Your right about fixed costs, but there is more to it than that. Energetically, it makes no sense to lift so much material into orbit and then not leave it there to grow humankind's presence in space. Rockets with maximum to-orbit payload sizes with tiny return capsules make more sense. The shuttle might make sense if energy was 10X -100X cheaper than it was, and it might be someday... And it probably was cheaper relatively when the shuttle was designed.
But even with cheap energy, the shuttle program also only makes sense if rockets were hard to build, but they are easier to build than shuttles because they are simpler and don't need to withstand re-entry. The shuttle needed so much overhauling every trip anyway it might even have just been cheaper to make a new one anyway, since it often cheaper to make something new than to remake something old with testing. Maybe someday we'll have Star Trek shuttlecraft, but we aren't there yet.
... I saw the web for the first time at a public computer while researching our garden simulator. I was not impressed. Back then I had used Hypercard and Smalltalk, and it just seemed like we could do a whole lot better, and I had been thinkign about how to do that. I still feel that way a bit, alhough obviously the linking idea has worked well, HTML and http had broad powers in their simplicity, even with links not being first class objects and virtual machines not being standardized, and so on. So, first impressions can be misleading, although I still feel there are major missing pieces or standards. We need to push on to a social semantic desktop, IMHO, and I've tried some in that direction myself... http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
By the way, a little known fact -- the 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon, about a culturally sophisticated networked culture that "defeats" a huge military empire that comes to conquer it, inspired Ted Nelson to work on hypertext (I asked Ted Nelson about this directly when he gave a talk at at IBM Research, and he had forgotten the name of the story, but that's where the name came from), and then his work obviously was one of the inspirations of the web. The story is floating around on the web, like in Google Books: http://www.google.com/#q=the+skills+of+xanadu
Here is a link to her thesis: http://www.cfkurtz.com/publications.html "Kurtz, C.F. 1991. The Evolution of Information Gathering: Operational Constraints. M.A. Thesis, State University of New York at Stony Brook. Also available here. " http://www.cfkurtz.com/Kurtz_EvolutionOfInformationGathering_1991.pdf "I present two new approaches to the study of information in foraging theory. First, rather than determine the cost a forager should pay to obtain information, I concentrate on the consequences of information use in an interacting population. I describe a density-dependent model which tracks genotypes with high and low information access through evolutionary time. Stable polymorphisms result. I suggest that the value of information is not monotonically increasing. Second, I present a scheme for partitioning the information used in the decision making process. Three types of information are recognized: internal information, or an individual's internal state; external information, or environmental factors; and relational information, or rules for predicting transformations of internal state. Interactions between the three types are examined in an extension of the basic model."
She says this paper is more succinct, but it is not online: "Kurtz, C.F. 1991. The evolution of information gathering: operational constraints. In From Animals to Animats, eds. Meyer, J.A. and S.W. Wilson. Proc. 1st Int. Conf. on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, Paris, MIT Press."
Basically, as part of her graduate work in Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook (about 1990), my wife (Cynthia Kurtz) did computer simulations of digital organisms, and discovered that sometimes being "dumb" is really being smart, because you don't stick with the smart crowd who ends up competing over the same resource. People did not want to believe her results because they went against all the "foraging theory" of the time. She only got an MA out of that, not a PhD. She presented her results at an early ALife conference. Now people rediscover that effect in smart power grids...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality "In economics, an externality (or transaction spillover) is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices,[1] incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit. A benefit in this case is called a positive externality or external benefit, while a cost is called a negative externality or external cost."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure "The process of enclosure has sometimes been accompanied by force, resistance, and bloodshed, and remains among the most controversial areas of agricultural and economic history in England. Marxist and neo-Marxist historians argue that rich landowners used their control of state processes to appropriate public land for their private benefit. This created a landless working class that provided the labour required in the new industries developing in the north of England. "
Anyway, AC, so that is the kind of reasons you got screwed by the system, and why you are poor when your current birthright is currently about 1/7-billionth of the Earth and ultimately the same percentage of the solar system or beyond. You have a right to part of our cultural and technical capital, but you deny that right for yourself, and for everyone else. See also, on why wealth comes from more than present-day labor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
And that is why the first part of this "Manna" story by Marshall Brain may well be your future (and for the rest of us, too): http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
The problem in the USA, which has been pursuing regressive neoliberalism for decades, is that the US Republicans are the worst sort of Socialists, who privatize profits (Enclosure) while socializing costs (Externalities). A truly socialist country would not do that. As for your suggestion of "America, love its regressive neoliberalism or leave it", well, people can't move as easily as capital encoded in internet packets -- they have family issues, language issues, cultural issues. So most people are stuck in the USA as it goes down the toilet. The USA may well take the whole world with it too, given all its stockpiled WMDs (which is another reason to stay and try to reform it, since where are you gonna hide from widespread US-originated plagues, nuclear fallout, and killer robots?). See also: http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/ "Neoliberalism As Water Balloon" http://vimeo.com/6803752
That said, local subsistence is one way forward, but so is a basic income, a gift economy, and better democratic planning at all levels of our society. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"I dislike the feeling of being taken advantage of, manipulated, bought, sold and generally given an ear-tag with a number on it. Anybody who fell for this campaign is a giant sucker who deserves to be treated like cattle."
Thanks, AC. Although I guess that is the nature of social pressure as herd movements. Does anyone really want to get left totally alone or, alternatively, trampled?
Your comment reminds me about the original "Prisoner" series, which used to be online over at AMC, but they seem to have taken it down? I only see stuff about the remake here now: http://www.amctv.com/shows/the-prisoner
=== That IBM report leaves out the idea that a "Social Semantic Desktop" will integrate all our communications (including email-like messages). It kind of fits under "interoperability" but is something beyond that. Ideally, something like my (essentially) peer-to-peer Thunderbird email client (but much better, as a social semantic desktop application) would be able to track all the content on all those systems for me.
I accepted an invitation to Google+ to be in a web conference on "Discussions on the Future of the Economy", to talk about the effect technology is having on economics.
So, am I any happier with a Google+ account? Not so far.
It was fun to play around with the video chat for a few minutes with my wife and kid on another computer. Although now I see that event shows up in my "stream" but it is not clear who can see that; It just happened automatically. I don't think that is shared, but it just is not easily clear who can see it.
Google+ is now just another stream of stuff that I have no local copy of. Anything I put on those servers is lost to me if they go down or I leave the service (unless I go to extra trouble to make a copy). I can't integrate it in with my existing email archive. There is already a lot of stuff in the stream from the people I've added to circles, but I have no easy way to navigate it other that a rather cumbersome and relatively slow web interface. Google now knows anything I search for in that stream.
Google+ is now one more stream of pressure on me. It joins twitter, which I use mostly for microblogging (like links to slashdot posts). But for twitter, I can ignore it mostly as a site and let Thunderbird just keep up with for me using its RSS feed reader functionality for people I follow and I also get email from it otherwise I would never see what people sent me. I don't see how to get an RSS feed of Google+ stuff? Maybe it is there, but it is just one more adhoc learning curve. It looks like you can't do it, except with some third party application like "plusfeed" on appspot. Even with that, which I'm not going to bother to wrestle with right now, I am hostage to Google's good graces for access to the information others want to send me (reminds me of the current problem with high-priced science journals controlling the copyrights on tax-funded research):.
Now Google knows part of my social network. I felt socially pressured to put a current picture of me up on the web, invading my privacy in a way email does not pressure me.
Do I even know when the Logitech camera and microphone are working? Yes, they are supposed to have a red light go on, but to use Google+ chat I had to install opaque proprietary software that I have no idea what it did to my computer. Who audits that kind of stuff? Where do the streams even go when I know they are recording? When I was at IBM Research a decade ago, people were working on indexing video. Yesterday there was a Slashdot article about a DOD project to index videos looking for terrorists, how long is it before all that stuff is routinely screened if it is not already? Is Google going to tell us if it is?
On the plus side, I added you to a circle and you reciprocated. Although I might have felt that had we sent an email back and forth. Why should you have been essentially pressured to make a public social decision about that? Did Google track everything you did to make that decision?
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority "Illusory superiority is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests, and the possession of desirable characteristics or personality traits. It is one of many positive illusions relating to the self, and is a phenomenon studied in social psychology. Illusory superiority is often referred to as the above average effect. Other terms include superiority bias, leniency error, sense of relative superiority, the primus inter pares effect, and the Lake Wobegon effect (named after Garrison Keillor's fictional town where "all the children are above average")."
A complementary regression-towards-the-mean effect is that the most really competent people tend to overestimate how competent their peers are relative to themselves.
"People who start off vowing to "change it from the inside" almost always end up just becoming corrupted themselves."
Yes, that is a big risk. You are right that institutions have their own internal dynamics. Langdon Winner talks about this, how a person not filling their role in an organization will be replaced like we might swap out a bad memory stick in a computer. So does Noam Chomsky when he talks about "What makes the mainstream media mainstream".
There are no easy answers, though I tried to "think outside the box" with some of my essays that I linked to.
But I'm not sure we have that "luxury" considering how many WMDs the USA has stockpiled... It would be better and less risky to find a transformational or transcendent way forward to something better.
Thanks for the reply. I still think the situation is more complex than you outlined, and you are stuck in just viewing this through one lens of "regulation is bad". But what about managing "Externalities" through taxes, subsidies, and regulation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
See also (though it ignores the value of health and community):
"Marxism of the Right" http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/ "If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism."
You think China and Japan and so on are less "socialistic" than the USA?
Also, the US government would have plenty of money without two (or is it five?) recent needless wars and the Bush tax cuts for the wealth.
All sorts of technologies have been subsidized in the past. Railroads were heavily subsidized, for example.
If you look at solar panels, costs are now dropping for the same reasons your computer chip costs are dropping, a lot of R&D and investment in that area. There is now, according to one report I read, as much research going into PV solar in two years as the entire amount invested in research on it since it was invented. There is a chart of falling prices here: http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
That price decrease has little to do with government subsidies (other than pump-priming, to offset all the subsidies to fossil fuels and nuclear, given externalities of those have been generally ignored and "socialized".)
The bottom line: the USA is falling apart because Republicans make the worst socialists -- they privatize gains while socializing costs. Real socialist countries don't do that. That is why Western Europe, in general, is a much happier place than the USA for most people, and most people live longer there. As is Canada. Unfortunately, people can not flow over borders as easily as capital, otherwise much of the USA might just move somewhere with access to health care, cheap college, and so on (those who don't watch Fox News.:-) Though with that said, and it is joking obviously, since cultural ties and family ties keep most people rooted where they are short of a shooting civil war or other broad physical disaster, there are still many good things about US culture, like freedom of speech, which can still be better than in some other countries. But it seems the list of things better about the USA than other countries is getting shorter and shorter.
However, on top of that, there are broad trends from the centralization of wealth due to the increasing value of capital in production relative to human labor, which indeed undermines the paid value of most human labor (and not just in the USA, but eventually everywhere, which is why we will eventually see a new economic system for the 21st century with stuff like a basic income, a gift economy, better planning, and more advanced local subsistence production): http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
What China gained by making stuff for the USA
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"The Japanese and Chinese at the peril of their own economies have been subsidizing US consumers, which doesn't speak highly of their economic understanding."
As I see it, a reason for China (but not Japan) to do this was to gain access to US technical know how over the past two decades. So one might say Chinese citizens were essentially being taxed by China to pay for knowledge transfer from the USA. But now that China knows pretty much everything the USA did about making stuff, and is leaping ahead in some areas, things have changed...
But yes, otherwise this is stupid. These countries could just print money (or create credit) and give it to their own citizens (like with a basic income) who can then buy the products and use them in the country.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/6cdc99eaaba91855/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en#09eb7f4c973349f2 "This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."
Electrical security is just one more reason. Electric cars can help in balancing renewable energy shifts in a smart grid, too.
Still, it is also true the cost of some commodities has declined during that time, too. Computing has dropped during that time. So has the cost of housing (good for some, bad for others). And probably the cost of employing labor has dipped a bit (which is both good and bad). The relative premium for some organic food items may be declining.
Solar panel prices have dropped in half, which has huge implications, as GE predicts by 2015 they will be cheaper to use than fossil fuels. That cheap clean energy will in turn eventually drive down other prices (see Julian Simon also).
Are there any other commodities that have gone down in cost during that time?
Quality for some things have also improved. Car quality has improved during that time for the same cost. Medicine has improved some. The internet has gotten better (more content, more choices). Mobile phones are way better for the same price in terms of features. It is hard to capture that in simple numbers.
Some of those commodity rises are also due to the rise of consumption in China.
Still, overall, I tend to agree with your economic pessimism. Our scarcity-oriented economic system built around an income-through-jobs link is unable to handle 21st century trends (especially from the rise of robotics and AI, coupled with limited demand like due to environmentalism).
It seems to me that once money has moved to the casino economy (like currency speculation), it is no longer available for use in the real economy. This could cause a currency crisis in the real economy, even though the total amount of currency in the system might be huge.
I've been trying to get Richard Stallman and the FSF to consider supporting a campaign (suggesting maybe run by me for pay, so I'm biased, but OK if it was someone else) for fostering the cataloging, creation, and discussion of free software that explores conventional and alternative heterodox economics for a 21st century of abundance for all, based on this appeal: http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/ [responsiblefinance.ch] "The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged. This situation reflects the institutional power that the unconditional proponents of main-stream thought continue to exert on university teaching and research. This domination, propagated by the so-called top universities, dates back at least a quarter of a century and is effectively global. However, the very fact that this paradigm persists despite the current crisis, highlights the extent of its power and the dangerousness of its dogmatic character. Teachers and researchers, the signatories of the appeal, assert that this situation restricts the fecundity of research and teaching in economics, finance and management, diverting them as it does from issues critical to society."
Lots of other suggestions cole ted by me here: http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Banks' Observation on Money: "Money is a sign of poverty."
Fernhout's Corollary to Banks' Observation on Money: "The degree to which money needs to be handled in a society is inversely proportional to the abundance of imagination, skill, freedom, effort, and community present."
"If you are willing to work for a shadowy unaccountable government agency that loves to violate the rights of its own countrymen, well, you didn't have much character or moral/ethical fiber to begin with."
AC, The problem with this line of argument is that if no good people work there for that reason, it is bound to be even worse. It's a general problem with the US DOD more broadly. I feel the US military is being horribly misused by US politicans to fight wars whose main point seems to be to line the pockets of those in the war racket (see Smedly Butler), but, if only the worst of the worst join the US security forces because they are being misused, where does that leave us as a country?
I wrote this about the CIA, but it applies equally well to a place like the NSA: "On dealing with social hurricanes (like the US CIA) " http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. Another theme is exploring the meaning, if true, of a allegation by Wayne Madsen about President Obama's deeper connection to the CIA than was otherwise known."
Contrast: ""VMR will be an enhanced capability to generate the intelligence required for successful counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations" the agency said."
With: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all.... 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."
That said, it seems like a cool project technically, with multiple uses in civilian applications.
Thanks for the example on trees. I guess that is the value in a symbolic project like "The Long Now", to help get people thinking about that: http://longnow.org/
I've found my optimism has increased with trying to list all the things I'm thankful for before I got to sleep each day, and also getting more sunlight (and vitamin D) and eating better, etc..
The good news is, lots of people are planting all sorts of "trees", like in that Paul Hawken book: http://www.blessedunrest.com/ "A leading environmentalist and social activist's examination of the worldwide movement for social and environmental change
Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.
Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another."
But he says in that book how unaware everyone is of what other people around them are doing that is positive. I guess the mainstream media does not focus much on those planting "trees"? Although, maybe, sometimes focusing attention on new trees would get them vandalized? So that inattention may not be all bad.
The number one thing suggested in the book "Small is Possible" (by George McRobie about EF Schumacher's work, from 1981) is to figure out what is going on around you.
Maybe we need a Google Maps for good news about new trees being planted?:-) But maybe we just need something simpler and more local.
Thanks for the history lesson. I can wonder if the same happened in Argentina, too?
"Argentina: Sheer neoliberal lunacy" http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/twr137a.htm "The following article provides the background to the current crisis in Argentina and traces the roots of the crisis to adoption of the neoliberal economic reforms advocated by the IMF.... SINCE 1989-90, Argentinaâ(TM)s neoliberal economic model has closely followed the Washington Consensus requirements: trade (tariff reduction) and financial (free capital inflows and outflows) liberalisation; deregulation of the economy (liberalisation of prices of goods); and the âretirementâ(TM) of the State from economic activities (privatisation of the state enterprises, e.g., oil and gas, banks, telecommunications) as well as some of its functions (coverage of social security, for example). This prescription, which has been applied mainly through the medium of the economic reform policies of the Bretton Woods institutions (in particular the IMF), has also shaped the development of many other countries of Latin America...."
I can fear you will prove right, sadly. The USA is already so far gone. But the problem is, Mexico did not have nuclear weapons and other WMDs like killer robots to unleash as it descended into madness. The USA, on the other hand...
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."
Slashdot Mirror
Your right about fixed costs, but there is more to it than that. Energetically, it makes no sense to lift so much material into orbit and then not leave it there to grow humankind's presence in space. Rockets with maximum to-orbit payload sizes with tiny return capsules make more sense. The shuttle might make sense if energy was 10X -100X cheaper than it was, and it might be someday... And it probably was cheaper relatively when the shuttle was designed.
But even with cheap energy, the shuttle program also only makes sense if rockets were hard to build, but they are easier to build than shuttles because they are simpler and don't need to withstand re-entry. The shuttle needed so much overhauling every trip anyway it might even have just been cheaper to make a new one anyway, since it often cheaper to make something new than to remake something old with testing. Maybe someday we'll have Star Trek shuttlecraft, but we aren't there yet.
Laser launch stuff seems interesting...
... I saw the web for the first time at a public computer while researching our garden simulator. I was not impressed. Back then I had used Hypercard and Smalltalk, and it just seemed like we could do a whole lot better, and I had been thinkign about how to do that. I still feel that way a bit, alhough obviously the linking idea has worked well, HTML and http had broad powers in their simplicity, even with links not being first class objects and virtual machines not being standardized, and so on. So, first impressions can be misleading, although I still feel there are major missing pieces or standards. We need to push on to a social semantic desktop, IMHO, and I've tried some in that direction myself...
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
By the way, a little known fact -- the 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon, about a culturally sophisticated networked culture that "defeats" a huge military empire that comes to conquer it, inspired Ted Nelson to work on hypertext (I asked Ted Nelson about this directly when he gave a talk at at IBM Research, and he had forgotten the name of the story, but that's where the name came from), and then his work obviously was one of the inspirations of the web. The story is floating around on the web, like in Google Books:
http://www.google.com/#q=the+skills+of+xanadu
Here is a link to her thesis:
http://www.cfkurtz.com/publications.html
"Kurtz, C.F. 1991. The Evolution of Information Gathering: Operational Constraints. M.A. Thesis, State University of New York at Stony Brook. Also available here. "
http://www.cfkurtz.com/Kurtz_EvolutionOfInformationGathering_1991.pdf
"I present two new approaches to the study of information in foraging theory. First, rather than determine the cost a forager should pay to obtain information, I concentrate on the consequences of information use in an interacting population. I describe a density-dependent model which tracks genotypes with high and low information access through evolutionary time. Stable polymorphisms result. I suggest that the value of information is not monotonically increasing. Second, I present a scheme for partitioning the information used in the decision making process. Three types of information are recognized: internal information, or an individual's internal state; external information, or environmental factors; and relational information, or rules for predicting transformations of internal state. Interactions between the three types are examined in an extension of the basic model."
She says this paper is more succinct, but it is not online: "Kurtz, C.F. 1991. The evolution of information gathering: operational constraints. In From Animals to Animats, eds. Meyer, J.A. and S.W. Wilson. Proc. 1st Int. Conf. on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, Paris, MIT Press."
Basically, as part of her graduate work in Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook (about 1990), my wife (Cynthia Kurtz) did computer simulations of digital organisms, and discovered that sometimes being "dumb" is really being smart, because you don't stick with the smart crowd who ends up competing over the same resource. People did not want to believe her results because they went against all the "foraging theory" of the time. She only got an MA out of that, not a PhD. She presented her results at an early ALife conference. Now people rediscover that effect in smart power grids...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
"In economics, an externality (or transaction spillover) is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices,[1] incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit. A benefit in this case is called a positive externality or external benefit, while a cost is called a negative externality or external cost."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
"The process of enclosure has sometimes been accompanied by force, resistance, and bloodshed, and remains among the most controversial areas of agricultural and economic history in England. Marxist and neo-Marxist historians argue that rich landowners used their control of state processes to appropriate public land for their private benefit. This created a landless working class that provided the labour required in the new industries developing in the north of England. "
Anyway, AC, so that is the kind of reasons you got screwed by the system, and why you are poor when your current birthright is currently about 1/7-billionth of the Earth and ultimately the same percentage of the solar system or beyond. You have a right to part of our cultural and technical capital, but you deny that right for yourself, and for everyone else. See also, on why wealth comes from more than present-day labor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
And that is why the first part of this "Manna" story by Marshall Brain may well be your future (and for the rest of us, too):
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
The problem in the USA, which has been pursuing regressive neoliberalism for decades, is that the US Republicans are the worst sort of Socialists, who privatize profits (Enclosure) while socializing costs (Externalities). A truly socialist country would not do that. As for your suggestion of "America, love its regressive neoliberalism or leave it", well, people can't move as easily as capital encoded in internet packets -- they have family issues, language issues, cultural issues. So most people are stuck in the USA as it goes down the toilet. The USA may well take the whole world with it too, given all its stockpiled WMDs (which is another reason to stay and try to reform it, since where are you gonna hide from widespread US-originated plagues, nuclear fallout, and killer robots?). See also:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
"Neoliberalism As Water Balloon"
http://vimeo.com/6803752
Meanwhile, you are just defending your own assailants because they have misled you with their self-serving "mythology of wealth":
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
That said, local subsistence is one way forward, but so is a basic income, a gift economy, and better democratic planning at all levels of our society.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"I dislike the feeling of being taken advantage of, manipulated, bought, sold and generally given an ear-tag with a number on it. Anybody who fell for this campaign is a giant sucker who deserves to be treated like cattle."
Thanks, AC. Although I guess that is the nature of social pressure as herd movements. Does anyone really want to get left totally alone or, alternatively, trampled?
Your comment reminds me about the original "Prisoner" series, which used to be online over at AMC, but they seem to have taken it down? I only see stuff about the remake here now:
http://www.amctv.com/shows/the-prisoner
Also related (but spoilers as complete episode guides):
http://www.theprisoneronline.com/
By me, about Paul Jones' interesting #noemail experiment, in the context of a 2008 IBM report on unified communications: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/2008-ibm-predicts-five-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications-read-more-ibm-predicts-5-future-trends-that-will-drive-unified-communications/comment-page-1/#comment-441613
===
That IBM report leaves out the idea that a "Social Semantic Desktop" will integrate all our communications (including email-like messages). It kind of fits under "interoperability" but is something beyond that. Ideally, something like my (essentially) peer-to-peer Thunderbird email client (but much better, as a social semantic desktop application) would be able to track all the content on all those systems for me.
I accepted an invitation to Google+ to be in a web conference on "Discussions on the Future of the Economy", to talk about the effect technology is having on economics.
So, am I any happier with a Google+ account? Not so far.
It was fun to play around with the video chat for a few minutes with my wife and kid on another computer. Although now I see that event shows up in my "stream" but it is not clear who can see that; It just happened automatically. I don't think that is shared, but it just is not easily clear who can see it.
Google+ is now just another stream of stuff that I have no local copy of. Anything I put on those servers is lost to me if they go down or I leave the service (unless I go to extra trouble to make a copy). I can't integrate it in with my existing email archive. There is already a lot of stuff in the stream from the people I've added to circles, but I have no easy way to navigate it other that a rather cumbersome and relatively slow web interface. Google now knows anything I search for in that stream.
Google+ is now one more stream of pressure on me. It joins twitter, which I use mostly for microblogging (like links to slashdot posts). But for twitter, I can ignore it mostly as a site and let Thunderbird just keep up with for me using its RSS feed reader functionality for people I follow and I also get email from it otherwise I would never see what people sent me. I don't see how to get an RSS feed of Google+ stuff? Maybe it is there, but it is just one more adhoc learning curve. It looks like you can't do it, except with some third party application like "plusfeed" on appspot. Even with that, which I'm not going to bother to wrestle with right now, I am hostage to Google's good graces for access to the information others want to send me (reminds me of the current problem with high-priced science journals controlling the copyrights on tax-funded research):.
Now Google knows part of my social network. I felt socially pressured to put a current picture of me up on the web, invading my privacy in a way email does not pressure me.
Do I even know when the Logitech camera and microphone are working? Yes, they are supposed to have a red light go on, but to use Google+ chat I had to install opaque proprietary software that I have no idea what it did to my computer. Who audits that kind of stuff? Where do the streams even go when I know they are recording? When I was at IBM Research a decade ago, people were working on indexing video. Yesterday there was a Slashdot article about a DOD project to index videos looking for terrorists, how long is it before all that stuff is routinely screened if it is not already? Is Google going to tell us if it is?
On the plus side, I added you to a circle and you reciprocated. Although I might have felt that had we sent an email back and forth. Why should you have been essentially pressured to make a public social decision about that? Did Google track everything you did to make that decision?
Am I better off with Google+ over everyone usin
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
To second that book recommendation. Great post.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
"Illusory superiority is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests, and the possession of desirable characteristics or personality traits. It is one of many positive illusions relating to the self, and is a phenomenon studied in social psychology. Illusory superiority is often referred to as the above average effect. Other terms include superiority bias, leniency error, sense of relative superiority, the primus inter pares effect, and the Lake Wobegon effect (named after Garrison Keillor's fictional town where "all the children are above average")."
A complementary regression-towards-the-mean effect is that the most really competent people tend to overestimate how competent their peers are relative to themselves.
"People who start off vowing to "change it from the inside" almost always end up just becoming corrupted themselves."
Yes, that is a big risk. You are right that institutions have their own internal dynamics. Langdon Winner talks about this, how a person not filling their role in an organization will be replaced like we might swap out a bad memory stick in a computer. So does Noam Chomsky when he talks about "What makes the mainstream media mainstream".
There are no easy answers, though I tried to "think outside the box" with some of my essays that I linked to.
There is also some useful advice in books like these:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun-at-Work-Livingston/dp/0937063053
But others might suggest that total institutional collapse will be the only way "forward":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse
But I'm not sure we have that "luxury" considering how many WMDs the USA has stockpiled... It would be better and less risky to find a transformational or transcendent way forward to something better.
Better suggestions always welcome.
Thanks for the reply. I still think the situation is more complex than you outlined, and you are stuck in just viewing this through one lens of "regulation is bad". But what about managing "Externalities" through taxes, subsidies, and regulation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
See also (though it ignores the value of health and community):
"Marxism of the Right"
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism."
You think China and Japan and so on are less "socialistic" than the USA?
Neoliberal economics has kept real wages flat for thirty years in the USA, which is part of the reason for the current economic crisis. Related:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Jix4opZuY
Also, the US government would have plenty of money without two (or is it five?) recent needless wars and the Bush tax cuts for the wealth.
All sorts of technologies have been subsidized in the past. Railroads were heavily subsidized, for example.
If you look at solar panels, costs are now dropping for the same reasons your computer chip costs are dropping, a lot of R&D and investment in that area. There is now, according to one report I read, as much research going into PV solar in two years as the entire amount invested in research on it since it was invented. There is a chart of falling prices here:
http://www.solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
That price decrease has little to do with government subsidies (other than pump-priming, to offset all the subsidies to fossil fuels and nuclear, given externalities of those have been generally ignored and "socialized".)
The bottom line: the USA is falling apart because Republicans make the worst socialists -- they privatize gains while socializing costs. Real socialist countries don't do that. That is why Western Europe, in general, is a much happier place than the USA for most people, and most people live longer there. As is Canada. Unfortunately, people can not flow over borders as easily as capital, otherwise much of the USA might just move somewhere with access to health care, cheap college, and so on (those who don't watch Fox News. :-) Though with that said, and it is joking obviously, since cultural ties and family ties keep most people rooted where they are short of a shooting civil war or other broad physical disaster, there are still many good things about US culture, like freedom of speech, which can still be better than in some other countries. But it seems the list of things better about the USA than other countries is getting shorter and shorter.
However, on top of that, there are broad trends from the centralization of wealth due to the increasing value of capital in production relative to human labor, which indeed undermines the paid value of most human labor (and not just in the USA, but eventually everywhere, which is why we will eventually see a new economic system for the 21st century with stuff like a basic income, a gift economy, better planning, and more advanced local subsistence production):
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"The Japanese and Chinese at the peril of their own economies have been subsidizing US consumers, which doesn't speak highly of their economic understanding."
As I see it, a reason for China (but not Japan) to do this was to gain access to US technical know how over the past two decades. So one might say Chinese citizens were essentially being taxed by China to pay for knowledge transfer from the USA. But now that China knows pretty much everything the USA did about making stuff, and is leaping ahead in some areas, things have changed...
But yes, otherwise this is stupid. These countries could just print money (or create credit) and give it to their own citizens (like with a basic income) who can then buy the products and use them in the country.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/6cdc99eaaba91855/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en#09eb7f4c973349f2
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."
Electrical security is just one more reason. Electric cars can help in balancing renewable energy shifts in a smart grid, too.
Why let the state dictate so much? Let the parents decide how to spend that redistributed money to best take care of their families. http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
Interesting analysis by the numbers thanks.
Still, it is also true the cost of some commodities has declined during that time, too. Computing has dropped during that time. So has the cost of housing (good for some, bad for others). And probably the cost of employing labor has dipped a bit (which is both good and bad). The relative premium for some organic food items may be declining.
Solar panel prices have dropped in half, which has huge implications, as GE predicts by 2015 they will be cheaper to use than fossil fuels. That cheap clean energy will in turn eventually drive down other prices (see Julian Simon also).
Are there any other commodities that have gone down in cost during that time?
Quality for some things have also improved. Car quality has improved during that time for the same cost. Medicine has improved some. The internet has gotten better (more content, more choices). Mobile phones are way better for the same price in terms of features. It is hard to capture that in simple numbers.
Some of those commodity rises are also due to the rise of consumption in China.
Still, overall, I tend to agree with your economic pessimism. Our scarcity-oriented economic system built around an income-through-jobs link is unable to handle 21st century trends (especially from the rise of robotics and AI, coupled with limited demand like due to environmentalism).
On alternative economic approaches (by me):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
See also: http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16 ..."
""Cheap labor". That's their whole philosophy in a nutshell
Well, not quite, since as you point out, a certain group line their own pockets, too (see also Smedly Butler).
And also related:
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
Alternatives:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
To agree with your broad point: http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
See the "Money as Debt II - Promises Unleashed" video. Related except:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s
It seems to me that once money has moved to the casino economy (like currency speculation), it is no longer available for use in the real economy. This could cause a currency crisis in the real economy, even though the total amount of currency in the system might be huge.
Robotics are going to have the same effect of a concentration of wealth, according to Marshall Brain.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2356864&cid=36936914
I've been trying to get Richard Stallman and the FSF to consider supporting a campaign (suggesting maybe run by me for pay, so I'm biased, but OK if it was someone else) for fostering the cataloging, creation, and discussion of free software that explores conventional and alternative heterodox economics for a 21st century of abundance for all, based on this appeal:
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/ [responsiblefinance.ch]
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged. This situation reflects the institutional power that the unconditional proponents of main-stream thought continue to exert on university teaching and research. This domination, propagated by the so-called top universities, dates back at least a quarter of a century and is effectively global. However, the very fact that this paradigm persists despite the current crisis, highlights the extent of its power and the dangerousness of its dogmatic character. Teachers and researchers, the signatories of the appeal, assert that this situation restricts the fecundity of research and teaching in economics, finance and management, diverting them as it does from issues critical to society."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee
Lots of other suggestions cole ted by me here:
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
"Velocity of money? No, it's about velocity of knowledge, freedom of the market, lower friction, and overall more wealth."
From: http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/e4638f0fdd9f7ef1?hl=en
Banks' Observation on Money: "Money is a sign of poverty."
Fernhout's Corollary to Banks' Observation on Money: "The degree to which money needs to be handled in a society is inversely proportional to the abundance of imagination, skill, freedom, effort, and community present."
And mathematically:
M = 1 / I * S * F * E * C
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Ptavvs ..."
"A reflective statue is found at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans, having lain there for 1.5 billion years.
Citation needed that it actually causes significant harm?
"If you are willing to work for a shadowy unaccountable government agency that loves to violate the rights of its own countrymen, well, you didn't have much character or moral/ethical fiber to begin with."
AC, The problem with this line of argument is that if no good people work there for that reason, it is bound to be even worse. It's a general problem with the US DOD more broadly. I feel the US military is being horribly misused by US politicans to fight wars whose main point seems to be to line the pockets of those in the war racket (see Smedly Butler), but, if only the worst of the worst join the US security forces because they are being misused, where does that leave us as a country?
I wrote this about the CIA, but it applies equally well to a place like the NSA:
"On dealing with social hurricanes (like the US CIA) "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful. Another theme is exploring the meaning, if true, of a allegation by Wayne Madsen about President Obama's deeper connection to the CIA than was otherwise known."
The thing is, we all need security. The issue is how to go about getting it in a non-ironic way, whcih I suggest here means focusing on intrinsic security and mutual security:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
One other alternative is for civilians to take on more of an interest in security and other public intelligence matters; see:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
Contrast: ""VMR will be an enhanced capability to generate the intelligence required for successful counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations" the agency said."
With: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all.
That said, it seems like a cool project technically, with multiple uses in civilian applications.
Thanks for the example on trees. I guess that is the value in a symbolic project like "The Long Now", to help get people thinking about that:
http://longnow.org/
I've found my optimism has increased with trying to list all the things I'm thankful for before I got to sleep each day, and also getting more sunlight (and vitamin D) and eating better, etc..
The good news is, lots of people are planting all sorts of "trees", like in that Paul Hawken book:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"A leading environmentalist and social activist's examination of the worldwide movement for social and environmental change
Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.
Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another."
But he says in that book how unaware everyone is of what other people around them are doing that is positive. I guess the mainstream media does not focus much on those planting "trees"? Although, maybe, sometimes focusing attention on new trees would get them vandalized? So that inattention may not be all bad.
The number one thing suggested in the book "Small is Possible" (by George McRobie about EF Schumacher's work, from 1981) is to figure out what is going on around you.
Maybe we need a Google Maps for good news about new trees being planted? :-) But maybe we just need something simpler and more local.
Thanks for the history lesson. I can wonder if the same happened in Argentina, too? ... SINCE 1989-90, Argentinaâ(TM)s neoliberal economic model has closely followed the Washington Consensus requirements: trade (tariff reduction) and financial (free capital inflows and outflows) liberalisation; deregulation of the economy (liberalisation of prices of goods); and the âretirementâ(TM) of the State from economic activities (privatisation of the state enterprises, e.g., oil and gas, banks, telecommunications) as well as some of its functions (coverage of social security, for example). This prescription, which has been applied mainly through the medium of the economic reform policies of the Bretton Woods institutions (in particular the IMF), has also shaped the development of many other countries of Latin America. ..."
"Argentina: Sheer neoliberal lunacy"
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/twr137a.htm
"The following article provides the background to the current crisis in Argentina and traces the roots of the crisis to adoption of the neoliberal economic reforms advocated by the IMF.
I can fear you will prove right, sadly. The USA is already so far gone. But the problem is, Mexico did not have nuclear weapons and other WMDs like killer robots to unleash as it descended into madness. The USA, on the other hand...
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."