A variety of solutions is great, even if mainstream nuclear may be questionable given our social systems being unable to have the required transparancy and accountability.
But 100% solar is not "insane", especially with energy storage. For energy storage, molten salt, compressed air, and lifting weights or water are all currently viable options, with more on the way, but it is still a bit awkward compared to much better batteries or fuel cells. But those are not unmanageable compared to the kind of things civil engineers and industrial engineers already manage. Storing hydrogen in nickel-metal hydrides may be a workable safe solution. http://www.hydrogencomponents.com/hydride.html
Fossil fuels use a lot of land already for mining and transportation and rights of ways, which could be used for solar. We could have solar roadways, too: http://www.solarroadways.com/
Also, about 50% of the US land area is devoted to the production of animal products (mostly growing grain for livestock) so clearly the USA is willing to devote huge amounts of land for questionable endeavors (as animal products and refined grains together ingested in mass quantities are killing many Americans who should be eating more vegetables, fruits, and beans instead).
So, people in the USA could cut back 2% on animal products and be healthier and get cheap sustainable power from that freed up land, as that is as much land as it would take to go all solar. Having lived near working farms sometimes, most of them look like moonscape industrial wastelands a lot of the time anyway, and many are dosed regularly with pesticides, so I'm not sure solar would be that much of a worse thing -- it probably would be better for the groundwater. Maybe more native animals and plants might live between panels than on poisoned farms?
New York City just did a study that it could supply half its electricity by solar roofs, so we may not even need that much other land devoted to solar. Also, energy efficiency and using solar as process heat directly instead of electricity can cut the land area needed too.
So, I'm not saying we will go 100% solar as you are right about geothermal and wind etc., and there is algae too, and we may even see hot or cold fusion, but 100% solar is not "insane" in any way I can see, just unlikely.
Still, as I see it, solar is so convenient being quiet and low maintenance, that once more innovation goes into it, it will likely be cheaper than anything other than some type of fusion. Now that solar being at grid parity is three to five years away, it is within the planning horizons of US companies. I read recently in an article interviewing a researcher in thin silicon-based panels that something like as much money is now going into PV solar research in two years as since it was invented.
Lots of agreement up until the bit about transportation fuels; see: http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm "So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
That's just one estimate, and the author there says it is a guestimate, but the point is, we probably don't need the oil at all.
Also, not sure why you wrote "UNconstitutional"? Seems constitutional to me, even though the same thing happened to Kennedy when he started printing money instead of borrowing it.
"Whats wrong with government spending money to create jobs?"
While I'm sympathetic to the government subsidizing projects if the government is correcting for some externalities, overall, a tax-funded basic income would be a better and more general idea; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee
There are plenty of things that need doing, like raising children well, or comforting the dying, or being an informed citizen or good neighbor, that ideally should not be "jobs".
But even though born in the USA, my parents were both from the Netherlands and I've visited there, and so I tend to think most US politics related to economics is crazy as it is based on false assumptions about human nature and what is possible with decently run government that better accounts for market externalities and focuses more on mutual/intrinsic security than a war racket.
I agree with you on banks, but as for "voluntary trades", if all the land was enclosed through military force (see the enclosure acts or the hisotry of displacing natives in the Americas), preventing people from hunting and gathering or eventually using advanced nanotech to make solar panels and food in their self-replicating 3D printers from local raw materials, then what is voluntary about having to become a wage slave in order to get food and other goods? That is an argument for a "basic income" as a human right to redress the enclosure and privatization of most public resources.
Also, when one party is at a huge finanical or informational or legal disadvantage to another, including by being pushed to try addictive products like the original "Coca-Cola", it is hard to consider any trade "voluntary", as huge concentrations of wealth tend to reshape the legal-socioeconomic landscape in their favor (including by advertising and lobbying). Related:
"Cheap-Labor Conservative Issues Guide" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
There are other types of economic transactions, too, beyond exchange and subsistence, like gift giving, planning, and theft -- the last being something the US banking industry seems good at, as in, "give us trillions of dollars or we break-a your economy"). See also on the five economies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
Local solar panels are at least a step to breaking out of that.
"That is, no matter how terribly inefficient you are at producing A and B, it still makes sense to trade with you."
From the Wikipedia article on the subject: "Full employment - if one or other of the economies has less than full employment of factors of production, then this excess capacity must usually be used up before the comparative advantage reasoning can be applied."
With rising unemployment due to robotics and other automation, better design, accumulating infrastructure, eventually cheap solar and fusion energy that replaces labor, and voluntary social networks, in the face of limited demand, that key assumption of "comparative advantage" is invalid. So, then arguments can be made for tariffs, subsidies, and so on.
If externalities were accounted for (pollution, risk, disease, war), renewables have been cheaper since the 1970s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power "The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy."
"Superior lightweight alternatives are being embraced except for those companies with time and money to burn."
Please list them with pros and cons.
BTW, Java was a stupid idea (VisualWorks Smalltalk was better then and might still be), but after fifteen years or so of suffering, there is a lot of good stuff about the Java platform IMHO, both code libraries and including the use of the JVM for other languages. Android is based around a version of Java. Everything has its problems. Java could use a lot more attention on the desktop, and I prefer a message passing model over a function calling model myself. Too bad Java has not been free-as-in-freedom from the start or it would have gone much further.
Anyway, I'd be curious what you thought the alternatives were.
You are right. Mir should have been kept flying for future raw materials as well as for historical significance. Maybe some ion thrusters could have done the job of compensating for atmospheric drag, like were used on the recent space probe Dawn that went to Vesta.
And the same was true for every shuttle launched and every external tank -- they all should have been kept in orbit for raw materials, with crew returned in a small capsule. The Space Studies Institute had a study about twenty years ago that for a small decrease in payload capacity, every shuttle external tank could have been boosted into orbit.
The whole US space program in that sense was very short sighted to return anything from space, even if it would have taken a bit of extra propellant to keep it up there. Even now, the space shuttles should have been left docked to the space station to expand it and use later for raw materials. All "trash" should be left in orbit too, for later use, for the reasons you outline. Instead, a major part of the final shuttle mission was taking trash back from orbit. That is so stupid energetically and so short sighted.
In space, you can just take a big mirror and melt stuff down. Maybe we can't do that well yet (like containing molten stuff) but we will someday. Or we will have nanotech to do it.
I worked with someone at IBM who at the time had an IBM Forth, but the PC division just was living in its own world. Forth would have been far more powerful and exapndable and easier to use than DOS.
Glad you found that interesting, if, admittedly, pessimistic. While the text is not on his website like the Underground History of American Education book, this other book by him talks more about his own teaching experience, including breaking the "rules" on behalf of his students, and offers more solutions
"A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto" http://www.amazon.com/Different-Kind-Teacher-American-Schooling/dp/1893163210 "John Taylor Gatto analyzes the roots of the modern American education system, detailing how it was designed to foster economic interests and facilitate management of the labor force. He then outlines ways to revitalize the system, advocating greater emphasis on critical analysis, creativity, practicality, and real-world exposure in the curriculum. He also calls on educators and administrators to acknowledge young people's need for a spiritual and ethical framework upon which to build a good life."
It's always an issue with a problematical institution -- do you tell all the good caring people to leave and so it gets worse, or do you ask the people to care to hang in there and make it not as bad as it could have been while still letting it grind on? It's a tough situation. At least understanding it better may help in avoiding burnout. One important thing to remember about burnout is that it generally only happens to the people who really care. So, if you look around you and see people who look burned out, remember each of them was a person capable of caring and who probably still does, deep down.
Hope you and your students are getting your vitamin D if you all are indoors a lot. The human body is not well adapted to spending most of the day indoors and then traveling around in enclosed vehicles.
"figuratively speaking that's what the future holds for those kids, as their future has already been eaten by their great grandparents and grandparents and parents, who voted themselves a system, that promoted bread and circuses, income transfer from the young and unborn to the old and the dead."
True enough, sadly, especially when you consider social security and medicare, and if ou assume the money on schooling is mostly misspent like John Taylor Gatto or John Holt suggest. Still, with robotics and other automation, 3D printing, better design, voluntary social networks, and accumulation of infrastructure, and so on, the future may still be bright. Stuff like Social Security or the US debt may become meaningless when money has less value (like Iain Banks says, "Money is a sign of poverty.")
I like the Peter Schiff video you link to (even as I can quibble that he may ignore some issues like the USA having the only intact major economy after WWII allowing expansionism, or ignoring an explanatory reason the chinese made stuff for the USA as a way to gain access to US technology to bootstrap themselves and gain political advantage, as a sort of tax on Chinese workers). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj8rMwdQf6k
I put together a knol on the deeper issues, and why the kind of business cycles and bubbles Peter Schiff talked about are only some of the trends, where deeper trends of rising productivity in the face of limited demand are createing permanent structural unemployment (without other major changes) -- so his explanation is incomplete, like he ignores no net job growth in the 2000s and flat real wages for three decades in the USA despite productivity increase during those decades by a factor of two to three times. http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Redistributism, but to families as basic income: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html "New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not. "
So, at home, library, museum, or business, technology is delivering the goods (physical or digital) and making these places all a lot better.
With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still considered a problem area, see:
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over" http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools? Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on d
"It's well-known that the entire college system is a huge money-making scheme, and quality has gone down in favor of appealing to more students and drawing more money. "
From ways to deal with joblessness: http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery "Increased schooling expectations (for example jobs that once done by people without even a high school diploma like child care now may require a graduate degree as a qualification) have led to an increased number of jobs in teaching as well as kept young people out of the labor market. Professor David Goodstein in his "The Big Crunch" essay suggests an exponential growth trend in academia also continued into the 1970s, but has ended now, leading to an oversupply of people with PhDs and other advanced degrees relative to the needs of academia. This has led to some of the inflation of academic requirements for various jobs given the oversupply of people with degrees, which in turn has led to even more schooling to get a degree, as a form of academic certification arms race."
Slashdot Mirror
A variety of solutions is great, even if mainstream nuclear may be questionable given our social systems being unable to have the required transparancy and accountability.
But 100% solar is not "insane", especially with energy storage. For energy storage, molten salt, compressed air, and lifting weights or water are all currently viable options, with more on the way, but it is still a bit awkward compared to much better batteries or fuel cells. But those are not unmanageable compared to the kind of things civil engineers and industrial engineers already manage. Storing hydrogen in nickel-metal hydrides may be a workable safe solution.
http://www.hydrogencomponents.com/hydride.html
Fossil fuels use a lot of land already for mining and transportation and rights of ways, which could be used for solar. We could have solar roadways, too:
http://www.solarroadways.com/
Also, about 50% of the US land area is devoted to the production of animal products (mostly growing grain for livestock) so clearly the USA is willing to devote huge amounts of land for questionable endeavors (as animal products and refined grains together ingested in mass quantities are killing many Americans who should be eating more vegetables, fruits, and beans instead).
Going 100% solar would only take 1% or so of the USA, maybe less.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php
So, people in the USA could cut back 2% on animal products and be healthier and get cheap sustainable power from that freed up land, as that is as much land as it would take to go all solar. Having lived near working farms sometimes, most of them look like moonscape industrial wastelands a lot of the time anyway, and many are dosed regularly with pesticides, so I'm not sure solar would be that much of a worse thing -- it probably would be better for the groundwater. Maybe more native animals and plants might live between panels than on poisoned farms?
New York City just did a study that it could supply half its electricity by solar roofs, so we may not even need that much other land devoted to solar. Also, energy efficiency and using solar as process heat directly instead of electricity can cut the land area needed too.
So, I'm not saying we will go 100% solar as you are right about geothermal and wind etc., and there is algae too, and we may even see hot or cold fusion, but 100% solar is not "insane" in any way I can see, just unlikely.
Still, as I see it, solar is so convenient being quiet and low maintenance, that once more innovation goes into it, it will likely be cheaper than anything other than some type of fusion. Now that solar being at grid parity is three to five years away, it is within the planning horizons of US companies. I read recently in an article interviewing a researcher in thin silicon-based panels that something like as much money is now going into PV solar research in two years as since it was invented.
More on GE:
http://ceramics.org/ceramictechtoday/2011/06/01/ge-expands-on-thin-film-solar-becomes-near-term-grid-parity-believer/
Related on trends: http://solarbuzz.com/
Lots of agreement up until the bit about transportation fuels; see:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
That's just one estimate, and the author there says it is a guestimate, but the point is, we probably don't need the oil at all.
Also, not sure why you wrote "UNconstitutional"? Seems constitutional to me, even though the same thing happened to Kennedy when he started printing money instead of borrowing it.
Also, if accounting for externalities, renewables have probably been cheaper than fossil fuels for decades. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://warisaracket.org/semperfi.html
"Whats wrong with government spending money to create jobs?"
While I'm sympathetic to the government subsidizing projects if the government is correcting for some externalities, overall, a tax-funded basic income would be a better and more general idea; see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee
There are plenty of things that need doing, like raising children well, or comforting the dying, or being an informed citizen or good neighbor, that ideally should not be "jobs".
Some other economic reform ideas I've collected are outlined on my site:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
But even though born in the USA, my parents were both from the Netherlands and I've visited there, and so I tend to think most US politics related to economics is crazy as it is based on false assumptions about human nature and what is possible with decently run government that better accounts for market externalities and focuses more on mutual/intrinsic security than a war racket.
See also:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
"RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
I agree with you on banks, but as for "voluntary trades", if all the land was enclosed through military force (see the enclosure acts or the hisotry of displacing natives in the Americas), preventing people from hunting and gathering or eventually using advanced nanotech to make solar panels and food in their self-replicating 3D printers from local raw materials, then what is voluntary about having to become a wage slave in order to get food and other goods? That is an argument for a "basic income" as a human right to redress the enclosure and privatization of most public resources.
Also, when one party is at a huge finanical or informational or legal disadvantage to another, including by being pushed to try addictive products like the original "Coca-Cola", it is hard to consider any trade "voluntary", as huge concentrations of wealth tend to reshape the legal-socioeconomic landscape in their favor (including by advertising and lobbying). Related:
"Cheap-Labor Conservative Issues Guide"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
There are other types of economic transactions, too, beyond exchange and subsistence, like gift giving, planning, and theft -- the last being something the US banking industry seems good at, as in, "give us trillions of dollars or we break-a your economy"). See also on the five economies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
Local solar panels are at least a step to breaking out of that.
"That is, no matter how terribly inefficient you are at producing A and B, it still makes sense to trade with you."
From the Wikipedia article on the subject: "Full employment - if one or other of the economies has less than full employment of factors of production, then this excess capacity must usually be used up before the comparative advantage reasoning can be applied."
With rising unemployment due to robotics and other automation, better design, accumulating infrastructure, eventually cheap solar and fusion energy that replaces labor, and voluntary social networks, in the face of limited demand, that key assumption of "comparative advantage" is invalid. So, then arguments can be made for tariffs, subsidies, and so on.
As for efficiency, note that even GE, makers of gas turbines and nuclear power plants, say solar may be cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear by 2015. Look at the graphs for yourself:
http://solarbuzz.com/facts-and-figures/retail-price-environment/module-prices
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/solar-may-be-cheaper-than-fossil-power-in-five-years-ge-says.html
"You forgot flying cars! In 20 years we should all have flying cars. And fusion. And holographic storage. And..."
We do have all those things more or less. Or is that the joke based on recent slashdot stories?
http://www.terrafugia.com/
GE 500GB holographics disks
Rossi Cold Fusion E-Cat
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-06-27/tech/fusion_1_hot-fusion-holy-grail-junk-mail?_s=PM:TECH
Agreeing, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Taxes, subsidies, and regulation are all ways of dealing with externalities through government planning affecting the market.
US Republicans are the worst sort of regressive "socialists" -- they regularly privatize profits but socialize costs.
Renewables have probably been cheaper that fossil fuels and nuclear, accounting for externalities, since the 1970s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
The total is problematical, but interesting links on the true costs of oil: http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
On the odd energetics of gasoline made using natural gas and electricity vs. plain electric cars:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
Why safer electric cars should be free:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/6cdc99eaaba91855/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en#09eb7f4c973349f2
See also my presentation here on five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-26/solar-may-be-cheaper-than-fossil-power-in-five-years-ge-says.html
If externalities were accounted for (pollution, risk, disease, war), renewables have been cheaper since the 1970s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy."
"Superior lightweight alternatives are being embraced except for those companies with time and money to burn."
Please list them with pros and cons.
BTW, Java was a stupid idea (VisualWorks Smalltalk was better then and might still be), but after fifteen years or so of suffering, there is a lot of good stuff about the Java platform IMHO, both code libraries and including the use of the JVM for other languages. Android is based around a version of Java. Everything has its problems. Java could use a lot more attention on the desktop, and I prefer a message passing model over a function calling model myself. Too bad Java has not been free-as-in-freedom from the start or it would have gone much further.
Anyway, I'd be curious what you thought the alternatives were.
So everyone will just surf the web on cartrips, or talk to each other, or have lunch together, with a different interior seat configuration.
You are right. Mir should have been kept flying for future raw materials as well as for historical significance. Maybe some ion thrusters could have done the job of compensating for atmospheric drag, like were used on the recent space probe Dawn that went to Vesta.
And the same was true for every shuttle launched and every external tank -- they all should have been kept in orbit for raw materials, with crew returned in a small capsule. The Space Studies Institute had a study about twenty years ago that for a small decrease in payload capacity, every shuttle external tank could have been boosted into orbit.
The whole US space program in that sense was very short sighted to return anything from space, even if it would have taken a bit of extra propellant to keep it up there. Even now, the space shuttles should have been left docked to the space station to expand it and use later for raw materials. All "trash" should be left in orbit too, for later use, for the reasons you outline. Instead, a major part of the final shuttle mission was taking trash back from orbit. That is so stupid energetically and so short sighted.
In space, you can just take a big mirror and melt stuff down. Maybe we can't do that well yet (like containing molten stuff) but we will someday. Or we will have nanotech to do it.
http://visions2200.com/SpaceHabitat.html
I worked with someone at IBM who at the time had an IBM Forth, but the PC division just was living in its own world. Forth would have been far more powerful and exapndable and easier to use than DOS.
Glad you found that interesting, if, admittedly, pessimistic. While the text is not on his website like the Underground History of American Education book, this other book by him talks more about his own teaching experience, including breaking the "rules" on behalf of his students, and offers more solutions
"A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto"
http://www.amazon.com/Different-Kind-Teacher-American-Schooling/dp/1893163210
"John Taylor Gatto analyzes the roots of the modern American education system, detailing how it was designed to foster economic interests and facilitate management of the labor force. He then outlines ways to revitalize the system, advocating greater emphasis on critical analysis, creativity, practicality, and real-world exposure in the curriculum. He also calls on educators and administrators to acknowledge young people's need for a spiritual and ethical framework upon which to build a good life."
Another book by him as well:
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/0865714487
It's always an issue with a problematical institution -- do you tell all the good caring people to leave and so it gets worse, or do you ask the people to care to hang in there and make it not as bad as it could have been while still letting it grind on? It's a tough situation. At least understanding it better may help in avoiding burnout. One important thing to remember about burnout is that it generally only happens to the people who really care. So, if you look around you and see people who look burned out, remember each of them was a person capable of caring and who probably still does, deep down.
Hope you and your students are getting your vitamin D if you all are indoors a lot. The human body is not well adapted to spending most of the day indoors and then traveling around in enclosed vehicles.
We homeschool/unschool too. Remember, these parents are also the product of schooling... For solutions, see my other comments to this story, including just giving the school money directly to parents as a basic income so they can homeschool more easily:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2347524&cid=36890548
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2347524&cid=36890640
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2347524&cid=36890476
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2347524&cid=36890432
"figuratively speaking that's what the future holds for those kids, as their future has already been eaten by their great grandparents and grandparents and parents, who voted themselves a system, that promoted bread and circuses, income transfer from the young and unborn to the old and the dead."
True enough, sadly, especially when you consider social security and medicare, and if ou assume the money on schooling is mostly misspent like John Taylor Gatto or John Holt suggest. Still, with robotics and other automation, 3D printing, better design, voluntary social networks, and accumulation of infrastructure, and so on, the future may still be bright. Stuff like Social Security or the US debt may become meaningless when money has less value (like Iain Banks says, "Money is a sign of poverty.")
I like the Peter Schiff video you link to (even as I can quibble that he may ignore some issues like the USA having the only intact major economy after WWII allowing expansionism, or ignoring an explanatory reason the chinese made stuff for the USA as a way to gain access to US technology to bootstrap themselves and gain political advantage, as a sort of tax on Chinese workers).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj8rMwdQf6k
Here is a video on 21st economics economics I made that can help understand how our kids may still have a good future:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
I put together a knol on the deeper issues, and why the kind of business cycles and bubbles Peter Schiff talked about are only some of the trends, where deeper trends of rising productivity in the face of limited demand are createing permanent structural unemployment (without other major changes) -- so his explanation is incomplete, like he ignores no net job growth in the 2000s and flat real wages for three decades in the USA despite productivity increase during those decades by a factor of two to three times.
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Redistributism, but to families as basic income: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not. "
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
This essay could be considered supporting Alan Kay's suggestion that
"the computer revolution hasn't happened yet".
http://squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/face_to_face.html
Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools
by Paul D. Fernhout
January, 2007
Educational technology has been a big success at homes, in libraries, in
museums, and in business.
Let's say you have an interest in, say, Aardvarks. At home and want to :-) Try Amazon:
know the weight of a typical aardvark right now? Google it:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aardvark+weight
Want to buy one?
http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Safari-Aardvark/dp/B000H6H4VK
Want to sell one you no longer need? Try ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Aardvark-Direct-Pro-Q10-PCI-Audio-Interface-w-CubaseLE_W0QQitemZ270076288454QQihZ017QQcategoryZ64446QQcmdZViewItem
Want to collaborate with others on making one better? Try sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aardvark
Want a 3D simulation written by an aardvark?
http://flyawaysimulation.com/article746.html
Want to make your own educational simulation about aardvarks? Try one of
the tools linked here:
http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html
An endless variety of information related to just one arbitrary topic,
easily accessible using Google or another search engine.
At the library, want to find a good book on, say, Zebras? Use an online
library catalog system:
http://leopac.nypl.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&aspect=basic&npp=10&ipp=20&ri=&index=GW&term=zebras
Want to make a museum kiosk showing protein folding in action in 3D? Write
a simulation with Python:
https://simtk.org/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=&topics=18+307
Does your business need to know more about "quality control" to prevent
customer complaints? Lots of online resources:
http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=quality+control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_control
So, at home, library, museum, or business, technology is delivering the
goods (physical or digital) and making these places all a lot better.
With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still
considered a problem area, see:
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools?
Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other
places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not
much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting
"learning on d
Seen this by Gatto? http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Seen this? http://lawschoolscam.blogspot.com/
Maybe connects wit: http://www.lawyerswithdepression.com/
Make sure you're getting your vitamin D if you are an indoors-oriented person.
On your sig of "There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.", there is also the mailbox (to mail representatives) and moving box (to move to a new jurisdiction with different laws).
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ca9_1254431392&comments=1
http://floridaegu.blogspot.com/2010/10/boxes-of-liberty.html
... the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"It's well-known that the entire college system is a huge money-making scheme, and quality has gone down in favor of appealing to more students and drawing more money. "
See also my posts on that: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
From ways to deal with joblessness: http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"Increased schooling expectations (for example jobs that once done by people without even a high school diploma like child care now may require a graduate degree as a qualification) have led to an increased number of jobs in teaching as well as kept young people out of the labor market. Professor David Goodstein in his "The Big Crunch" essay suggests an exponential growth trend in academia also continued into the 1970s, but has ended now, leading to an oversupply of people with PhDs and other advanced degrees relative to the needs of academia. This has led to some of the inflation of academic requirements for various jobs given the oversupply of people with degrees, which in turn has led to even more schooling to get a degree, as a form of academic certification arms race."