I don't usually mod up ACs, but this is informative and well presented.
We've wrestled with this Google Apps for Education issue as well for a small non-profit I am a trustee of. Is it worth it for the privacy issues? Of course, if the NSA spies on everyone, maybe that is a moot point?
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers
Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.
There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chartâ"unless a culprit runs afoul of the mediaâ"an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tell all. Which explains why precious few experienced hands care to ruin themselves to act the hero. This is not to say sensitive, intelligent, moral, and concerned individuals arenâ(TM)t distributed through each of the twenty-two categories, but the conflict of interest is so glaring between serving
My post 3 years ago: http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/8412-4049 "Why Is This Idea Important?: This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all. So, why 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion? To understand that, consider a few historical trends...."
Too bad the opengov software munged the formatting.
via Gift economies, Star Trek subsistence via 3D printing, democratic participatory planning, and more things perhaps. See also Ian Banks' Culture series, and Marshall Brain's Manna, and James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear. Still, I guess some might move towards that via a "basic income",
So true. Or as Albert Einstein said: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. If one were to take that goal out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind."
John Taylor Gatto talks about the core purpose of education in his writings, which include self-development, becoming a good citizen, and preparation for work. Unfortunately, so much focus now in schools is on preparation for work, and it is overall preparation for work like rote factory work that is less and less in existence. But, adding some humanities courses when someone is 18-21 can't repair all the damage of a missing part of K-12. http://www.awakenedamerican.com/content/john-taylor-gatto-explains-secrets-elite-boarding-school-education
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 most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
The original article is yet another reason for eating a high quality anti-inflammation mostly-plant-based whole-foods diet of the type that MDs like Joel Fuhrman or Andrew Weil suggest. Still, it can be hard to overcome the "Pleasure Trap" on your own, http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx http://www.bluezones.com/
Fuhrman suggest a diversity of phytonutrients helps prevent cancer. But the original article is a different angle on the actual operating principle of such prevention. "Eat For Health -- The Anti-Cancer Diet" http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx "As reported by the U.S. government and Center for Disease Control (CDC), cancers of the colon, breast, prostate and lung are the top four deadliest cancers in the modern world. After billions of dollars devoted to researching drug treatments for cancer and minimal increases in life expectancy for those undergoing chemotherapy for most common cancers, many authorities such as the National Institute of Health and the American Cancer Society, have been issuing a stronger voice advocating more preventive measures to reduce cancer incidence. Diet has become a key element in the fight against cancer.
The most recent scientific advancement in the anti-cancer research is the identification of specific foods and food elements that offer powerful protection against cancer. These foods are essential for both prevention of cancer and also inc
From 2009: http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp.html "Among his solutions is a low-cost "lab-on-a-chip," made of paper and carpet tape. The paper wicks bodily fluids -- urine, for example -- and turns color to provide diagnostic information, such as how much glucose or protein is present. His goal is to distribute these simple paper diagnostic systems to developing countries, where people with basic training can administer tests and send results to distant doctors via cameraphone."
From there, as a disclosure to make it harder to patent it all: ------ Princeton University Freecycle Transportation Network -- an internet of physical packages
Here is just one more example of changes to PU's infrastructure and operations from a Post-Scarcity point of view. These might take burning another billion dollars of the PU endowment or so, but you will see soon another reason why money is going out of style anyway, whether PU does this or someone else.:-) But, there may well be reasonable objections to it, so consider it first mainly as a thought experiment in understanding Post-Scarcity style issues. Maybe it is both possible and worth doing, maybe it is neither.
"The Freecycle Network (often abbreviated TFN or just known as Freecycle) is a non-profit organization... that organizes a worldwide network of "gifting" groups, aiming to divert reusable goods from landfill. It provides a worldwide online registry, and coordinates the creation of local groups and forums for individuals and non-profits to offer and receive free items for reuse or recycling, promoting gift economics as a motivating cultural outlook. "Changing the world one gift at a time" is The Freecycle Network's official tagline. "
(Note that "Freecycle" is a trademark, so if PU used it, it would need permission.)
Obviously, long term the solution in a few decades might be general purpose nanotech 3D printers that can both "print" (or "compile") and "unprint" (or "decompile"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age Perhaps you don't believe that kind of 3D printing and unprinting is possible or even desirable (perhaps due to energy costs of disassembly). Or maybe you think 3D printing might be possible, but would take a long time. Or perhaps you expect much production and disposal may still be centralized at least at the neighborhood level. Or maybe you expect that people will still have sentimental attachments to specific items they wish to store and retrieve. So, until all those issues are resolved for 3D printing, how can PU handle the embarrasment of material riches it has now and will soon have more of? And how can it make it *easy* to do the same as "The Freecycle Network" does -- give away items to people who want them instead of sending them to a landfill?
Princeton University could put in place a system of kiosks around campus which had what looked like Star Trek matter replicators. These would all be connected underground to one or more warehouses. Whenever anyone needed anything on campus, they would go to a kiosk and flip through
Solar panels started as very expensive niche products about 50 years ago with satellite power, then for calculators, then for no-wire yard lights, then for off-grid homes and things like supplementing generator power for portable traffic lights for road construction. Now solar panels have dropped so far in price they are going mainstream with "grid parity" in various places including India (and maybe in a few years almost everywhere including the northern USA).
In the 1980s, people were talking about exactly this sort of progression for solar panels, and it has played out pretty much as outlined.
So, yes, this strategy can make a lot of sense for other things like biofuels, especially in a society that otherwise has become very risk adverse or incapable of making long-term investments. But even in a society willing to take risks, an incremental path can still make a lot of sense.
With renewables, the first most cost effective step was almost always to become more energy efficient (like insulating a home and replacing low-effeciency appliances). Then, renewables have an easier time handling the remaining load, and the money saved by the energy efficiency improvements could be used to fund that conversion. So, another incremental approach.
Still, what the solar industry wanted more than anything was a "level playing field" where coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear would pay their true costs up front. Those "externality" costs include pollution, health damage, defending long supply lines militarily, meltdown risk, and even the politically corrosive effect of large centralized power systems on a democracy. If those costs had to be paid up front for those other technologies, renewables (as well as energy conservation like passive solar homes) would have probably been cost effective since the 1970s. See the book "Brittle Power" and similar writings by the Lovins for more on that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Unfortunately, the renewable industry lost hope for that in the 1980s Reagan years especially, with the push there to allow companies to privatize gains but socialize costs. So, the renewable industry was forced to turn to this incremental strategy even though they should have won in a fair market decades ago.
People who live in traditional societies eating a traditional vegetable heavy diet and getting lots of sunlight and exercise also seem to have less lung cancer even when they smoke. "Eat For Health - The Anti-Cancer Diet" http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
I can see you project an optimistic sense of humor about it all, which can be a healthful thing: http://www.humorproject.com/bookstore/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10116744 "Laughter has many clinical benefits, promoting beneficial physiological changes and an overall sense of well-being. Humor even has long-term effects that strengthen the effectiveness of the immune system."
Yeah, stairs can be a real life-saver for many -- to get some regular exercise, which moves the lymph around, which boosts the immune system and the body's natural self-cleaning mechanisms. Walking outside in the sunshine helps, too (although of course how you need to manage your DVT and clot risks however competent doctors recommend): http://www.bluezones.com/
And also, here is a movie (and book) on how clogged arteries can limit blood flow to the body's cells, creating a huge variety of health issues from that common cause (perhaps the root cause of most chronic illnesses in the US today as "diseases of affluence" such as you may be experiencing): http://www.ravediet.com/
I'm since thinking that the human mind/body/brain/spirit seems to act as if it has a bunch of layers, where there seem to be safeguards built-in to the lower layers (shaped by evolution?) which may limit the ease of radical changes which are sometimes (but not always) in practice self-destructive acts. Those lower layers may also be related to communications links with other humans, to maintain the functioning of the group (stuff like a sense of fairness, compassion, etc. as well as probably status issues too from another direction).
Which connects to this story on simulated universes, math and infinite convergences: "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility. Short story, Sam Hughes (2007)." http://qntm.org/responsibility
I made artificial life simulations myself in the 1980s, and started thinking about the moral implications....
James P. Hogan has some related books too, like Entoverse, and Realtime Interrupt.
The late (sadly, unless he is on to better post-human things) Ian Banks wrote in passing in the Cture Novels about humans in non-human form. http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm "One idea behind the Culture as it is depicted in the stories is that it has gone through cyclical stages during which there has been extensive human-machine interfacing, and other stages (sometimes coinciding with the human-machine eras) when extensive genetic alteration has been the norm. The era of the stories written so far - dating from about 1300 AD to 2100 AD - is one in which the people of the Culture have returned, probably temporarily, to something more 'classical' in terms of their relations with the machines and the potential of their own genes.
The Culture recognises, expects and incorporates fashions - albeit long-term fashions - in such matters. It can look back to times when people lived much of their lives in what we would now call cyberspace, and to eras when people chose to alter themselves or their children through genetic manipulation, producing a variety of morphological sub-species. Remnants of the various waves of such civilisational fashions can be found scattered throughout the Culture, and virtually everyone in the Culture carries the results of genetic manipulation in every cell of their body; it is arguably the most reliable signifier of Culture status.
Thanks to that genetic manipulation, the average Culture human will be born whole and healthy and of significantly (though not immensely) greater intelligence than their basic human genetic inheritance might imply. There are thousands of alterations to that human-basic inheritance - blister-free callusing and a clot-filter protecting the brain are two of the less important ones mentioned in the stories - but the major changes the standard Culture person would expect to be born with would include an optimized immune system and enhanced senses, freedom from inheritable diseases or defects, the ability to control their autonomic processes and nervous system (pain can, in effect, be switched off), and to survive and fully recover from wounds which would either kill or permanently mutilate without such genetic tinkering."
Sci-fi has been exploring this for decades.
Geordi La Forge's Visor in 1990s Star Trek is one answer. As is Data. As is Reginald Barclay's forays into becoming superhuman on the holodeck. As is Q.
From JD Bernal in the 1920s: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/flesh/ "Starting, as Mr. J. B. S. Haldane so convincingly predicts, in an ectogenetic factory, man will have anything from sixty to a hundred and twenty years of larval, unspecialized existence - surely enough to satisfy the advocates of a natural life. In this stage he need not be cursed by the age of science and mechanism, but can occupy his time (without the conscience of wasting it) in dancing, poetry and love-making, and perhaps incidentally take part in the reproductive activity. Then he will leave the body whose potentialities he should have sufficiently explored.
The next stage might be compared to that of a chrysalis, a complicated and rather unpleasant process of transforming the already existing organs and grafting on all the new sensory and motor mechanisms. There would follow a period of re-education in which he would grow to understand the functioning of his new se
A basic income would give more people more time for self-education and civic engagement and raising independent children. They would have more time to review all this data.
Alaska has a bit of a basic income. Brazil has something of one recently. Germany has been talking about one. The USA has a basic income for people over 65 called "Social Security", so it could just be extended to all from birth and replace things like public schooling and unemployment insurance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
Of course, two countries that implemented something of them, Lybia and Iran have experienced US attempts to destabilize them. See also "the Threat of a Good Example" by Noam Chomsky: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.html "No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria...."
Still, once could argue a basic income just props up capitalism. I guess it depends how it is implemented and what people actually would do with their time.
There are many reasons things change slowly. People are naturally resistant to change, since they know the old ways work somewhat at least in the past. New intellectual paradigms take a while to propagate. Some people are invested in the current system emotionally and financially, even as it crumbles or faces increasing catastrophic systemic risks. And so on.
Although, perhaps it is better to not know what "X" is now, if it will take decades to see it come into being, with so much needless suffering along the way?:-(
Great story by H. G. Wells: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind "At the end of his descent, down a snow-slope in the mountain's shadow, he finds a valley, cut off from the rest of the world on all sides by steep precipices. Unbeknownst to Nunez, he has discovered the fabled Country of the Blind...."
"We already faced this at the end of cold war. The fact was faced by inventing a new enemy, one which CIA helps to create: terrorism."
While you make a good point, my point is deeper than that. We are facing such a radical transformation of our society through exponentially increasing computer power, that it is hard to predict where it will all end. The "Singularity" is one theme like that. Our path out of any singularity will have a lot to do with our path going into the singularity. So, we should strive to make our social world as happy and healthy a place as possible now, so we have the best chance at a good outcome.
Also, from another direction on the theme, with better computers, we may be able to simulate water better, as well as carbon, nitrogen, nickel, and silicon, and that may lead to a host of new materials and techniques (water filters, energy sources, communications equipment, computing, medicines, nanobots, rockets, space habitats, robotics, etc.). The political-economic implications of all that are staggering. So, by comparison, using computer farms for analysis related to eavesdropping is fairly tame -- in fact, it mainly just reinforces the status quo. But at the same time, we have these other bigger trends. That includes, countries trying to get a competitive edge while also reducing their attack surface (like, say, Singapore perhaps figuring out how to ensure clean air despite nearby forest fires or to ensure clean water with improved desalination techniques).
War machines are one aspect of Exascale-plus computing, as are the NSA revelations. From a historical perspective, I can wonder what use could be made of all these records and growing computing power in 100 years? Could that information and such computers be used to make historical simulations and recreations of this time period? Not saying whether that is good or bad -- just noting it. A point made in some sci-fi stories about tools to view the past is, when does the past begin? As a trustee of a small historical society, I can even wonder what the implications are if the NSA has all the local town communications from ten years ago? Our charter is to preserve local history and make it available for access. But what history is socially acceptable or socially prudent to preserve or to recreate, when, say, you know the NSA may have records of every local person's telephone and internet conversations with their doctors and lawyers and lovers and relatives? Will those archives be opened up in 30 years? In 50? In 100? If only AIs process that data (to avoid an NSA analyst listening to an un-targeted US citizen's conversations for legal reasons), will the AI grow by learning from them? How would such knowledge spread into the AIs running the war machines?
And see also, on universal bi-directional Brin-like surveillance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days "The Light of Other Days is a 2000 science fiction novel written by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke,[1] which explores the development of wormhole technology to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the space-time continuum. The wormhole technology is first used to send digital information via gamma rays, then developed further to transmit light waves. The media corporation who develops this advance can spy on anyone anywhere it chooses. A logical development from the laws of space-time allows light waves to be detected from the past. This enhances the wormhole technology into a "time viewer" where anyone opening a wormhole can view people and events from any point throughout time and space."
Whatever one can say about what really went on around 1776 in North America, in theory, the whole meaning of a democratic republic is supposedly that it is "government of the people, by the people, for the people".
Or as he wrote here: http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/JohnGardner-RoadtoSelf-Renewal2.pdf "We cannot dream of a Utopia in which all arrangements are ideal and everyone is flawless. Life is tumultuous -- an endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous struggle, never an assured victory. Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and refought. You may wonder if such a struggle, endless and of uncertain outcome, isn't more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world."
Or, as Edmund Burke said, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
So, the struggle against bad government , to ensure the government remains responsive and accountable and appropriately effective, is a bit like fighting mildew in a bathroom -- a never ending struggle. Still, we also need both hierarchy and meshworks in our lives, and indeed, we always have a mix of them as they keep turning into each other: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
And if the Earth does become one big thinking war machine (like in "Colossus: The Forbin Project") then the algorithms running on its internal homogenous API interfaces become the new actors struggling for resources and democratic accountability (in a purely computational meshwork/hierarchy context). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
How many googols of years has this been going on? "The World Was Probably Already Destroyed" http://www.digitalcosmology.com/Blog/2012/12/06/t/ "Some people wonder if our planet will be destroyed on December 21, 2012. I have friends asking me every day whether I think the world will end in a few weeks. But it is possible that our planet was already destroyed and before that occured its scientists managed to send a capsule in space with a supercomputer running its simulation.... Will the destruction happen again in the simulation? Probably not since the conditions that caused it were of stochastic nature. However, even if the destruction takes place in the simulation, the computer will restart it and the world will be created again in an endless fashion...."
Yet, each time, people (or creatures that act like people) must find anew some balance of competition and cooperation, of meshwork and hierarchy, of a middle ground between fire and ice (to ignore the n-dimensional aspects as another layer of complexity).
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001 "To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality...."
The increase in global spying is only one technology-driven trend of many going on right now. Other ones have all sorts of implications. That is why we need better open source tools to help figure things out and make better decisions about what health is and how to shape healthy behavior with (as Lawrence Lessig said in Code 2.0) rules, norms, prices and architecture. http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
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. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.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.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially... irony.:-)"
And your point about the irony of how our fear of Skynet will lead to us building it preemptively is a great example of this general theme. It would be not much to worry about except that these technologies are so powerful -- which means we don't have to fight over material resources... See Marshall Brain's Manna at the end for another vision of what might be possible if we build a different sort of infrastructure with these technologies. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
That said, people may always find ways to compete to show off for status. So, we as a global society need to redirect those urges into more productive (or less destructive) areas... "Evolution for competition & cooperation" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3866253&cid=44019221
"Re:Helping the NSA transcend to abundance thinking (Score:3)" http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001 [slashdot.org] "To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality...."
The increase in global spying is only one technology-driven trend of many going on right now.
Humans are adapted to live in the sunshine. The US RDA for vitamin D is way too low for most adults, especially ones who spend most of their time indoors these days (which is most everyone in the USA): http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
If you have allergies, look into adding more phytonutrients to your diet along with the vitamin D. http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx "If allergies are the problem, have you ever thought why your immune system is so sensitive and reactive to normal environmental substances?
Patients often state, “I struggled for years with pain and fatigue, until I finally found out fibromyalgia was my problem.” Does giving it a name establish a cause? Of course not. If you give the problem a name, patients may feel a little relieved that they now know what is wrong, but it usually does not help or solve their condition. The accuracy of the diagnosis is not as important when compared to the accuracy and effectiveness of the therapeutic recommendations for the problem.
On a practical level, the name of a disease doesn’t even matter that much. It is uncovering the cause of the disease that matters. When most of the causes are uncovered and removed, the body can manifest a recovery, all by itself. Most people are not taught, and they fail to realize that the vast majority of diseases occur because they are earned. They are earned by the causes of disease that stress their body to the point where their genetic weaknesses have a chance to be expressed."
I looked up the David Buss evolutionary psychology reference you supplied (TMND) and saw he has one about women specifically, where a key point in the book is that there are many reasons women do what they do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Buss
That makes sense when you think about it, because historically, like with some Native Americans, there were sometimes matriarchies where women controlled the land, and in hunter/gatherer societies that was a big deal. Selection for other attributes of men may then have been important.
It turns out I made a slashdot post about a year ago that touches on this issue too: "Re:Helping the NSA transcend to abundance thinking (Score:3)" http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001 "To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality...."
I then mention some men/women issues related to the themes you raised. Also, I make a point that relates to yours, that men tend to move from high testosterone competition patterns in their teens and twenties to lower testosterone cooperative patterns in their forties and fifties.
Evolution selects for all possible combinations at all possible levels, even if our simple brains may have trouble following that or turning it into math...
Also, regarding being short -- when food or air is in short supply, being smaller can be an advantage sometimes. Being short also helps in Judo, Life is full of tradeoffs, where our characteristics and preferences can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation. That is one reason the world is so diverse.
Good point about how standards change over time, too.
Hope to have time to see those Adam Curtis documentaries someday! Thanks for the recommendations.
"A lot of us saw the dawn of the information age as the potential for a second Enlightenment, when a universally free flow of ideas and wisdom would lift mankind as a whole into an era of freedom and prosperity. Universal education and information was going to save humanity. Silly us. All we really did was give the despots more tools."
A lot of bad stuff is probably going to go down, true. But, we can remain hopeful good things will happen too. See Howard Zinn, for example: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."
I watched that great video on "In the Year 2525" and am writing this on a US$250 Chromebook. Maybe it is not the best tool for covert browsing or communications like, say, "Freedombox" aspires to (for what that might be worth), but this cheap Chromebook is a great tool for learning. It would have been (almost) unbelievable in the 1950s. Ask yourself, as far as content learning goes, if you are a curious intellectually-inclined young person today, would you rather have had an expensive 1980s Princeton education with access to Firestone library (as I got), or just one year with a $250 Chromebook with acess to the 2013 internet for effortlessly following link after link and reading endless discussions on any topic you find interesting? If I was young again, I'd pick the Chromebook. An Ivy league education may have other benefits, as do face-to-face communities, but cheap access to endless information for those inclined to soak it up is now a reality -- and it is affordable for more and more people on the planet (including through discarded last generation smartphones). Another example, from India: http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
I followed your link. Now, please humor me and read "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (a sci-fi short story from the 1950s) to see what the internet and cheap mobile computing may still make possible. That story may help rekindle your optimism for what broad global education may make possible. It is available online here: http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51
Yes, the USA may be relatively fading (including from thirty years of Neo-Liberalism and stuff like creeping surveillance and fearful self-destructive paranoia). "Neoliberalism as a Water Balloon"
As much as I might like to disagree broadly with what you have written, I can't, because there is clearly a lot of truth to it from an evolutionary perspective. It's quite true that young people (teens, and twenties, especially, but also later as you point to) do try to show off in various ways to impress the opposite sex as part of human mating rituals. But, let me try to at least surround that truth would some additional options and nuances as a ramble.
First, as an example of a way to deal with this. In James P. Hogan's sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" about a post-scarcity society, he addresses this by the notion that people compete to demonstrate excellence in their chosen skills. Showing excellence in helping the community become a form of "Wealth". Material goods are given away freely, including to those who make no contributions to society, in part because, if someone is "poor" (not contributing, so socially disrespected), why heap additional problems on them by not letting them have material goods? So, while you have outlined a truth, how society chooses to deal with that truth, how these urges are directed, is an aspect of culture and circumstance.
From another direction, life on this plane of existence seems to consist of both cooperation and competition, arrayed across a mix of both meshworks and hierarchies. As E. O. Wilson points out, organisms often cooperate within some defined social boundary (like an ant colony) and then compete outside of the boundary (like ant wars). Humans historically have cooperated within tribes, even as they fought other tribes to define essentially property line boundaries between tribes. Many people enjoy team sports where you cooperate in your team but compete against other teams. Even Genghis Khan's command organization must have had some sense of internal cooperation even as it may have attacked other communities. So, the healthy human brain is able to navigate this social landscape (at least withing historic boundaries and the "Dunbar's" number of 100 - 230 tribe members). So, again the issue becomes, how does society direct these impulses within the limits of human potential? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
Freud had some keen insights, but he also overgeneralized and was a bit nutty. (People might say that about me, too?:-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/10/reviews/970810.10boxert.html "Freud may have been bad. But can he really have been bad in so many contradictory ways? A sampling of recent books suggests that after a century of Freud flogging, the critics still haven't finished with him."
One aspect not there is perhaps that the left tends to emphasize the cooperative aspect of society -- that we are all in this together, and if we all cooperate, we will all be better off, and that included caring for all children. While it may be rarely stated this extremely, the right tends to emphasize that people should succeed on their own merits, and part of success is being able to afford to raise children -- where if people can't afford children personally, they should not have them, and if they do have children, it is only right if the children suffer and die, because failure should not be propagated in order to maintain the health of the population.
There actually is quite a bit of sense to that sort of "Social Darwinism" from an individualist perspective -- except that it ignores both how much of success is collective, how sexual recombination crosses social rules about inherited wealth, and that the marketplace can be pretty f
Natural selection is a very limited idea which doesn't address the idea of souls, (which can essentially, last forever, or at least incarnate over the course of hundreds of lifetimes).
This idea, of course, is unavailable to those who have not researched the concept far enough to recognize its validity, or who have not been able to conquer their internal programming far enough to even allow the processing of such taboo subjects.
Taking it into account requires the modification of such rational theories as Natural Selection, which is still a force to be certain, but one complicated by dozens of other factors which essentially render much conventional wisdom on the subject, as it applies to humans and their continued species evolution, meaningless.
Added to that is the idea that humans are farmed creatures at this point; our evolution directed by others, not ourselves or any brute natural forces, all for entirely different goals than basic survivability. If we look at how we manage cow, chicken and pig livestocks, we can see that natural selection is no longer an arbitrary natural process, and the same is true of us. Survivability is now just another factor in the food production equation, taking a back seat to other concerns. It is safe to say that few of the managed life forms we consume could survive on their own outside the industrial farming system.
Those with older souls have a somewhat higher chance of putting up resistance to the desired results of this process. As you observe, will-power (combined with knowledge) allow a person to avoid the traps of addiction. Included in this, I would add, the eating of real foods and the behaving in ways which provide real power. That process, however, comes at the tail end of having lived many lives as slaves and managed animals, of falling into those traps in order to know them inside and out. This means being a slave animal can be seen as a required experience in order to achieve the insight and instincts necessary to accrue real power in the end. There is value in being a mindless addict, as so many are today, and such lives will be lived by a given soul until it no longer needs to extract wisdom from the experience and can move on to whatever further lessons needed that ground work. You burn yourself until you respect fire.
There will be life forms of one kind or another which dominate their position on the food chain, and then after a time, they will go extinct, as will their farmers, and those above them. Humans are just a passing phase, and their survivability and the great public concern for it is a null point in the big picture. The souls they contain are the important thing, and the only thing which determines whether they 'survive' is whether or not they choose to either continue to absorb knowledge or reject the creation.
Some undeniable truths and meta-truths mixed with some (probably) speculation and mysticism on reincarnation. Love it!:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't usually mod up ACs, but this is informative and well presented.
We've wrestled with this Google Apps for Education issue as well for a small non-profit I am a trustee of. Is it worth it for the privacy issues? Of course, if the NSA spies on everyone, maybe that is a moot point?
See also John Taylor Gatto on why the system is so hard to change. From:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/17b.htm
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Power à 22
PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers
Control of the educational enterprise is distributed among at least these twenty-two players, each of which can be subdivided into in-house warring factions which further remove the decision-making process from simple accessibility. The financial interests of these associational voices are served whether children learn to read or not.
There is little accountability. No matter how many assertions are made to the contrary, few penalties exist past a certain level on the organizational chartâ"unless a culprit runs afoul of the mediaâ"an explanation for the bitter truth whistle-blowers regularly discover when they tell all. Which explains why precious few experienced hands care to ruin themselves to act the hero. This is not to say sensitive, intelligent, moral, and concerned individuals arenâ(TM)t distributed through each of the twenty-two categories, but the conflict of interest is so glaring between serving
My post 3 years ago: http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/8412-4049 ..."
"Why Is This Idea Important?: This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all. So, why 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion? To understand that, consider a few historical trends.
Too bad the opengov software munged the formatting.
Also mentioned here:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/44897-8319
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/openmanufacturing/sAqgfZ9291A/ZQKlJXBNIAcJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
http://www.bluezones.com/programs/blue-zones-communities/albert-lea-mn/
Overcoming "The Pleasure Trap" can be hard, and it helps when you have community support.
Your point illustrates how good health is becoming a geeky info-tech thing?
via Gift economies, Star Trek subsistence via 3D printing, democratic participatory planning, and more things perhaps. See also Ian Banks' Culture series, and Marshall Brain's Manna, and James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear. Still, I guess some might move towards that via a "basic income",
So true. Or as Albert Einstein said:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. If one were to take that goal out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind."
John Taylor Gatto talks about the core purpose of education in his writings, which include self-development, becoming a good citizen, and preparation for work. Unfortunately, so much focus now in schools is on preparation for work, and it is overall preparation for work like rote factory work that is less and less in existence. But, adding some humanities courses when someone is 18-21 can't repair all the damage of a missing part of K-12.
http://www.awakenedamerican.com/content/john-taylor-gatto-explains-secrets-elite-boarding-school-education
And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinate
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 most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."
The original article is yet another reason for eating a high quality anti-inflammation mostly-plant-based whole-foods diet of the type that MDs like Joel Fuhrman or Andrew Weil suggest. Still, it can be hard to overcome the "Pleasure Trap" on your own,
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.bluezones.com/
Fuhrman suggest a diversity of phytonutrients helps prevent cancer. But the original article is a different angle on the actual operating principle of such prevention.
"Eat For Health -- The Anti-Cancer Diet"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
"As reported by the U.S. government and Center for Disease Control (CDC), cancers of the colon, breast, prostate and lung are the top four deadliest cancers in the modern world. After billions of dollars devoted to researching drug treatments for cancer and minimal increases in life expectancy for those undergoing chemotherapy for most common cancers, many authorities such as the National Institute of Health and the American Cancer Society, have been issuing a stronger voice advocating more preventive measures to reduce cancer incidence. Diet has become a key element in the fight against cancer.
The most recent scientific advancement in the anti-cancer research is the identification of specific foods and food elements that offer powerful protection against cancer. These foods are essential for both prevention of cancer and also inc
From 2009: http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp.html
"Among his solutions is a low-cost "lab-on-a-chip," made of paper and carpet tape. The paper wicks bodily fluids -- urine, for example -- and turns color to provide diagnostic information, such as how much glucose or protein is present. His goal is to distribute these simple paper diagnostic systems to developing countries, where people with basic training can administer tests and send results to distant doctors via cameraphone."
Described by me here, but others had the idea before: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#Princeton_University_Freecycle_Transportation_Network_--_an_internet_of_physical_packages
From there, as a disclosure to make it harder to patent it all:
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Princeton University Freecycle Transportation Network -- an internet of physical packages
Here is just one more example of changes to PU's infrastructure and operations from a Post-Scarcity point of view. These might take burning another billion dollars of the PU endowment or so, but you will see soon another reason why money is going out of style anyway, whether PU does this or someone else. :-) But, there may well be reasonable objections to it, so consider it first mainly as a thought experiment in understanding Post-Scarcity style issues. Maybe it is both possible and worth doing, maybe it is neither.
A big problem in a post-scarcity society is not so much how to make abundance, but how to get rid of it. :-) The Freecycle network mentioned at the start is an example of that:
http://www.freecycle.org/
Or, from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freecycle_Network
"The Freecycle Network (often abbreviated TFN or just known as Freecycle) is a non-profit organization ... that organizes a worldwide network of "gifting" groups, aiming to divert reusable goods from landfill. It provides a worldwide online registry, and coordinates the creation of local groups and forums for individuals and non-profits to offer and receive free items for reuse or recycling, promoting gift economics as a motivating cultural outlook. "Changing the world one gift at a time" is The Freecycle Network's official tagline. "
(Note that "Freecycle" is a trademark, so if PU used it, it would need permission.)
Obviously, long term the solution in a few decades might be general purpose nanotech 3D printers that can both "print" (or "compile") and "unprint" (or "decompile").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
Perhaps you don't believe that kind of 3D printing and unprinting is possible or even desirable (perhaps due to energy costs of disassembly). Or maybe you think 3D printing might be possible, but would take a long time. Or perhaps you expect much production and disposal may still be centralized at least at the neighborhood level. Or maybe you expect that people will still have sentimental attachments to specific items they wish to store and retrieve. So, until all those issues are resolved for 3D printing, how can PU handle the embarrasment of material riches it has now and will soon have more of? And how can it make it *easy* to do the same as "The Freecycle Network" does -- give away items to people who want them instead of sending them to a landfill?
Material transportation and storage systems (like Amazon uses) could play a big role here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos ('86)
As could interactive computer information systems on material goods (like eBay pioneered).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman ('77)
How might these be used together?
Princeton University could put in place a system of kiosks around campus which had what looked like Star Trek matter replicators. These would all be connected underground to one or more warehouses. Whenever anyone needed anything on campus, they would go to a kiosk and flip through
Solar panels started as very expensive niche products about 50 years ago with satellite power, then for calculators, then for no-wire yard lights, then for off-grid homes and things like supplementing generator power for portable traffic lights for road construction. Now solar panels have dropped so far in price they are going mainstream with "grid parity" in various places including India (and maybe in a few years almost everywhere including the northern USA).
In the 1980s, people were talking about exactly this sort of progression for solar panels, and it has played out pretty much as outlined.
So, yes, this strategy can make a lot of sense for other things like biofuels, especially in a society that otherwise has become very risk adverse or incapable of making long-term investments. But even in a society willing to take risks, an incremental path can still make a lot of sense.
With renewables, the first most cost effective step was almost always to become more energy efficient (like insulating a home and replacing low-effeciency appliances). Then, renewables have an easier time handling the remaining load, and the money saved by the energy efficiency improvements could be used to fund that conversion. So, another incremental approach.
Still, what the solar industry wanted more than anything was a "level playing field" where coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear would pay their true costs up front. Those "externality" costs include pollution, health damage, defending long supply lines militarily, meltdown risk, and even the politically corrosive effect of large centralized power systems on a democracy. If those costs had to be paid up front for those other technologies, renewables (as well as energy conservation like passive solar homes) would have probably been cost effective since the 1970s. See the book "Brittle Power" and similar writings by the Lovins for more on that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Unfortunately, the renewable industry lost hope for that in the 1980s Reagan years especially, with the push there to allow companies to privatize gains but socialize costs. So, the renewable industry was forced to turn to this incremental strategy even though they should have won in a fair market decades ago.
If you are dealing with cancer recovery, some ideas:
"Ketogenic Diet May Be Key to Cancer Recovery"
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/03/10/ketogenic-diet.aspx
"The premise is that since cancer cells need glucose to thrive, and carbohydrates turn into glucose in your body, then cutting out carbs literally starves the cancer cells."
People who live in traditional societies eating a traditional vegetable heavy diet and getting lots of sunlight and exercise also seem to have less lung cancer even when they smoke.
"Eat For Health - The Anti-Cancer Diet"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
Also look into vitamin D:
http://www.naturalnews.com/036597_vitamin_D_anti-cancer_drug.html
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/
And iodine:
http://theiodineproject.webs.com/cancerandiodine.htm
Making these sorts of changes is not quite the same as an Android body btw, mentioned in Star Trek episode "I, Mudd" as something Uhura wants), but at least it might help get to the point where you could have one if you wanted -- related to out other conversation:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3892785&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=44082521
I can see you project an optimistic sense of humor about it all, which can be a healthful thing:
http://www.humorproject.com/bookstore/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10116744
"Laughter has many clinical benefits, promoting beneficial physiological changes and an overall sense of well-being. Humor even has long-term effects that strengthen the effectiveness of the immune system."
So, laughing is probably better healthwise than a buzz from a "droud"? :-)
http://laughteryoga.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXEfjVnYkqM
For nerve damage, vitamin B12 and omegas 3s. See also my comments here on mercury and herbs:
http://aaronwinborn.com/blogs/aaron/monday-was-my-46th-birthday-and-likely-my-last-anything-awesome-i-should-try-after-i-die
Yeah, stairs can be a real life-saver for many -- to get some regular exercise, which moves the lymph around, which boosts the immune system and the body's natural self-cleaning mechanisms. Walking outside in the sunshine helps, too (although of course how you need to manage your DVT and clot risks however competent doctors recommend):
http://www.bluezones.com/
For some inspiration, a movie that is up for free on YouTube for a while for the two year anniversary (again, adjusted for DVT):
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/
http://www.rebootwithjoe.com/
And also, here is a movie (and book) on how clogged arteries can limit blood flow to the body's cells, creating a huge variety of health issues from that common cause (perhaps the root cause of most chronic illnesses in the US today as "diseases of affluence" such as you may be experiencing):
http://www.ravediet.com/
Also ask, "What Color is Your Diet?"
http://www.amazon.com/W
Just wanted to connect the point on people deciding what senses or body shapes/capacities to have to what we were discussed a couple days ago on: "Do-It-Yourself Brain Stimulation Has Scientists Worried"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3862853&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=44012505
Related themes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://xkcd.com/597/
Here is a fable I wrote about thirty years ago about a knight who becomes whatever he wrote in a book -- sort of like many self-defined Transhumanists aspire to:
"The Problems of Being Self Determining"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-problems-of-being-self-determining.html
I'm since thinking that the human mind/body/brain/spirit seems to act as if it has a bunch of layers, where there seem to be safeguards built-in to the lower layers (shaped by evolution?) which may limit the ease of radical changes which are sometimes (but not always) in practice self-destructive acts. Those lower layers may also be related to communications links with other humans, to maintain the functioning of the group (stuff like a sense of fairness, compassion, etc. as well as probably status issues too from another direction).
Which connects to this story on simulated universes, math and infinite convergences:
"I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility. Short story, Sam Hughes (2007)."
http://qntm.org/responsibility
I made artificial life simulations myself in the 1980s, and started thinking about the moral implications....
James P. Hogan has some related books too, like Entoverse, and Realtime Interrupt.
The late (sadly, unless he is on to better post-human things) Ian Banks wrote in passing in the Cture Novels about humans in non-human form.
http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
"One idea behind the Culture as it is depicted in the stories is that it has gone through cyclical stages during which there has been extensive human-machine interfacing, and other stages (sometimes coinciding with the human-machine eras) when extensive genetic alteration has been the norm. The era of the stories written so far - dating from about 1300 AD to 2100 AD - is one in which the people of the Culture have returned, probably temporarily, to something more 'classical' in terms of their relations with the machines and the potential of their own genes.
The Culture recognises, expects and incorporates fashions - albeit long-term fashions - in such matters. It can look back to times when people lived much of their lives in what we would now call cyberspace, and to eras when people chose to alter themselves or their children through genetic manipulation, producing a variety of morphological sub-species. Remnants of the various waves of such civilisational fashions can be found scattered throughout the Culture, and virtually everyone in the Culture carries the results of genetic manipulation in every cell of their body; it is arguably the most reliable signifier of Culture status.
Thanks to that genetic manipulation, the average Culture human will be born whole and healthy and of significantly (though not immensely) greater intelligence than their basic human genetic inheritance might imply. There are thousands of alterations to that human-basic inheritance - blister-free callusing and a clot-filter protecting the brain are two of the less important ones mentioned in the stories - but the major changes the standard Culture person would expect to be born with would include an optimized immune system and enhanced senses, freedom from inheritable diseases or defects, the ability to control their autonomic processes and nervous system (pain can, in effect, be switched off), and to survive and fully recover from wounds which would either kill or permanently mutilate without such genetic tinkering."
Sci-fi has been exploring this for decades.
Geordi La Forge's Visor in 1990s Star Trek is one answer. As is Data. As is Reginald Barclay's forays into becoming superhuman on the holodeck. As is Q.
From the 1950s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Than_Human
Or from Sturgeon also in the 1950s (The Skills of Xanadu, which presaged an motivated the internet and mobile computing in some ways):
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
From JD Bernal in the 1920s: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/flesh/
"Starting, as Mr. J. B. S. Haldane so convincingly predicts, in an ectogenetic factory, man will have anything from sixty to a hundred and twenty years of larval, unspecialized existence - surely enough to satisfy the advocates of a natural life. In this stage he need not be cursed by the age of science and mechanism, but can occupy his time (without the conscience of wasting it) in dancing, poetry and love-making, and perhaps incidentally take part in the reproductive activity. Then he will leave the body whose potentialities he should have sufficiently explored.
The next stage might be compared to that of a chrysalis, a complicated and rather unpleasant process of transforming the already existing organs and grafting on all the new sensory and motor mechanisms. There would follow a period of re-education in which he would grow to understand the functioning of his new se
More ideas: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
On self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
The grad plans were about "Elysium" but for all. Contrast:
http://www.itsbetteruphere.com/
with, from me:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/solarius/
Related attempts, but not very successful so far:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.openvirgle.net/
David Brin on the Transparent society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_society
Related suggestions by me:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
A basic income would give more people more time for self-education and civic engagement and raising independent children. They would have more time to review all this data.
Alaska has a bit of a basic income. Brazil has something of one recently. Germany has been talking about one. The USA has a basic income for people over 65 called "Social Security", so it could just be extended to all from birth and replace things like public schooling and unemployment insurance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
Of course, two countries that implemented something of them, Lybia and Iran have experienced US attempts to destabilize them. See also "the Threat of a Good Example" by Noam Chomsky: ..."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.html
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria.
Still, once could argue a basic income just props up capitalism. I guess it depends how it is implemented and what people actually would do with their time.
See Marshall Brain's Manna for a fictional example with both a basic income and a transparent society.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
There are many reasons things change slowly. People are naturally resistant to change, since they know the old ways work somewhat at least in the past. New intellectual paradigms take a while to propagate. Some people are invested in the current system emotionally and financially, even as it crumbles or faces increasing catastrophic systemic risks. And so on.
Although, perhaps it is better to not know what "X" is now, if it will take decades to see it come into being, with so much needless suffering along the way? :-(
James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" is a good example of people not being willing to embrace "X" when it is staring them in the face.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
Another "X" is vitamin D and good nutrition to prevent or reverse much chronic disease.
https://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
But that's been know for thousands of years. It just gets forgotten now and then.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/62262-let-food-be-thy-medicine-and-medicine-be-thy-f
Great story by H. G. Wells: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind ..."
"At the end of his descent, down a snow-slope in the mountain's shadow, he finds a valley, cut off from the rest of the world on all sides by steep precipices. Unbeknownst to Nunez, he has discovered the fabled Country of the Blind.
It does not go as he or the reader might expect. Spoilers at Wikipedia, but here it it is online:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11870
As a possible example, people who would share publicly-funded information freely in violation of copyright are persecuted (Aaron Swartz)...
"And of course you cannot switch it off because everyone who wants to do so will be seen by it as danger and eliminated."
http://obront.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/is-there-a-god-sci-fi-short-story/
See also my comment here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3892591&cid=44080213
"We already faced this at the end of cold war. The fact was faced by inventing a new enemy, one which CIA helps to create: terrorism."
While you make a good point, my point is deeper than that. We are facing such a radical transformation of our society through exponentially increasing computer power, that it is hard to predict where it will all end. The "Singularity" is one theme like that. Our path out of any singularity will have a lot to do with our path going into the singularity. So, we should strive to make our social world as happy and healthy a place as possible now, so we have the best chance at a good outcome.
Also, from another direction on the theme, with better computers, we may be able to simulate water better, as well as carbon, nitrogen, nickel, and silicon, and that may lead to a host of new materials and techniques (water filters, energy sources, communications equipment, computing, medicines, nanobots, rockets, space habitats, robotics, etc.). The political-economic implications of all that are staggering. So, by comparison, using computer farms for analysis related to eavesdropping is fairly tame -- in fact, it mainly just reinforces the status quo. But at the same time, we have these other bigger trends. That includes, countries trying to get a competitive edge while also reducing their attack surface (like, say, Singapore perhaps figuring out how to ensure clean air despite nearby forest fires or to ensure clean water with improved desalination techniques).
War machines are one aspect of Exascale-plus computing, as are the NSA revelations. From a historical perspective, I can wonder what use could be made of all these records and growing computing power in 100 years? Could that information and such computers be used to make historical simulations and recreations of this time period? Not saying whether that is good or bad -- just noting it. A point made in some sci-fi stories about tools to view the past is, when does the past begin? As a trustee of a small historical society, I can even wonder what the implications are if the NSA has all the local town communications from ten years ago? Our charter is to preserve local history and make it available for access. But what history is socially acceptable or socially prudent to preserve or to recreate, when, say, you know the NSA may have records of every local person's telephone and internet conversations with their doctors and lawyers and lovers and relatives? Will those archives be opened up in 30 years? In 50? In 100? If only AIs process that data (to avoid an NSA analyst listening to an un-targeted US citizen's conversations for legal reasons), will the AI grow by learning from them? How would such knowledge spread into the AIs running the war machines?
And see also, on universal bi-directional Brin-like surveillance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
"The Light of Other Days is a 2000 science fiction novel written by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke,[1] which explores the development of wormhole technology to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the space-time continuum. The wormhole technology is first used to send digital information via gamma rays, then developed further to transmit light waves. The media corporation who develops this advance can spy on anyone anywhere it chooses. A logical development from the laws of space-time allows light waves to be detected from the past. This enhances the wormhole technology into a "time viewer" where anyone opening a wormhole can view people and events from any point throughout time and space."
Typo, not world, but words, is what Gardner wrote, as above
Whatever one can say about what really went on around 1776 in North America, in theory, the whole meaning of a democratic republic is supposedly that it is "government of the people, by the people, for the people".
As John Gardner wrote in "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society", every generation must learn anew for itself the meaning of the world carved in the stone monuments.
http://books.google.com/books?id=U5hXpnwUmW4C&printsec=frontcover
Or as he wrote here:
http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/pages/documents/JohnGardner-RoadtoSelf-Renewal2.pdf
"We cannot dream of a Utopia in which all arrangements are ideal and everyone is flawless. Life is tumultuous -- an endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous struggle, never an assured victory. Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and refought. You may wonder if such a struggle, endless and of uncertain outcome, isn't more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world."
Or, as Edmund Burke said, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
So, the struggle against bad government , to ensure the government remains responsive and accountable and appropriately effective, is a bit like fighting mildew in a bathroom -- a never ending struggle. Still, we also need both hierarchy and meshworks in our lives, and indeed, we always have a mix of them as they keep turning into each other:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
And if the Earth does become one big thinking war machine (like in "Colossus: The Forbin Project") then the algorithms running on its internal homogenous API interfaces become the new actors struggling for resources and democratic accountability (in a purely computational meshwork/hierarchy context).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
Of course, we "people" all may be such already. :-)
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
How many googols of years has this been going on? ... Will the destruction happen again in the simulation? Probably not since the conditions that caused it were of stochastic nature. However, even if the destruction takes place in the simulation, the computer will restart it and the world will be created again in an endless fashion. ..."
"The World Was Probably Already Destroyed"
http://www.digitalcosmology.com/Blog/2012/12/06/t/
"Some people wonder if our planet will be destroyed on December 21, 2012. I have friends asking me every day whether I think the world will end in a few weeks. But it is possible that our planet was already destroyed and before that occured its scientists managed to send a capsule in space with a supercomputer running its simulation.
Still, there is always the first time...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
Yet, each time, people (or creatures that act like people) must find anew some balance of competition and cooperation, of meshwork and hierarchy, of a middle ground between fire and ice (to ignore the n-dimensional aspects as another layer of complexity).
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001 ..."
"To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality.
A further elaboration on that theme:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
The increase in global spying is only one technology-driven trend of many going on right now. Other ones have all sorts of implications. That is why we need better open source tools to help figure things out and make better decisions about what health is and how to shape healthy behavior with (as Lawrence Lessig said in Code 2.0) rules, norms, prices and architecture.
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... irony. :-)"
"... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.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.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially
And your point about the irony of how our fear of Skynet will lead to us building it preemptively is a great example of this general theme. It would be not much to worry about except that these technologies are so powerful -- which means we don't have to fight over material resources... See Marshall Brain's Manna at the end for another vision of what might be possible if we build a different sort of infrastructure with these technologies.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
That said, people may always find ways to compete to show off for status. So, we as a global society need to redirect those urges into more productive (or less destructive) areas...
"Evolution for competition & cooperation"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3866253&cid=44019221
"Re:Helping the NSA transcend to abundance thinking (Score:3)" ..."
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001 [slashdot.org]
"To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality.
The increase in global spying is only one technology-driven trend of many going on right now.
unless they have a contraindication like sarcoidosis: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/
Humans are adapted to live in the sunshine. The US RDA for vitamin D is way too low for most adults, especially ones who spend most of their time indoors these days (which is most everyone in the USA): http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
It's not surprise Assange has lung issues if he has become vitamin D deficient: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/pneumonia/
If you have allergies, look into adding more phytonutrients to your diet along with the vitamin D.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx
"If allergies are the problem, have you ever thought why your immune system is so sensitive and reactive to normal environmental substances?
Patients often state, “I struggled for years with pain and fatigue, until I finally found out fibromyalgia was my problem.” Does giving it a name establish a cause? Of course not. If you give the problem a name, patients may feel a little relieved that they now know what is wrong, but it usually does not help or solve their condition. The accuracy of the diagnosis is not as important when compared to the accuracy and effectiveness of the therapeutic recommendations for the problem.
On a practical level, the name of a disease doesn’t even matter that much. It is uncovering the cause of the disease that matters. When most of the causes are uncovered and removed, the body can manifest a recovery, all by itself. Most people are not taught, and they fail to realize that the vast majority of diseases occur because they are earned. They are earned by the causes of disease that stress their body to the point where their genetic weaknesses have a chance to be expressed."
I looked up the David Buss evolutionary psychology reference you supplied (TMND) and saw he has one about women specifically, where a key point in the book is that there are many reasons women do what they do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Buss
That makes sense when you think about it, because historically, like with some Native Americans, there were sometimes matriarchies where women controlled the land, and in hunter/gatherer societies that was a big deal. Selection for other attributes of men may then have been important.
It turns out I made a slashdot post about a year ago that touches on this issue too: ..."
"Re:Helping the NSA transcend to abundance thinking (Score:3)"
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001
"To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality.
I then mention some men/women issues related to the themes you raised. Also, I make a point that relates to yours, that men tend to move from high testosterone competition patterns in their teens and twenties to lower testosterone cooperative patterns in their forties and fifties.
Regarding "The Selfish Gene", see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
http://www.amazon.com/The-Difference-Diversity-Creates-Societies/dp/0691138540
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift
Evolution selects for all possible combinations at all possible levels, even if our simple brains may have trouble following that or turning it into math...
Also, regarding being short -- when food or air is in short supply, being smaller can be an advantage sometimes. Being short also helps in Judo, Life is full of tradeoffs, where our characteristics and preferences can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation. That is one reason the world is so diverse.
Good point about how standards change over time, too.
Hope to have time to see those Adam Curtis documentaries someday! Thanks for the recommendations.
"A lot of us saw the dawn of the information age as the potential for a second Enlightenment, when a universally free flow of ideas and wisdom would lift mankind as a whole into an era of freedom and prosperity. Universal education and information was going to save humanity. Silly us. All we really did was give the despots more tools."
A lot of bad stuff is probably going to go down, true. But, we can remain hopeful good things will happen too. See Howard Zinn, for example:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."
I watched that great video on "In the Year 2525" and am writing this on a US$250 Chromebook. Maybe it is not the best tool for covert browsing or communications like, say, "Freedombox" aspires to (for what that might be worth), but this cheap Chromebook is a great tool for learning. It would have been (almost) unbelievable in the 1950s. Ask yourself, as far as content learning goes, if you are a curious intellectually-inclined young person today, would you rather have had an expensive 1980s Princeton education with access to Firestone library (as I got), or just one year with a $250 Chromebook with acess to the 2013 internet for effortlessly following link after link and reading endless discussions on any topic you find interesting? If I was young again, I'd pick the Chromebook. An Ivy league education may have other benefits, as do face-to-face communities, but cheap access to endless information for those inclined to soak it up is now a reality -- and it is affordable for more and more people on the planet (including through discarded last generation smartphones). Another example, from India:
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
I followed your link. Now, please humor me and read "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (a sci-fi short story from the 1950s) to see what the internet and cheap mobile computing may still make possible. That story may help rekindle your optimism for what broad global education may make possible. It is available online here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51
Even stuff like more people learning about the idea of a basic income may make a huge difference over the next ten years...
http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/1gd0q7/krugman_endorses_universal_basic_income/
Yes, the USA may be relatively fading (including from thirty years of Neo-Liberalism and stuff like creeping surveillance and fearful self-destructive paranoia).
"Neoliberalism as a Water Balloon"
As much as I might like to disagree broadly with what you have written, I can't, because there is clearly a lot of truth to it from an evolutionary perspective. It's quite true that young people (teens, and twenties, especially, but also later as you point to) do try to show off in various ways to impress the opposite sex as part of human mating rituals. But, let me try to at least surround that truth would some additional options and nuances as a ramble.
First, as an example of a way to deal with this. In James P. Hogan's sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" about a post-scarcity society, he addresses this by the notion that people compete to demonstrate excellence in their chosen skills. Showing excellence in helping the community become a form of "Wealth". Material goods are given away freely, including to those who make no contributions to society, in part because, if someone is "poor" (not contributing, so socially disrespected), why heap additional problems on them by not letting them have material goods? So, while you have outlined a truth, how society chooses to deal with that truth, how these urges are directed, is an aspect of culture and circumstance.
From another direction, life on this plane of existence seems to consist of both cooperation and competition, arrayed across a mix of both meshworks and hierarchies. As E. O. Wilson points out, organisms often cooperate within some defined social boundary (like an ant colony) and then compete outside of the boundary (like ant wars). Humans historically have cooperated within tribes, even as they fought other tribes to define essentially property line boundaries between tribes. Many people enjoy team sports where you cooperate in your team but compete against other teams. Even Genghis Khan's command organization must have had some sense of internal cooperation even as it may have attacked other communities. So, the healthy human brain is able to navigate this social landscape (at least withing historic boundaries and the "Dunbar's" number of 100 - 230 tribe members). So, again the issue becomes, how does society direct these impulses within the limits of human potential?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
Freud had some keen insights, but he also overgeneralized and was a bit nutty. (People might say that about me, too? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/10/reviews/970810.10boxert.html
"Freud may have been bad. But can he really have been bad in so many contradictory ways? A sampling of recent books suggests that after a century of Freud flogging, the critics still haven't finished with him."
G. William Domhoff goes into detail about differences between the left and right:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.htm
One aspect not there is perhaps that the left tends to emphasize the cooperative aspect of society -- that we are all in this together, and if we all cooperate, we will all be better off, and that included caring for all children. While it may be rarely stated this extremely, the right tends to emphasize that people should succeed on their own merits, and part of success is being able to afford to raise children -- where if people can't afford children personally, they should not have them, and if they do have children, it is only right if the children suffer and die, because failure should not be propagated in order to maintain the health of the population.
There actually is quite a bit of sense to that sort of "Social Darwinism" from an individualist perspective -- except that it ignores both how much of success is collective, how sexual recombination crosses social rules about inherited wealth, and that the marketplace can be pretty f
Some undeniable truths and meta-truths mixed with some (probably) speculation and mysticism on reincarnation. Love it! :-)
And I loved "What Dreams May Come".too, which I quote here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
And I wonder what spin the "simulation argument" idea would put on your suggestions?
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Ultimately, what you are pointing towards is the mystery of consciousness...