... Malthus was right -- for a civilization without machines, automatic factories, hydroponics and food synthesis, nuclear breeder plants, ocean-mining for metals and minerals... And a vastly increasing supply of labor... And architecture that rose high in the air and dug deep in the ground and floated far out on the water on piers and pontoons... architecture that could be poured one day and lived in the next... And robots. Above all, robots... robots to burrow and haul and smelt and fabricate, to build and farm and weave and sew. What the land lacked in wealth, the sea was made to yield and the laboratory invented the rest... and the factories became a pipeline of plenty, churning out enough to feed and clothe and house a dozen worlds. Limitless discovery, infinite power in the atom, tireless labor of humanity and robots, mechanization that drove jungle and swamp and ice off the Earth, and put up office buildings and manufacturing centers and rocket ports in their place... The pipeline of production spewed out riches that no king in the time of Malthus could have known. But a pipeline has two ends. The invention and power and labor pouring in at one end must somehow be drained out at the other... Lucky Morey, blessed economic-consuming unit, drowning in the pipeline's flood, striving manfully to eat and drink and wear and wear out his share of the ceaseless tide of wealth. Morey felt far from blessed, for the blessings of the poor are always best appreciated from afar....
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14... "By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men."
To expand on your point, while this is obviously a complex topic with many possible causes, could part of that decline in overall happiness be the result of well-meaning people encouraging (or even forcing) women to do things they don't really want to do for whatever reason?
FTFY: "There's an entirely plausible future out there where Americans struggle with terrible pollution as Chinese-owned robots in America make cheap junk for wealthy Chinese."
https://web.archive.org/web/20... "Consider millions of these devices airdropped into Iraq and Yugoslavia -- instead of more expensive cruise missiles! Anybody got $1 billion to spend on ensuring democracy with a true defense against tyranny in those places? (This is probably what the U.S. military's spends on gas/oil for a month cruising the area...) "
All true -- but it is probably easier to get permits for changing electrical service than for installing a large gasoline tank and pumps.I would think neighbors are going to object a lot more to adding gasoline pumps and a tank versus upgrading breaker boxes and maybe replacing a power line.
Surprisingly, it looks like raw costs may be roughly comparable (many thousands of dollars) for improved electrical service (especially if you have to run an additional phase etc.) vs. gasoline pumps and a tank -- except the risk of a leaking tank and related environmental impact makes that approach more problematical., as does the need to allocate a lot of space for a tank. https://www.fixr.com/costs/ins... http://costowl.com/home-improv...
Makes me think becoming an electrician is probably a great career choice for the next decade or so!
"I stop to eat at roadside inns which are likely never to have charging points,"
It's much easier for a business to put in a charging point connected to their existing electric lines than to install a gas pump and underground gas tanks. So why would a roadside inn not install charge points to increase (or maintain) business?
With EVs, any roadside business can now be a gas station -- but without dealing with the costs or regulations.
like I have been working towards? http://web.archive.org/web/201... "I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progress or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as, say, Slashdot is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to Slashdot as Slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones...."
Of course, older software developers with families and community roots might help provide a moral conscience to the organization as well as provide examples to others about work/life balance -- which might be bad for Google's short-term bottom line...
Although such older people (of all genders) also might have helped Google think through better ways to do hiring long ago.
Also, I've made some previous comments I made about Google in 2008 that might be problematical in getting me hired there::-) http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-ra... "So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?
Google-ites and other financially obese people IMHO need to take a good look at the junk food capitalist propaganda they are eating and serving up to others, as in saying (even in jest): http://www.google.com/virgle/o... "we should profit from others' use of our innovations, and we should buy or lease others' intellectual property whenever it advances our own goals" -- even while running one of the biggest post-scarcity enterprises on Earth based on free-as-in-freedom software.:-(
Until then, it is up to us other "semi-evil... quasi-evil... not evil enough" hobbyists with smaller budgets to save the Asteroids and the Planets (including Earth) http://www.openvirgle.net/ from financially obese people and their unexamined
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca... "This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.... Science can be fun, but considered as a career, science suffers by comparison to the professions and the business world. Consider someone taking the kind of high IQ and drive that would be required to obtain a tenure-track position at U.C. Berkeley and going into medicine. This person would very likely be a top specialist of some sort, earning at least $300,000 per year. Instead of being fired at age 44, our medical specialist would be near the height of her value to her patients and employer. Her experience and reputation would continue to add to her salary and prestige until she was perhaps 60 years old. [A woman who wanted to spend more time with her children can choose from a variety of medical careers, such as emergency medicine, that involve shift work and where a high salary can be earned with just two or three shifts per week. She could also work from home as a radiologist reading data transmitted via Internet.]...
How closely does academic science match these criteria? I took a 17-year-old Argentine girl on a tour of the M.I.T. campus. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, so maybe this was a good time to show her the possibilities in female nerddom. While walking around, we ran into a woman who recently completed a Ph.D. in Aero/Astro, probably the most rigorous engineering department at MIT. What did the woman engineer say to the 17-year-old? "I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any job at all. There are only about 10 universities that hire people in my area and the last one to have a job opening had more than 800 applicants."
And that's engineering, which, thanks to its reputation for dullness and the demand from industrial employers, has a lot less competition for jobs than in science.
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....
A divorce litigator put it a little more simply: "There is no reason for a woman to go to medical school. If she wants to have the spending power of a doctor she can just have sex with three doctors." (see the Wisconsin chapter for how the arithmetic works out) In some states, though not Wisconsin, a plaintiff's own earnings or earning potential can reduce the potential profits from child support. "A degree in poetry is a lot better than a degree in medicine when you're a child support plaintiff," observed one litigator, and added "for a woman with a functioning reproductive system, the decision to attend college and work is seldom an economically rational one in the United States."..."
He also writes: "This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should de
Delays can be caused by waiting on flight crews to arrive. So, by automating piloting (as well as even flight attendants), airlines would get more flexibility in when they can fly.
Ultimately though a big change may happen when this technology trickles down to (self-)flying cars. And also when cheaper technology makes it possible for more people to be their own pilots for fun (in more reliable small aircraft perhaps with "pilot assist" technologies to prevent the worst mishaps).
Granted, that statistic does not say how many crashes were avoided by pilot excellence...
So, yes, the AIs will let some crashes happen a good pilot would prevent, but the AIs will also prevent many crashes a typical pilot might cause through being sleepy, stressed, forgetful, or whatever.
For learning, *much* better simulators (more detailed, including sensor failure) are part of the answer.
That said, as manufactured products and energy get cheaper through automation and improved materials and better designs, maybe more people will be flying for fun soon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Eneloop cells lose their charge much more slowly than the 0.5â"4% per day lost by older-technology NiMH batteries, retaining about 85% of their charge for a year after charging.[2] This allows them to be sold precharged and ready for use, unlike older types.... Following the acquisition of Sanyo by Panasonic, a fourth generation was introduced in April 2013. The number of charges per cell was increased from 1800 to 2100 cycles for both AA (BK-3MCC) and AAA (BK-4MCC) models...."
Don't have them for a drill though -- just use them in most AA and AAA applications.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... "Why are diabetics often given inadequate -- or just plain wrong -- dietary advice?
Much of the inadequate and dangerous advice stems from a belief that diabetic patients will not be sufficiently motivated to make the necessary lifestyle changes to heal their diabetes. The typical watered-down, nutritional guidelines are designed to merely manage blood glucose by balancing carbohydrate, fat and protein to keep medication needs consistant. These guidelines are not designed to promote long-term health or fix the problem. To achieve excellent health, it is not the ratio of carbohydrate, protein and fat that is important; it is the combination of micronutrient quantity, micronutrient variety, and staying within our caloric requirements to achieve and maintain an ideal weight.
Many physicians are unaware or skeptical that type 2 diabetes can be reversed with superior nutrition. Other physicians agree that weight loss and high-nutrient eating can lead to diabetes reversal, but either don't know how to motivate their patients or simply doubt that their patients would be willing to make or capable of making the necessary changes. Instead, well-meaning physicians prescribe drugs to bring dangerously high glucose levels down; they want to protect their patients against complications, but the medications cause more problems. Insulin and several oral diabetes medications promote weight gain, which makes the patient even more diabetic, increasing risk for heart disease and necessitating even larger doses of medications -- the patient is caught in a never ending cycle of more and more drugs. Patients are told that medications will take care of their blood glucose.
This reliance on medication gives patients a false sense of security and allows them to avoid personal responsibility -- exercising frequently and eating right is not a life-or-death matter when you can "just take a pill." Many patients don't realize that their health will continue to deteriorate over time, even with their somewhat more "controlled" glucose levels. Medications can't do what removing the cause of the diabetes (the standard American diet and a sedentary lifestyle) can do. I say that people with diabetes deserve to know that drugs are a poor option, because my nutritarian diet is infinitely more effective and protective which can grant them the potential to reverse their disease and live healthfully into old age...."
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2... "The earliest instance known to QI of this prototypical claim was printed in the August 1908 issue of a periodical for bicyclists called "Bassett's Scrap Book". A short item contrasted the modern age to ancient times and presented a variation of the epigraph:
> The "good old times" seemed as bad to the "good-old-timers" as the present times seem to the modern man, as shown by the following translation on an inscription on a tablet in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople, Turkey:--
>> Naram Sin, 5000 B.C.
>> We have fallen upon evil times, the world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book."
But see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The lament for Sumer and Urim or the lament for Sumer and Ur is a poem and one of five known Mesopotamian "city laments"â"dirges for ruined cities in the voice of the city's tutelary goddess. The other city laments are: The Lament for Ur The Lament for Nippur The Lament for Eridu The Lament for Uruk In 2004 BCE, during the last year of King Ibbi-Sin's reign, Ur fell to an army from the east.[1] The Sumerians decided that such a catastrophic event could only be explained through divine intervention and wrote in the lament that the gods, "An, Enlil, Enki and Ninmah decided [Ur's] fate"[2] The literary works of the Sumerians were widely translated (e.g. by the Hittites, Hurrians and Canaanites), and the world-renowned expert in Sumerian history, Samuel Noah Kramer, wrote that later Greek as well as Hebrew texts "were profoundly influenced by them."[3] Contemporary scholars have drawn parallels between the lament and passages from the bible (e.g. "the Lord departed from his temple and stood on the mountain east of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 10:18-19)."[4]"
Related books maybe of interest (all easier read than done): * "The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online" by Mary Aiken * "Wired Child: Reclaiming Childhood in a Digital Age Paperback" by Richard Freed * "Reset Your Child's Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills by Reversing the Effects of Electronic Screen-Time Paperback" by Victoria L. Dunckley MD
And your AC license has the same issue. If you build your business around such AC software, and AC does something nasty to you like pollute your water supply or infringe your patents, and you sue over that harm, you lose the right to use the AC software in your business. It is a Trojan Horse license in that sense. See.also my comments on this starting in 2015: https://github.com/Automattic/...
Concern about intermittent power outages is one example: http://www.sfreviews.net/2face... "Set in roughly the mid-21st century, Two Faces chronicles the exploits of a team of scientists as they attempt to develop a computer capable of learning, of using the equivalent of human common sense in its decision-making and programming strategies. The world is by this time, of course, dominated by computer technology, and one such system already in place, responsible for running many of society's most important and necessary faculties both on Earth and in space, has nearly killed a construction crew on the moon through a decision that was unimpeachably logical but not very bright. But a new system, spearheaded by Dr. Raymond Dyer, happens to be in development, with vigorous testing being undertaken to perfect its learning capabilities, so that the computer will best approximate the way human beings learn from infancy how to function in the world around them through trial, error and experience.
But Dyer is plagued with doubts. After championing the system, he feels horrendous guilt at the near-disaster on the moon and really begins to worry what might happen should the new system evolve faster than expected, with more distressing results. What would happen if it becomes truly self-aware, with the survival instincts of an actual life-form? And then, what would happen if it perceived the very humans that created it as a threat to its own continued existence? What if it couldn't be turned off? (Yes, this premise was also the basis for James Cameron's Terminator films.) Fortunately, a remarkable beta-test opportunity presents itself. A space station under construction will have this bold new supercomputer installed, and then it will be, in a manner of speaking, attacked; thus a closed society, a microcosm of Earth is in place with the computer allowed to do what it will to defend itself in a worst-case scenario, without putting the Earth itself at any risk. Beautiful, right? So the system, named Spartacus, is installed on the orbital space station Janus, and sure enough, before you can say "Windows 2000" Spartacus is outmaneuvering, outguessing, and staying several jumps ahead of Dyer and his team, with a learning curve that quickly becomes alarming -- and dangerous.
Computers are Hogan's forte, and this cautionary tale -- written, incidentally, at a time when Radio Shack's TRS-80 was the best-known desktop home computer -- has a simple and difficult-to-argue message: humanity should not abdicate its responsibility to its own welfare simply because we can develop the technology to do so...."
My idea from seven years ago: ""The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc." http://web.archive.org/web/201... "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security....
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
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 computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
Anyway, still working towards that in my very limited spare time.... http://twirlip.net/
Hope sharing and cooperation to build a better world is not outlawed now... But I guess I should not be surprised when insane people vote for making sanity a crime...
...one that contributed to my own father's death more than a decade ago: https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear... "PCI is not a long-term solution to coronary artery disease. Approximately 21 percent of stent placements clog up again (called restenosis) within 6 months, and about 60 percent of arteries treated by angioplasty and stenting eventually will undergo restenosis.11,12 PCI treats only a small portion of a vessel, while atherosclerotic plaque continues to develop at many sites throughout the cardiovascular system. Most often, the most risky and vulnerable plaque areas, likely to cause a heart attack, are not those that are most obstructing and treated with stenting. This is even worse, because the patient is led to believe they are more protected and often continues the dangerous eating style that was the initial cause of the heart disease. Consequently, the heart disease progresses.
President Bush needed aggressive nutritional counseling and potentially life-saving nutritional information. It sounds like he was not properly informed of these studies that document the ineffectiveness of PCI and the value of the proper dietary intervention. If that is the case, I consider that malpractice....
Was President Bush informed about Dr. Ornish's Lifestyle Heart Trial, which scientifically documented that lifestyle changes alone can reverse coronary artery disease? We have no way of knowing, but it seems unlikely, given the media reports. It sounds like President Bush was misinformed about PCI by his doctors and given the false impression this procedure was life-extending and lifesaving. Certainly the media reports gave the American people the impression that this procedure was necessary for him.
Every day, patients are counseled to undergo these unnecessary and potentially dangerous procedures by their cardiologists. Instead, an arterial blockage should be seen as a wake-up call, a motivating factor to pursue optimal health via superior nutrition and exercise.
Optimal medical therapy is not enough; heart disease is preventable and reversible with superior nutritional therapy, which produces dramatically more effective results than PCI or OMT and provides dramatic protection against future cardiac events. In my clinical experience with hundreds of patients with advanced heart disease, I have seen dramatic and consistent reversal of heart disease, relief of angina symptoms, and future freedom from heart disease in those who have chosen to follow my Nutritarian eating style."
That said, I agree with much of the rest of your post!
Your unfortunate choice of example though is itself an example of the problems of civilization. Remember, doctors used to promote smoking for weight loss too. And most recently the incorrect "fat makes you fat" meme promoted by the medical profession has led to the deaths of millions from heart disease as they turned to sugar and starch instead and spiked their blood sugar causing inflammation which led to clogged arteries. Meanwhile people living traditional low-tech "bluezones" lifestyles often live into their 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One other downside to modern civilization is supernormal stimuli: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for todayâ(TM)s densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life.[1] T
Slashdot Mirror
... Malthus was right -- for a civilization without machines, automatic factories, hydroponics and food synthesis, nuclear breeder plants, ocean-mining for metals and minerals... ...
And a vastly increasing supply of labor...
And architecture that rose high in the air and dug deep in the ground and floated far out on the water on piers and pontoons... architecture that could be poured one day and lived in the next...
And robots.
Above all, robots... robots to burrow and haul and smelt and fabricate, to build and farm and weave and sew.
What the land lacked in wealth, the sea was made to yield and the laboratory invented the rest... and the factories became a pipeline of plenty, churning out enough to feed and clothe and house a dozen worlds.
Limitless discovery, infinite power in the atom, tireless labor of humanity and robots, mechanization that drove jungle and swamp and ice off the Earth, and put up office buildings and manufacturing centers and rocket ports in their place...
The pipeline of production spewed out riches that no king in the time of Malthus could have known.
But a pipeline has two ends. The invention and power and labor pouring in at one end must somehow be drained out at the other...
Lucky Morey, blessed economic-consuming unit, drowning in the pipeline's flood, striving manfully to eat and drink and wear and wear out his share of the ceaseless tide of wealth.
Morey felt far from blessed, for the blessings of the poor are always best appreciated from afar.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14...
"By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men."
To expand on your point, while this is obviously a complex topic with many possible causes, could part of that decline in overall happiness be the result of well-meaning people encouraging (or even forcing) women to do things they don't really want to do for whatever reason?
Pray tell us please where is this Nerdvana? :-)
FTFY: "There's an entirely plausible future out there where Americans struggle with terrible pollution as Chinese-owned robots in America make cheap junk for wealthy Chinese."
wish I had mod points right now
Wow -- this is an awesome idea (even despite the many practical difficulties)!
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Consider millions of these devices airdropped into Iraq and Yugoslavia -- instead of more expensive cruise missiles! Anybody got $1 billion to spend on ensuring democracy with a true defense against tyranny in those places? (This is probably what the U.S. military's spends on gas/oil for a month cruising the area...) "
All true -- but it is probably easier to get permits for changing electrical service than for installing a large gasoline tank and pumps.I would think neighbors are going to object a lot more to adding gasoline pumps and a tank versus upgrading breaker boxes and maybe replacing a power line.
Surprisingly, it looks like raw costs may be roughly comparable (many thousands of dollars) for improved electrical service (especially if you have to run an additional phase etc.) vs. gasoline pumps and a tank -- except the risk of a leaking tank and related environmental impact makes that approach more problematical., as does the need to allocate a lot of space for a tank.
https://www.fixr.com/costs/ins...
http://costowl.com/home-improv...
Makes me think becoming an electrician is probably a great career choice for the next decade or so!
"I stop to eat at roadside inns which are likely never to have charging points,"
It's much easier for a business to put in a charging point connected to their existing electric lines than to install a gas pump and underground gas tanks. So why would a roadside inn not install charge points to increase (or maintain) business?
With EVs, any roadside business can now be a gas station -- but without dealing with the costs or regulations.
Yes, I agree. What you ask for is the most important statistic.
And it relates to "how many crashes were avoided by pilot excellence".
like I have been working towards? ..."
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progress or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as, say, Slashdot is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to Slashdot as Slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones.
My latest efforts along that line: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
And I put together ideas here like using IBIS:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Of course, there seems to be so much age discrimination at Google (including against people who can't easily relocate), not much point in me applying there in my 50s:
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
Of course, older software developers with families and community roots might help provide a moral conscience to the organization as well as provide examples to others about work/life balance -- which might be bad for Google's short-term bottom line...
Although such older people (of all genders) also might have helped Google think through better ways to do hiring long ago.
Also, I've made some previous comments I made about Google in 2008 that might be problematical in getting me hired there: :-) :-( ... quasi-evil ... not evil enough" hobbyists with smaller budgets to save the Asteroids and the Planets (including Earth) http://www.openvirgle.net/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-ra...
"So what is Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California but a little temporary space habitat bubble of happiness for regular employees, but floating on a sea of relative misery for everyone else planetwide who supports it? Can't we as a society or Google/Virgle as an aspiration do better that that? And even within that bubble are emerging issues. How long can a company expect to run on twenty-somethings without kids?
Google-ites and other financially obese people IMHO need to take a good look at the junk food capitalist propaganda they are eating and serving up to others, as in saying (even in jest): http://www.google.com/virgle/o... "we should profit from others' use of our innovations, and we should buy or lease others' intellectual property whenever it advances our own goals" -- even while running one of the biggest post-scarcity enterprises on Earth based on free-as-in-freedom software.
Until then, it is up to us other "semi-evil
from financially obese people and their unexamined
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca... ... Science can be fun, but considered as a career, science suffers by comparison to the professions and the business world. Consider someone taking the kind of high IQ and drive that would be required to obtain a tenure-track position at U.C. Berkeley and going into medicine. This person would very likely be a top specialist of some sort, earning at least $300,000 per year. Instead of being fired at age 44, our medical specialist would be near the height of her value to her patients and employer. Her experience and reputation would continue to add to her salary and prestige until she was perhaps 60 years old. [A woman who wanted to spend more time with her children can choose from a variety of medical careers, such as emergency medicine, that involve shift work and where a high salary can be earned with just two or three shifts per week. She could also work from home as a radiologist reading data transmitted via Internet.] ... ... ..."
"This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.
How closely does academic science match these criteria? I took a 17-year-old Argentine girl on a tour of the M.I.T. campus. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, so maybe this was a good time to show her the possibilities in female nerddom. While walking around, we ran into a woman who recently completed a Ph.D. in Aero/Astro, probably the most rigorous engineering department at MIT. What did the woman engineer say to the 17-year-old? "I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any job at all. There are only about 10 universities that hire people in my area and the last one to have a job opening had more than 800 applicants."
And that's engineering, which, thanks to its reputation for dullness and the demand from industrial employers, has a lot less competition for jobs than in science.
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.
A divorce litigator put it a little more simply: "There is no reason for a woman to go to medical school. If she wants to have the spending power of a doctor she can just have sex with three doctors." (see the Wisconsin chapter for how the arithmetic works out) In some states, though not Wisconsin, a plaintiff's own earnings or earning potential can reduce the potential profits from child support. "A degree in poetry is a lot better than a degree in medicine when you're a child support plaintiff," observed one litigator, and added "for a woman with a functioning reproductive system, the decision to attend college and work is seldom an economically rational one in the United States."
He also writes: "This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should de
Other options: https://www.icafrica.org/en/ne...
Delays can be caused by waiting on flight crews to arrive. So, by automating piloting (as well as even flight attendants), airlines would get more flexibility in when they can fly.
Ultimately though a big change may happen when this technology trickles down to (self-)flying cars. And also when cheaper technology makes it possible for more people to be their own pilots for fun (in more reliable small aircraft perhaps with "pilot assist" technologies to prevent the worst mishaps).
...and 60% of crashes are due to pilot error: http://www.planecrashinfo.com/...
Granted, that statistic does not say how many crashes were avoided by pilot excellence...
So, yes, the AIs will let some crashes happen a good pilot would prevent, but the AIs will also prevent many crashes a typical pilot might cause through being sleepy, stressed, forgetful, or whatever.
For learning, *much* better simulators (more detailed, including sensor failure) are part of the answer.
That said, as manufactured products and energy get cheaper through automation and improved materials and better designs, maybe more people will be flying for fun soon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ... Following the acquisition of Sanyo by Panasonic, a fourth generation was introduced in April 2013. The number of charges per cell was increased from 1800 to 2100 cycles for both AA (BK-3MCC) and AAA (BK-4MCC) models. ..."
"Eneloop cells lose their charge much more slowly than the 0.5â"4% per day lost by older-technology NiMH batteries, retaining about 85% of their charge for a year after charging.[2] This allows them to be sold precharged and ready for use, unlike older types.
Don't have them for a drill though -- just use them in most AA and AAA applications.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... ..."
"Why are diabetics often given inadequate -- or just plain wrong -- dietary advice?
Much of the inadequate and dangerous advice stems from a belief that diabetic patients will not be sufficiently motivated to make the necessary lifestyle changes to heal their diabetes. The typical watered-down, nutritional guidelines are designed to merely manage blood glucose by balancing carbohydrate, fat and protein to keep medication needs consistant. These guidelines are not designed to promote long-term health or fix the problem. To achieve excellent health, it is not the ratio of carbohydrate, protein and fat that is important; it is the combination of micronutrient quantity, micronutrient variety, and staying within our caloric requirements to achieve and maintain an ideal weight.
Many physicians are unaware or skeptical that type 2 diabetes can be reversed with superior nutrition. Other physicians agree that weight loss and high-nutrient eating can lead to diabetes reversal, but either don't know how to motivate their patients or simply doubt that their patients would be willing to make or capable of making the necessary changes. Instead, well-meaning physicians prescribe drugs to bring dangerously high glucose levels down; they want to protect their patients against complications, but the medications cause more problems. Insulin and several oral diabetes medications promote weight gain, which makes the patient even more diabetic, increasing risk for heart disease and necessitating even larger doses of medications -- the patient is caught in a never ending cycle of more and more drugs. Patients are told that medications will take care of their blood glucose.
This reliance on medication gives patients a false sense of security and allows them to avoid personal responsibility -- exercising frequently and eating right is not a life-or-death matter when you can "just take a pill." Many patients don't realize that their health will continue to deteriorate over time, even with their somewhat more "controlled" glucose levels. Medications can't do what removing the cause of the diabetes (the standard American diet and a sedentary lifestyle) can do. I say that people with diabetes deserve to know that drugs are a poor option, because my nutritarian diet is infinitely more effective and protective which can grant them the potential to reverse their disease and live healthfully into old age.
Just watched Episode 9 "What Ships Are For" based on your comment and -- wow -- well done!
http://www.startrekcontinues.c...
I agree -- Trek at its very best.
Thanks for the ideas/requirements. I too have 1000s of bookmarks. I might try to implement some of these ideas here: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2...
"The earliest instance known to QI of this prototypical claim was printed in the August 1908 issue of a periodical for bicyclists called "Bassett's Scrap Book". A short item contrasted the modern age to ancient times and presented a variation of the epigraph:
> The "good old times" seemed as bad to the "good-old-timers" as the present times seem to the modern man, as shown by the following translation on an inscription on a tablet in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople, Turkey:--
>> Naram Sin, 5000 B.C.
>> We have fallen upon evil times, the world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book."
But see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The lament for Sumer and Urim or the lament for Sumer and Ur is a poem and one of five known Mesopotamian "city laments"â"dirges for ruined cities in the voice of the city's tutelary goddess.
The other city laments are:
The Lament for Ur
The Lament for Nippur
The Lament for Eridu
The Lament for Uruk
In 2004 BCE, during the last year of King Ibbi-Sin's reign, Ur fell to an army from the east.[1] The Sumerians decided that such a catastrophic event could only be explained through divine intervention and wrote in the lament that the gods, "An, Enlil, Enki and Ninmah decided [Ur's] fate"[2]
The literary works of the Sumerians were widely translated (e.g. by the Hittites, Hurrians and Canaanites), and the world-renowned expert in Sumerian history, Samuel Noah Kramer, wrote that later Greek as well as Hebrew texts "were profoundly influenced by them."[3] Contemporary scholars have drawn parallels between the lament and passages from the bible (e.g. "the Lord departed from his temple and stood on the mountain east of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 10:18-19)."[4]"
Part of what is going on in various ways in cities expecially for millennia "like moths to a flame":
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
Related books maybe of interest (all easier read than done):
* "The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online" by Mary Aiken
* "Wired Child: Reclaiming Childhood in a Digital Age Paperback" by Richard Freed
* "Reset Your Child's Brain: A Four-Week Plan to End Meltdowns, Raise Grades, and Boost Social Skills by Reversing the Effects of Electronic Screen-Time Paperback" by Victoria L. Dunckley MD
And your AC license has the same issue. If you build your business around such AC software, and AC does something nasty to you like pollute your water supply or infringe your patents, and you sue over that harm, you lose the right to use the AC software in your business. It is a Trojan Horse license in that sense. See.also my comments on this starting in 2015: https://github.com/Automattic/...
Concern about intermittent power outages is one example: http://www.sfreviews.net/2face... ..."
"Set in roughly the mid-21st century, Two Faces chronicles the exploits of a team of scientists as they attempt to develop a computer capable of learning, of using the equivalent of human common sense in its decision-making and programming strategies. The world is by this time, of course, dominated by computer technology, and one such system already in place, responsible for running many of society's most important and necessary faculties both on Earth and in space, has nearly killed a construction crew on the moon through a decision that was unimpeachably logical but not very bright. But a new system, spearheaded by Dr. Raymond Dyer, happens to be in development, with vigorous testing being undertaken to perfect its learning capabilities, so that the computer will best approximate the way human beings learn from infancy how to function in the world around them through trial, error and experience.
But Dyer is plagued with doubts. After championing the system, he feels horrendous guilt at the near-disaster on the moon and really begins to worry what might happen should the new system evolve faster than expected, with more distressing results. What would happen if it becomes truly self-aware, with the survival instincts of an actual life-form? And then, what would happen if it perceived the very humans that created it as a threat to its own continued existence? What if it couldn't be turned off? (Yes, this premise was also the basis for James Cameron's Terminator films.) Fortunately, a remarkable beta-test opportunity presents itself. A space station under construction will have this bold new supercomputer installed, and then it will be, in a manner of speaking, attacked; thus a closed society, a microcosm of Earth is in place with the computer allowed to do what it will to defend itself in a worst-case scenario, without putting the Earth itself at any risk. Beautiful, right? So the system, named Spartacus, is installed on the orbital space station Janus, and sure enough, before you can say "Windows 2000" Spartacus is outmaneuvering, outguessing, and staying several jumps ahead of Dyer and his team, with a learning curve that quickly becomes alarming -- and dangerous.
Computers are Hogan's forte, and this cautionary tale -- written, incidentally, at a time when Radio Shack's TRS-80 was the best-known desktop home computer -- has a simple and difficult-to-argue message: humanity should not abdicate its responsibility to its own welfare simply because we can develop the technology to do so.
Siri, do you concur with Watson?
My idea from seven years ago: ...
""The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security.
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
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 computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
Anyway, still working towards that in my very limited spare time....
http://twirlip.net/
Hope sharing and cooperation to build a better world is not outlawed now... But I guess I should not be surprised when insane people vote for making sanity a crime...
https://en.wikipe
...one that contributed to my own father's death more than a decade ago: ...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear...
"PCI is not a long-term solution to coronary artery disease. Approximately 21 percent of stent placements clog up again (called restenosis) within 6 months, and about 60 percent of arteries treated by angioplasty and stenting eventually will undergo restenosis.11,12 PCI treats only a small portion of a vessel, while atherosclerotic plaque continues to develop at many sites throughout the cardiovascular system. Most often, the most risky and vulnerable plaque areas, likely to cause a heart attack, are not those that are most obstructing and treated with stenting. This is even worse, because the patient is led to believe they are more protected and often continues the dangerous eating style that was the initial cause of the heart disease. Consequently, the heart disease progresses.
President Bush needed aggressive nutritional counseling and potentially life-saving nutritional information. It sounds like he was not properly informed of these studies that document the ineffectiveness of PCI and the value of the proper dietary intervention. If that is the case, I consider that malpractice.
Was President Bush informed about Dr. Ornish's Lifestyle Heart Trial, which scientifically documented that lifestyle changes alone can reverse coronary artery disease? We have no way of knowing, but it seems unlikely, given the media reports. It sounds like President Bush was misinformed about PCI by his doctors and given the false impression this procedure was life-extending and lifesaving. Certainly the media reports gave the American people the impression that this procedure was necessary for him.
Every day, patients are counseled to undergo these unnecessary and potentially dangerous procedures by their cardiologists. Instead, an arterial blockage should be seen as a wake-up call, a motivating factor to pursue optimal health via superior nutrition and exercise.
Optimal medical therapy is not enough; heart disease is preventable and reversible with superior nutritional therapy, which produces dramatically more effective results than PCI or OMT and provides dramatic protection against future cardiac events. In my clinical experience with hundreds of patients with advanced heart disease, I have seen dramatic and consistent reversal of heart disease, relief of angina symptoms, and future freedom from heart disease in those who have chosen to follow my Nutritarian eating style."
That said, I agree with much of the rest of your post!
Your unfortunate choice of example though is itself an example of the problems of civilization. Remember, doctors used to promote smoking for weight loss too. And most recently the incorrect "fat makes you fat" meme promoted by the medical profession has led to the deaths of millions from heart disease as they turned to sugar and starch instead and spiked their blood sugar causing inflammation which led to clogged arteries. Meanwhile people living traditional low-tech "bluezones" lifestyles often live into their 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One other downside to modern civilization is supernormal stimuli:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for todayâ(TM)s densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life.[1] T