Yes, you make a good point on third parties. I like the "No Confidence" option idea you outline. However, here is another alternative, basically doing something like the Tea Party did in moving the Republicans more rightward, but for the Democrats moving leftward/Green/other(basic income?), from sociologist G. William Domhoff: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_egalitarians.html === So what should egalitarian activists do in terms of future elections if and when the issues, circumstances, and candidates seem right? First, they should form Egalitarian Democratic Clubs. That gives them an organizational base as well as a distinctive new social identity within the structural pathway to government that is labeled "the Democratic Party." Forming such clubs makes it possible for activists to maintain their sense of separatism and purity while at the same time allowing them to compete within the Democratic Party. There are numerous precedents for such clubs within the party, including liberal and reform clubs in the past, and the conservative Democratic Leadership Council at the present time.
This strategy of forging a separate social identity is also followed by members of the right wing within the Republican Party. By joining organizations like the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition, they can define themselves as Christians who have to work out of necessity within the debased confines of the Republican Party. That is, they think of themselves as Christians first and Republicans second, and that is what egalitarians should do: identify themselves primarily as egalitarians and only secondarily as Democrats.
After forming Egalitarian Democrat Clubs, egalitarian activists should find people to run in selected Democratic primaries from precinct to president. They should not simply support eager candidates who come to them with the hope of turning them into campaign workers. They have to create candidates of their own who already are committed to the egalitarian movement and to its alternative economic vision of planning through the market. The candidates have to be responsible to the clubs, or else the candidates naturally will look out for their own self interest and careers. They should focus on winning on the basis of the program, and make no personal criticisms of their Democratic rivals. Personal attacks on mainstream politicians are a mistake, a self-made trap, for egalitarian insurgents.
In talking about the program, the candidates actually do much more than explain what egalitarians stand for. By discussing such issues as increasing inequality and the abandonment of fairness, and then placing the blame for these conditions on the corporate-conservative coalition and the Republican Party, they help to explain to fellow members of the movement who is "us" and who is "them." They help to create a sense of "we-ness," a new collective identity. As candidates who present a positive program and attack those who oppose it, they are serving as "entrepreneurs of identity," an important part of the job description for any spokesperson in a new social movement. ====
Some issue I have with the Greens, BTW, even though I though voting Green made sense as a protest vote where I lived (e.g. I have problems with a push for "full employment" instead of a "basic income", or a push for expanding schooling instead of better supporting self-education and homeschooling, or an implicit push for population limits in various ways versus moving into space habitats, etc.): http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3227495&cid=41864225
Even in the case of Obama as president, such Egalitarian Democratic clubs could be useful in the sense of, as Ralph Nader cites, "Make me do it" regarding progressive change, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to reformers: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/15-0
You had a choice: http://www.jillstein.org/issues "FINANCIAL REFORM
* Break up the oversized banks that are "too big to fail," starting with Bank of America.
* Create a Corporation for Economic Democracy, a new federal corporation (like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) to provide publicity, training, education, and direct financing for cooperative development and for democratic reforms to make government agencies, private associations, and business enterprises more participatory.
* End bailouts for the financial elite and use the FDIC resolution process for failed banks to reopen them as public banks where possible after failed loans and underlying assets are auctioned off.
* Bring monetary policy under democratic control by prohibiting private banks from creating money, thus restoring government's Constitutional authority.
* Let pension funds be managed by boards controlled by workers, not corporate managers.
* Regulate all financial derivatives and require them to be traded on open exchanges.
* Require banks to use honest bookkeeping so that toxic assets cannot be hidden or sold to unsuspecting persons.
* Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks.
* Democratize monetary policy to bring about public control of the money supply and credit creation. This means nationalizing the private bank-dominated Federal Reserve Banks and placing them under a Federal Monetary Authority within the Treasury Department.
* Establish federal, state, and municipal publicly-owned banks that function as non-profit utilities and focus on helping people, not enriching themselves."
That said, the Factor e Farm people are really trying hard and making some progress in the general area. What is ridiculous is that this is not a top priority issue funded by NASA, NIST, and European counterparts with hundreds of thousands of reasonable paid engineers involved.
Another related idea I posted: "Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium" https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg/HXC7-XHSGLkJ "Now, does this [Greece running out of tear gas during riots about economics] make any sense if you understand the possibilities of open manufacturing or an open society? In Greece you have a warm climate, access to oceans, lots of sun and wind, an educated populace with a 2000+ year history of democracy (on and off:-), no obvious external enemies declaring war, and so on. And they are so worried about their future ability to make and use things (which is how I translate "fears for Greece's economic future") that they are running out of tear gas? This all makes no *physical* sense. The place should be a paradise. Instead it is in "self-destruct mode" according to one editor. It must be *ideology*. Or, more correctly, ideology *embodied* in a certain type of productive infrastructure...."
Frankly, it feels to me like the failure of engineering academia in the USA to comprehensively work to analyze our productive processes is perhaps a reflection of how much a certain form of capitalist ideology infests US academia. It seems like it is heresy to even consider that anything other than some mystical "market" would decide what would be manufactured or how it would be made or moved between users, even though a lot of companies are being weighed down by supply chains they don't really understand or control. So, in academia you can study one tiny part of how something is made, but you can't try to create an approach to comprehend the whole because that goes against mainstream economic dogma of willful blindness about lifecycle consequences and comprehensive design. Only in a thought experiment like NASA might do about a moon base or something like that is it permitted to discuss the idea of comprehensive planning about how to make *everything* and take it all through a full lifecycle. Meanwhile, we drown in our own e-waste because externalities like disposal are not priced in up-front. Modern computer-based manufacturing has the potential to be so flexible that we could have, if not Star Trek replicators, at least the next best thing of small production runs and mass customization coming out of very flexible manufacturing lines (seem James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" for some descriptions of what that would look like, set in a space habitat).
Still, there is the RepRap project and such as an exception in academia. So, I think change is happening, slowly. Maybe the rate of change on this meme is growing exponentially though?
Here is a sort-of rebuttal. As a disclaimer, I intend to vote for Jill Stein as a protest vote because I live in a "safe state" for Obama and both major US parties are IMHO right wing compared to the rest of the world, as "Hatta" below suggests. I certainly agree with a lot of the spirit of what you wrote -- however I feel you are being unfair to conservatives (even with a nod to William Buckley as you did) as well as post-modernists who all make several good *emotional* points even if their proposed solutions may be tragic. What follows are some examples.
=== Abortion
Exactly when human life begins to have moral value during pregnancy is essentially a religious question with mystical origins. If you believe that human life begins at conception, then the fact that there are over a million abortions a year (a million annual murders from that point of view) pretty much can emotionally eclipse most other issues (as a "Holocaust" every decade). Personally, I feel many conservatives are hypocrites in arguing life must be protected from conception to birth, but then after birth it is OK to destroy families economically. In practice many conservative economic positions tend to increase the number of abortions because women fear a future without a social safety net. That is why so many US Catholics vote for Democrats, to reduce abortions by improving social conditions for everyone. Also, outlawing abortions may not really reduce the number much in practice. Did criminalization stop US drug use? But that ironic inconsistency in conservative policy does not deny the core emotional concern of a holocaust every decade of ten million or more defenseless human murdered (to those who think that way). On the other hand, if you think the moral value of human life begins sometime significantly only months after conception (or have some other metaphysical take on this), then this may just be a non-issue. In the 1800s, many US citizens saw little wrong with the enslavement of African Americans who were then seen by many as somehow less than fully human, which thus somehow justifying their enslavement similar to owning a horse. I'm not saying the abortion and slavery are the same, just that overall opinions on the moral worth of human lives can obviously change.
=== The politics of science
Despite your dismissal of post-modernists, the fact is, science is heavily politicized. Read the book "Disciplined Minds" for the gory details. It is the conservatives who have been fighting most against the increase of institutionalized compulsory schooling (like by denigrating academia, or by fighting to legalize a homeschooling alternative to public schooling). Compulsory public schooling has its roots in 1800s Prussia. Formal compulsory schooling is a different thing than "education" which was previously done mostly at home or through tutors or via apprenticeships or on the job or at libraries. According to John Taylor Gatto, schooling was designed to reduce human beings to the emotional state where they were ready to be Prussian cannon fodder and Prussian wage slaves in the Prussian military machine. While as above I plan to vote for Jill Stein for her positions overall (especially her position on health issues), I disagree strongly with her position to expand formal schooling.
=== Economics
US industrial productivity has more than doubled since the 1980s, but real wages for most workers (especially male workers) have been stagnant or declined. Where has all this extra productivity gone? Because wages have not kept pace, to buy this extra productivity, workers have had to take out loans if they can access it at all. Thus our recent financial crisis as it all collapsed. Between the increase in the workforce by women moving away from the home and childcare and into the workforce, and the rise in robotics and other automation, workers have less and less bargaining power. Meanwhile US families and communities fall apart from lack of volunteer labor. In practice US conservatives have no real answer to this question
See Dr. Joel Fuhrman: http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cold-flu-flu-and-nutrition-dr-fuhrman-responds-to-comments.html "The idea that a person eating a nutrient-rich diet is just as likely to develop and suffer the dangerous consequences from an influenza virus as a cheese burgers and soda eating American is simply wrong. More importantly such opinions are dangerous as they may lead to tragic outcomes for those mistaking authority for knowledge. Let's review just a few articles from the scientific literature that further support this concept that nutritional.excellence can offer protection from viral attacks. I will show the reference and post some explanatory comments below each reference...."
Can you provide any substantial evidence to back up your claims to the contrary? Can you even cite any good evidence the flu vaccine to date has accomplished anything significant except put more aluminum in people's bodies? By contrast: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/does-the-vaccine-matter/307723/ "But what if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is wrong? What if flu vaccines do not protect people from dying -- particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized? The U.S. government -- with the support of leaders in the public-health and medical communities -- has put its faith in the power of vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread and lethality of swine flu. Other plans to contain the pandemic seem anemic by comparison. Yet some top flu researchers are deeply skeptical of both flu vaccines and antivirals. Like the engineers who warned for years about the levees of New Orleans, these experts caution that our defenses may be flawed, and quite possibly useless against a truly lethal flu. And that unless we are willing to ask fundamental questions about the science behind flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, we could find ourselves, in a bad epidemic, as helpless as the citizens of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina....
Jackson's findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the "frail elderly" didn't or couldn't. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson's papers "are beautiful," says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. "They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done."
The results were
I recall someone at a Space Studies Institute conference suggesting this idea. You collect the solar power in space via a solar space satellite, and then you focus it on the aircraft (either as a laser beam or as microwaves). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power
Presumably you could do the same from the ground as well perhaps. Think of this as a variation of laser launching systems where a small capsule rides a laser beam into space (perhaps with the beam ablating some layer at the bottom which serves as propellant).
As I suggested a dozen years ago: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm "The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
* Autonomous military robots out of control
* Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
* Ethnically targeted virus..."
See also though the root cause misperception: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?..."
Think of the unknowns surrounding DNA like a lock that kept us safe from ourselves. Removing those unknowns is like telling everyone how to open all the locks on the planet (including digital locks protecting nuclear weapons). That implies our culture needs to change if we are to survive. On my website I talk about some of that. Here is another good one: http://anwot.org/
"No one has hit the nail on the head yet how to use technology to properly increase a student's ability to learn. If / when that time does come, teachers / professors will need to make a carefully calculated decision how they will react to it. "
Something I wrote over five years ago: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
That bottom line: modern schools were designed in Prussia in the 19th century mainly to dumb people down and destroy their individual initiative to fit the needs of the Prussian military and the Prussian economy (see John Taylor Gatto). Give them more resources and they will only do that obsolete mission better.
See also: http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/index.html http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/neuvm.pdf "The most important thing that IBM did to us was the announcement on February 8, 1983, of the Object Code Only (OCO) policy. I fear that ten years from now another speaker will be standing here telling you that that was the day VM died, but I hope not.
Since that day in 1983, the community has devoted enormous effort to attempting to convince IBM’s management that the OCO decision was a mistake. Many, many people have contributed to this effort in SHARE and in the other user groups. The greatest of SHARE’s source heroes is unquestionably Gabe Goldberg, who has persevered and maintained hope and a sense of humor in the face of IBM’s seemingly implacable position. In SEAS, Hans Deckers has been a particularly hard worker in the battle against OCO, and Sverre Jarp, the SEAS Past President, also deserves much praise for his role.
In February, 1985, the SHARE VM Group presented IBM with a White Paper that concluded with the sentence, “We hope that IBM will decide not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.” Though we had tried to make our White Paper reasonable and business-like, IBM chose not to reply to it.
A few months after the announcement of the OCO policy, IBM released the first OCO version of VM, VM/PC. VM/PC had a number of problems, including poor performance and incorrect or missing or incompatible function. Without source, the users were unable to correct or compensate for these problems, so nobody was surprised when VM/PC fell flat...."
(Is that a picture of me talking to Kirk Alexander in front of an SGI Iris in the iCGL running some windowing and 3D model creation software I wrote? Not sure... Might be someone else and different software. What an amazing community back then and there -- one I did not appreciate enough at the time and just took for granted in my youth and lack of experience.)
A key point made in Melinda Varian's history of the VM Community is that even though only a small percentage of users actually looked at and changed the source code (an argument IBM made as to why providing the source did not matter), those users were a very impotent driver of fixes and innovation. When I was contracting at IBM Research around 2000, there were IBMers still angry about that decision two decades earlier and how it went badly for IBM, and they helped create some of the pressure for IBM to support the Free and Open Source Software movement. I pushed to get Python formally approved for official use in IBM Research back then, which took a bit of doing to go through IBM Legal. They even (embarrassingly) wrote Guido to ask him if he really had written it.
And: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952 http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2010/06/artificial-scarcity-altair-basic-and.html "Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer? Bill Gates: No. the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system. You got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong."
The web with plain-text distribution of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which are often readable, have been a bit of a return to those earlier days when you often had to type in BAS
And all the professional physicists and engineers denied that amorphous semiconductors were possible for many years, even when confronted with evidence... See for example: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9621164/Stanford-Ovshinsky.html "In 1960, with his second wife Iris, a biochemist, he founded Energy Conversion Laboratories (later renamed Energy Conversion Devices, or ECD) at Rochester Hills, Michigan, to develop his ideas, and in 1968 held a press conference at which he announced that he had succeeded in making a "glass transistor" that relied on a principle which (with understandable immodesty) he called Ovonics. This breakthrough, he predicted, would eventually lead to desktop computers and television sets "hanging like portraits on the wall". The announcement made the front pages and ECDâ(TM)s stock (the company went public in 1967) soared. Within days, however, semiconductor engineers dismissed the idea and ECDâ(TM)s stock price collapsed. Most scientists had never heard of amorphous materials, and some rubbished Ovshinsky as a high school dropout and former machinist with no university qualifications. He was branded a crank. Eventually, though, Ovshinskyâ(TM)s theories proved correct, ushering in a whole new field of solid-state physics."
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds "Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt,[1] published in 2000. The book describes how professionals are made; the methods of professional and graduate schools that turn eager entering students into disciplined managerial and intellectual workers that correctly perceive and apply the employer's doctrine and outlook. Schmidt uses the examples of law, medicine, and physics, and describes methods that students and professional workers can use to preserve their personalities and independent thought."
"and respond to the takedown notices in my spare time."
That's certainly a good legal point, showing how far out society has regressed since the 1960s -- no only can't we put a human on the Moon anymore, but we can't even discuss it while including copies of forty year old documents (that should long ago have become public domain under any reasonable copyright regime).
Makes me think of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead "Using this and other examples, Jacobs argued that modern political and economic ideologies were in effect no different than those dominant in Western civilization's past Dark Ages, such as Middle Age Roman Catholicism. In both cases, she claimed, the dominant ideology prevented and discouraged people from finding rational and scientifically-verifiable explanations and solutions."
As Jane Jacobs says, a Dark Age is when a society has forgotten even that it used to know something. We seem to be getting there in spaceflight, a few recent small company proprietary successes aside, like SpaceX. In general, the USA has also made publicly discussing some aspects of rocketry and such illegal for military reasons. http://www.exportlawblog.com/archives/439
My own, so far unsuccesful, steps in that direction, but others are succeeding in that idrection as part of an open manufacturing movement: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
You may be in denial about the potential of AI and robotics? Saying horse carts were replaced by automobiles and human workers switched from making one to the other is different from saying most human automotive assembly workers and human automotive drivers are about to be replaced by robots and AIs (along with most other human workers in their respective jobs).
Also, compulsory public schools institutionalize various incremental levels of violent coercion to all children (including increasingly essentially forced drugging). It is difficult morally to justify the institutionalization of all children in day-prisons based on pointing out some bad parents, especially when the obvious results of doing that for generations are so bad. As is said here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling#History === During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects -- even though the mothers were "mentally retarded teenagers" -- and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, "by western standards of measurement."[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting.[9] Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children -- particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes -- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children -- when obviously most children already have even more secure housing."[10]
Similar to Holt, the Moores embraced homeschooling after the publication of their first work, Better Late Than Early, 1975, and went on to become important homeschool advocates and consultants with the publication of books like Home Grown Kids, 1981, Homeschool Burnout, and others.[9] =====
Also on that theme: http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html "Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the chil
"The three assumptions for home schooling are that it is inherently preferable for a parent to stay home to be there for the kids if they are needed, and that school as it is now is a negative influence the children who parents want to bring them up in a morale world. The third, and more controversial, is that 12 years of schooling is overkill. "
There is a lot more complexity to this than that, although you make some good points.
Home-based and community-based education is often about reclaiming family and community from institutionalization. http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Contrast a "public" school with a "public" library, where many peopel throught the ages have learned a lot without someone grading them or monitoring everything they learned or forcing them to read certain books on a certain fixed schedule. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3a.htm "One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps m
Maybe it is more an "anti-violence" push?:-) http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/ "Lest you think I am overreacting when I declare that the means and methods by which nearly all of the children in this country are educated are inherently violent, consider what Webster's lists as its third definition for "violent": "caused by force; not natural, as in a violent death."
Conventional education is all about force, beginning with each state's compulsory education statute. The failure to cover the state mandated curriculum, or its equivalent, is punishable by law. Even worse, students and teachers trapped inside schools that sort, grade, and rank children like fruits and vegetables face an increasing specter of punishment if the students don't measure up on mandatory -- and soon to be nationwide -- high stakes standardized tests. Students are told that, if they don't pass, then they can't move on to the next level. Teachers are told that, if their students don't pass, then it's time to look for another job. The indelible bottom line: learn or else. (Chris Mercogliano, past co-director of the Albany Free School)"
If the money is allocated to "education" then why do you consider it reasonable to exclude non-classroom (e.g. administrative) overhead? The fact is, divide the number of kids in NY in public schools by the amount spent, and it is about $20K per child per year. Administering a system where the money goes directly to the familes should have very little overhead. Personally, I'd rather see a more general basic income for everyone in the USA though on the order of US$2000 per month (about one half the US GDP), and then families could decide how much of that to allocate to educational expenses. http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html http://www.usbig.net/index.php
I agree we'll see 60% unemployment or worse (barring radical changes) fairly soon (due to robotics, AI, and free content on computer networks), but I don't think that issue is fixable by reforming public schools. Every country is going to see this, regardless of the school system. Some solutions besides a basic income: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
So, maybe you have to stay a school teacher for that reason. I certainly face the same economic issue myself regarding other paying work. And maybe you students are indeed better off with your approach in the context you describe, all other things being equal. So, then the issue is, how can one change the context so all other things are not equal and there is a rebalancing?
Still, either a universal basic income or the proposal I outlined would give families plenty of money to hire math tutors like yourself if their kids wanted to learn math. Or a basic income for everyone would mean you could do different things with your own time.
If all the kids you were teaching had freely chose to be in your class, would you have to think so much about authority? What would your day be like if the only kids you were interacting with explicitly wanted to be learning math or anything else you wanted to teach (like they wanted to be engineers or whatever)? The fact that there are children who are compelled to be in your classroom when they don't want to be there is a big part of the problem. Sadly, Jaime Escalante's efforts were essentially shut down by the school bureaucracy that could not accept them, so I'm not saying creating or sustaining alternatives in public schools is easy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante#National_attention
Or: http://www.augusttojune.com/ "Come inside a public school happily and purposefully going against current trends and join 26 8-10 year olds, their teacher, and their parents for a year bursting with opportunities for curiosity, creativity and compassion. "
The last link, is a documentary about an alternative public school, so things are possible.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html "New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Kids "The War on Kids is a 2009 documentary film about the American school system. The film takes a look at public school education in America and concludes that schools are not only failing to educate, but are increasingly authoritarian institutions more akin to prisons that are eroding the foundations of American democracy. Students are robbed of basic freedoms primarily due to irrational fears; they are searched, arbitrarily punished and force-fed dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. The educational mission of the public school system has been reduced from one of learning and preparation for adult citizenship to one of control and containment."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power "Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."
Those who, like in Canada, invest mainly in intrinsic security and mutual security are generally in a much more secure position over the long term than those who foolishly invest mainly in extrinsic and unilateral security like sadly has been the recent custom of those to the immediate south of Canada. http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/ === The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
To address that pervasive threat from unrecognized irony, it would help to re-envision the CIA as a non-ironic post-scarcity institution. Then the CIA could help others (including in the White House) make more informed decisions to move past this irony as well.
A first step towards that could be for IARPA to support better free software tools for "crowdsourced" public intelligence work involving using a social semantic desktop for sensemaking about open source data and building related open public action plans from that data to make local communities healthier, happier, more intrinsically secure, and also more mutually secure. Secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy local (and virtual) communities then can form together a secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy nation and planet in a non-ironic way. Details on that idea are publicly posted by me here in the form of a Proposal Abstract to the IARPA Incisive Analysis solicitation: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats and Opportunities" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2368162&cid=37016386...
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html ===
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete....
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach. ===
My biggest issue with Kurzweil is that the singularity is like a mirror, and what he sees there is a mirror of his success in business creating artificial scarcity through copyrights and patents and engaging in commercial competition rather than global free cooperation. Still, he gets a lot of ideas right.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
The Richest Man in the World: A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income.
The knol mentioned in the video has been moved here because Google Knol is shutting down: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
That parable and video was directly inspired by this:
"Structural Unemployment: The Economists Just Don't Get It"
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/#comment-254
Yes, you make a good point on third parties. I like the "No Confidence" option idea you outline. However, here is another alternative, basically doing something like the Tea Party did in moving the Republicans more rightward, but for the Democrats moving leftward/Green/other(basic income?), from sociologist G. William Domhoff:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_egalitarians.html
===
So what should egalitarian activists do in terms of future elections if and when the issues, circumstances, and candidates seem right? First, they should form Egalitarian Democratic Clubs. That gives them an organizational base as well as a distinctive new social identity within the structural pathway to government that is labeled "the Democratic Party." Forming such clubs makes it possible for activists to maintain their sense of separatism and purity while at the same time allowing them to compete within the Democratic Party. There are numerous precedents for such clubs within the party, including liberal and reform clubs in the past, and the conservative Democratic Leadership Council at the present time.
This strategy of forging a separate social identity is also followed by members of the right wing within the Republican Party. By joining organizations like the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition, they can define themselves as Christians who have to work out of necessity within the debased confines of the Republican Party. That is, they think of themselves as Christians first and Republicans second, and that is what egalitarians should do: identify themselves primarily as egalitarians and only secondarily as Democrats.
After forming Egalitarian Democrat Clubs, egalitarian activists should find people to run in selected Democratic primaries from precinct to president. They should not simply support eager candidates who come to them with the hope of turning them into campaign workers. They have to create candidates of their own who already are committed to the egalitarian movement and to its alternative economic vision of planning through the market. The candidates have to be responsible to the clubs, or else the candidates naturally will look out for their own self interest and careers. They should focus on winning on the basis of the program, and make no personal criticisms of their Democratic rivals. Personal attacks on mainstream politicians are a mistake, a self-made trap, for egalitarian insurgents.
In talking about the program, the candidates actually do much more than explain what egalitarians stand for. By discussing such issues as increasing inequality and the abandonment of fairness, and then placing the blame for these conditions on the corporate-conservative coalition and the Republican Party, they help to explain to fellow members of the movement who is "us" and who is "them." They help to create a sense of "we-ness," a new collective identity. As candidates who present a positive program and attack those who oppose it, they are serving as "entrepreneurs of identity," an important part of the job description for any spokesperson in a new social movement.
====
Some issue I have with the Greens, BTW, even though I though voting Green made sense as a protest vote where I lived (e.g. I have problems with a push for "full employment" instead of a "basic income", or a push for expanding schooling instead of better supporting self-education and homeschooling, or an implicit push for population limits in various ways versus moving into space habitats, etc.):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3227495&cid=41864225
Even in the case of Obama as president, such Egalitarian Democratic clubs could be useful in the sense of, as Ralph Nader cites, "Make me do it" regarding progressive change, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to reformers:
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/15-0
You had a choice: http://www.jillstein.org/issues
"FINANCIAL REFORM
* Break up the oversized banks that are "too big to fail," starting with Bank of America.
* Create a Corporation for Economic Democracy, a new federal corporation (like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) to provide publicity, training, education, and direct financing for cooperative development and for democratic reforms to make government agencies, private associations, and business enterprises more participatory.
* End bailouts for the financial elite and use the FDIC resolution process for failed banks to reopen them as public banks where possible after failed loans and underlying assets are auctioned off.
* Bring monetary policy under democratic control by prohibiting private banks from creating money, thus restoring government's Constitutional authority.
* Let pension funds be managed by boards controlled by workers, not corporate managers.
* Regulate all financial derivatives and require them to be traded on open exchanges.
* Require banks to use honest bookkeeping so that toxic assets cannot be hidden or sold to unsuspecting persons.
* Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks.
* Democratize monetary policy to bring about public control of the money supply and credit creation. This means nationalizing the private bank-dominated Federal Reserve Banks and placing them under a Federal Monetary Authority within the Treasury Department.
* Establish federal, state, and municipal publicly-owned banks that function as non-profit utilities and focus on helping people, not enriching themselves."
"However, more analysis needs to be put into their plan; more requirements gathering and architecture is needed."
Something I tried to get NASA to support a dozen years ago: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
That said, the Factor e Farm people are really trying hard and making some progress in the general area. What is ridiculous is that this is not a top priority issue funded by NASA, NIST, and European counterparts with hundreds of thousands of reasonable paid engineers involved.
Another related idea I posted: :-), no obvious external enemies declaring war, and so on. And they are so worried about their future ability to make and use things (which is how I translate "fears for Greece's economic future") that they are running out of tear gas? This all makes no *physical* sense. The place should be a paradise. Instead it is in "self-destruct mode" according to one editor. It must be *ideology*. Or, more correctly, ideology *embodied* in a certain type of productive infrastructure. ..."
"Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg/HXC7-XHSGLkJ
"Now, does this [Greece running out of tear gas during riots about economics] make any sense if you understand the possibilities of open manufacturing or an open society? In Greece you have a warm climate, access to oceans, lots of sun and wind, an educated populace with a 2000+ year history of democracy (on and off
The closes I know of from the US government is from the Carter presidency: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
Here is something more recent from NIST which is great but not quite as self-replication focused and only had about 20 staff involved (last I heard):
http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/lifecycle/sm_smo.cfm
http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/lifecycle/
Frankly, it feels to me like the failure of engineering academia in the USA to comprehensively work to analyze our productive processes is perhaps a reflection of how much a certain form of capitalist ideology infests US academia. It seems like it is heresy to even consider that anything other than some mystical "market" would decide what would be manufactured or how it would be made or moved between users, even though a lot of companies are being weighed down by supply chains they don't really understand or control. So, in academia you can study one tiny part of how something is made, but you can't try to create an approach to comprehend the whole because that goes against mainstream economic dogma of willful blindness about lifecycle consequences and comprehensive design. Only in a thought experiment like NASA might do about a moon base or something like that is it permitted to discuss the idea of comprehensive planning about how to make *everything* and take it all through a full lifecycle. Meanwhile, we drown in our own e-waste because externalities like disposal are not priced in up-front. Modern computer-based manufacturing has the potential to be so flexible that we could have, if not Star Trek replicators, at least the next best thing of small production runs and mass customization coming out of very flexible manufacturing lines (seem James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" for some descriptions of what that would look like, set in a space habitat).
Still, there is the RepRap project and such as an exception in academia. So, I think change is happening, slowly. Maybe the rate of change on this meme is growing exponentially though?
Here is a sort-of rebuttal. As a disclaimer, I intend to vote for Jill Stein as a protest vote because I live in a "safe state" for Obama and both major US parties are IMHO right wing compared to the rest of the world, as "Hatta" below suggests. I certainly agree with a lot of the spirit of what you wrote -- however I feel you are being unfair to conservatives (even with a nod to William Buckley as you did) as well as post-modernists who all make several good *emotional* points even if their proposed solutions may be tragic. What follows are some examples.
=== Abortion
Exactly when human life begins to have moral value during pregnancy is essentially a religious question with mystical origins. If you believe that human life begins at conception, then the fact that there are over a million abortions a year (a million annual murders from that point of view) pretty much can emotionally eclipse most other issues (as a "Holocaust" every decade). Personally, I feel many conservatives are hypocrites in arguing life must be protected from conception to birth, but then after birth it is OK to destroy families economically. In practice many conservative economic positions tend to increase the number of abortions because women fear a future without a social safety net. That is why so many US Catholics vote for Democrats, to reduce abortions by improving social conditions for everyone. Also, outlawing abortions may not really reduce the number much in practice. Did criminalization stop US drug use? But that ironic inconsistency in conservative policy does not deny the core emotional concern of a holocaust every decade of ten million or more defenseless human murdered (to those who think that way). On the other hand, if you think the moral value of human life begins sometime significantly only months after conception (or have some other metaphysical take on this), then this may just be a non-issue. In the 1800s, many US citizens saw little wrong with the enslavement of African Americans who were then seen by many as somehow less than fully human, which thus somehow justifying their enslavement similar to owning a horse. I'm not saying the abortion and slavery are the same, just that overall opinions on the moral worth of human lives can obviously change.
=== The politics of science
Despite your dismissal of post-modernists, the fact is, science is heavily politicized. Read the book "Disciplined Minds" for the gory details. It is the conservatives who have been fighting most against the increase of institutionalized compulsory schooling (like by denigrating academia, or by fighting to legalize a homeschooling alternative to public schooling). Compulsory public schooling has its roots in 1800s Prussia. Formal compulsory schooling is a different thing than "education" which was previously done mostly at home or through tutors or via apprenticeships or on the job or at libraries. According to John Taylor Gatto, schooling was designed to reduce human beings to the emotional state where they were ready to be Prussian cannon fodder and Prussian wage slaves in the Prussian military machine. While as above I plan to vote for Jill Stein for her positions overall (especially her position on health issues), I disagree strongly with her position to expand formal schooling.
=== Economics
US industrial productivity has more than doubled since the 1980s, but real wages for most workers (especially male workers) have been stagnant or declined. Where has all this extra productivity gone? Because wages have not kept pace, to buy this extra productivity, workers have had to take out loans if they can access it at all. Thus our recent financial crisis as it all collapsed. Between the increase in the workforce by women moving away from the home and childcare and into the workforce, and the rise in robotics and other automation, workers have less and less bargaining power. Meanwhile US families and communities fall apart from lack of volunteer labor. In practice US conservatives have no real answer to this question
"except put more aluminum in people's bodies"
Correction: that should have said, "except put more mercury in people's bodies".
http://www.livestrong.com/article/72306-flu-vaccine-ingredients/
See Dr. Joel Fuhrman: http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cold-flu-flu-and-nutrition-dr-fuhrman-responds-to-comments.html ..."
"The idea that a person eating a nutrient-rich diet is just as likely to develop and suffer the dangerous consequences from an influenza virus as a cheese burgers and soda eating American is simply wrong. More importantly such opinions are dangerous as they may lead to tragic outcomes for those mistaking authority for knowledge. Let's review just a few articles from the scientific literature that further support this concept that nutritional.excellence can offer protection from viral attacks. I will show the reference and post some explanatory comments below each reference.
Numerous citations there.
Also, on vitamin D:
And: http://www.naturalnews.com/029760_vitamin_D_influenza.html
Counter-evidence on vitamin D though:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/02/health/vitamin-d-colds/index.html
But elsewhere it's been said by Dr. John Cannell that vitamin D has only helped with some influenza strains and also by compairson that the amount in the previous study may still have been too low:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/news-archive/2009/h1n1-flu-and-vitamin-d/
Can you provide any substantial evidence to back up your claims to the contrary? Can you even cite any good evidence the flu vaccine to date has accomplished anything significant except put more aluminum in people's bodies? By contrast: ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/does-the-vaccine-matter/307723/
"But what if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is wrong? What if flu vaccines do not protect people from dying -- particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized? The U.S. government -- with the support of leaders in the public-health and medical communities -- has put its faith in the power of vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread and lethality of swine flu. Other plans to contain the pandemic seem anemic by comparison. Yet some top flu researchers are deeply skeptical of both flu vaccines and antivirals. Like the engineers who warned for years about the levees of New Orleans, these experts caution that our defenses may be flawed, and quite possibly useless against a truly lethal flu. And that unless we are willing to ask fundamental questions about the science behind flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, we could find ourselves, in a bad epidemic, as helpless as the citizens of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
Jackson's findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the "frail elderly" didn't or couldn't. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson's papers "are beautiful," says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. "They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done."
The results were
I recall someone at a Space Studies Institute conference suggesting this idea. You collect the solar power in space via a solar space satellite, and then you focus it on the aircraft (either as a laser beam or as microwaves).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power
Presumably you could do the same from the ground as well perhaps. Think of this as a variation of laser launching systems where a small capsule rides a laser beam into space (perhaps with the beam ablating some layer at the bottom which serves as propellant).
As I suggested a dozen years ago: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm ..."
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
* Autonomous military robots out of control
* Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
* Ethnically targeted virus
See also though the root cause misperception: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ..."
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
Think of the unknowns surrounding DNA like a lock that kept us safe from ourselves. Removing those unknowns is like telling everyone how to open all the locks on the planet (including digital locks protecting nuclear weapons). That implies our culture needs to change if we are to survive. On my website I talk about some of that. Here is another good one: http://anwot.org/
The Richest Man in the World: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income.
The knol mentioned in the video has been moved here because Google Knol is shutting down: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
That parable and video was directly inspired by this:
"Structural Unemployment: The Economists Just Don't Get It"
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/#comment-254
"No one has hit the nail on the head yet how to use technology to properly increase a student's ability to learn. If / when that time does come, teachers / professors will need to make a carefully calculated decision how they will react to it. "
Something I wrote over five years ago: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html ...
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
See also:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
That bottom line: modern schools were designed in Prussia in the 19th century mainly to dumb people down and destroy their individual initiative to fit the needs of the Prussian military and the Prussian economy (see John Taylor Gatto). Give them more resources and they will only do that obsolete mission better.
See also: http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/index.html ..."
http://www.leeandmelindavarian.com/Melinda/neuvm.pdf
"The most important thing that IBM did to us was the announcement on February 8, 1983, of the Object Code Only (OCO) policy. I fear that ten years from now another speaker will be standing here telling you that that was the day VM died, but I hope not.
Since that day in 1983, the community has devoted enormous effort to attempting to convince IBM’s management that the OCO decision was a mistake. Many, many people have contributed to this effort in SHARE and in the other user groups. The greatest of SHARE’s source heroes is unquestionably Gabe Goldberg, who has persevered and maintained hope and a sense of humor in the face of IBM’s seemingly implacable position. In SEAS, Hans Deckers has been a particularly hard worker in the battle against OCO, and Sverre Jarp, the SEAS Past President, also deserves much praise for his role.
In February, 1985, the SHARE VM Group presented IBM with a White Paper that concluded with the sentence, “We hope that IBM will decide not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.” Though we had tried to make our White Paper reasonable and business-like, IBM chose not to reply to it.
A few months after the announcement of the OCO policy, IBM released the first OCO version of VM, VM/PC. VM/PC had a number of problems, including poor performance and incorrect or missing or incompatible function. Without source, the users were unable to correct or compensate for these problems, so nobody was surprised when VM/PC fell flat.
(Is that a picture of me talking to Kirk Alexander in front of an SGI Iris in the iCGL running some windowing and 3D model creation software I wrote? Not sure... Might be someone else and different software. What an amazing community back then and there -- one I did not appreciate enough at the time and just took for granted in my youth and lack of experience.)
A key point made in Melinda Varian's history of the VM Community is that even though only a small percentage of users actually looked at and changed the source code (an argument IBM made as to why providing the source did not matter), those users were a very impotent driver of fixes and innovation. When I was contracting at IBM Research around 2000, there were IBMers still angry about that decision two decades earlier and how it went badly for IBM, and they helped create some of the pressure for IBM to support the Free and Open Source Software movement. I pushed to get Python formally approved for official use in IBM Research back then, which took a bit of doing to go through IBM Legal. They even (embarrassingly) wrote Guido to ask him if he really had written it.
And:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=437640&cid=22255952
http://yuhongbao.blogspot.com/2010/06/artificial-scarcity-altair-basic-and.html
"Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?
Bill Gates: No. the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system. You got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong."
The web with plain-text distribution of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which are often readable, have been a bit of a return to those earlier days when you often had to type in BAS
A combination of artificial ingredients in food, along with a lack of key nutrients like omega 3 fats, vitamin D, iodine, magnesium, plant phytonutrients, and so on, can really impair brain function. For more details, see for example:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cat-adhd.html
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/adhd-preventing-and-treating-adhd-in-children.html
See also for adjusting your taste preferences:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap !"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Good luck.
And all the professional physicists and engineers denied that amorphous semiconductors were possible for many years, even when confronted with evidence... See for example:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9621164/Stanford-Ovshinsky.html
"In 1960, with his second wife Iris, a biochemist, he founded Energy Conversion Laboratories (later renamed Energy Conversion Devices, or ECD) at Rochester Hills, Michigan, to develop his ideas, and in 1968 held a press conference at which he announced that he had succeeded in making a "glass transistor" that relied on a principle which (with understandable immodesty) he called Ovonics. This breakthrough, he predicted, would eventually lead to desktop computers and television sets "hanging like portraits on the wall". The announcement made the front pages and ECDâ(TM)s stock (the company went public in 1967) soared. Within days, however, semiconductor engineers dismissed the idea and ECDâ(TM)s stock price collapsed. Most scientists had never heard of amorphous materials, and some rubbished Ovshinsky as a high school dropout and former machinist with no university qualifications. He was branded a crank. Eventually, though, Ovshinskyâ(TM)s theories proved correct, ushering in a whole new field of solid-state physics."
I can wonder if we'll see the same with so-called "cold fusion" (LENR)? Example:
http://pesn.com/2012/10/18/9602209_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_October18/
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
"Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt,[1] published in 2000. The book describes how professionals are made; the methods of professional and graduate schools that turn eager entering students into disciplined managerial and intellectual workers that correctly perceive and apply the employer's doctrine and outlook. Schmidt uses the examples of law, medicine, and physics, and describes methods that students and professional workers can use to preserve their personalities and independent thought."
I've always found the story of Stanford Ovshinsky inspirational. He was like a more-well-grounded Bucky Fuller. Too bad about prostrate cancer; here is some advice on reducing the risk for those of us (males) who carry on:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/prostate-cancer-dr-fuhrmans-diet-advice-for-prostate-health.html
"and respond to the takedown notices in my spare time."
That's certainly a good legal point, showing how far out society has regressed since the 1960s -- no only can't we put a human on the Moon anymore, but we can't even discuss it while including copies of forty year old documents (that should long ago have become public domain under any reasonable copyright regime).
Makes me think of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead
"Using this and other examples, Jacobs argued that modern political and economic ideologies were in effect no different than those dominant in Western civilization's past Dark Ages, such as Middle Age Roman Catholicism. In both cases, she claimed, the dominant ideology prevented and discouraged people from finding rational and scientifically-verifiable explanations and solutions."
As Jane Jacobs says, a Dark Age is when a society has forgotten even that it used to know something. We seem to be getting there in spaceflight, a few recent small company proprietary successes aside, like SpaceX. In general, the USA has also made publicly discussing some aspects of rocketry and such illegal for military reasons.
http://www.exportlawblog.com/archives/439
Still, some people are trying to relearn things on a small scale:
http://www.smartplanet.com/photos/privately-funded-open-source-rocket-lifts-off-photos/6243520
My own, so far unsuccesful, steps in that direction, but others are succeeding in that idrection as part of an open manufacturing movement:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
You may be in denial about the potential of AI and robotics? Saying horse carts were replaced by automobiles and human workers switched from making one to the other is different from saying most human automotive assembly workers and human automotive drivers are about to be replaced by robots and AIs (along with most other human workers in their respective jobs).
Also, compulsory public schools institutionalize various incremental levels of violent coercion to all children (including increasingly essentially forced drugging). It is difficult morally to justify the institutionalization of all children in day-prisons based on pointing out some bad parents, especially when the obvious results of doing that for generations are so bad. As is said here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling#History
===
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects -- even though the mothers were "mentally retarded teenagers" -- and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, "by western standards of measurement."[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting.[9] Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children -- particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes -- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children -- when obviously most children already have even more secure housing."[10]
Similar to Holt, the Moores embraced homeschooling after the publication of their first work, Better Late Than Early, 1975, and went on to become important homeschool advocates and consultants with the publication of books like Home Grown Kids, 1981, Homeschool Burnout, and others.[9]
=====
Also on that theme:
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the chil
"The three assumptions for home schooling are that it is inherently preferable for a parent to stay home to be there for the kids if they are needed, and that school as it is now is a negative influence the children who parents want to bring them up in a morale world. The third, and more controversial, is that 12 years of schooling is overkill. "
There is a lot more complexity to this than that, although you make some good points.
I'd rather see a "basic income" for all than paying people to be responsible parents, neighbors, or friends.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Home-based and community-based education is often about reclaiming family and community from institutionalization.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
It certainly is true that unhealthy habits may get passed from kid to kid in schools (they are probably the easiest places to buy addictive drugs, for example). There are other addictive and unhealthy things passed on too at schools, even if they may originate elsewhere:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.chefann.com/
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
But public school can be seen as inherently immoral in part because it rests on a premise of unneeded violence through coercion.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/
Contrast a "public" school with a "public" library, where many peopel throught the ages have learned a lot without someone grading them or monitoring everything they learned or forcing them to read certain books on a certain fixed schedule.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3a.htm
"One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps m
Maybe it is more an "anti-violence" push? :-) http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/
"Lest you think I am overreacting when I declare that the means and methods by which nearly all of the children in this country are educated are inherently violent, consider what Webster's lists as its third definition for "violent": "caused by force; not natural, as in a violent death."
Conventional education is all about force, beginning with each state's compulsory education statute. The failure to cover the state mandated curriculum, or its equivalent, is punishable by law. Even worse, students and teachers trapped inside schools that sort, grade, and rank children like fruits and vegetables face an increasing specter of punishment if the students don't measure up on mandatory -- and soon to be nationwide -- high stakes standardized tests. Students are told that, if they don't pass, then they can't move on to the next level. Teachers are told that, if their students don't pass, then it's time to look for another job. The indelible bottom line: learn or else. (Chris Mercogliano, past co-director of the Albany Free School)"
If the money is allocated to "education" then why do you consider it reasonable to exclude non-classroom (e.g. administrative) overhead? The fact is, divide the number of kids in NY in public schools by the amount spent, and it is about $20K per child per year. Administering a system where the money goes directly to the familes should have very little overhead. Personally, I'd rather see a more general basic income for everyone in the USA though on the order of US$2000 per month (about one half the US GDP), and then families could decide how much of that to allocate to educational expenses.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/index.php
I agree we'll see 60% unemployment or worse (barring radical changes) fairly soon (due to robotics, AI, and free content on computer networks), but I don't think that issue is fixable by reforming public schools. Every country is going to see this, regardless of the school system. Some solutions besides a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
I like listening to music. Here is what some people have to say about forcing other people to listen to music:
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-06-02/news/31989906_1_music-groups-torture-prisoners-guantanamo-bay
"A new documentary released by Al Jazeera exposes the use of childrens songs and heavy metal music to torture prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. "
I also like math... By analogy, what is forcing people to do math against their will?
You wrote: "I hated highschool..."
Then you wrote: "I have to ..."
Why do you have to perpetuate the system you hate?
I know there are answers -- the right to consume in our society is linked to participating in our current economic order. See: "The Triple Revolution Memorandum".
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/17/why-the-triple-revolution-memorandum-was-ahead-of-its-time/index.html
So, maybe you have to stay a school teacher for that reason. I certainly face the same economic issue myself regarding other paying work. And maybe you students are indeed better off with your approach in the context you describe, all other things being equal. So, then the issue is, how can one change the context so all other things are not equal and there is a rebalancing?
Still, either a universal basic income or the proposal I outlined would give families plenty of money to hire math tutors like yourself if their kids wanted to learn math. Or a basic income for everyone would mean you could do different things with your own time.
What you say from your experience is truth. But, you can still think more deeply and creatively about the meaning of it, like John Taylor Gatto, Jeff Schmidt, or John Holt did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(educator)
If all the kids you were teaching had freely chose to be in your class, would you have to think so much about authority? What would your day be like if the only kids you were interacting with explicitly wanted to be learning math or anything else you wanted to teach (like they wanted to be engineers or whatever)? The fact that there are children who are compelled to be in your classroom when they don't want to be there is a big part of the problem. Sadly, Jaime Escalante's efforts were essentially shut down by the school bureaucracy that could not accept them, so I'm not saying creating or sustaining alternatives in public schools is easy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante#National_attention
Khan Academy is one example of part of a different way forward. Free schools are another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
http://www.sudval.org/
Or:
http://www.augusttojune.com/
"Come inside a public school happily and purposefully going against current trends and join 26 8-10 year olds, their teacher, and their parents for a year bursting with opportunities for curiosity, creativity and compassion. "
The last link, is a documentary about an alternative public school, so things are possible.
More alternatives:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
More on this theme
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not."
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
A "basic income" for all is an other solution...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_on_Kids
"The War on Kids is a 2009 documentary film about the American school system. The film takes a look at public school education in America and concludes that schools are not only failing to educate, but are increasingly authoritarian institutions more akin to prisons that are eroding the foundations of American democracy. Students are robbed of basic freedoms primarily due to irrational fears; they are searched, arbitrarily punished and force-fed dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. The educational mission of the public school system has been reduced from one of learning and preparation for adult citizenship to one of control and containment."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy. In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."
We in the USA need a security strategy the emphasizes intrinsic security and mutual security over extrinsic security and unilateral security. More on that here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"The only serious threat to Canada is the USA and that war would be over rather quickly, so why bother with a huge military to defend against that?"
Agreed, considering Canada has already repulsed invasions from the southern border twice, so it could probably do it a third time even easier... :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Canada_(1775)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812#Invasions_of_Upper_and_Lower_Canada.2C_1812
Those who, like in Canada, invest mainly in intrinsic security and mutual security are generally in a much more secure position over the long term than those who foolishly invest mainly in extrinsic and unilateral security like sadly has been the recent custom of those to the immediate south of Canada.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
===
The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
To address that pervasive threat from unrecognized irony, it would help to re-envision the CIA as a non-ironic post-scarcity institution. Then the CIA could help others (including in the White House) make more informed decisions to move past this irony as well.
A first step towards that could be for IARPA to support better free software tools for "crowdsourced" public intelligence work involving using a social semantic desktop for sensemaking about open source data and building related open public action plans from that data to make local communities healthier, happier, more intrinsically secure, and also more mutually secure. Secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy local (and virtual) communities then can form together a secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy nation and planet in a non-ironic way. Details on that idea are publicly posted by me here in the form of a Proposal Abstract to the IARPA Incisive Analysis solicitation: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats and Opportunities" ...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2368162&cid=37016386
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html ...
===
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
===
My biggest issue with Kurzweil is that the singularity is like a mirror, and what he sees there is a mirror of his success in business creating artificial scarcity through copyrights and patents and engaging in commercial competition rather than global free cooperation. Still, he gets a lot of ideas right.