Decades ago, in ninth grade biology class, I asked my biology teacher how a Hydra (or other creatures) knows how to form its shape from cells, but he hemmed and hawed, and essentially would not admit that he did not know, or even that no one knew. We had been supposed to look at some Hydra in class, but they never arrived or something like that. I later studied Hydra in Ecology and Evolution grad studies, but people still did not quite know how they formed their shapes.
In pretty much every other way he was a great teacher from my point of view back then though (aside from not being willing to admit he did not know something), because he went covered a lot of material in an interesting way, and was obviously very proud of his knowledge. He definitely sparked my interest in biology with the way he ran the class, the way he handled that question aside. Anyway, thanks for everything Mr. Nast -- one of your students went on to biology graduate studies and making biology-related software made possible by the great job you did in some blue collar high school on Long Island.
"It also underlines a fact I have known for years. Senior staff, officials, managers the political classes and military staff don't understand the technology at all."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "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?... 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."
I think you might have missed the sarcasm, which is more obvious in the context of the whole book, sorry.
I feel pretty much anyone can be amazing given the right circumstances and environment.
But hey, even if things are a mess, we can at least try to do the basics for our own lives -- eat well, get vitamin D, develop mental disciplines that help us stay as positively engaged as possible, and so on.
It is sometimes the depth of our roots -- little pleasures, family, friends, hobbies, habits, spirituality, music, communities, and so on -- that keep us from blowing over in life's storms.
Or, from a different direction, as I quoted from the book version of "What Dreams May Come": http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html "This is their composite mental image?" I asked. Soundless; hueless; lifeless. "It is," he said. "And you work here?" I felt stunned that anyone who had the choice would elect to work in this forbidding place. "This is nothing," was all he said.
"Who needs a free thinking population when you are on top..."
As John Taylor Gatto wrote: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprisesâ"no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
But with that said, there is a lot of life in the cracks of our society
There is even a lot of happiness: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_freshstart.html "Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up."
So, while one can dwelle on the negative, there can be a lot of positives one can look at too. Example: http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty "The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcit
I hope your insightful post and related predictions are very wrong, but I am hard pressed to find flaws in what you say other than trying to stay hopeful.
Please make sure you are getting your vitamin D, eating lots of vegetables and fruits, and getting omega-3s to be in the best of health for any tough times to come.
In brief, there have always been five interwoven economies, and the balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes: * A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here."); * A gift economy ("The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past."); * A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks."); * An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat."); * A theft (or conquest) economy ("What's yours is mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, or can afford better lawyers.").
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including: * robotics, AI, and other automation, * better design, * the accumulation of physical infrastructure, * relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or * the emergence of voluntary social networks.
So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with: * A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else); * A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle; * A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; * An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and * Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.
The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society.
If you go there again, please mention my: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY "This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
Herbert Snorrason might agree with you (and this is not to disagree): http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/b9664aa1473d6d53?hl=en "But there's another point I want to make: I'm a humanities major; history, in particular. That's a subject not exactly known for clarity or brevity. But even so, you manage to surpass everything I've read during my studies. That includes the writings of people like Karl Marx. In the original.
Say what you will, but that doesn't seem very practical-minded to me. "
I guess that leaves lots of work for others to say what I say in better ways.:-) Which might be a good thing given stuff coming out of the lab like this::-)
"PR2 Fetches Sandwich from Subway " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp0
One attempt by me to be less verbose and more clear and simple::-) "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
I guess the key point is that cheap energy, like cheap robots, can be in many cases be substituted for human labor and human intelligence and so the economy is fundamentally transformed.
"If what he's selling is true (my money is on not for the record) he can get rich and change the world for the better. I can't hardly blame someone with a potentially world altering invention wanting to keep it under wraps for as long as possible. Yeah, it's against the open source ethos, but it's also how reality works for 99% of the people out there; you don't give your work away for free."
This is taken from material written by Paul Fernhout and posted under a free license in a comment to Andrea Rossi's Journal of Nuclear Physics, and is posted here by the author under the GFDL.
The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had (subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think about the socioecenomic implications of their invention in causing a permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where money does not matter very much anymore.
There have always been four interwoven economies, and the balance of them is shaped by our society:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here."); and
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");
[* Someone on Slashdot later pointed out there was essentially a fifth "theft economy" too; more on all that here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY ]
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including due to robotics, AI, and other automation, due to better design, due to the accumulation of physical infrastructure, due to cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or due to the emergence of voluntary social networks.
Mainstream economists try to get around this long term trend by assuming infinite demand, but that is just not in accord with human psychology or social dynamics. See Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, or an emerging "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" ethic, or see any of the world's major religions â" including humanism â" about moving beyond materialistic values.
So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers;
A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and
An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income.
Andrea-
When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made their original cold fusion announcement, I sent them a co
"I guess you might say what I am trying to do here is save you a million dollars, so you can keep it around to keep debunking the more usual paranormal claims related to ESP and so on.:-) In general, I think your skepticism about cold fusion is commendable and well warranted, but, a flat denial of its possibility is shading into the area where science progresses by going beyond what we know well and exploring into that which we are just speculating about (such as the exploration of human flight over a century ago that eventually led to success after much skepticism and many failures). I am concerned that you may have not been skeptical enough about the claims of mainstream hot fusion scientists when they dismiss something like cold fusion that might impact their funding. As I reflect on that issue of cold fusion, and think as well about another contentious human enterprise like homeopathy and as it compares to mainstream medicine with its own problems, I guess I begin to wonder about the general issue of the limits to knowledge given it is part of a social process. You have made it all too clear how anything involving people is subject to corruption and confusion for several reasons. I quote several fairly mainstream academics who say the same thing. So, this is plea in a way for skepticism about mainstream science. Of course, if one is skeptical about mainstream science, then that opens the door to all sorts of possibilities, either now, or in the future as our technology and science continue to change. I also mention in passing nutritional interventions to cure heart disease that you may have an interest in following up on...."
While what you outline sounds sensible, there are at least three big issues that are problematical with an analogy to physical things like bridges or houses.
Unlike building a physical bridge using well known technologies to get specifically from point A to point B (a requirement almost anyone can understand), new software generally has vague requirements and often uses new technologies. From: http://gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html "Rosenberg's Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. The corollary is, The only software that's worth making is software that does something new."
If software did not have vague requirements, chances are you could just use an off-the-shelf solution. That is a big difference between software (easy to copy) and bridges (a copy somewhere else costs about the same as the original). That is why so much of CS is BS, because a lot of it is about formal proofs that systems satisfy requirements, but if the requirements are buggy (or incomplete), then what is the point of proving they are met?
So, if a big part of the project is coming up with the "spec", what do you do about a bug in the "spec"?
Also, in practice, people generally don't get to pick what tools they use for all sorts of cultural reasons (previous tools used by an organization, availability of staff, issues with future maintenance, and so on). For example, if bridges could be made out of 10,000 different types of materials, all with very different properties and each needing specialized expertise to maintain, with those materials quickly coming and going in fashion, what material would a bridge-builder pick? Worse, what if the material most in fashion was the worst designed, hardest to use, most unsafe stuff that was only popular because somebody pumped a billion dollars into marketing it? Contrast that with designing a lot of bridges where it is true there are some choices of material, including a variety of mixing proportions for concrete, but the range is not so large. So, being a professional software engineer signing off on things would be a much harder job in a rapidly changing industry than being a professional physical engineer.
Also, just as another problem, it is very rare in physical engineering that someone would suddenly say, your bridge is broken because the road leading up to it is suddenly ten times wider and has a monorail track down the middle, but that is what happens in software all the time.:-)
With that said, I generally agree with the other person who replied AC to your post, that we'd see an increase in use of standards. We might see better standards.
Which leads to my second reservation. Personally, as someone who has been programming for about thirty years, I think the world suffers from too many programmers -- although also too little knowledge about programming.:-) Part of what I mean by that is that the world does not need so much software in practice, and in the end, most programmers just end up making work for each other with incompatible standards, an endless variety of ad-hoc data formats, implementations of languages and applications that include "a half-implemented buggy version of Common Lisp" and so on (not to say Common Lisp is that great). How many accounting systems do we really need? How many word processors? How many programming languages? The software world might be much more stable and functional and secure if we had only 1% of the software developers we had now making the software that ran our world (the top 1% however we define that) given the difference in nature of software than bridges, that you can easily copy a good solution. Our competitive economy tends to prevent that though, where good solutions from long ago (Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth) get passed by for new proprietary solutions with a lot of marketing dollars behind them, and even those good solutions (like Smallta
"Wouldn't you hold the software developer accountable for that?"
Which gets to why this idea by itself won't work.
First, who is the "software developer" of a system that uses lots of modules from a variety of vendors (including hardware aspects)? You have an entire ocean of people involved with a big project like that from designers to coders to testers to users...
Second, companies will just use corporate law to create liability shields where each part that could go wrong will be in its own sue-able unit with minimal assets.
Third, let's say something does go wrong, and you can point at a bit of offending code. But, was that really the problem? What about the compiler not smart enough to catch a *semantic* error? What about the simulators that were not good enough to discover the bug in advance? What about the testing procedures? What about the broken CS training programs that focus on theory and not practice? What about the managers who picked a poor development platform because it was popular? When you can go up a chain (or web) of responsibility, why blame the coder at the bottom when there are so many factors involved in making that accident, some of which operate on different timescales?
This whole issue is part of the reason why things like Forth and Smalltalk were so wonderful as small and understandable self-reflective systems, but we got mainstream adoption of buggy C/C++ and bloated Java instead. When the plane crashes from a pointer error, maybe we should blame those who did not choose to support Smalltalk decades ago?
"Einstein defended the value of religion in a very well articulated paper, although he was quick to point out potential dangers there."
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "
"surely they will trade with others and the externalities will yet remain"
Perhaps, and certainly a small country could say that. But the USA is generally a major consumer of Chinese products, so the policies it sets have a big influence there.
You're probably right about the potential for wars over pristine lands, although hopefully we'll develop better technologies for cleaning stuff up before then (nanotech based?)
Productivity has been rising in US society, like when better software tools help, say, human medical insurance claims processors be 10% more productive, or when we get other productivity improvements via robotics and other automation, voluntary social networks, or better design including government streamlining. If productivity rises, then in the absence of increased demand, employment goes down. Your statement assumes demand will rise faster than productivity. Most mainstream economists take that as an article of faith (since otherwise their fancy elegant equations suffer divide by zero errors). But we are not seeing increasing demand in the USA.
There are several reasons for this over the past few decades. Here are some of them:
* Environmentalism with a "reduce, reuse, recycle" ethic has reduced demand for many new things.
* A voluntary simplicity movement has reduced people's desire for more stuff.
* As people get enough material goods, they tend to move up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs towards things like self-expression and self-actualization, which generally (not always) don't require too many personal material goods.
* There is a law of diminishing, and then even negative, returns to more goods and services. Too much clutter in our life makes us unhappy. Too many choices makes us stressed.
* Real wages in the USA have been flat for the past three or more decades while wealth concentrates upward due to supply and demand (too much cheap labor, including as women entered the workforce in big numbers). There were zero net jobs produced in the USA during the last decade, even as the US population grew significantly. Consumption of all the goods produced was supported by the wealthy 1% loaning workers the money that otherwise might have come from wages, but that credit bubble, driven in part by home mortgage refinancing, has popped (and we are about to see the student loan bubble do the same).
* The top 1% are now so wealthy they do not need to buy much physical stuff with their wealth. So, they put much of their cash into the "casino economy" (see Money as Debt II) of currency speculation, stock and land speculation, and so on, that neither creates real wealth or really consumes much of it. This creates a de facto currency crisis in the physical economy, just the same as if the wealthy had just burned all their dollars. Mainstream economists ignore this when they look at the total money supply, assuming that cash on these financial casino tables is the same as cash in the pocket of a middle class person.
* There is the usual fear/greed cycle coinciding with all this (but made worse by 9/11).
* There has been a simple accumulation of infrastructure and high quality long-lasting good-enough goods in the USA (so, when do we have enough?).
(Offshoring is a factor in all this, but is generally a red herring overall, since these trends will affect other countries soon enough, and are in Europe already as the OP mentioned.)
But in brief, solutions include some mix of a basic income, improved local subsistence by advanced technology like 3D printing and solar panels, a stronger gift economy, and participatory democratic planning.
People are making desperate appeals to improve the teaching of economics, but so for the mainstream economists have a monopolistic stranglehold on the profession (which is ultimately choking to death our society as these academic economics knowledge workers desperately fight to keep their own paid positions as professors despite their increasing obsolete knowledge and world views, since economics is the science of the management of scarcity and creation of artificial scarcity, not the creation and management of true abundance): http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/ "The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three
"There are many public university around the globe, who also do not put their curriculum on-line, largely due to the over-reach of copyright locking out knowledge from the public good, for no other reasons than greed and ego, even when it was taxpayer dollars that paid for those works to be produced. "
A related essay I wrote: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Other idea by me: "Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease " http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html "Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process? "
And: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or b
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47 "The right likes to think that every Leftist "hates" the "rich". I suppose there are those on the Left who hate the rich, but if they do, their anger is misplaced. It's the "wannabe's" you have to watch out for...."
See my other reply in this thread pointing out how connected we are all globally. You also can't completely absolve yourself of the moral guilt of knowing poor people in China are being poisoned for your flat screen TV just because they are powerless to get the Chinese governent to protect their health. A related example if the rise of things like "fair trade" coffee.
I do agree with your last point however; China will undoubtedly raise its environmental standards over time with increasing material prosperity and greater understanding. It's sad for the Chinese people that they could not immediately benefit by US know how about that. Ultimately, pollution is usually more costly overall than doing it right environmentally in the first place (due to the costs of allowing entropy to spread contaminant -- it's much harder to clean up a polluted aquifer than deal with a barrel of sludge).
And supporting oppressive regimes through US foreign policy is then only a problem if you live in Saudi Arabia? (Hint, where were most of the 9/11 hijackers from?)
Also, do you want China's nuclear arsenal to be commanded by someone suffering from growing up with mercury poisoning?
Do you want the next flu epidemic coming from an area of China with peopele whose immune systems have been weakend by pollution?
And do you want US jobs lost while those risks are made more likely?
Also, coudld some future global laws lead to financial claims against the USA somehow for cleanup costs?
Coudl the three days of regular life be the true answer? Even if one believed in a higher power and related subdeities, could not then some devil be messing with him?
Still, to be fair, and a truly skeptical skeptic, he might indeed be right. And even if his brain was altered, maybe it was improved? But personally, I don't buy it for the reasons you list.
Good points. Still, in Code 2.0, Lawrence Lessig makes the point that the processes that govern us include rules, norms, prices, and architecture. So, there are other aspects of control outside what lawyers normally do: http://codev2.cc/
The agreements could be standardized by convention... Or by legal requirements (like Nolo Press contributes to). That might eliminate 90% of lawyer's workload. People googling on advice can also reduce the need for paid advice, or allow individuals to use what little they really need more effectively (so, less billable hours).
My site has a lot about post-scarcity economic alternatives to a collapsing exchange economy in the face of the decline of the value of moct paid human labor: http://www.pdfernhout.net/
FTFY. And he will be following in a Robotic Sarah Palin's footsteps, since she governed a state with a basic income (from the Alasakn Permanent Fund). He'll get the robot vote, for sure.
"We are exporting our toxic waste to China by sending out the manufacturing. There's more to cost of manufacture than just assembly, but nobody on Slashdot ever seems to consider such things."
This is insightful; thanks. This is a major problem with "free trade" agreements, not accounting for externalities.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow!
Decades ago, in ninth grade biology class, I asked my biology teacher how a Hydra (or other creatures) knows how to form its shape from cells, but he hemmed and hawed, and essentially would not admit that he did not know, or even that no one knew. We had been supposed to look at some Hydra in class, but they never arrived or something like that. I later studied Hydra in Ecology and Evolution grad studies, but people still did not quite know how they formed their shapes.
A couple lessons there for me I guess including the one about some teachers and authority:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
In pretty much every other way he was a great teacher from my point of view back then though (aside from not being willing to admit he did not know something), because he went covered a lot of material in an interesting way, and was obviously very proud of his knowledge. He definitely sparked my interest in biology with the way he ran the class, the way he handled that question aside. Anyway, thanks for everything Mr. Nast -- one of your students went on to biology graduate studies and making biology-related software made possible by the great job you did in some blue collar high school on Long Island.
Plants work somewhat differently from animals though. My wife and I implicitly used some of the ideas related to auxins etc. in this software we wrote to breed virtual 3D plants:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio/blob/master/README.txt
"It also underlines a fact I have known for years. Senior staff, officials, managers the political classes and military staff don't understand the technology at all."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
"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?
"but where would they fit?"
I think you might have missed the sarcasm, which is more obvious in the context of the whole book, sorry.
I feel pretty much anyone can be amazing given the right circumstances and environment.
But hey, even if things are a mess, we can at least try to do the basics for our own lives -- eat well, get vitamin D, develop mental disciplines that help us stay as positively engaged as possible, and so on.
Be careful too of making life too abstract -- there are pleasure traps but there are also pleasures that keep us rooted. We need both roots and wings.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
It is sometimes the depth of our roots -- little pleasures, family, friends, hobbies, habits, spirituality, music, communities, and so on -- that keep us from blowing over in life's storms.
Or, from a different direction, as I quoted from the book version of "What Dreams May Come":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"This is their composite mental image?" I asked. Soundless; hueless; lifeless.
"It is," he said.
"And you work here?" I felt stunned that anyone who had the choice would elect to work in this forbidding place.
"This is nothing," was all he said.
"Who needs a free thinking population when you are on top ..."
As John Taylor Gatto wrote:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprisesâ"no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
But with that said, there is a lot of life in the cracks of our society
There is even a lot of happiness:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_freshstart.html
"Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up."
So, while one can dwelle on the negative, there can be a lot of positives one can look at too. Example:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcit
I hope your insightful post and related predictions are very wrong, but I am hard pressed to find flaws in what you say other than trying to stay hopeful.
Links you might find of interest:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
"Voyage from Yesteryear"
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
My site with lots of alternatives to disaster:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
On optimism and other things by Howard Zinn:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
Please make sure you are getting your vitamin D, eating lots of vegetables and fruits, and getting omega-3s to be in the best of health for any tough times to come.
Tell your friend about my website: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
For a start though, a "basic income" would be a good idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
But other ideas are here:
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
In brief, there have always been five interwoven economies, and the balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat.");
* A theft (or conquest) economy ("What's yours is mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, or can afford better lawyers.").
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including:
* robotics, AI, and other automation,
* better design,
* the accumulation of physical infrastructure,
* relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or
* the emergence of voluntary social networks.
So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics;
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and
* Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.
The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society.
If you go there again, please mention my: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
The text for the presentation is here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
I sent an email about it to the Occupy Wall Street website. Basically, that outlines alternatives to think about.
Thanks for the comment and reading what I wrote.
Herbert Snorrason might agree with you (and this is not to disagree):
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/b9664aa1473d6d53?hl=en
"But there's another point I want to make: I'm a humanities major; history, in particular. That's a subject not exactly known for clarity or brevity. But even so, you manage to surpass everything I've read during my studies. That includes the writings of people like Karl Marx. In the original.
Say what you will, but that doesn't seem very practical-minded to me. "
I guess that leaves lots of work for others to say what I say in better ways. :-) Which might be a good thing given stuff coming out of the lab like this: :-)
"PR2 Fetches Sandwich from Subway "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp0
One attempt by me to be less verbose and more clear and simple: :-)
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
It would help to have better tools for everyone to have better discussions:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319
I guess the key point is that cheap energy, like cheap robots, can be in many cases be substituted for human labor and human intelligence and so the economy is fundamentally transformed.
Links you might like about the research-proven value of detailed diverse discussions:
http://www.amazon.com/Difference-Diversity-Creates-Schools-Societies/dp/0691128383
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-responds-to-arguments-over-his-theory-of-arguing/
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Focused-Conversation-Access-Workplace/dp/0865714169
... indoors posting too much: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d/vitamin-d-supplementation/
"If what he's selling is true (my money is on not for the record) he can get rich and change the world for the better. I can't hardly blame someone with a potentially world altering invention wanting to keep it under wraps for as long as possible. Yeah, it's against the open source ethos, but it's also how reality works for 99% of the people out there; you don't give your work away for free."
I wrote an essay on why that logic does not hold up and sent it to Rossi months ago, and then posted it here too:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
=== The text
This is taken from material written by Paul Fernhout and posted under a free license in a comment to Andrea Rossi's Journal of Nuclear Physics, and is posted here by the author under the GFDL.
The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had (subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think about the socioecenomic implications of their invention in causing a permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where money does not matter very much anymore.
There have always been four interwoven economies, and the balance of them is shaped by our society:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here."); and
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");
[* Someone on Slashdot later pointed out there was essentially a fifth "theft economy" too; more on all that here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY ]
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including due to robotics, AI, and other automation, due to better design, due to the accumulation of physical infrastructure, due to cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or due to the emergence of voluntary social networks.
Mainstream economists try to get around this long term trend by assuming infinite demand, but that is just not in accord with human psychology or social dynamics. See Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, or an emerging "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" ethic, or see any of the world's major religions â" including humanism â" about moving beyond materialistic values.
So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers;
A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and
An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income.
Andrea-
When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made their original cold fusion announcement, I sent them a co
Building on your theme (by me): http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"I guess you might say what I am trying to do here is save you a million dollars, so you can keep it around to keep debunking the more usual paranormal claims related to ESP and so on. :-) In general, I think your skepticism about cold fusion is commendable and well warranted, but, a flat denial of its possibility is shading into the area where science progresses by going beyond what we know well and exploring into that which we are just speculating about (such as the exploration of human flight over a century ago that eventually led to success after much skepticism and many failures). I am concerned that you may have not been skeptical enough about the claims of mainstream hot fusion scientists when they dismiss something like cold fusion that might impact their funding. As I reflect on that issue of cold fusion, and think as well about another contentious human enterprise like homeopathy and as it compares to mainstream medicine with its own problems, I guess I begin to wonder about the general issue of the limits to knowledge given it is part of a social process. You have made it all too clear how anything involving people is subject to corruption and confusion for several reasons. I quote several fairly mainstream academics who say the same thing. So, this is plea in a way for skepticism about mainstream science. Of course, if one is skeptical about mainstream science, then that opens the door to all sorts of possibilities, either now, or in the future as our technology and science continue to change. I also mention in passing nutritional interventions to cure heart disease that you may have an interest in following up on. ..."
While what you outline sounds sensible, there are at least three big issues that are problematical with an analogy to physical things like bridges or houses.
Unlike building a physical bridge using well known technologies to get specifically from point A to point B (a requirement almost anyone can understand), new software generally has vague requirements and often uses new technologies. From:
http://gamearchitect.net/Articles/SoftwareIsHard.html
"Rosenberg's Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. The corollary is, The only software that's worth making is software that does something new."
If software did not have vague requirements, chances are you could just use an off-the-shelf solution. That is a big difference between software (easy to copy) and bridges (a copy somewhere else costs about the same as the original). That is why so much of CS is BS, because a lot of it is about formal proofs that systems satisfy requirements, but if the requirements are buggy (or incomplete), then what is the point of proving they are met?
So, if a big part of the project is coming up with the "spec", what do you do about a bug in the "spec"?
Also, in practice, people generally don't get to pick what tools they use for all sorts of cultural reasons (previous tools used by an organization, availability of staff, issues with future maintenance, and so on). For example, if bridges could be made out of 10,000 different types of materials, all with very different properties and each needing specialized expertise to maintain, with those materials quickly coming and going in fashion, what material would a bridge-builder pick? Worse, what if the material most in fashion was the worst designed, hardest to use, most unsafe stuff that was only popular because somebody pumped a billion dollars into marketing it? Contrast that with designing a lot of bridges where it is true there are some choices of material, including a variety of mixing proportions for concrete, but the range is not so large. So, being a professional software engineer signing off on things would be a much harder job in a rapidly changing industry than being a professional physical engineer.
Also, just as another problem, it is very rare in physical engineering that someone would suddenly say, your bridge is broken because the road leading up to it is suddenly ten times wider and has a monorail track down the middle, but that is what happens in software all the time. :-)
With that said, I generally agree with the other person who replied AC to your post, that we'd see an increase in use of standards. We might see better standards.
Which leads to my second reservation. Personally, as someone who has been programming for about thirty years, I think the world suffers from too many programmers -- although also too little knowledge about programming. :-) Part of what I mean by that is that the world does not need so much software in practice, and in the end, most programmers just end up making work for each other with incompatible standards, an endless variety of ad-hoc data formats, implementations of languages and applications that include "a half-implemented buggy version of Common Lisp" and so on (not to say Common Lisp is that great). How many accounting systems do we really need? How many word processors? How many programming languages? The software world might be much more stable and functional and secure if we had only 1% of the software developers we had now making the software that ran our world (the top 1% however we define that) given the difference in nature of software than bridges, that you can easily copy a good solution. Our competitive economy tends to prevent that though, where good solutions from long ago (Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth) get passed by for new proprietary solutions with a lot of marketing dollars behind them, and even those good solutions (like Smallta
"Wouldn't you hold the software developer accountable for that?"
Which gets to why this idea by itself won't work.
First, who is the "software developer" of a system that uses lots of modules from a variety of vendors (including hardware aspects)? You have an entire ocean of people involved with a big project like that from designers to coders to testers to users...
Second, companies will just use corporate law to create liability shields where each part that could go wrong will be in its own sue-able unit with minimal assets.
Third, let's say something does go wrong, and you can point at a bit of offending code. But, was that really the problem? What about the compiler not smart enough to catch a *semantic* error? What about the simulators that were not good enough to discover the bug in advance? What about the testing procedures? What about the broken CS training programs that focus on theory and not practice? What about the managers who picked a poor development platform because it was popular? When you can go up a chain (or web) of responsibility, why blame the coder at the bottom when there are so many factors involved in making that accident, some of which operate on different timescales?
This whole issue is part of the reason why things like Forth and Smalltalk were so wonderful as small and understandable self-reflective systems, but we got mainstream adoption of buggy C/C++ and bloated Java instead. When the plane crashes from a pointer error, maybe we should blame those who did not choose to support Smalltalk decades ago?
"Einstein defended the value of religion in a very well articulated paper, although he was quick to point out potential dangers there."
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "
"surely they will trade with others and the externalities will yet remain"
Perhaps, and certainly a small country could say that. But the USA is generally a major consumer of Chinese products, so the policies it sets have a big influence there.
You're probably right about the potential for wars over pristine lands, although hopefully we'll develop better technologies for cleaning stuff up before then (nanotech based?)
Productivity has been rising in US society, like when better software tools help, say, human medical insurance claims processors be 10% more productive, or when we get other productivity improvements via robotics and other automation, voluntary social networks, or better design including government streamlining. If productivity rises, then in the absence of increased demand, employment goes down. Your statement assumes demand will rise faster than productivity. Most mainstream economists take that as an article of faith (since otherwise their fancy elegant equations suffer divide by zero errors). But we are not seeing increasing demand in the USA.
There are several reasons for this over the past few decades. Here are some of them:
* Environmentalism with a "reduce, reuse, recycle" ethic has reduced demand for many new things.
* A voluntary simplicity movement has reduced people's desire for more stuff.
* As people get enough material goods, they tend to move up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs towards things like self-expression and self-actualization, which generally (not always) don't require too many personal material goods.
* There is a law of diminishing, and then even negative, returns to more goods and services. Too much clutter in our life makes us unhappy. Too many choices makes us stressed.
* Real wages in the USA have been flat for the past three or more decades while wealth concentrates upward due to supply and demand (too much cheap labor, including as women entered the workforce in big numbers). There were zero net jobs produced in the USA during the last decade, even as the US population grew significantly. Consumption of all the goods produced was supported by the wealthy 1% loaning workers the money that otherwise might have come from wages, but that credit bubble, driven in part by home mortgage refinancing, has popped (and we are about to see the student loan bubble do the same).
* The top 1% are now so wealthy they do not need to buy much physical stuff with their wealth. So, they put much of their cash into the "casino economy" (see Money as Debt II) of currency speculation, stock and land speculation, and so on, that neither creates real wealth or really consumes much of it. This creates a de facto currency crisis in the physical economy, just the same as if the wealthy had just burned all their dollars. Mainstream economists ignore this when they look at the total money supply, assuming that cash on these financial casino tables is the same as cash in the pocket of a middle class person.
* There is the usual fear/greed cycle coinciding with all this (but made worse by 9/11).
* There has been a simple accumulation of infrastructure and high quality long-lasting good-enough goods in the USA (so, when do we have enough?).
(Offshoring is a factor in all this, but is generally a red herring overall, since these trends will affect other countries soon enough, and are in Europe already as the OP mentioned.)
I have collected numerous possible solutions on my website: http://www.pdfernhout.net/
But in brief, solutions include some mix of a basic income, improved local subsistence by advanced technology like 3D printing and solar panels, a stronger gift economy, and participatory democratic planning.
People are making desperate appeals to improve the teaching of economics, but so for the mainstream economists have a monopolistic stranglehold on the profession (which is ultimately choking to death our society as these academic economics knowledge workers desperately fight to keep their own paid positions as professors despite their increasing obsolete knowledge and world views, since economics is the science of the management of scarcity and creation of artificial scarcity, not the creation and management of true abundance):
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three
"There are many public university around the globe, who also do not put their curriculum on-line, largely due to the over-reach of copyright locking out knowledge from the public good, for no other reasons than greed and ego, even when it was taxpayer dollars that paid for those works to be produced. "
A related essay I wrote:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Other idea by me:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process? "
And:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or b
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47 ..."
"The right likes to think that every Leftist "hates" the "rich". I suppose there are those on the Left who hate the rich, but if they do, their anger is misplaced. It's the "wannabe's" you have to watch out for.
CFCs were banned by an international treaty regarding their production which by itself has little directly to do with trade:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
See my other reply in this thread pointing out how connected we are all globally. You also can't completely absolve yourself of the moral guilt of knowing poor people in China are being poisoned for your flat screen TV just because they are powerless to get the Chinese governent to protect their health. A related example if the rise of things like "fair trade" coffee.
I do agree with your last point however; China will undoubtedly raise its environmental standards over time with increasing material prosperity and greater understanding. It's sad for the Chinese people that they could not immediately benefit by US know how about that. Ultimately, pollution is usually more costly overall than doing it right environmentally in the first place (due to the costs of allowing entropy to spread contaminant -- it's much harder to clean up a polluted aquifer than deal with a barrel of sludge).
And supporting oppressive regimes through US foreign policy is then only a problem if you live in Saudi Arabia? (Hint, where were most of the 9/11 hijackers from?)
Also, do you want China's nuclear arsenal to be commanded by someone suffering from growing up with mercury poisoning?
Do you want the next flu epidemic coming from an area of China with peopele whose immune systems have been weakend by pollution?
And do you want US jobs lost while those risks are made more likely?
Also, coudld some future global laws lead to financial claims against the USA somehow for cleanup costs?
Good points, especially on why pick one specific faith of hundreds of fairly mainstream ones?
Also, heart attacks can often cause brain damage.
http://www.bri.ucla.edu/bri_weekly/news_050822.asp
Coudl the three days of regular life be the true answer? Even if one believed in a higher power and related subdeities, could not then some devil be messing with him?
Also, vitamin D deficiency and vegetable deficiency disease cause most heart attacks, so it may indeed have been a coincidence related to poor diet, or even the wrath of the "sun god":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/news-archive/2008/vitamin-d-in-pediatrics/
Still, to be fair, and a truly skeptical skeptic, he might indeed be right. And even if his brain was altered, maybe it was improved? But personally, I don't buy it for the reasons you list.
Good points. Still, in Code 2.0, Lawrence Lessig makes the point that the processes that govern us include rules, norms, prices, and architecture. So, there are other aspects of control outside what lawyers normally do:
http://codev2.cc/
It was said by American financier Jay Gould: "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
I wonder is someday someone might say, "I can hire one-half of the lawyers to disenfranchise the other half"?
Then, just repeat that process about ten times... :-)
Just like it's essentially being repeated with other professions...
The agreements could be standardized by convention... Or by legal requirements (like Nolo Press contributes to). That might eliminate 90% of lawyer's workload. People googling on advice can also reduce the need for paid advice, or allow individuals to use what little they really need more effectively (so, less billable hours).
See also Marshall Brain's Manna on breaking down tasks and deskilling them, even lawyering.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
If you can just make lawyers twice as productive with some tools, what happens to half the lawyers we have now?
What if with limited AI you can make lawyers 10X more productive? What do 90% of the current lawyers do, considering lawyers getting out of school now are finding now jobs for them?
http://lawschoolscam.blogspot.com/
http://www.lawyerswithdepression.com/
Or do we get a legal arms race of pointless lawsuits to keep lawyers employed? IIRC the USA has something like 2X to 5X more lawyers per capita than much of the rest of the world to begin with...
http://www.averyindex.com/lawyers_per_capita.php
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_country_in_the_world_has_most_lawyers_per_capita
My site has a lot about post-scarcity economic alternatives to a collapsing exchange economy in the face of the decline of the value of moct paid human labor:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
AC wrote: "Robotic Rick Perry 2032"
FTFY. And he will be following in a Robotic Sarah Palin's footsteps, since she governed a state with a basic income (from the Alasakn Permanent Fund). He'll get the robot vote, for sure.
Related on the rights of robots:
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article1695546.ece
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6200005.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence
A related parable on economic change and robots that I created (which mentions robot lawyers):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
"We are exporting our toxic waste to China by sending out the manufacturing. There's more to cost of manufacture than just assembly, but nobody on Slashdot ever seems to consider such things."
This is insightful; thanks. This is a major problem with "free trade" agreements, not accounting for externalities.