... then I could not post any replies. It took me a couple of months to figure out what had happened. I had just figured Slashdot was failing with some weird error message, guessing incorrectly perhaps related to the IP range of my ISP. I was also going through mixed feelings about Slashdot, so fixing it was not high on my priority list.
I eventually had to contact someone at Slashdot via email to fix my account. Then I could post again.
But they never unmarked the submissions as SPAM.
Here are the three submissions I posted that got marked SPAM:
My stats on submissions over the past fifteen years or so: https://slashdot.org/~Paul+Fer... "47 declined, 12 accepted (59 total, 20.34% accepted)"
I did get one front page submission again today (on Moore's Law ending). The problem is that many interesting tech stories are about specific companies that might sell something -- like that one by HP Labs. I could maybe understand the reasoning that an article about a law firm's report about employment law (and technology) might seem spammish. But a fact-based article about the GOP convention (and tech hypocrisy)? Or an article from a US government agency about cold fusion replication (vindicating the original researchers)?
The person who responded to my email (maybe six to nine months ago?) said Slashdot had been working on its spam filters.
Still kind of annoyed those all three still have bright red SPAM tags since they were not intended as such and I have no financial interest whatsoever in those groups mentioned. But I was glad to get posting privileges back.
Much more frightening was the time my GitHub account went away after posting an issue on Calypso (for WordPress). That felt like having my whole career deleted. I had spend hours writing up the comment previously intending to post it on Matt Mullenweg's blog, but it did not go through (guessing for length and links), and then decided to make a GitHub issue instead. Their spam filters must have detected that a lot of text with links was pasted right after opening an issue. Fortunately GitHub put my account back right away after I contacted them. That issue: https://github.com/Automattic/... And a post about that to Mullenweg's blog: https://ma.tt/2015/11/dance-to...
Both cases serve as reminders to me of the problems of investing time into specific commercial online services with creating a body of published works and an associated online reputation. Fortunately, both companies fixed things up -- since they have reputations to maintain too.
Anyway, hope Slashdot resolves the account issue for you too, Mosquito Bites! I see Slashdot marked twelve of your submissions as spam -- which all look like good articles to me: https://slashdot.org/~Mosquito...
Seeing this happen both to me and someone else makes me really wonder about the risk of submitting any more articles to Slashdot? I'd rather be able to discuss stuff than get front page articles posted.
Anyway, could be worse -- see the movie Brazil (hopefully not the darker Director's cut version though).
That's a bit like plot in this parable I created seven years ago: "The Richest Man in The World" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."
The richest man in the world uses monopolies and robotics to expand to more monopolies (including owning the food supply as well as the government which compliantly expands his monopolies further) until all the wealth in the world is owned by just one person (and his robots). As both in the USA recently and in the story, many people argued the solution to widespread unemployment was cut social benefits along with lowering taxes to promote investment -- but the robots still got all the jobs.
from 1947: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "With Folded Hands..." is a 1947 science fiction novelette by American writer Jack Williamson. Willamson's influence for this story was the aftermath of World War II and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his concern that "some of the technological creations we had developed with the best intentions might have disastrous consequences in the long run."[1]"
AIs in that story helpfully decide to protect us from all possible short-term physical risk..
The Culture series EarthCent Ambassador series Old Guy Cybertank series
Player Piano I feel is a bit silly in some ways (even as it makes some good points relative to social structures today). A basic income would take care of most of the issues in that society instead of make-work low-status jobs. The book also ignores how raising children well (especially in the most important early years) takes about as much time as you can put into it -- ass can a desire to learn, and a desire to create your own local subsistence processes for fun, learning, community, and security.
about a decade ago: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a... "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Glad to see more and more people are thinking about this.
And thanks for the laugh: "Push for a universal basic income for your robot AI" has to be one of the funniest things I've read on Slashdot.
And that idea is not that far fetched: http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/... "Robots and software persons are entitled to protection of life and liberty. But does "life" imply the right of a program to execute, or merely to be stored? Denying execution would be like keeping a human in a permanent coma â" which seems unconstitutional. Do software persons have a right to data they need in order to keep executing? Can robot citizens claim social benefits? Are unemployed robo-persons entitled to welfare? Medical care, including free tuneups at the government machine shop? Electricity stamps? Free education? Family and reproductive rights? Don't laugh. A recent NASA technical study found that self-reproducing robots could be developed today in a 20-year Manhattan-Project-style effort costing less than $10 billion (NASA Conference Publication 2255, 1982)."
From my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... "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.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially... irony.:-)"
Thanks for the interesting link to the harvardpolitics site.
Just saw that Rahiel Kasim, Scientific Programmer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, made a plugin like this -- yay! https://news.ycombinator.com/i... === I made a browser extension [1] that automatically archives bookmarks to archive.is or (currently Chromium only) locally as MHTML files. [1]: https://github.com/rahiel/arch... ===
https://chomsky.info/200401__/ "CHOMSKY: It's close to a historical universal that the term "terror" is used for their terror against us and our clients, not our terror against them. Heads of states can qualify as "terrorists," when they are official enemies."
https://chomsky.info/20011018-... "Well that brings us back to the question, what is terrorism? I have been assuming we understand it. Well, what is it? Well, there happen to be some easy answers to this. There is an official definition. You can find it in the US code or in US army manuals. A brief statement of it taken from a US army manual, is fair enough, is that terror is the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to attain political or religious ideological goals through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear. That's terrorism. That's a fair enough definition. I think it is reasonable to accept that. The problem is that it can't be accepted because if you accept that, all the wrong consequences follow. For example, all the consequences I have just been reviewing. Now there is a major effort right now at the UN to try to develop a comprehensive treaty on terrorism. When Kofi Annan got the Nobel prize the other day, you will notice he was reported as saying that we should stop wasting time on this and really get down to it.
But there's a problem. If you use the official definition of terrorism in the comprehensive treaty you are going to get completely the wrong results. So that can't be done. In fact, it is even worse than that. If you take a look at the definition of Low Intensity Warfare which is official US policy you find that it is a very close paraphrase of what I just read. In fact, Low Intensity Conflict is just another name for terrorism. That's why all countries, as far as I know, call whatever horrendous acts they are carrying out, counter terrorism. We happen to call it Counter Insurgency or Low Intensity Conflict. So that's a serious problem. You can't use the actual definitions. You've got to carefully find a definition that doesn't have all the wrong consequences."
https://chomsky.info/200205__0... "The problem of definition is held to be vexing and complex. There are, however, proposals that seem straightforward, for example, in US Army manuals, which define terrorism as "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear." NOTE{_US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism Counteraction_ (TRADOC Pamphlet No. 525-37), 1984.} That definition carries additional authority because of the timing: it was offered as the Reagan administration was intensifying its war on terrorism. The world has changed little enough so that these recent precedents should be instructive, even apart from the continuity of leadership from the first war on terrorism to its recent reincarnation....
Evidently, we have to qualify the definition of "terrorism" given in official sources: the term applies only to terrorism against _us_, not the terrorism we carry out against _them_. The practice is conventional, even among the most extreme mass murderers: the Nazis were protecting the population from terrorist partisans directed from abroad, while the Japanese were laboring selflessly to create an "earthly paradise" as they fought off the "Chinese bandits" terrorizing the peaceful people of Manchuria and their legitimate government. Exceptions would be hard to find.
The same convention applies to the war to exterminate the Nicaraguan cancer. On Law Day 1984, President Reagan proclaimed that without law there can be only "chaos and disorder." The day before, he had announced that the US would disregard the proceedings of the International Court of Justice, which went on to condemn his administration for its "u
My idea to a Knight News Challenge on Libraries : https://web.archive.org/web/20... "Create a browser addon so when people post to the web they can send a copy for storage and hosting by a network of local libraries."
Sad that the Knight News Foundation has changed their software and so all the old contributions are no longer available. Hard to respect a group like that which takes so much hard work by so many people and just dumps it. It's an example of the very thing that contribution was about -- the need for distributed backups. Glad that info is still findable in archive.org -- until perhaps the Knight News Foundation puts up a broad robots.txt and makes it all inaccessible.
---- More details on the idea
Describe your project.
There are two many single points of failure on the internet for collections of important knowledge. For example, years of posts to Facebook, Reddit, Slashdot, MetaFilter, or SoylentNews would all be lost if those websites were to be shut down. We have an answer to that challenge.
While the Internet Archive is backing up some of the internet, it is another single point of failure. We propose developing data standards, software applications, coordination protocols. and hardware specifications so every local library in the world can participate in backing up part of the internet. While that brings up many copyright concerns, we have an approach to deal with that.
We propose making web browser addon applications major web browsers. This browser addon would make it easy for people posting content to any website on the internet to send a copy for safe keeping to their local library (or other access gateway). From there, the content would be distributed across the distributed library network. Any previously published content they have written could also be added to this system using that browser app. The content would be sent a standardized form for indexing and linking with other content using semantic information. Users would specify a Creative Commons license or similar free license for their content when they contributed the content. Each data item would be assigned a unique hash for its content to help ensure its integrity and retrievability (similar to how the Git source control system stores information).
Each local library might only store terabytes of information (likely using Apache Hadoop and perhaps Apache Accumulo or similar software). But, together as a network, thousands of local libraries could store the world's knowledge in a reliable distributed way. Even one library would have the absolutely most important data for that locality, and any few libraries would have most of the popular data across the network.
How does this project advance the library field?
Libraries have historically kept paper copies of the world's information. There were multiple copies of every published book archived across the library network even if each library typically only had one copy of only some of the total. This project will help libraries do the same for the world's digital information -- with each library having part of a distributed whole. In a somewhat holographic way, each library would maintain a copy of the most important information for its local patrons, while also serving as a backup for some of the rest of the data from outside its locality.
Who is the audience and what are their information needs?
The global web community, The Internet Archive. The need is to have reliable backups of freely published digital information.
Yesterday at least the main page was accessible in the internet archive. This morning,that page is no longer available. So, it looks like the new site just added a restrictive robots.txt? There were three crawls from yesterday in the archive that each had the new site with the black-background main page, so the site was being crawled frequently just now.
Or perhaps the archive itself has been pressured to make the content not accessible?
In any case, it is sad that domains that are let go can have new owners buy them and put up a robots.txt and the internet archive stops making available the old version of the site from the previous owner (probably not the case here, just a reminder of what can happen to our history).
Whatever the merits of the copyright claim, this does show how much we rely on archive.org to check what was going on and also how it is (politically) a single point of failure in that sense.
A different perspective on robots.txt: http://www.archiveteam.org/ind... "What this situation does, in fact, is cause many more problems than it solves - catastrophic failures on a website are ensured total destruction with the addition of ROBOTS.TXT. Modifications, poor choices in URL transition, and all other sorts of management work can lead to a loss of historically important and relevant data. Unchecked, and left alone, the ROBOTS.TXT file ensures no mirroring or reference for items that may have general use and meaning beyond the website's context. Precisely one reason comes to mind to have ROBOTS.TXT, and it is, incidentally, stupid - to prevent robots from triggering processes on the website that should not be run automatically. A dumb spider or crawler will hit every URL linked, and if a site allows users to activate a link that causes resource hogging or otherwise deletes/adds data, then a ROBOTS.TXT exclusion makes perfect sense while you fix your broken and idiotic configuration. Again, Archive Team interprets ROBOTS.TXT as damage and temporary madness, and works around it. Everyone should. If you don't want people to have your data, don't put it online."
It's a tool for quickly editing interactive fiction that can be driven by voice recognition.
I actually applied (with mixed feelings, given Alexa's possibilities for privacy violation) to Amazon's Alexa developer funding program to port StoryHarp to Alexa's system just after Alexa came out, but nothing came of it.
Can you cite any evidence for your opinion that "Without CATS, nothing in space is possible except on demonstration scale"? Here is some counter-evidence to your point.
While Russia has raised its prices recently, it used to charge about US$20 million to bring a person to the international space station and back. Increasing volume of one-way flights would bring those costs down given the current cheapest cost to orbit for a 200 lb human is likely closer to US$1 million based on current $5000 per pound launch costs for satellites: https://space.stackexchange.co...
A million dollars (adjusted for inflation) is in the ballpark of what people paid to move from Europe to the Americas in the 1600s (according to Freeman Dyson in one of his books).
There are millions of people on Earth who purchase multi-million dollar homes. The availability of money for going to space right now for millions of people is simply not the issue.
So, why are these affluent people not moving to space? Why are they are instead buying multi-million dollar condos in NYC and multi-million dollar houses on the beach?
Answer: Because there are no long-term interesting cities or habitats in space yet worth living in for the long-term.
We need to build the space habitats first, and then transportation costs will fall to make them accessible to everyone
From the 1929 by J.D.Bernal: http://bactra.org/Bernal/world... "Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfill all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant.... A globe interior eight miles across would contain as much effective space as a countryside one hundred and fifty miles square even if one gave a liberal allowance of air, say fifty feet above the ground.... However, the essential positive activity of the globe or colony would be in the development, growth and reproduction of the globe. A globe which was merely a satisfactory way of continuing life indefinitely would barely be more than a reproduction of terrestrial conditions in a more restricted sphere. "
And to get to that point of having such space habitats, we first need to learn how to build such sustainable self-contained and self-replicating things on Earth. Learning to do so so can benefit all of humanity right now.
Then, when we know how to make such things through Earth-based experiment and simulation, all it takes is *one* launch of *one* automated factor seed to the Moon or an asteroid (or
See my post on Slashdot from 2005: https://slashdot.org/comments.... "So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements)."
If Elon Musk wants to get to Mars, he should invest in projects like OSCOMAK (my idea, but other people have similar ones): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... "The OSCOMAK project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas."
Build that first, then deploy automated seeds to Mars and the Moon and Asteroids, and they will come... Because there will be a reason to go there...
CATS (Cheap Access to Space) is the technological equivalent of supply-side economics.
Supply side economics is the dumb (yet brilliantly marketed) idea that if we give all out money to rich people, then stuff will trickle down eventually because they will invest in businesses and hire people. That totally ignores that anyone with provable demand for a producible product can already get a bank loan based on booked orders (as well as of course angel investments and venture capital). Give the money to people to spend, and immediately you will see businesses pop up to service that demand. What really happens when you give rich people more money is that they either do the financial equivalent of stuffing it in a matters or they gamble it in high stakes poker games with other rich people and none of it ever reaches the real economy.
CATS is about supply. The idea goes that if we can make launching people into space cheap enough, if we can make getting to Mars cheap enough, then people will go there. CATS is a dumb idea for the same reasons as supply side economics. We don't go to space because, except for a few scientists studying it and a few tourists on thrill rides, there is nothing of obvious human interest there right now.
I'm not saying cosmology or astronomy is not interesting -- it is fascinating. But if you want to study cosmology, you will almost certainly be much much happier studying such things on Earth right now than by yourself and maybe a few others cooped up in a tiny buried shack on Mars after having been irradiated for months on the way there.
If we can build great settlements on land, underground, in Antarctica, and in the oceans -- then soon enough we can build them anywhere including Mars, the Moon, and the Asteroid. Then people will move to space habitats for the same reasons people move to New York City or Austin or Paris or Amsterdam -- because they are interesting places to live around lots of interesting people doing interesting things. And once there are interesting places to go in space, then people will figure out cheaper ways to get there -- including by beaming power to Earth if needed and building space ships in space to shuttle people up from Earth.
I once calculated that we could evacuate the Earth in about ten years if we switched all our industries to the effort and accepted a 1% - 5% fatality rate (same as ocean voyages to the "New World" centuries ago). So, the issue is not the cost of getting into space. The issue is that there is no pl
http://pdfernhout.net/to-james... "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)"
In a capitalist system, dollars are ration units for most people (workers, not owners) -- and those ration units are used to get what the person needs or wants from the market. Given difficulties in centralized planning processes, it is unlikely to be more efficient in meeting most people's needs for the government to decide in advance what to make rather than let market forces meet those needs (assuming the market is regulated for externalities and risks). Maybe that may change someday as governments become more responsive and better planners via networked computing, but it does not seem where the USA is now.
That said, a real society is made up of a mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned interactions (as well as some theft that is hopefully minimized). Every society is going to decide on the balance of those five types of transactions based on its unique history and culture. So it is not wrong to think about how government planning could be done better -- as long as we think about how planning fits into that larger mix.
I discuss that in more detail on my website and in this video: "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
By me from 2009 after trying to explain the merits of a basic income to a millionaire: http://pdfernhout.net/basic-in... "One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?"
Highlights: * safety net for millionaires if they go bankrupt * safety net for millionaire's kids * happier and safer streets to stroll through * more beautiful communities to spend time in * more variety of goods and services from niche producers * more free software and free content reducing expenses * more interesting art to look at * bigger markets with reliable incomes * less gold diggers to worry about * less kidnapping * universal health coverage (implicit in the idea) * emergency medical services could be sized for national disasters * being a doctor would be more fun (many are millionaires) * no need for companies to pay social security taxes or unemployment taxes * no need for affirmative action or anti-discrimination laws for businesses * no need for reparations for slavery * no resistance to businesses going to full automation even if massive job loss * no need for a minimum wage * employees you hire really want to be there to work * happier managers and CEOs * more innovation in the economy * no need for public schools * more homeschooling * happier children * less drug addiction
"So, for all these reasons, millionaires and billionaires could sleep more soundly at night, especially those with social consciences. Those with social consciences would have recognized that while the market is great at creating wealth, it is also great at concentrating wealth which creates problems, since the market does not hear the needs of those without money to shout out for them. But, a basic income gives everyone in a society a voice with which to talk to the market, whether the market needs their labor or not. And with rising automation like AI and robotics, better design, and limited demand because the best things in life are free or cheap, more and more the market will not need humans to be involved in production, and so there will be less and less jobs for humans to do. So, this approach deals with a fundamental problem with divide-by-zero errors in mainstream economics, the kind of errors that cause unrest of various types. The fact is, the basic income is already about what most millionaires might be earning off their investments after inflation (assuming they have anything left after the recent market crash). So, in a way, this proposal makes everyone in the USA into effective millionaires (or close to it). So, that means that millionaires have a lot more potential friends in the local neighborhood with a millionaire-level of spare time to do fun things with during the day. So, being a millionaire will be a much less lonely thing in our society. And should a millionaire have children, the millionaire knows, no matter how irresponsible with money their kid might be, that child will always be a millionaire, in terms of a basic income...."
===
Glad to see more and more discussion of the Universal Basic Income idea. A healthy society has a good mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned interactions (and little theft), so we need to continue to improve in all those areas even if a basic income helps improve the exchange economy: "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://web.archive.org/web/20... "So strategy and tactics in the context of political debate is the same as it is in any forum where issues are debated. It is to win over the fact finder, whether that is the jury, public opinion or the actual voters. Everything you do, everything you write, every position you take, every tactic you use, is "on stage" and affects the person in the middle who is watching. He is who you are communicating with. Your communication with the other side is for the purpose of making a point with the audience, not with the person with whom you are arguing."
An idea: "The argumentative theory of reasoning" (Humans may be adapted to find solutions to problems and approach the truth through arguing with each other in small groups) https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes...
That's funny. When I tried that, it said copyright 1980 Gary Kildall and Digital Research... The repo must be corrupt... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Kildall obtained a copy of PC DOS, examined it, and concluded that it infringed on CP/M. When he asked Gerry Davis what legal options were available, Davis told him that intellectual property law for software was not clear enough to sue.[12] "
Agreed on the need to open source much more government code -- although one can discuss limited exceptions for security reasons which is a slippery slope.
Even for security-related intelligence tools, open sourcing much more makes a lot of sense for both national and international reasons as I explained here in 2010 in an OpenPCAST proposal: http://web.archive.org/web/201...
OpenPCAST was an Obama administration initiative, and it seems to be currently inaccessible under the Trump administration, so here is the full text from there with updated links.
==== The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc.
This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security.
I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progress or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as, say, Slashdot is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to Slashdot as Slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones.
OpenPCAST itself could benefit through using such tools.
Such technologies have already been pioneered by SRI and others in SEAS, Angler, and the broader Genoa II project.
And a public memorial that mentions Tom Armour's loss to brain cancer (cancer being one of the biggest real killers of US Americans historically, along with strokes, heart disease, and diabetes): http://web.archive.org/web/201...
If only those intelligence systems had also been able to help prevent or treat brain cancer (as well as other disasters, from the plague of obesity through the still ongoing BP Gulf oil leak disaster).
For example, we are beginning to understand how curing vitamin D deficiency and eating more fruits, vegetables, and legumes can help with prevention of many cancers and a host of other diseases, such as through the work of Dr. John Cannell and Dr. Joel Fuhrman and others in connecting the dots about vitamin D and nutrition and health. But why should such dedicated people trying to help all Americans (and other people) not have access to the best sensemaking tools tax dollars are creating to help with their work?
So, beyond national security implications, better FOSS intelligence tools
That said, I'm all for a basic income for everyone! Especially 20s-30s something people who are often running on little sleep from taking care of young children...
If production processes pollute, that is a matter for regulations and subsidies or taxes to adjust for externalities.
Fossil fuels, for example, should have a huge tax on them to account for all the environmental and health problems they cause (including mercury pollution) and risks (like the need for a big military to defend long supply lines) with the tax money redistributed as a basic income. You just pay those costs in health insurance premiums, lower productivity from health issues, higher taxes for the military, groundwater pollution cleanup tax costs, and so on -- instead of at the pump or wall outlet -- and thus distorting market forces. https://www.pri.org/stories/20... http://www.environmentamerica....
I worked with Alain Kornhauser about thirty years ago, first taking his robotics course as an undergraduate, later managing his robotics lab as an employee, and then again even later (briefly) as a grad student tangentially as part of a group doing self-driving car research focused mainly on a neural networks approach. I had also been hanging around Red Whittaker's group making the first ALVAN (Autonomous Land Vehicle) around 1986 before going back to Princeton to work as an employee.
While I did not contribute much of significance to that self-driving car group (I had other interests), I had suggested we train cars to just drive one specific route based on videos from driving that route a variety of times. I guessed that most daily commutes are just along the same route and so that could be a big win. But he dismissed that idea for some reason I'm still not sure I understand. Still think it made a lot of sense though for the resources we had at the time.
About ten years ago I suggested he get his PAVE students to write software to drive Gran Turismo as a challenge. Not much response from him on that then though. Glad to see his is finally doing that -- although with much better game/simulation software now.
I also suggested he could make PAVE the free and open source software hub for self-driving vehicle software to address some concerns I outlined back in 2001 in the essay to the Markle Foundation: http://pdfernhout.net/on-fundi...
From the email I sent Alain in 2007-02-02:
"Glad to read of your group's successes with the Grand Challenge. I've long thought a fun project for your students would be to write software that takes visual input from a a PlayStation 2 driving game like "Gran Turismo" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... http://www.gran-turismo.com/ (direct via video out to video capture, or even through a camera focused on a TV) and processes that image to drive the simulation via a USB hookup into the PlayStation. Not quite the real thing (and Red Whittaker might rightfully scoff at that approach as ignoring much of the challenge of making real hardware survive in a tough environment:-) , but it is cheap, easy, and safe to do in an undergraduate lab with limited supervision. And the racing game simulators just keep getting more and more realistic. And if that challenge becomes too easy, you can then add noise to the video signal to make it harder... Or introduce lags or noise in the USB steering. And then start working on controlling ATV Off Road Fury or the the Snowmobile racing games, and so on. Or have kids write software to control one game and then give them only one day to make it work for another... Probably lots of good science and engineering and education to do there on a (relatively) small budget."
I mentioned that idea again to him in 2011-06-18 when I was looking for jobs:
"Or maybe you need someone to do more work on cars that drive themselves, which sounds like more fun?:-) Except that PAVE stuff is all student run, and good for that approach, so I can see you probably won't need someone for that. I still feel getting students interested in writing open source software to process images from the latest driving simulator games is a good (safe) project that might advance the state-of-the-art in automotive intelligence in a very positive way.:-) I'm sure it would at lead to lots of funny press though ("Students at Princeton are seriously playing with video games", and so on). Whether that is good or bad depends on your point of view, perhaps."
Anyway, glad to see that idea finally getting some traction.:-)
While he did not take some of my ideas that seriously, I did not take his
"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" explains how supporting true team spirit is a key aspect of a high-performance organization. You can find some good evidence in there for your point.
The authors also explain better ways to manage email. Here are subheadings from the book chapter:
Chapter 33: E(vil) Mail 199 In Days of Yore 199 Corporate Spam 200 What Does "FYI" Even Mean? 200 Is This an Open Organization or a Commune? 201 Repeal Passive Consent 201 Building a Spam-less Self-Coordinating Organization 202
In general, their focus on good use of email is on helping people in organizations self-coordinate. It is more a vision of the manager as supporting good communications within and between teams versus than a manager being a hub of communications. So, to them, lots of CCs on emails suggest the possibility of some sort of organizational dysfunction which could be corrected by training people to be more self-coordinating.
That book is the second item I list here in a curated reading list on creating and sustaining high-performance organizations: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Another book by one of the authors (Tom DeMarco) is listed as the first item: "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency"
But, this is all easier said than done in practice.
http://bjk5.com/post/718871964... "Every team has two email addresses: one for team members and one for the team's "blackhole." [For example: ] analytics-team@khanacademy.org and analytics-blackhole@khanacademy.org.
The -team@ address is for emailing all members of the team. When you send email to analytics-team@, you expect everyone on the analytics team to read it. Subscribing to analytics-team@ means analytics-related email will land in your priority inbox as soon as it's sent, and you're expected to read it.
The -blackhole@ address is for anything else that has anything to do with analytics. When you CC:analytics-blackhole@, you don't expect subscribers to immediately read it. Subscribing to analytics-blackhole@ means you'll receive analytics-related email, but it'll get filtered out of your inbox and you're not expected to read it unless you feel like it.... Anybody in the org can join any of these email lists. analytics-team@ is usually just team members, but analytics-blackhole@ has all sorts of lookie-loo subscribers who're interested in analytics happenings."
So, given the original story, maybe this transparency approach has an extra side effect (perhaps unintended) of maintaining trust in an organization by avoiding the "directly CC-ing the boss" effect?
It's not quite BCCing the whole company -- like Tesen joked -- as it is more organized. But essentially the whole company could in theory read (almost) anything with that approach.
Slashdot Mirror
... then I could not post any replies. It took me a couple of months to figure out what had happened. I had just figured Slashdot was failing with some weird error message, guessing incorrectly perhaps related to the IP range of my ISP. I was also going through mixed feelings about Slashdot, so fixing it was not high on my priority list.
I eventually had to contact someone at Slashdot via email to fix my account. Then I could post again.
But they never unmarked the submissions as SPAM.
Here are the three submissions I posted that got marked SPAM:
"SPAM: Investigation of Nano-Nuclear Reactions in Condensed Matter"
https://slashdot.org/submissio...
"SPAM: Employment Law and Robotics, AI, and Automation"
https://slashdot.org/submissio...
"SPAM: Trump GOP convention infringed copyright for at least seven songs "
https://slashdot.org/submissio...
My stats on submissions over the past fifteen years or so:
https://slashdot.org/~Paul+Fer...
"47 declined, 12 accepted (59 total, 20.34% accepted)"
I did get one front page submission again today (on Moore's Law ending). The problem is that many interesting tech stories are about specific companies that might sell something -- like that one by HP Labs. I could maybe understand the reasoning that an article about a law firm's report about employment law (and technology) might seem spammish. But a fact-based article about the GOP convention (and tech hypocrisy)? Or an article from a US government agency about cold fusion replication (vindicating the original researchers)?
The person who responded to my email (maybe six to nine months ago?) said Slashdot had been working on its spam filters.
Still kind of annoyed those all three still have bright red SPAM tags since they were not intended as such and I have no financial interest whatsoever in those groups mentioned. But I was glad to get posting privileges back.
Much more frightening was the time my GitHub account went away after posting an issue on Calypso (for WordPress). That felt like having my whole career deleted. I had spend hours writing up the comment previously intending to post it on Matt Mullenweg's blog, but it did not go through (guessing for length and links), and then decided to make a GitHub issue instead. Their spam filters must have detected that a lot of text with links was pasted right after opening an issue. Fortunately GitHub put my account back right away after I contacted them. That issue:
https://github.com/Automattic/...
And a post about that to Mullenweg's blog:
https://ma.tt/2015/11/dance-to...
Both cases serve as reminders to me of the problems of investing time into specific commercial online services with creating a body of published works and an associated online reputation. Fortunately, both companies fixed things up -- since they have reputations to maintain too.
Anyway, hope Slashdot resolves the account issue for you too, Mosquito Bites! I see Slashdot marked twelve of your submissions as spam -- which all look like good articles to me:
https://slashdot.org/~Mosquito...
Seeing this happen both to me and someone else makes me really wonder about the risk of submitting any more articles to Slashdot? I'd rather be able to discuss stuff than get front page articles posted.
Anyway, could be worse -- see the movie Brazil (hopefully not the darker Director's cut version though).
That's a bit like plot in this parable I created seven years ago:
"The Richest Man in The World"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."
The richest man in the world uses monopolies and robotics to expand to more monopolies (including owning the food supply as well as the government which compliantly expands his monopolies further) until all the wealth in the world is owned by just one person (and his robots). As both in the USA recently and in the story, many people argued the solution to widespread unemployment was cut social benefits along with lowering taxes to promote investment -- but the robots still got all the jobs.
from 1947: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ..." is a 1947 science fiction novelette by American writer Jack Williamson. Willamson's influence for this story was the aftermath of World War II and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his concern that "some of the technological creations we had developed with the best intentions might have disastrous consequences in the long run."[1]"
"With Folded Hands
AIs in that story helpfully decide to protect us from all possible short-term physical risk..
Also A Logic Named Joe (more on human nature):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
More hopeful:
Two Faces of Tomorrow:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...
The Culture series
EarthCent Ambassador series
Old Guy Cybertank series
Player Piano I feel is a bit silly in some ways (even as it makes some good points relative to social structures today). A basic income would take care of most of the issues in that society instead of make-work low-status jobs. The book also ignores how raising children well (especially in the most important early years) takes about as much time as you can put into it -- ass can a desire to learn, and a desire to create your own local subsistence processes for fun, learning, community, and security.
about a decade ago: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Glad to see more and more people are thinking about this.
And thanks for the laugh: "Push for a universal basic income for your robot AI" has to be one of the funniest things I've read on Slashdot.
And that idea is not that far fetched: http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/...
"Robots and software persons are entitled to protection of life and liberty. But does "life" imply the right of a program to execute, or merely to be stored? Denying execution would be like keeping a human in a permanent coma â" which seems unconstitutional. Do software persons have a right to data they need in order to keep executing? Can robot citizens claim social benefits? Are unemployed robo-persons entitled to welfare? Medical care, including free tuneups at the government machine shop? Electricity stamps? Free education? Family and reproductive rights? Don't laugh. A recent NASA technical study found that self-reproducing robots could be developed today in a 20-year Manhattan-Project-style effort costing less than $10 billion (NASA Conference Publication 2255, 1982)."
From my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... ... ... irony. :-)"
"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.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially
Thanks for the interesting link to the harvardpolitics site.
Just saw that Rahiel Kasim, Scientific Programmer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, made a plugin like this -- yay!
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
===
I made a browser extension [1] that automatically archives bookmarks to archive.is or (currently Chromium only) locally as MHTML files.
[1]: https://github.com/rahiel/arch...
===
Seen here:
"Show HN: Tesoro -- Personal internet archive (tesoro.io)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
He was responding to other people with similar ideas for browser plugins.
Now we just need the local library infrastructure and data standards to connect to.
https://chomsky.info/200401__/
"CHOMSKY: It's close to a historical universal that the term "terror" is used for their terror against us and our clients, not our terror against them. Heads of states can qualify as "terrorists," when they are official enemies."
https://chomsky.info/20011018-...
"Well that brings us back to the question, what is terrorism? I have been assuming we understand it. Well, what is it? Well, there happen to be some easy answers to this. There is an official definition. You can find it in the US code or in US army manuals. A brief statement of it taken from a US army manual, is fair enough, is that terror is the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to attain political or religious ideological goals through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear. That's terrorism. That's a fair enough definition. I think it is reasonable to accept that. The problem is that it can't be accepted because if you accept that, all the wrong consequences follow. For example, all the consequences I have just been reviewing. Now there is a major effort right now at the UN to try to develop a comprehensive treaty on terrorism. When Kofi Annan got the Nobel prize the other day, you will notice he was reported as saying that we should stop wasting time on this and really get down to it.
But there's a problem. If you use the official definition of terrorism in the comprehensive treaty you are going to get completely the wrong results. So that can't be done. In fact, it is even worse than that. If you take a look at the definition of Low Intensity Warfare which is official US policy you find that it is a very close paraphrase of what I just read. In fact, Low Intensity Conflict is just another name for terrorism. That's why all countries, as far as I know, call whatever horrendous acts they are carrying out, counter terrorism. We happen to call it Counter Insurgency or Low Intensity Conflict. So that's a serious problem. You can't use the actual definitions. You've got to carefully find a definition that doesn't have all the wrong consequences."
https://chomsky.info/200205__0... ...
"The problem of definition is held to be vexing and complex. There are, however, proposals that seem straightforward, for example, in US Army manuals, which define terrorism as "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear." NOTE{_US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism Counteraction_ (TRADOC Pamphlet No. 525-37), 1984.} That definition carries additional authority because of the timing: it was offered as the Reagan administration was intensifying its war on terrorism. The world has changed little enough so that these recent precedents should be instructive, even apart from the continuity of leadership from the first war on terrorism to its recent reincarnation.
Evidently, we have to qualify the definition of "terrorism" given in official sources: the term applies only to terrorism against _us_, not the terrorism we carry out against _them_. The practice is conventional, even among the most extreme mass murderers: the Nazis were protecting the population from terrorist partisans directed from abroad, while the Japanese were laboring selflessly to create an "earthly paradise" as they fought off the "Chinese bandits" terrorizing the peaceful people of Manchuria and their legitimate government. Exceptions would be hard to find.
The same convention applies to the war to exterminate the Nicaraguan cancer. On Law Day 1984, President Reagan proclaimed that without law there can be only "chaos and disorder." The day before, he had announced that the US would disregard the proceedings of the International Court of Justice, which went on to condemn his administration for its "u
My idea to a Knight News Challenge on Libraries : https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Create a browser addon so when people post to the web they can send a copy for storage and hosting by a network of local libraries."
Sad that the Knight News Foundation has changed their software and so all the old contributions are no longer available. Hard to respect a group like that which takes so much hard work by so many people and just dumps it. It's an example of the very thing that contribution was about -- the need for distributed backups. Glad that info is still findable in archive.org -- until perhaps the Knight News Foundation puts up a broad robots.txt and makes it all inaccessible.
---- More details on the idea
Describe your project.
There are two many single points of failure on the internet for collections of important knowledge. For example, years of posts to Facebook, Reddit, Slashdot, MetaFilter, or SoylentNews would all be lost if those websites were to be shut down. We have an answer to that challenge.
While the Internet Archive is backing up some of the internet, it is another single point of failure. We propose developing data standards, software applications, coordination protocols. and hardware specifications so every local library in the world can participate in backing up part of the internet. While that brings up many copyright concerns, we have an approach to deal with that.
We propose making web browser addon applications major web browsers. This browser addon would make it easy for people posting content to any website on the internet to send a copy for safe keeping to their local library (or other access gateway). From there, the content would be distributed across the distributed library network. Any previously published content they have written could also be added to this system using that browser app. The content would be sent a standardized form for indexing and linking with other content using semantic information. Users would specify a Creative Commons license or similar free license for their content when they contributed the content. Each data item would be assigned a unique hash for its content to help ensure its integrity and retrievability (similar to how the Git source control system stores information).
Each local library might only store terabytes of information (likely using Apache Hadoop and perhaps Apache Accumulo or similar software). But, together as a network, thousands of local libraries could store the world's knowledge in a reliable distributed way. Even one library would have the absolutely most important data for that locality, and any few libraries would have most of the popular data across the network.
How does this project advance the library field?
Libraries have historically kept paper copies of the world's information. There were multiple copies of every published book archived across the library network even if each library typically only had one copy of only some of the total. This project will help libraries do the same for the world's digital information -- with each library having part of a distributed whole. In a somewhat holographic way, each library would maintain a copy of the most important information for its local patrons, while also serving as a backup for some of the rest of the data from outside its locality.
Who is the audience and what are their information needs?
The global web community, The Internet Archive. The need is to have reliable backups of freely published digital information.
Yesterday at least the main page was accessible in the internet archive. This morning,that page is no longer available. So, it looks like the new site just added a restrictive robots.txt? There were three crawls from yesterday in the archive that each had the new site with the black-background main page, so the site was being crawled frequently just now.
Or perhaps the archive itself has been pressured to make the content not accessible?
In any case, it is sad that domains that are let go can have new owners buy them and put up a robots.txt and the internet archive stops making available the old version of the site from the previous owner (probably not the case here, just a reminder of what can happen to our history).
Whatever the merits of the copyright claim, this does show how much we rely on archive.org to check what was going on and also how it is (politically) a single point of failure in that sense.
A different perspective on robots.txt:
http://www.archiveteam.org/ind...
"What this situation does, in fact, is cause many more problems than it solves - catastrophic failures on a website are ensured total destruction with the addition of ROBOTS.TXT. Modifications, poor choices in URL transition, and all other sorts of management work can lead to a loss of historically important and relevant data. Unchecked, and left alone, the ROBOTS.TXT file ensures no mirroring or reference for items that may have general use and meaning beyond the website's context.
Precisely one reason comes to mind to have ROBOTS.TXT, and it is, incidentally, stupid - to prevent robots from triggering processes on the website that should not be run automatically. A dumb spider or crawler will hit every URL linked, and if a site allows users to activate a link that causes resource hogging or otherwise deletes/adds data, then a ROBOTS.TXT exclusion makes perfect sense while you fix your broken and idiotic configuration.
Again, Archive Team interprets ROBOTS.TXT as damage and temporary madness, and works around it. Everyone should. If you don't want people to have your data, don't put it online."
By me: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
It's a tool for quickly editing interactive fiction that can be driven by voice recognition.
I actually applied (with mixed feelings, given Alexa's possibilities for privacy violation) to Amazon's Alexa developer funding program to port StoryHarp to Alexa's system just after Alexa came out, but nothing came of it.
Thanks for the insightful and informative post!
Can you cite any evidence for your opinion that "Without CATS, nothing in space is possible except on demonstration scale"? Here is some counter-evidence to your point.
While Russia has raised its prices recently, it used to charge about US$20 million to bring a person to the international space station and back. Increasing volume of one-way flights would bring those costs down given the current cheapest cost to orbit for a 200 lb human is likely closer to US$1 million based on current $5000 per pound launch costs for satellites:
https://space.stackexchange.co...
A million dollars (adjusted for inflation) is in the ballpark of what people paid to move from Europe to the Americas in the 1600s (according to Freeman Dyson in one of his books).
There are millions of people on Earth who purchase multi-million dollar homes. The availability of money for going to space right now for millions of people is simply not the issue.
So, why are these affluent people not moving to space? Why are they are instead buying multi-million dollar condos in NYC and multi-million dollar houses on the beach?
Answer: Because there are no long-term interesting cities or habitats in space yet worth living in for the long-term.
We need to build the space habitats first, and then transportation costs will fall to make them accessible to everyone
For one idea on build space habitats/cities, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
From the 1929 by J.D.Bernal: ... A globe interior eight miles across would contain as much effective space as a countryside one hundred and fifty miles square even if one gave a liberal allowance of air, say fifty feet above the ground. ... However, the essential positive activity of the globe or colony would be in the development, growth and reproduction of the globe. A globe which was merely a satisfactory way of continuing life indefinitely would barely be more than a reproduction of terrestrial conditions in a more restricted sphere. "
http://bactra.org/Bernal/world...
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfill all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant.
And to get to that point of having such space habitats, we first need to learn how to build such sustainable self-contained and self-replicating things on Earth. Learning to do so so can benefit all of humanity right now.
Then, when we know how to make such things through Earth-based experiment and simulation, all it takes is *one* launch of *one* automated factor seed to the Moon or an asteroid (or
See my post on Slashdot from 2005: https://slashdot.org/comments....
"So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements)."
If Elon Musk wants to get to Mars, he should invest in projects like OSCOMAK (my idea, but other people have similar ones):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The OSCOMAK project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas."
Build that first, then deploy automated seeds to Mars and the Moon and Asteroids, and they will come... Because there will be a reason to go there...
CATS (Cheap Access to Space) is the technological equivalent of supply-side economics.
Supply side economics is the dumb (yet brilliantly marketed) idea that if we give all out money to rich people, then stuff will trickle down eventually because they will invest in businesses and hire people. That totally ignores that anyone with provable demand for a producible product can already get a bank loan based on booked orders (as well as of course angel investments and venture capital). Give the money to people to spend, and immediately you will see businesses pop up to service that demand. What really happens when you give rich people more money is that they either do the financial equivalent of stuffing it in a matters or they gamble it in high stakes poker games with other rich people and none of it ever reaches the real economy.
CATS is about supply. The idea goes that if we can make launching people into space cheap enough, if we can make getting to Mars cheap enough, then people will go there. CATS is a dumb idea for the same reasons as supply side economics. We don't go to space because, except for a few scientists studying it and a few tourists on thrill rides, there is nothing of obvious human interest there right now.
I'm not saying cosmology or astronomy is not interesting -- it is fascinating. But if you want to study cosmology, you will almost certainly be much much happier studying such things on Earth right now than by yourself and maybe a few others cooped up in a tiny buried shack on Mars after having been irradiated for months on the way there.
If we can build great settlements on land, underground, in Antarctica, and in the oceans -- then soon enough we can build them anywhere including Mars, the Moon, and the Asteroid. Then people will move to space habitats for the same reasons people move to New York City or Austin or Paris or Amsterdam -- because they are interesting places to live around lots of interesting people doing interesting things. And once there are interesting places to go in space, then people will figure out cheaper ways to get there -- including by beaming power to Earth if needed and building space ships in space to shuttle people up from Earth.
I once calculated that we could evacuate the Earth in about ten years if we switched all our industries to the effort and accepted a 1% - 5% fatality rate (same as ocean voyages to the "New World" centuries ago). So, the issue is not the cost of getting into space. The issue is that there is no pl
http://pdfernhout.net/to-james... "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)"
In a capitalist system, dollars are ration units for most people (workers, not owners) -- and those ration units are used to get what the person needs or wants from the market. Given difficulties in centralized planning processes, it is unlikely to be more efficient in meeting most people's needs for the government to decide in advance what to make rather than let market forces meet those needs (assuming the market is regulated for externalities and risks). Maybe that may change someday as governments become more responsive and better planners via networked computing, but it does not seem where the USA is now.
That said, a real society is made up of a mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned interactions (as well as some theft that is hopefully minimized). Every society is going to decide on the balance of those five types of transactions based on its unique history and culture. So it is not wrong to think about how government planning could be done better -- as long as we think about how planning fits into that larger mix.
I discuss that in more detail on my website and in this video:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
By me from 2009 after trying to explain the merits of a basic income to a millionaire: http://pdfernhout.net/basic-in...
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?"
Highlights:
* safety net for millionaires if they go bankrupt
* safety net for millionaire's kids
* happier and safer streets to stroll through
* more beautiful communities to spend time in
* more variety of goods and services from niche producers
* more free software and free content reducing expenses
* more interesting art to look at
* bigger markets with reliable incomes
* less gold diggers to worry about
* less kidnapping
* universal health coverage (implicit in the idea)
* emergency medical services could be sized for national disasters
* being a doctor would be more fun (many are millionaires)
* no need for companies to pay social security taxes or unemployment taxes
* no need for affirmative action or anti-discrimination laws for businesses
* no need for reparations for slavery
* no resistance to businesses going to full automation even if massive job loss
* no need for a minimum wage
* employees you hire really want to be there to work
* happier managers and CEOs
* more innovation in the economy
* no need for public schools
* more homeschooling
* happier children
* less drug addiction
"So, for all these reasons, millionaires and billionaires could sleep more soundly at night, especially those with social consciences. Those with social consciences would have recognized that while the market is great at creating wealth, it is also great at concentrating wealth which creates problems, since the market does not hear the needs of those without money to shout out for them. But, a basic income gives everyone in a society a voice with which to talk to the market, whether the market needs their labor or not. And with rising automation like AI and robotics, better design, and limited demand because the best things in life are free or cheap, more and more the market will not need humans to be involved in production, and so there will be less and less jobs for humans to do. So, this approach deals with a fundamental problem with divide-by-zero errors in mainstream economics, the kind of errors that cause unrest of various types. The fact is, the basic income is already about what most millionaires might be earning off their investments after inflation (assuming they have anything left after the recent market crash). So, in a way, this proposal makes everyone in the USA into effective millionaires (or close to it). So, that means that millionaires have a lot more potential friends in the local neighborhood with a millionaire-level of spare time to do fun things with during the day. So, being a millionaire will be a much less lonely thing in our society. And should a millionaire have children, the millionaire knows, no matter how irresponsible with money their kid might be, that child will always be a millionaire, in terms of a basic income. ..."
===
Glad to see more and more discussion of the Universal Basic Income idea. A healthy society has a good mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned interactions (and little theft), so we need to continue to improve in all those areas even if a basic income helps improve the exchange economy:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"So strategy and tactics in the context of political debate is the same as it is in any forum where issues are debated. It is to win over the fact finder, whether that is the jury, public opinion or the actual voters. Everything you do, everything you write, every position you take, every tactic you use, is "on stage" and affects the person in the middle who is watching. He is who you are communicating with. Your communication with the other side is for the purpose of making a point with the audience, not with the person with whom you are arguing."
https://www.truthmapping.com/a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://cognexus.org/id41.htm
https://www.amazon.com/Dialogu...
Others: http://barcamp.org/w/page/4722...
An idea: "The argumentative theory of reasoning" (Humans may be adapted to find solutions to problems and approach the truth through arguing with each other in small groups)
https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes...
That's funny. When I tried that, it said copyright 1980 Gary Kildall and Digital Research... The repo must be corrupt...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Kildall obtained a copy of PC DOS, examined it, and concluded that it infringed on CP/M. When he asked Gerry Davis what legal options were available, Davis told him that intellectual property law for software was not clear enough to sue.[12] "
Agreed on the need to open source much more government code -- although one can discuss limited exceptions for security reasons which is a slippery slope.
Even for security-related intelligence tools, open sourcing much more makes a lot of sense for both national and international reasons as I explained here in 2010 in an OpenPCAST proposal:
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
OpenPCAST was an Obama administration initiative, and it seems to be currently inaccessible under the Trump administration, so here is the full text from there with updated links.
====
The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc.
This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security.
I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progress or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as, say, Slashdot is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to Slashdot as Slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones.
OpenPCAST itself could benefit through using such tools.
Such technologies have already been pioneered by SRI and others in SEAS, Angler, and the broader Genoa II project.
Related by (the, sadly, late) Tom Armour on Genoa II:
http://web.archive.org/web/200...
And a public memorial that mentions Tom Armour's loss to brain cancer (cancer being one of the biggest real killers of US Americans historically, along with strokes, heart disease, and diabetes):
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
If only those intelligence systems had also been able to help prevent or treat brain cancer (as well as other disasters, from the plague of obesity through the still ongoing BP Gulf oil leak disaster).
For example, we are beginning to understand how curing vitamin D deficiency and eating more fruits, vegetables, and legumes can help with prevention of many cancers and a host of other diseases, such as through the work of Dr. John Cannell and Dr. Joel Fuhrman and others in connecting the dots about vitamin D and nutrition and health. But why should such dedicated people trying to help all Americans (and other people) not have access to the best sensemaking tools tax dollars are creating to help with their work?
So, beyond national security implications, better FOSS intelligence tools
https://developers.slashdot.or...
That said, I'm all for a basic income for everyone! Especially 20s-30s something people who are often running on little sleep from taking care of young children...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ra...
http://investingnews.com/daily...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Despite their name, rare earth elements are â" with the exception of the radioactive promethium â" relatively plentiful in Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million, or as abundant as copper."
And batteries can be recycled...
If production processes pollute, that is a matter for regulations and subsidies or taxes to adjust for externalities.
Fossil fuels, for example, should have a huge tax on them to account for all the environmental and health problems they cause (including mercury pollution) and risks (like the need for a big military to defend long supply lines) with the tax money redistributed as a basic income. You just pay those costs in health insurance premiums, lower productivity from health issues, higher taxes for the military, groundwater pollution cleanup tax costs, and so on -- instead of at the pump or wall outlet -- and thus distorting market forces.
https://www.pri.org/stories/20...
http://www.environmentamerica....
I worked with Alain Kornhauser about thirty years ago, first taking his robotics course as an undergraduate, later managing his robotics lab as an employee, and then again even later (briefly) as a grad student tangentially as part of a group doing self-driving car research focused mainly on a neural networks approach. I had also been hanging around Red Whittaker's group making the first ALVAN (Autonomous Land Vehicle) around 1986 before going back to Princeton to work as an employee.
While I did not contribute much of significance to that self-driving car group (I had other interests), I had suggested we train cars to just drive one specific route based on videos from driving that route a variety of times. I guessed that most daily commutes are just along the same route and so that could be a big win. But he dismissed that idea for some reason I'm still not sure I understand. Still think it made a lot of sense though for the resources we had at the time.
About ten years ago I suggested he get his PAVE students to write software to drive Gran Turismo as a challenge. Not much response from him on that then though. Glad to see his is finally doing that -- although with much better game/simulation software now.
I also suggested he could make PAVE the free and open source software hub for self-driving vehicle software to address some concerns I outlined back in 2001 in the essay to the Markle Foundation:
http://pdfernhout.net/on-fundi...
From the email I sent Alain in 2007-02-02:
"Glad to read of your group's successes with the Grand Challenge. I've long thought a fun project for your students would be to write software that takes visual input from a a PlayStation 2 driving game like "Gran Turismo" :-) , but it is cheap, easy, and safe to do in an undergraduate lab with limited supervision. And the racing game simulators just keep getting more and more realistic. And if that challenge becomes too easy, you can then add noise to the video signal to make it harder... Or introduce lags or noise in the USB steering. And then start working on controlling ATV Off Road Fury or the the Snowmobile racing games, and so on. Or have kids write software to control one game and then give them only one day to make it work for another... Probably lots of good science and engineering and education to do there on a (relatively) small budget."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://www.gran-turismo.com/
(direct via video out to video capture, or even through a camera focused on a TV) and processes that image to drive the simulation via a USB hookup into the PlayStation. Not quite the real thing (and Red Whittaker might rightfully scoff at that approach as ignoring much of the challenge of making real hardware survive in a tough environment
I mentioned that idea again to him in 2011-06-18 when I was looking for jobs:
"Or maybe you need someone to do more work on cars that drive themselves, which sounds like more fun? :-) Except that PAVE stuff is all student run, and good for that approach, so I can see you probably won't need someone for that. I still feel getting students interested in writing open source software to process images from the latest driving simulator games is a good (safe) project that might advance the state-of-the-art in automotive intelligence in a very positive way. :-) I'm sure it would at lead to lots of funny press though ("Students at Princeton are seriously playing with video games", and so on). Whether that is good or bad depends on your point of view, perhaps."
Anyway, glad to see that idea finally getting some traction. :-)
While he did not take some of my ideas that seriously, I did not take his
"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" explains how supporting true team spirit is a key aspect of a high-performance organization. You can find some good evidence in there for your point.
The authors also explain better ways to manage email. Here are subheadings from the book chapter:
Chapter 33: E(vil) Mail 199
In Days of Yore 199
Corporate Spam 200
What Does "FYI" Even Mean? 200
Is This an Open Organization or a Commune? 201
Repeal Passive Consent 201
Building a Spam-less Self-Coordinating Organization 202
In general, their focus on good use of email is on helping people in organizations self-coordinate. It is more a vision of the manager as supporting good communications within and between teams versus than a manager being a hub of communications. So, to them, lots of CCs on emails suggest the possibility of some sort of organizational dysfunction which could be corrected by training people to be more self-coordinating.
That book is the second item I list here in a curated reading list on creating and sustaining high-performance organizations:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Another book by one of the authors (Tom DeMarco) is listed as the first item: "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency"
But, this is all easier said than done in practice.
http://bjk5.com/post/718871964... ... Anybody in the org can join any of these email lists. analytics-team@ is usually just team members, but analytics-blackhole@ has all sorts of lookie-loo subscribers who're interested in analytics happenings."
"Every team has two email addresses: one for team members and one for the team's "blackhole." [For example: ] analytics-team@khanacademy.org and analytics-blackhole@khanacademy.org.
The -team@ address is for emailing all members of the team. When you send email to analytics-team@, you expect everyone on the analytics team to read it. Subscribing to analytics-team@ means analytics-related email will land in your priority inbox as soon as it's sent, and you're expected to read it.
The -blackhole@ address is for anything else that has anything to do with analytics. When you CC:analytics-blackhole@, you don't expect subscribers to immediately read it. Subscribing to analytics-blackhole@ means you'll receive analytics-related email, but it'll get filtered out of your inbox and you're not expected to read it unless you feel like it.
The approach was derived from how Stripe does it: https://stripe.com/blog/email-...
So, given the original story, maybe this transparency approach has an extra side effect (perhaps unintended) of maintaining trust in an organization by avoiding the "directly CC-ing the boss" effect?
It's not quite BCCing the whole company -- like Tesen joked -- as it is more organized. But essentially the whole company could in theory read (almost) anything with that approach.