"What we envisioned: Man overseeing the construction robots doing their elaborate dance. What we got: robotic sensors collect every bit of observable data, so that the man can be put into good use with highest efficiency."
Good to see people starting to think about this. To generalize along those lines, see my essay here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
In that sense, I'm glad to see this article about the construction use of drones. The movie "Silent Running" showed me the potential of "drones" for construction, maintenance, surgery, agriculture, and more. It helped inspire my own early efforts in robotics and AI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
I was hoping someone would post something connecting Asimov's writings about robotics and political thinking, and your post comes closest of what I've seen so far.
Early in Asimov's future history are the "Spacers" who have a lot of robots per person. Aurora in "The Robotics of Dawn" is the most extreme in that regard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Robots_of_Dawn
At the end of the book, the Earthers conclude they have nothing to fear from the Spacers because having so much robotic abundance has somehow sapped the will of the Spacers to expand, and so the Galaxy is open to the teeming masses of less technologically advanced Earthers (or something like that, it's been a long while since I read it).
The general setting as explained in another novel of the time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caves_of_Steel "They live roughly three millennia in Earth's future, a time when hyperspace travel has been discovered, and a few worlds relatively close to Earth have been colonised â" fifty planets known as the "Spacer worlds". The Spacer worlds are rich, have low population density (average population of one hundred million each), and use robot labor very heavily. Meanwhile, Earth is overpopulated (with a total population of eight billion), and strict rules against robots have been passed."
That theme of robots somehow sapping human will for initiative, health, and growth is a recurring theme in Asimov's work. I think the "mighty brains" that solve all human problems including weather control on Earth decide to shut themselves off at some point? Harry Seldon's "plan" hinges on a mysterious working-behind-the-scenes Second Foundation. Also, the advanced robots that continue from the previous novels are also said to somehow direct human affairs behind-the-scenes for human betterment (whatever that is) without being known, because if their influence was known it would somehow be bad for humanity.
There probably is a lot to discuss there about themes that relate to capitalism, communism, and socialism. Any discussion of such should bear in min a point that Chomsky makes, that the USSR claimed socialism was what it was doing as "Communism" even though what the USSR was more about was totalitarianism/authoritarianism at the time. But Chomsky also suggests the USA in vilifying socialism as what the USSR did also was doing that as self-justification for its own power structures and to avoid people thinking about alternatives. We have seen over the past few decades in the USA the vast increasing concentration of wealth as the wealthy buy favorable laws and also buy non-profits to spew pro-wealth-centralization propaganda, resulting in essentially flat real wages while the GDP more than doubled. Contrast that with more "socialist" countries of Western Europe like the Netherlands, Sweden, or even Germany, which in general show overall higher levels of health and happiness across the population that the USA.
On modern Germany: http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/ "How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place?
The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
By today's US standards, the "New Deal" is socialism, and the US Republicans are bent on turning it back in any way they can -- and many US Democrats for the most part are willing to let them under some notion of "compromise".
If you have the technology to build generation ships, then you essentially have the technology to build self-replicating space habitats which can duplicate themselves using sunlight and asteroidal ores. (See JD Bernal's ideas form the 1920s or GK O'Neill's from the 1970s or MT Savage's ideas from the 1990s). WIth such technology, there woudl be enough living space for quadrillions of humans in just this one solar system.
Of course, in a thousand years or so, we may be bumping into such limits for the solar system if we grow exponentially. Still, that is without even figuring out how to tap zero-point energy to create energy and matter from "empty" space and also return it to "empty" space when you are done with it.
Also, more likely, humanity may go the way of Italy with declining birth rates way below replacement, in part from an economic system that prevents the young from having enough resources to be likely to start families, and also so many other distractions that make family-building seem less attractive by comparison.. In general, industrialized countries start shrinking population-wise, except for immigration from older less-materially-focused cultures with higher birth rates. Perhaps the Amish will inherit the stars?
Anyway, space habitats are alternatives to "planets". which seem like a very inefficient way mass-wise to create a layer of air and water in a certain temperature. One planet could support a few billion humans on the surface, or the same amount of matter could support tens of trillions of humans if made into space habitats.
Still, with growth in population and technology aroudn the solar system, it would then be almost certain some humans (or their post-human descendants or machines) would try to bring some part of it to other stars for whatever reasons. This would be a bit like of the way ancient bacteria probably spread from other stars to seed Earth? If we can figure out how to productively tap zero-point energy, we may see a gradual expansion of infrastructure into free space between star systems, with people making matter as needed as they go. Not sure of the gravitational collapse risks though, with "gravity pollution" as a future version of greenhouse gas pollution? Well, someone else's problem.:-)
But, sadly, our scarcity-based ideologies may well doom us first, as we turn all those technologies of potential cooperative abundance into competitove weapons of mass-destruction to fight over perceived scarcity (even ignoring the Italy problem), That may explain the Fermi paradox? We need a new enlightenment if we are to survive this phase-change possible by increasing technological abilities. See for example JP Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" which is a story about a generation ship going to a planet around another star.
The reason diagnosis is problematical is that most illness in our society comes from poor nutrition (and sometimes other lifestyle choices). The body may break down in endless different ways on a poor diet -- but the commonality of the poor diet. So why even bother in most cases to figure out specifically how the disease is cause by poor diet? Granted, some small amount of disease may not fit this model -- but most does. For stuff that does not fit, we are getting better computer tools for diagnosis every day.
"Of course, as others have pointed out, it all boils down to how the AMA keeps MDs artificially scarce so that their wages are inflated way beyond what they need to be...."
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report "The Flexner Report[1] is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by the professional educator Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexner Report and its aftermath. The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. Many American medical schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Flexner Report, and subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were closed outright. The Report also concluded that there were too many medical schools in the USA, and that too many doctors were being trained. A repercussion of the Flexner Report, resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool....
One of the consequences of Flexner's advocacy of university-based medical education was that medical education became much more expensive, putting such education out of reach of all but upper-class white men. The small "proprietary" schools Flexner condemned, which were contended to have been based in generations-old folk traditions rather than relatively recent Western science, did admit African-Americans, women, and students of limited financial means. These students usually could not afford six to eight years of university education, and were often simply denied admission to medical schools affiliated with universities. While many such doctors continued to practice, they did so under proscribed circumstances and for less pay. It was also more difficult for people of color, residents of rural areas, and for those of limited means to obtain medical care in any form."
Before writing this report, Flexner has studied school children and realized that hands-on learning was better than the rote learning prevalent at the time. His suggestions about that were mostly ignored. Unfortunately, he applied the same idea to medical training where it is for many reasons inappropriate. Ultimately, being a "hands on" problem solving physician is mostly a bad idea. Most illnesses people suffer from relate to diet, lifestyle, poverty, and social stress. See Dr. Joel Fuhrnan or Dr. Andre Weil's writings for examples. Physicians should have been taught the basics in these areas, and learned how to persuade patients to return to healthy cultural basics. Instead, they became pill pushers and procedure pushers, always treating and palliating, but rarely preventing or curing. And over the past century, US Americans in many ways have become sicker and sicker, suffering from "disease of affluence" like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and gout, with an increasing "frailspan" at the end of life. Yet, we have known a better ways towards health, for thousands of years, including sunlight, eating more vegetables, fasting, humor, and so on.. Still, a good solid maybe 20% of modern medicine is indeed useful and miraculous (like trauma surgery) -- it's just that most of the rest is problematical.. One example -- the scam of most heart surgery: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx "Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree
"And what bright minds are going to go to 4 years of med school at around $50k per year after college (or even $0 per year if you fix that), then do residency at 80 hours/week for 3-7 more years after that, for around a decade of extra training, to get out making $100k for 60-80hrs week of work with no flexibility, working nights/weekend/holidays, missing family events, kids birthdays, etc etc? Answer; no one you want diagnosing or operating on you. Probably no one, period."
Thanks for the great reply. PRT ideas are really cool (good fictional example is in Logan's Run). Wish I had more time to provide a more detailed reply. But essentially, I think some of these issues are points of uncertainty.
How much would electric cars costs go down with mass production and a build-out of recharging infrastructure? How much safer would the cars be with just a bit more research and testing if there was a trillion dollar initiative (on the order of the Interstate Highway initiative of the 1950s)? How soon would be have fusion energy to power these cars with another trillion dollar initiative (a slashdot article a while back said we were US$80 billion away)? If we can spend trillions on Iraq (including future obligations like to care for injured soldiers), and trillions for wall street bailouts, and trillions for "quantiative easing" as mostly a gift to the banks, shouldn't be able to put a couple trillion into upgrading the US transportation system which is still at the core of US commerce and defense? How many varieties of vehicles do people really want? How much of the US military is ostensibly justified to protect supplies of oil? How much of the current US military posture is obsolete or ironic (i.e. expensive aircraft carriers perhaps being sitting ducks for either submarines or missiles, tanks being vulnerable to cheap drones, 3D-printed military robotics used to fight over economic ideas like capitalism that are falling apart due to 3D printer and advanced robotics eliminating the value of most human labor, etc.)? Could a trillion dollars invested in battery research lead to major breakthroughs? Would human behavior change some with a greater sense of abundance? Probably no one knows all these answers for sure, so fertile ground for lots of discussion.
BTW, I'd be willing to spend more on "defense" as long as it was well spent; I feel the current US defense spending is ineffective ("planning to refight the last war" etc.); to my mind, making the US transportation system safer, more resilient, and more self-reliant is an example of improving the intrinsic security of the USA (including saving 30,000 lives and perhaps 10X that serious injuries per year). And that's just the USA: http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/28/opinion/sutter-road-deaths/ "The ongoing Pulitzer project highlights sobering facts: Roads kill 1.24 million people each year, and by 2030, that annual number is expected to jump to 3.6 million."
The original justification for the Interstate Highway system was "defense" (including to land airplanes): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System "The Interstate Highway System gained a champion in President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was influenced by his experiences as a young Army officer crossing the country in the 1919 Army Convoy on the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America. Eisenhower gained an appreciation of the Reichsautobahn system, the first "national" implementation of modern Germany's Autobahn network as a necessary component of a national defense system while he was serving as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II.[9] He recognized that the proposed system would also provide key ground transport routes for military supplies and troop deployments in case of an emergency or foreign invasion."
Yeah, it is amazing what is possible technologically compared to politically/socially. I wrote a related essay here: "Getting to 100 social-technical points" https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openmanufacturing/BByqMARHqOw "One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.:-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points. So, 50 * 2 = 100. Or, 2 * 50 = 100. or, 10 * 10 = 100.
Social points might be things like learning to share better, or learning to get along with each other better in resolving conflicts with less damage, or in general, even eventually a global mindshift:
"Global Mindshift: The Wombat" http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml Technical points are like the ones we are usually talking about here, how to make things efficiently and effectively.
Let us consider three scenarios for these points, with the numbers as above...."
These levels can probably go up and down. So, the USA is maybe a 3 out of 100 socially (for emphasizing selfishness over community and short-term over long-term) but maybe an 10 out of 100 technologically/infrastructurally? So, 3 * 10 = 30, or about a third of the way to abundance for all? Fusion power might increase that technology level to 20? A 1960s/1970s-like social renaissance might bring the social level back up to 10? Put both of those together, and we easily could provide abundance for all (like Bucky Fuller wrote about being possible decades ago). Add nanotech-based 3D printers to fusion to bring the US tech level up to, say, 30, and even with social problems keeping the US at 3, at 3 * 30 = 90 we would be close to providing abundance for all. Still might not be there because at a social level of 3, ideas like "artificial scarcity" (such as copyright, patents, DRM, etc.) still seem like productive helpful ideas as opposed to immoral harmful ones. Or, if the USA got up to 10 socially, with say a "basic income" for all, then our current technology might be enough for abundance for all. Yet, having said that, "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed" (William Gibson), so one can see more advanced communities socially here and there (including on the internet here and there) and some technology ideas have not yet become widespread but may soon. Inside a social bubble like, say, the Google Corporation, there is abundance for all already.
Metal is cool, but wood is pretty amazing in its own way. It is in a sense self-replicating, And to work with it artistically you need to think about grain and species and dryness and so on. Some woodworkers look for special branches shapes in the forest that they convert to things like chairs, tables, or special sculptures.
I've heard of education at some universities like MIT being called "drinking from a firehose". There is always so much to learn. The Buddhist path, in the sense of prioritization and simplification to some meaningful end may be a good strategy for having fun. Even just one Minecraft-like simulated world could be made effectively infinite, if you are looking for endless new vistas -- although in another sense, much of it is probably just more of the same.
By me from 2009 (excerpts): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openmanufacturing/bNyZ6qupGFU "This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity....
As a rough approximation, sixteen million new cars a year times US$30,000 a car (lower price through volume) would be US$480 billion a year, an amount easily found by reducing some of the about US$1 trillion defense budget (including everything) and US$2.5 trillion health care cost which is about half paid in taxes (total US$3.trillion for those two things, about US$2,25 trillion in taxes). Essentially, US$480 billion a year for free-to-the-user safe electric cars would be only about 20% of the US$2.25 trillion a year in taxes we spend on health care and defense. And in turn, we would save a big chunk of US$164 billion a year for accidents, and a big chunk of the defense budget spent to defend oil supplies, and a big chunk of other medical costs related to environmental pollution, and a big chunk of costs related to global climate change. So, overall, the US tax payer would probably save money on taxes by giving away free open-source safe luxury electric cars (or, at least plug-in hybrids to start).
Beyond that, then there is the additional benefits that more research in auto safety (even to the cost of hundreds of billions of US dollars a year), especially in perfecting cars that drive themselves at night using radar. Such cars might eliminate virtually all driving accidents eventually, as well as let the human "driver" of such a car use the internet or sleep during the trip (about 90% of serious accidents happen at night, often related to poor visibility or tiredness). One such example of great research in this area (although it may not be FOSS yet?):
"Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering" http://pave.princeton.edu/
So, why don't we do this right now? I'd suggest it is mainly due to scarcity ideology creating artificial scarcity. For instance, the same computer technologies that can be used to design and operate safer cars are instead used to manage electronic credit or to produce fancy advertising and astroturfing related to promoting free market fundamentalism.
Essentially, it's all ideology (or ignorance, or corruption, or vested interests, which may all be essentially the same thing), because as I show above, it is even financially cheaper to be both financially-subsidized free-as-in-beer and open source free-as-in-freedom. There are also other various freedoms that safer free-to-the-user electric cars would give us (including freedom from seeing loved ones die in car accidents, by cancer caused by gasoline additives, or by hurricanes caused by global climate change).
So, I'd suggest, over the next ten to twenty years, this is a major change we will likely see in the USA's personal transportation system -- self-driving free-to-the-user safer electric cars (or plug-in hybrids) built using FOSS methodology. And, taxes will then go *down*, along with other direct to the user expenses for insurance, maintenance, and energy, because our transportation system will then, by adjusting for externalities (like national security, pollution, and health care costs), be cheaper overall to design, build, operate, and recycle."
So, in that sense, expensive cars are another example of market failure due to unaccounted-for externalities.
At three minutes in, specifically, she suggests a stress could trigger autism, and such a stress could be a fever resulting from a vaccination injection, the result of which in children who are predisposed by a mitochondrial disorder could thus set off the symptoms of autism...
Dr. Julie Gerberding has since left her position as head of the CDC and is now the president of Merck's Vaccine division. As you point out, people against vaccines also may have financial interests at stake (book sales, medical practices, product sales, etc.). Whatever one can say about vaccines, certainly understanding the conflicts of interest and weasel words pervading the whole field seems like a huge job... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Gerberding
To build on some other suggestions in comments to this article, since getting enough vitamin D, eating more vegetables, avoiding dairy, getting exercise, nursing children past age two, and so on have been proven to often improve health and increase disease resistance in humans, it seems like any family which is not doing all of those things is putting the community at risk. So, the question is, should we legally enforce "BlueZones" and "Nutritarianism" on the world in order to protect those with compromised immune systems because they avoid sunlight, eat poorly, don't exercise, were bottle-fed, and so on? http://www.bluezones.com/ http://www.drfuhrman.com/children/default.aspx
At the very least, as a deterrent to creating health hazards for themselves and others, perhaps people who admit to having eaten processed meats (or who otherwise can be identified by credit card purchase records) probably should not have any possibly related medical conditions covered by insurance?
It would help to have better tools to use to wade through all the muck (including for detecting statistical fallacies as the grandparent post by "Todd Knarr" points out). Some suggestion
Peer review stretched to its limit by money
on
How Science Goes Wrong
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· Score: 5, Interesting
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."
... but I don't know when numerical control was first done for it? My father worked on a system to put metal on the bottom of ceramic cookware to improve heat conductivity at METCO in the 1980s, although even then that was done by hand for tests. Flame spray was commonly used then to build up worn metal shafts for repairs. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_spraying "In classical (developed between 1910 and 1920) but still widely used processes such as flame spraying and wire arc spraying, the particle velocities are generally low ( [less than] 150 m/s), and raw materials must be molten to be deposited. Plasma spraying, developed in the 1970s, uses a high-temperature plasma jet generated by arc discharge with typical temperatures >15000 K, which makes it possible to spray refractory materials such as oxides, molybdenum, etc."
When life gives you "lemons"... Me from 2009: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.:-)
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.:-)
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.:-)"
Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time.:-)... [My] objective is analysts [eavesdropping on these words] being reborn mentally as post-scarcity beings...
My advice to people here is to build movements in such a way that the CIA can be proud of them:-) as well as so Smari and Bryan and others here can be proud of them too.:-) And, given the CIA is hiring machinists, build a movement where, in a good way, you assume everyone in it is working for the CIA,:-) but where you still get important stuff done in moving the world towards a post-scarcity open future. Just like people should assume Google is a division of the NSA and/or CIA.:-) An impossible task? Well, consider it more like a creative challenge.:-)"
Still, I guess most people just don't seem to be able to get this level of indirection yet.. Sometimes you just have to accept the inevitable (see Kubler-Ross on grief) and make the most of it. If it wasn't the NSA tapping everything in the USA, it would be the UK and India and China and so on (who may well be doing it too). So if you accept the growth of the NSA or equivalent as inevitable, then what kind of place should it become?
As I say there: "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful...."
That dovetails with my points here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.... There is a fundamental mismatch bet
Difficult conversations,yes. And here is an even more difficult aspect, because there is no profit in it for the mainstream cancer industry: http://www.lef.org/protocols/cancer/brain_tumor_01.htm "Vitamin D3, the chemical form of vitamin D made in the skin and sold as a nutritional supplement, calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxy vitamin D), the active form of vitamin D, and various chemical analogs and metabolites of vitamin D, have all been shown to inhibit growth and trigger apoptosis in neuroblastoma and glioma cells (Naveilhan P et al 1994, Baudet C et al 1996, Elias J et al 2003, van Ginkel PR et al 2007)."
But once you have cancer, getting rid of it is iffy no matter what you do. The best thing to do is to prevent it, which again is fairly inexpensive, without much profit for the mainstream medical industry: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
The USA even subsidizes creating cancer through its agricultural policies: http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html "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 pyramidsâ"subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
I doubt this level of alleged fraud is common, but it does show the risk of conflict of interest in oncology, where the same doctor prescribing the treatments profits from carrying them out: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/07/1229570/-Michigan-doctor-arrested-for-purposely-misdiagnosing-cancer "In the course of the scheme, prosecutors say Dr. Fata falsified and directed others to falsify documents. MHO billed Medicare for approximately $35 million dollars over a two-year period, approximately $25 of which is attributable to Dr. Fata, federal officials said The complaint further alleges that Dr. Fata directed the administration of unnecessary chemotherapy to patients in remission; deliberate misdiagnosis of patients as having cancer to justify unnecessary cancer treatment; administration of chemotherapy to end-of-life patients who will not benefit from the treatment; deliberate misdiagnosis of patients without cancer to justify expensive testing; fabrication of other diagnoses such as anemia and fatigue to justify unnecessary hematology treatments, and distribution of controlled substances to patients without medical necessity or are administered at dangerous levels."
Conflicts of interest apply to research as well: "Financial conflicts of interest in economic analyses in oncology." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21441858 "Some financial conf
There are disagreements on the effect of starch on health, one being between Dr. Joel Fuhmran (advocating more calories from leafy green vegetables, other non-starchy vegetables, and beans) and Dr. John McDougall (advocating calories more from starchy plants like sweet potato and whole grains, in part on pragmatic grounds). Even as they both agree that starch should be the basis of calories for humans. See: http://www.lanimuelrath.com/diet-nutrition/mcdougall-vs-fuhrman-notes-for-you-from-the-great-plant-based-doctors-debate/
See my other posts here for other related links and also agreement that many vegetarians' diets are pretty bad for reasons like you mention, and also pros and cons on some degree of animal products (up to 10% or so of calories)
In general, the longest lived societies get moderate exercise in the sunshine (vitamin D) and eat a lot of legumes (lentils, beans, etc.) and only limited animal products. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/12/Vendiagram.gif http://www.bluezones.com/ "The people inhabiting Blue Zones share common lifestyle characteristics that contribute to their longevity. The Venn diagram at the right highlights the following six shared characteristics among the people of Okinawa, Sardinia, and Loma Linda Blue Zones:[8]
Family -- Family is put ahead of other concerns.
No smoking -- Smoking is not found in large quantities.
Plant-based diet -- Except for the Sardinian diet, the majority of food consumed is derived from plants.
Constant moderate physical activity -- Moderate physical activity is an inseparable part of life.
Social engagement -- People of all ages are socially active and integrated into their communities.
Legumes -- Legumes are commonly consumed."
However, for people who have serious heart disease, then things change. Meat may have a much worse effect then. If such a person wants to reverse their heart disease, they may have to go on a diet without probably any meat (or very very little) for a time: http://www.heartattackproof.com/huffpost.htm "Answer: In an intensive 5 hour counseling session for a group of heart patients my first priority is to eliminate the mystery of what causes their disease. It has not been stress, or genes. It is their western diet of processed oil, dairy, and meat. Hypertension, diabetes, and smoking must be controlled but food trumps all. I spend at least an hour defining the protective role of endothelial cells and nitric oxide functioning as the ultimate guardians of our blood vessels. They quickly understand that their lifetime of ingesting these harmful products has totally overwhelmed and destroyed their endothelium to an extent where it is unable to protect them. They fully grasp that they must forever eliminate ingesting foods that will further destroy their already compromised endothelium. They understand heart disease is a food borne illness....
They understand that they can halt their disease. They are presented with my scientific articles demonstrating reversal of disease. They learn that anginal chest pain may diminish or disappear within 10-14 days in some patients while others may take longer. We share our data confirming reversal of carotid artery disease to the brain, coronary artery disease of the heart, peripheral vascular disease in the extremities, and the reversal of erectile dysfunction. They are made to appreciate how rapidly and powerfully the endothelial
"Meat is often a cheaper source of your necessary nutrients than vegetables."
Ignoring how meat does not have essential phytonutrients in it (as you mention), consider the political reason of why that is the case as far as "calories": http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html "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."
On your other points, most vegetarians' diets probably aren't very good. They may have too many refined sugars and too few vegetables, too little variety, and too little of things like iodine. It takes a lot of learning and opportunity and time to eat well as a vegetarian. But what is important to acknowledge is that there are plant-based diet styles that will reverse heart disease. So that 32% figure might be some kind of average, but it does not reflect the best possible outcome for someone who is really trying to reverse or prevent heart disease. See my other post here for links, or see as one example, Dr. Esselstyn' work: http://www.heartattackproof.com/
I'd agree though that some small amount of free-range organic grass-fed meat or other similar animal products can potentially be part of a reasonably healthy diet -- other ethical and financial and scalability and externality questions aside. Even Dr. Fuhrman agrees on that part as far as the research -- that if you get 10% or less of your calories from animal products, you are doing pretty well. http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx https://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article5.aspx "Therefore I encourage consumption of a carefully planned vegetarian diet or one that includes a small amount of animal products, perhaps 10% of total calories or less, rather than 40 -60 % that children eat today. An animal-product-rich omnivorous diet cannot be considered nutritious food or called healthful."
High fat diets of animal products laced with growth hormones and such are probably bad for children in general. And also, there are few to no purely vegan diets in history. Even gorillas get some small percentage of their calories from termites and other insects they eat incidentally. B12 is another nutrient than can be an issue, usually provided by animal products, and some say can be supplied from dirty vegetables. Our food supply is in that sense too "clean" to be a pure vegan in (without special effort and selected supplements, if that). Vegans who are also neat freaks may be setting themselves up for disaster in that sense; yet on the other hand, since much "organic" food is grown using animal manure from livestock operations, not washing your vegetables well is a health risk too from E.coli contamination.
It does not take much animal products though to provide some essentials. Related example: http://drbass.com/generations.html "This text is still extremely important, since similar mistakes are still being made today, typically by aspiring vegans and vegan raw-foodists. Deficiencies th
Also, if arteries in you heart are all clogged up, then what about arteries in you arms, legs, liver, and brain? Cardiovascular disease affects every system in the body -- it is just that heart problems tend to be more tragically obvious than other clogs. So, the best approach is not to unclog a little part of the hearth that will just clog back up soon, but to unclog everything by eating differently.
Further research led me to Dr. McDougall, and registered dietitian Jeff Novick. All these people gave hope for arresting, and perhaps reversing, my condition through diet and lifestyle modifications. In contrast, neither my internist, nor my cardiologist, was aware of these doctors or their programs or any significant benefit to lifestyle modification. They discouraged me from delaying the surgery, but accepted my decision to at least give diet and "medical management" a try.
My early results were promising. My first blood test on the diet showed my cholesterol was now down to 120 mg/dL and my LDL was 60 mg/dL. My internist was astounded. Medication had only lowered my numbers slightly. I was on Dr. Esselstyn's exact program, which is virtually identical to that of Dr. McDougall, and I hired the McDougall Program dietitian, Jeff Novick, RD, as my coach. I found that everything I needed was available immediately and for free through Dr. McDougall's website. I learned that my results would directly reflect my compliance with the program. I resolved that I would do this program 100 percent. If I could not be 100 percent on my own or failed to get my doctors' support, then I was going to go to the McDougall Live-in Program without delay. (I still plan on going.) I owed that to myself and my family.
Almost immediately, my chest pain went away. My internist asked how I had accomplished this and my dramatic cholesterol drop, and then became quite interested in my program. I needed his help because of the side effects of the medications that occurred once I changed my diet. I had to quickly get off my blood pressure medications because my readings were extremely low and I was feeling light headed. My blood sugars came way down and I had to terminate my diabetes medication. I eventually stopped all of my Lipitor, yet my total cholesterol stayed at 160 mg/dL (my LDL cholesterol remained at 60 mg/dL). I have lost over 60 pounds since beginning my new diet and exercise program in January of 2008, and I continue to lose as my energy increases. I have had no more kidney stones.
After following my progress for almost a year and a half, the cardiologist wanted to repeat the nuclear heart scan. My internist agreed. He was also sure that I was wrong when I had told him that many clinical trials have shown no important benefits other than pain relief for the surgery they had proposed for me more than a year and a half ago. Despite my many obvious improvements, the cardiologist still believed that coronary artery disease is always progressive, and told me not to get my hopes up about the new test. I repeated the exercise nuclear heart scan on May 5, 2009.
This time, I felt great running on the treadmill. I took my heart rate beyond the maximum expected for my age, and had no pain. The monitors I was connected to indicated no problems. Immediately after the test, I spoke with my cardiologist, who seemed somewhat perplexed. He chose his words very carefully. He wanted to know if I had felt chest pain on the first exam in 2008. I think he did not believe the prev
This was originally posted to Slashdot on May 25 2002: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33107&cid=3582999 It was in relation to an article: "MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!" about the MPAA wanting copyright protection built into all computer hardware. I sent a copy to Richard Stallman back then and he said it made him laugh.:-) My comments to the Department of Justice request for comments were in the form of this satire:
Transcript of April 1, 2016 MicroSlaw Presidential Speech (Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under 2011 Fee Requirements Law)
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far more efficiently, inexpensively and, I assure you, justly, by large corpora
Key line from there to echo your point: "The politicians and their supporters said the solution was to lower taxes and cut social benefits to promote business investment. They tried that, but the robots still got all the jobs."
Good luck: http://www.terrywahls.com/ "For four years, secondary progressive multiple sclerosis confined Dr. Terry Wahls to a tilt-recline wheelchair. But by using Functional Medicine to create the Wahls Protocolâ, Dr. Wahls has transformed her health and body: now she walks easily without a cane and commutes by bicycle. Dr. Wahls uses these diets and protocols in her primary care and traumatic brain injury clinics and is leading a clinical trial to test her protocols on others."
See also Dr. Joel Fuhrman's writings on "Nutritarianism" and similar. http://www.drfuhrman.com/success/SuccessStory.aspx?id=260 "I heard about Dr. Fuhrman and made an appointment. He told me on my first visit that MS is not a problem and we could handle this (my wife broke down in tears). Dr. Fuhrman explained everything, gave me a diet to follow and I was on my way. I have only had one follow up visit with him because I have steadily improved (no more numbness when I bend my neck, no more touching cold things on my legs and feeling like they are hot). I have absolutely no symptoms.
Since then, I have sent many people to Dr Fuhrman, some with MS, some with Lupus and they all are doing better. I regularly buy his books by the case and give them out. I tell every one who will listen about my story. I firmly believe that there are no coincidences in this world, everything has a purpose including my diagnosis. I am grateful for the opportunity to be helping Dr Fuhrman with his life purpose by sharing my story. Thank You!"
Anyway, hope some indirect good might come out of this shutdown for your family if this information helps.
"Because the robot is loyal to whomever sets it up, one rogue billionaire can buy up a robot army and conquer his choice of any number of banana republics that he wants.... So a single man to conquer a nation wouldn't be unheard of. In fact no one might even know who is the man who conquered their country."
Good points in theory Something related I created: "The richest man in the world: A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income.": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
I met Mark Raibert in the mid-1980s while hanging out at CMU when he was just getting going with robots that hopped on one leg. He's come along way the past quarter century. Much of the robotics work at CMU then (as probably now) was funded by the military. I've been thinking about these sorts of social and economic aspects of robotics ever since. See my website for more related ideas.
BTW, in practice, as was noted by someone else in a comment to another story a week or so ago, it is far easier to design robots that kill all humans (like based on heat signature and shape) than to design robots that distinguish some humans from others.
"Yep. That goes a long way towards explaining the complete lack of innovation in the computer industry. Basically nothing has improved or even changed in the last 30 years."
Personally, cross-platform reasonable speedy VisualWorks Smalltalk from the 1990s in many ways still has not been surpassed (except in the sense it was not free and open source and somewhat lesser stuff like Python and now Java is). The Newton's 1990s view of a PDA with integrated soups of data is still (in some ways) advanced beyond Android. Or from: http://inventors.about.com/od/istartinventions/a/internet.htm "Vannevar Bush first proposed the basics of hypertext in 1945 [in "As We May Think"]. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, HTML (hypertext markup language), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators) in 1990." Project Xanadu was around in the 1980s doing Hypertext, inspired by Theodore Sturegon's 1950 short story "The Skills of Xanadu".
Don't confuse the eventual implementation of part of old ideas (like Kay's 1970s DynaBook vision being realized in part in today's laptops and smartphones) with the notion of conceptual progress.
Even much of robotics and AI is just old ideas finally being more workable with better hardware. http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm "The stupendous growth and competitiveness of the computer industry is one reason. A less appreciated one is that intelligent machine research did not make steady progress in its first fifty years, it marked time for thirty of them! Though general computer power grew a hundred thousand fold from 1960 to 1990, the computer power available to AI programs barely budged from 1 MIPS during those three decades. "
Much of what young kids are interested in is what they have seen in movies, read in stories, or played with in games, and so on. True, they may sometimes put things together in new ways. But its still very often old, old ideas they are working with.
Slashdot Mirror
"What we envisioned: Man overseeing the construction robots doing their elaborate dance. What we got: robotic sensors collect every bit of observable data, so that the man can be put into good use with highest efficiency."
Good to see people starting to think about this. To generalize along those lines, see my essay here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
In that sense, I'm glad to see this article about the construction use of drones. The movie "Silent Running" showed me the potential of "drones" for construction, maintenance, surgery, agriculture, and more. It helped inspire my own early efforts in robotics and AI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
See my comment here on robotics and economics: http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4422509&cid=45382891
But yes, sad...
I was hoping someone would post something connecting Asimov's writings about robotics and political thinking, and your post comes closest of what I've seen so far.
Early in Asimov's future history are the "Spacers" who have a lot of robots per person. Aurora in "The Robotics of Dawn" is the most extreme in that regard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Robots_of_Dawn
At the end of the book, the Earthers conclude they have nothing to fear from the Spacers because having so much robotic abundance has somehow sapped the will of the Spacers to expand, and so the Galaxy is open to the teeming masses of less technologically advanced Earthers (or something like that, it's been a long while since I read it).
The general setting as explained in another novel of the time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caves_of_Steel
"They live roughly three millennia in Earth's future, a time when hyperspace travel has been discovered, and a few worlds relatively close to Earth have been colonised â" fifty planets known as the "Spacer worlds". The Spacer worlds are rich, have low population density (average population of one hundred million each), and use robot labor very heavily. Meanwhile, Earth is overpopulated (with a total population of eight billion), and strict rules against robots have been passed."
That theme of robots somehow sapping human will for initiative, health, and growth is a recurring theme in Asimov's work. I think the "mighty brains" that solve all human problems including weather control on Earth decide to shut themselves off at some point? Harry Seldon's "plan" hinges on a mysterious working-behind-the-scenes Second Foundation. Also, the advanced robots that continue from the previous novels are also said to somehow direct human affairs behind-the-scenes for human betterment (whatever that is) without being known, because if their influence was known it would somehow be bad for humanity.
There probably is a lot to discuss there about themes that relate to capitalism, communism, and socialism. Any discussion of such should bear in min a point that Chomsky makes, that the USSR claimed socialism was what it was doing as "Communism" even though what the USSR was more about was totalitarianism/authoritarianism at the time. But Chomsky also suggests the USA in vilifying socialism as what the USSR did also was doing that as self-justification for its own power structures and to avoid people thinking about alternatives. We have seen over the past few decades in the USA the vast increasing concentration of wealth as the wealthy buy favorable laws and also buy non-profits to spew pro-wealth-centralization propaganda, resulting in essentially flat real wages while the GDP more than doubled. Contrast that with more "socialist" countries of Western Europe like the Netherlands, Sweden, or even Germany, which in general show overall higher levels of health and happiness across the population that the USA.
On modern Germany:
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
"How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place?
The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
By today's US standards, the "New Deal" is socialism, and the US Republicans are bent on turning it back in any way they can -- and many US Democrats for the most part are willing to let them under some notion of "compromise".
See also:
If you have the technology to build generation ships, then you essentially have the technology to build self-replicating space habitats which can duplicate themselves using sunlight and asteroidal ores. (See JD Bernal's ideas form the 1920s or GK O'Neill's from the 1970s or MT Savage's ideas from the 1990s). WIth such technology, there woudl be enough living space for quadrillions of humans in just this one solar system.
Of course, in a thousand years or so, we may be bumping into such limits for the solar system if we grow exponentially. Still, that is without even figuring out how to tap zero-point energy to create energy and matter from "empty" space and also return it to "empty" space when you are done with it.
Also, more likely, humanity may go the way of Italy with declining birth rates way below replacement, in part from an economic system that prevents the young from having enough resources to be likely to start families, and also so many other distractions that make family-building seem less attractive by comparison.. In general, industrialized countries start shrinking population-wise, except for immigration from older less-materially-focused cultures with higher birth rates. Perhaps the Amish will inherit the stars?
Anyway, space habitats are alternatives to "planets". which seem like a very inefficient way mass-wise to create a layer of air and water in a certain temperature. One planet could support a few billion humans on the surface, or the same amount of matter could support tens of trillions of humans if made into space habitats.
Still, with growth in population and technology aroudn the solar system, it would then be almost certain some humans (or their post-human descendants or machines) would try to bring some part of it to other stars for whatever reasons. This would be a bit like of the way ancient bacteria probably spread from other stars to seed Earth? If we can figure out how to productively tap zero-point energy, we may see a gradual expansion of infrastructure into free space between star systems, with people making matter as needed as they go. Not sure of the gravitational collapse risks though, with "gravity pollution" as a future version of greenhouse gas pollution? Well, someone else's problem. :-)
But, sadly, our scarcity-based ideologies may well doom us first, as we turn all those technologies of potential cooperative abundance into competitove weapons of mass-destruction to fight over perceived scarcity (even ignoring the Italy problem), That may explain the Fermi paradox? We need a new enlightenment if we are to survive this phase-change possible by increasing technological abilities. See for example JP Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" which is a story about a generation ship going to a planet around another star.
Both pill pushers and most diagnostician work is problematical. See my comment here: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4407051&cid=45332611
The reason diagnosis is problematical is that most illness in our society comes from poor nutrition (and sometimes other lifestyle choices). The body may break down in endless different ways on a poor diet -- but the commonality of the poor diet. So why even bother in most cases to figure out specifically how the disease is cause by poor diet? Granted, some small amount of disease may not fit this model -- but most does. For stuff that does not fit, we are getting better computer tools for diagnosis every day.
Maybe of interest: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2011/07/18/how-i-overcame-bipolar-ii/
"What came out of my year without sugar, coffee, or alcohol? I got my life back."
And look into Omega 3s, Vitamin D, light therapy, and eating more vegetables:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/adhd-bipolar-disorder-another-brick-in-the-wall.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/bulletin/December07_Whats_Cooking_Bulletin.html
Migraine are often triggered by food additives, especially sulfites.
Good luck!
"Of course, as others have pointed out, it all boils down to how the AMA keeps MDs artificially scarce so that their wages are inflated way beyond what they need to be. ..."
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report ...
"The Flexner Report[1] is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by the professional educator Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexner Report and its aftermath.
The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical schools to enact higher admission and graduation standards, and to adhere strictly to the protocols of mainstream science in their teaching and research. Many American medical schools fell short of the standard advocated in the Flexner Report, and subsequent to its publication, nearly half of such schools merged or were closed outright. The Report also concluded that there were too many medical schools in the USA, and that too many doctors were being trained. A repercussion of the Flexner Report, resulting from the closure or consolidation of university training, was reversion of American universities to male-only admittance programs to accommodate a smaller admission pool.
One of the consequences of Flexner's advocacy of university-based medical education was that medical education became much more expensive, putting such education out of reach of all but upper-class white men. The small "proprietary" schools Flexner condemned, which were contended to have been based in generations-old folk traditions rather than relatively recent Western science, did admit African-Americans, women, and students of limited financial means. These students usually could not afford six to eight years of university education, and were often simply denied admission to medical schools affiliated with universities. While many such doctors continued to practice, they did so under proscribed circumstances and for less pay. It was also more difficult for people of color, residents of rural areas, and for those of limited means to obtain medical care in any form."
Before writing this report, Flexner has studied school children and realized that hands-on learning was better than the rote learning prevalent at the time. His suggestions about that were mostly ignored. Unfortunately, he applied the same idea to medical training where it is for many reasons inappropriate. Ultimately, being a "hands on" problem solving physician is mostly a bad idea. Most illnesses people suffer from relate to diet, lifestyle, poverty, and social stress. See Dr. Joel Fuhrnan or Dr. Andre Weil's writings for examples. Physicians should have been taught the basics in these areas, and learned how to persuade patients to return to healthy cultural basics. Instead, they became pill pushers and procedure pushers, always treating and palliating, but rarely preventing or curing. And over the past century, US Americans in many ways have become sicker and sicker, suffering from "disease of affluence" like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and gout, with an increasing "frailspan" at the end of life. Yet, we have known a better ways towards health, for thousands of years, including sunlight, eating more vegetables, fasting, humor, and so on.. Still, a good solid maybe 20% of modern medicine is indeed useful and miraculous (like trauma surgery) -- it's just that most of the rest is problematical.. One example -- the scam of most heart surgery:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree
"And what bright minds are going to go to 4 years of med school at around $50k per year after college (or even $0 per year if you fix that), then do residency at 80 hours/week for 3-7 more years after that, for around a decade of extra training, to get out making $100k for 60-80hrs week of work with no flexibility, working nights/weekend/holidays, missing family events, kids birthdays, etc etc? Answer; no one you want diagnosing or operating on you. Probably no one, period."
Thus, something like Watson will eventually replace them and work 24X7 at a much lower cost and with much greater accuracy overall, although before that, it will let fewer doctors do the work of more:
http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/ibm-making-watson-show-its-medical-work/
Thanks for the great reply. PRT ideas are really cool (good fictional example is in Logan's Run). Wish I had more time to provide a more detailed reply. But essentially, I think some of these issues are points of uncertainty.
How much would electric cars costs go down with mass production and a build-out of recharging infrastructure? How much safer would the cars be with just a bit more research and testing if there was a trillion dollar initiative (on the order of the Interstate Highway initiative of the 1950s)? How soon would be have fusion energy to power these cars with another trillion dollar initiative (a slashdot article a while back said we were US$80 billion away)? If we can spend trillions on Iraq (including future obligations like to care for injured soldiers), and trillions for wall street bailouts, and trillions for "quantiative easing" as mostly a gift to the banks, shouldn't be able to put a couple trillion into upgrading the US transportation system which is still at the core of US commerce and defense? How many varieties of vehicles do people really want? How much of the US military is ostensibly justified to protect supplies of oil? How much of the current US military posture is obsolete or ironic (i.e. expensive aircraft carriers perhaps being sitting ducks for either submarines or missiles, tanks being vulnerable to cheap drones, 3D-printed military robotics used to fight over economic ideas like capitalism that are falling apart due to 3D printer and advanced robotics eliminating the value of most human labor, etc.)? Could a trillion dollars invested in battery research lead to major breakthroughs? Would human behavior change some with a greater sense of abundance? Probably no one knows all these answers for sure, so fertile ground for lots of discussion.
BTW, I'd be willing to spend more on "defense" as long as it was well spent; I feel the current US defense spending is ineffective ("planning to refight the last war" etc.); to my mind, making the US transportation system safer, more resilient, and more self-reliant is an example of improving the intrinsic security of the USA (including saving 30,000 lives and perhaps 10X that serious injuries per year). And that's just the USA:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/28/opinion/sutter-road-deaths/
"The ongoing Pulitzer project highlights sobering facts: Roads kill 1.24 million people each year, and by 2030, that annual number is expected to jump to 3.6 million."
The original justification for the Interstate Highway system was "defense" (including to land airplanes):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
"The Interstate Highway System gained a champion in President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was influenced by his experiences as a young Army officer crossing the country in the 1919 Army Convoy on the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America. Eisenhower gained an appreciation of the Reichsautobahn system, the first "national" implementation of modern Germany's Autobahn network as a necessary component of a national defense system while he was serving as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II.[9] He recognized that the proposed system would also provide key ground transport routes for military supplies and troop deployments in case of an emergency or foreign invasion."
So, how about a "war on traffic fatalities"? :-)
Yeah, it is amazing what is possible technologically compared to politically/socially. I wrote a related essay here: :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points. ..."
"Getting to 100 social-technical points"
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openmanufacturing/BByqMARHqOw
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.
So, 50 * 2 = 100.
Or, 2 * 50 = 100.
or, 10 * 10 = 100.
Social points might be things like learning to share better, or learning to get along with each other better in resolving conflicts with less damage, or in general, even eventually a global mindshift:
"Global Mindshift: The Wombat"
http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
Technical points are like the ones we are usually talking about here, how to make things efficiently and effectively.
Let us consider three scenarios for these points, with the numbers as above.
These levels can probably go up and down. So, the USA is maybe a 3 out of 100 socially (for emphasizing selfishness over community and short-term over long-term) but maybe an 10 out of 100 technologically/infrastructurally? So, 3 * 10 = 30, or about a third of the way to abundance for all? Fusion power might increase that technology level to 20? A 1960s/1970s-like social renaissance might bring the social level back up to 10? Put both of those together, and we easily could provide abundance for all (like Bucky Fuller wrote about being possible decades ago). Add nanotech-based 3D printers to fusion to bring the US tech level up to, say, 30, and even with social problems keeping the US at 3, at 3 * 30 = 90 we would be close to providing abundance for all. Still might not be there because at a social level of 3, ideas like "artificial scarcity" (such as copyright, patents, DRM, etc.) still seem like productive helpful ideas as opposed to immoral harmful ones. Or, if the USA got up to 10 socially, with say a "basic income" for all, then our current technology might be enough for abundance for all. Yet, having said that, "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed" (William Gibson), so one can see more advanced communities socially here and there (including on the internet here and there) and some technology ideas have not yet become widespread but may soon. Inside a social bubble like, say, the Google Corporation, there is abundance for all already.
Metal is cool, but wood is pretty amazing in its own way. It is in a sense self-replicating, And to work with it artistically you need to think about grain and species and dryness and so on. Some woodworkers look for special branches shapes in the forest that they convert to things like chairs, tables, or special sculptures.
I've heard of education at some universities like MIT being called "drinking from a firehose". There is always so much to learn. The Buddhist path, in the sense of prioritization and simplification to some meaningful end may be a good strategy for having fun. Even just one Minecraft-like simulated world could be made effectively infinite, if you are looking for endless new vistas -- although in another sense, much of it is probably just more of the same.
By me from 2009 (excerpts): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openmanufacturing/bNyZ6qupGFU ...
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity.
As a rough approximation, sixteen million new cars a year times US$30,000 a car (lower price through volume) would be US$480 billion a year, an amount easily found by reducing some of the about US$1 trillion defense budget (including everything) and US$2.5 trillion health care cost which is about half paid in taxes (total US$3.trillion for those two things, about US$2,25 trillion in taxes). Essentially, US$480 billion a year for free-to-the-user safe electric cars would be only about 20% of the US$2.25 trillion a year in taxes we spend on health care and defense. And in turn, we would save a big chunk of US$164 billion a year for accidents, and a big chunk of the defense budget spent to defend oil supplies, and a big chunk of other medical costs related to environmental pollution, and a big chunk of costs related to global climate change. So, overall, the US tax payer would probably save money on taxes by giving away free open-source safe luxury electric cars (or, at least plug-in hybrids to start).
Beyond that, then there is the additional benefits that more research in auto safety (even to the cost of hundreds of billions of US dollars a year), especially in perfecting cars that drive themselves at night using radar. Such cars might eliminate virtually all driving accidents eventually, as well as let the human "driver" of such a car use the internet or sleep during the trip (about 90% of serious accidents happen at night, often related to poor visibility or tiredness). One such example of great research in this area (although it may not be FOSS yet?):
"Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering"
http://pave.princeton.edu/
So, why don't we do this right now? I'd suggest it is mainly due to scarcity ideology creating artificial scarcity. For instance, the same computer technologies that can be used to design and operate safer cars are instead used to manage electronic credit or to produce fancy advertising and astroturfing related to promoting free market fundamentalism.
Essentially, it's all ideology (or ignorance, or corruption, or vested interests, which may all be essentially the same thing), because as I show above, it is even financially cheaper to be both financially-subsidized free-as-in-beer and open source free-as-in-freedom. There are also other various freedoms that safer free-to-the-user electric cars would give us (including freedom from seeing loved ones die in car accidents, by cancer caused by gasoline additives, or by hurricanes caused by global climate change).
So, I'd suggest, over the next ten to twenty years, this is a major change we will likely see in the USA's personal transportation system -- self-driving free-to-the-user safer electric cars (or plug-in hybrids) built using FOSS methodology. And, taxes will then go *down*, along with other direct to the user expenses for insurance, maintenance, and energy, because our transportation system will then, by adjusting for externalities (like national security, pollution, and health care costs), be cheaper overall to design, build, operate, and recycle."
So, in that sense, expensive cars are another example of market failure due to unaccounted-for externalities.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/04/22/head-of-cdc-admits-on-cnn-that-vaccines-can-trigger-autism.aspx
"Recently Julie Gerberding, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), appeared on Dr. Sanjay Gupta's show House Call and explained that vaccines can trigger autism in a vulnerable subset of children. This is the claim that many parents have been making since at least the 1980s, and they have been dismissed and even mocked for making it."
At three minutes in, specifically, she suggests a stress could trigger autism, and such a stress could be a fever resulting from a vaccination injection, the result of which in children who are predisposed by a mitochondrial disorder could thus set off the symptoms of autism...
See also though, along the lines you suggest, for other more likely and more frequent causes of autism though, such as vitamin D deficiency and food additives and so on:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
Dr. Julie Gerberding has since left her position as head of the CDC and is now the president of Merck's Vaccine division. As you point out, people against vaccines also may have financial interests at stake (book sales, medical practices, product sales, etc.). Whatever one can say about vaccines, certainly understanding the conflicts of interest and weasel words pervading the whole field seems like a huge job...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Gerberding
To build on some other suggestions in comments to this article, since getting enough vitamin D, eating more vegetables, avoiding dairy, getting exercise, nursing children past age two, and so on have been proven to often improve health and increase disease resistance in humans, it seems like any family which is not doing all of those things is putting the community at risk. So, the question is, should we legally enforce "BlueZones" and "Nutritarianism" on the world in order to protect those with compromised immune systems because they avoid sunlight, eat poorly, don't exercise, were bottle-fed, and so on?
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/children/default.aspx
Maybe we should start by cracking down on luncheonmeat consumers? :-)
http://www.ehow.com/info_8360513_luncheon-meat-dangers.html
http://institutefornaturalhealing.com/2012/04/processed-meats-declared-too-dangerous-for-human-consumption/
At the very least, as a deterrent to creating health hazards for themselves and others, perhaps people who admit to having eaten processed meats (or who otherwise can be identified by credit card purchase records) probably should not have any possibly related medical conditions covered by insurance?
The medical literature is very messy, for lots of reasons, such as expressed in quotes I've collected here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
It would help to have better tools to use to wade through all the muck (including for detecting statistical fallacies as the grandparent post by "Todd Knarr" points out). Some suggestion
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."
I've collected some other quotes on social problems in science here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
... but I don't know when numerical control was first done for it? My father worked on a system to put metal on the bottom of ceramic cookware to improve heat conductivity at METCO in the 1980s, although even then that was done by hand for tests. Flame spray was commonly used then to build up worn metal shafts for repairs. From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_spraying
"In classical (developed between 1910 and 1920) but still widely used processes such as flame spraying and wire arc spraying, the particle velocities are generally low ( [less than] 150 m/s), and raw materials must be molten to be deposited. Plasma spraying, developed in the 1970s, uses a high-temperature plasma jet generated by arc discharge with typical temperatures >15000 K, which makes it possible to spray refractory materials such as oxides, molybdenum, etc."
Thanks for everything, Dad!
When life gives you "lemons"... Me from 2009: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html :-) :-) :-)" :-) ... [My] objective is analysts [eavesdropping on these words] being reborn mentally as post-scarcity beings ... :-) as well as so Smari and Bryan and others here can be proud of them too. :-) And, given the CIA is hiring machinists, build a movement where, in a good way, you assume everyone in it is working for the CIA, :-) but where you still get important stuff done in moving the world towards a post-scarcity open future. Just like people should assume Google is a division of the NSA and/or CIA. :-) An impossible task? Well, consider it more like a creative challenge. :-)"
"Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.
Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time.
My advice to people here is to build movements in such a way that the CIA can be proud of them
Still, I guess most people just don't seem to be able to get this level of indirection yet.. Sometimes you just have to accept the inevitable (see Kubler-Ross on grief) and make the most of it. If it wasn't the NSA tapping everything in the USA, it would be the UK and India and China and so on (who may well be doing it too). So if you accept the growth of the NSA or equivalent as inevitable, then what kind of place should it become?
As I say there: "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. ..."
That dovetails with my points here: ... There is a fundamental mismatch bet
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
Difficult conversations,yes. And here is an even more difficult aspect, because there is no profit in it for the mainstream cancer industry: http://www.lef.org/protocols/cancer/brain_tumor_01.htm
"Vitamin D3, the chemical form of vitamin D made in the skin and sold as a nutritional supplement, calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxy vitamin D), the active form of vitamin D, and various chemical analogs and metabolites of vitamin D, have all been shown to inhibit growth and trigger apoptosis in neuroblastoma and glioma cells (Naveilhan P et al 1994, Baudet C et al 1996, Elias J et al 2003, van Ginkel PR et al 2007)."
Iodine is another thing to consider for helping with cure and prevention, and again is very cheap and not patentable so has few advocates in the cancer industry:
http://brain-cancer-survivor.blogspot.com/2011/12/could-iodine-kill-cancer-cells.html
As Upton Sinclair said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Upton Sinclair also wrote a book on using fasting to heal cancer, btw, but what profit is their in advising patients to fast compared to advising them to buy $10K bottles of pills every month?
http://www.healingcancernaturally.com/fasting-cure-for-health.html
But once you have cancer, getting rid of it is iffy no matter what you do. The best thing to do is to prevent it, which again is fairly inexpensive, without much profit for the mainstream medical industry:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
The USA even subsidizes creating cancer through its agricultural policies:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
"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 pyramidsâ"subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."
I doubt this level of alleged fraud is common, but it does show the risk of conflict of interest in oncology, where the same doctor prescribing the treatments profits from carrying them out:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/07/1229570/-Michigan-doctor-arrested-for-purposely-misdiagnosing-cancer
"In the course of the scheme, prosecutors say Dr. Fata falsified and directed others to falsify documents. MHO billed Medicare for approximately $35 million dollars over a two-year period, approximately $25 of which is attributable to Dr. Fata, federal officials said The complaint further alleges that Dr. Fata directed the administration of unnecessary chemotherapy to patients in remission; deliberate misdiagnosis of patients as having cancer to justify unnecessary cancer treatment; administration of chemotherapy to end-of-life patients who will not benefit from the treatment; deliberate misdiagnosis of patients without cancer to justify expensive testing; fabrication of other diagnoses such as anemia and fatigue to justify unnecessary hematology treatments, and distribution of controlled substances to patients without medical necessity or are administered at dangerous levels."
Conflicts of interest apply to research as well:
"Financial conflicts of interest in economic analyses in oncology."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21441858
"Some financial conf
There are disagreements on the effect of starch on health, one being between Dr. Joel Fuhmran (advocating more calories from leafy green vegetables, other non-starchy vegetables, and beans) and Dr. John McDougall (advocating calories more from starchy plants like sweet potato and whole grains, in part on pragmatic grounds). Even as they both agree that starch should be the basis of calories for humans. See:
http://www.lanimuelrath.com/diet-nutrition/mcdougall-vs-fuhrman-notes-for-you-from-the-great-plant-based-doctors-debate/
See my other posts here for other related links and also agreement that many vegetarians' diets are pretty bad for reasons like you mention, and also pros and cons on some degree of animal products (up to 10% or so of calories)
In general, the longest lived societies get moderate exercise in the sunshine (vitamin D) and eat a lot of legumes (lentils, beans, etc.) and only limited animal products. Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/12/Vendiagram.gif
http://www.bluezones.com/
"The people inhabiting Blue Zones share common lifestyle characteristics that contribute to their longevity. The Venn diagram at the right highlights the following six shared characteristics among the people of Okinawa, Sardinia, and Loma Linda Blue Zones:[8]
Family -- Family is put ahead of other concerns.
No smoking -- Smoking is not found in large quantities.
Plant-based diet -- Except for the Sardinian diet, the majority of food consumed is derived from plants.
Constant moderate physical activity -- Moderate physical activity is an inseparable part of life.
Social engagement -- People of all ages are socially active and integrated into their communities.
Legumes -- Legumes are commonly consumed."
However, for people who have serious heart disease, then things change. Meat may have a much worse effect then. If such a person wants to reverse their heart disease, they may have to go on a diet without probably any meat (or very very little) for a time: ...
http://www.heartattackproof.com/huffpost.htm
"Answer: In an intensive 5 hour counseling session for a group of heart patients my first priority is to eliminate the mystery of what causes their disease. It has not been stress, or genes. It is their western diet of processed oil, dairy, and meat. Hypertension, diabetes, and smoking must be controlled but food trumps all. I spend at least an hour defining the protective role of endothelial cells and nitric oxide functioning as the ultimate guardians of our blood vessels. They quickly understand that their lifetime of ingesting these harmful products has totally overwhelmed and destroyed their endothelium to an extent where it is unable to protect them. They fully grasp that they must forever eliminate ingesting foods that will further destroy their already compromised endothelium. They understand heart disease is a food borne illness.
They understand that they can halt their disease. They are presented with my scientific articles demonstrating reversal of disease. They learn that anginal chest pain may diminish or disappear within 10-14 days in some patients while others may take longer. We share our data confirming reversal of carotid artery disease to the brain, coronary artery disease of the heart, peripheral vascular disease in the extremities, and the reversal of erectile dysfunction. They are made to appreciate how rapidly and powerfully the endothelial
"Meat is often a cheaper source of your necessary nutrients than vegetables."
Ignoring how meat does not have essential phytonutrients in it (as you mention), consider the political reason of why that is the case as far as "calories":
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
"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, consider how externalities of meat production such as destroying marine ecosystems from overfishing, manure runoff polluting fresh water supplies, and the destruction of so many forests and other land ecosystems to produce cattle feed:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
On your other points, most vegetarians' diets probably aren't very good. They may have too many refined sugars and too few vegetables, too little variety, and too little of things like iodine. It takes a lot of learning and opportunity and time to eat well as a vegetarian. But what is important to acknowledge is that there are plant-based diet styles that will reverse heart disease. So that 32% figure might be some kind of average, but it does not reflect the best possible outcome for someone who is really trying to reverse or prevent heart disease. See my other post here for links, or see as one example, Dr. Esselstyn' work:
http://www.heartattackproof.com/
I'd agree though that some small amount of free-range organic grass-fed meat or other similar animal products can potentially be part of a reasonably healthy diet -- other ethical and financial and scalability and externality questions aside. Even Dr. Fuhrman agrees on that part as far as the research -- that if you get 10% or less of your calories from animal products, you are doing pretty well.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
https://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article5.aspx
"Therefore I encourage consumption of a carefully planned vegetarian diet or one that includes a small amount of animal products, perhaps 10% of total calories or less, rather than 40 -60 % that children eat today. An animal-product-rich omnivorous diet cannot be considered nutritious food or called healthful."
High fat diets of animal products laced with growth hormones and such are probably bad for children in general. And also, there are few to no purely vegan diets in history. Even gorillas get some small percentage of their calories from termites and other insects they eat incidentally. B12 is another nutrient than can be an issue, usually provided by animal products, and some say can be supplied from dirty vegetables. Our food supply is in that sense too "clean" to be a pure vegan in (without special effort and selected supplements, if that). Vegans who are also neat freaks may be setting themselves up for disaster in that sense; yet on the other hand, since much "organic" food is grown using animal manure from livestock operations, not washing your vegetables well is a health risk too from E.coli contamination.
It does not take much animal products though to provide some essentials. Related example:
http://drbass.com/generations.html
"This text is still extremely important, since similar mistakes are still being made today, typically by aspiring vegans and vegan raw-foodists. Deficiencies th
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/HeartDisease.aspx
http://www.heartattackproof.com/
Don't let the naysayer comments get you down.
Also, if arteries in you heart are all clogged up, then what about arteries in you arms, legs, liver, and brain? Cardiovascular disease affects every system in the body -- it is just that heart problems tend to be more tragically obvious than other clogs. So, the best approach is not to unclog a little part of the hearth that will just clog back up soon, but to unclog everything by eating differently.
A story from: ...
http://www.drmcdougall.com/health/education/health-science/stars/stars-written/robert-cross/
-----
Robert Cross: Formerly Dying from Heart Disease
Further research led me to Dr. McDougall, and registered dietitian Jeff Novick. All these people gave hope for arresting, and perhaps reversing, my condition through diet and lifestyle modifications. In contrast, neither my internist, nor my cardiologist, was aware of these doctors or their programs or any significant benefit to lifestyle modification. They discouraged me from delaying the surgery, but accepted my decision to at least give diet and "medical management" a try.
My early results were promising. My first blood test on the diet showed my cholesterol was now down to 120 mg/dL and my LDL was 60 mg/dL. My internist was astounded. Medication had only lowered my numbers slightly. I was on Dr. Esselstyn's exact program, which is virtually identical to that of Dr. McDougall, and I hired the McDougall Program dietitian, Jeff Novick, RD, as my coach. I found that everything I needed was available immediately and for free through Dr. McDougall's website. I learned that my results would directly reflect my compliance with the program. I resolved that I would do this program 100 percent. If I could not be 100 percent on my own or failed to get my doctors' support, then I was going to go to the McDougall Live-in Program without delay. (I still plan on going.) I owed that to myself and my family.
Almost immediately, my chest pain went away. My internist asked how I had accomplished this and my dramatic cholesterol drop, and then became quite interested in my program. I needed his help because of the side effects of the medications that occurred once I changed my diet. I had to quickly get off my blood pressure medications because my readings were extremely low and I was feeling light headed. My blood sugars came way down and I had to terminate my diabetes medication. I eventually stopped all of my Lipitor, yet my total cholesterol stayed at 160 mg/dL (my LDL cholesterol remained at 60 mg/dL). I have lost over 60 pounds since beginning my new diet and exercise program in January of 2008, and I continue to lose as my energy increases. I have had no more kidney stones.
After following my progress for almost a year and a half, the cardiologist wanted to repeat the nuclear heart scan. My internist agreed. He was also sure that I was wrong when I had told him that many clinical trials have shown no important benefits other than pain relief for the surgery they had proposed for me more than a year and a half ago. Despite my many obvious improvements, the cardiologist still believed that coronary artery disease is always progressive, and told me not to get my hopes up about the new test. I repeated the exercise nuclear heart scan on May 5, 2009.
This time, I felt great running on the treadmill. I took my heart rate beyond the maximum expected for my age, and had no pain. The monitors I was connected to indicated no problems. Immediately after the test, I spoke with my cardiologist, who seemed somewhat perplexed. He chose his words very carefully. He wanted to know if I had felt chest pain on the first exam in 2008. I think he did not believe the prev
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
This was originally posted to Slashdot on May 25 2002: :-) My comments to the Department of Justice request for comments were in the form of this satire:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33107&cid=3582999
It was in relation to an article: "MPAA to Senate: Plug the Analog Hole!"
about the MPAA wanting copyright protection built into all computer hardware. I sent a copy to Richard Stallman back then and he said it made him laugh.
Transcript of April 1, 2016 MicroSlaw Presidential Speech (Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under 2011 Fee Requirements Law)
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far more efficiently, inexpensively and, I assure you, justly, by large corpora
More idea by me: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
A parable by me about robotics and a basic income: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
Key line from there to echo your point: "The politicians and their supporters said the solution was to lower taxes and cut social benefits to promote business investment. They tried that, but the robots still got all the jobs."
Good luck: http://www.terrywahls.com/
"For four years, secondary progressive multiple sclerosis confined Dr. Terry Wahls to a tilt-recline wheelchair. But by using Functional Medicine to create the Wahls Protocolâ, Dr. Wahls has transformed her health and body: now she walks easily without a cane and commutes by bicycle. Dr. Wahls uses these diets and protocols in her primary care and traumatic brain injury clinics and is leading a clinical trial to test her protocols on others."
See also Dr. Joel Fuhrman's writings on "Nutritarianism" and similar.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/success/SuccessStory.aspx?id=260
"I heard about Dr. Fuhrman and made an appointment. He told me on my first visit that MS is not a problem and we could handle this (my wife broke down in tears). Dr. Fuhrman explained everything, gave me a diet to follow and I was on my way. I have only had one follow up visit with him because I have steadily improved (no more numbness when I bend my neck, no more touching cold things on my legs and feeling like they are hot). I have absolutely no symptoms.
Since then, I have sent many people to Dr Fuhrman, some with MS, some with Lupus and they all are doing better. I regularly buy his books by the case and give them out. I tell every one who will listen about my story. I firmly believe that there are no coincidences in this world, everything has a purpose including my diagnosis. I am grateful for the opportunity to be helping Dr Fuhrman with his life purpose by sharing my story. Thank You!"
Anyway, hope some indirect good might come out of this shutdown for your family if this information helps.
Many more: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
I agree that we should be concerned about the issue of virtual slavery...
And not just because we ourselves may be AIs...
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
"Because the robot is loyal to whomever sets it up, one rogue billionaire can buy up a robot army and conquer his choice of any number of banana republics that he wants. ... So a single man to conquer a nation wouldn't be unheard of. In fact no one might even know who is the man who conquered their country."
Good points in theory Something related I created:
"The richest man in the world: A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income.":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
I met Mark Raibert in the mid-1980s while hanging out at CMU when he was just getting going with robots that hopped on one leg. He's come along way the past quarter century. Much of the robotics work at CMU then (as probably now) was funded by the military. I've been thinking about these sorts of social and economic aspects of robotics ever since. See my website for more related ideas.
BTW, in practice, as was noted by someone else in a comment to another story a week or so ago, it is far easier to design robots that kill all humans (like based on heat signature and shape) than to design robots that distinguish some humans from others.
"Yep. That goes a long way towards explaining the complete lack of innovation in the computer industry. Basically nothing has improved or even changed in the last 30 years."
More true than one might think at first: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/08/09/1641249/back-to-the-future-of-programming
See also:
"The Real Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" by Alan Kay
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2007007a_revolution.pdf
http://archive.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/kay.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
Personally, cross-platform reasonable speedy VisualWorks Smalltalk from the 1990s in many ways still has not been surpassed (except in the sense it was not free and open source and somewhat lesser stuff like Python and now Java is). The Newton's 1990s view of a PDA with integrated soups of data is still (in some ways) advanced beyond Android. Or from:
http://inventors.about.com/od/istartinventions/a/internet.htm
"Vannevar Bush first proposed the basics of hypertext in 1945 [in "As We May Think"]. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, HTML (hypertext markup language), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators) in 1990."
Project Xanadu was around in the 1980s doing Hypertext, inspired by Theodore Sturegon's 1950 short story "The Skills of Xanadu".
Don't confuse the eventual implementation of part of old ideas (like Kay's 1970s DynaBook vision being realized in part in today's laptops and smartphones) with the notion of conceptual progress.
Even much of robotics and AI is just old ideas finally being more workable with better hardware.
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
"The stupendous growth and competitiveness of the computer industry is one reason. A less appreciated one is that intelligent machine research did not make steady progress in its first fifty years, it marked time for thirty of them! Though general computer power grew a hundred thousand fold from 1960 to 1990, the computer power available to AI programs barely budged from 1 MIPS during those three decades. "
Still, it is also true there are no doubt many innovations now lurking here or there for which we have not yet hear much of. As WIlliam Gibson said:
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/681-the-future-is-already-here-it-s-just-not-evenly
"The future is already here â" it's just not evenly distributed."
Much of what young kids are interested in is what they have seen in movies, read in stories, or played with in games, and so on. True, they may sometimes put things together in new ways. But its still very often old, old ideas they are working with.