Maybe they did not read this? http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
Just to begin with, on your point on putting in so many hours, even ignoring how the people you cite in finance are often playing a zero sum game with each other and other people's money ( http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/25/110725fa_fact_cassidy ) that may add little social value overall, and 70% of what most doctors do is useless to harmful ( http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-triumph-of-new-age-medicine/8554/ ), consider the law of diminishing returns on overwork: ""Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork: Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?" http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010 "Since the start of the recession, the number of unemployed in the U.S. has doubled. Those who are fortunate enough to still have jobs are often working longer hours for less pay, with the ever-present threat of losing being laid off. But even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours -- the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life.
According to Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago and author of "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life," European social democracy -- particularly Germany's-- offers some tantalizing solutions to our overworked age. In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. In an attempt to make Germany more like the U.S., Angela Merkel has proposed deregulation and tax cuts only to be met with fury on the left. Over multiple trips spanning a decade, Geoghegan decided to investigate how the Germans were living so well, and by extension, what we might be able to learn from them.
Salon spoke to Geoghegan over the phone about Germany's luxurious worker benefits, our own dysfunctional attitudes towards work, and how we can make our lives more like theirs.... We don't have any material value of leisure time, which is extremely valuable to people. We don't have any way of valuing what these European public goods are really worth. You know, it's 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it's zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing. Between you and me, I'd rather go to school at Humboldt.
So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives. That GDP is thrown on top of all the GDP that comes from gambling and fraud of one kind or another. It's a more straightforward description of what Kenneth Rogoff and the Economist would call the financialization of the American economy. That transformation is a big part of the American economic model as it has morphed in some very perverse directions in the last 30 or 40 years. It's why the collapse here is going to take a much more serious long-term toll in this country than in the decades ahead."
Someone speaking from a German point of view might suggest that if you have to work more than 40 hours a week, either you or your organization are not very competent, and if that much work did indeed need to be done, it would probably be better socially if it was done by
With no age limits. That's it. Everything else flows from that.
Here is a post from today by me with lots of links to pages with more links as to why this makes sense and would eventually restructure the USA in a healthy, joyful, abundant, and more intrinsically/mutually secure way: http://groups.google.com/group/postscarcity/msg/cc6c635340b394e6
".. because those quacks peddling death in a pill ARE using coercion and violence. It's called "Take my pill or you are going to die. I guarantee this pill will let you live. Nothing else can save you." And that's what their sales pitches boil down to."
Are you talking about the conventional practicioners or the alternative ones?
"The Triumph of New-Age Medicine" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-triumph-of-new-age-medicine/8554/ "Medicine has long decried acupuncture, homeopathy, and the like as dangerous nonsense that preys on the gullible. Again and again, carefully controlled studies have shown alternative medicine to work no better than a placebo. But now many doctors admit that alternative medicine often seems to do a better job of making patients well, and at a much lower cost, than mainstream care -- and they're trying to learn from it.... The list of much-hyped and in some cases heavily prescribed drugs that have failed to do much to combat complex diseases, while presenting a real risk of horrific side effects, is a long one, including Avastin for cancer (blood clots, heart failure, and bowel perforation), Avandia for diabetes (heart attacks), and torcetrapib for heart disease (death). In many cases, the drugs used to treat the most-serious cancers add mere months to patients' lives, often at significant cost to quality of life.... "
And quoting Marcia Angell: 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]"
Vitamin D, periodic fasting, and eating a lot more vegetables, fruits, and beans can help prevent cancer, but it is harder to deal with cancer in those ways when you already have it (though they can sometimes still help). See Dr. Joel Fuhrman and Dr. John Cannell for more information with references.
But it also seems like, as above, some (not all) mainstream practices for cancer really are pointless (but profitable).
My mother died of colon cancer (as part of her situation where she also had dementia). A surgeon pushed us into doing an operation for her cancer that I really regret as the testing, hospitalization and recovery process put her through a lot of trauma and did her no real good. A good thing to do with my anger, both at that surgeon and at myself for being persuaded by him, is to tell others how to have a good chance of preventing cancer, and a very much smaller chance at treating it with good nutrition, vitamin D, and sometimes fasting. I even just twittered something on that @ Hugo Chavez (with links to those references for Fuhrman and Cannell): http://twitter.com/#!/pdfernhout/status/95159429871321090
Cancer is a horrible disease, and anger about it is common. Like Mr. Fred Rogers might say, all feelings are legitimate, it's what we do with them that matters. I hope you can find something positive and constructive to do with your anger about cancer and those who take advantage of people suffering from it, whoever those people are.
The figures you cite are just for federal personal income tax and ignore the disappearance of corporate taxes as well as the rise in regressive taxes related to sales, social security, medicare, and housing. They also ignore that we have the largest rich/poor wealth disparity than in any time since the run up to the last great depression.
"I'm not sure about others, but in my small group I work with, I know many, many people would walk away from the job if the top rates went back to 91%."
Terrific! More jobs for other people who want them or need them.:-) Other people can grow into becoming "top performers" if we need that. Right now, the rich get richer, and the tallest sunflowers shade out the small ones and suck most of the nutrients out of the soil with bigger root systems. We need to address that somehow, otherwise, frankly, beyond our democracy disappearing socially now, the whole system may just disintegrate physically (perhaps in global war with nukes, plagues, killer robots, and whatever else) as poverty increases and the income-through-jobs link breaks as the "top performers" are increasingly robots and AIs. There is little political democracy without some financial democracy.
Social security and medicare for all, regardless of age, would go a long way to addressing the problems the USA faces, including the problem that the richest Republicans are the worst socialists as far as privatizing gains and socializing costs for pollution, war, ill health, and risk.
"Hopefully though, they're NOTHING LIKE US (or rather, the bogus side of us that is), & can teach us a thing or two about how to co-exist with others like ourselves, in peaceful cooperation, instead of wars & such! I think the "real answers" for us, as humanity, won't come from us here, or they would have by now!"
Considering much of industrialized US-centered humanity has been busy wiping out extra-terrestrial ocean-based alien intelligences like octopods and whales, and terrestrial ones like trumpeting elephants, and Islamic-banking-interest-free Muslims, I have to wonder if we in the USA could learn any lesson from any "alien"?
One answer is to laugh.:-) See my essay on intrinsic/mutual security: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Villages full of laughing children is a fundamanetal truth of humanity that we ignore at our own peril... It's too bad we use compulsory schooling and/or napalm to destroy them so often.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/4298e48e35b7efc0?hl=en "Now, there are probably lots of ways you could do this [grow cell cultures as agricultural liquids like orange juice] that you know more about that I. But here is what I envision for home use (as opposed to big industrial use).
You have two versions. One is for outdoors, and is a big machine you set up in you yard with a glass top that has photosynthesizing algae that either produce the liquids directly or produce something that feeds another culture specific to a plant or animal derived culture specific to what you want to make. You need to add water, but for extra nutrients, you also add ground up rock dust (Smari could sell everyone some from Iceland:-) or you add seawater.
For indoor use, you replace your home furnace with these things as presumably they would give off heat if indoors you lit them with artificial lamps or if they consumed oil or natural gas (bio-derived elsewhere) as feedstocks. Again, you add water and rock dust (or seawater). So, you have year-round indoor agricultural liquid production at very low cost.
(I'll give away an idea here as a patent-preventing disclosure that I've been hoarding.:-) You could have this or any other local industrial process be thermostat controlled (or predictively controlled, or timer controlled, or some combination), so if your house or facility needs more heat you run the process; and if your building is hot enough for your needs, you don't run it, thus using local industrial-like processes to regulate your homes climate. For processes that absorb heat you could do the inverse for air conditioning. You can do that with networked computers too, so if you need heat you do local computation for the network, if you don't need heat, you shut those processors down. Special processor units or industrial process units for various purposes could be designed to replace regular electric baseboard heaters or central furnaces. So, essentially, industry is running for no extra energy charge where people use electricity to heat, and it runs at a subsidy where people use currently cheaper ways to heat like oil or gas or wood. And sometimes you might want to produce stuff anyway, and so you would need to dump the waste heat or use it in some other way or store it in some thermal storage system like a water mass or sand mass or phase changing salts or other such system, with the stored heat being used as part of the thermoregulatory planning. Of course, if you insulated your home well, you might not need a furnace, so there are economic limits to this idea as people improve their infrastructure in other ways...)
This would totally change how agriculture was done. Instead of having lunar moonscapes like Iowa is part of the year, people would just produce their own agricultural liquids in neighborhood facilities or at home, using the local waste heat for other purposes as well. Most agricultural lands could be returned to wilderness. The total energy bill for a home might not go up very much using the above idea for thermostatic regulation. "
A week ago I sent something to GE about this idea for their ecomagination challenge --even though I missed getting the idea into their contest, I wanted people to know about it. But it is not listed here yet (if ever): http://challenge.ecomagination.com/ct/ct_list.bix?c=home
"Well, it is if they were hoarding data that should be public, say."
Any comments on the ethics related to hoarding and "financial obesity" (a term I first read in a story by James P. Hogan)?
The USA used to be a more dynamic place in many ways decades ago when it had progressive taxation rate at 91% or so for income above a certain limit...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
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?
A decade ago I suggested that in the same way people in the 1960s would have laughed at the idea of a million people in prison in the USA for non-violent drug offenses, which is what we have now, so too we may see the same with copyright soon enough, unless our ideology changes. Hard to believe it was possible then, but we still seem to be going that way. Where do we want to be in ten more years?
"Our current notions of property exist because they benefit enough of society that people have approved the appropriate force required to enforce those notions."
For more on that theme, see:
"The Mythology of Wealth" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 "... The first thing they teach you in law school -- and I mean the first thing-- is that "property" is a collection of legal rights. They are mental abstractions. They were created in more or less their present form in the middle ages by common law judges.... Under our system of laws, the ultimate owner of all "property" is the sovereign -- the government. That is who originally granted your "rights". Our system of laws and government defines your rights, and creates an entire infrastructure to regulate them. There are courts that will "enforce" your rights â" that is send out the local muscle man known as the "sheriff" to chuck "squatters" off your property. Every state in the union has a system of publicly recording the documents that establish your "title" in order to put the world on notice of exactly "owns" what. So, how are these "property rights" created? That's easy. They are created the same way all mythological realities are created -- with a little mumbo-jumbo...."
Good point on the tragedy of the commons, AC. Thanks. So, arms races like this with advanced technology can be seen as a "tragedy of the commons". What does that tell us about thinking about them or dealing with them?
So, see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Modern_solutions "Articulating solutions to the tragedy of the commons is one of the main problems of political philosophy. In absence of enlightened self-interest, some form of authority or federation is needed to solve the collective action problem. In a typical example, governmental regulations can limit the amount of a common good available for use by any individual. Permit systems for extractive economic activities including mining, fishing, hunting, livestock raising and timber extraction are examples of this approach. Similarly, limits to pollution are examples of governmental intervention on behalf of the commons. Alternatively, resource users themselves can cooperate to conserve the resource in the name of mutual benefit."
And more from that article: "The commons dilemma is a specific class of social dilemma in which people's short-term selfish interests are at odds with long-term group interests and the common good. In academia, a range of related terminology has also been used as shorthand for the theory or aspects of it, including resource dilemma, take-some dilemma, and common pool resource. Commons dilemma researchers have studied conditions under which groups and communities are likely to under- or over-harvest common resources in both the laboratory and field. Research programs have concentrated on a number of motivational, strategic, and structural factors that might be conducive to management of commons. In game theory, which constructs mathematical models for individuals' behavior in strategic situations, the corresponding "game", developed by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, is known as the Commonize Costs â" Privatize Profits Game (CCâ"PP game)."
One irony is that "the commons" were generally well cared for in England.
And also related as the inverse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-commons "The tragedy of the anticommons is a neologism coined by Michael Heller to describe a coordination breakdown where the existence of numerous rightsholders frustrates achieving a socially desirable outcome. The term mirrors the older term tragedy of the commons used to describe coordination breakdowns arising from insufficient rightsholders. The concept provides a unifying framework for a range of coordination failures including patent thickets, submarine patents, nail houses, and more generally bureaucratic red tape. Overcoming these breakdowns can be difficult, often violent, but there are assorted means including eminent domain, Laches, patent pools or other licensing organizations."
Good points, and please see my other reply in this thread quoting Prof. G. WIlliam Domhoff on "Strategic Nonviolence" and Jame P. Hogan on "Voyage From Yesteryear" which connects to them: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2344152&cid=36853896
Note also that a willingness to die for a cause is not the same as a willingess to kill for a cause.
"Quorum Senising" is another aspect of understanding how societies go through sudden phase changes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing "Quorum sensing is a system of stimulus and response correlated to population density. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population. In similar fashion, some social insects use quorum sensing to determine where to nest. In addition to its function in biological systems, quorum sensing has several useful applications for computing and robotics. Quorum sensing can function as a decision-making process in any decentralized system, as long as individual components have: (a) a means of assessing the number of other components they interact with and (b) a standard response once a threshold number of components is detected."
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html "One of the distinctive features of left activists is their willingness to go to the streets to win people to their causes and create the political pressures necessary for the social changes they advocate. Studies in social psychology and sociology support this strategy by showing there has to be a non-routine dimension to any effort toward change. It doesn't make any sense to people to say that things are terrible, but they just should vote and write letters to their elected representatives. If things are going to change, then people have to get out of their routines one way or another. There has to be social disruption. There has to be a "getting in the way of power" as one author-activist puts it. There has to be a social movement that has a shared political identity.
But case studies also show that these movements go nowhere without an electoral component, as seen with the women's suffrage movement, the industrial union movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, and the environmental movement. Changes in government were the end result in every case. They usually don't go far enough, but that just means the next cycle of movement activism is necessary.
Studies of social movements in the United States also show that the necessary social disruption has to be created through the principled use of strategic nonviolence. Any form of violence, whether property damage or physical battles with opponents and police, will turn off the great majority of Americans and bring down overwhelming police and military repression.
For the past 10-15 years the usefulness of an exclusive focus on nonviolence has been questioned by new activists. They do not see much use in the carefully orchestrated acts of civil disobedience to which it is often reduced, where the time and place of arrest have been negotiated beforehand with the police. They have come to see nonviolence as primarily a philosophy, a religious sentiment, or a moral renunciation of violence, or even as a New Age belief in a way to create win-win situations for all concerned if there is enough love and understanding.
However, the strategic nonviolence I am talking about is far more than that. It is a strategy for winning in conflicts where there are real differences between the adversaries, including class antagonisms. As a form of conflict, nonviolent direct action is best understood in terms of the same basic concepts that are used to understand violent (military) conflicts, because the underlying reality in both cases is the engagement in conflict over opposing perspectives and interests. Thus the phrase "strategic nonviolence," which is in fact what trade union organizers practice through strikes and what civil rights leaders employed through sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts. It is a form of struggle that is focused on prevailing despite the fact that the opponents -- usually a government or power elite -- have superior resources and are likely to use one or another form of violence if they think it can succeed...."
See also James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear": http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary "The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. Wha
The article is pretty scary. I'm not sure the people at these well-funded companies even realize the potential for these tools to be used accidentally to do all sorts of nasty things. Or what is going to happen when script kiddies get a hold of them or they are reverse engineersed, like Stuxnet is a blueprint for worse. It is just insanity. It shows the folly of current US defense posture relying primarily on extrinsic security (defending things by soldiers or hackers) and unilateral security (trying to scare your opponents into submission by being the meanest nastiest SOB around). We need to move back to a defense posture that emphasizes intrinsic security (systems that can take abuse) and mutual security (cultivating allies through diplomacy wuth everyone watching each other's back). US security used to be more like that before WWII, but it is a lot less profitable for defense contractors because, unlike security theater, intrinisic and mutual security actually work and don't lead to expensive arms races!
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
Spam is ironic too in this way, with some few destroying email in order to make some small (relative to global scale) profit on it, and meanwhile making it harder to use email to bring abundance to everyone.
There needs to be a general term for this. Selfishness disease? Or is is better to just call it a "Racket"? http://warisaracket.org/racket.html
The biggest crime is not even in the theft -- it is in forcing everyone to spend a lot of time worrying about theft,.
We could build much more secure systems, especially based on free and open systems like GNU/Linux, and we had the opportunity, but the US Congress made it hard twenty years ago to build good encryption into everything and bad standards stuck, and now with effectively infinite copyrights and overly broad patents, cooperation has been made harder to make good systems for everyone. Richard Stallman's points on freedom are making more and more sense every day. http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society-2/
So we see another arms race sucking up so much time and energy and the lives of smart people to produce what? Meanwhile the singularity (if it is to happen) draws nearer every day.
See also: http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/ "In this influential work about the staggering divide between children and the outdoors, child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today's wired generation -- he calls it nature-deficit -- to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as the rises in obesity, attention disorders, and depression. Last Child in the Woods is the first book to bring together a new and growing body of research indicating that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children and adults. More than just raising an alarm, Louv offers practical solutions and simple ways to heal the broken bondâ"and many are right in our own backyard."
We have lived in the NY Adirondack Park for several years, and I can say it has had some of the same effects you describe (but not as intensely living in a house, obviously).
Being outside a lot is also a bit of a cure for vitamin D deficiency that unknowingly afflicts so many "nerds", so that might have had beneficial health effects, as might have eating more simply. See:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap" http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
I'd be curious how you got stranded anywhere like that these days.
See also: http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htmhttp://warisaracket.org/ "Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, Retired
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes...."
Not a very funny joke though, at least not when your country is hollowing itself out over it and ignoring intrinisic security and mutual security or when your country is on the receiving end of a war launched for profit in the USA.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler: "It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here, here, and here." "But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?" "The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space." "What about the nuclear bombs?" "All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the oceans." "What about the tanks?" "The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world." "I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?" "The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness." "Well, send in the Daleks." "The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with the rockets." "Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades." "We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters, solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason." "But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?" "They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots." "I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?" "Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance." "How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong?... Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room... now!" [Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of enginee
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Maybe they did not read this? http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
I like this other big scale wind idea too: http://www.maglevwindturbine.com/
Just to begin with, on your point on putting in so many hours, even ignoring how the people you cite in finance are often playing a zero sum game with each other and other people's money ( http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/25/110725fa_fact_cassidy ) that may add little social value overall, and 70% of what most doctors do is useless to harmful ( http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-triumph-of-new-age-medicine/8554/ ), consider the law of diminishing returns on overwork: ...
""Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork: Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?"
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010
"Since the start of the recession, the number of unemployed in the U.S. has doubled. Those who are fortunate enough to still have jobs are often working longer hours for less pay, with the ever-present threat of losing being laid off. But even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours -- the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life.
According to Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago and author of "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life," European social democracy -- particularly Germany's-- offers some tantalizing solutions to our overworked age. In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. In an attempt to make Germany more like the U.S., Angela Merkel has proposed deregulation and tax cuts only to be met with fury on the left. Over multiple trips spanning a decade, Geoghegan decided to investigate how the Germans were living so well, and by extension, what we might be able to learn from them.
Salon spoke to Geoghegan over the phone about Germany's luxurious worker benefits, our own dysfunctional attitudes towards work, and how we can make our lives more like theirs.
We don't have any material value of leisure time, which is extremely valuable to people. We don't have any way of valuing what these European public goods are really worth. You know, it's 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it's zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing. Between you and me, I'd rather go to school at Humboldt.
So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives. That GDP is thrown on top of all the GDP that comes from gambling and fraud of one kind or another. It's a more straightforward description of what Kenneth Rogoff and the Economist would call the financialization of the American economy. That transformation is a big part of the American economic model as it has morphed in some very perverse directions in the last 30 or 40 years. It's why the collapse here is going to take a much more serious long-term toll in this country than in the decades ahead."
Someone speaking from a German point of view might suggest that if you have to work more than 40 hours a week, either you or your organization are not very competent, and if that much work did indeed need to be done, it would probably be better socially if it was done by
With no age limits. That's it. Everything else flows from that.
Here is a post from today by me with lots of links to pages with more links as to why this makes sense and would eventually restructure the USA in a healthy, joyful, abundant, and more intrinsically/mutually secure way:
http://groups.google.com/group/postscarcity/msg/cc6c635340b394e6
".. because those quacks peddling death in a pill ARE using coercion and violence. It's called "Take my pill or you are going to die. I guarantee this pill will let you live. Nothing else can save you." And that's what their sales pitches boil down to."
Are you talking about the conventional practicioners or the alternative ones?
"The Triumph of New-Age Medicine" ... The list of much-hyped and in some cases heavily prescribed drugs that have failed to do much to combat complex diseases, while presenting a real risk of horrific side effects, is a long one, including Avastin for cancer (blood clots, heart failure, and bowel perforation), Avandia for diabetes (heart attacks), and torcetrapib for heart disease (death). In many cases, the drugs used to treat the most-serious cancers add mere months to patients' lives, often at significant cost to quality of life. ... "
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-triumph-of-new-age-medicine/8554/
"Medicine has long decried acupuncture, homeopathy, and the like as dangerous nonsense that preys on the gullible. Again and again, carefully controlled studies have shown alternative medicine to work no better than a placebo. But now many doctors admit that alternative medicine often seems to do a better job of making patients well, and at a much lower cost, than mainstream care -- and they're trying to learn from it.
And quoting Marcia Angell:
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]"
Vitamin D, periodic fasting, and eating a lot more vegetables, fruits, and beans can help prevent cancer, but it is harder to deal with cancer in those ways when you already have it (though they can sometimes still help). See Dr. Joel Fuhrman and Dr. John Cannell for more information with references.
But it also seems like, as above, some (not all) mainstream practices for cancer really are pointless (but profitable).
My mother died of colon cancer (as part of her situation where she also had dementia). A surgeon pushed us into doing an operation for her cancer that I really regret as the testing, hospitalization and recovery process put her through a lot of trauma and did her no real good. A good thing to do with my anger, both at that surgeon and at myself for being persuaded by him, is to tell others how to have a good chance of preventing cancer, and a very much smaller chance at treating it with good nutrition, vitamin D, and sometimes fasting. I even just twittered something on that @ Hugo Chavez (with links to those references for Fuhrman and Cannell):
http://twitter.com/#!/pdfernhout/status/95159429871321090
Cancer is a horrible disease, and anger about it is common. Like Mr. Fred Rogers might say, all feelings are legitimate, it's what we do with them that matters. I hope you can find something positive and constructive to do with your anger about cancer and those who take advantage of people suffering from it, whoever those people are.
The figures you cite are just for federal personal income tax and ignore the disappearance of corporate taxes as well as the rise in regressive taxes related to sales, social security, medicare, and housing. They also ignore that we have the largest rich/poor wealth disparity than in any time since the run up to the last great depression.
"I'm not sure about others, but in my small group I work with, I know many, many people would walk away from the job if the top rates went back to 91%."
Terrific! More jobs for other people who want them or need them. :-) Other people can grow into becoming "top performers" if we need that. Right now, the rich get richer, and the tallest sunflowers shade out the small ones and suck most of the nutrients out of the soil with bigger root systems. We need to address that somehow, otherwise, frankly, beyond our democracy disappearing socially now, the whole system may just disintegrate physically (perhaps in global war with nukes, plagues, killer robots, and whatever else) as poverty increases and the income-through-jobs link breaks as the "top performers" are increasingly robots and AIs. There is little political democracy without some financial democracy.
Social security and medicare for all, regardless of age, would go a long way to addressing the problems the USA faces, including the problem that the richest Republicans are the worst socialists as far as privatizing gains and socializing costs for pollution, war, ill health, and risk.
But sure, if you'd rather a wealth tax than an income tax, see also:
"Basic Income from a Millionaire's Perspective?"
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
"Hopefully though, they're NOTHING LIKE US (or rather, the bogus side of us that is), & can teach us a thing or two about how to co-exist with others like ourselves, in peaceful cooperation, instead of wars & such! I think the "real answers" for us, as humanity, won't come from us here, or they would have by now!"
Considering much of industrialized US-centered humanity has been busy wiping out extra-terrestrial ocean-based alien intelligences like octopods and whales, and terrestrial ones like trumpeting elephants, and Islamic-banking-interest-free Muslims, I have to wonder if we in the USA could learn any lesson from any "alien"?
One answer is to laugh. :-) See my essay on intrinsic/mutual security: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Villages full of laughing children is a fundamanetal truth of humanity that we ignore at our own peril... It's too bad we use compulsory schooling and/or napalm to destroy them so often.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/4298e48e35b7efc0?hl=en :-) or you add seawater. :-) You could have this or any other local industrial process be thermostat controlled (or predictively controlled, or timer controlled, or some combination), so if your house or facility needs more heat you run the process; and if your building is hot enough for your needs, you don't run it, thus using local industrial-like processes to regulate your homes climate. For processes that absorb heat you could do the inverse for air conditioning. You can do that with networked computers too, so if you need heat you do local computation for the network, if you don't need heat, you shut those processors down. Special processor units or industrial process units for various purposes could be designed to replace regular electric baseboard heaters or central furnaces. So, essentially, industry is running for no extra energy charge where people use electricity to heat, and it runs at a subsidy where people use currently cheaper ways to heat like oil or gas or wood. And sometimes you might want to produce stuff anyway, and so you would need to dump the waste heat or use it in some other way or store it in some thermal storage system like a water mass or sand mass or phase changing salts or other such system, with the stored heat being used as part of the thermoregulatory planning. Of course, if you insulated your home well, you might not need a furnace, so there are economic limits to this idea as people improve their infrastructure in other ways...)
"Now, there are probably lots of ways you could do this [grow cell cultures as agricultural liquids like orange juice] that you know more about that I. But here is what I envision for home use (as opposed to big industrial use).
You have two versions. One is for outdoors, and is a big machine you set up in you yard with a glass top that has photosynthesizing algae that either produce the liquids directly or produce something that feeds another culture specific to a plant or animal derived culture specific to what you want to make. You need to add water, but for extra nutrients, you also add ground up rock dust (Smari could sell everyone some from Iceland
For indoor use, you replace your home furnace with these things as presumably they would give off heat if indoors you lit them with artificial lamps or if they consumed oil or natural gas (bio-derived elsewhere) as feedstocks. Again, you add water and rock dust (or seawater). So, you have year-round indoor agricultural liquid production at very low cost.
(I'll give away an idea here as a patent-preventing disclosure that I've been hoarding.
This would totally change how agriculture was done. Instead of having lunar moonscapes like Iowa is part of the year, people would just produce their own agricultural liquids in neighborhood facilities or at home, using the local waste heat for other purposes as well. Most agricultural lands could be returned to wilderness. The total energy bill for a home might not go up very much using the above idea for thermostatic regulation. "
A week ago I sent something to GE about this idea for their ecomagination challenge --even though I missed getting the idea into their contest, I wanted people to know about it. But it is not listed here yet (if ever):
http://challenge.ecomagination.com/ct/ct_list.bix?c=home
Interesting point AC, thanks.
Thanks for the example.
Another issue in a digital age is, how do you prove a "receipt" is valid?
"Well, it is if they were hoarding data that should be public, say."
Any comments on the ethics related to hoarding and "financial obesity" (a term I first read in a story by James P. Hogan)?
The USA used to be a more dynamic place in many ways decades ago when it had progressive taxation rate at 91% or so for income above a certain limit...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
"Naturally someone will respond that this is a different fight and how dare I compare freedom of information to the civil rights movement etc."
I got slapped down a decade ago for comparing issues related to copyright to slavery, but I still feel it is a problem that is becoming related to slavery, as a system of control and now justification for imprisonment (copyright infringement used to be mostly only a civil, not a criminal, offense a couple decades ago).
"License management tools: good, bad, or ugly?"
http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/browse_thread/thread/df4b4363d544f766/1e499c6db59117a2?hl=en#1e499c6db59117a2
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?
A decade ago I suggested that in the same way people in the 1960s would have laughed at the idea of a million people in prison in the USA for non-violent drug offenses, which is what we have now, so too we may see the same with copyright soon enough, unless our ideology changes. Hard to believe it was possible then, but we still seem to be going that way. Where do we want to be in ten more years?
A related satire I sent to the US DOJ years ago when they asked for comments:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
Lawrence Lessig made a similar point in his book "Code" in the first chapter, "Code Is Law".
"Our current notions of property exist because they benefit enough of society that people have approved the appropriate force required to enforce those notions."
For more on that theme, see: ... Under our system of laws, the ultimate owner of all "property" is the sovereign -- the government. That is who originally granted your "rights". Our system of laws and government defines your rights, and creates an entire infrastructure to regulate them. There are courts that will "enforce" your rights â" that is send out the local muscle man known as the "sheriff" to chuck "squatters" off your property. Every state in the union has a system of publicly recording the documents that establish your "title" in order to put the world on notice of exactly "owns" what. So, how are these "property rights" created? That's easy. They are created the same way all mythological realities are created -- with a little mumbo-jumbo. ..."
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"... The first thing they teach you in law school -- and I mean the first thing-- is that "property" is a collection of legal rights. They are mental abstractions. They were created in more or less their present form in the middle ages by common law judges.
Good point on the tragedy of the commons, AC. Thanks. So, arms races like this with advanced technology can be seen as a "tragedy of the commons". What does that tell us about thinking about them or dealing with them?
So, see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Modern_solutions
"Articulating solutions to the tragedy of the commons is one of the main problems of political philosophy. In absence of enlightened self-interest, some form of authority or federation is needed to solve the collective action problem. In a typical example, governmental regulations can limit the amount of a common good available for use by any individual. Permit systems for extractive economic activities including mining, fishing, hunting, livestock raising and timber extraction are examples of this approach. Similarly, limits to pollution are examples of governmental intervention on behalf of the commons. Alternatively, resource users themselves can cooperate to conserve the resource in the name of mutual benefit."
And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Application_to_evolutionary_biology
"A parallel was drawn recently between the tragedy of the commons and the competing behaviour of parasites that through acting selfishly eventually diminish or destroy their common host."
And more from that article: "The commons dilemma is a specific class of social dilemma in which people's short-term selfish interests are at odds with long-term group interests and the common good. In academia, a range of related terminology has also been used as shorthand for the theory or aspects of it, including resource dilemma, take-some dilemma, and common pool resource. Commons dilemma researchers have studied conditions under which groups and communities are likely to under- or over-harvest common resources in both the laboratory and field. Research programs have concentrated on a number of motivational, strategic, and structural factors that might be conducive to management of commons. In game theory, which constructs mathematical models for individuals' behavior in strategic situations, the corresponding "game", developed by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, is known as the Commonize Costs â" Privatize Profits Game (CCâ"PP game)."
One irony is that "the commons" were generally well cared for in England.
And also related as the inverse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-commons
"The tragedy of the anticommons is a neologism coined by Michael Heller to describe a coordination breakdown where the existence of numerous rightsholders frustrates achieving a socially desirable outcome. The term mirrors the older term tragedy of the commons used to describe coordination breakdowns arising from insufficient rightsholders. The concept provides a unifying framework for a range of coordination failures including patent thickets, submarine patents, nail houses, and more generally bureaucratic red tape. Overcoming these breakdowns can be difficult, often violent, but there are assorted means including eminent domain, Laches, patent pools or other licensing organizations."
Good points, and please see my other reply in this thread quoting Prof. G. WIlliam Domhoff on "Strategic Nonviolence" and Jame P. Hogan on "Voyage From Yesteryear" which connects to them:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2344152&cid=36853896
Note also that a willingness to die for a cause is not the same as a willingess to kill for a cause.
"Quorum Senising" is another aspect of understanding how societies go through sudden phase changes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing
"Quorum sensing is a system of stimulus and response correlated to population density. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population. In similar fashion, some social insects use quorum sensing to determine where to nest. In addition to its function in biological systems, quorum sensing has several useful applications for computing and robotics. Quorum sensing can function as a decision-making process in any decentralized system, as long as individual components have: (a) a means of assessing the number of other components they interact with and (b) a standard response once a threshold number of components is detected."
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html ..."
"One of the distinctive features of left activists is their willingness to go to the streets to win people to their causes and create the political pressures necessary for the social changes they advocate. Studies in social psychology and sociology support this strategy by showing there has to be a non-routine dimension to any effort toward change. It doesn't make any sense to people to say that things are terrible, but they just should vote and write letters to their elected representatives. If things are going to change, then people have to get out of their routines one way or another. There has to be social disruption. There has to be a "getting in the way of power" as one author-activist puts it. There has to be a social movement that has a shared political identity.
But case studies also show that these movements go nowhere without an electoral component, as seen with the women's suffrage movement, the industrial union movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, and the environmental movement. Changes in government were the end result in every case. They usually don't go far enough, but that just means the next cycle of movement activism is necessary.
Studies of social movements in the United States also show that the necessary social disruption has to be created through the principled use of strategic nonviolence. Any form of violence, whether property damage or physical battles with opponents and police, will turn off the great majority of Americans and bring down overwhelming police and military repression.
For the past 10-15 years the usefulness of an exclusive focus on nonviolence has been questioned by new activists. They do not see much use in the carefully orchestrated acts of civil disobedience to which it is often reduced, where the time and place of arrest have been negotiated beforehand with the police. They have come to see nonviolence as primarily a philosophy, a religious sentiment, or a moral renunciation of violence, or even as a New Age belief in a way to create win-win situations for all concerned if there is enough love and understanding.
However, the strategic nonviolence I am talking about is far more than that. It is a strategy for winning in conflicts where there are real differences between the adversaries, including class antagonisms. As a form of conflict, nonviolent direct action is best understood in terms of the same basic concepts that are used to understand violent (military) conflicts, because the underlying reality in both cases is the engagement in conflict over opposing perspectives and interests. Thus the phrase "strategic nonviolence," which is in fact what trade union organizers practice through strikes and what civil rights leaders employed through sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts. It is a form of struggle that is focused on prevailing despite the fact that the opponents -- usually a government or power elite -- have superior resources and are likely to use one or another form of violence if they think it can succeed.
See also James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear":
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. Wha
The article is pretty scary. I'm not sure the people at these well-funded companies even realize the potential for these tools to be used accidentally to do all sorts of nasty things. Or what is going to happen when script kiddies get a hold of them or they are reverse engineersed, like Stuxnet is a blueprint for worse. It is just insanity. It shows the folly of current US defense posture relying primarily on extrinsic security (defending things by soldiers or hackers) and unilateral security (trying to scare your opponents into submission by being the meanest nastiest SOB around). We need to move back to a defense posture that emphasizes intrinsic security (systems that can take abuse) and mutual security (cultivating allies through diplomacy wuth everyone watching each other's back). US security used to be more like that before WWII, but it is a lot less profitable for defense contractors because, unlike security theater, intrinisic and mutual security actually work and don't lead to expensive arms races!
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
Spam is ironic too in this way, with some few destroying email in order to make some small (relative to global scale) profit on it, and meanwhile making it harder to use email to bring abundance to everyone.
There needs to be a general term for this. Selfishness disease? Or is is better to just call it a "Racket"?
http://warisaracket.org/racket.html
The biggest crime is not even in the theft -- it is in forcing everyone to spend a lot of time worrying about theft,.
We could build much more secure systems, especially based on free and open systems like GNU/Linux, and we had the opportunity, but the US Congress made it hard twenty years ago to build good encryption into everything and bad standards stuck, and now with effectively infinite copyrights and overly broad patents, cooperation has been made harder to make good systems for everyone. Richard Stallman's points on freedom are making more and more sense every day.
http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society-2/
So we see another arms race sucking up so much time and energy and the lives of smart people to produce what? Meanwhile the singularity (if it is to happen) draws nearer every day.
Not only that, but "humans" are roughly 90% bacteria by numbers of cells, and 1% to 10% bacteria by weight (mostly in the colon).
Thanks for sharing.
See also: http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
"In this influential work about the staggering divide between children and the outdoors, child advocacy expert Richard Louv directly links the lack of nature in the lives of today's wired generation -- he calls it nature-deficit -- to some of the most disturbing childhood trends, such as the rises in obesity, attention disorders, and depression. Last Child in the Woods is the first book to bring together a new and growing body of research indicating that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children and adults. More than just raising an alarm, Louv offers practical solutions and simple ways to heal the broken bondâ"and many are right in our own backyard."
We have lived in the NY Adirondack Park for several years, and I can say it has had some of the same effects you describe (but not as intensely living in a house, obviously).
Being outside a lot is also a bit of a cure for vitamin D deficiency that unknowingly afflicts so many "nerds", so that might have had beneficial health effects, as might have eating more simply. See:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap"
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
I'd be curious how you got stranded anywhere like that these days.
Glad you liked it. You're welcome.
That vitamin D link got messed up btw and should really be:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/
See also: http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm http://warisaracket.org/ ..."
"Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, Retired
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
Not a very funny joke though, at least not when your country is hollowing itself out over it and ignoring intrinisic security and mutual security or when your country is on the receiving end of a war launched for profit in the USA.
See my reply here for the punch line: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2339642&cid=36840394
And why Defense Department IT is actually in "Irony Age".
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Sorry to keep sounding like a broken record.
Here is a hypothetical parody remix of the Hitler "Downfall" scene:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/32e8fc32c89c96bd
Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler: ... ... now!"
"It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here,
here, and here."
"But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?"
"The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for
self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space."
"What about the nuclear bombs?"
"All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the
oceans."
"What about the tanks?"
"The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the
internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world."
"I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?"
"The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like
malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness."
"Well, send in the Daleks."
"The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with
the rockets."
"Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades."
"We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters,
solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason."
"But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?"
"They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns
were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots."
"I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the
world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule
the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?"
"Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons
to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance."
"How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong?
Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room
[Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of enginee