Can you say what browser, OS, and hardware you tried it on?
Voxel.js was snappy when I tried it with Chromium on a Mac Pro desktop (vintage about four-five years ago with 2.8 Ghz Intel Xeon, fairly stock graphics card). It seemed to run even faster than Minecraft (granted it was probably doing a lot less with demo worlds).
No doubt most people would agree with you.:-) That is part of the reason the US economy is in such a mess.:-(
But hey, if people won't listen to a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Paul Krugman for ideological reasons, why should they listen to me? His book on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_This_Depression_Now! "But the essential point is that what we really need to get out of this current depression is another burst of government spending. Is it really that simple? Would it really be that easy? Basically, yes."
But before I reply to your points, agreeing with some and elaborating on other, let me make one point clear. I feel a healthy society balanced four different types of economic transactions -- subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange, while minimizing theft. I write about that on my site. http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
The rest of this is my musings about getting the exchange economy moving again (short of a basic income which would be better) and is certainly arguable. But what I feel is unquestionable is that ultimately we need all four types of those economic transactions for a healthy society. The USA has been suffering a huge loss in those other three areas of subsistence, gift giving, and planning, meaning those areas were not as available recently as they could have been to pick up the slack when the exchange economy started failing a big percent of the US population.
In many ways, getting those other types of economies to function well is a more important issue than tinkering with the money supply. As Zimbabwe shows, one can always make mistakes with regulating a money supply. We can't count only on fiat dollars to sustain a healthy society, even though they are by themselves easy to count and so mainstream numerically-oriented economists tend to focus on exchanges of them while ignoring non-monetary gifts like posts on slashdot, or subsistence efforts like people being able to print their own toys at home or generate their own solar power on their roof.
Those areas are actually in resurgence these days and will interact or substitute for the exchange economy more and more in years to come. Which actually might argue for a decrease in the need for as much money supply.:-)
Now on to your points.
"If there really is inadequate money supply there wouldn't be inflation, you'd get deflation."
True in general as the economy freezes up. I don't think I said we face much inflation overall right now? My point is the economy has stopped functioning for many people in the USA and also China (leading to few jobs for the college educated in China due to having an product-export-oriented economy needing factory workers until they can be automated away). http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57549450-92/foxconn-reportedly-installing-robots-to-replace-workers/
"The last I checked that was not happening at least with the US dollar."
Well, over the last few years, US household have lost on the order of US$8 trillion in wealth; seems like something must have deflated in value to me (mainly real estate, but some other things too like some stocks etc.): http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/news/economy/household_wealth/index.htm "U.S. household wealth fell by about $16.4 trillion of net worth from its peak in spring 2007, about six months before the start of the recession, to when things hit bottom in the first quarter of 2009, according to figures from the Federal Reserve. While a rebound in the stock market, an improved savings rate and consumer steps to reduce debt resulted in net worth g
BTW, "TheLink", thanks for the link to the Zimbabwe 100 Trillion Dollar Bill Banknote 2008" at Amazon. I just bought a few such notes for home education and to give away.:-)
It is unfortunate the solutions to Zimbabwe's economic problems on this Wikipedia page do not include other possibilities of improving the subsistence, give, and planned parts of the Zimbabwe economy, or creating LETS systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
The Wikipedia page on Zimbabwe talks about problems in Zimbabwe with lack of transparency and corruption. It just goes to show that any token is meaningless without some sort of democratically-accountable or otherwise generally-agreed-upon way of defining what it means. That goes the same for bank notes as twitter hash tags. So you are right to be concerned, but that does not mean the issue can not be managed in practice most of the time (at least until we fully transition to a post-scarcity economy where rationing via ration unit tokens like fiat dollars is not very important in practice, similar to how the USA does not generally ration access to public library drinking water fountains). See also on symbols and meanings: "Data and Reality" http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm And on post-scarcity economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy
Still, as you point out, those Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar banknotes still can be useful in various ways. So, their symbolic meaning may just be different than the original printers intended.:-)
But that example does not mean all printed materials have no meaning depending on the social context. Clearly, LETS dollars can have useful value in local areas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system "LETS can help revitalise and build community by allowing a wider cross-section of the community -- individuals, small businesses, local services and voluntary groups -- to save money and resources in cooperation with others and extend their purchasing power. Other benefits may include social contact, health care, tuition and training, support for local enterprise and new businesses. One goal of this approach is to stimulate the economies of economically depressed towns that have goods and services, but little official currency: the LETS scheme does not require outside sources of income as stimulus."
Realistically, there are hundreds of trillions of US dollars in the US financial system in various ways (including derivatives and future obligations). Printing even another 15 trillion (the US annual GDP) would likely have little effect overall if, say, the money went to invest in improved infrastructure., education, preventive health care, sustainable energy, rethinking national security to be mutual and intrinsic, and general scientific R&D (including on fusion energy and agricultural robotics) which all would increase the value of the USA as an ongoing community. China has already been doing some of that with great success. I'm suggesting it could do even more to even more success.
While what you say about fiat dollars is true as far as it goes, it ignores the bigger picture of "Credit as a Public Utility" as discussed by Richard C. Cook at two of the links. http://www.globalresearch.ca/an-emergency-program-of-monetary-reform-for-the-united-states/5494 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3p48upXJaA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL "The author of this independent report worked for the Carter White House and NASA, then spent 21 years with the U.S. Treasury Department. In the report, he explains that the U.S. financial system headed by the Federal Reserve System has failed and that only an emergency program of monetary reform can address conditions which may be leading to a catastrophe like the Great Depression or worse. Such an assessment has become increasingly familiar as economic storm clouds continue to gather. But the analysis and recommendations contained in the report may be surprising, even to many progressives. "
Fiat currencies are more than just a "store of value" which is what you are focusing on. Fiat dollars are actually in many ways a very poor store of value (compared to real estate, gold, monopolies, skills, or whatever). Fiat dollars are also a medium of exchange, which transmits signals of "demand". That's why I sometimes call them "ration units". When a society with our sort of heavily-exchange--based economic system has too few such fiat tokens to signal demand, the system does not work well, just the same as if you had too few "Kanban tokens" in a factory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
Both the USA and China have an inadequate money supply for the current needs of their societies. In the USA this is true for two reasons. One is because most digital currency in the USA has left the real economy most US citizens are engaged in, and those digital blips in banking computers have moved to the zero-sum casino economy of speculative investments in "FIRE" asset inflation. The other is that the Clinton Administration so well managed the US Federal Budget that it moved into surplus and stopped borrowing, which meant new currency was no longer being created and injected into a growing US economy. That helped cause the subsequent economic depression.
To understand this, imagine what would happen to the US economy if everyone stuffed all their US dollars (or digital banking equivalents) into their mattresses. Soon everyone in the USA would be out of work. Why is that? The demand is still there. The infrastructure is still there. The raw material is still there. The reason is that there is no way for "consumers" to send signals (via fiat dollars) to make the system work.
Granted in real life, people would begin to barter, would invent local currencies (search on LETS), or would start trading with foreign currencies. Or people might begin to somehow more formally communicate demand via twitters or emails, which could even get passed around as IOUs as another form of currency. So, there are limits to this thought experiment. But for the sake of the argument we could assume all these other means of exchange had been outlawed (as some countries have done, including to an extent Cuba or the old USSR).
As is suggested at the following link, the main reason for the American Revolution was mainly that got laws passed to prevent American colonists from printing their own money any longer, which led to a depression in the American colonies: http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/06/other-reason-for-american-revolution.html "This, [Benjamin Franklin] said, was the real reason for the Revolution: "the colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that
Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD, talks about the political history of how the meat and dairy industry got this information into schools in one chapter. But, here are some key points if you are probably not going to read that right away.
First, here is some general history of changing guidelines (you can see the pre-1956 guidelines we more diverse): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guides "From 1956 until 1992 the United States Department of Agriculture recommended its "Basic Four" food groups."
Those four food groups were: "Milk", "Meat", "Cereals and breads", and "Vegetables and fruits". They were usually displayed in roughly equal physically-sized portions. Beans were technically included in the "meat" group, but in practice are fairly ignorable by most people in that model (including how it was typically drawn). Because of differing calorie density (fruits and vegetables having few calories per unit volume because of fiber), this meant 90% or more of your calories when eating by the four food groups would be from animal products and (usually) refined grains in bread. As described in "Eat to Live", humans are adapted to get most of their calories from fruits, vegetables, and beans (plus some nuts, seed, and whole grains). The "basic four" effectively inverts this concept, meaning your diet will have almost no essential phytonutrients.
It is true a case can be made for some animal products in the diet (especially for omega-3 fats, and for iodine unless you eat sea vegetables, and for some other reasons). People can argue about the role of fish-eating in recent human development perhaps, even though fish today may be polluted with mercury and PCBs. I'm not saying I agree 100% with Fuhrman about every detail, but he sketches out well the big picture.
It is harder to make the case for having any refined grains and refined sugar in the diet (meaning refined flour and sugar, as opposed to whole grains). That is because refined grains and refined sugar spike insulin levels and cause inflammation (the small particles are rapidly digested). Fuhrman also suggests not eating much unrefined grains (like brown rice) although others like Dr. McDougall may disagree from a convenience perspective: http://www.lanimuelrath.com/diet-nutrition/mcdougall-vs-fuhrman-notes-for-you-from-the-great-plant-based-doctors-debate/
So, basically, the four food groups is a prescription for disease -- specially heart disease and stroke, cancer, and diabetes, which are the main "diseases of affluence" that kill most US Americans now but were very rare 100 years ago. Ideally, you should get 90% of your calories from fruits, vegetables, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains) and use animal products as side dishes, flavorings, or binders in recipes. As Dr. Fuhrman says in Eat To Live, we have not yet seen what modern medicine could do to extend the lives of people who ate in a healthy way.
Note also that most of the world tend to be lactose intolerant. Thus emphasizing milk also destroys many people's health, especially that of many minority children in the USA who will then suffer from continual stomach distress and worse. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance
It used to be decades ago that when a US company really needed people without making a commitment to training, they would hire US citizen contractors earnign about 2X to 3X the prevailing wage (beyond overhead). The tradeoff was you had less job security as a contractor, got no training which meant skills could go obsolete, and had little time for chit chat. So, contractors are really what H1Bs have replaced more than employees.
As Cringely points out: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/10/26/1837214/cringley-h-1b-visa-abuse-limits-wages-and-steals-us-jobs "It's not hard to suppose from this information that an influx of H-1B workers representing an average 20 percent of the local technical work force (those 500,000 H-1Bs against a 2.5 million body labor pool) would push down local wages. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that it does, too, but most of the more rigorous academic studies don't show this because there is no easily available data."
At the upper limit, at 300,000 H1Bs a year, in seven years the US IT workforce would be entirely foreign with 2.1 million more H1Bs plus 500,000 already. So much for national security. If we do need that many technical immigrants in the USA, at least make them citizens when they arrive so it is more fair for everyone. And then the USA can still tax them when they move out of the country like the US government would if my family moved abroad to lower our living expenses.:-)
As a consequence of H1Bs (and some other trends to be fair, including stuff H. Ross Perot and EDS lobbied for to make it harder to be an independent contractor, and also the rise in people calling themselves programmers), the contractor market in most IT has nosedived over the past two decades. Driving down regular wages and working conditions is just an extra bonus for companies, given now they can get contractors for employee rates and not have to train them or make any commitments to them (including working conditions like office space, assistants, vacation, personal time, and so on). As a domino effect, things have gotten worse for regular professional employees. Just watch some old movies of office life like "Desk Set" to see what many larger corporations used to be like as far as professional employees having more personal and social space at work -- while still leaving their job at the office at 5pm. Some few companies are somewhat exceptions these days, like Google or SAS, but not many. Still, there are other trends as well, so H1Bs can't be blamed for all of that -- they are just part of it. So, while it used to be that being a contractor meant you got paid much better; now the employee position tends to be better compensated overall. Some of that history used to be in comments on Janet Ruhl's "Real Rates" site archive as one place where I watched it all slowly play out over the last two decades, but unfortunately the site had technical problems and most posts disappeared: htt
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm "With most of the rank and file employees replaced by robots and eliminated from the payroll, all of the money flowing into a large corporation has only one place to go -- upward toward the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will be dramatic when robots arrive."
It's kind of surprising how much politicians think they can get away with now in the USA. There is still massive unemployment and they think they can push through legislation like this. Why not instead, say, just mandate that all US companies be willing to pay for two months of employee training a year, to level the economic playing field and promote the growth of the US workforce? And also mandate vacation time as well? http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/ ""Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork... Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?"
Personally though, I'm all for throwing open the borders. The issue is making H1Bs second-class citizens. If you want to import workers, make them citizens when they step off the boat. And give everyone a basic income. It's an experiment, but its hard to imagine doing much worse than what we have.
What ever happend to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"? Why not ake the USA into the "Australia Project" Marshall Brain wrote about in Manna? http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Anyway, it's been great fun playing with the demos -- especially the surprising voxel-portal one. At first I thought the behavior was a bug, and then I realized it was a feature -- wow!:-) http://substack.net/projects/voxel-portal/
It's just amazing to think I can, as above, supply people with URLs that with one click will put them in a virtual world of some sort.
Well, assuming their browser supports WebGL well, but that will just get better over time. I downloaded Chromium just to run this since Firefox 18 had problems on my Mac with WebGL. I've tried WebGL before, but never had seen anything really compelling to use it for. Voxel.js may just be the breakthrough app for WebGL -- you and James Halliday have put together something that amazing.
You may have found it slow, but I have found it faster than Minecraft on a desktop (Mac Pro with eight 2.8 Ghz Intel Xeon cores, where only 60%-75% of one core seems to be used by Voxel.js under Chromium). Granted, Voxel.js may be doing a lot less than Minecraft, or the demo worlds may be smaller, I don't know, so this is not a comprehensive comparison. But at least for something simple, Voxel.js seems very useable on a Mac desktop that is more than four years old and does not have especially fancy graphics cards in it. I have not seen any lag in it.
AC wrote: "needs webgl to run, I think that would have been more important to mention than the whole js thing?"
Good point, AC. I should have mentioned WebGL in the article summary. That is the probably the biggest stumbling block for lots of people running this. That was a problem I myself encountered with a crashing problem with Firefox 18 when I enabled WebGL, and worked around that by trying Voxel.js in Chromium, the open source version of Chrome. Still, in another couple of years, I would think WebGL might be fairly well supported in lots of browsers?
Good points. I've been feeling more-and-more lately that "if something does not have a URL, it is broken".:-)
And Minecraft worlds don't have URLs. Voxel.js world do. A simple seeming difference, but the implications are huge about sharing, discovering, mashups, archiving, expanding, and so on.
Thanks for the info. I ended up installing Chromium to run it.
As "eksith" points out in another reply, everything has hiccups at first. The important thing is that this is working with technology that is based around open standards. And the design is modular and expandable.
First, they say "Chrome version 23 or above or Firefox version 17 or above are recommended." So, you can try either.
I had problems using Voxel.js in Firefox 18 on the Mac, so I downloaded Chromium (the open-source fork of Chrome) from FreeSMUG , and Voxel.js ran fine it it. It was actually snappier than Minecraft on my machine, but that may just be because of a smaller world?
I feel I'd probably rather download Chromium once and then surf to web pages than download a Java application like Minecraft and deal with all sorts of issues when trying to use Minecraft add-ons (given Minecraft has not prioritized supporting community add-ons). It has been a pain to manage lots of incompatible Minecraft add-ons (my wife even wrote a tool to help our kid deal with that). Also, when you download Minecraft addons, they presumably with full permissions and so could do anything to your system like read or delete files. I presume that web pages in Chromium are much more limited in what they can do (even though I have heard about theoretical WebGL exploits). http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/06/17/121236/microsoft-brands-webgl-a-harmful-technology
It would probably be fair to say WebGL is not that well supported everywhere. I had problems with it in Firefox as above. Still, it seems to me like this group is trying hard to use open standards with JavaScript and WebGL, so I'm not sure your criticism is fair in that sense. WebGL is supported by multiple browsers, but probably just not very well yet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL
Still, give it time, and I expect WebGL (or something similar) will run most anywhere.
Anyway, this generation may be "nuts" in their own way, true.:-) The question is, is the "nuts" of a bunch of people across the planet getting together virtually to write free and open source software (for shareable virtual worlds of abundant virtual resources) more "nuts" than a bunch of people getting together to give us, say, the "Cold War" and the artificial scarcity of software patents and endless copyrights etc.?
In the book "The China Price", a factory worker is discussed who had his hand mangled in an injection molder. He was left to fend for himself with a tiny bit of "compensation" from the factory. No wonder smart people in China want to avoid factory jobs -- they are not like factory jobs in the USA. See: "The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage" by Alexandra Harney http://www.amazon.com/The-China-Price-Competitive-Advantage/dp/0143114867 "In this landmark work of investigative reporting, former Financial Times correspondent Alexandra Harney uncovers a story of immense significance to us all: how China's factory economy gains a competitive edge by selling out its workers, environment, and future. Harney's firsthand reporting brings us face-to-face with a world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact a staggering toll in human misery and environmental damage. This eye-opening expose offers, for the first time, an intimate look at the defining business story of our time."
I also don't understand why China does not just print money to give out as a "basic income" to Chinese citizens so they can buy Chinese factory products (eventually recycled by taxes when the money supply grows to the right size). While in the past it might have made sense for Chinese factory workers to accept low wages as a sort of "tax" so China could learn how to make things based on Western know-how, it seems that has passed the point of diminishing returns. The big issue is that the Chinese don't have enough cash to buy their own goods, and that should be relatively easy to solve. I guess even the Chinese don't understand modern fiat-dollar economics, let alone the emerging post-scarcity economic model? Of course, I could say much the same about the USA, where there is a shortage of money supply because so much digital cash is either sitting on the sidelines parked in zero interest bank accounts or is in the zero-sum "casino economy" on Wall Street. Related links: http://www.globalresearch.ca/an-emergency-program-of-monetary-reform-for-the-united-states/5494 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3p48upXJaA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
Great blog post, Max. Thanks for chiming in. I've enjoyed your previous instructional materials about CouchDB and other things like "JavaScript for Cats". http://jsforcats.com/
So far our cat has only expressed limited interest in that website, but maybe over time interest will pick up?:-)
For some reason, I think it would be really cool to put some sort of Couch-like database backend to this, even though I can't think of what it could be used for?:-) But that is the beauty of your well-architected modular approach to Voxel.js (which you mention in comparison to other systems out there). It should be relatively easy to make an interface to any data source (whether hosted using CouchDB or anything else) using standard web protocols.
An example of that is what you did when you made a module that "dynamically renders any area of San Francisco into a crude voxel world". My wife worked towards doing that with data from the USGS for Minecraft, but there were various difficulties trying to transform the data. As a trustee of a local small community historical society, which has trouble competing for attention of the younger crowd against the web and apps and such, I've been thinking that it would be great if communities could make virtual worlds that local residents could visit. There could be different versions of these worlds, for the past, the present, and the future. Then people could discuss history, current issues, and long-term planning in them.
Although there is a lot to be said for face-to-face get-togethers too, like with your Gather project. https://gather.at/
This modular extensibility of Voxel.js seems like a huge win long-term, as does being easy to install as more and more browsers improve their support for WebGL. I feel it also might be cool to run Voxel.js on Java using the Rhino JavaScript engine and some Java 3D backend, for people to use if their web browser still struggles with WebGL.
Anyway, thanks for making this fantastic hopeful project! I hope being on the front page of Slashdot brings in more developers and users.
The cross-platform install process is easier with Javascript than just about anything else. That is the biggest win here -- beyond the idea of open source virtual worlds which others have done before. Perhaps that didn't used to be the case years ago, but it is now for any software that is going to quickly get mass adoption. Still, it's true that Android and iOS both try to make that easy -- if you've bought special hardware. HTML5 and related technologies like WebGL are trying to create standards for being able to use back-end engines, and Voxel.js taps into that.
Still, I tried to run Voxel.js in Firefox 18 on the Mac, with having to turn on "experimental" (for my mac) WebGL support just for this, and it crashed my browser every time. Nonetheless, it's only a matter of time before good 3D support is in browsers everywhere. Personally, I'd have rather seen a well-sandboxed virtual machine as the standard in the browser (whether Java, Parrot, Lua, or anything else), but Javascript is what we got.
Actually, I've been wondering if I could run Voxel.js on top of Java running a Javascript engine that talks to a 3D backend? As a software developer, I'm willing to go through more install hassles, even if I know most people aren't.
I'd agree with Joe_Dragon that apprenticeships can make a lot of sense. Your post makes me think about something else, putting a few factoids together in a new way. I'm thinking, speculating a bit from what I saw in academia the 1970s and 1980s, that there was a time, decades ago (like before the 1970s) when academia was growing so fast (exponentially) that people from industry without PhDs or much anything beyond real knowledge could become well-respected reasonably-paid teachers (unlike today's somewhat disrespected and poorly-paid adjuncts). In the 1970s, exponential growth of academia stopped (as David Goodstein points out). So, at that point, there came a glut of PhDs on the market with few job prospects since academia kept churning them out at a rate appropriate for exponential growth that was no longer happening. Working conditions for most new faculty plummeted (supply and demand). It became impossible to get even a mediocre college teaching job without a PhD (or at least a Masters for lesser schools). So, academia over the last couple decades became staffed with *only* academics with little real-world life experience which it generated internally. The two-way interchange between industry and academia became essentially one-way, academia to industry. Add to this in the USA the loss of the family farm, loss of good hands-on union mechanical/electrical jobs with apprenticeships, the expansion of the school year, and the increase of opaque black boxes in industry, and the result is few entering academia had any practical non-academic experience or had any way of getting any (like by summer jobs). This of course is all a bit of an over-simplification, yet is may explain why courses are less useful now? References: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
Bottom line: most real education is "self-directed education", whether it is in the garden, in the shop, in the library, or in the "classroom". However, self-directed does not mean we do not learn much from other people, whether face-to-face or through their writings or recordings. Thus, you learned from people who wrote the textbooks, even if the "teacher" you say regularly face-to-face may have had little to offer.
You may be beyond this, but this is probably a good way to learn computing almost from the ground up these days: http://www.nand2tetris.org/
Or one can build programmable computers from Redstone in Minecraft?:-)
It sounds like anyone who teaches optimization by teaching assembly probably does not know much about optimization, since assembly is just a distraction from it, especially given today's compilers can generally write better assembly for most CPUs than most programmers ever could. The real optimization challenges are in algorithms, thinking about prioritization of values and managing complexity (of both data and implementations)...
Nand-to-Tetris is a bottom up book. "Data and Reality" by William Kent is a complementary book that is in-a-sense top-down: http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
"The same people that refuse to accept a problem or system as beyond their comprehension are the same people that look down on things like religion and for the same reason. It isn't how human brains are designed to work, but it is what got our species this far."
There are few things that can reduce your fecundity (or probabbly effectiveness in designing good things) like a life lived in existential angst and social strife, and religion can help prevent those problems (whaever one might say about the truth of the dogmas): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
You're right, people can make a big difference in small ways, and together that can add up to a lot. Plus, every small change gives us more experience, confidence, and resources to use in working towards larger things.
As I quote here from "What Dreams May Come": http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html === "This is their composite mental image?" I asked. Soundless; hueless; lifeless. "It is," he said. "And you work here?" I felt stunned that anyone who had the choice would elect to work in this forbidding place. "This is nothing," was all he said. ===
And: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/307761/ "Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."
While Shirky's post has some great insights, I actually disagree with a sentiment implied where he says: "Most of us won't kill ourselves, no matter how bad things get.... Madoff hasn't killed himself because he isn't the kind of person who kills himself." While perhaps true, it is misleading. I'd suggest depression and suicide could happen in almost anyone's life probabilistically, but that certain circumstances make it more or less likely. Then, if it does, the survivors tend to work backwards from "if only" proximate causes, but overall it is always a network of interacting causes and effects. Genes are one thing affecting probabilities, but so is nutrition, lifestyle, mental outlook, mental habits including gratitude, religions and spiritual upbringing or life philosophy, social networks, physical infrastructure, and many other factors (including what we think about the world) which interact with each other. Or, in other words, a life is like a tree, and whether that tree is blown over by any particular storm in life is about both how big the (perceived) storm is and how deep the tree's roots are (and roots help us grow more roots). For a person, roots are things like nutrition, family, friends, hobbies, community, music, values, habits, religion/philosophy, and so on. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology
Thanks for the success story of personal growth to grow deeper roots in various ways. Good luck in continuing to grow them as best as is possible in this plane of existence filled with various dualistic tensions, with life at a Yin/Yang interface of
"Although Obama's Affordable Care Act gives better access to treatment options for mentally ill persons:..."
Things like nutrition, positive psychology, physical infrastructure, life opportunities, community and so on can make a huge difference in mental health. But they are not generally covered as treatments by insurance. Similarly, health insurance may pay $100K for a heart operation, but it won't pay a penny towards the healthy food needed to stay physically and mentally well. http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
And for decades bad nutritional advice like "the four food groups" has been enshrined in public education by regulatory capture and clever marketing by agribusiness.
See also on optimism: 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."
Slashdot Mirror
Can you say what browser, OS, and hardware you tried it on?
Voxel.js was snappy when I tried it with Chromium on a Mac Pro desktop (vintage about four-five years ago with 2.8 Ghz Intel Xeon, fairly stock graphics card). It seemed to run even faster than Minecraft (granted it was probably doing a lot less with demo worlds).
"Seems like bullshit to me."
No doubt most people would agree with you. :-) That is part of the reason the US economy is in such a mess. :-(
But hey, if people won't listen to a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Paul Krugman for ideological reasons, why should they listen to me? His book on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_This_Depression_Now!
"But the essential point is that what we really need to get out of this current depression is another burst of government spending. Is it really that simple? Would it really be that easy? Basically, yes."
But before I reply to your points, agreeing with some and elaborating on other, let me make one point clear. I feel a healthy society balanced four different types of economic transactions -- subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange, while minimizing theft. I write about that on my site.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
The rest of this is my musings about getting the exchange economy moving again (short of a basic income which would be better) and is certainly arguable. But what I feel is unquestionable is that ultimately we need all four types of those economic transactions for a healthy society. The USA has been suffering a huge loss in those other three areas of subsistence, gift giving, and planning, meaning those areas were not as available recently as they could have been to pick up the slack when the exchange economy started failing a big percent of the US population.
In many ways, getting those other types of economies to function well is a more important issue than tinkering with the money supply. As Zimbabwe shows, one can always make mistakes with regulating a money supply. We can't count only on fiat dollars to sustain a healthy society, even though they are by themselves easy to count and so mainstream numerically-oriented economists tend to focus on exchanges of them while ignoring non-monetary gifts like posts on slashdot, or subsistence efforts like people being able to print their own toys at home or generate their own solar power on their roof.
Those areas are actually in resurgence these days and will interact or substitute for the exchange economy more and more in years to come. Which actually might argue for a decrease in the need for as much money supply. :-)
Now on to your points.
"If there really is inadequate money supply there wouldn't be inflation, you'd get deflation."
True in general as the economy freezes up. I don't think I said we face much inflation overall right now? My point is the economy has stopped functioning for many people in the USA and also China (leading to few jobs for the college educated in China due to having an product-export-oriented economy needing factory workers until they can be automated away).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57549450-92/foxconn-reportedly-installing-robots-to-replace-workers/
"The last I checked that was not happening at least with the US dollar."
Well, over the last few years, US household have lost on the order of US$8 trillion in wealth; seems like something must have deflated in value to me (mainly real estate, but some other things too like some stocks etc.):
http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/news/economy/household_wealth/index.htm
"U.S. household wealth fell by about $16.4 trillion of net worth from its peak in spring 2007, about six months before the start of the recession, to when things hit bottom in the first quarter of 2009, according to figures from the Federal Reserve. While a rebound in the stock market, an improved savings rate and consumer steps to reduce debt resulted in net worth g
BTW, "TheLink", thanks for the link to the Zimbabwe 100 Trillion Dollar Bill Banknote 2008" at Amazon. I just bought a few such notes for home education and to give away. :-)
It is unfortunate the solutions to Zimbabwe's economic problems on this Wikipedia page do not include other possibilities of improving the subsistence, give, and planned parts of the Zimbabwe economy, or creating LETS systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
The Wikipedia page on Zimbabwe talks about problems in Zimbabwe with lack of transparency and corruption. It just goes to show that any token is meaningless without some sort of democratically-accountable or otherwise generally-agreed-upon way of defining what it means. That goes the same for bank notes as twitter hash tags. So you are right to be concerned, but that does not mean the issue can not be managed in practice most of the time (at least until we fully transition to a post-scarcity economy where rationing via ration unit tokens like fiat dollars is not very important in practice, similar to how the USA does not generally ration access to public library drinking water fountains). See also on symbols and meanings:
"Data and Reality"
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
And on post-scarcity economics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy
Still, as you point out, those Zimbabwe 100 trillion dollar banknotes still can be useful in various ways. So, their symbolic meaning may just be different than the original printers intended. :-)
But that example does not mean all printed materials have no meaning depending on the social context. Clearly, LETS dollars can have useful value in local areas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system
"LETS can help revitalise and build community by allowing a wider cross-section of the community -- individuals, small businesses, local services and voluntary groups -- to save money and resources in cooperation with others and extend their purchasing power. Other benefits may include social contact, health care, tuition and training, support for local enterprise and new businesses. One goal of this approach is to stimulate the economies of economically depressed towns that have goods and services, but little official currency: the LETS scheme does not require outside sources of income as stimulus."
Realistically, there are hundreds of trillions of US dollars in the US financial system in various ways (including derivatives and future obligations). Printing even another 15 trillion (the US annual GDP) would likely have little effect overall if, say, the money went to invest in improved infrastructure., education, preventive health care, sustainable energy, rethinking national security to be mutual and intrinsic, and general scientific R&D (including on fusion energy and agricultural robotics) which all would increase the value of the USA as an ongoing community. China has already been doing some of that with great success. I'm suggesting it could do even more to even more success.
More on all of lots of other alternatives here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
Expecations in our global society are changing. TFA about expectations rising in China is just part of all that. It is hard to predict where those rising expectations will lead us. Maybe the asteroids and then stars?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jan/22/space-mining-gold-asteroids
With space craft powered by LENR (aka cold fusion)?
While what you say about fiat dollars is true as far as it goes, it ignores the bigger picture of "Credit as a Public Utility" as discussed by Richard C. Cook at two of the links.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/an-emergency-program-of-monetary-reform-for-the-united-states/5494
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3p48upXJaA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
"The author of this independent report worked for the Carter White House and NASA, then spent 21 years with the U.S. Treasury Department. In the report, he explains that the U.S. financial system headed by the Federal Reserve System has failed and that only an emergency program of monetary reform can address conditions which may be leading to a catastrophe like the Great Depression or worse. Such an assessment has become increasingly familiar as economic storm clouds continue to gather. But the analysis and recommendations contained in the report may be surprising, even to many progressives. "
Fiat currencies are more than just a "store of value" which is what you are focusing on. Fiat dollars are actually in many ways a very poor store of value (compared to real estate, gold, monopolies, skills, or whatever). Fiat dollars are also a medium of exchange, which transmits signals of "demand". That's why I sometimes call them "ration units". When a society with our sort of heavily-exchange--based economic system has too few such fiat tokens to signal demand, the system does not work well, just the same as if you had too few "Kanban tokens" in a factory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
Both the USA and China have an inadequate money supply for the current needs of their societies. In the USA this is true for two reasons. One is because most digital currency in the USA has left the real economy most US citizens are engaged in, and those digital blips in banking computers have moved to the zero-sum casino economy of speculative investments in "FIRE" asset inflation. The other is that the Clinton Administration so well managed the US Federal Budget that it moved into surplus and stopped borrowing, which meant new currency was no longer being created and injected into a growing US economy. That helped cause the subsequent economic depression.
To understand this, imagine what would happen to the US economy if everyone stuffed all their US dollars (or digital banking equivalents) into their mattresses. Soon everyone in the USA would be out of work. Why is that? The demand is still there. The infrastructure is still there. The raw material is still there. The reason is that there is no way for "consumers" to send signals (via fiat dollars) to make the system work.
Granted in real life, people would begin to barter, would invent local currencies (search on LETS), or would start trading with foreign currencies. Or people might begin to somehow more formally communicate demand via twitters or emails, which could even get passed around as IOUs as another form of currency. So, there are limits to this thought experiment. But for the sake of the argument we could assume all these other means of exchange had been outlawed (as some countries have done, including to an extent Cuba or the old USSR).
As is suggested at the following link, the main reason for the American Revolution was mainly that got laws passed to prevent American colonists from printing their own money any longer, which led to a depression in the American colonies:
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/06/other-reason-for-american-revolution.html
"This, [Benjamin Franklin] said, was the real reason for the Revolution: "the colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that
Explained in detail with many refs: http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/ETLBook.aspx
Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD, talks about the political history of how the meat and dairy industry got this information into schools in one chapter. But, here are some key points if you are probably not going to read that right away.
First, here is some general history of changing guidelines (you can see the pre-1956 guidelines we more diverse):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guides
"From 1956 until 1992 the United States Department of Agriculture recommended its "Basic Four" food groups."
Those four food groups were: "Milk", "Meat", "Cereals and breads", and "Vegetables and fruits". They were usually displayed in roughly equal physically-sized portions. Beans were technically included in the "meat" group, but in practice are fairly ignorable by most people in that model (including how it was typically drawn). Because of differing calorie density (fruits and vegetables having few calories per unit volume because of fiber), this meant 90% or more of your calories when eating by the four food groups would be from animal products and (usually) refined grains in bread. As described in "Eat to Live", humans are adapted to get most of their calories from fruits, vegetables, and beans (plus some nuts, seed, and whole grains). The "basic four" effectively inverts this concept, meaning your diet will have almost no essential phytonutrients.
You also need phytonutrients to grow well and for your immune system to resist cancer and other disease.
http://www.peertrainer.com/health/dr_joel_fuhrman_super_immunity_book.aspx
It is true a case can be made for some animal products in the diet (especially for omega-3 fats, and for iodine unless you eat sea vegetables, and for some other reasons). People can argue about the role of fish-eating in recent human development perhaps, even though fish today may be polluted with mercury and PCBs. I'm not saying I agree 100% with Fuhrman about every detail, but he sketches out well the big picture.
It is harder to make the case for having any refined grains and refined sugar in the diet (meaning refined flour and sugar, as opposed to whole grains). That is because refined grains and refined sugar spike insulin levels and cause inflammation (the small particles are rapidly digested). Fuhrman also suggests not eating much unrefined grains (like brown rice) although others like Dr. McDougall may disagree from a convenience perspective:
http://www.lanimuelrath.com/diet-nutrition/mcdougall-vs-fuhrman-notes-for-you-from-the-great-plant-based-doctors-debate/
So, basically, the four food groups is a prescription for disease -- specially heart disease and stroke, cancer, and diabetes, which are the main "diseases of affluence" that kill most US Americans now but were very rare 100 years ago. Ideally, you should get 90% of your calories from fruits, vegetables, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains) and use animal products as side dishes, flavorings, or binders in recipes. As Dr. Fuhrman says in Eat To Live, we have not yet seen what modern medicine could do to extend the lives of people who ate in a healthy way.
Note also that most of the world tend to be lactose intolerant. Thus emphasizing milk also destroys many people's health, especially that of many minority children in the USA who will then suffer from continual stomach distress and worse. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance
More on the problems of milk for most people:
It used to be decades ago that when a US company really needed people without making a commitment to training, they would hire US citizen contractors earnign about 2X to 3X the prevailing wage (beyond overhead). The tradeoff was you had less job security as a contractor, got no training which meant skills could go obsolete, and had little time for chit chat. So, contractors are really what H1Bs have replaced more than employees.
Another casualty has been the older employee, who was previously either employed at higher wages or became the contractor, rather than in general a pervasive age discrimination that has emerged in the IT field (and hiring of young H1Bs is a generally ignored part of that). Related:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/12/03/1435217/half-life-of-a-tech-worker-15-years
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/11/18/142222/its-hard-for-techies-over-40-to-stay-relevant-says-sap-lab-director
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/11/28/017239/silicon-valleys-dirty-little-secret-age-bias
As Cringely points out:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/10/26/1837214/cringley-h-1b-visa-abuse-limits-wages-and-steals-us-jobs
"It's not hard to suppose from this information that an influx of H-1B workers representing an average 20 percent of the local technical work force (those 500,000 H-1Bs against a 2.5 million body labor pool) would push down local wages. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that it does, too, but most of the more rigorous academic studies don't show this because there is no easily available data."
At the upper limit, at 300,000 H1Bs a year, in seven years the US IT workforce would be entirely foreign with 2.1 million more H1Bs plus 500,000 already. So much for national security. If we do need that many technical immigrants in the USA, at least make them citizens when they arrive so it is more fair for everyone. And then the USA can still tax them when they move out of the country like the US government would if my family moved abroad to lower our living expenses. :-)
As a consequence of H1Bs (and some other trends to be fair, including stuff H. Ross Perot and EDS lobbied for to make it harder to be an independent contractor, and also the rise in people calling themselves programmers), the contractor market in most IT has nosedived over the past two decades. Driving down regular wages and working conditions is just an extra bonus for companies, given now they can get contractors for employee rates and not have to train them or make any commitments to them (including working conditions like office space, assistants, vacation, personal time, and so on). As a domino effect, things have gotten worse for regular professional employees. Just watch some old movies of office life like "Desk Set" to see what many larger corporations used to be like as far as professional employees having more personal and social space at work -- while still leaving their job at the office at 5pm. Some few companies are somewhat exceptions these days, like Google or SAS, but not many. Still, there are other trends as well, so H1Bs can't be blamed for all of that -- they are just part of it. So, while it used to be that being a contractor meant you got paid much better; now the employee position tends to be better compensated overall. Some of that history used to be in comments on Janet Ruhl's "Real Rates" site archive as one place where I watched it all slowly play out over the last two decades, but unfortunately the site had technical problems and most posts disappeared:
htt
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm "With most of the rank and file employees replaced by robots and eliminated from the payroll, all of the money flowing into a large corporation has only one place to go -- upward toward the executives and shareholders. The concentration of wealth will be dramatic when robots arrive."
Some solutions I've cataloged: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
The most obvious is a "basic income" like they have some of in Alaska with the Alaskan Permanet Fund: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
It's kind of surprising how much politicians think they can get away with now in the USA. There is still massive unemployment and they think they can push through legislation like this. Why not instead, say, just mandate that all US companies be willing to pay for two months of employee training a year, to level the economic playing field and promote the growth of the US workforce? And also mandate vacation time as well? ... Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?"
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
""Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork
Personally though, I'm all for throwing open the borders. The issue is making H1Bs second-class citizens. If you want to import workers, make them citizens when they step off the boat. And give everyone a basic income. It's an experiment, but its hard to imagine doing much worse than what we have.
What ever happend to "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"? Why not ake the USA into the "Australia Project" Marshall Brain wrote about in Manna?
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Max, on voxeljs.com, there are two demos which work fine but have broken source code links to go to missing GItHub pages (the first and eighth demo):
http://maxogden.github.com/voxel-engine/
http://shama.github.com/voxel-drone/
Anyway, it's been great fun playing with the demos -- especially the surprising voxel-portal one. At first I thought the behavior was a bug, and then I realized it was a feature -- wow! :-)
http://substack.net/projects/voxel-portal/
It's just amazing to think I can, as above, supply people with URLs that with one click will put them in a virtual world of some sort.
Well, assuming their browser supports WebGL well, but that will just get better over time. I downloaded Chromium just to run this since Firefox 18 had problems on my Mac with WebGL. I've tried WebGL before, but never had seen anything really compelling to use it for. Voxel.js may just be the breakthrough app for WebGL -- you and James Halliday have put together something that amazing.
You may have found it slow, but I have found it faster than Minecraft on a desktop (Mac Pro with eight 2.8 Ghz Intel Xeon cores, where only 60%-75% of one core seems to be used by Voxel.js under Chromium). Granted, Voxel.js may be doing a lot less than Minecraft, or the demo worlds may be smaller, I don't know, so this is not a comprehensive comparison. But at least for something simple, Voxel.js seems very useable on a Mac desktop that is more than four years old and does not have especially fancy graphics cards in it. I have not seen any lag in it.
Which demos did you try from here?
http://voxeljs.com/
What browser, OS, and hardware did you try with?
I have noticed an issue where I don't see a hand or pointer. I'm not sure if that is a limit in the software or an issue with my configuration.
AC wrote: "needs webgl to run, I think that would have been more important to mention than the whole js thing?"
Good point, AC. I should have mentioned WebGL in the article summary. That is the probably the biggest stumbling block for lots of people running this. That was a problem I myself encountered with a crashing problem with Firefox 18 when I enabled WebGL, and worked around that by trying Voxel.js in Chromium, the open source version of Chrome. Still, in another couple of years, I would think WebGL might be fairly well supported in lots of browsers?
Good points. I've been feeling more-and-more lately that "if something does not have a URL, it is broken". :-)
And Minecraft worlds don't have URLs. Voxel.js world do. A simple seeming difference, but the implications are huge about sharing, discovering, mashups, archiving, expanding, and so on.
Here is a discussion where I explain that idea in more detail, that it's not so much the idea of a desktop app that is broken as the idea of an app without book-markable exchangeable URLs:
http://barcamp.org/w/page/61193582/CapCamp2012_Open_Data_Standards
Thanks for the info. I ended up installing Chromium to run it.
As "eksith" points out in another reply, everything has hiccups at first. The important thing is that this is working with technology that is based around open standards. And the design is modular and expandable.
First, they say "Chrome version 23 or above or Firefox version 17 or above are recommended." So, you can try either.
I had problems using Voxel.js in Firefox 18 on the Mac, so I downloaded Chromium (the open-source fork of Chrome) from FreeSMUG , and Voxel.js ran fine it it. It was actually snappier than Minecraft on my machine, but that may just be because of a smaller world?
I feel I'd probably rather download Chromium once and then surf to web pages than download a Java application like Minecraft and deal with all sorts of issues when trying to use Minecraft add-ons (given Minecraft has not prioritized supporting community add-ons). It has been a pain to manage lots of incompatible Minecraft add-ons (my wife even wrote a tool to help our kid deal with that). Also, when you download Minecraft addons, they presumably with full permissions and so could do anything to your system like read or delete files. I presume that web pages in Chromium are much more limited in what they can do (even though I have heard about theoretical WebGL exploits).
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/06/17/121236/microsoft-brands-webgl-a-harmful-technology
Here is a pre-built download link for Chromium if Mac users need it:
http://www.freesmug.org/chromium
Or people can build it from source:
http://www.chromium.org/
It would probably be fair to say WebGL is not that well supported everywhere. I had problems with it in Firefox as above. Still, it seems to me like this group is trying hard to use open standards with JavaScript and WebGL, so I'm not sure your criticism is fair in that sense. WebGL is supported by multiple browsers, but probably just not very well yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL
Still, give it time, and I expect WebGL (or something similar) will run most anywhere.
Anyway, this generation may be "nuts" in their own way, true. :-) The question is, is the "nuts" of a bunch of people across the planet getting together virtually to write free and open source software (for shareable virtual worlds of abundant virtual resources) more "nuts" than a bunch of people getting together to give us, say, the "Cold War" and the artificial scarcity of software patents and endless copyrights etc.?
In the book "The China Price", a factory worker is discussed who had his hand mangled in an injection molder. He was left to fend for himself with a tiny bit of "compensation" from the factory. No wonder smart people in China want to avoid factory jobs -- they are not like factory jobs in the USA. See:
"The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage" by Alexandra Harney
http://www.amazon.com/The-China-Price-Competitive-Advantage/dp/0143114867
"In this landmark work of investigative reporting, former Financial Times correspondent Alexandra Harney uncovers a story of immense significance to us all: how China's factory economy gains a competitive edge by selling out its workers, environment, and future. Harney's firsthand reporting brings us face-to-face with a world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact a staggering toll in human misery and environmental damage. This eye-opening expose offers, for the first time, an intimate look at the defining business story of our time."
China is already moving to increase automation. From a couple years ago:
http://ww5.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen."
The same issues will play out as in the USA with a declining need for most human labor in all areas. For ideas on what to do about it:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
I also don't understand why China does not just print money to give out as a "basic income" to Chinese citizens so they can buy Chinese factory products (eventually recycled by taxes when the money supply grows to the right size). While in the past it might have made sense for Chinese factory workers to accept low wages as a sort of "tax" so China could learn how to make things based on Western know-how, it seems that has passed the point of diminishing returns. The big issue is that the Chinese don't have enough cash to buy their own goods, and that should be relatively easy to solve. I guess even the Chinese don't understand modern fiat-dollar economics, let alone the emerging post-scarcity economic model? Of course, I could say much the same about the USA, where there is a shortage of money supply because so much digital cash is either sitting on the sidelines parked in zero interest bank accounts or is in the zero-sum "casino economy" on Wall Street. Related links:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/an-emergency-program-of-monetary-reform-for-the-united-states/5494
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3p48upXJaA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
Great blog post, Max. Thanks for chiming in. I've enjoyed your previous instructional materials about CouchDB and other things like "JavaScript for Cats".
http://jsforcats.com/
So far our cat has only expressed limited interest in that website, but maybe over time interest will pick up? :-)
For some reason, I think it would be really cool to put some sort of Couch-like database backend to this, even though I can't think of what it could be used for? :-) But that is the beauty of your well-architected modular approach to Voxel.js (which you mention in comparison to other systems out there). It should be relatively easy to make an interface to any data source (whether hosted using CouchDB or anything else) using standard web protocols.
An example of that is what you did when you made a module that "dynamically renders any area of San Francisco into a crude voxel world". My wife worked towards doing that with data from the USGS for Minecraft, but there were various difficulties trying to transform the data. As a trustee of a local small community historical society, which has trouble competing for attention of the younger crowd against the web and apps and such, I've been thinking that it would be great if communities could make virtual worlds that local residents could visit. There could be different versions of these worlds, for the past, the present, and the future. Then people could discuss history, current issues, and long-term planning in them.
Although there is a lot to be said for face-to-face get-togethers too, like with your Gather project.
https://gather.at/
This modular extensibility of Voxel.js seems like a huge win long-term, as does being easy to install as more and more browsers improve their support for WebGL. I feel it also might be cool to run Voxel.js on Java using the Rhino JavaScript engine and some Java 3D backend, for people to use if their web browser still struggles with WebGL.
Anyway, thanks for making this fantastic hopeful project! I hope being on the front page of Slashdot brings in more developers and users.
The cross-platform install process is easier with Javascript than just about anything else. That is the biggest win here -- beyond the idea of open source virtual worlds which others have done before. Perhaps that didn't used to be the case years ago, but it is now for any software that is going to quickly get mass adoption. Still, it's true that Android and iOS both try to make that easy -- if you've bought special hardware. HTML5 and related technologies like WebGL are trying to create standards for being able to use back-end engines, and Voxel.js taps into that.
Here is Alan Kay talking about why Dan Ingalls started working on the next generation of Squeak (the "Lively Kernel") in Javascript:
http://bitworking.org/news/290/JavaScript-is-the-new-Smalltalk
Still, I tried to run Voxel.js in Firefox 18 on the Mac, with having to turn on "experimental" (for my mac) WebGL support just for this, and it crashed my browser every time. Nonetheless, it's only a matter of time before good 3D support is in browsers everywhere. Personally, I'd have rather seen a well-sandboxed virtual machine as the standard in the browser (whether Java, Parrot, Lua, or anything else), but Javascript is what we got.
Actually, I've been wondering if I could run Voxel.js on top of Java running a Javascript engine that talks to a 3D backend? As a software developer, I'm willing to go through more install hassles, even if I know most people aren't.
I'd agree with Joe_Dragon that apprenticeships can make a lot of sense. Your post makes me think about something else, putting a few factoids together in a new way. I'm thinking, speculating a bit from what I saw in academia the 1970s and 1980s, that there was a time, decades ago (like before the 1970s) when academia was growing so fast (exponentially) that people from industry without PhDs or much anything beyond real knowledge could become well-respected reasonably-paid teachers (unlike today's somewhat disrespected and poorly-paid adjuncts). In the 1970s, exponential growth of academia stopped (as David Goodstein points out). So, at that point, there came a glut of PhDs on the market with few job prospects since academia kept churning them out at a rate appropriate for exponential growth that was no longer happening. Working conditions for most new faculty plummeted (supply and demand). It became impossible to get even a mediocre college teaching job without a PhD (or at least a Masters for lesser schools). So, academia over the last couple decades became staffed with *only* academics with little real-world life experience which it generated internally. The two-way interchange between industry and academia became essentially one-way, academia to industry. Add to this in the USA the loss of the family farm, loss of good hands-on union mechanical/electrical jobs with apprenticeships, the expansion of the school year, and the increase of opaque black boxes in industry, and the result is few entering academia had any practical non-academic experience or had any way of getting any (like by summer jobs). This of course is all a bit of an over-simplification, yet is may explain why courses are less useful now? References:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
More links here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html
See also my: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
Bottom line: most real education is "self-directed education", whether it is in the garden, in the shop, in the library, or in the "classroom". However, self-directed does not mean we do not learn much from other people, whether face-to-face or through their writings or recordings. Thus, you learned from people who wrote the textbooks, even if the "teacher" you say regularly face-to-face may have had little to offer.
You may be beyond this, but this is probably a good way to learn computing almost from the ground up these days:
http://www.nand2tetris.org/
Or one can build programmable computers from Redstone in Minecraft? :-)
It sounds like anyone who teaches optimization by teaching assembly probably does not know much about optimization, since assembly is just a distraction from it, especially given today's compilers can generally write better assembly for most CPUs than most programmers ever could. The real optimization challenges are in algorithms, thinking about prioritization of values and managing complexity (of both data and implementations)...
Nand-to-Tetris is a bottom up book. "Data and Reality" by William Kent is a complementary book that is in-a-sense top-down:
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
I'd also recommend playing around with Forth (or a latter day equivalent like "Joy") to get a good sense of factoring problem well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language)
My kid st
... for a much lesser "crime" of interfering with business models based on "artificial scarcity"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
BTW, something Martin Luther King said:
http://simple.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
"Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."
See my other posts, but in short: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
"Try going 72 hours without food. You'll be amazed how *real* discomfort can focus the mind."
For some people, if you do it right:
http://curezone.com/forums/fm.asp?i=1137654
http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/2/288.full.pdf
http://www.fastingconnection.com/forum/General-posts-to-Index/1184-fasting-and-bipolar-disorder
See Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work for how to fast correctly.
http://www.amazon.com/Fasting-Eating-Health-Medical-Conquering/dp/031218719X
Although ultimately people have to eat right:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
"The same people that refuse to accept a problem or system as beyond their comprehension are the same people that look down on things like religion and for the same reason. It isn't how human brains are designed to work, but it is what got our species this far."
There are few things that can reduce your fecundity (or probabbly effectiveness in designing good things) like a life lived in existential angst and social strife, and religion can help prevent those problems (whaever one might say about the truth of the dogmas):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
So, the "truth" is more complex than you imply...
You're right, people can make a big difference in small ways, and together that can add up to a lot. Plus, every small change gives us more experience, confidence, and resources to use in working towards larger things.
Terrific point about separating an appraisal of the world from general moods.
And after all, some people even like tough challenges:
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
As I quote here from "What Dreams May Come":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
===
"This is their composite mental image?" I asked. Soundless; hueless; lifeless.
"It is," he said.
"And you work here?" I felt stunned that anyone who had the choice would elect to work in this forbidding place.
"This is nothing," was all he said.
===
Howard Zinn also suggested there is always reason for the "optimism of uncertainty": http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
I agree about the bringing nutrition/lifestyle stuff all together synergistically:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Also maybe of interest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depression
And:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-science-of-success/307761/
"Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people."
While Shirky's post has some great insights, I actually disagree with a sentiment implied where he says: "Most of us won't kill ourselves, no matter how bad things get. ... Madoff hasn't killed himself because he isn't the kind of person who kills himself." While perhaps true, it is misleading. I'd suggest depression and suicide could happen in almost anyone's life probabilistically, but that certain circumstances make it more or less likely. Then, if it does, the survivors tend to work backwards from "if only" proximate causes, but overall it is always a network of interacting causes and effects. Genes are one thing affecting probabilities, but so is nutrition, lifestyle, mental outlook, mental habits including gratitude, religions and spiritual upbringing or life philosophy, social networks, physical infrastructure, and many other factors (including what we think about the world) which interact with each other. Or, in other words, a life is like a tree, and whether that tree is blown over by any particular storm in life is about both how big the (perceived) storm is and how deep the tree's roots are (and roots help us grow more roots). For a person, roots are things like nutrition, family, friends, hobbies, community, music, values, habits, religion/philosophy, and so on. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology
Thanks for the success story of personal growth to grow deeper roots in various ways. Good luck in continuing to grow them as best as is possible in this plane of existence filled with various dualistic tensions, with life at a Yin/Yang interface of
"Although Obama's Affordable Care Act gives better access to treatment options for mentally ill persons: ..."
Things like nutrition, positive psychology, physical infrastructure, life opportunities, community and so on can make a huge difference in mental health. But they are not generally covered as treatments by insurance. Similarly, health insurance may pay $100K for a heart operation, but it won't pay a penny towards the healthy food needed to stay physically and mentally well.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
Worse -- junk food is heavily subsidized:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
And for decades bad nutritional advice like "the four food groups" has been enshrined in public education by regulatory capture and clever marketing by agribusiness.
Contrast with a model like "Blue Zones":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
Or what Dr. Andrew Weil writes about in his book "Why Our Health Matters".
"The unfortunate fact is that there's no way to fix depression."
Nutrition can help oftentimes: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
See also on optimism:
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."
More health advice:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Ideas towards building a better world:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html