"They all still afford college and everything else because they only buy what they need. They don't buy two cars per person, they make large meals and reuse leftovers, the first two kids get new clothing and everyone else has hand-me-downs, they go to cheaper schools, etc... Their cable and internet bills are the same as yours, they go to more community activities and have enough people to play board and card games with themselves so less expensive electronic gaming, they've got multiple people to split up the chores so everything gets done faster despite there being a little more work. It really isn't that harder to wash 6 dishes than wash and dry 2 dishes (another kid will do the drying of the 6 dishes). It's just as easy to read to four kids the same story as it is to read to two kids. Eventually the older kids will start helping out the younger kids, providing you with more time and the older kid better experience compared to an only child. Assuming all the kids don't hate each other, they've got their brothers and sisters who will back them up when needed thus less prone to depression and feeling like an outcast. There are many, many more examples. I'm not sure which large families you've seen, but the one's I've seen get by by having a more sustainable life style. Tax breaks don't out weight the cost of a kid. If they did, kids wouldn't be expensive and everyone would have many. Each kid after 2 or 3 becomes cheaper than the last."
Mod parent up. With a solar system that is almost entirely empty, I'm just shocked to see all the people on Slashdot celebrating low fertility. Sure, a small cafe (the Earth) in a big city (the Solar system) may have an occupancy limit, but we don't go around telling people not to have kids because some cafe is too crowded. People generally just open another cafe...
And here is why: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Tsiolkovsky.html "Russian physicist and theoretical father of rocketry. Tsiolkovsky was the son of a Polish deportee to Siberia. Tsiolkovsky was an inventor and aviation engineer who was also an insightful visionary. As early as 1894, he designed a monoplane which subsequently flew in 1915. He also built the first Russian wind tunnel in 1897. In 1903, as part of a series of articles in a Russian aviation magazine, Tsiolkovsky published the rocket equation, Eric Weisstein's World of Physics and in 1929, a theory of multistage rockets. Tsiolkovsky was also the author of Investigations of Outer Space by Rocket Devices (1911) and Aims of Astronauts (1914). One of Tsiolkovsky's many memorable and inspiring quotes is "Mankind will not forever remain on Earth, but in the pursuit of light and space will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere, and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space" (1911). Tsiolkovsky's most famous quote is, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever." "
This "overpopulation" meme is so short sighted and despairing. Someday maybe we will see potential parents getting obsessed with "pleasure traps" of modern technology as perhaps a bad thing, rather than something that is now celebrated. Industrialized populations (especially places like Japan and Italy, and even the USA just about without immigration) are no longer even replacing themselves and their populations demographically will fall. Where does tha
"The main problem...most people would prefer a global war that wipes out 2/3 of the population rather than living in a world where they can't eat meat"
From: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx ==== By Doug Lisle and Alan Goldhamer An abundance of food, by itself, is not a cause of health problems. But modern technology has done more than to simply make food perpetually abundant. Food also has been made artificially tastier. Food is often more stimulating than ever before -- as the particular chemicals in foods that cause pleasure reactions have been isolated-and artificially concentrated. These chemicals include fats (including oils), refined carbohydrates (such as refined sugar and flour), and salt. Meats were once consumed mostly in the form of wild game -- typically about 15% fat. Today's meat is a much different product. Chemically and hormonally engineered, it can be as high as 50% fat or more. Ice cream is an extraordinary invention for intensifying taste pleasure -- an artificial concoction of pure fat and refined sugar. Once an expensive delicacy, it is now a daily ritual for many people. French fries and potato chips, laden with artificially-concentrated fats, are currently the most commonly consumed "vegetable" in our society. As Dr. Fuhrman reports in his excellent volume Eat to Live, these artificial products, and others like them, comprise a whopping 93% American diet. Our teenage population, for example, consumes up to 25% of their calories in the form of soda pop!
Most of our citizenry can't imagine how it could be any other way. To remove (or dramatically reduce) such products from America's daily diet seems intolerable -- even absurd. Most people believe that if they were to do so, they would enjoy their food -- and their lives -- much less. Indeed, most people believe that they would literally suffer if they consumed a health-promoting diet devoid of such indulgences. But, it is here that their perception is greatly in error. The reality is that humans are well designed to fully enjoy the subtler tastes of whole natural foods, but are poorly equipped to realize this fact. And like a frog sitting in dangerously hot water, most people are being slowly destroyed by the limitations of their awareness.
The pleasure trap
Figure 1 (above) depicts a devastating trap. People consuming a whole natural foods diet will experience a normal range of pleasure from eating low-fat, high-fiber, unprocessed foodsâ"shown as Phase I. However, if concentrated, adulterated, processed foods are consistently allowed in the diet, they quickly will become preferred.
In Phase II, we see that these products are typically experienced as better -- that is, more pleasurable -- than natural foods. This is the result of the heightened pleasure-inducing characteristics of artificially-produced foods. However, within a short period of time (a few weeks), the taste nerves adapt to this higher level of stimulation, and reduce their firing rate. This reduces the pleasure experience of artificially-stimulating foods back down to normal levels (Phase III).
Phase III is the culmination of a process of extraordinary importance. It is within Phase III that most people live out their lives. And it is from within Phase III that most people will engineer their own health crises. Phase III occurs when we have become "used to it" - used to the extreme levels of stimulation present in artificial foods. Yet ultimately, we experience no more pleasure than had we remained on a simpler, more healthful diet! However, this process is rarely noticed - just as we rarely notice the process of getting used to a brightly-lit room.
A challenging escape
Once in awhile, a person may actually become aware of important dietary knowledge. Despite the ingenious misinformation campaigns waged by the dairy, cattle, and processed food industries, sometimes a person actually comes to understand the truth about diet. At such times, determin
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
From JD Bernal writing in the 1920s: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/ "Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant. "
Quadrillions of humans could live in style in space habitats in the solar system. It would take another 1000 years of exponential growth to approach that. And then it is somebody else's problem -- perhaps to create virtual universes, travel faster-than-light, or create matter and energy and space from the quantum vacuum, or just migrate into a computational matrix?
"People do not want to admit that death==nonexistence so they make-up imaginary 'trips' to some other place (heaven, hell, Elysian Fields, space, whatever). In reality Sally Ride's personality dissolved into nothingness at the moment her brain's neurons broke connection with one another when they were deprived of oxygen."
For another perspective, see: http://noetic.org/search/?q=survival http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/tart/ http://physicalismisdead.blogspot.com/2012/05/charles-tart-on-postmortem-survival.html http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=charles+tart http://www.amazon.com/States-Consciousness-Charles-Tart/dp/0595151965 http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Materialism-Evidence-Paranormal/dp/1572246456 "Charles Tart reconciles the scientific and spiritual worlds by looking at empirical evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena that point toward our spiritual nature, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and psychic healing.
Science seems to tell us that we are all meaningless products of blind biological and chemical forces, leading meaningless lives that will eventually end in death. The truth is that unseen forces such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and other phenomena inextricably link us to the spiritual world, and while many skeptics and scientists deny the existence of these spiritual phenomena, the experiences of millions of people indicate that they do take place.
In this book, copublished with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart presents over fifty years of scientific research conducted at the nation's leading universities that proves humans do have natural spiritual impulses and abilities. The End of Materialism presents an elegant argument for the union of science and spirituality in light of this new evidence, and explains why a truly rational viewpoint must address the reality of a spiritual world. Tart's work marks the beginning of an evidence-based spiritual awakening that will profoundly influence your understanding of the deeper forces at work in our lives."
Are you seriously telling me that some academics at Harvard telling politicians what they want to hear, (that "using killer robots like you are already doing works great") is a good thing? That academics advocating policies with obvious "blowback" potential is "solving a small problem" that "improves the world"? http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Second-Edition-Consequences-American/dp/0805075593
When even people at the CIA are expressing doubts? http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LF05Df02.html "Some United States Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in the agency's drone strikes program in Pakistan and elsewhere are privately expressing their opposition to the program within the agency because it is helping al-Qaeda and its allies recruit, according to a retired military officer in contact with them.
"Some of the CIA operators are concerned that, because of its blowback effect, it is doing more harm than good," said Jeffrey
Addicott, former legal adviser to US Special Forces and director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, in an interview with Inter Press Service (IPS).
Addicott said the CIA operatives that he knows have told him al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are effectively using the drone strikes to recruit more militants.
CIA officers "are very upset" with the drone strike policy, Addicott said. "They'll do what the boss says, but they view it as a harmful exercise. They say we're largely killing rank and file Pakistani Taliban, and they are the ones who are agitated by the campaign."
Because the drone strikes kill innocent civilians and bystanders along with leaders from far away, they "infuriate the Muslim male", said Addicott, thus making them more willing to join the movement. The men in Pakistan's tribal region "view Americans as cowards and weasels", he said. "
Have you ever given any thought to the implications of Harvard academics endorsing the ever wider use of killer robots to solve political problems? Including the political problems resulting from earlier use of killer robots by the USA? Where does it end? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
So many things in our world are complex feedback loops. And yes, many academics actually study such complex things (especially in biology and ecology). But apparently it is too hard for those two guys at Harvard to google on "CIA drone blowback"?
I have collected plenty of fairly straight-forward alternative solutions. For example, a "basic income" which is supported by five Nobel prize winners in economics according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee#Advocates
The issue is not whether solutions are simple or complex (witness the US tax code's complexity, or the complexity of all sorts of numerical models, including most recently one to simulate a bacterium posted recently on slashdot). The issue outline in "Disciplined Minds" is about putting on ideological blinders -- ones that may even prevent someone from seeing or advocating for simple solutions (like a basic
From the mid 1990s by the Vice-provost of Caltech: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."
All reasoning is also based on emotion, which relate to perceptions, assumptions, priorities and preferences which are, to some extent, outside of pure rationality (which why "technocracy" has many issues). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error
But the biggest issue is that our socio-economic-political system is not well-adapted to handle "externalities" including systemic risks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Accounting for externalities (including US defense spending for long oil supply lines), renewables (and energy efficiency) have been *cheaper* than fossil fuels since the 1970s... Two resources on that from around 1980:
Well, ignoring the obvious job security worries for mainstream economists stepping out of line, maybe the issue is more "religious" at this point? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/ "A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of deja vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies."
And: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html?pagewanted=all "But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists -- like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor -- have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.""
How many millions of people have been harmed by the essentially "religious" market fundamentalism of so many mainstream economists, who turn a blind eye to externalities, systemic risks, and wealth concentration? (To be clear, it is also a weird sort of market fundamentalism in the USA mixed with protectionism for favored already "worthy" wealthy groups.)
See also: http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue21/Stanford21.htm "I am an economist. It is seventeen days since I last uttered the phrase "supply and demand." But the demon still lurks untamed, within me. Economics is an addiction. Every other addiction has a Twelve Step program, laced with tough love and blunt self-honesty. Why not a Twelve Step program for economists? God knows, we have done enough damage with our arrogant, drunken prescriptions. Here's how each and every economist can face up to their inner demons, and make their own small contribution to setting things right.
Step 1: Admit you have a problem. Like they say at the AA meetings, this is half the solution
But maybe US vice-president Joe Biden would agree about the founder of Wikileaks? http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/19/assange-high-tech-terrorist-biden "Asked if he saw Assange as closer to a hi-tech terrorist than the whistleblower who released the Pentagon papers in the 1970s, which disclosed the lie on which US involvement in Vietnam was based, Biden replied: "I would argue it is closer to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers. But, look, this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world."
See my other posts citing Chomsky on the double-think and double-standard in defining a "terrorist", which basically comes down to a terorist being defined as anyone whom somebody influential in the USA government does not like. And that apparently includes US citizens: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/drone-attacks-lawsuit/ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/18/families-us-citizens-killed-in-yemen-drone-strikes-file-lawsuit/ "The wrongful death lawsuit, filed Wednesday, claims that the killings of U.S. citizens al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and operative Samir Khan were unconstitutional. Khan was the publisher of the terror magazine Inspire.... The lawsuit says: "The U.S. practice of 'targeted killing' has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, including many hundreds of civilian bystanders. While some targeted killings have been carried out in the context of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many have taken place outside the context of armed conflict, in countries including Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan, and the Philippines." "These killings rely on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts.... The killings violated fundamental rights afforded to all U.S. citizens, including the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law," the lawsuit says."
And see also: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/05/29/analysis-how-obama-changed-definition-of-civilian-in-secret-drone-wars/ "As the Bureau's own data on Pakistan makes clear, the very first covert drone strikes of the Obama presidency, just three days after he took office, resulted in civilian deaths in Pakistan. As many as 19 civilians â" including four children â" died in two error-filled attacks. Until now it had been thought that Obama was initially unaware of the civilian deaths. Bob Woodward has reported that the president was only told by CIA chief Michael Hayden that the strikes had missed their High Value Target but had killed 'five al Qaeda militants.' Now Newsweek correspondent Daniel Klaidman reveals that Obama knew about the civilian deaths within hours. He reports an anonymous participant at a subsequent meeting with the President: 'You could tell from his body language that he was not a happy man.' Obama is described aggressively questioning the tactics used. Until now it had been thought that President Obama was initially unaware of the civilian deaths. Yet despite the errors, the president ultimately chose to keep in place the CIA's controversial policy of using 'signature strikes' against unknown militants. That tactic has just been extended to Yemen. On another notorious occasion, the article reveals that US officials were aware at the earliest stage that civilians -- including 'dozens of women and children' -- had died in Obama's first ordered strike
...is with better ideas: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful...."
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm "There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism. One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. In each case it is clear how to proceed. Pursuing the literal approach, we begin by determining what constitutes terrorism. We then seek instances of the phenomenon -- concentrating on the major examples, if we are serious -- and try to determine causes and remedies. The propagandistic approach dictates a different course. We begin with the thesis that terrorism is the responsibility of some officially designated enemy. We then designate terrorist acts as "terrorist" just in the cases where they can be attributed (whether plausibly or not) to the required source; otherwise they are to be ignored, suppressed, or termed "retaliation" or "self-defence."
It comes as no surprise that the propagandistic approach is adopted by governments generally, and by their instruments in totalitarian states. More interesting is the fact that the same is largely true of the media and scholarship in the Western industrial democracies, as has been documented in extensive detail.1 "We must recognize," Michael Stohl observes, "that by convention -- and it must be emphasized only by convention -- great power use and the threat of the use of force is normally described as coercive diplomacy and not as a form of terrorism," though it commonly involves "the threat and often the use of violence for what would be described as terroristic purposes were it not great powers who were pursuing the very same tactic."2 Only one qualification must be added: the term "great powers" must be restricted to favored states; in the Western conventions under discussion, the Soviet Union is granted no such rhetorical license, and indeed can be charged and convicted on the flimsiest of evidence....
The message is clear: no one has the right of self-defense against US terrorist attack. The US is a terrorist state by right. That is unchallengeable doctrine...."
And: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200205--02.htm "The condemnations of terrorism are sound, but leave some questions unanswered. The first is: What do we mean by "terrorism"? Second: What is the proper response to the crime? Whatever the answer, it must at least satisfy a moral truism: If we propose some principle that is to be applied to antagonists, then we must agree -- in fact, strenuously insist -- that the principle apply to us as well. Those who do not rise even to this minimal level of integrity plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of right and wrong, good and evil."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds "Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt 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."
Those links explain in part how can such "smart" people totally ignore the potential for "blowback" from the violent actions they endorse (actions which include the slaughter of endless innocents, the violation of national sovereignty and probably international law, the setting of an example of ironic misuse of advanced technology that could otherwise bring material abundance to the entire world, and so on)... These links help show why these academics are willfully blind to the idea that they are endorsing polices that may be creating 100 new terrorist for every one they think they might have killed.
Never forget what one of our greatest Marine Major Generals said: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket "War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit from warfare."
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were *supposed* to be expensive quagmires so somebody's buddies coudl get lucrative "defense" contracts. These conflicts were *supposed* to drive up oil prices so somebody's buddies would see the value of their domestic oil holdings increase. And so on...
See also: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-cohn/killer-drone-attacks-ille_b_1623065.html "Christof Heyns, the current UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, expressed grave concern about the targeted killings, saying they may constitute war crimes. He called on the Obama administration to explain how its drone strikes comport with international law, specify the bases for decisions to kill rather than capture particular individuals, and whether the State in which the killing takes place has given consent. Heyns further asked for specification of the procedural safeguards in place, if any, to ensure in advance of drone killings that they comply with international law. He also wanted to know what measures the U.S. government takes after any such killing to ensure that its legal and factual analysis was accurate and, if not, the remedial measures it would take, including justice and reparations for victims and their families. Although Heyns' predecessor made similar requests, Heyns said the United States has not provided a satisfactory response.
Heyns also called on the U.S. government to make public the number of civilians collaterally killed as a result of drone attacks, and the measures in place to prevent such casualties. Once again, Heyns said the United States has not satisfactor
The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products.
The project's short-term benefits will include
* technology education,
* historical education,
* collaboration,
* sustainable technology development,
* public science literacy, and
* knowledge democratization.
The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).
We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.
It is the aim of this project to create an open-source community centered around applications and knowledge related to space settlement. To gain the broadest participation, the project will also include knowledge related to terrestrial settlements. The initial focus will be on collecting "manufacturing recipes" on how to make things: for example, how to make a 1930's style lathe. Information collected will range from historical interest (fabrication techniques of the stone age to make flint knives) to current (fabrication techniques to make stainless steel knives) to futuristic (fabrication techniques requiring nanotechnology to make diamond knives). This project will involve potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe. It is expected that ultimately millions of individuals (many in developing nations) will benefit from use of this database directly or indirectly.
I've been mostly working towards a social semantic desktop to support the creative, organizational, and analysis parts. And still not much to show for it.:-)
http://www.post-scarcity-princeton.com/ From the essay I wrote four years ago: "... We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once?... Capitalism is often it seems all about cost cutting. Why do people have such a hard time thinking about what happens as costs approach zero, even for improvements in quality? Or why do economists have a hard time understanding that many conventional economic equations may produce infinities as costs trend towards zero?... Here is one approach to "reboot" Princeton for a post-scarcity world. This is just an example. No doubt the creative minds on campus can come up with better proposals once they turn their attention to the matter. Should these be followed, it's a lot more likely I might encourage my own child to apply in a dozen years or so...."
Might be helpful: http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Diabetes.aspx "How can we lower high glucose levels, lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, lose weight and not need to take drugs such as insulin and sulfonylureas which cause weight gain? Here is the simple answer -- the best diet for humans to live longer in superior health is also the best diet for one with diabetes. That is a diet with a high nutrient per calorie ratio as described in my books, Eat To Live and Eat For Health. When one eats a diet predominating in nature's perfect foods -- green vegetables, beans, eggplant, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, garlic, raw nuts and seeds and limited amount of fresh fruit, it becomes relatively easy for people to eat as much as they want and still lose weight relatively quickly. This includes lots of great tasting food and great recipes, but no oil, butter, cheese, flour or sweets. My experience has demonstrated that those choosing to follow my nutritional recommendation will have their diabetes controlled astonishingly fast even before they have lost most of their excess weight."
"If your unit gets surprise attacked by the enemy, do you want to spend 5 minutes (at least) calling an online vote on whether to counterattack or retreat, or do you want a commander to give an immediate order?"
How about every individual just does what they have trained to do in that situation? Search on Manuel De Landa's essay on "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces".
As that older article points out, the Bakers also spent some time early on at IBM Research doing speech stuff (and from when I was working at the IBM Speech group myself much later, it did not seem completely clear what way most of the knowledge was flowing). My undergrad adviser at Princeton, George A. Miller, who did a lot in the psychology of natural language and knew the Bakers (I think from when he was at Rockefeller with them), told me about this loss more than a decade ago, as a cautionary tale. More than the money, what really hurt most for the couple was not being able to work on their project anymore. For anyone who really cares about what they are working on, this is a good argument for working in the free and open source software realm rather than trying to finance proprietary software somehow, even when you think you are the "owner" of the software. Imagine if the Bakers had released Dragon as FOSS back then and built a consultancy around it -- at least they would not be alienated from their 20+ year labor of love (or "third child" as they called the software). In general, you also can't expect the same people who put their love into creating great things for the world to be fully prepared to deal with business sharks (even business sharks like GS being supposedly hired to "help" them). I'm glad my wife and I released our own labors of love (like our Garden Simulator and PlantStudio software) as FOSS instead of taking on investors and making it proprietary, since at least we can always still work with the source code. Of course, the flip side of that is often not having the time to do that because of a need to do other things for money. We ideally need a "basic income" and similar social changes to solve that problem and to minimize a software industry based around "artificial scarcity". http://www.basicincome.org/bien/ http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
"all its done in the past 40 years is act as an engine of misery, destruction and sorrow across the globe."
Because it is ironic? http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
See also: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful...."
Of course, decades later, this may all seem obvious. I've ended up working more more towards a general purpose social-semantic desktop ideas, while thankfully the rest of the world is finally starting to embrace an open source "maker" movement (but with scattered and poorly-integrated tools and repositories). I agree we need better analysis tools for all this, as well as better standards for encoding manufacturing knowledge.
A high degree of automation also probably requires a new vision for "economics", and I've written on that as well on my website (about moving towards a more "Star Trek" like economy).
This all has encountered tremendous resistance/apathy for a variety of reasons. Part of that resistance is probably that trying to talk about manufacturing webs goes against the grain of capitalism, which focuses on lots of narrowly-defined actors who try to socialize all their costs of producing one strand of the web as externalities while privatizing their profits and creating intellectual rent-seeking monopolies to lock those profits in indefinitely. For example, when I was in grad school at Princeton in the 1980s in Operatiosn Research, the professors were very excited about "picking up nickles before a steam roller" (make short term profits while ignoring systemic risk). To talk about systemic risk, or ways to deal with that, went against a narrow short-term focus on profitable optimizations (the kind that lead to lots of industry support and related grants). Thus, ironically, all those professors who contributed intellectually to our current economic disaster (for the 99%) were heavily rewarded for decades with resources and prestige, and then they get to shrug off the disaster their ideas helped cause as an unpredictable "black swan" economic event. Those who tried to do anything about it pro-actively were essentially punished.:-) Such is life, I guess. I'm glad that overall alternatives continue to emerge. A book related to why interdisciplinary work that goes against current cultural grain is so hard to do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
Raising children well and being a good citizen and good neighbor will probably always absorb about as much attention as adults can put into it... We buy a lot of stuff from Amazon -- in part because it is very convenient, and we get an enormous selection, and we don't have to think much about the security of each vendor relationship, and it saves us time and gas traveling quite a distance to stores. I tend to view the Amazon website as like the interface to some really slow Star Trek Matter Replicator that takes about two days to make just about anything. Eventually that wait time will get smaller and smaller for more and more things. Yes, this will add up to large scale social consequences though as more and more people do this. Maybe everyone in the world should just get a US$2000 credit deposited by the government (from taxes and royalties and newly issued money) every month at Amazon as a "basic income"?:-) Our economy is fundamentally changing but most pundits and politicians and especially mainstream economists don't talk about it.
As I write on the main page of my website:
In brief, there have always been five interwoven economies, and the balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes: * A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here."); * A gift economy ("The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past."); * A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks."); * An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat."); * A theft (or conquest) economy ("What's yours is mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, or can afford better lawyers.").
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including: * robotics, AI, and other automation, * better design, * the accumulation of physical infrastructure, * relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or * the emergence of voluntary social networks.
So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with: * A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else); * A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle; * A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; * An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and * Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.
The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society.
Understanding this big picture is all part of rethinking socieoconomic institutions for the 21st century based on new (yet old) paradigms.
BTW, google on "iron sun" as well as "electric universe". I've been wondering if the sun is powered by LENR reactions from quantum tunnelling boundary evaporation of neutrons from a huge iron-nickel mass? The hydrogen seen on the surface of the sun may not be representative of what is below the surface, same as much of the earth is covered with water, but only a mile deep. The core of the Earth may be heated by a similar boudnary evaporation and LENR process? The universe may have a lot more iron decaying into hydrogen than hydrogen fusing into iron...
Slashdot Mirror
"They all still afford college and everything else because they only buy what they need. They don't buy two cars per person, they make large meals and reuse leftovers, the first two kids get new clothing and everyone else has hand-me-downs, they go to cheaper schools, etc... Their cable and internet bills are the same as yours, they go to more community activities and have enough people to play board and card games with themselves so less expensive electronic gaming, they've got multiple people to split up the chores so everything gets done faster despite there being a little more work. It really isn't that harder to wash 6 dishes than wash and dry 2 dishes (another kid will do the drying of the 6 dishes). It's just as easy to read to four kids the same story as it is to read to two kids. Eventually the older kids will start helping out the younger kids, providing you with more time and the older kid better experience compared to an only child. Assuming all the kids don't hate each other, they've got their brothers and sisters who will back them up when needed thus less prone to depression and feeling like an outcast. There are many, many more examples. I'm not sure which large families you've seen, but the one's I've seen get by by having a more sustainable life style. Tax breaks don't out weight the cost of a kid. If they did, kids wouldn't be expensive and everyone would have many. Each kid after 2 or 3 becomes cheaper than the last."
Mod parent up. With a solar system that is almost entirely empty, I'm just shocked to see all the people on Slashdot celebrating low fertility. Sure, a small cafe (the Earth) in a big city (the Solar system) may have an occupancy limit, but we don't go around telling people not to have kids because some cafe is too crowded. People generally just open another cafe...
Here is a step towards how:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319
And here is why:
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Tsiolkovsky.html
"Russian physicist and theoretical father of rocketry. Tsiolkovsky was the son of a Polish deportee to Siberia. Tsiolkovsky was an inventor and aviation engineer who was also an insightful visionary. As early as 1894, he designed a monoplane which subsequently flew in 1915. He also built the first Russian wind tunnel in 1897. In 1903, as part of a series of articles in a Russian aviation magazine, Tsiolkovsky published the rocket equation, Eric Weisstein's World of Physics and in 1929, a theory of multistage rockets. Tsiolkovsky was also the author of Investigations of Outer Space by Rocket Devices (1911) and Aims of Astronauts (1914). One of Tsiolkovsky's many memorable and inspiring quotes is "Mankind will not forever remain on Earth, but in the pursuit of light and space will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere, and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space" (1911). Tsiolkovsky's most famous quote is, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever." "
The more people, the more vision and imagination...
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
This "overpopulation" meme is so short sighted and despairing. Someday maybe we will see potential parents getting obsessed with "pleasure traps" of modern technology as perhaps a bad thing, rather than something that is now celebrated. Industrialized populations (especially places like Japan and Italy, and even the USA just about without immigration) are no longer even replacing themselves and their populations demographically will fall. Where does tha
"The main problem...most people would prefer a global war that wipes out 2/3 of the population rather than living in a world where they can't eat meat"
From: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
==== By Doug Lisle and Alan Goldhamer
An abundance of food, by itself, is not a cause of health problems. But modern technology has done more than to simply make food perpetually abundant. Food also has been made artificially tastier. Food is often more stimulating than ever before -- as the particular chemicals in foods that cause pleasure reactions have been isolated-and artificially concentrated. These chemicals include fats (including oils), refined carbohydrates (such as refined sugar and flour), and salt. Meats were once consumed mostly in the form of wild game -- typically about 15% fat. Today's meat is a much different product. Chemically and hormonally engineered, it can be as high as 50% fat or more. Ice cream is an extraordinary invention for intensifying taste pleasure -- an artificial concoction of pure fat and refined sugar. Once an expensive delicacy, it is now a daily ritual for many people. French fries and potato chips, laden with artificially-concentrated fats, are currently the most commonly consumed "vegetable" in our society. As Dr. Fuhrman reports in his excellent volume Eat to Live, these artificial products, and others like them, comprise a whopping 93% American diet. Our teenage population, for example, consumes up to 25% of their calories in the form of soda pop!
Most of our citizenry can't imagine how it could be any other way. To remove (or dramatically reduce) such products from America's daily diet seems intolerable -- even absurd. Most people believe that if they were to do so, they would enjoy their food -- and their lives -- much less. Indeed, most people believe that they would literally suffer if they consumed a health-promoting diet devoid of such indulgences. But, it is here that their perception is greatly in error. The reality is that humans are well designed to fully enjoy the subtler tastes of whole natural foods, but are poorly equipped to realize this fact. And like a frog sitting in dangerously hot water, most people are being slowly destroyed by the limitations of their awareness.
The pleasure trap
Figure 1 (above) depicts a devastating trap. People consuming a whole natural foods diet will experience a normal range of pleasure from eating low-fat, high-fiber, unprocessed foodsâ"shown as Phase I. However, if concentrated, adulterated, processed foods are consistently allowed in the diet, they quickly will become preferred.
In Phase II, we see that these products are typically experienced as better -- that is, more pleasurable -- than natural foods. This is the result of the heightened pleasure-inducing characteristics of artificially-produced foods. However, within a short period of time (a few weeks), the taste nerves adapt to this higher level of stimulation, and reduce their firing rate. This reduces the pleasure experience of artificially-stimulating foods back down to normal levels (Phase III).
Phase III is the culmination of a process of extraordinary importance. It is within Phase III that most people live out their lives. And it is from within Phase III that most people will engineer their own health crises. Phase III occurs when we have become "used to it" - used to the extreme levels of stimulation present in artificial foods. Yet ultimately, we experience no more pleasure than had we remained on a simpler, more healthful diet! However, this process is rarely noticed - just as we rarely notice the process of getting used to a brightly-lit room.
A challenging escape
Once in awhile, a person may actually become aware of important dietary knowledge. Despite the ingenious misinformation campaigns waged by the dairy, cattle, and processed food industries, sometimes a person actually comes to understand the truth about diet. At such times, determin
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
... structural unemployment and a basic income 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 "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_habitat
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319
From JD Bernal writing in the 1920s:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant. "
Quadrillions of humans could live in style in space habitats in the solar system. It would take another 1000 years of exponential growth to approach that. And then it is somebody else's problem -- perhaps to create virtual universes, travel faster-than-light, or create matter and energy and space from the quantum vacuum, or just migrate into a computational matrix?
As Julian Simon said, the human imagination is the ultimate resource (whether expressed through science or otherwise):
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
The more people, the more imagination. People may consume resources and take up space, but they also produce resources and make spaces worth being in.
"People do not want to admit that death==nonexistence so they make-up imaginary 'trips' to some other place (heaven, hell, Elysian Fields, space, whatever). In reality Sally Ride's personality dissolved into nothingness at the moment her brain's neurons broke connection with one another when they were deprived of oxygen."
For another perspective, see: http://noetic.org/search/?q=survival
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/tart/
http://physicalismisdead.blogspot.com/2012/05/charles-tart-on-postmortem-survival.html
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=charles+tart
http://www.amazon.com/States-Consciousness-Charles-Tart/dp/0595151965
http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Materialism-Evidence-Paranormal/dp/1572246456
"Charles Tart reconciles the scientific and spiritual worlds by looking at empirical evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena that point toward our spiritual nature, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and psychic healing.
Science seems to tell us that we are all meaningless products of blind biological and chemical forces, leading meaningless lives that will eventually end in death. The truth is that unseen forces such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and other phenomena inextricably link us to the spiritual world, and while many skeptics and scientists deny the existence of these spiritual phenomena, the experiences of millions of people indicate that they do take place.
In this book, copublished with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart presents over fifty years of scientific research conducted at the nation's leading universities that proves humans do have natural spiritual impulses and abilities. The End of Materialism presents an elegant argument for the union of science and spirituality in light of this new evidence, and explains why a truly rational viewpoint must address the reality of a spiritual world. Tart's work marks the beginning of an evidence-based spiritual awakening that will profoundly influence your understanding of the deeper forces at work in our lives."
Sadly, it looks like Sally Ride might have died of sunlight deficiency and vegetable deficiency:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/cancer/pancreatic-cancer/
Are you seriously telling me that some academics at Harvard telling politicians what they want to hear, (that "using killer robots like you are already doing works great") is a good thing? That academics advocating policies with obvious "blowback" potential is "solving a small problem" that "improves the world"?
http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Second-Edition-Consequences-American/dp/0805075593
When even people at the CIA are expressing doubts?
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LF05Df02.html
"Some United States Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in the agency's drone strikes program in Pakistan and elsewhere are privately expressing their opposition to the program within the agency because it is helping al-Qaeda and its allies recruit, according to a retired military officer in contact with them.
"Some of the CIA operators are concerned that, because of its blowback effect, it is doing more harm than good," said Jeffrey
Addicott, former legal adviser to US Special Forces and director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, in an interview with Inter Press Service (IPS).
Addicott said the CIA operatives that he knows have told him al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are effectively using the drone strikes to recruit more militants.
CIA officers "are very upset" with the drone strike policy, Addicott said. "They'll do what the boss says, but they view it as a harmful exercise. They say we're largely killing rank and file Pakistani Taliban, and they are the ones who are agitated by the campaign."
Because the drone strikes kill innocent civilians and bystanders along with leaders from far away, they "infuriate the Muslim male", said Addicott, thus making them more willing to join the movement. The men in Pakistan's tribal region "view Americans as cowards and weasels", he said. "
Have you ever given any thought to the implications of Harvard academics endorsing the ever wider use of killer robots to solve political problems? Including the political problems resulting from earlier use of killer robots by the USA? Where does it end?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
So many things in our world are complex feedback loops. And yes, many academics actually study such complex things (especially in biology and ecology). But apparently it is too hard for those two guys at Harvard to google on "CIA drone blowback"?
I have collected plenty of fairly straight-forward alternative solutions. For example, a "basic income" which is supported by five Nobel prize winners in economics according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee#Advocates
I outline them on my website in various spots, including here (both positive and negative ones, in this case):
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
Here is a book of alternatives collected by others:
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dictionary_of_Alternatives.html?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
The issue is not whether solutions are simple or complex (witness the US tax code's complexity, or the complexity of all sorts of numerical models, including most recently one to simulate a bacterium posted recently on slashdot). The issue outline in "Disciplined Minds" is about putting on ideological blinders -- ones that may even prevent someone from seeing or advocating for simple solutions (like a basic
From the mid 1990s by the Vice-provost of Caltech: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."
More like that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
Also:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/02/26/peer-review-as-censorship/
All reasoning is also based on emotion, which relate to perceptions, assumptions, priorities and preferences which are, to some extent, outside of pure rationality (which why "technocracy" has many issues).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error
But the biggest issue is that our socio-economic-political system is not well-adapted to handle "externalities" including systemic risks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Any reasonable projection over the next twenty years shows we will almost certainly have dirt-cheap PV given exponential growth of that industry and rapidly dropping costs. We may even have hot or cold fusion in that time (and other things). With alternatives on the way, there is not a very good case to be made for risking destroy our groundwater for just a bit more fossil fuels:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power-the-world-in-16-years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity#Solar_power
http://pesn.com/2012/07/19/9602138_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_July19/
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/414559/a-new-approach-to-fusion/
And so on...
Accounting for externalities (including US defense spending for long oil supply lines), renewables (and energy efficiency) have been *cheaper* than fossil fuels since the 1970s... Two resources on that from around 1980:
Well, ignoring the obvious job security worries for mainstream economists stepping out of line, maybe the issue is more "religious" at this point?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/
"A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of deja vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies."
And:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html?pagewanted=all
"But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists -- like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor -- have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.""
These are people who essentially deny that economic alternatives exists (or are viable, which is the same thing); contrast that with:
"The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization" By Martin Parker, Valerie Fournier, Patrick Reedy
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Dictionary_of_Alternatives.html?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
How many millions of people have been harmed by the essentially "religious" market fundamentalism of so many mainstream economists, who turn a blind eye to externalities, systemic risks, and wealth concentration? (To be clear, it is also a weird sort of market fundamentalism in the USA mixed with protectionism for favored already "worthy" wealthy groups.)
See also:
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue21/Stanford21.htm
"I am an economist. It is seventeen days since I last uttered the phrase "supply and demand." But the demon still lurks untamed, within me. Economics is an addiction. Every other addiction has a Twelve Step program, laced with tough love and blunt self-honesty. Why not a Twelve Step program for economists? God knows, we have done enough damage with our arrogant, drunken prescriptions. Here's how each and every economist can face up to their inner demons, and make their own small contribution to setting things right.
Step 1: Admit you have a problem. Like they say at the AA meetings, this is half the solution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRMV7zi4h_k
But maybe US vice-president Joe Biden would agree about the founder of Wikileaks?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/19/assange-high-tech-terrorist-biden
"Asked if he saw Assange as closer to a hi-tech terrorist than the whistleblower who released the Pentagon papers in the 1970s, which disclosed the lie on which US involvement in Vietnam was based, Biden replied: "I would argue it is closer to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers. But, look, this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world."
See my other posts citing Chomsky on the double-think and double-standard in defining a "terrorist", which basically comes down to a terorist being defined as anyone whom somebody influential in the USA government does not like. And that apparently includes US citizens: ... The lawsuit says: "The U.S. practice of 'targeted killing' has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, including many hundreds of civilian bystanders. While some targeted killings have been carried out in the context of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many have taken place outside the context of armed conflict, in countries including Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan, and the Philippines." "These killings rely on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts. ... The killings violated fundamental rights afforded to all U.S. citizens, including the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law," the lawsuit says."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/drone-attacks-lawsuit/
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/18/families-us-citizens-killed-in-yemen-drone-strikes-file-lawsuit/
"The wrongful death lawsuit, filed Wednesday, claims that the killings of U.S. citizens al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and operative Samir Khan were unconstitutional. Khan was the publisher of the terror magazine Inspire.
And see also:
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/05/29/analysis-how-obama-changed-definition-of-civilian-in-secret-drone-wars/
"As the Bureau's own data on Pakistan makes clear, the very first covert drone strikes of the Obama presidency, just three days after he took office, resulted in civilian deaths in Pakistan. As many as 19 civilians â" including four children â" died in two error-filled attacks. Until now it had been thought that Obama was initially unaware of the civilian deaths. Bob Woodward has reported that the president was only told by CIA chief Michael Hayden that the strikes had missed their High Value Target but had killed 'five al Qaeda militants.' Now Newsweek correspondent Daniel Klaidman reveals that Obama knew about the civilian deaths within hours. He reports an anonymous participant at a subsequent meeting with the President: 'You could tell from his body language that he was not a happy man.' Obama is described aggressively questioning the tactics used. Until now it had been thought that President Obama was initially unaware of the civilian deaths. Yet despite the errors, the president ultimately chose to keep in place the CIA's controversial policy of using 'signature strikes' against unknown militants. That tactic has just been extended to Yemen. On another notorious occasion, the article reveals that US officials were aware at the earliest stage that civilians -- including 'dozens of women and children' -- had died in Obama's first ordered strike
...is with better ideas: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html ..."
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful.
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm ... ..."
"There are two ways to approach the study of terrorism. One may adopt a literal approach, taking the topic seriously, or a propagandistic approach, construing the concept of terrorism as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power. In each case it is clear how to proceed. Pursuing the literal approach, we begin by determining what constitutes terrorism. We then seek instances of the phenomenon -- concentrating on the major examples, if we are serious -- and try to determine causes and remedies. The propagandistic approach dictates a different course. We begin with the thesis that terrorism is the responsibility of some officially designated enemy. We then designate terrorist acts as "terrorist" just in the cases where they can be attributed (whether plausibly or not) to the required source; otherwise they are to be ignored, suppressed, or termed "retaliation" or "self-defence."
It comes as no surprise that the propagandistic approach is adopted by governments generally, and by their instruments in totalitarian states. More interesting is the fact that the same is largely true of the media and scholarship in the Western industrial democracies, as has been documented in extensive detail.1 "We must recognize," Michael Stohl observes, "that by convention -- and it must be emphasized only by convention -- great power use and the threat of the use of force is normally described as coercive diplomacy and not as a form of terrorism," though it commonly involves "the threat and often the use of violence for what would be described as terroristic purposes were it not great powers who were pursuing the very same tactic."2 Only one qualification must be added: the term "great powers" must be restricted to favored states; in the Western conventions under discussion, the Soviet Union is granted no such rhetorical license, and indeed can be charged and convicted on the flimsiest of evidence.
The message is clear: no one has the right of self-defense against US terrorist attack. The US is a terrorist state by right. That is unchallengeable doctrine.
And:
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200205--02.htm
"The condemnations of terrorism are sound, but leave some questions unanswered. The first is: What do we mean by "terrorism"? Second: What is the proper response to the crime? Whatever the answer, it must at least satisfy a moral truism: If we propose some principle that is to be applied to antagonists, then we must agree -- in fact, strenuously insist -- that the principle apply to us as well. Those who do not rise even to this minimal level of integrity plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of right and wrong, good and evil."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
"Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt 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."
See also:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest
Those links explain in part how can such "smart" people totally ignore the potential for "blowback" from the violent actions they endorse (actions which include the slaughter of endless innocents, the violation of national sovereignty and probably international law, the setting of an example of ironic misuse of advanced technology that could otherwise bring material abundance to the entire world, and so on)... These links help show why these academics are willfully blind to the idea that they are endorsing polices that may be creating 100 new terrorist for every one they think they might have killed.
Never forget what one of our greatest Marine Major Generals said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
"War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit from warfare."
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan were *supposed* to be expensive quagmires so somebody's buddies coudl get lucrative "defense" contracts. These conflicts were *supposed* to drive up oil prices so somebody's buddies would see the value of their domestic oil holdings increase. And so on...
See also:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-cohn/killer-drone-attacks-ille_b_1623065.html
"Christof Heyns, the current UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, expressed grave concern about the targeted killings, saying they may constitute war crimes. He called on the Obama administration to explain how its drone strikes comport with international law, specify the bases for decisions to kill rather than capture particular individuals, and whether the State in which the killing takes place has given consent. Heyns further asked for specification of the procedural safeguards in place, if any, to ensure in advance of drone killings that they comply with international law. He also wanted to know what measures the U.S. government takes after any such killing to ensure that its legal and factual analysis was accurate and, if not, the remedial measures it would take, including justice and reparations for victims and their families. Although Heyns' predecessor made similar requests, Heyns said the United States has not provided a satisfactory response.
Heyns also called on the U.S. government to make public the number of civilians collaterally killed as a result of drone attacks, and the measures in place to prevent such casualties. Once again, Heyns said the United States has not satisfactor
From: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products.
The project's short-term benefits will include
* technology education,
* historical education,
* collaboration,
* sustainable technology development,
* public science literacy, and
* knowledge democratization.
The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).
We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.
You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web: here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
The slides for the presentation are here.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/KFReviewPaperForSSIConference2001.pdf
You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here. ...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
It is the aim of this project to create an open-source community centered around applications and knowledge related to space settlement. To gain the broadest participation, the project will also include knowledge related to terrestrial settlements. The initial focus will be on collecting "manufacturing recipes" on how to make things: for example, how to make a 1930's style lathe. Information collected will range from historical interest (fabrication techniques of the stone age to make flint knives) to current (fabrication techniques to make stainless steel knives) to futuristic (fabrication techniques requiring nanotechnology to make diamond knives). This project will involve potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe. It is expected that ultimately millions of individuals (many in developing nations) will benefit from use of this database directly or indirectly.
====
Still working on it on and off, been about a quarter century...
"Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
I've been mostly working towards a social semantic desktop to support the creative, organizational, and analysis parts. And still not much to show for it. :-)
See also:
http://www.openvirgle.net/
Although I'd suggest looking hard at OpenLuna, TMP2, the Mars Society's efforts, Open Source Ecology, the Lifeboat Foun
http://www.post-scarcity-princeton.com/ ... Capitalism is often it seems all about cost cutting. Why do people have such a hard time thinking about what happens as costs approach zero, even for improvements in quality? Or why do economists have a hard time understanding that many conventional economic equations may produce infinities as costs trend towards zero? ... Here is one approach to "reboot" Princeton for a post-scarcity world. This is just an example. No doubt the creative minds on campus can come up with better proposals once they turn their attention to the matter. Should these be followed, it's a lot more likely I might encourage my own child to apply in a dozen years or so. ..."
From the essay I wrote four years ago: "... We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once?
Might be helpful: http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Diabetes.aspx
"How can we lower high glucose levels, lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, lose weight and not need to take drugs such as insulin and sulfonylureas which cause weight gain? Here is the simple answer -- the best diet for humans to live longer in superior health is also the best diet for one with diabetes. That is a diet with a high nutrient per calorie ratio as described in my books, Eat To Live and Eat For Health. When one eats a diet predominating in nature's perfect foods -- green vegetables, beans, eggplant, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, garlic, raw nuts and seeds and limited amount of fresh fruit, it becomes relatively easy for people to eat as much as they want and still lose weight relatively quickly. This includes lots of great tasting food and great recipes, but no oil, butter, cheese, flour or sweets. My experience has demonstrated that those choosing to follow my nutritional recommendation will have their diabetes controlled astonishingly fast even before they have lost most of their excess weight."
Good luck to you and your dad.
"If your unit gets surprise attacked by the enemy, do you want to spend 5 minutes (at least) calling an online vote on whether to counterattack or retreat, or do you want a commander to give an immediate order?"
How about every individual just does what they have trained to do in that situation? Search on Manuel De Landa's essay on "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces".
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking
:-)
Supposed to be "good"
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/code_pr.html
As that older article points out, the Bakers also spent some time early on at IBM Research doing speech stuff (and from when I was working at the IBM Speech group myself much later, it did not seem completely clear what way most of the knowledge was flowing). My undergrad adviser at Princeton, George A. Miller, who did a lot in the psychology of natural language and knew the Bakers (I think from when he was at Rockefeller with them), told me about this loss more than a decade ago, as a cautionary tale. More than the money, what really hurt most for the couple was not being able to work on their project anymore. For anyone who really cares about what they are working on, this is a good argument for working in the free and open source software realm rather than trying to finance proprietary software somehow, even when you think you are the "owner" of the software. Imagine if the Bakers had released Dragon as FOSS back then and built a consultancy around it -- at least they would not be alienated from their 20+ year labor of love (or "third child" as they called the software). In general, you also can't expect the same people who put their love into creating great things for the world to be fully prepared to deal with business sharks (even business sharks like GS being supposedly hired to "help" them). I'm glad my wife and I released our own labors of love (like our Garden Simulator and PlantStudio software) as FOSS instead of taking on investors and making it proprietary, since at least we can always still work with the source code. Of course, the flip side of that is often not having the time to do that because of a need to do other things for money. We ideally need a "basic income" and similar social changes to solve that problem and to minimize a software industry based around "artificial scarcity".
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
"all its done in the past 40 years is act as an engine of misery, destruction and sorrow across the globe."
Because it is ironic? http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
See also: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html ..."
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful.
Mod parent up. And see also my: http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
Never really got off the ground so far though...
See also this paper I co-wrote and presented to the 2001 SSI conference on doing all that as an open-source project:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
Or my graduate school plans from the 1980s:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
Of course, decades later, this may all seem obvious. I've ended up working more more towards a general purpose social-semantic desktop ideas, while thankfully the rest of the world is finally starting to embrace an open source "maker" movement (but with scattered and poorly-integrated tools and repositories). I agree we need better analysis tools for all this, as well as better standards for encoding manufacturing knowledge.
Some other ideas I've posted towards encouraging that:
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/21-000-Flexible-Public-Fabrication-Facilities-across-the-USA/8412-4049
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/A-global-effort-to-develop-self-replicating-space-habitats/76206-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Towards-building-a-21st-century-society-in-the-USA-through-open-research/44914-8319
Or:
"Getting Greece and Iceland to be 99% self-sufficient by mass; international consortium"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/openmanufacturing/YzbzBFjeBkg
A high degree of automation also probably requires a new vision for "economics", and I've written on that as well on my website (about moving towards a more "Star Trek" like economy).
This all has encountered tremendous resistance/apathy for a variety of reasons. Part of that resistance is probably that trying to talk about manufacturing webs goes against the grain of capitalism, which focuses on lots of narrowly-defined actors who try to socialize all their costs of producing one strand of the web as externalities while privatizing their profits and creating intellectual rent-seeking monopolies to lock those profits in indefinitely. For example, when I was in grad school at Princeton in the 1980s in Operatiosn Research, the professors were very excited about "picking up nickles before a steam roller" (make short term profits while ignoring systemic risk). To talk about systemic risk, or ways to deal with that, went against a narrow short-term focus on profitable optimizations (the kind that lead to lots of industry support and related grants). Thus, ironically, all those professors who contributed intellectually to our current economic disaster (for the 99%) were heavily rewarded for decades with resources and prestige, and then they get to shrug off the disaster their ideas helped cause as an unpredictable "black swan" economic event. Those who tried to do anything about it pro-actively were essentially punished. :-) Such is life, I guess. I'm glad that overall alternatives continue to emerge. A book related to why interdisciplinary work that goes against current cultural grain is so hard to do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
Still, I thi
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
Raising children well and being a good citizen and good neighbor will probably always absorb about as much attention as adults can put into it... We buy a lot of stuff from Amazon -- in part because it is very convenient, and we get an enormous selection, and we don't have to think much about the security of each vendor relationship, and it saves us time and gas traveling quite a distance to stores. I tend to view the Amazon website as like the interface to some really slow Star Trek Matter Replicator that takes about two days to make just about anything. Eventually that wait time will get smaller and smaller for more and more things. Yes, this will add up to large scale social consequences though as more and more people do this. Maybe everyone in the world should just get a US$2000 credit deposited by the government (from taxes and royalties and newly issued money) every month at Amazon as a "basic income"? :-) Our economy is fundamentally changing but most pundits and politicians and especially mainstream economists don't talk about it.
As I write on the main page of my website:
In brief, there have always been five interwoven economies, and the balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat.");
* A theft (or conquest) economy ("What's yours is mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, or can afford better lawyers.").
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including:
* robotics, AI, and other automation,
* better design,
* the accumulation of physical infrastructure,
* relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or
* the emergence of voluntary social networks.
So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics;
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and
* Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.
The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society.
Understanding this big picture is all part of rethinking socieoconomic institutions for the 21st century based on new (yet old) paradigms.
An may work: http://pesn.com/2012/07/05/9602122_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_July5/
BTW, google on "iron sun" as well as "electric universe". I've been wondering if the sun is powered by LENR reactions from quantum tunnelling boundary evaporation of neutrons from a huge iron-nickel mass? The hydrogen seen on the surface of the sun may not be representative of what is below the surface, same as much of the earth is covered with water, but only a mile deep. The core of the Earth may be heated by a similar boudnary evaporation and LENR process? The universe may have a lot more iron decaying into hydrogen than hydrogen fusing into iron...