My wife and I visited Isles, Inc about 18 years ago, to talk about our garden simulator. In Marty Johnson's office he had this quote under his computer monitor: "You can't plow a field by turning it over in your mind".
Of course, if you are a computer programmer or mathematician who spends a lot of time on mental things, that adage may be a bit less true,:-) but it's still a good sentiment about engagement.
I regret now not trying harder to figure out some way we could have worked together back then.
Those videos might be inspiring as far as thinking about the value of what you are doing in Chicago and what is possible.
Although I feel we still need bigger things like a basic income or other broader shifts, too, if our economy continues to implode with rising productivity (like from robotics) coupled with limited demand from currency issues and an environmental ethic and the law of diminsihing returns on having more stuff. Stronger local communities might lead to the energy to make bureaucracies accountable again and get better policies in place?
Related about a new book on US economic problems: http://www.counterpunch.org/mokhiber07292011.html "Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner were at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. this week for a discussion about their book -- Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.... "Five years from now, mark my words -- none of the people responsible for this -- not only not be held accountable -- they will be in more important positions -- that is what would happen in Russia." Rosner pretty much agreed. "My father was a federal prosecutor and my mother was a criminologist, and her speciality was Soviet criminology," Rosner said. "As she read our book -- she kept saying -- Jesus, this sounds like the way it is done there. Every piece of it. You have an entrenched bureaucracy without accountability." Rosner said a "code of silence" protects those complicit in the recent collapse."
That new book mentioned there echoes this old one:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
Stronger local communities might be able to generate more social energy for national (and global) accountability?
"Visions of a Free Society" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjHTrwCstcM
I mentionian "localism" as one way to deal with increasing unemployment towards the end here (as one of four broad apporaches including a basic income, a gift economy, and better democratic resource-based planning): http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
So, all the local efforts can add up nationally. How can we expect to have healthy national politics if our local politics are non-existent or dysfunctional? (I guess the Greens have been saying that for a long time.)
"I thought that if I could just bring free or very low cost t'ai chi classes to less affluent communities, it would help with some of those readily treatable diseases that were going for the most part untreated because of the expense of drugs and lack of access to health care."
Wow, that all sounds wonderful. My wife (who likes Taoism) and I tried some Tai Chi classes a long time ago and my wife liked them especially (they were a little hard for us to get to though at the time). I used to do Aikido and first had a Tai Chi class at a university, like you say. There is one local Tai Chi class not too far from where we live now, but they meet are too early in the morning for her unfortunately. She does Yoga instead though.
On health, while exercise is great for improving health overall, it has mixed results for weight loss, as active exercise tends to make people hungry. But I could imagine Tai Chi is different because it is getting you more in touch with your body, and that is one key to health and eating well.
I lost about fifty pounds (and 20+ BP points) over the last year and a half through a combination of advice similar to what Dr. Joel Fuhrman suggests (eat more vegetables fruits, and beans mainly), plus 5000 IU Vitamin D3 daily. I also much earlier did some fasting (both juice and water fasts) which Dr. Fuhrman also wrote about. But fasting really involves changing your diet to be useful, although it can be useful for resensitizing taste buds (one reasons successful major religions tend to have regular periods of fasting perhaps). I also used a treadmill workstation more in front of the computer (the treadmill sadly shorted out recently though).
Here are related links about stuff that helped me:
While almost everyone agrees most people in the USA need more vitamin D, there is some disagreement about optimal blood levels, and whether that would differ based on ethnicity -- it's a field that needs more research. The three vitamin D links above go from high to low recommendations (all are higher than the new US RDA for adults though).
Iodine has helped my health too (eating more seaweed especially), and supplemental omega-3s, and making green smoothies, and a good multivitamin.
Unfortunately, it can be a bit more expensive to eat this way with fruits and vegetables year round (especially organic ones, but organic is not essential even if good compared to the health benefits of vegetables over refined foods). I talked with one person working at a grocery store who was about to go in for a second heart operation about eating more vegetables, but he said they were too expensive. But insurance pays big bucks for the heart operations. It's a crazy system.
Related: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/treating-the-cause-not-the-illness/ "In 1965, in an impoverished rural county in the Mississippi Delta, the pioneering physician Jack Geiger helped found one of the nationâ(TM)s first community health centers. Many of the children Geiger treated were seriously malnourished, so he began writing âoeprescriptionsâ for food â
"That makes a lot more sense than "quantitative easing" which prints the same amount of money just to give it to a few banks, who then lend it out at rate 10 times that at which they borrowed it."
Parts are on YouTube, and in Money as Debt II there is a great animation of people on a treadmill as debts are created. There is also a section on the "casino economy" where much money ends up just betting on currency fluctuations and such, and is unavailable for transactions in the physical economy.
I liked your points elsewhere about printing extra money, when it is needed, creating more wealth than any inflation. The Social Credit movement argued something like that, and said the printed money should be distributed as a basic income. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who divided the factors of production into only land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny these factors in production, he believed the "cultural inheritance of society" was the primary factor. Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx claimed that labour creates all value. While Douglas did not deny that all costs are ultimately due to labour charges of some sort (past or present), he denied that the present labour of the world creates all wealth. Douglas was careful to distinguish between value, costs and prices. He claimed that one of the factors leading to a misdirection of thought in terms of the nature and function of money was economists' obsession over values and their relation to prices and incomes. While Douglas recognized "value in use" as a legitimate theory of values, he also claimed that values were subjective and not capable of being measured in an objective manner. Thus, he rejected the idea that the role of money is to act as a standard, or measure, of value. Douglas believed that the role of money is distribution of production....
Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."
Anyway, more hopeful/collaborative reading that many people have long been trying to deal with this social disease of greed and fear and ignorance, even while there is plenty to go around, and more and more every day.
"I'm a little less pessimistic reading about others who, faced with the same dire conclusions as mine, choose to get to work to change things."
Glad to hear it. I'm still pessimistic socially though, even as I'm optimistic technologically. But, as Howard Zinn said: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."
"Sometime, I'll drop you an email telling you about my own little local project inspired by the same goals."
Please do. Rene Dubois said: "Think globally, act locally, plan modestly". The last part is usually left off. So you may well have much more success than I with a little local project with a much better chance of real success.
"Now the bloodbath that is happening in Mexico makes sense. We are the human sacrifices to the almighty Market."
Good point. And also, just like some Aztecs thought the sun would come up without human sacrifice, many economists might argue production won't come up without the poor and unemployed as human sacrifices too in a way, the argument being that poverty (including lack of access to health care) creates a willing labor pool: "Cheap Labor Conservatives Issues Guide" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
See also "The Mythology of Wealth": http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 "According to the new mythology, human beings are economic competitors. The "marketplace" is the new "Valhalla", where "economic man" frolics. The "market" we are told, contains its own "rationality". It rewards the efficient. It rewards that list of virtues George Will cites, like "thrift", "delayed gratification" and of course, "hard work". Free competition in the market place "rationally" selects the more "worthy" competitor. Thus, the wealthy are the superior competitors who have "earned" their elite status. If you haven't succeeded it can only be because of your "inferiority".
Before debunking this whole ideology, a few observations are in order. First of all, notice that the hierarchical social order is back. It has a new veneer of "rationality", but it is the same old ugly reality. Elites are "better" than you. The non-elites who do the work have "earned" their position, and are proper objects of scorn. Thus, we have a handful of haves, worthy of admiration and respect, and a large class of industrial serfs who own nothing but their bellies. The theory has changed, but the reality is just the same. Not surprisingly, cheap-labor believers in the "rational" hierarchy are hostile to democracy. In fact, they have decided that democratic government is an enemy to "market efficiency". What Thomas Jefferson won through debunking the old forms of social hierarchy, today's cheap-labor conservative is busy taking back through his new "rational" form of the same old sh*t...."
Anyway, everything has strengths and weaknesses in different situations. But in general, I agree SQL systems can do a lot as a mature technology, and maybe more than some NoSQL advocates understand or are willing to admit.
As in the book, Data & Reality, it can be pretty hard to model data well. Every model make simplifications of reality, and sometimes we find out the choice of simplification was not a good one, especially if needs change. But I also agree with you that good tools can make that easier to handle. I think one big advantage of SQL systems over NoSQL Schema-free systems is that the database schema serves as form of documentation of intent of what is going on. That documentaiton of intent then is traded off against flexibility at the application level.
Ideally, one could use a system without those kind of documentaiton/flexibility tradeoffs.
Due in part to lack of adequate investment in public health research?
Do US Republican generally wanting to privatize gains and socialize costs make them the worst sort of socialists?
"Also, Obama has no plan, he just criticizes other."
I agree that Obama has been a terrible president so far. He blew his chance to make big changes in the first few days by trying to negotiate with idealogues who would rather destroy the USA than lose an election. He could have just declared medicare covers anyone of any age his first day in office (as in, not enforcing age limits), and then moved on from there to ensuring everyone had a basic income (social security for all, withotu age limits) even if there are no more jobs, and moved on from there to bringing our troops home and shifting the US defense budget to the space program.:-)
Related: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/ "This is no surprise, as [propertarian] libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then [propertarian] libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism.... The most fundamental problem with [propertarian] libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments. [Along with health and community.]"
And: "The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
It's a good idea. See: "How to Do Agent-Based Simulations in the Future: From Modeling Social Mechanisms to Emergent Phenomena and Interactive Systems Design " http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/11-06-024.pdf "Since the advent of computers, the natural and engineering sciences have enormously progressed. Computer simulations allow one to understand interactions of physical particles and make sense of astronomical observations, to describe many chemical properties ab initio, and to design energy-efficient aircrafts and safer cars. Today, the use of computational devices is pervasive. Offices, administrations, financial trading, economic exchange, the control of infrastructure networks, and a large share of our communication would not be conceivable without the use of computers anymore. Hence, it would be very surprising, if computers could not make a contribution to a better understanding of social and economic systems. While relevant also for the statistical analysis of data and data-driven efforts to reveal patterns of human interaction, we will focus here on the prospects of computer simulation of social and economic systems. More specifically, we will discuss the techniques of agent-based modeling (ABM) and multi-agent simulation (MAS), including the challenges, perspectives and limitations of the approach. In doing so, we will discuss a number of issues, which have not been covered by the excellent books and review papers available so far. In particular, we will de- scribe the different steps belonging to a thorough agent-based simulation study, and try to explain, how to do them right from a scientific perspective. To some extent, computer simulation can be seen as experimental technique for hypothesis testing and scenario analysis, which can be used complementary and in combination with experiments in real-life, the lab or the Web."
Or what I started almost a decade ago, but then had a kid and left on the back burner: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/simulchaord "This project is mainly to develop simulations of chaordic organizations, processes, and systems under the GPL license, with "chaordic" used as defined by Dee Hock at http://www.chaordic.org/ and in his book "Birth of the Chaordic Age"."
A more general idea along those lines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee "A basic income guarantee (or basic income) is a proposed system of social security, that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households, groups, or nations, in order to provide for individual basic human needs. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Network emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs."... Winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics who fully support a basic income include Herbert Simon, Friedrich Hayek, James Meade, Robert Solow, and Milton Friedman."
If we took half the US GDP, that would be around US$2000 a month per person. The other half of the GDP, equivalent to what it was in the mid 1990s, would presumably be enough to motivate some people to work more who wanted more than that. As a plus for conservatives, we could get rid of the minimum wage law and various other things like that which so many US Republicans hate, given workers would no longer need so much protection as they could decide to live off the basic income or use that money to start their own business.
Thank you too, in return. I just used that point on fish and water writing to someone else today, coincidentally.
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/ "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."
So, it is more than a lack of visionaries. The world has no shortage of would-be visionaries, like Paul Hawken documents: http://www.blessedunrest.com/ "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."
First, you wrote an interesting mix of things in your reply, so thanks. On this point, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_religion#Divine_pharaoh "Egyptologists have long debated the degree to which the pharaoh was considered a god. It seems most likely that the Egyptians viewed royal authority itself as a divine force. Therefore, although the Egyptians recognized that the pharaoh was human and subject to human weakness, they simultaneously viewed him as a god, because the divine power of kingship was incarnate in him. He therefore acted as intermediary between Egypt's people and the gods.[25]"
My point on hunters/gatherers is that we might soon have technology that lets people with access to land use solar panels to collect power for 3D printers that can print more solar panels and 3D printers, along with mining robots and agricultural robots. So, what do you call that lifestyle? See also Marshall Brain's Manna story. http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
We don't need "money" to buy food if we have the land and time and tools to grow it ourselves, or others give it to us (as we give them things), or if the government plans well to produce enough food and distribute it to those who need it, or if, sadly, people feel compelled to steal it (although theft is defined differently in different places, like if deer are "the kings" or not or if wild berries can be picked by anyone on undeveloped property). Those are all alternative ways people get food.
That is why I suggest there have always been five interwoven economies, of which exchange is only one (the others being subsistence, gift, planned, and theft): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
Right now, in our society, exchange is dominant, though it is coupled with a growing rich/poor divide and flat real wages for 30+ years (despite productivity doubling or tripling during that time with the extra value just going to the top 1%). The system is failing in part because capitalism does not work if wealth is too concentrated. The wealthy tend to pull their money out of the real economy and put it in the "casino" economy of stuff like currency speculation, r into government bonds that finance wars, or even just by buying up all the land speculatively from other and keeping it idle etc..
I agree with you on the dysfunctional make-work aspects of our society, and explored that here, outlining many "transactions of decline" that can be used to create jobs, war being one of those transactions of decline, but others include endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanded prisons, increased sickness, and other things: http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Exactly, AC, it is a game (though one with potentially deadly legal ramifications for people who go to prison over copyright issues, even ignoring how stress like the article poster is experienceing can itself be deadly).
So, basically, how do we prove anything about ownership in a digital world of abundance where copies of anything digital are essentially free and can also be easily altered?
The answer is probably that it is very hard to impossible -- it depends on how much trouble people are willing to go to, or how much skill they have. And people in other posts have pointed out how unfair and unreasonable that is -- that justice then depends on how much money you have to hire that skill.
As I said the other day:
"Copyright and a police state (Score:4, Informative)" http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2344152&cid=36854132 "A deep issue that no one seems to be talking about is that ultimately, how can you "prove" you have legal access to any digital pattern at all, or "prove" that you do not have patterns you should not -- without a complete review of every financial and informational transaction you have ever made? Like to see if you gave the original away and so forth? How can you prove you have a right to read some book you purchased and format shifted to digital media? And so on. This is a big issue when there are reward-offered "tip lines" for people to rat on their employers or coworkers. Ultimately, the only way copyright can be enforced in the age to come, where you can store the library of congress on your cell phone in twenty years plus all the music ever recorded, is to have an unbelievably intrusive police state... Is an all pervasive police state what we want in the USA in order to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which is the constitutional intent of copyright? Or is a police state likely to shut down a lot of creativity in a society?"
Ultimately, the BSA and forces like it may be the biggest reason why we move beyond copyright as a society (or the USA will descend into so much dysfunctionality it ebceoms the has-been laughingstock of the world). A related satire I wrote about a year ago on that and sent to the US DOJ: http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html "My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.... There are only a million Americans behind bars for copyright infringement so far. No one complained about the million plus non-violent drug offenders we've had there for years. No one complained about the million plus terrorists we've got there now,
"The question is: will all this lead to an era of unprecedented splendor, or of poverty? I'd say it depends on how fast we can wean ourselfs off of our ideological commitment to capitalism and turn to some form of socialism (technically, a post-scarcity society)."
Please see my other post in this thread or my site for my related comments on these trends: http://www.pdfernhout.net/
Or just my sig below.
Essentially, I feel a big issue is for us to get our socioeconomic house in order before we create so many weapons and competitive processes with all this advanced technology that we accidentally do ourseves in with it. We need to make the social transition first, because our path out of any singularities may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into them. But it is tricky, because better technology makes it easier to solve some social disputes by having a bigger pie. I like James P. Hogan's 1982 "Voyage From Yesyeryear" novel that explores these themes. http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"That post was made by Montgomery Scott when they came for the whales."
Either that or it was made by someone in many other cultures and many other times, before "the market" was enshrined as "God"; the following is by a Harvard theologian: "The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/ "A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of deja vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies...."
Even as a CouchDB user, I've found your comments in this thread interesting, thanks. You might also like the book "Data & Reality" by William Kent on information representation: http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
I agrre with you that changing application needs is a big issue, no matter what system you use.
That said, CouchDB's easy peer-to-peer replication is still pretty neat.:-) Can you point to a FOSS SQL-based system that can easily match that specific feature?
I agree, and more: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science "The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"
By me: 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've been wondering if I should include attention and reputation in there too?
To agree with you: http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html "The Original Affluent Society... Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
And "The mythology of wealth" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 "All of the "laws, ordinances, customs and usages" that regulate control over resources and relationships between people -- including their business relationships -- are nothing more than a set of rules invented by the imagination of some human being -- frequently one who has been dead since the middle ages. Those rights are frequently exchanged for -- get this -- printed pieces of paper with pictures of dead people on them. Where is the value of those pieces of paper? The answer is in your mind, in the mind of the person you are "bargaining" with -- and nowhere else. Itâ(TM)s all a big game. It is our mythology, and it is no more real than belief in Zeus, Hera and Aphrodite."
Thanks for the perspective on the GIS study. Looking again, I also see I might have not read this carefully enough: http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/25/technology/solar-new-york/ "If every one of those roofs had solar panels, when the sun shines the brightest the city could get half its electricity from solar power."
So, that would only be for peak hours (so, four hours a day or so, which is more in agreement with what you said). But in any case, cities usually have resource regions, like Jane Jacobs talks about, so there is no reason NYC can't just have a big solar farm upstate, same as it has watersheds there.
I also live in upstate NY, in a partially passive-solar house (it was a cabin in the Adirondacks that someone expanded with passive-solar additions).
The house has electric heat to avoid combustion because that was before air-to-air heat exchangers were understood, and electric heat is expensive, though still less than I used to pay for oil heat in a drafty place a decade ago. We should improve it more though. We could benefit a lot from solar thermal for hot water. Our house is on a slab though, not a basement, so our options are a bit more limited for upgrades. A heat pump might be a great investment, too. Also related on what is possible with much better design:
"No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Innovative 'Passive Houses'" http://www.google.com/#q=no+furnace
I'm mostly a software developer (including some real-time embedded in the past) and also a writer, and I don't care for heights (even as my father would tell about scampering up a tall mast on a training ship as a young man to wave his hat to the queen of the Netherlands). So while I like all these changes, they end up being more hands-on than I am comfortable doing myself.
I have one emergency solar panel tucked away I have never put up permanently, for example, that I bought in the run-up to the Iraq war when I was unsure what reprisals there would be, just to be able to keep a laptop going if worst came to worst. About eight years later, that panel can probably now be bought for about half the cost. http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
The XPower 1500 portable battery/inverter device I bought to go with it for energy storage failed though and in a fairly short time, probably over a cheap charger that came with it failing and overcharging (causing the battery to vent sulfurous smelling gas so I did not trust it anymore), and so we paid to have it recycled (the shipping etc. costs to have it sent back to the factory for "repair" was pretty high).
But ultimately, we'd like a permanent system "just in case" and also to be more "green" (though that is debatable when you live near hydroelectric power). It looks like, even being on the grid, the costs are looking more and more attractive (with current subsidies, although if fossil fuels and nukes payed the true costs of pollution, health, defense, and risk up-front, renewables probably have been cheaper since the 1970s, so I don't feel bad about the subsidies).
I feel innovations in financing and the spread of trusted brands for doing these kind of improvements is going to have a big effect in getting more people to make changes. But we are not quite there yet. But we are very close. One of the reasons we've put off doing much about that is just the sense that costs keep dropping, so we wait for the next best thing.
Great to see NYPA is hiring -- something like "Lead Real Time Systems Engineer" is tempting for embedded software developers interested in energy issues, even ones with a fear of heights::-) http://www.nypa.gov/careers/default.htm
"you cannot store electricity unless your production is near a hydro dam"
Well, depending on the system and locality, you can also store power as: * compressed air, usually underground, * molten salt, * hydrogen in nickel-metal hydrides, * lifting big weights.
Eventually we might just turn electricity into synthetic biofuels, too. And of course batteries continue to improve.
If power was cheaper during the day, industrial processes might change. For example, you can grind up rock to make great organic fertilizer, but it is energy intensive, so you might only do that during the day. Same with liquifying air to get liquid nitrogen or helium, just do it when power is cheap. I don't know if that intermittent approach would work for some things like metal smelting though. But it might also work for, say, indoor agriculture with grow lights.
Slashdot Mirror
"Postgres-XC"
Cool, thanks.
Just saw Isles (previously mentioned) had some videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3krXLJEfdhQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WX6dcsn-fc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c52hHMHsOGU
etc.
My wife and I visited Isles, Inc about 18 years ago, to talk about our garden simulator. In Marty Johnson's office he had this quote under his computer monitor: "You can't plow a field by turning it over in your mind".
Of course, if you are a computer programmer or mathematician who spends a lot of time on mental things, that adage may be a bit less true, :-) but it's still a good sentiment about engagement.
I regret now not trying harder to figure out some way we could have worked together back then.
Those videos might be inspiring as far as thinking about the value of what you are doing in Chicago and what is possible.
Although I feel we still need bigger things like a basic income or other broader shifts, too, if our economy continues to implode with rising productivity (like from robotics) coupled with limited demand from currency issues and an environmental ethic and the law of diminsihing returns on having more stuff. Stronger local communities might lead to the energy to make bureaucracies accountable again and get better policies in place?
Related about a new book on US economic problems: ... "Five years from now, mark my words -- none of the people responsible for this -- not only not be held accountable -- they will be in more important positions -- that is what would happen in Russia." Rosner pretty much agreed. "My father was a federal prosecutor and my mother was a criminologist, and her speciality was Soviet criminology," Rosner said. "As she read our book -- she kept saying -- Jesus, this sounds like the way it is done there. Every piece of it. You have an entrenched bureaucracy without accountability." Rosner said a "code of silence" protects those complicit in the recent collapse."
http://www.counterpunch.org/mokhiber07292011.html
"Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner were at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. this week for a discussion about their book -- Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.
That new book mentioned there echoes this old one:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."
Stronger local communities might be able to generate more social energy for national (and global) accountability?
"Visions of a Free Society"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjHTrwCstcM
I mentionian "localism" as one way to deal with increasing unemployment towards the end here (as one of four broad apporaches including a basic income, a gift economy, and better democratic resource-based planning):
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
So, all the local efforts can add up nationally. How can we expect to have healthy national politics if our local politics are non-existent or dysfunctional? (I guess the Greens have been saying that for a long time.)
W
"I thought that if I could just bring free or very low cost t'ai chi classes to less affluent communities, it would help with some of those readily treatable diseases that were going for the most part untreated because of the expense of drugs and lack of access to health care."
Wow, that all sounds wonderful. My wife (who likes Taoism) and I tried some Tai Chi classes a long time ago and my wife liked them especially (they were a little hard for us to get to though at the time). I used to do Aikido and first had a Tai Chi class at a university, like you say. There is one local Tai Chi class not too far from where we live now, but they meet are too early in the morning for her unfortunately. She does Yoga instead though.
On health, while exercise is great for improving health overall, it has mixed results for weight loss, as active exercise tends to make people hungry. But I could imagine Tai Chi is different because it is getting you more in touch with your body, and that is one key to health and eating well.
I lost about fifty pounds (and 20+ BP points) over the last year and a half through a combination of advice similar to what Dr. Joel Fuhrman suggests (eat more vegetables fruits, and beans mainly), plus 5000 IU Vitamin D3 daily. I also much earlier did some fasting (both juice and water fasts) which Dr. Fuhrman also wrote about. But fasting really involves changing your diet to be useful, although it can be useful for resensitizing taste buds (one reasons successful major religions tend to have regular periods of fasting perhaps). I also used a treadmill workstation more in front of the computer (the treadmill sadly shorted out recently though).
Here are related links about stuff that helped me:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap"
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Dr. Fuhrman's Nutritarian Pyramid"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
"About vitamin D"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/
http://grassrootshealth.net/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-fuhrman-md/vitamin-d-recommendations_b_800468.html
While almost everyone agrees most people in the USA need more vitamin D, there is some disagreement about optimal blood levels, and whether that would differ based on ethnicity -- it's a field that needs more research. The three vitamin D links above go from high to low recommendations (all are higher than the new US RDA for adults though).
Iodine has helped my health too (eating more seaweed especially), and supplemental omega-3s, and making green smoothies, and a good multivitamin.
Unfortunately, it can be a bit more expensive to eat this way with fruits and vegetables year round (especially organic ones, but organic is not essential even if good compared to the health benefits of vegetables over refined foods). I talked with one person working at a grocery store who was about to go in for a second heart operation about eating more vegetables, but he said they were too expensive. But insurance pays big bucks for the heart operations. It's a crazy system.
Related:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/treating-the-cause-not-the-illness/
"In 1965, in an impoverished rural county in the Mississippi Delta, the pioneering physician Jack Geiger helped found one of the nationâ(TM)s first community health centers. Many of the children Geiger treated were seriously malnourished, so he began writing âoeprescriptionsâ for food â
"That makes a lot more sense than "quantitative easing" which prints the same amount of money just to give it to a few banks, who then lend it out at rate 10 times that at which they borrowed it."
You've probably seen this, but if not, you might like it:
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
Parts are on YouTube, and in Money as Debt II there is a great animation of people on a treadmill as debts are created. There is also a section on the "casino economy" where much money ends up just betting on currency fluctuations and such, and is unavailable for transactions in the physical economy.
I liked your points elsewhere about printing extra money, when it is needed, creating more wealth than any inflation. The Social Credit movement argued something like that, and said the printed money should be distributed as a basic income. ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who divided the factors of production into only land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny these factors in production, he believed the "cultural inheritance of society" was the primary factor. Cultural inheritance is defined as the knowledge, technique and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization. Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx claimed that labour creates all value. While Douglas did not deny that all costs are ultimately due to labour charges of some sort (past or present), he denied that the present labour of the world creates all wealth. Douglas was careful to distinguish between value, costs and prices. He claimed that one of the factors leading to a misdirection of thought in terms of the nature and function of money was economists' obsession over values and their relation to prices and incomes. While Douglas recognized "value in use" as a legitimate theory of values, he also claimed that values were subjective and not capable of being measured in an objective manner. Thus, he rejected the idea that the role of money is to act as a standard, or measure, of value. Douglas believed that the role of money is distribution of production.
Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."
See also for points on the breakign link between work and income, from 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Anyway, more hopeful/collaborative reading that many people have long been trying to deal with this social disease of greed and fear and ignorance, even while there is plenty to go around, and more and more every day.
I don't ag
"I'm a little less pessimistic reading about others who, faced with the same dire conclusions as mine, choose to get to work to change things."
Glad to hear it. I'm still pessimistic socially though, even as I'm optimistic technologically. But, as Howard Zinn said:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."
"Sometime, I'll drop you an email telling you about my own little local project inspired by the same goals."
Please do. Rene Dubois said: "Think globally, act locally, plan modestly". The last part is usually left off. So you may well have much more success than I with a little local project with a much better chance of real success.
Thanks for your other comments.
"Now the bloodbath that is happening in Mexico makes sense. We are the human sacrifices to the almighty Market."
Good point. And also, just like some Aztecs thought the sun would come up without human sacrifice, many economists might argue production won't come up without the poor and unemployed as human sacrifices too in a way, the argument being that poverty (including lack of access to health care) creates a willing labor pool:
"Cheap Labor Conservatives Issues Guide"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
See also "The Mythology of Wealth": ..."
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"According to the new mythology, human beings are economic competitors. The "marketplace" is the new "Valhalla", where "economic man" frolics. The "market" we are told, contains its own "rationality". It rewards the efficient. It rewards that list of virtues George Will cites, like "thrift", "delayed gratification" and of course, "hard work". Free competition in the market place "rationally" selects the more "worthy" competitor. Thus, the wealthy are the superior competitors who have "earned" their elite status. If you haven't succeeded it can only be because of your "inferiority".
Before debunking this whole ideology, a few observations are in order. First of all, notice that the hierarchical social order is back. It has a new veneer of "rationality", but it is the same old ugly reality. Elites are "better" than you. The non-elites who do the work have "earned" their position, and are proper objects of scorn. Thus, we have a handful of haves, worthy of admiration and respect, and a large class of industrial serfs who own nothing but their bellies. The theory has changed, but the reality is just the same. Not surprisingly, cheap-labor believers in the "rational" hierarchy are hostile to democracy. In fact, they have decided that democratic government is an enemy to "market efficiency". What Thomas Jefferson won through debunking the old forms of social hierarchy, today's cheap-labor conservative is busy taking back through his new "rational" form of the same old sh*t.
Thanks. It is suggested here that "Multi-master replication" is not supported, which is what CouchDB excels at.
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Binary_Replication_Tutorial
Contrast with what is easy in that regard for CouchDB:
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Replication
Anyway, everything has strengths and weaknesses in different situations. But in general, I agree SQL systems can do a lot as a mature technology, and maybe more than some NoSQL advocates understand or are willing to admit.
As in the book, Data & Reality, it can be pretty hard to model data well. Every model make simplifications of reality, and sometimes we find out the choice of simplification was not a good one, especially if needs change. But I also agree with you that good tools can make that easier to handle. I think one big advantage of SQL systems over NoSQL Schema-free systems is that the database schema serves as form of documentation of intent of what is going on. That documentaiton of intent then is traded off against flexibility at the application level.
Ideally, one could use a system without those kind of documentaiton/flexibility tradeoffs.
"The problem is that government spends more than it takes it."
Due to borrow and spend conservatives launching war rackets of choice?
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
Instead of tax and spend liberals who at least pay more as they go?
"Smaller government is not a bad thing."
Unless government is too small to account for externalities through taxes, subsidies, and regulation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
And so we pay in our health bills and tax bills (and even inability to eat wild-caught mercurly laden fish) on the back-end the costs we should be paying up-front at the gas pumps and electrical outlets and supermarkets, in which case renewables would have been cheaper than fossil fuels since the 1970s and we would not be having such a health care crisis?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
Or getting scammed by heart surgeons?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
And scammed by dermatologists who are causing by some estimates 30 cancers for every melanoma they prevent?
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/cancer/
Due in part to lack of adequate investment in public health research?
Do US Republican generally wanting to privatize gains and socialize costs make them the worst sort of socialists?
"Also, Obama has no plan, he just criticizes other."
I agree that Obama has been a terrible president so far. He blew his chance to make big changes in the first few days by trying to negotiate with idealogues who would rather destroy the USA than lose an election. He could have just declared medicare covers anyone of any age his first day in office (as in, not enforcing age limits), and then moved on from there to ensuring everyone had a basic income (social security for all, withotu age limits) even if there are no more jobs, and moved on from there to bringing our troops home and shifting the US defense budget to the space program. :-)
Related: ... The most fundamental problem with [propertarian] libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments. [Along with health and community.]"
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"This is no surprise, as [propertarian] libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then [propertarian] libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism.
And:
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
It's a good idea. See:
"How to Do Agent-Based Simulations in the Future: From Modeling Social Mechanisms to Emergent Phenomena and Interactive Systems Design "
http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/11-06-024.pdf
"Since the advent of computers, the natural and engineering sciences have enormously progressed. Computer simulations allow one to understand interactions of physical particles and make sense of astronomical observations, to describe many chemical properties ab initio, and to design energy-efficient aircrafts and safer cars. Today, the use of computational devices is pervasive. Offices, administrations, financial trading, economic exchange, the control of infrastructure networks, and a large share of our communication would not be conceivable without the use of computers anymore. Hence, it would be very surprising, if computers could not make a contribution to a better understanding of social and economic systems. While relevant also for the statistical analysis of data and data-driven efforts to reveal patterns of human interaction, we will focus here on the prospects of computer simulation of social and economic systems. More specifically, we will discuss the techniques of agent-based modeling (ABM) and multi-agent simulation (MAS), including the challenges, perspectives and limitations of the approach. In doing so, we will discuss a number of issues, which have not been covered by the excellent books and review papers available so far. In particular, we will de- scribe the different steps belonging to a thorough agent-based simulation study, and try to explain, how to do them right from a scientific perspective. To some extent, computer simulation can be seen as experimental technique for hypothesis testing and scenario analysis, which can be used complementary and in combination with experiments in real-life, the lab or the Web."
And also:
http://www.brookings.edu/topics/agent-based-models.aspx
Or what I started almost a decade ago, but then had a kid and left on the back burner:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/simulchaord
"This project is mainly to develop simulations of chaordic organizations, processes, and systems under the GPL license, with "chaordic" used as defined by Dee Hock at http://www.chaordic.org/ and in his book "Birth of the Chaordic Age"."
Something on the idea of a campaign to get more free software written about manstream and alternative economics:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2356864&cid=36936914
A more general idea along those lines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee ... Winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics who fully support a basic income include Herbert Simon, Friedrich Hayek, James Meade, Robert Solow, and Milton Friedman."
"A basic income guarantee (or basic income) is a proposed system of social security, that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households, groups, or nations, in order to provide for individual basic human needs. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Network emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs."
If we took half the US GDP, that would be around US$2000 a month per person. The other half of the GDP, equivalent to what it was in the mid 1990s, would presumably be enough to motivate some people to work more who wanted more than that. As a plus for conservatives, we could get rid of the minimum wage law and various other things like that which so many US Republicans hate, given workers would no longer need so much protection as they could decide to live off the basic income or use that money to start their own business.
Thank you too, in return. I just used that point on fish and water writing to someone else today, coincidentally.
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/
"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."
Also related indirectly:
"RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
So, it is more than a lack of visionaries. The world has no shortage of would-be visionaries, like Paul Hawken documents:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"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."
The problem is more like visionaries are filtered out or bought off or changed or isolated or starved or turned into wage slaves doing unrelated stuff to survive. Example:
"The murdering of my years: artists & activists making ends meet"
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_murdering_of_my_years.html?id=iBA7vACOwngC
Related articles on how dissent in academia is systematically suppressed:
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
Yet, things progres anyway, as a tribute to the better side of human nature. Here are examples of GPL'd software that could serve as a base for moving further into exploring alternative economics:
http://p.seppecher.free.fr/jamel/
http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.ryzom.com/en/
There is also a lot of other softwar
"The Pharaoh was not God."
First, you wrote an interesting mix of things in your reply, so thanks. On this point,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_religion#Divine_pharaoh
"Egyptologists have long debated the degree to which the pharaoh was considered a god. It seems most likely that the Egyptians viewed royal authority itself as a divine force. Therefore, although the Egyptians recognized that the pharaoh was human and subject to human weakness, they simultaneously viewed him as a god, because the divine power of kingship was incarnate in him. He therefore acted as intermediary between Egypt's people and the gods.[25]"
Today, "The Market" is often seen as "God" in the USA, as suggested by Harvey Cox, Harvard theologian:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/
My point on hunters/gatherers is that we might soon have technology that lets people with access to land use solar panels to collect power for 3D printers that can print more solar panels and 3D printers, along with mining robots and agricultural robots. So, what do you call that lifestyle? See also Marshall Brain's Manna story.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
We don't need "money" to buy food if we have the land and time and tools to grow it ourselves, or others give it to us (as we give them things), or if the government plans well to produce enough food and distribute it to those who need it, or if, sadly, people feel compelled to steal it (although theft is defined differently in different places, like if deer are "the kings" or not or if wild berries can be picked by anyone on undeveloped property). Those are all alternative ways people get food.
That is why I suggest there have always been five interwoven economies, of which exchange is only one (the others being subsistence, gift, planned, and theft):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
Right now, in our society, exchange is dominant, though it is coupled with a growing rich/poor divide and flat real wages for 30+ years (despite productivity doubling or tripling during that time with the extra value just going to the top 1%). The system is failing in part because capitalism does not work if wealth is too concentrated. The wealthy tend to pull their money out of the real economy and put it in the "casino" economy of stuff like currency speculation, r into government bonds that finance wars, or even just by buying up all the land speculatively from other and keeping it idle etc..
I agree with you on the dysfunctional make-work aspects of our society, and explored that here, outlining many "transactions of decline" that can be used to create jobs, war being one of those transactions of decline, but others include endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanded prisons, increased sickness, and other things:
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Or we can try to move beyond "work"; some ideas on that by others:
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjHTrwCstcM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ArkJmUOIqM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neNwAZSBMb0
I don't think v
"That is basically the game the BSA plays. And they're very good at it, and will most likely win."
I should have added to my other reply that this is a good reason to stick to free software...
Exactly, AC, it is a game (though one with potentially deadly legal ramifications for people who go to prison over copyright issues, even ignoring how stress like the article poster is experienceing can itself be deadly).
So, basically, how do we prove anything about ownership in a digital world of abundance where copies of anything digital are essentially free and can also be easily altered?
The answer is probably that it is very hard to impossible -- it depends on how much trouble people are willing to go to, or how much skill they have. And people in other posts have pointed out how unfair and unreasonable that is -- that justice then depends on how much money you have to hire that skill.
As I said the other day:
"Copyright and a police state (Score:4, Informative)"
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2344152&cid=36854132
"A deep issue that no one seems to be talking about is that ultimately, how can you "prove" you have legal access to any digital pattern at all, or "prove" that you do not have patterns you should not -- without a complete review of every financial and informational transaction you have ever made? Like to see if you gave the original away and so forth? How can you prove you have a right to read some book you purchased and format shifted to digital media? And so on. This is a big issue when there are reward-offered "tip lines" for people to rat on their employers or coworkers. Ultimately, the only way copyright can be enforced in the age to come, where you can store the library of congress on your cell phone in twenty years plus all the music ever recorded, is to have an unbelievably intrusive police state... Is an all pervasive police state what we want in the USA in order to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which is the constitutional intent of copyright? Or is a police state likely to shut down a lot of creativity in a society?"
Ultimately, the BSA and forces like it may be the biggest reason why we move beyond copyright as a society (or the USA will descend into so much dysfunctionality it ebceoms the has-been laughingstock of the world). A related satire I wrote about a year ago on that and sent to the US DOJ: ... There are only a million Americans behind bars for copyright infringement so far. No one complained about the million plus non-violent drug offenders we've had there for years. No one complained about the million plus terrorists we've got there now,
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
"My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
"The question is: will all this lead to an era of unprecedented splendor, or of poverty? I'd say it depends on how fast we can wean ourselfs off of our ideological commitment to capitalism and turn to some form of socialism (technically, a post-scarcity society)."
Yes -- Marshall Brain says much the same in "Manna". And Iain Banks says "Money is a sign of poverty." Bob Black writes about this too.
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Please see my other post in this thread or my site for my related comments on these trends: http://www.pdfernhout.net/
Or just my sig below.
Essentially, I feel a big issue is for us to get our socioeconomic house in order before we create so many weapons and competitive processes with all this advanced technology that we accidentally do ourseves in with it. We need to make the social transition first, because our path out of any singularities may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into them. But it is tricky, because better technology makes it easier to solve some social disputes by having a bigger pie. I like James P. Hogan's 1982 "Voyage From Yesyeryear" novel that explores these themes.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"That post was made by Montgomery Scott when they came for the whales."
Either that or it was made by someone in many other cultures and many other times, before "the market" was enshrined as "God"; the following is by a Harvard theologian: ..."
"The Market as God: Living in the new dispensation"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/
"A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.
Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of deja vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies.
Even as a CouchDB user, I've found your comments in this thread interesting, thanks. You might also like the book "Data & Reality" by William Kent on information representation:
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
I agrre with you that changing application needs is a big issue, no matter what system you use.
That said, CouchDB's easy peer-to-peer replication is still pretty neat. :-) Can you point to a FOSS SQL-based system that can easily match that specific feature?
I agree, and more: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"
And: "Useless Studies, Real Harm"
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/useless-pharmaceutical-studies-real-harm.html
On alternatives:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://drfuhrman.com/ http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/cancer/
Fasting can help some too.
By me: 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've been wondering if I should include attention and reputation in there too?
So, there are alternatives to the exchange economy. Also"
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6928744.ece
"Former teacher Heidemarie Schwermer has lived without money in Germany for 13 years. Our writer finds out how she does it."
Think also about did people live before money existed?
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
But back then not all land was "privatized" and hoarded and rented for money... So people could hunt and gather.
Note also that "money", like fiat dollars, is essentially imaginary.
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
To agree with you: http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html ... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
"The Original Affluent Society... Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.
And "The mythology of wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"All of the "laws, ordinances, customs and usages" that regulate control over resources and relationships between people -- including their business relationships -- are nothing more than a set of rules invented by the imagination of some human being -- frequently one who has been dead since the middle ages. Those rights are frequently exchanged for -- get this -- printed pieces of paper with pictures of dead people on them. Where is the value of those pieces of paper? The answer is in your mind, in the mind of the person you are "bargaining" with -- and nowhere else. Itâ(TM)s all a big game. It is our mythology, and it is no more real than belief in Zeus, Hera and Aphrodite."
On the wheels coming off our system (scary, but incomplete as it ignores automation and the general decline of the paid value of most human labor, so it will be worse):
http://www.aftershockeconomy.com/
http://w3.newsmax.com/a/aftershockb/video.cfm
On moving beyond that (by me):
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
How do you prove a "receipt" is valid? :-)
Thanks for the perspective on the GIS study. Looking again, I also see I might have not read this carefully enough:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/25/technology/solar-new-york/
"If every one of those roofs had solar panels, when the sun shines the brightest the city could get half its electricity from solar power."
So, that would only be for peak hours (so, four hours a day or so, which is more in agreement with what you said). But in any case, cities usually have resource regions, like Jane Jacobs talks about, so there is no reason NYC can't just have a big solar farm upstate, same as it has watersheds there.
I also live in upstate NY, in a partially passive-solar house (it was a cabin in the Adirondacks that someone expanded with passive-solar additions).
The house has electric heat to avoid combustion because that was before air-to-air heat exchangers were understood, and electric heat is expensive, though still less than I used to pay for oil heat in a drafty place a decade ago. We should improve it more though. We could benefit a lot from solar thermal for hot water. Our house is on a slab though, not a basement, so our options are a bit more limited for upgrades. A heat pump might be a great investment, too. Also related on what is possible with much better design:
"No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Innovative 'Passive Houses'"
http://www.google.com/#q=no+furnace
I'm mostly a software developer (including some real-time embedded in the past) and also a writer, and I don't care for heights (even as my father would tell about scampering up a tall mast on a training ship as a young man to wave his hat to the queen of the Netherlands). So while I like all these changes, they end up being more hands-on than I am comfortable doing myself.
I have one emergency solar panel tucked away I have never put up permanently, for example, that I bought in the run-up to the Iraq war when I was unsure what reprisals there would be, just to be able to keep a laptop going if worst came to worst. About eight years later, that panel can probably now be bought for about half the cost.
http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
The XPower 1500 portable battery/inverter device I bought to go with it for energy storage failed though and in a fairly short time, probably over a cheap charger that came with it failing and overcharging (causing the battery to vent sulfurous smelling gas so I did not trust it anymore), and so we paid to have it recycled (the shipping etc. costs to have it sent back to the factory for "repair" was pretty high).
But ultimately, we'd like a permanent system "just in case" and also to be more "green" (though that is debatable when you live near hydroelectric power). It looks like, even being on the grid, the costs are looking more and more attractive (with current subsidies, although if fossil fuels and nukes payed the true costs of pollution, health, defense, and risk up-front, renewables probably have been cheaper since the 1970s, so I don't feel bad about the subsidies).
I feel innovations in financing and the spread of trusted brands for doing these kind of improvements is going to have a big effect in getting more people to make changes. But we are not quite there yet. But we are very close. One of the reasons we've put off doing much about that is just the sense that costs keep dropping, so we wait for the next best thing.
Great to see NYPA is hiring -- something like "Lead Real Time Systems Engineer" is tempting for embedded software developers interested in energy issues, even ones with a fear of heights: :-)
http://www.nypa.gov/careers/default.htm
Or so said Alan Kay, more or less, arguing for open reference implementations.
"you cannot store electricity unless your production is near a hydro dam"
Well, depending on the system and locality, you can also store power as:
* compressed air, usually underground,
* molten salt,
* hydrogen in nickel-metal hydrides,
* lifting big weights.
Eventually we might just turn electricity into synthetic biofuels, too. And of course batteries continue to improve.
If power was cheaper during the day, industrial processes might change. For example, you can grind up rock to make great organic fertilizer, but it is energy intensive, so you might only do that during the day. Same with liquifying air to get liquid nitrogen or helium, just do it when power is cheap. I don't know if that intermittent approach would work for some things like metal smelting though. But it might also work for, say, indoor agriculture with grow lights.