to a basic income, how is it "freeing" an individual to for her to separate her from her young children she cares about and move her from a position of great autonomy in the household and part of a distributed network of peers to one where she is statistically a bottom-ranked person on a hierarchy who has a boss staring at her back all the time and is subject to other degrading regulations (like when she can go to the bathroom)? And for the most part ultimately for little economic gain after paying for child-care expenses, a business wardrobe, more purchased meals, and a second car?
Thanks for the informative reply. On livestock, sadly with so many Confined Animal Feeding Operations, it seems their waste from CAFOs will go to "waste" in huge lagoons? But I'm not sure if that is just manure or whether the urine goes into such lagoons too. From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... http://www.nrdc.org/water/poll... "According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a non-profit environmental advocacy group, these lagoons often break, leak or overflow, allowing microbes from animal waste to seep into the ground and contaminate air and water supplies."
I've read half the water in the USA is polluted by livestock production (not sure if that is true).
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap--as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation--and more self-discipline--than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation - and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
"We're all time poor, and a lot of people are money poor too,"
Sadly, so true... Yet we in the USA so often ironically claim somehow we are "rich". As Iain Banks said in the Culture series: "Money is a sign of poverty".
Here is some advice on building a healthier and happier society from cultures that achieved that: http://www.bluezones.com/
I think regulations and politics can help with that, but it has to probably be of a deeper more thoughtful form than much of what passes as mainstream politics today. Things like a basic income, an expanded gift economy, internet-empowered democratic decision making, rethinking education to move beyond "compulsory schooling", reconstructing our dwellings and towns and cities to be more walkable and human-friendly and sustainable and healthy, and so on...
Not to dispute your insightful point in the short term, but taking this one step further, won't the "vigilantes" eventually also have their actions recorded? If so, presumably they would be subject to easy prosecution for assault, which presumably would be a deterrent or at least prevent it from happening repeatedly? That said, recordings could always be faked or erased I guess, so some sort of "cyber arms race" might continue at the community level.
I'm not saying I'm especially looking forward to such a future, but If universal surveillance is indeed where we are heading, at least we can try to make the best of it. A generalization on that I suggested three years ago: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d... "Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card tabulating equipment] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
Here is another idea though, grinding up rock to make fertilizer, to mimic the way land around volcanoes remains fertile from the volcanic ash: http://remineralize.org/
Lua: http://kripken.github.io/lua.v... "Lua is implemented in portable C. It is possible to run C compiled to JavaScript at speeds approaching that of a native build (using the asm.js subset of JavaScript), which means that you can in principle run C code that happens to implement a VM at high speed as well. Of course this is theoretical until it is actually attempted - that is the point of this project."
3D, just amazing Doom-clone: https://developer.mozilla.org/... "BananaBread is a 3D first person shooter that runs on the web. It takes the Cube 2: Sauerbraten engine, which is written in C++ and OpenGL, and compiles it using Emscripten into JavaScript and WebGL so that it can run in modern browsers using standards-based web APIs and without the need for plugins. The project has several goals. First, to serve as a testcase for running a demanding 3D game in browsers: Having a working testcase lets us try out new browser features and to profile performance in order to make browsers faster. Another goal is to prove that games of this nature can run in JavaScript and WebGL, which many people are skeptical about. Finally, all the code in this project is open (and practically all the art assets), so others can learn from this effort and use this code to create their own browser games. The latest update of this demo uses asm.js for additional speed, and WebRTC for multiplayer."
It's been said JavaScript is much better than we deserved... It's great to see all these advances. And I think you are right, the next two years will see the further spread of all this.
My own JavaScript experiments towards a social semantic desktop, with the idea that you could have a simple backend and do most of the heavy lifting of processing and displaying information locally in the browser. https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
I had something like "NotScript" for Chrome in mind as opposed to Chrome's block all JavaScript option. But "NotScript" for Chrome does not have all the same features of NoScript (which inspired it) for FireFox. Related: http://hackademix.net/2009/12/...
Thanks for the reply. Glad you found something that worked for your dog though. However, six seems pretty young to get arthritis for a dog? Did your vet ever talk to you about nutrition and arthritis?
I feel the biggest issue is that for many there are other ways to manage arthritis (including nutrition) that are not mentioned in the rush to cover up the pain...
according to Dan Pink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us --- This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace. Watch the full lecture here: http://www.thersa.org/events/v... "
Maybe asking for "passionate" programmers to do mundane tasks is a sign of supply/demand issues for programmers? So, perhaps many employers think they can demand more and more from a large number of programmers? That may be made worse by our overall mainstream economy continues its death spiral of lower wages leading to lower demand leading to lower wages etc.? Contrast with how things were like in the 1970s when there were very few programmers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... http://www.columbia.edu/cu/com... "It must have been about 1973. Life at IBM was good, and I was busy doing whatever it is that engineers did then. Suddenly, in the life of our project, something came up that called for a computer program that did not exist, and I was asked to create it. My boss knew I'd never written a program before; not unusual since in those days there were very few engineers who knew how to program...."
Of course, that was back when more companies were willing to invest significantly in employee education and career development... Back when US labor was stronger politically and before trickle-down neoliberal economics, deregulation, offshoring, H1Bs, and lowered taxes on the wealthy and corporations became popular ideas (even though ironically the US economy overall has gotten worse and worse for more and more people the more these ideas are adopted). Still, there are always exceptions of organizations or parts of organizations (like "skunkworks") that embrace the ideas Dan Pink talks about.
This was just after it came out around 1997. My wife and I had gotten a dog from a shelter about two years earlier, who turned out to be likely in retrospect much older than we had thought. Still, she was our "baby", as we did not have any kids then. And she was truly a wonderful dog, gentle as a lamb, but with a fearsome bark, looking a bit like a wolf. She would follow us everywhere and would spend all day laying by my feet as I programmed. She had started limping a bit from arthritis. I gave her baby aspirin which seemed to help. Our vet suggested this new "wonder drug" just out called Rimadyl. Our vet never to my recollection suggested any other options like glucosomine. I did not want to try Rymadil because the baby aspirin was working well and in general I think most drugs are best avoided, but my wife accused me of being mean to the dog, and I foolishly gave in and we bought the medicine from the vet (a conflict of interest?). We put our dog on half the prescribed dose.
Well, for a few weeks it was indeed wonderful. Our dog was prancing like a puppy at first. It was just amazing. Then a couple months later, she just collapsed in the middle of the day. We brought her to the vet. The vet did not know what it was. It was the early days of the web and we turned there for help. There were a bunch of report of Rimadyl causing just this sort of thing. A post my wife made from around then in our desperation (we got some private replies too): https://groups.google.com/foru...
I can't prove Rimadyl killed our dog, but it was very coincidental. We took her off Rymadyl, and she lasted about a month after that, with me carrying a 70 lb dog outside several times a day to do her business in the yard, with her otherwise laying on the couch or a mat all day. We finally put her to sleep when she could not even keep her tongue in her mouth (probably we waited too long). The vet denied the connection to the end, saying instead that or dog must have had liver cancer and the Rymadyl was somehow helping her with the pain, and encouraged us to put her back on it -- which we would not.
The important thing to be aware of is that Rimadyl/Carprofen is at best a pain killer. It does nothing to improve underlying health, and likely it can cause disease in some dogs. You roll the dice with your dogs life when you try it, as this other similar example suggests: http://www.stevedalepetworld.c... "For both dogs, the answer seemed like a no-brainer - Rimadyl (generically called carprofen), the drug is particularly suited to treat osteoarthritis. Within days, Bernie was his old self, bounding up and down stairs - at least as much as any corgi can bound - and again he loved to be petted. Today, he's still on the twice daily pill that his owners say brought Bernie back to life. George's results were less dramatic, but Townsend noted at least some improvement, so she continued to use Rimadyl for about a month. Then, one morning George suddenly got very sick. He could barely move, he couldn't keep food down. George's condition worsened and within days he was being cared for by vets around the clock; he was no longer able to stand and could barely keep his head up. Townsend fails in her attempt to hold back tears as she recalls, "I looked into his eyes and George told me 'enough.' We ended his suffering on October 13, 1997.""
My satirical take on it all: https://groups.google.com/foru... ----- Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler: "It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here, here, and here." "But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?" "The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space." "What about the nuclear bombs?" "All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the oceans." "What about the tanks?" "The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world." "I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?" "The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness." "Well, send in the Daleks." "The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with the rockets." "Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades." "We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters, solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason." "But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?" "They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots." "I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?" "Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance." "How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong?... Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room... now!" [Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of engineers.:-) Then cue long tirade on how could engineers seriously wanted to help the German workers to not have to work so hard when the whole Nazi party platform was based on providing full employment using fiat dollars. Then cue long tirade on how could engineers have taken the socialism part seriously and shared the wealth of nature and technology with everyone globally.] "So how are the common people paying for all this?" "Much is free, and there is a basic income given to everyone for the rest. There is so much to go around with the robots and 3D printers and solar panels and so on, that most of the old work no longer needs to be done." "You mean people get money without working at jobs? But nobody would work?" "Everyone does what they love. And they are producing so much just as gifts." "Oh, so you mean people are producing so much for free that the economic system has failed?" "Yes, the old pyramid scheme one, anyway. There is a new post-scarcity economy, where between automation and a a gift economy the income-through-jobs link is almost completely broken. Everyone also gets income as a right of citizenship as a share of all our resources for the few things that still need to be rationed. Even you." "Really? How much is this basic income?" "Two thousand a month." "Two thousand a month? Just for bein
By me in response ro "Virgle", including a bit on the two worlds at Google: http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-ra... ---- "But given what Gatto and Ellul say, that action may be a long time coming because the wealthy get so much emotional reward out of believing the propaganda of elites deserving abundance amidst scarcity for the many and spreading that propaganda further (even via Virgle).
"The Mythology of Wealth" http://www.democraticundergrou... "The cheap-labor conservative "minimalist government" social Darwinian world view is just plain bullshit. It builds a new class structure, which just like the ancient class structures, is based on a set of mythological concepts. In fact, those mythological concepts like "property rights", "contract rights", "corporations", "stocks", "bonds", and even "money" itself are socially created to regulate distribution and access to resources. The "market place" is a human creation. The details of how it operates are determined by the particulars of the institutions on which it is built. It is "instituted among men", and if its workings become destructive of the lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness of people subject to it, it may be "altered or abolished"."
For example, Google contractors get no Segways and massages? http://www.google-watch.org/go... Or second class badges? http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/... "I used to work at Google as a Contractor. Let me tell you, it wasn't the greatest place for a contractor. First, you have red badges, so anyone with a Google badge looks down on you. Already you feel left out, and you don't feel like enjoying all the benefits Googler's have.... I don't miss working there. The people arn't really all that friendly, people have arrogance and MBA, PHD attitudes."
And ultimately, aren't even the people in sweatshops in, say, China who build component used in Google servers in some sense Google contractors? Definitely no Segways or massages for them.:-( http://www.monthlyreview.org/m... "Well over 150 million migrant workers from rural areas have crowded into the cities over the past decade in search of economic survival. They may regularly not get paid for months at a time. Public healthcare across the economy is declining to the point where many millions of working families cannot afford to seek medical care or risk huge debt if they do. Migrant workers are at especial risk. Large numbers of workers in the toy industry have now lost their jobs directly as a result of the Mattel recall, and its fallout continues. They are the direct victims of their local bosses' abuses and the lack of safety control. But of course they and their stories and suffering, literally inscribed in the toys they make, remain invisible."
So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?" ----
We've been watching "Manor House" and "Downton Abbey" and it is perhaps interesting to think about the upstairs/downstairs distinction in relation to Google employees vs. contractors and other supporters (including suppliers and users).
Personally, I feel Google (including its top management) i
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G... "Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree.
So what we do is accept and if we don't accept this we are fired or harrassed, we accept the state's prescription that's written in manuals. You do this first, and this second, and this third, and here you have a little latitude to talk to the kid. And the way the state checks on whether you've followed that diet is your standardized tests given at intervals
If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs."
Maybe also of interest: http://schoolsucksproject.com/ ""In my 12 years of teaching, school sucks has been perhaps the most common phrase I've heard students use to describe their feelings about "public education" or more appropriately, compulsory schooling. Yet this seemingly bitter and reductive slogan is actually quite clever. School sucks is perhaps the most accurate and astute synopsis of the system I've ever heard. The 15,000-hour process of compulsory schooling has a dramatic effect on the mind of a child. When we first enter these institutions at age six, many of our best personal attributes are already in place. We are curious, innovative, unique, creative and hopeful in ways that we will rarely be able to replicate throughout the rest of our lives. But over time, school sucks those essential attributes out of too many of us...and replaces them with predictability, obedience and apathy. Unfortunately, for over a century this process has been referred to as "education." It isn't. Our aim is to reclaim that word, to take it back from those who wish to use institutionalized schools (at all levels) to mold impressionable minds into desirable and predictable finished products. Education is a journey by the individual, for the individual." -Brett"
The film begins by studying the Zero Tolerance policies in public schools in the 1990s, which were designed to eradicate drugs and weapons at schools. By arbitrary application of this policy via unchecked authority, soon nail clippers, key chains, and aspirin were considered dangerous and violations of the rules. This policy, combined with Columbine-inspired fear, has resulted in kindergartners being suspended for using pointed fingers as guns in games of cops and robbers and students being suspended for having Midol and Alka-Seltzer. This policy has turned schools into Kafka-esque nightmares, absurd and demoralizing. Increasingly, issues once dealt with by the guidance counselor or a trip to the principal's office are now handled by handcuffs and tasers in the hands of police.[1]
Students are denied basic constitutional rights. They can be searched, drug-tested, forced to incriminate themselves, and capriciously punished. Surveillance cameras, locker searches, and metal detectors are shown to be commonplace. Courts routinely uphold the school's right to do whatever they choose, creating an atmosphere of fear and loathing, anger and despair. The physical structure of these institutions are themselves oppressive, resembling prisons in many ways, yet even more dreary.[2]
Ironically, the film shows that the drastic measures schools employ are ineffective as tools of protection. Security cameras did nothing more than film the Columbine massacre for news outlets. This oppressiveness does nothing to advance learning. Various teachers state on camera that this atmosphere is frustrating to work in, with all curriculum handed down from the state and that this "one-size-fits-all" approach doesn't work well with human beings.[3]
Even more harmful than this physical oppression is the use and abuse of psychiatric tools. The rampant diagnoses of ADD and similar conditions are shown to be intimately connected to pharmaceutical companies' promotional activities. The alleged disorder known as ODD - oppositional defiance disorder - is used to further control kids by serving as a gateway for further authoritative measures, often of the extreme kind.[3] Ritalin and other drugs are being over-prescribed. These strong drugs can have dire consequences, including suicide and murder. Some school shooters, including the Columbine killers, have used or been on these drugs.
This film touches on an area almost completely ignored in any discussion of education - the genesis of compulsory education. Public schools are modeled after a Prussian system, one geared towards creating compliant soldiers.[4] Later, it was modified during the industrial revolution to train people for the work force (hence the bells signaling movement).[5] Ultimately, the film argues that more money, smaller classrooms, better trained teachers and other bromides won't produce effective education because the problems are deep and institutional. In director Cevin Soling's words, "I was converted by teachers, by a number of people I interviewed is that the main mission of school is submission to authority."[5]
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com... "The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte--one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichte's challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther's plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the "Old Deluder Satan" law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn't didn't. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century: as late as 1920, only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the world's highest per capita income in the world.
Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it's not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt's brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference.
The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.
The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the exp
... was to have a historical aspect (my proposal from around 1999): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... "The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products."
Can't say I've gotten very far with it in the past quarter century (so many unrelated distractions just to make a living), but it is good to at least see all the scattered piecemeal efforts around the web with so much great content. The general adhoc Maker movement has the momentum now, and might someday converge on something like this. In any case, it would be good to have standards for encoding this knowledge so we could then apply tools to look at all the complex web of interdependencies. NIST has done a bit in that direction.
So true. See also by me from 2008: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post... "Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?... We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once?:-)...
What can PU do down the road to help assure any future similar prospective's parents or guardians that PU helps such students sort through all their dreams and ethics to set priorities, and to help them see what makes sense for a humane world and a happy life, and what does not? What sort of skills can PU help someone like that learn to be an even better collaborator on free projects? As happened with Linus Torvalds in Finland, how can PU help ethics and poetry come together with science and engineering in such a young person's life?...
Rather than move books into a new "Lewis Science Library" (as if even just today's usual prospectives would care about that in the internet age with Google Books and so forth accessible from their dorm desktops or from networked laptops anywhere), the building could be renamed the "Lewis Center for Post-Scarcity Studies and Economic Transcendence"....
All the books over 20 years old slated to be moved there could be digitized and served to the world, with the originals shipped to an English speaking poor place like New Delhi, India to be given away for free. When Princeton gets sued for this, the alumni lawyers could rally to its defense, either winning in court or changing the copyright laws. Then *all* the books at PU could be digitized, served to the world, and shipped for "disposal" to India, perhaps with notarized copies of original cover pages kept in a vault somewhere as proof of purchase, and the books stamped "intended for disposal; may not be resold, only given away". The URL where the book can be found at princeton.edu should also be stamped onto the inside cover. (Obviously "rare" books might be excepted from being shipped to India, and now there would be a lot more space for more of them.) The space freed in Firestone could be converted to indoor squash courts as well as office and lab space for free projects. When PU gets sued again for making its whole collection available to the public for free, tap into the alumni lawyer network to deal with it, or even tap into the endowment to solve this some way with money which would soon be near worthless anyway as more and more of the economy goes free.
The university could free all the patents and copyrights it controls, as well as make new contracts for faculty, staff, and students, that all published work done using university resources must be freely licensed....
See also my post on Google/BostonDynamics: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4556777&cid=45691707 "Intelligent mobile robots are near to totally transforming our society. And the transition might be quicker than we might expect, as robots can go from worse than human to better than human at some task almost overnight when there is an R&D breakthrough in some area.... One thing most people do not yet understand about robotics (especially in the hands of some place like Google) is that if you have millions of networked robots, all learning independently, they can pool that learning over the network. And that network can then learn very quickly. And so "performance" can improve very quickly, with millions of trial-and-error experiments running in parallel with the results integrated with learning algorithms. That is perhaps the biggest upside and downside of a big data company like Google getting into robotics, especially if they keep the results proprietary (which they may or may not do)."
Couple that rend with "War is a Racket" (Marine Major General Smedly Butler) and those various dystopian robotics movies may even be too optimistic... Would it really require something much more than billions of networked cheap robotic cockroaches wielding some small weapon to wipe out all or most of humanity? Even if that network failed a year later? I still feel the primary issue is the one in my sig -- that we need (as Einstein called for) a new way of thinking to go with out new-found technological powers.
Supports your point: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "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...."
The idea that hunter/gathers worked hard is a convenient one to promulgate if your objective is to keep long-suffering agricultural serfs from revolting... Some suggest the expulsion from the Garden of Eden story in the Bible is about the transition from hunter/gathering to agriculture (and similar painful stories are in other cultures).
As you point out, the work hunter/gathers had to do to get food depends on things like the specific living situation as well as population density. As population density goes up because of the success of hunter/gathering, sadly, it makes it harder and harder to live that way. Then militaristic bureaucracies can arise to control the most productive lands (including estuaries) adding another dimension to the issue. In the past, those might eventually collapse and a cycle would start over (see Daniel Quinn who in Beyond Civilization points out how often this cycle happened). But nowadays a collapse would probably involve nukes that could render much of the Earth uninhabitable plus our global populations based on agriculture and advanced technology are many many times what hunter/gathering would support. So, our collective best bet is to keep things going and take advantage of new possibilities, like creating and living in self-replicating space habitats that duplicate themselves from lunar or asteroid ore and solar energy as well as making advanced Earthly cities including in the ocean and so on. And with robotics and a basic income, most humans can go back to the better part of a hunter/gather lifestyle, including having time to raise children well and to be part of a socially-connected community.
Slashdot Mirror
My comments to the Diaspora list: https://groups.google.com/foru...
A video I put together a couple years ago for a Kickstarter project, but did not proceed with, thinking Kickstarter is not a great match for funding open source software (as opposed to projects where people get something tangible -- although I liked your user ID suggestion):
http://twirlip.com/
Work I've done towards those ideas there:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://sourceforge.net/project...
Anyway, I'd like to see the Slashdot community (and the world) move towards a more distributed model of knowledge sharing instead of towards just another website. Essentially, it would be a model where users posted content to shared archives (like in response to a discussion topic). The archives would be RESTful systems that mostly just accepted and served content files and perhaps provided some indexing. All the presentation would be done in the web browser via JavaScript-powered tools (now that you can compile C to JavaScript and run it fast, anything is possible in the browser). The content objects could be tagged in such a way that further posts could reference the previous posts moderate them up and down, or refine them into new posts, or link concept maps or hierarchies to ideas in specific posts. In some ways similar to Slashdot, the application used to read the content could check digital signatures for content (done using public key cryptography) to calculate valid mod point usage and to give priority to posts from "friends" or others who were deemed by the user (or other trusted users) to be non-trolls. Copyright licensing for posts (such as Creative Commons) could be specified in digital form. Still lots of things to be worked out for a fully distributed system. In the end, a specific community might still have some central database of users and karma and public keys hosted by some community-approved group organized by some official non-profit constitution, but at least the content would be replicated everywhere and available for local processing in creative ways. That distributed nature would reduce the risk of all the content being lost in another "Iron Mountain"-like scenario.
"Your citations include a single internist who has no scientific research to back up his claims and is widely regarded as a quack and a website which stuck 'As seen on CNN' on it's home page, both of which are trying to sell weight loss solutions."
Considering how much of what many cardiologists do is essentially a scam, I guess the bar for medical practice is pretty low, whoever you call a "quack".
http://www.healthleadersmedia....
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
And even some oncologists, too:
http://nation.time.com/2013/08...
That said, let us look as the site you dismiss based on it saying the related doctor (Dr. Esselsytn) has been on CNN:
http://www.heartattackproof.co...
"Former President Bill Clinton on CNN credits Dr. Esselstyn with helping him regain his health."
Another quack? Bill Clinton is an example of how improvement is possible by changing what we eat.
I think you've also missed my point that we try to regulate the wrong things. For example, if everyone has a basic income (social security from birth) people would have more time for home cooking. Or, if we subsidized fruits and vegetables instead of meat, dairy, and grains, again we might have a much healthier populace. See:
http://www.seriouseats.com/200...
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
Also, if US Americans got European-length vacations, they might get more outdoor activity in the sunshine, which might improve their health by exercise and vitamin D. As well as being less stressed and have more time for learning about cooking and health and doing gardening.
Anyway, good luck in your own continuing researches into improving health. You make a good point on how surveys on happiness across the decades might be biased by social expectations; I can hope you are right in this case!
From: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
"The copyright system developed along with the printing press. In the age of the printing press, it was unfeasible for an ordinary reader to copy a book. Copying a book required a printing press, and ordinary readers did not have one. What's more, copying in this way was absurdly expensive unless many copies were made--which means, in effect, that only a publisher could copy a book economically.
So when the public traded to publishers the freedom to copy books, they were selling something which they could not use. Trading something you cannot use for something useful and helpful is always good deal. Therefore, copyright was uncontroversial in the age of the printing press, precisely because it did not restrict anything the reading public might commonly do.
But the age of the printing press is gradually ending. The xerox machine and the audio and video tape began the change; digital information technology brings it to fruition. These advances make it possible for ordinary people, not just publishers with specialized equipment, to copy. And they do!
Once copying is a useful and practical activity for ordinary people, they are no longer so willing to give up the freedom to do it. They want to keep this freedom and exercise it instead of trading it away. The copyright bargain that we have is no longer a good deal for the public, and it is time to revise it--time for the law to recognize the public benefit that comes from making and sharing copies.
With this analysis, we see why rejection of the old copyright bargain is not based on supposing that the Internet is ineffably unique. The Internet is relevant because it facilitates copying and sharing of writings by ordinary readers. The easier it is to copy and share, the more useful it becomes, and the more copyright as it stands now becomes a bad deal."
See also: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/... ... ...
"Something strange and dangerous is happening in copyright law. Under the US Constitution, copyright exists to benefit users--those who read books, listen to music, watch movies, or run software--not for the sake of publishers or authors. Yet even as people tend increasingly to reject and disobey the copyright restrictions imposed on them "for their own benefit," the US government is adding more restrictions, and trying to frighten the public into obedience with harsh new penalties.
How did copyright policies come to be diametrically opposed to their stated purpose? And how can we bring them back into alignment with that purpose? To understand, we should start by looking at the root of United States copyright law: the US Constitution.
The copyright bargain places the public first: benefit for the reading public is an end in itself; benefits (if any) for publishers are just a means toward that end. Readers' interests and publishers' interests are thus qualitatively unequal in priority. The first step in misinterpreting the purpose of copyright is the elevation of the publishers to the same level of importance as the readers.
The second mistake in copyright policy consists of adopting the goal of maximizing--not just increasing--the number of published works. The erroneous concept of "striking a balance" elevated the publishers to parity with the readers; this second error places them far above the readers.
Diminishing returns applies to copyright just as to any other purchase. The first freedoms we should trade away are those we miss the least, and whose sacrifice gives the largest encouragement to publication. As we trade additional freedoms that cut closer to home, we find that each trade is a bigger sacrifice than the last, while bringing a smaller increment in literary activity. Well before the increment becomes zero,
"The few weeks of discipline crap has been disproved, both scientifically and by human experience over and over again"
Citations needed... Examples where it can work:
http://www.drmcdougall.com/hea...
http://www.heartattackproof.co...
http://www.healthpromoting.com...
I would agree that it can be a difficult path to walk sometimes in our society -- especially when the entire family does not make the change at once, and so essentially keeps re-infecting each other with bad eating habits by bringing junk food into the house. The battle of the "bulge" is generally lost or won in the supermarket, since food brought in to the home is pretty much guaranteed to be eaten in reverse order of healthfulness. As Paul Graham said in his essay:
http://paulgraham.com/addictio...
"Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
How can talking about better urban planning be a "fantasy"? Communities can improve themselves. See for example, Albert Lea, MN:
http://www.bluezones.com/progr...
"Our team of experts Dan Burden, Dr. Brian Wansink, and Dr. Leslie Lytle, empowered the community to make a few small lifestyle and environmental changes. Citizens improved in four areas: eating better, becoming more active, connecting with one another and finding a greater sense of purpose, and reaped the positive benefits of revitalizing their bodies, their spirits and their town. The community made a variety of changes including adding workplace wellness policies, revised restaurant menu and vending machine offerings, community gardens, walking clubs, walking school buses and new hiking trails.
Community Successes
* Life expectancy increased an average of 3.1 years
* Participants lost a collective 12,000 pounds
* An average 21% drop in absenteeism by key employers
* City employees showed a 40% decrease in health care costs"
Many cities in Europe have zoning policies that encourage walk-ability and discourage sprawl that leads to automobile dependency.
Also, for your other comments, it sounds to me like you're mostly just being pessimistic without really looking at alternatives such as I've outlined. We may lack the political will to improve ourselves, but for the most part, we collectively know how if we wanted to. Much of the stuff I've outlined is about moving forward. For example, with dish washing machines, high-powered blending machines, ceramic knives, improved heating devices and pots, home grocery delivery in many areas, YouTube example videos, and so on, home cooking is probably a lot easier than it has even been. And that is even before talking about the potential for home gardening robots and home cooking robots. Or even purchased prepared meals that are just prepared *better*.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
As for women specifically, compared to a basic income, how is it "freeing" an individual to for her to separate her from her young children she cares about and move her from a position of great autonomy in the household and part of a distributed network of peers to one where she is statistically a bottom-ranked person on a hierarchy who has a boss staring at her back all the time and is subject to other degrading regulations (like when she can go to the bathroom)? And for the most part ultimately for little economic gain after paying for child-care expenses, a business wardrobe, more purchased meals, and a second car?
Thanks for the informative reply. On livestock, sadly with so many Confined Animal Feeding Operations, it seems their waste from CAFOs will go to "waste" in huge lagoons? But I'm not sure if that is just manure or whether the urine goes into such lagoons too. From:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.nrdc.org/water/poll...
"According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a non-profit environmental advocacy group, these lagoons often break, leak or overflow, allowing microbes from animal waste to seep into the ground and contaminate air and water supplies."
I've read half the water in the USA is polluted by livestock production (not sure if that is true).
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap--as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation--and more self-discipline--than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation - and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
See also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
Also, advice to eat home-made food:
http://www.thersa.org/events/r...
http://www.thersa.org/events/v...
"We're all time poor, and a lot of people are money poor too,"
Sadly, so true... Yet we in the USA so often ironically claim somehow we are "rich". As Iain Banks said in the Culture series: "Money is a sign of poverty".
Here is some advice on building a healthier and happier society from cultures that achieved that: http://www.bluezones.com/
Yet, adapting that for a world of "pleasure traps" or "supernornal stimuli" or "the acceleration of addictiveness" in the 21st century is a huge challenge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.amazon.com/Supernor...
http://paulgraham.com/addictio...
I think regulations and politics can help with that, but it has to probably be of a deeper more thoughtful form than much of what passes as mainstream politics today. Things like a basic income, an expanded gift economy, internet-empowered democratic decision making, rethinking education to move beyond "compulsory schooling", reconstructing our dwellings and towns and cities to be more walkable and human-friendly and sustainable and healthy, and so on...
In "The Skills of Xanadu": https://archive.org/details/pr...
Not to dispute your insightful point in the short term, but taking this one step further, won't the "vigilantes" eventually also have their actions recorded? If so, presumably they would be subject to easy prosecution for assault, which presumably would be a deterrent or at least prevent it from happening repeatedly? That said, recordings could always be faked or erased I guess, so some sort of "cyber arms race" might continue at the community level.
See also Brin's Transparent Society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
And the end of Marshall Brain's Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
I'm not saying I'm especially looking forward to such a future, but If universal surveillance is indeed where we are heading, at least we can try to make the best of it. A generalization on that I suggested three years ago:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card tabulating equipment] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
Yes, especially in China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
Which is part of how they have been "Farmers of 40 Centuries": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
I've been interested in this from the point of view of space colonies. Biosphere II did this:
http://www.janepoynter.com/doc...
http://www.globalecotechnics.c...
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11...
http://b2science.org/news/1453
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
As did John Todd at Ocean Arks commercially for towns needing sewage treatment:
http://www.oceanarksint.org/in...
Here is another idea though, grinding up rock to make fertilizer, to mimic the way land around volcanoes remains fertile from the volcanic ash:
http://remineralize.org/
Lua: http://kripken.github.io/lua.v...
"Lua is implemented in portable C. It is possible to run C compiled to JavaScript at speeds approaching that of a native build (using the asm.js subset of JavaScript), which means that you can in principle run C code that happens to implement a VM at high speed as well. Of course this is theoretical until it is actually attempted - that is the point of this project."
A Sql.js demo: http://kripken.github.io/sql.j...
3D, just amazing Doom-clone: https://developer.mozilla.org/...
"BananaBread is a 3D first person shooter that runs on the web. It takes the Cube 2: Sauerbraten engine, which is written in C++ and OpenGL, and compiles it using Emscripten into JavaScript and WebGL so that it can run in modern browsers using standards-based web APIs and without the need for plugins. The project has several goals. First, to serve as a testcase for running a demanding 3D game in browsers: Having a working testcase lets us try out new browser features and to profile performance in order to make browsers faster. Another goal is to prove that games of this nature can run in JavaScript and WebGL, which many people are skeptical about. Finally, all the code in this project is open (and practically all the art assets), so others can learn from this effort and use this code to create their own browser games. The latest update of this demo uses asm.js for additional speed, and WebRTC for multiplayer."
The author's GitHub site, where there is a tool to compile LLVM output like from C to JavaScript: https://github.com/kripken
https://github.com/kripken/ems...
By others (MineCraft-like): http://voxeljs.com/
It's been said JavaScript is much better than we deserved... It's great to see all these advances. And I think you are right, the next two years will see the further spread of all this.
My own JavaScript experiments towards a social semantic desktop, with the idea that you could have a simple backend and do most of the heavy lifting of processing and displaying information locally in the browser.
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
I had something like "NotScript" for Chrome in mind as opposed to Chrome's block all JavaScript option. But "NotScript" for Chrome does not have all the same features of NoScript (which inspired it) for FireFox. Related: http://hackademix.net/2009/12/...
http://noscript.net/
But it still is a bit of a kludge, compared to your broader insightful point. Chrome has something similar, but I don't think it is as good.
Thanks for the reply. Glad you found something that worked for your dog though. However, six seems pretty young to get arthritis for a dog? Did your vet ever talk to you about nutrition and arthritis?
I feel the biggest issue is that for many there are other ways to manage arthritis (including nutrition) that are not mentioned in the rush to cover up the pain...
according to Dan Pink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us --- This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace. Watch the full lecture here: http://www.thersa.org/events/v... "
Maybe asking for "passionate" programmers to do mundane tasks is a sign of supply/demand issues for programmers? So, perhaps many employers think they can demand more and more from a large number of programmers? That may be made worse by our overall mainstream economy continues its death spiral of lower wages leading to lower demand leading to lower wages etc.? Contrast with how things were like in the 1970s when there were very few programmers: ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/com...
"It must have been about 1973. Life at IBM was good, and I was busy doing whatever it is that engineers did then. Suddenly, in the life of our project, something came up that called for a computer program that did not exist, and I was asked to create it. My boss knew I'd never written a program before; not unusual since in those days there were very few engineers who knew how to program.
Of course, that was back when more companies were willing to invest significantly in employee education and career development... Back when US labor was stronger politically and before trickle-down neoliberal economics, deregulation, offshoring, H1Bs, and lowered taxes on the wealthy and corporations became popular ideas (even though ironically the US economy overall has gotten worse and worse for more and more people the more these ideas are adopted). Still, there are always exceptions of organizations or parts of organizations (like "skunkworks") that embrace the ideas Dan Pink talks about.
This was just after it came out around 1997. My wife and I had gotten a dog from a shelter about two years earlier, who turned out to be likely in retrospect much older than we had thought. Still, she was our "baby", as we did not have any kids then. And she was truly a wonderful dog, gentle as a lamb, but with a fearsome bark, looking a bit like a wolf. She would follow us everywhere and would spend all day laying by my feet as I programmed. She had started limping a bit from arthritis. I gave her baby aspirin which seemed to help. Our vet suggested this new "wonder drug" just out called Rimadyl. Our vet never to my recollection suggested any other options like glucosomine. I did not want to try Rymadil because the baby aspirin was working well and in general I think most drugs are best avoided, but my wife accused me of being mean to the dog, and I foolishly gave in and we bought the medicine from the vet (a conflict of interest?). We put our dog on half the prescribed dose.
Well, for a few weeks it was indeed wonderful. Our dog was prancing like a puppy at first. It was just amazing. Then a couple months later, she just collapsed in the middle of the day. We brought her to the vet. The vet did not know what it was. It was the early days of the web and we turned there for help. There were a bunch of report of Rimadyl causing just this sort of thing. A post my wife made from around then in our desperation (we got some private replies too):
https://groups.google.com/foru...
I can't prove Rimadyl killed our dog, but it was very coincidental. We took her off Rymadyl, and she lasted about a month after that, with me carrying a 70 lb dog outside several times a day to do her business in the yard, with her otherwise laying on the couch or a mat all day. We finally put her to sleep when she could not even keep her tongue in her mouth (probably we waited too long). The vet denied the connection to the end, saying instead that or dog must have had liver cancer and the Rymadyl was somehow helping her with the pain, and encouraged us to put her back on it -- which we would not.
The important thing to be aware of is that Rimadyl/Carprofen is at best a pain killer. It does nothing to improve underlying health, and likely it can cause disease in some dogs. You roll the dice with your dogs life when you try it, as this other similar example suggests:
http://www.stevedalepetworld.c...
"For both dogs, the answer seemed like a no-brainer - Rimadyl (generically called carprofen), the drug is particularly suited to treat osteoarthritis. Within days, Bernie was his old self, bounding up and down stairs - at least as much as any corgi can bound - and again he loved to be petted. Today, he's still on the twice daily pill that his owners say brought Bernie back to life. George's results were less dramatic, but Townsend noted at least some improvement, so she continued to use Rimadyl for about a month. Then, one morning George suddenly got very sick. He could barely move, he couldn't keep food down. George's condition worsened and within days he was being cared for by vets around the clock; he was no longer able to stand and could barely keep his head up. Townsend fails in her attempt to hold back tears as she recalls, "I looked into his eyes and George told me 'enough.' We ended his suffering on October 13, 1997.""
See also:
http://www.srdogs.com/Pages/ri...
For some health advice on pet nutrition to fix underlying problems, try Dr. Pitcairn:
http://www.amazon.com/Pitcairn...
Part of that book on arthritis:
http://books.google.com/books?...
and also shorter intestines than humans: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/qu...
So, dogs can eat a lot of old stuff that would make humans very sick.
BTW, Dr. Pitcairn is a much better than average source of nutritional advice from a vet:
http://www.amazon.com/Pitcairn...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Also related:
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/...
My satirical take on it all: ... ... now!" :-) Then cue long tirade on how could engineers seriously wanted to help the German workers to not have to work so hard when the whole Nazi party platform was based on providing full employment using fiat dollars. Then cue long tirade on how could engineers have taken the socialism part seriously and shared the wealth of nature and technology with everyone globally.]
https://groups.google.com/foru...
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Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler:
"It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here, here, and here."
"But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?"
"The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space."
"What about the nuclear bombs?"
"All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the oceans."
"What about the tanks?"
"The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world."
"I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?"
"The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness."
"Well, send in the Daleks."
"The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with the rockets."
"Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades."
"We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters, solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason."
"But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?"
"They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots."
"I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?"
"Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance."
"How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong?
Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room
[Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of engineers.
"So how are the common people paying for all this?"
"Much is free, and there is a basic income given to everyone for the rest. There is so much to go around with the robots and 3D printers and solar panels and so on, that most of the old work no longer needs to be done."
"You mean people get money without working at jobs? But nobody would work?"
"Everyone does what they love. And they are producing so much just as gifts."
"Oh, so you mean people are producing so much for free that the economic system has failed?"
"Yes, the old pyramid scheme one, anyway. There is a new post-scarcity economy, where between automation and a a gift economy the income-through-jobs link is almost completely broken. Everyone also gets income as a right of citizenship as a share of all our resources for the few things that still need to be rationed. Even you."
"Really? How much is this basic income?"
"Two thousand a month."
"Two thousand a month? Just for bein
By me in response ro "Virgle", including a bit on the two worlds at Google: http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-ra... ... I don't miss working there. The people arn't really all that friendly, people have arrogance and MBA, PHD attitudes." :-(
----
"But given what Gatto and Ellul say, that action may be a long time coming because the wealthy get so much emotional reward out of believing the propaganda of elites deserving abundance amidst scarcity for the many and spreading that propaganda further (even via Virgle).
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.democraticundergrou...
"The cheap-labor conservative "minimalist government" social Darwinian world view is just plain bullshit. It builds a new class structure, which just like the ancient class structures, is based on a set of mythological concepts. In fact, those mythological concepts like "property rights", "contract rights", "corporations", "stocks", "bonds", and even "money" itself are socially created to regulate distribution and access to resources. The "market place" is a human creation. The details of how it operates are determined by the particulars of the institutions on which it is built. It is "instituted among men", and if its workings become destructive of the lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness of people subject to it, it may be "altered or abolished"."
For example, Google contractors get no Segways and massages?
http://www.google-watch.org/go...
Or second class badges?
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/...
"I used to work at Google as a Contractor. Let me tell you, it wasn't the greatest place for a contractor. First, you have red badges, so anyone with a Google badge looks down on you. Already you feel left out, and you don't feel like enjoying all the benefits Googler's have.
And ultimately, aren't even the people in sweatshops in, say, China who build component used in Google servers in some sense Google contractors? Definitely no Segways or massages for them.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/m...
"Well over 150 million migrant workers from rural areas have crowded into the cities over the past decade in search of economic survival. They may regularly not get paid for months at a time. Public healthcare across the economy is declining to the point where many millions of working families cannot afford to seek medical care or risk huge debt if they do. Migrant workers are at especial risk. Large numbers of workers in the toy industry have now lost their jobs directly as a result of the Mattel recall, and its fallout continues. They are the direct victims of their local bosses' abuses and the lack of safety control. But of course they and their stories and suffering, literally inscribed in the toys they make, remain invisible."
So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?"
----
We've been watching "Manor House" and "Downton Abbey" and it is perhaps interesting to think about the upstairs/downstairs distinction in relation to Google employees vs. contractors and other supporters (including suppliers and users).
Personally, I feel Google (including its top management) i
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree.
So what we do is accept and if we don't accept this we are fired or harrassed, we accept the state's prescription that's written in manuals. You do this first, and this second, and this third, and here you have a little latitude to talk to the kid. And the way the state checks on whether you've followed that diet is your standardized tests given at intervals
If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs."
Maybe also of interest: http://schoolsucksproject.com/
""In my 12 years of teaching, school sucks has been perhaps the most common phrase I've heard students use to describe their feelings about "public education" or more appropriately, compulsory schooling. Yet this seemingly bitter and reductive slogan is actually quite clever. School sucks is perhaps the most accurate and astute synopsis of the system I've ever heard. The 15,000-hour process of compulsory schooling has a dramatic effect on the mind of a child. When we first enter these institutions at age six, many of our best personal attributes are already in place. We are curious, innovative, unique, creative and hopeful in ways that we will rarely be able to replicate throughout the rest of our lives. But over time, school sucks those essential attributes out of too many of us...and replaces them with predictability, obedience and apathy. Unfortunately, for over a century this process has been referred to as "education." It isn't. Our aim is to reclaim that word, to take it back from those who wish to use institutionalized schools (at all levels) to mold impressionable minds into desirable and predictable finished products. Education is a journey by the individual, for the individual." -Brett"
See also my other posts in this discussion connecting to your points:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The film begins by studying the Zero Tolerance policies in public schools in the 1990s, which were designed to eradicate drugs and weapons at schools. By arbitrary application of this policy via unchecked authority, soon nail clippers, key chains, and aspirin were considered dangerous and violations of the rules. This policy, combined with Columbine-inspired fear, has resulted in kindergartners being suspended for using pointed fingers as guns in games of cops and robbers and students being suspended for having Midol and Alka-Seltzer. This policy has turned schools into Kafka-esque nightmares, absurd and demoralizing. Increasingly, issues once dealt with by the guidance counselor or a trip to the principal's office are now handled by handcuffs and tasers in the hands of police.[1]
Students are denied basic constitutional rights. They can be searched, drug-tested, forced to incriminate themselves, and capriciously punished. Surveillance cameras, locker searches, and metal detectors are shown to be commonplace. Courts routinely uphold the school's right to do whatever they choose, creating an atmosphere of fear and loathing, anger and despair. The physical structure of these institutions are themselves oppressive, resembling prisons in many ways, yet even more dreary.[2]
Ironically, the film shows that the drastic measures schools employ are ineffective as tools of protection. Security cameras did nothing more than film the Columbine massacre for news outlets. This oppressiveness does nothing to advance learning. Various teachers state on camera that this atmosphere is frustrating to work in, with all curriculum handed down from the state and that this "one-size-fits-all" approach doesn't work well with human beings.[3]
Even more harmful than this physical oppression is the use and abuse of psychiatric tools. The rampant diagnoses of ADD and similar conditions are shown to be intimately connected to pharmaceutical companies' promotional activities. The alleged disorder known as ODD - oppositional defiance disorder - is used to further control kids by serving as a gateway for further authoritative measures, often of the extreme kind.[3] Ritalin and other drugs are being over-prescribed. These strong drugs can have dire consequences, including suicide and murder. Some school shooters, including the Columbine killers, have used or been on these drugs.
This film touches on an area almost completely ignored in any discussion of education - the genesis of compulsory education. Public schools are modeled after a Prussian system, one geared towards creating compliant soldiers.[4] Later, it was modified during the industrial revolution to train people for the work force (hence the bells signaling movement).[5] Ultimately, the film argues that more money, smaller classrooms, better trained teachers and other bromides won't produce effective education because the problems are deep and institutional. In director Cevin Soling's words, "I was converted by teachers, by a number of people I interviewed is that the main mission of school is submission to authority."[5]
---
Lots more links:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Sad almost all the discussion here misses the deeper issue of compulsory schooling...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte--one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.
In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one's life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition1 lay the power to cloud men's minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichte's challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther's plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the "Old Deluder Satan" law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn't didn't. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century: as late as 1920, only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school, though Switzerland has the world's highest per capita income in the world.
Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it's not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt's brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference.
The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army;2 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.
The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the exp
... was to have a historical aspect (my proposal from around 1999): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products."
The idea goes back into the 1980s:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
Can't say I've gotten very far with it in the past quarter century (so many unrelated distractions just to make a living), but it is good to at least see all the scattered piecemeal efforts around the web with so much great content. The general adhoc Maker movement has the momentum now, and might someday converge on something like this. In any case, it would be good to have standards for encoding this knowledge so we could then apply tools to look at all the complex web of interdependencies. NIST has done a bit in that direction.
So true. See also by me from 2008: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post... ... We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once? :-) ... ... ... ...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?
What can PU do down the road to help assure any future similar prospective's parents or guardians that PU helps such students sort through all their dreams and ethics to set priorities, and to help them see what makes sense for a humane world and a happy life, and what does not? What sort of skills can PU help someone like that learn to be an even better collaborator on free projects? As happened with Linus Torvalds in Finland, how can PU help ethics and poetry come together with science and engineering in such a young person's life?
Rather than move books into a new "Lewis Science Library" (as if even just today's usual prospectives would care about that in the internet age with Google Books and so forth accessible from their dorm desktops or from networked laptops anywhere), the building could be renamed the "Lewis Center for Post-Scarcity Studies and Economic Transcendence".
All the books over 20 years old slated to be moved there could be digitized and served to the world, with the originals shipped to an English speaking poor place like New Delhi, India to be given away for free. When Princeton gets sued for this, the alumni lawyers could rally to its defense, either winning in court or changing the copyright laws. Then *all* the books at PU could be digitized, served to the world, and shipped for "disposal" to India, perhaps with notarized copies of original cover pages kept in a vault somewhere as proof of purchase, and the books stamped "intended for disposal; may not be resold, only given away". The URL where the book can be found at princeton.edu should also be stamped onto the inside cover. (Obviously "rare" books might be excepted from being shipped to India, and now there would be a lot more space for more of them.) The space freed in Firestone could be converted to indoor squash courts as well as office and lab space for free projects. When PU gets sued again for making its whole collection available to the public for free, tap into the alumni lawyer network to deal with it, or even tap into the endowment to solve this some way with money which would soon be near worthless anyway as more and more of the economy goes free.
The university could free all the patents and copyrights it controls, as well as make new contracts for faculty, staff, and students, that all published work done using university resources must be freely licensed.
See also my post on Google/BostonDynamics: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4556777&cid=45691707 ... One thing most people do not yet understand about robotics (especially in the hands of some place like Google) is that if you have millions of networked robots, all learning independently, they can pool that learning over the network. And that network can then learn very quickly. And so "performance" can improve very quickly, with millions of trial-and-error experiments running in parallel with the results integrated with learning algorithms. That is perhaps the biggest upside and downside of a big data company like Google getting into robotics, especially if they keep the results proprietary (which they may or may not do)."
"Intelligent mobile robots are near to totally transforming our society. And the transition might be quicker than we might expect, as robots can go from worse than human to better than human at some task almost overnight when there is an R&D breakthrough in some area.
Couple that rend with "War is a Racket" (Marine Major General Smedly Butler) and those various dystopian robotics movies may even be too optimistic... Would it really require something much more than billions of networked cheap robotic cockroaches wielding some small weapon to wipe out all or most of humanity? Even if that network failed a year later? I still feel the primary issue is the one in my sig -- that we need (as Einstein called for) a new way of thinking to go with out new-found technological powers.
Supports your point: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "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. ..."
The idea that hunter/gathers worked hard is a convenient one to promulgate if your objective is to keep long-suffering agricultural serfs from revolting... Some suggest the expulsion from the Garden of Eden story in the Bible is about the transition from hunter/gathering to agriculture (and similar painful stories are in other cultures).
As you point out, the work hunter/gathers had to do to get food depends on things like the specific living situation as well as population density. As population density goes up because of the success of hunter/gathering, sadly, it makes it harder and harder to live that way. Then militaristic bureaucracies can arise to control the most productive lands (including estuaries) adding another dimension to the issue. In the past, those might eventually collapse and a cycle would start over (see Daniel Quinn who in Beyond Civilization points out how often this cycle happened). But nowadays a collapse would probably involve nukes that could render much of the Earth uninhabitable plus our global populations based on agriculture and advanced technology are many many times what hunter/gathering would support. So, our collective best bet is to keep things going and take advantage of new possibilities, like creating and living in self-replicating space habitats that duplicate themselves from lunar or asteroid ore and solar energy as well as making advanced Earthly cities including in the ocean and so on. And with robotics and a basic income, most humans can go back to the better part of a hunter/gather lifestyle, including having time to raise children well and to be part of a socially-connected community.