"I can go to Amazon and have on my desk, tomorrow, for $2000, a 16 core, 32 thread, 128GB system with a TB SSD. I can get more ram and a faster nvme too if I needed it. Apple would START pricing at $3999 for an 8/16 with 32GB and 256GB."
The closest I see on Amazon to those specs on Amazon is around US$5000 for "ADAMANT 16X-Core Liquid Cooled Workstation Desktop PC AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 3.4Ghz 128Gb DDR4 5TB HDD 500Gb M.2 SSD 1000W PSU AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB |3Year Warranty & Lifetime Tech Support|".
That is US$3000 more than you said was on Amazon and comparable with what you said Apple pricing would be.
So, links or it didn't happen.:-)
That said, I agree with much of the recent grousing about Apple about limitations for a professional computer user (like few ports, short battery life, and no pen interface on the recent MacBook Pro) or excessive costs and a short warranty for a home user for what you get (which has been true on and off for Apple for decades, but the OS and better design used to make up for some of that). Also, the move to lead-free solder across the industry has caused much early failures of Apple equipment (including a MacBook Pro I have from ~2011 and otherwise might still be using).
On the other hand, my multi-core Mac Pro from 2008 still works remarkably well (after various upgrades for memory, SSD, and graphics). And older MacBook Pros from the 2010 time period otherwise seemed like a fairly good deal at the time even maybe up to 2015 -- especially if you wanted a centered trackpad on a 15" laptop. And going further back to when Apple was more innovative, the Newton was groundbreaking and just reaching potential success with the MP2000 with the StrongArm. I liked having multiple monitor support on Nubus when many Windows users could not even understand multiple monitors setups were possible with a computer. HyperCard came from Apple and is still an amazing idea even now. And Squeak Smalltalk was/is neat.
So, yes, it is hard to look at an Apple with massive amounts of cash in the bank and wonder, why can't they produce innovation or a compelling professional computer anymore? Aside from early quality issues for both, Microsoft seems to be doing better with the SurfaceBook Pro and the Lenovo Yoga 720 seems amazing.
For me, the biggest disappointment given Apple's roots and the initial 1984video advertisement for the Mac, is perhaps that one might hope, as with HyperCard, Apple might take the side of the users against, say, social media surveillance, creating a "FreedomBox" Mac Mini..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "In one interpretation of the commercial, "1984" used the unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by her white tank top with a stylized line drawing of Appleâ(TM)s Macintosh computer on it) as a means of saving humanity from "conformity" (Big Brother).["
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "FreedomBox is a community project to develop, design and promote personal servers running free software for distributed social networking, email and audio/video communications."
Guess Linux is carrying on that idea... Writing this using Gallium OS on a repurposed Chromebook...
Or me from 2011: http://phibetaiota.net/2011/09... "The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USAâ(TM)s current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue."
Frankly, I've spent almost twenty years on Slashdot arguing with many posters who disregarded solar energy (and other renewables, as well as energy efficiency); example of me debating that from 2013: https://hardware.slashdot.org/... https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Or John Todd and the (now defunct/spunoff) New Alchemy Institute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The New Alchemy Institute was a research center that did pioneering investigation into organic agriculture, aquaculture, and bioshelter design between 1969 and 1991. It was founded by John Todd, Nancy Jack Todd, and William McLarney. Its purpose was to research human support systems of food, water, and shelter and to completely rethink how these systems were designed."
Solar energy has been more and more effective in ever broader niche uses which drove its growth for decades (as Home Power magazine and others predicted years ago) -- from satellites, to calculators, to homes ten miles off-grid, to generator replacements for temporary traffic lights, to one mile-off-grid homes, to on-grid homes. Finally now that grid parity has been widely reached and it is becoming foolish in most places to install anything but solar PV for electricity generation, now everyone wakes up to what has been going on. Although even now their remain deniers here and there (as in that slashdot post linked above).
=== The bigger picture: general exponential trends across multiple technologies
As I noted in the 2000 post I made, the same exponential changes in technological capacity that drive cheaper PV also apply in other areas -- even for cheaper nuclear energy (whether from uranium, thorium or hot/cold fusion). But for the same reasons most people ignored the PV trends, most people ignore these other trends.
Here is a proposal I sent to DARPA in 1999 to try to deal with the consequences of exponential technological growth (including(as we see with North Korea recently increased capacity globally for making WMDs): https://groups.google.com/foru... "I agree with Hans Moravec on several points; one of them is the implications of this chart:
Been considering it myself... Mainly to get both a pen and good discrete video. Held off because the high-res 4K UHD version unfortunately had an issue with a lose light diffuser leading to a black line on the screen: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/f...
Also, I'm not sure how well the pen will feel when trying to use it with a 15" laptop compared to a 13".
I don't think the lower-res HD version has that diffuser issue though, and it is quite a bit cheaper -- so I've been considering getting one of those to replace a four year old Asus laptop with discrete video. But it is now so close to the end of the year, maybe a deal will show up.
The new Chromebooks with pens are also tempting. I'm writing this using Gallium OS on a Acer 15" CB5-571 with 128 GB flash upgrade. So, I could imagine upgrading one of those newer Chromebooks the same way. But they won't have discrete graphics.
It's a shame Apple has so messed up their "Pro" line of laptops (too thin, few ports, decreasing reliability, touch bar craziness) while also continuing to ignore those who want a pen as well as a keyboard and UNIX-y OS.
http://www.jetpress.org/volume... "This paper describes how the performance of AI machines tends to improve at the same pace that AI researchers get access to faster hardware. The processing power and memory capacity necessary to match general intellectual performance of the human brain are estimated. Based on extrapolation of past trends and on examination of technologies under development, it is predicted that the required hardware will be available in cheap machines in the 2020s.... It may seem rash to expect fully intelligent machines in a few decades, when the computers have barely matched insect mentality in a half-century of development. Indeed, for that reason, many long-time artificial intelligence researchers scoff at the suggestion, and offer a few centuries as a more believable period. But there are very good reasons [exponential growth] why things will go much faster in the next fifty years than they have in the last fifty...."
http://web.archive.org/web/201... "Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [tabulators] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
Mithril.js emphasizes leveraging JavaScript using the HyperScript API (instead of an adhoc templating language) and automatic redrawing when your application changes via user interaction or a network event. This makes web single-page application development quite pleasant to write and maintain and is scalable. You can also test much of such vdom-based UIs without creating real DOM nodes. https://mithril.js.org/
Check out Tachyons and similar CSS libraries which use CSS classes to essentially define inline styles efficiently and in a maintainable way across big applications. Tachyons works especially well with HyperScript, letting you can do almost all your UI styling in JavaScript.
Of course, few web developers grok this yet because most affirm "best practices" from years ago (e.g. semantic CSS, HTML-first design, JavaScript as a progressive afterthought). Most web developers are used to coding in non-standard HTML-ish templating systems (e.g. Angular, Vue, JSX). This give them a false sense of security they can maintain more complex apps that are mostly about JavaScript. By leveraging JavaScript from the start, Mithril.js may have a slightly higher learning curve (learning more about JavaScript), but it pays off down the road with much more maintainable applications.
React has helped a lot of developers begin to move past some of that, but it has its own baggage (including JSX) from being only half-way to the new paradigm outlined above. MIT licensing improves things, but I still feel Mithril is better for technical reasons. Mithril is simpler internally because Mithril does not emphasize subtree component rendering which React does for "efficiency" but which I'd suggest in practice leads to worse designs and a less understandable core. I also feel HyperScript is a better way to write UIs than JSX by keeping all your code in standard JavaScript/TypeScript without other awkward object constructions. While you can use HyperScript with React via a third-party library, it is a bit klunky as an add on, and most of the React code examples and libraries use JSX.
https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear... "The main cause of an ischemic or embolic stroke is the Standard American Diet, which is low in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants but high in inflammatory animal products and refined/processed foods. This leads to inflammation, oxidative stress, and immune dysfunction that promote vascular damage. Strokes are associated with diseases that are a result of poor diet such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, and chronic kidney disease. Tobacco use and a sedentary lifestyle also contribute to stroke risk. Hemorrhagic strokes have a different constellation of risks, including salt, medications, and alcohol use and a low cholesterol level versus a high cholesterol level for ischemic stroke...."
But Vue.js has so much buzz right now and caters to people who like writing HTML-ish templates, I'd expect Automattic will go with that -- instead of Mithril.js which I feel is a better technical choice for people who prefer their UIs are defined entirety by JavaScript/TypeScript.
Personally, I feel templating approaches to making JavaScript-powered UIs like React's JSX or Angular's own templating approach or the templating systems in many other UI systems are obsolete. Modern webapps can use Mithril+Tachyons+JavaScript/TypeScript to write components in single files where all the code is just JavaScript/TypeScript. Such apps don't need to be partially written in either CSS and some non-standard variant of HTML that reimplements part of a programming language (badly). (Well, there may be a tiny bit of custom CSS needed on top of Tachyons, but very little.)
Here is an example of a coding playground I wrote that way with several examples in it which use that approach: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/T...
So, by writing UIs using HyperScript (plus a vdom library), you can potentially (with some work) replace a backend like Mithril with almost any other vdom or even a non-vdom solution. So, that is another way I mitigate this risk when I have a choice.
Granted, I know many web developers grew up on tweaking HTML and love HTML-looking templates and so they love JSX or whatever and are happy to ignore how hard it is to refactor such non-code stuff in the middle of their applications or validate it (granted, some IDEs are getting better at that). But I came to web development from desktop and embedded development working with systems where you (usually) generated UIs directly from code (e.g. using Swing, Tk, wxWidgets, and so on). I like the idea that standard tools can help me refactor all the code I work on and detect many inconsistencies.
Remember, the brain is mostly fat. Some inspiration of what may be possible: https://nutritionandmetabolism... "We report the unexpected resolution of longstanding schizophrenic symptoms after starting a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet. After a review of the literature, possible reasons for this include the metabolic consequences from the elimination of gluten from the diet, and the modulation of the disease of schizophrenia at the cellular level."
And: https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear... "Depression doesnâ(TM)t have one specific cause; environmental and genetic factors may be at play, as well as psychosocial stressors, however, a major factor causing depression is unhealthy dietary factors. Fast-food and commercial baked goods are linked to depression in a dose dependent manner, and dietary excellence can be the solution for many suffering individuals. A feeling of a depressed mood can also be a symptom of other medical conditions or a side effect from a medication, so to be sure of what is causing your symptoms, you may need to discuss your depression with your doctor."
Search also on "The UltraMind Solution: The Simple Way to Defeat Depression, Overcome Anxiety, and Sharpen Your Mind" by Dr.Mark Hyman, again focusing on nutrition.
Water-only fasting helps in some cases of mental illness too (especially if brain inflammation is caused by some food allergy). The Russians did a lot of research and practice on that.
Obviously, good mood is more complex than just nutrition. Look at Dr. Andrew Weil for a broader perspective.
Or see this quoting Philip Hickey, Ph.D: http://www.eqi.org/p1/depressi... Is Not An Illness: It is an Adaptive Mechanism "In order to feel good, the following eight factors must be present in our lives. * good nutrition * fresh air * sunshine (in moderation) * physical activity * purposeful activity with regular experiences of success * good relationships * adequate and regular sleep * ability to avoid destructive social entanglements, while remaining receptive to positive encounters"
Also, check out:"The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time Paperback" by Alex Korb PhD.
There are lots more resources like that. There are lots of alternatives to placebo-like mental drugs...
So, when all else fails,consider: "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore for finding meaning and even personal growth in the darkness (might be of some help to you too as it is a difficult journey you are on together).
Looking at the video of the Softwere robotic system in operation, I don't see how sewing custom clothes that way would be significantly any harder than standard ones for that particular system.
It's not like we are printing clothes now with web presses -- clothes production has been a labor intensive custom operation producing varying quality. See: "Robots threatens Bangladeshi garment workers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But even if the delta was, say, 10X (or more) between custom clothes and mass-produced clothes, if the cost after full automation was so low (including automating material production), then many people might choose the $1.00 custom shirt over the $0.10 mass produced shirt in the same way so many people buy custom coffee at Starbucks when it could be so much cheaper to get standard coffee from one big pot.
Also, when the cost (to all parties, including the customer's own time) of choosing, ordering, boxing, and delivering (and maybe returning) an item begins to significantly outweigh the cost of the item, then consumers may tend to purchase more expensive higher quality items given the incremental difference is not that big a percentage of the total delivered cost.
I agree with you though it is a bit of a chicken and egg thing where the market still needs to get proven along with the reliability of the technology.
Search on "oncologists would not have chemotherapy".
Boosting the bodies own defenses against cancer in various ways (including nutrition, intermittent fasting, immune-system tuning, etc.) is another approach at least generally without negative side effects -- wonder if Watson has been fed enough alternative data to recommend it (especially for prevention)?
Example: https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear... "Cancer screening is promoted as preventive health, and while this may detect early forms of cancer so it can be treated earlier, it does not prevent the development of cancer and has minimal effects on reducing cancer deaths. A Nutritarian diet has the power to repair defects that can lead to cancer, detoxify carcinogens, cause cancer cell death, cut off blood supplies to growing tumors , and stimulate the immune system to recognize, repair abnormalities, and even fight and kill cancer cells. The vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and antioxidants found in a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds is the key to prevention and even can play an important role in the treatment of various cancers."
Good luck with your own health care choices. It is hard to wade through all the conflicting information and conflict-of-interest. I wanted to make free software to help people make sense of conflicting health information -- but just not enough time given a need to earn money in other ways. What I could do with Watson hardware and that project's budget... (When I was at IBM Research around 2000 I proposed making an interactive display wall powered by an AI-like system to help people make complex decisions and better designs -- but as a contractor the idea did not go that far beyond a proof-of-concept with nine old Thinkpads that looked a lot like a Jeopardy screen, made when my supervisor went on a long vacation...) https://web.archive.org/web/20... https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Considering compulsory schooling is a relatively recent invention since Prussian times (intended to subordinate almost all citizens into a military hierarchy), how did children learn to interact with other people of all ages before the 1800s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Hint -- it takes a village to raise child -- and village life is not what kids experience in a typical school (public or private).
To begin with, when do kids in a typical school (public or private) actually get to interact with other kids in a playful loosely-structured way with only occasional adult supervision or intervention like in the past? As opposed to interacting with other people as if they were in a tightly-guarded prison? For many schools, outdoor play and unstructured recess is a thing of the past and kids are punished if they talk to each other in the classroom outside of narrowly prescribed situations. The kid of social interaction kids get in most schools is completely abnormal by historical standards.
Contrast what goes on in a typical school with, say, a "Sudbury Free school" (one of the better private school models, but still not very common): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "A Sudbury school is a type of school, usually for the K-12 age range, where students have complete responsibility for their own education, and the school is run by direct democracy in which students and staff are equals.[1] Students individually decide what to do with their time, and tend to learn as a by-product of ordinary experience rather than through coursework. There is no predetermined educational syllabus, prescriptive curriculum or standardized instruction. This is a form of democratic education. Daniel Greenberg, one of the founders of the original Sudbury Model school, writes that the two things that distinguish a Sudbury Model school are that everyone - adults and children - are treated equally and that there is no authority other than that granted by the consent of the governed.[2]"
Although even within that free school model, there are issues related to forcing a kid to be somewhere other than their local community every day. A free school may also not be a great match for more introverted children.
As I write in that essay on post-scarcity unschooling, quoting a job advertisement for truant officers suggesting truancy can lead to violent crime or a least an unsuccessful unproductive life: "See, that is the false choice -- suggesting you either confine a child to prison or they will commit their first violent crime and have to be imprisoned. That is a very dim view of human nature, neighborhoods and families. Yet, it is a self justifying view, in part destroying the very neighborhood fabric it claims to be defending. So, we are left with streets that are safe because there are no people on them. We have successfully destroyed the village in order to save it, using compulsory schooling instead of napalm."
Or in this case, you suggest unless kids are put in prison for their formative years they will become "freaks".
Given thousands of years of human history raising kids at home and in villages and towns (and yes, cities), doesn't the historical evidence suggest that it would more likely be the other way around? Especially when compulsory schooling was designed precisely to produce cannon fodder for Prussian wars? Which then coincided with two world wars originating out of the Prussian area?
http://www.home-school.com/Art... "Let me begin by characterizing where I'm coming from. I taught for thirty years in the Manhattan Public School. It was never my intention to teach. It happened by accident. I expected only to teach for a year or two. I got caught up in what seemed to me inexplicable problems that were so interesting that I would ask, "Would you mind if I stay an extra year?" When I woke up, thirty years had passed. After I got out, I still didn't have the answer to these puzzles. That was almost exactly nine years ago, and I set out to answer my questions. Had I known that it would take nine years to do that, I might very well have gotten a new set of questions. But as it was, one thing led to another, and I began to see that schools were functioning exactly as they had been designed to function, and that just puzzled the heck out of me. I said, "How could this happen? What purpose would explain schools being the way they are?" So I've been on a detective hunt for nine years. And what I'd like to say first of all to homeschoolers in particular - because they're right on the front lines, and they have to depend largely on themselves for courage and for inspiration - is that you made the right choice. You've made a choice to free your children to be the best people they can be, the best citizens they can be, and to be their personal best. But had you allowed those kids to remain in the grip of institutional schooling, the kids would have become instruments of a different purpose. People should understand that the local insanity that they think they're reacting against, if that's in fact their motive for homeschooling, is institution-wide, it's quite intentional, and it leads to an end that's useful to somebody [just not the school kids]."
Homeschooling costs one parent not being in the workforce though -- which means six figures a year in a place like Silicon Valley if both parents could work at professional jobs.
Wrote this about NYS around 2009, but is would apply to CA too: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa... "New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it b
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The story centers on a scrappy, no-nonsense plantation owner called Leiningen (his first name is never mentioned in the story), and his stubborn refusal to abandon his plantation in the face of a seemingly unstoppable mass of army ants, described as "an elemental -- an act of God!""
When I was hanging around CMU Robotics Institute in the 1980s I realized that the biggest risk of future robotics and AI could be that Hans Moravec's "Mind Children" would be some autistic messes which only regret the destruction of all humans many years after they did it (if they did not themselves also fail from lack of maintenance shortly after the last humans were wiped out).
See James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" for an example of how an AI could arise accidentally with a survival instinct that saw humanity as a threat.
For another example, I created perhaps the world's first 2D kinematic simulation of self-replicating robots in the 1980s in ZetaLisp+Flavors on a Symbolics 3600, and the very first thing the first robot did when i turned it on after making a duplicate of itself was cannibalize its offspring to make another duplicate. That was completely unexpected to me. To prevent that, I had to add a sense of "smell" to the robots who would add a scent to the parts reflecting shared identity. But that sense of surprise of my creation doing something completely unexpected (and destructive) has always stuck with me.
As in the story "Leiningen Versus the Ants", a lot of small "dumb" things working together can be very dangerous -- and as I discovered -- unpredictable from emergent behavior.
An ant-level AI embodied in an ant-size or roach-sized robot could potentially wipe out all humanity (especially if they were self-replicating -- or even just if trillions were produced as weapons).
Yet, the same sort of underlying technology could create abundance for all humans if designed towards different ends... Like to create ocean habitats or space habitats... Or even just Star Trek matter replicators or 3D printers...
It will be sadly ironic that with so much abundance potentially there for everyone we let our fears of scarcity cause us to choose to use such technologies of abundance to destroy abundance instead of create abundance.
Gilder sure got this prediction right in 1996: "If bandwidth is free, you get a completely different computer architecture and information economy. Transcending all previous concepts of centralization and decentralization, one global machine will distribute processing to the optimal point and access everything. Feeding on low power and high bandwidth, the most common computer of the new era will be a digital cellular phone with an IP address."
And thus we have everyone's smartphones connecting to Google and Facebook.
It's interesting to reflect on his point that "Every economic era is based on a key abundance and a key scarcity."
And I sum them up as: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
That builds on Einstein's comment that "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
It's ironic that computing technology like AI and robotics that could free all of humanity from drudgery may instead -- if Musk's warning were ignored -- lead to the enslavement and then extinction of humans by AIs and robots wielded by an every dwindling population of the elite at war with each other over whatever perception of scarcity they have.
The same is true for nuclear energy used instead in nuclear bombs, nanotech and biotech used as weapons instead of to build and heal, and so on for many other technologies -- including even bureaucracy that can either plan how to most quickly create abundance for all or plan how to most efficiently send people to concentration camps.
Perhaps today's scarcity seems to be one of imagination? At least some people tried -- like Gene Rodenberry. I'm currently reading "Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek" by Manu Saadia which explores some of that optimism. As is said in that book, it all boils down to whether we choose to share prosperity in a mostly egalitarian way. I wrote another essay that makes a related point where I suggest post-scarcity is the product of social progress times technical progress passing some threshold.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol... "As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now "the single best predictor" of bankruptcy. "
Yes, our material standards and expectations in the USA are so high that raising a kid is so expensive in the USA especially. And yet we also don't have the community (something individual money can't buy) and easy availability of child-care that hunter/gatherer tribes had (replacing real community with the faux community of compulsory authoritarian schooling). I sometimes reflect on my own suburban neighborhood growing up with many stay-at-home moms all around and so many kids all around on the street (yet loosely supervised by those stay-at-home moms) and think what an impoverished life so many kids these days have in a brave new world shaped by two-income families even with so many toys, bigger houses, "good schools", and the internet. Trying to make things work on just one income in such a situation is then so much harder.
Good luck doing the best you can for your family in a system where family values is too often a meaningless slogan (or actively undermined by economic policy).
Long term, a basic income could help make it possible for more people to have more time and flexibility be better parents and better neighbors without going bankrupt in the process (a more general idea than Warren's specific suggestions in that article).
Similar here -- had an only child in my late thirties and I can see how much more energy I would have had for kids when I was younger. Getting less sleep is also a much bigger deal when you are older.
That said, trying to keep up also made me more health conscious (e.g. eating more fruits and vegetables, getting enough vitamin D3, iodine, and B vitamins, etc. see for example Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Dr. Andrew Weil, "The Pleasure Trap" book, etc. ).
My dad had me when he was in his late forties -- so it's a little more obvious to me now why we did not do outdoor sports together... But I did learn a lot from seeing him do things and he helped me with building robots as a kid.
There are jokes above about people developing Rust instead of having kids -- and that is sadly too true in my case where my wife and I worked on free software together (our garden simulator and other software) instead of perhaps having kids sooner. Hard to say in retrospect it was worth it compared to having a kid sooner (especially so my own elderly father could have been a grandparent to my kid).
A better way to put that might be that having a kid generally takes so much resources you are generally less free to do other things (like invest in your "mind children" and/or various social causes). So if you (and especially if both spouses) try to have a career outside of the mainstream (especially in somewhere without a social safety net or good support for the arts and sciences), putting off kids is something you can slide into (and maybe regret). It's even more of a resource demand if you want to homeschool.
See also: "The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet" https://www.amazon.com/Murderi... "Mickey Z. considers work a 50-year fugue from which some people awaken to wonder what has become of their lives. In The Murdering of My Years, cabbies, waitresses, clerks, telemarketers, and an array of others tell how they balance activism and artistic production with the daily struggle to make ends meet. Contributors' essays are at once absurd and poignant; captivating and strange. Collectively, their reflections challenge the myth of the American work ethic and exhort readers to advocate for themselves in the workplace."
Probably the biggest benefit for those who manage to be creative within the system (e.g. the lucky few academics who get tenure or who through luck or family connections or other reasons get a rare well-paying creative-type job outside of academia) is that they feel financially stable enough to have kids. For most others, especially women, see: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca... "What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility."
None of this is black and white since sometimes if you have a kid your own parents or even others in the community might be more amenable to helping you out in various ways. And kids help us grow in many ways -- and also help reconnect us with many important child-like basics in life. This is also such a complex topic no one post like this can do justice to it. It is hard to look back on anything I have written or implemented though and think such things may have as much connection with the future or personal significance or even social significance as having a child. That is something I may know now in my early fift
As I say on my site (pdfernhout.net): "Eventually, the balance will change in one of several ways. Here are three possibilities. People might engage in a political struggle leading to broad changes and broader equity in global resources (which is what is going on in some parts of Europe right now, as in the past). Or, some compromise might be achieved where lots of make-work is created (through needless wars-of-choice, endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanding prisons, or widespread avoidable sickness) that props up the income-through-jobs link (which seems to be the path the USA is going in part). Or poor people might essentially be starved to death or worked to death, and the remaining wealthy people will, among themselves and their robots, essentially produce a new society of the remaining people that is based on a new paradigm of broadly shared wealth (there are aspects of this that have been going on for a long time in the globe). That last option would be ironic because the robots, in combination with the material resources of the solar system, could just as easily produce wealth for quadrillions of people as for millions of people, and a bigger society is probably going to be more interesting. In practice, we seem to be seeing a mix of all three of these approaches. Which one will dominate long-term remains to be seen. Also, there may be other possibilities, of course."
"Then the whole economy collapses anyways because a consumption based economy can't function without consumers who all just died out"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. Trained as an engineer, Morey modifies his robots to enjoy helping to consume his family's quota. He fears punishment when his idea is discovered, but the Ration Boardâ"which has been looking for a way to abolish itselfâ"quickly implements Morey's idea across the world."
"AI (a not so smart type that can't evolve) based on smart contracts is needed to regulate our world."
An AI much like that is depicted in the EarthCent Ambassador sci-fi series by E. M. Foner starting with: "Date Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 1)" https://www.amazon.com/Night-U...
As I wrote here and in my sig: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious....
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...."
Slashdot Mirror
"I can go to Amazon and have on my desk, tomorrow, for $2000, a 16 core, 32 thread, 128GB system with a TB SSD. I can get more ram and a faster nvme too if I needed it. Apple would START pricing at $3999 for an 8/16 with 32GB and 256GB."
The closest I see on Amazon to those specs on Amazon is around US$5000 for "ADAMANT 16X-Core Liquid Cooled Workstation Desktop PC AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X 3.4Ghz 128Gb DDR4 5TB HDD 500Gb M.2 SSD 1000W PSU AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB |3Year Warranty & Lifetime Tech Support|".
That is US$3000 more than you said was on Amazon and comparable with what you said Apple pricing would be.
So, links or it didn't happen. :-)
That said, I agree with much of the recent grousing about Apple about limitations for a professional computer user (like few ports, short battery life, and no pen interface on the recent MacBook Pro) or excessive costs and a short warranty for a home user for what you get (which has been true on and off for Apple for decades, but the OS and better design used to make up for some of that). Also, the move to lead-free solder across the industry has caused much early failures of Apple equipment (including a MacBook Pro I have from ~2011 and otherwise might still be using).
On the other hand, my multi-core Mac Pro from 2008 still works remarkably well (after various upgrades for memory, SSD, and graphics). And older MacBook Pros from the 2010 time period otherwise seemed like a fairly good deal at the time even maybe up to 2015 -- especially if you wanted a centered trackpad on a 15" laptop. And going further back to when Apple was more innovative, the Newton was groundbreaking and just reaching potential success with the MP2000 with the StrongArm. I liked having multiple monitor support on Nubus when many Windows users could not even understand multiple monitors setups were possible with a computer. HyperCard came from Apple and is still an amazing idea even now. And Squeak Smalltalk was/is neat.
So, yes, it is hard to look at an Apple with massive amounts of cash in the bank and wonder, why can't they produce innovation or a compelling professional computer anymore? Aside from early quality issues for both, Microsoft seems to be doing better with the SurfaceBook Pro and the Lenovo Yoga 720 seems amazing.
For me, the biggest disappointment given Apple's roots and the initial 1984video advertisement for the Mac, is perhaps that one might hope, as with HyperCard, Apple might take the side of the users against, say, social media surveillance, creating a "FreedomBox" Mac Mini..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In one interpretation of the commercial, "1984" used the unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by her white tank top with a stylized line drawing of Appleâ(TM)s Macintosh computer on it) as a means of saving humanity from "conformity" (Big Brother).["
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"FreedomBox is a community project to develop, design and promote personal servers running free software for distributed social networking, email and audio/video communications."
Guess Linux is carrying on that idea... Writing this using Gallium OS on a repurposed Chromebook...
Me from 2000: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
Me from 2004: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
Me from 2008: https://groups.google.com/foru...
Or me from 2011:
http://phibetaiota.net/2011/09...
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USAâ(TM)s current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue."
Frankly, I've spent almost twenty years on Slashdot arguing with many posters who disregarded solar energy (and other renewables, as well as energy efficiency); example of me debating that from 2013:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
See also Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute's work, including from 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or John Todd and the (now defunct/spunoff) New Alchemy Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The New Alchemy Institute was a research center that did pioneering investigation into organic agriculture, aquaculture, and bioshelter design between 1969 and 1991. It was founded by John Todd, Nancy Jack Todd, and William McLarney. Its purpose was to research human support systems of food, water, and shelter and to completely rethink how these systems were designed."
And Home Power magazine. https://www.homepower.com/
Solar energy has been more and more effective in ever broader niche uses which drove its growth for decades (as Home Power magazine and others predicted years ago) -- from satellites, to calculators, to homes ten miles off-grid, to generator replacements for temporary traffic lights, to one mile-off-grid homes, to on-grid homes. Finally now that grid parity has been widely reached and it is becoming foolish in most places to install anything but solar PV for electricity generation, now everyone wakes up to what has been going on. Although even now their remain deniers here and there (as in that slashdot post linked above).
=== The bigger picture: general exponential trends across multiple technologies
As I noted in the 2000 post I made, the same exponential changes in technological capacity that drive cheaper PV also apply in other areas -- even for cheaper nuclear energy (whether from uranium, thorium or hot/cold fusion). But for the same reasons most people ignored the PV trends, most people ignore these other trends.
Here is a proposal I sent to DARPA in 1999 to try to deal with the consequences of exponential technological growth (including(as we see with North Korea recently increased capacity globally for making WMDs):
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"I agree with Hans Moravec on several points; one of them is the implications of this chart:
Been considering it myself... Mainly to get both a pen and good discrete video. Held off because the high-res 4K UHD version unfortunately had an issue with a lose light diffuser leading to a black line on the screen:
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/f...
Also, I'm not sure how well the pen will feel when trying to use it with a 15" laptop compared to a 13".
I don't think the lower-res HD version has that diffuser issue though, and it is quite a bit cheaper -- so I've been considering getting one of those to replace a four year old Asus laptop with discrete video. But it is now so close to the end of the year, maybe a deal will show up.
The new Chromebooks with pens are also tempting. I'm writing this using Gallium OS on a Acer 15" CB5-571 with 128 GB flash upgrade. So, I could imagine upgrading one of those newer Chromebooks the same way. But they won't have discrete graphics.
It's a shame Apple has so messed up their "Pro" line of laptops (too thin, few ports, decreasing reliability, touch bar craziness) while also continuing to ignore those who want a pen as well as a keyboard and UNIX-y OS.
http://www.jetpress.org/volume... ... It may seem rash to expect fully intelligent machines in a few decades, when the computers have barely matched insect mentality in a half-century of development. Indeed, for that reason, many long-time artificial intelligence researchers scoff at the suggestion, and offer a few centuries as a more believable period. But there are very good reasons [exponential growth] why things will go much faster in the next fifty years than they have in the last fifty. ..."
"This paper describes how the performance of AI machines tends to improve at the same pace that AI researchers get access to faster hardware. The processing power and memory capacity necessary to match general intellectual performance of the human brain are estimated. Based on extrapolation of past trends and on examination of technologies under development, it is predicted that the required hardware will be available in cheap machines in the 2020s.
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [tabulators] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
From almost two years ago: "Replace React with Mithril for licensing reasons"
https://github.com/Automattic/...
That said, I still feel Mithril.js + Tachyons.css is a better way to develop web apps (see my other comment on this article).
Mithril.js emphasizes leveraging JavaScript using the HyperScript API (instead of an adhoc templating language) and automatic redrawing when your application changes via user interaction or a network event. This makes web single-page application development quite pleasant to write and maintain and is scalable. You can also test much of such vdom-based UIs without creating real DOM nodes.
https://mithril.js.org/
Check out Tachyons and similar CSS libraries which use CSS classes to essentially define inline styles efficiently and in a maintainable way across big applications. Tachyons works especially well with HyperScript, letting you can do almost all your UI styling in JavaScript.
Here is one example FOSS project I wrote in that style: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Of course, few web developers grok this yet because most affirm "best practices" from years ago (e.g. semantic CSS, HTML-first design, JavaScript as a progressive afterthought). Most web developers are used to coding in non-standard HTML-ish templating systems (e.g. Angular, Vue, JSX). This give them a false sense of security they can maintain more complex apps that are mostly about JavaScript. By leveraging JavaScript from the start, Mithril.js may have a slightly higher learning curve (learning more about JavaScript), but it pays off down the road with much more maintainable applications.
React has helped a lot of developers begin to move past some of that, but it has its own baggage (including JSX) from being only half-way to the new paradigm outlined above. MIT licensing improves things, but I still feel Mithril is better for technical reasons. Mithril is simpler internally because Mithril does not emphasize subtree component rendering which React does for "efficiency" but which I'd suggest in practice leads to worse designs and a less understandable core. I also feel HyperScript is a better way to write UIs than JSX by keeping all your code in standard JavaScript/TypeScript without other awkward object constructions. While you can use HyperScript with React via a third-party library, it is a bit klunky as an add on, and most of the React code examples and libraries use JSX.
https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear... ..."
"The main cause of an ischemic or embolic stroke is the Standard American Diet, which is low in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants but high in inflammatory animal products and refined/processed foods. This leads to inflammation, oxidative stress, and immune dysfunction that promote vascular damage. Strokes are associated with diseases that are a result of poor diet such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, and chronic kidney disease. Tobacco use and a sedentary lifestyle also contribute to stroke risk. Hemorrhagic strokes have a different constellation of risks, including salt, medications, and alcohol use and a low cholesterol level versus a high cholesterol level for ischemic stroke.
Good luck!
That was two years ago. I commented on that on his blog here: https://ma.tt/2017/09/on-react...
But Vue.js has so much buzz right now and caters to people who like writing HTML-ish templates, I'd expect Automattic will go with that -- instead of Mithril.js which I feel is a better technical choice for people who prefer their UIs are defined entirety by JavaScript/TypeScript.
The below is from my comment a month ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Personally, I feel templating approaches to making JavaScript-powered UIs like React's JSX or Angular's own templating approach or the templating systems in many other UI systems are obsolete. Modern webapps can use Mithril+Tachyons+JavaScript/TypeScript to write components in single files where all the code is just JavaScript/TypeScript. Such apps don't need to be partially written in either CSS and some non-standard variant of HTML that reimplements part of a programming language (badly). (Well, there may be a tiny bit of custom CSS needed on top of Tachyons, but very little.)
Here is an example of a coding playground I wrote that way with several examples in it which use that approach: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/T...
So, by writing UIs using HyperScript (plus a vdom library), you can potentially (with some work) replace a backend like Mithril with almost any other vdom or even a non-vdom solution. So, that is another way I mitigate this risk when I have a choice.
Granted, I know many web developers grew up on tweaking HTML and love HTML-looking templates and so they love JSX or whatever and are happy to ignore how hard it is to refactor such non-code stuff in the middle of their applications or validate it (granted, some IDEs are getting better at that). But I came to web development from desktop and embedded development working with systems where you (usually) generated UIs directly from code (e.g. using Swing, Tk, wxWidgets, and so on). I like the idea that standard tools can help me refactor all the code I work on and detect many inconsistencies.
Remember, the brain is mostly fat. Some inspiration of what may be possible: https://nutritionandmetabolism...
"We report the unexpected resolution of longstanding schizophrenic symptoms after starting a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet. After a review of the literature, possible reasons for this include the metabolic consequences from the elimination of gluten from the diet, and the modulation of the disease of schizophrenia at the cellular level."
And:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear...
"Depression doesnâ(TM)t have one specific cause; environmental and genetic factors may be at play, as well as psychosocial stressors, however, a major factor causing depression is unhealthy dietary factors. Fast-food and commercial baked goods are linked to depression in a dose dependent manner, and dietary excellence can be the solution for many suffering individuals. A feeling of a depressed mood can also be a symptom of other medical conditions or a side effect from a medication, so to be sure of what is causing your symptoms, you may need to discuss your depression with your doctor."
Search also on "The UltraMind Solution: The Simple Way to Defeat Depression, Overcome Anxiety, and Sharpen Your Mind" by Dr.Mark Hyman, again focusing on nutrition.
Water-only fasting helps in some cases of mental illness too (especially if brain inflammation is caused by some food allergy). The Russians did a lot of research and practice on that.
Obviously, good mood is more complex than just nutrition. Look at Dr. Andrew Weil for a broader perspective.
Or see this quoting Philip Hickey, Ph.D:
http://www.eqi.org/p1/depressi... Is Not An Illness: It is an Adaptive Mechanism
"In order to feel good, the following eight factors must be present in our lives.
* good nutrition
* fresh air
* sunshine (in moderation)
* physical activity
* purposeful activity with regular experiences of success
* good relationships
* adequate and regular sleep
* ability to avoid destructive social entanglements, while remaining receptive to positive encounters"
Also, check out:"The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time Paperback" by Alex Korb PhD.
There are lots more resources like that. There are lots of alternatives to placebo-like mental drugs...
Our society is also all too quick to label a "spiritual crisis" as mental illness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, when all else fails,consider: "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore for finding meaning and even personal growth in the darkness (might be of some help to you too as it is a difficult journey you are on together).
Good luck to you and your wife!
Couldn't resist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Looking at the video of the Softwere robotic system in operation, I don't see how sewing custom clothes that way would be significantly any harder than standard ones for that particular system.
It's not like we are printing clothes now with web presses -- clothes production has been a labor intensive custom operation producing varying quality. See: "Robots threatens Bangladeshi garment workers"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But even if the delta was, say, 10X (or more) between custom clothes and mass-produced clothes, if the cost after full automation was so low (including automating material production), then many people might choose the $1.00 custom shirt over the $0.10 mass produced shirt in the same way so many people buy custom coffee at Starbucks when it could be so much cheaper to get standard coffee from one big pot.
Also, when the cost (to all parties, including the customer's own time) of choosing, ordering, boxing, and delivering (and maybe returning) an item begins to significantly outweigh the cost of the item, then consumers may tend to purchase more expensive higher quality items given the incremental difference is not that big a percentage of the total delivered cost.
I agree with you though it is a bit of a chicken and egg thing where the market still needs to get proven along with the reliability of the technology.
Search on "oncologists would not have chemotherapy".
Boosting the bodies own defenses against cancer in various ways (including nutrition, intermittent fasting, immune-system tuning, etc.) is another approach at least generally without negative side effects -- wonder if Watson has been fed enough alternative data to recommend it (especially for prevention)?
Example: https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear...
"Cancer screening is promoted as preventive health, and while this may detect early forms of cancer so it can be treated earlier, it does not prevent the development of cancer and has minimal effects on reducing cancer deaths. A Nutritarian diet has the power to repair defects that can lead to cancer, detoxify carcinogens, cause cancer cell death, cut off blood supplies to growing tumors , and stimulate the immune system to recognize, repair abnormalities, and even fight and kill cancer cells. The vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and antioxidants found in a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds is the key to prevention and even can play an important role in the treatment of various cancers."
Good luck with your own health care choices. It is hard to wade through all the conflicting information and conflict-of-interest. I wanted to make free software to help people make sense of conflicting health information -- but just not enough time given a need to earn money in other ways. What I could do with Watson hardware and that project's budget... (When I was at IBM Research around 2000 I proposed making an interactive display wall powered by an AI-like system to help people make complex decisions and better designs -- but as a contractor the idea did not go that far beyond a proof-of-concept with nine old Thinkpads that looked a lot like a Jeopardy screen, made when my supervisor went on a long vacation...)
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Considering compulsory schooling is a relatively recent invention since Prussian times (intended to subordinate almost all citizens into a military hierarchy), how did children learn to interact with other people of all ages before the 1800s?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Hint -- it takes a village to raise child -- and village life is not what kids experience in a typical school (public or private).
To begin with, when do kids in a typical school (public or private) actually get to interact with other kids in a playful loosely-structured way with only occasional adult supervision or intervention like in the past? As opposed to interacting with other people as if they were in a tightly-guarded prison? For many schools, outdoor play and unstructured recess is a thing of the past and kids are punished if they talk to each other in the classroom outside of narrowly prescribed situations. The kid of social interaction kids get in most schools is completely abnormal by historical standards.
Contrast what goes on in a typical school with, say, a "Sudbury Free school" (one of the better private school models, but still not very common):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"A Sudbury school is a type of school, usually for the K-12 age range, where students have complete responsibility for their own education, and the school is run by direct democracy in which students and staff are equals.[1] Students individually decide what to do with their time, and tend to learn as a by-product of ordinary experience rather than through coursework. There is no predetermined educational syllabus, prescriptive curriculum or standardized instruction. This is a form of democratic education. Daniel Greenberg, one of the founders of the original Sudbury Model school, writes that the two things that distinguish a Sudbury Model school are that everyone - adults and children - are treated equally and that there is no authority other than that granted by the consent of the governed.[2]"
Although even within that free school model, there are issues related to forcing a kid to be somewhere other than their local community every day. A free school may also not be a great match for more introverted children.
As I write in that essay on post-scarcity unschooling, quoting a job advertisement for truant officers suggesting truancy can lead to violent crime or a least an unsuccessful unproductive life: "See, that is the false choice -- suggesting you either confine a child to prison or they will commit their first violent crime and have to be imprisoned. That is a very dim view of human nature, neighborhoods and families. Yet, it is a self justifying view, in part destroying the very neighborhood fabric it claims to be defending. So, we are left with streets that are safe because there are no people on them. We have successfully destroyed the village in order to save it, using compulsory schooling instead of napalm."
Or in this case, you suggest unless kids are put in prison for their formative years they will become "freaks".
Given thousands of years of human history raising kids at home and in villages and towns (and yes, cities), doesn't the historical evidence suggest that it would more likely be the other way around? Especially when compulsory schooling was designed precisely to produce cannon fodder for Prussian wars? Which then coincided with two world wars originating out of the Prussian area?
See also Alfie Kohn on bad effects of extrinsic rewards for learning, competition with other kids, and also of grading:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/punis...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/conte...
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
As John Taylor Gatto points out, between school kids and teachers a
http://www.home-school.com/Art...
"Let me begin by characterizing where I'm coming from. I taught for thirty years in the Manhattan Public School. It was never my intention to teach. It happened by accident. I expected only to teach for a year or two. I got caught up in what seemed to me inexplicable problems that were so interesting that I would ask, "Would you mind if I stay an extra year?" When I woke up, thirty years had passed. After I got out, I still didn't have the answer to these puzzles. That was almost exactly nine years ago, and I set out to answer my questions. Had I known that it would take nine years to do that, I might very well have gotten a new set of questions. But as it was, one thing led to another, and I began to see that schools were functioning exactly as they had been designed to function, and that just puzzled the heck out of me. I said, "How could this happen? What purpose would explain schools being the way they are?" So I've been on a detective hunt for nine years. And what I'd like to say first of all to homeschoolers in particular - because they're right on the front lines, and they have to depend largely on themselves for courage and for inspiration - is that you made the right choice. You've made a choice to free your children to be the best people they can be, the best citizens they can be, and to be their personal best. But had you allowed those kids to remain in the grip of institutional schooling, the kids would have become instruments of a different purpose. People should understand that the local insanity that they think they're reacting against, if that's in fact their motive for homeschooling, is institution-wide, it's quite intentional, and it leads to an end that's useful to somebody [just not the school kids]."
Homeschooling costs one parent not being in the workforce though -- which means six figures a year in a place like Silicon Valley if both parents could work at professional jobs.
Wrote this about NYS around 2009, but is would apply to CA too: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it b
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The story centers on a scrappy, no-nonsense plantation owner called Leiningen (his first name is never mentioned in the story), and his stubborn refusal to abandon his plantation in the face of a seemingly unstoppable mass of army ants, described as "an elemental -- an act of God!""
See for example:
"Army Ants: Nature's Deadliest Organization"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
When I was hanging around CMU Robotics Institute in the 1980s I realized that the biggest risk of future robotics and AI could be that Hans Moravec's "Mind Children" would be some autistic messes which only regret the destruction of all humans many years after they did it (if they did not themselves also fail from lack of maintenance shortly after the last humans were wiped out).
See James P. Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" for an example of how an AI could arise accidentally with a survival instinct that saw humanity as a threat.
For another example, I created perhaps the world's first 2D kinematic simulation of self-replicating robots in the 1980s in ZetaLisp+Flavors on a Symbolics 3600, and the very first thing the first robot did when i turned it on after making a duplicate of itself was cannibalize its offspring to make another duplicate. That was completely unexpected to me. To prevent that, I had to add a sense of "smell" to the robots who would add a scent to the parts reflecting shared identity. But that sense of surprise of my creation doing something completely unexpected (and destructive) has always stuck with me.
As in the story "Leiningen Versus the Ants", a lot of small "dumb" things working together can be very dangerous -- and as I discovered -- unpredictable from emergent behavior.
An ant-level AI embodied in an ant-size or roach-sized robot could potentially wipe out all humanity (especially if they were self-replicating -- or even just if trillions were produced as weapons).
Yet, the same sort of underlying technology could create abundance for all humans if designed towards different ends... Like to create ocean habitats or space habitats... Or even just Star Trek matter replicators or 3D printers...
It will be sadly ironic that with so much abundance potentially there for everyone we let our fears of scarcity cause us to choose to use such technologies of abundance to destroy abundance instead of create abundance.
Gilder sure got this prediction right in 1996: "If bandwidth is free, you get a completely different computer architecture and information economy. Transcending all previous concepts of centralization and decentralization, one global machine will distribute processing to the optimal point and access everything. Feeding on low power and high bandwidth, the most common computer of the new era will be a digital cellular phone with an IP address."
And thus we have everyone's smartphones connecting to Google and Facebook.
It's interesting to reflect on his point that "Every economic era is based on a key abundance and a key scarcity."
Some of my own musings in that direction are here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
And I sum them up as: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
That builds on Einstein's comment that "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
It's ironic that computing technology like AI and robotics that could free all of humanity from drudgery may instead -- if Musk's warning were ignored -- lead to the enslavement and then extinction of humans by AIs and robots wielded by an every dwindling population of the elite at war with each other over whatever perception of scarcity they have.
The same is true for nuclear energy used instead in nuclear bombs, nanotech and biotech used as weapons instead of to build and heal, and so on for many other technologies -- including even bureaucracy that can either plan how to most quickly create abundance for all or plan how to most efficiently send people to concentration camps.
Perhaps today's scarcity seems to be one of imagination? At least some people tried -- like Gene Rodenberry. I'm currently reading "Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek" by Manu Saadia which explores some of that optimism. As is said in that book, it all boils down to whether we choose to share prosperity in a mostly egalitarian way. I wrote another essay that makes a related point where I suggest post-scarcity is the product of social progress times technical progress passing some threshold.
Bob Black had some interesting ideas too: http://www.primitivism.com/abo...
And Marshall Sahlins: http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
(Been meaning to write a book with the title of this post summarizing my previous writings on this...)
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
"As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now "the single best predictor" of bankruptcy. "
Yes, our material standards and expectations in the USA are so high that raising a kid is so expensive in the USA especially. And yet we also don't have the community (something individual money can't buy) and easy availability of child-care that hunter/gatherer tribes had (replacing real community with the faux community of compulsory authoritarian schooling). I sometimes reflect on my own suburban neighborhood growing up with many stay-at-home moms all around and so many kids all around on the street (yet loosely supervised by those stay-at-home moms) and think what an impoverished life so many kids these days have in a brave new world shaped by two-income families even with so many toys, bigger houses, "good schools", and the internet. Trying to make things work on just one income in such a situation is then so much harder.
Good luck doing the best you can for your family in a system where family values is too often a meaningless slogan (or actively undermined by economic policy).
Long term, a basic income could help make it possible for more people to have more time and flexibility be better parents and better neighbors without going bankrupt in the process (a more general idea than Warren's specific suggestions in that article).
Similar here -- had an only child in my late thirties and I can see how much more energy I would have had for kids when I was younger. Getting less sleep is also a much bigger deal when you are older.
That said, trying to keep up also made me more health conscious (e.g. eating more fruits and vegetables, getting enough vitamin D3, iodine, and B vitamins, etc. see for example Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, Dr. Andrew Weil, "The Pleasure Trap" book, etc. ).
My dad had me when he was in his late forties -- so it's a little more obvious to me now why we did not do outdoor sports together... But I did learn a lot from seeing him do things and he helped me with building robots as a kid.
There are jokes above about people developing Rust instead of having kids -- and that is sadly too true in my case where my wife and I worked on free software together (our garden simulator and other software) instead of perhaps having kids sooner. Hard to say in retrospect it was worth it compared to having a kid sooner (especially so my own elderly father could have been a grandparent to my kid).
A better way to put that might be that having a kid generally takes so much resources you are generally less free to do other things (like invest in your "mind children" and/or various social causes). So if you (and especially if both spouses) try to have a career outside of the mainstream (especially in somewhere without a social safety net or good support for the arts and sciences), putting off kids is something you can slide into (and maybe regret). It's even more of a resource demand if you want to homeschool.
See also:
"The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet"
https://www.amazon.com/Murderi...
"Mickey Z. considers work a 50-year fugue from which some people awaken to wonder what has become of their lives. In The Murdering of My Years, cabbies, waitresses, clerks, telemarketers, and an array of others tell how they balance activism and artistic production with the daily struggle to make ends meet. Contributors' essays are at once absurd and poignant; captivating and strange. Collectively, their reflections challenge the myth of the American work ethic and exhort readers to advocate for themselves in the workplace."
Probably the biggest benefit for those who manage to be creative within the system (e.g. the lucky few academics who get tenure or who through luck or family connections or other reasons get a rare well-paying creative-type job outside of academia) is that they feel financially stable enough to have kids. For most others, especially women, see:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility."
None of this is black and white since sometimes if you have a kid your own parents or even others in the community might be more amenable to helping you out in various ways. And kids help us grow in many ways -- and also help reconnect us with many important child-like basics in life. This is also such a complex topic no one post like this can do justice to it. It is hard to look back on anything I have written or implemented though and think such things may have as much connection with the future or personal significance or even social significance as having a child. That is something I may know now in my early fift
As I say on my site (pdfernhout.net): "Eventually, the balance will change in one of several ways. Here are three possibilities. People might engage in a political struggle leading to broad changes and broader equity in global resources (which is what is going on in some parts of Europe right now, as in the past). Or, some compromise might be achieved where lots of make-work is created (through needless wars-of-choice, endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanding prisons, or widespread avoidable sickness) that props up the income-through-jobs link (which seems to be the path the USA is going in part). Or poor people might essentially be starved to death or worked to death, and the remaining wealthy people will, among themselves and their robots, essentially produce a new society of the remaining people that is based on a new paradigm of broadly shared wealth (there are aspects of this that have been going on for a long time in the globe). That last option would be ironic because the robots, in combination with the material resources of the solar system, could just as easily produce wealth for quadrillions of people as for millions of people, and a bigger society is probably going to be more interesting. In practice, we seem to be seeing a mix of all three of these approaches. Which one will dominate long-term remains to be seen. Also, there may be other possibilities, of course."
"Then the whole economy collapses anyways because a consumption based economy can't function without consumers who all just died out"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. Trained as an engineer, Morey modifies his robots to enjoy helping to consume his family's quota. He fears punishment when his idea is discovered, but the Ration Boardâ"which has been looking for a way to abolish itselfâ"quickly implements Morey's idea across the world."
"AI (a not so smart type that can't evolve) based on smart contracts is needed to regulate our world."
An AI much like that is depicted in the EarthCent Ambassador sci-fi series by E. M. Foner starting with:
"Date Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 1)"
https://www.amazon.com/Night-U...
You provide a great insight: "This would manifest itself in the realization that the universe is logically impossible as a consequence of the past."
Of course, maybe that is what the debuggers in black are for? :-)
As I wrote here and in my sig: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... ... ... ..."
"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious.
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.
One place to find the story online is in the Galaxy Magazine April 1954 issue at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/ga...
Starts on page six.
The story was made into a large novel later called Midas World:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
not this handout that abdicates local responsibility for making Wisconsin a better place.