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."
For example: http://www.news-medical.net/news/20110701/Bone-fusion-drug-comes-under-scrutiny-due-to-researcherse28099-vested-interests.aspx "The Spine Journal has dedicated its June issue to a series of papers that carefully reject previous research supporting the use of Infuse, a controversial, but popular bone growth product commonly used in spinal fusion surgeries.
Infuse is used in a quarter of the estimated 432,000 spinal fusions performed in the U.S. each year. In a new study in The Spine Journal experts assert that the data backing Infuse's widespread use were published by researchers who received large sums of money from its maker, Medtronic, and who exaggerated the product's benefits while concealing its risks. Fifteen of the surgeons got at least $62 million from the company over the past decade, the paper said, citing an analysis of Medtronic documents and disclosures on the company's website.
The purported side effects, they said, include male sterility, infection, bone loss and unwanted bone growth. A stronger version of Infuse, called Amplify, was recently rejected for approval by the FDA because of concerns about possible cancer risks"
If you eat well, and you take the right amount of vitamin D (typically, from a pill), and you do some other good things, then your risk of most cancers drops way, way down. And you also reduce your risk of diabetes, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and dementia. What is not to like?
From what I read, it seems a lot of the cancer treatments you can get at an onocologist don't really statistically promote survival all that much (although some are indeed better than others). The problem is, once you have cancer, stuff like vitamin D and vegetables is not going to work so well. So, you really want to prevent cancer as much as possible. If there was a drug that a doctor, based on research, could say take this drug every day and your risk of all cancers on average goes down by, say, 50% or more, what would you pay for it? Well, take your vitamin D and eat well (lots of vegetables as Dr. Fuhrman suggests) and that is what you will probably find (maybe not that exact percent, and it depends on the cancer). And at no extra charge, you will reverse heart disease and get other good benefits.
Instead, people seek for the magic bullets and kids grow up eating junk. Very sad. But we've built a sick care system where the profit is in palliation not prevention, in treatment but not cure. We need to build a true health care system someday that promotes wellness.
From: http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART03076/A-Health-Care-Call-to-Action-by-Andrew-Weil-MD.html "We currently have an expensive system that is not making people well. While there has been tremendous debate over access and payment, there has been less focus on the content of health care. Without a change in that content, we will never have a sustainable system; all attempts at reform will be taken down by unmanageable costs."
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html "It may prove difficult in the short term to reduce the term of copyrights which have already been extended. Also, the forces pushing perpetual copyright are strong. However, there is another route, which may be easier, employing the concepts of Aikido -- moving with the strong force and redirecting it in a better way. Rather than fight to reduce the maximum term of copyrights, consider that existing and future copyrights could be taxed annually just like real estate as long as they are kept from the public domain. This uses a market-based approach to limit the external costs of copyright monopolies."
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx "According to the CDC, only one-third of U.S. adults eat two or more servings of fruit per day, and only one-quarter of adults eat three or more servings of vegetables per day. These minimal amounts cannot be expected to provide disease protection. I recommend a far more substantial intake of fruits and vegetables with 90 percent of calories coming from nutrient rich plant material, lots of it raw and green. I recommend about two pounds of vegetables and at least 4 fresh fruits per day. Most importantly, attention should be paid to the highly cancer-protective plant foods, greens, onion, berries, beans and seeds.... The most recent scientific advancement in the anti-cancer research is the identification of specific foods and food elements that offer powerful protection against cancer. These foods are essential for both prevention of cancer and also increased odds of survival after diagnosis. Harmful foods and supplements have also been identified, and avoiding or minimizing these is equally as important.... All vegetables are not equally protective. Epidemiological studies suggest that cruciferous vegetables, onions, and mushrooms are far more protective against cancer than vegetables overall - inverse relationships between cruciferous vegetable intake and breast, prostate, lung, and colorectal cancers have been found. For example, in one prospective study, one or more servings per week of cabbage reduced the risk of pancreatic cancer by 38% This was only one serving a week, which demonstrates that dramatic protection is available and real when a diet is ideally designed. The regular consumption of mushrooms has been demonstrated to decrease risk of breast cancer by over 60 percent. Onions, berries, seeds and beans also have dramatic beneficial effects. Beans in general, not just soy, are beneficial for protecting against reproductive cancers such as breast and prostate cancer.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/cancer/ http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/study-vitamin-d-kills-cancer-cells/story?id=9904415 "Doctors have known that low levels of vitamin D are linked to certain kinds of cancers as well as to diabetes and asthma, but new research also shows that the vitamin can kill human cancer cells. The results fall short of an immediate cancer cure, but they are encouraging, medical professionals say. JoEllen Welsh, a researcher with the State University of New York at Albany, has studied the effects of vitamin D for 25 years. Part of her research involves taking human breast cancer cells and treating them with a potent form of vitamin D. Within a few days, half the cancer cells shriveled up and died. Welsh said the vitamin has the same effect as a drug used for breast cancer treatment. "What happens is that vitamin D enters the cells and triggers the cell death process," she told "Good Morning America." "It's similar to what we see when we treat cells with Tamoxifen," a drug used to treat breast cancer. "
You can either get your chemotherapy every day from the phytonutrients in vegetables, fruits, and beans, and also vitamin D, or you can pay some oncologist a lot of money when you are older for iffy results.
Our world has the physical capacity for everyone to have a very nice life materially. But our mainstream economic dogma emphasizes competition and an income-through-jobs link. That pretty much ensures most people will suffer needlessly as our labor-based economy continues to implode in many areas. This creates a vast amount of social stress in a society.
That effect is strongest in the USA right now. But in the absence of broader socioeconomic changes, it will spread to other countries as they too go through the curve of increased technological capacity. Even China is starting to automate heavily due to issues about rising wages and issues about increasing expectations about quality. Countries that have better social safety nets (like universal health care and broader social welfare and more public investment in infrastructure and social programs) will have more resiliency in the face of economic problems, but even those conventional programs as-is, that still assume such social assistance is "temporary", may not be enough to deal with the huge changes ahead.
Eventually, the balance will change in one of several ways. Here are three possibilities. People might engage in a political struggle leading to broad changes and broader equity in global resources (which is what is going on in some parts of Europe right now, as in the past). Or, some compromise might be achieved where lots of make-work is created (through needless wars-of-choice, endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanding prisons, or widespread avoidable sickness) that props up the income-through-jobs link (which seems to be the path the USA is going in part). Or poor people might essentially be starved to death or worked to death, and the remaining wealthy people will, among themselves and their robots, essentially produce a new society of the remaining people that is based on a new paradigm of broadly shared wealth (there are aspects of this that have been going on for a long time in the globe). That last option would be ironic because the robots, in combination with the material resources of the solar system, could just as easily produce wealth for quadrillions of people as for millions of people, and a bigger society is probably going to be more interesting. In practice, we seem to be seeing a mix of all three of these approaches. Which one will dominate long-term remains to be seen. Also, there may be other possibilities, of course.
There I outline a case for why, in an industrialized information age 21st century society, rich people should support systematic wealth distribution (like a "basic income") as in their own best interests.
Also applies to commecialism: 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 [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and "commercial productive"] 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."
We can do better than allowing patents about gift giving.
Still, there is historic precendentfor this, sadly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch "A potlatch is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.... At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth.... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to "civilized" values."
See also, by a Native American: http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm "The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."
http://www.rakontu.org/ "Rakontu is free and open source software that small groups of people can use together to share and work with their stories. It's for people in neighborhoods, families, interest groups, support groups, work groups: any group of people with stories to share. Rakontu members build shared "story museums" that they can draw upon to achieve common goals."
My wife and I have been working on that. The first version was for Google App Engine, but our next version is being built for the deskop in Java using CouchDB for a backend (a backend that can be either server-based or peer-to-peer) that can also provide an RSS feed.
But, after a lot of time spent doing this for free, we need to raise some money to keep it going (like on the order of US$20K - US$40K to finish the next version of the design goals in the documents on that webpage). We've been talking about using Kickstarter. But maybe Diaspora has used up all the mindshare about that?
But in any case, my wife wrote a related blog post called "Steal these ideas": http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html "I spent part of last year building an open-source web application for story sharing and sensemaking in small groups. It's called Rakontu. This was a dream that began in 1999 (when I first started working in organizational and community narrative) and has been growing ever since. I used up years of savings to do it, and I was able to build far less than I would like to build someday, but I had a grand time and I'm glad I did it. I wrapped up the project about a month ago and posted an excerpt from a lessons-learned document for the project.
In my lessons-learned document I said that I'm more interested in the ideas from Rakontu moving on than the actual software surviving as is. Since then a few people have asked me to elaborate on that statement. So I've reviewed and thought, and I've come up with a list of six pieces of advice for anyone who would like to incorporate ideas from Rakontu into their own effort to support online story sharing."
In any case, some people are trying. Maybe someday our society will have a "basic income" to ensure all people have more time for civic-minded pursuits if they are so inclined.
"WWII was the best thing to happen to the US in its economic history."
Citation needed...
Counter argument: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/05/was-world-war-ii-good-for-the-american-economy.html " Had trends persisted in the absence of war, employment, TFP, and labor productivity would all likely have been higher in 1942â¦housing construction was robust and growing in 1939, 1940, and 1941, and when the postwar housing boom emerged with full force in 1946, it took off from where it had been arrested in 1941. Since the failure of residential construction to revive fully was one of the major contributors to the persistence of low private investment spending during the Depression, its signs of revival in the years immediately preceding the war suggest that had peace continued, investment, output, and employment growth would have continued as the economy reapproached capacity.
â¦There continues to be a popular perception that war is beneficial to an economy, particularly if it does not lead to much physical damaged to the country prosecuting it. The U.S. experience during the Second World War is the typical poster child for this point of view. Detailed research into the effects of armed conflict, however, has usually produced more nuanced interpretationsâ¦In that spirit, the research reported in this chapter represents a revisionist approach to the analysis of the Second World War, although one that is not entirely unanticipated."
However, it is true that the fact that the USA was the only major industrial economy left mostly unscathed by WWII did set the stage for major export-led growth in the USA in the next couple of decades.
But ultimately, the same could have been achieved with different social policies without the war and related death and destruction -- if we were more enlightened.
Sections of Iraq have been turned into a radioactive wasteland by US depleted uranium munitions, leading to high rates of birth defects. I guess its true that some people benefit from that (doctors? health care supplier?). But what a way to "build democracy". http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/falluja-cancer-children-birth-defects
But it is also true, as I say at the link below, that "transactions of decline" can prop up a scarcity-based socioeconomic model that does not make sense anymore by creating artificial scarcity even when abundance is possible: http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
First off, you are not clear about what percentage of petroleum becomes plastics and lubricants, and what is burned. I'd suggest the part used for products is relatively small. One example: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/770859.html "The manufacture of all plastics consumed approximately three percent of the total petroleum used in the US in 1997, and PS production comprised approximately.002 percent of that amount. Comparatively, 71 percent of total petroleum used in the US is used for gasoline, jet, and diesel fuel, and 26 percent for the production of asphalt, oils and lubricants."
Also, plastics and many other products including lubricants can be derived from other sources, such as plants, and things can be redesigned with magnetic bearings to reduce lubrication needs. Example: http://www.maglevwindturbine.com/
So, we have lots of options. We don't have to pollute or otherwise destroy our world for the reasons you suggest. We have plenty of alternatives.
That said, I'm not going to disagree that you make a good point about integrated systems. But your tone suggests you have not really looked into alternatives. Why is that?
Basically, one could write educational games for Android (like on understanding socioeconics), and in three years, when people replace their current Android phones, the used phones could go to materially poor nations for kids there to learn from all the free educational software.
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
I wrote that essay after working towards some FOSS tools to make it easier for kids to get into programming.
Also related: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm "So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
And conveniently I just made a 12 minute YouTube video with some answers (or at least good questions) about that, talking about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
Still, in general, you raise good questions. Ones that are ultimately political, even as many mainstream economists might imply they are just technical issues...
Remember, the USA helped create bin Laden by funding and training and arming him to fight against the USSR...
Yes, I agree on the need to switch to alternative energy and energy efficiency. The total US military budget is somewhere around US$1 trillion per year (or more with interest). That's a lot of solar panels and wind turbines and home insulation. Amory Lovins (IIRC) suggested decades ago that just the operating cost for two years of the US Persian Gulf deployment force would be enough to imporve US energy efficiency to the point where we did not need the oil from the Persian Gulf. So, yet more irony. On that, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
The state of the art in Germany is now to build houses without furnaces, they are so well-built, well-insulated, and have air-to-air heat exchangers for fresh air without much energy loss. http://www.enn.com/lifestyle/article/38940
Electric cars apparently use less energy per mile then it takes just to refine the oil into gasoline to go the same distance: http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
Another irony is that in the 1940s and 1950s nuclear physcisits realzied the thorium-based nuclear power would be inherently safer and more abundant than uranium and plutonium based nuclear power (you can't easily make bombs from thorium and it can't melt down easily because it is used already in the molten state and can be drained easily into cooling tanks) but thorium power was discarded precisely because it was safer (you could not make bombs from it). So, instead of cheap, abundant, safe thorium power, we got lots of nuclear bombs to fight over middle east oil fields and other resource rich areas we would not need to access if we had cheap power.
I wonder that will come out of this press conference tomorrow (still not sure if it is a scam or confusion or not): http://pesn.com/2011/06/17/9501849_Defkalion_Announces_Energy_Catalyzer_Press_Conference/ "By now, most people following exotic energy breakthroughs have read about Andrea Rossi's E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer) cold fusion technology. It utilizes nickel powder, hydrogen gas, an undisclosed catalyst, heat, and pressure to produce large amounts of energy. The technology is capable of producing over 4 kilowatts of thermal power from a reactor vessel only fifty cubic centimeters in volume (about he size of your fist). Cold fusion research has been ongoing for two decades, and there have been thousands of successful experiments. However, Andrea Rossi's technology is the most promising cold fusion technology yet to emerge.
Andrea Rossi's company Leonardo Corporation has licensed the technology to the Greek company Defkalion Green Technologies Inc., with sole purpose to sell, license, and manufacture industrialized commercially applicable products using the Andrea Rossi Energy Catalyzer with global exclusivity rights; except the Americas. Defkalion has recently sent out invitations to certain individuals to attend a press conference about the technology on June 23, 2011. The invitation is self explanatory, and is posted below. "
But in any case, we'll probably have dirt-cheap solar panels in twenty years through nanotechnology or similar improvements in materials. We'd have had cheaper solar a lot sooner if either we had more government-funded R&D on them or if US consumers had to pay the true cost of fossil fuels up front (including defense expenditures and health costs and pollution costs and war risk). http://www.iags.org/costofoil.html http://www.energyandcapital.com/article
I have to admit you have a point as to up-front costs, but if the robots can build and maintain other robots, which they can do to a limited extent already, the operating cost is less of an issue (although the robots can more easily get out of control like in James P. Hogan' s "Two Faces of Tomorrow").
Plus, in general, robots are becoming cheaper than human labor for more and more jobs anyway. See Marshall Brain's presentations, like this one:
"Marshall Brain - Automation & Unemployment" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Z8TR4ToNs
Or this from 1964: http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
Maybe you would prefer to read this, by John Taylor Gatto, about the socioeconomic system the US drones are defending? http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprise -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
Why not just get the robot drones to do the work instead of using them against opponents of a rapacious short-term-empire-minded social system based around the USA? And maybe get more people to accept that the answer to "Why do they hate us?" is not so much "Because we are free" but rather more of "Because we support their oppressors"?
See also, for something written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC: http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm "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...."
There are 200,000 apps or so out there (about half free). Even when you write something you think is good, who will try it, especially if you charge for it? I tried a model of "three years paid and then that verison goes under the GPL", but who even cares about that (except me)?
The good news is, in three years people will replace their fancy Android SmartPhones, and those old ones can go to materially poor children around the planet so they can join in the global conversation as well as have fun and learn from all the free apps out there. That's overall got to be a good thing. Something I wrote about that on the p2presearch list: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
Anyone know of a foundation job I could get making more free educational software for the Android planning for that day?
How can anyone prove they own anything digital these days, especially with lots of computers? Free software and content will win in the end, if only for that reason.
...because email is a tool of creating abundance (a better world), but spammers are still caught up with fighting over scarcity, and so they damage the system (email) that coudl bring material and social abundance to all (even the spammers).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html... 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?... 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.
(I know, I'm like a broken record on this -- for those who remember broken scratched records...)
Slashdot Mirror
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."
For example:
http://www.news-medical.net/news/20110701/Bone-fusion-drug-comes-under-scrutiny-due-to-researcherse28099-vested-interests.aspx
"The Spine Journal has dedicated its June issue to a series of papers that carefully reject previous research supporting the use of Infuse, a controversial, but popular bone growth product commonly used in spinal fusion surgeries.
Infuse is used in a quarter of the estimated 432,000 spinal fusions performed in the U.S. each year. In a new study in The Spine Journal experts assert that the data backing Infuse's widespread use were published by researchers who received large sums of money from its maker, Medtronic, and who exaggerated the product's benefits while concealing its risks. Fifteen of the surgeons got at least $62 million from the company over the past decade, the paper said, citing an analysis of Medtronic documents and disclosures on the company's website.
The purported side effects, they said, include male sterility, infection, bone loss and unwanted bone growth. A stronger version of Infuse, called Amplify, was recently rejected for approval by the FDA because of concerns about possible cancer risks"
If you eat well, and you take the right amount of vitamin D (typically, from a pill), and you do some other good things, then your risk of most cancers drops way, way down. And you also reduce your risk of diabetes, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and dementia. What is not to like?
From what I read, it seems a lot of the cancer treatments you can get at an onocologist don't really statistically promote survival all that much (although some are indeed better than others). The problem is, once you have cancer, stuff like vitamin D and vegetables is not going to work so well. So, you really want to prevent cancer as much as possible. If there was a drug that a doctor, based on research, could say take this drug every day and your risk of all cancers on average goes down by, say, 50% or more, what would you pay for it? Well, take your vitamin D and eat well (lots of vegetables as Dr. Fuhrman suggests) and that is what you will probably find (maybe not that exact percent, and it depends on the cancer). And at no extra charge, you will reverse heart disease and get other good benefits.
Instead, people seek for the magic bullets and kids grow up eating junk. Very sad. But we've built a sick care system where the profit is in palliation not prevention, in treatment but not cure. We need to build a true health care system someday that promotes wellness.
From:
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART03076/A-Health-Care-Call-to-Action-by-Andrew-Weil-MD.html
"We currently have an expensive system that is not making people well. While there has been tremendous debate over access and payment, there has been less focus on the content of health care. Without a change in that content, we will never have a sustainable system; all attempts at reform will be taken down by unmanageable costs."
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html
"It may prove difficult in the short term to reduce the term of copyrights which have already been extended. Also, the forces pushing perpetual copyright are strong. However, there is another route, which may be easier, employing the concepts of Aikido -- moving with the strong force and redirecting it in a better way. Rather than fight to reduce the maximum term of copyrights, consider that existing and future copyrights could be taxed annually just like real estate as long as they are kept from the public domain. This uses a market-based approach to limit the external costs of copyright monopolies."
If you take [copyright] away, you have a culture of one-hit-wonder amateurism."
Or you have a "basic income", or a "gift economy", or a "subsistence economy" or a "planned economy".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx ... The most recent scientific advancement in the anti-cancer research is the identification of specific foods and food elements that offer powerful protection against cancer. These foods are essential for both prevention of cancer and also increased odds of survival after diagnosis. Harmful foods and supplements have also been identified, and avoiding or minimizing these is equally as important. ... All vegetables are not equally protective. Epidemiological studies suggest that cruciferous vegetables, onions, and mushrooms are far more protective against cancer than vegetables overall - inverse relationships between cruciferous vegetable intake and breast, prostate, lung, and colorectal cancers have been found. For example, in one prospective study, one or more servings per week of cabbage reduced the risk of pancreatic cancer by 38% This was only one serving a week, which demonstrates that dramatic protection is available and real when a diet is ideally designed. The regular consumption of mushrooms has been demonstrated to decrease risk of breast cancer by over 60 percent. Onions, berries, seeds and beans also have dramatic beneficial effects. Beans in general, not just soy, are beneficial for protecting against reproductive cancers such as breast and prostate cancer.
"According to the CDC, only one-third of U.S. adults eat two or more servings of fruit per day, and only one-quarter of adults eat three or more servings of vegetables per day. These minimal amounts cannot be expected to provide disease protection. I recommend a far more substantial intake of fruits and vegetables with 90 percent of calories coming from nutrient rich plant material, lots of it raw and green. I recommend about two pounds of vegetables and at least 4 fresh fruits per day. Most importantly, attention should be paid to the highly cancer-protective plant foods, greens, onion, berries, beans and seeds.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/cancer/
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/study-vitamin-d-kills-cancer-cells/story?id=9904415
"Doctors have known that low levels of vitamin D are linked to certain kinds of cancers as well as to diabetes and asthma, but new research also shows that the vitamin can kill human cancer cells. The results fall short of an immediate cancer cure, but they are encouraging, medical professionals say. JoEllen Welsh, a researcher with the State University of New York at Albany, has studied the effects of vitamin D for 25 years. Part of her research involves taking human breast cancer cells and treating them with a potent form of vitamin D. Within a few days, half the cancer cells shriveled up and died. Welsh said the vitamin has the same effect as a drug used for breast cancer treatment. "What happens is that vitamin D enters the cells and triggers the cell death process," she told "Good Morning America." "It's similar to what we see when we treat cells with Tamoxifen," a drug used to treat breast cancer. "
You can either get your chemotherapy every day from the phytonutrients in vegetables, fruits, and beans, and also vitamin D, or you can pay some oncologist a lot of money when you are older for iffy results.
A knol I wrote covers that: http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
And from my site:
Our world has the physical capacity for everyone to have a very nice life materially. But our mainstream economic dogma emphasizes competition and an income-through-jobs link. That pretty much ensures most people will suffer needlessly as our labor-based economy continues to implode in many areas. This creates a vast amount of social stress in a society.
That effect is strongest in the USA right now. But in the absence of broader socioeconomic changes, it will spread to other countries as they too go through the curve of increased technological capacity. Even China is starting to automate heavily due to issues about rising wages and issues about increasing expectations about quality. Countries that have better social safety nets (like universal health care and broader social welfare and more public investment in infrastructure and social programs) will have more resiliency in the face of economic problems, but even those conventional programs as-is, that still assume such social assistance is "temporary", may not be enough to deal with the huge changes ahead.
Eventually, the balance will change in one of several ways. Here are three possibilities. People might engage in a political struggle leading to broad changes and broader equity in global resources (which is what is going on in some parts of Europe right now, as in the past). Or, some compromise might be achieved where lots of make-work is created (through needless wars-of-choice, endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanding prisons, or widespread avoidable sickness) that props up the income-through-jobs link (which seems to be the path the USA is going in part). Or poor people might essentially be starved to death or worked to death, and the remaining wealthy people will, among themselves and their robots, essentially produce a new society of the remaining people that is based on a new paradigm of broadly shared wealth (there are aspects of this that have been going on for a long time in the globe). That last option would be ironic because the robots, in combination with the material resources of the solar system, could just as easily produce wealth for quadrillions of people as for millions of people, and a bigger society is probably going to be more interesting. In practice, we seem to be seeing a mix of all three of these approaches. Which one will dominate long-term remains to be seen. Also, there may be other possibilities, of course.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
There I outline a case for why, in an industrialized information age 21st century society, rich people should support systematic wealth distribution (like a "basic income") as in their own best interests.
Also applies to commecialism: 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 [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and "commercial productive"] 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."
We can do better than allowing patents about gift giving.
Still, there is historic precendentfor this, sadly: ... At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to "civilized" values."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
"A potlatch is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.
See also, by a Native American:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."
Here is a PDF file with a presentation I put together on "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft".
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
Here is a 12 minute YouTube video of that presentation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
We can do better than this...
http://www.rakontu.org/
"Rakontu is free and open source software that small groups of people can use together to share and work with their stories. It's for people in neighborhoods, families, interest groups, support groups, work groups: any group of people with stories to share. Rakontu members build shared "story museums" that they can draw upon to achieve common goals."
My wife and I have been working on that. The first version was for Google App Engine, but our next version is being built for the deskop in Java using CouchDB for a backend (a backend that can be either server-based or peer-to-peer) that can also provide an RSS feed.
But, after a lot of time spent doing this for free, we need to raise some money to keep it going (like on the order of US$20K - US$40K to finish the next version of the design goals in the documents on that webpage). We've been talking about using Kickstarter. But maybe Diaspora has used up all the mindshare about that?
But in any case, my wife wrote a related blog post called "Steal these ideas":
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/08/steal-these-ideas.html
"I spent part of last year building an open-source web application for story sharing and sensemaking in small groups. It's called Rakontu. This was a dream that began in 1999 (when I first started working in organizational and community narrative) and has been growing ever since. I used up years of savings to do it, and I was able to build far less than I would like to build someday, but I had a grand time and I'm glad I did it. I wrapped up the project about a month ago and posted an excerpt from a lessons-learned document for the project.
In my lessons-learned document I said that I'm more interested in the ideas from Rakontu moving on than the actual software surviving as is. Since then a few people have asked me to elaborate on that statement. So I've reviewed and thought, and I've come up with a list of six pieces of advice for anyone who would like to incorporate ideas from Rakontu into their own effort to support online story sharing."
In any case, some people are trying. Maybe someday our society will have a "basic income" to ensure all people have more time for civic-minded pursuits if they are so inclined.
"WWII was the best thing to happen to the US in its economic history."
Citation needed...
Counter argument:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/05/was-world-war-ii-good-for-the-american-economy.html
" Had trends persisted in the absence of war, employment, TFP, and labor productivity would all likely have been higher in 1942â¦housing construction was robust and growing in 1939, 1940, and 1941, and when the postwar housing boom emerged with full force in 1946, it took off from where it had been arrested in 1941. Since the failure of residential construction to revive fully was one of the major contributors to the persistence of low private investment spending during the Depression, its signs of revival in the years immediately preceding the war suggest that had peace continued, investment, output, and employment growth would have continued as the economy reapproached capacity.
â¦There continues to be a popular perception that war is beneficial to an economy, particularly if it does not lead to much physical damaged to the country prosecuting it. The U.S. experience during the Second World War is the typical poster child for this point of view. Detailed research into the effects of armed conflict, however, has usually produced more nuanced interpretationsâ¦In that spirit, the research reported in this chapter represents a revisionist approach to the analysis of the Second World War, although one that is not entirely unanticipated."
However, it is true that the fact that the USA was the only major industrial economy left mostly unscathed by WWII did set the stage for major export-led growth in the USA in the next couple of decades.
But ultimately, the same could have been achieved with different social policies without the war and related death and destruction -- if we were more enlightened.
Sections of Iraq have been turned into a radioactive wasteland by US depleted uranium munitions, leading to high rates of birth defects. I guess its true that some people benefit from that (doctors? health care supplier?). But what a way to "build democracy".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/falluja-cancer-children-birth-defects
War is a racket:
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
But it is also true, as I say at the link below, that "transactions of decline" can prop up a scarcity-based socioeconomic model that does not make sense anymore by creating artificial scarcity even when abundance is possible:
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
:-)
If you read the essay, the title has a double meaning, as in "Education Technology has given schools a failing grade in the information age".
First off, you are not clear about what percentage of petroleum becomes plastics and lubricants, and what is burned. I'd suggest the part used for products is relatively small. One example: .002 percent of that amount. Comparatively, 71 percent of total petroleum used in the US is used for gasoline, jet, and diesel fuel, and 26 percent for the production of asphalt, oils and lubricants."
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/770859.html
"The manufacture of all plastics consumed approximately three percent of the total petroleum used in the US in 1997, and PS production comprised approximately
Most drugs are essentially a scam anyway, compared to eating better:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
Also, plastics and many other products including lubricants can be derived from other sources, such as plants, and things can be redesigned with magnetic bearings to reduce lubrication needs. Example:
http://www.maglevwindturbine.com/
Asphalt can be replaced at possibly less cost by solar roadways:
http://www.solarroadways.com/
I've worked a bit over the years towards systems that would help people figure out how to do that:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
So, we have lots of options. We don't have to pollute or otherwise destroy our world for the reasons you suggest. We have plenty of alternatives.
That said, I'm not going to disagree that you make a good point about integrated systems. But your tone suggests you have not really looked into alternatives. Why is that?
http://www.phibetaiota.net/about/
Disclaimer: they listed me recently in their "who's who in public intelligence" section.
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/1c59bf9a35454b51
Basically, one could write educational games for Android (like on understanding socioeconics), and in three years, when people replace their current Android phones, the used phones could go to materially poor nations for kids there to learn from all the free educational software.
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to
offer, schools themselves must change.
I wrote that essay after working towards some FOSS tools to make it easier for kids to get into programming.
Also related:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
And, speaking as someone who has been using computers for thirty years, and while thinking everyone should ideally have a baisc computer literacy to be an informed citizen, how many programmers does the world really need? Kids are smart. They know there are fewer and fewer "good" jobs in technology for all sorts of reasons.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://community.dice.com/t5/Tech-Market-Conditions/Alice-Dice-s-claim-of-4-Unemployment/td-p/235866
From:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4209831/Engineering--The-next-generation
"We often hear from readers who are engineers that they try to dissuade sons and daught
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
And conveniently I just made a 12 minute YouTube video with some answers (or at least good questions) about that, talking about a balance between five interwoven economies that shifts with cultural change and technological change:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
A PDF file of the presentation is here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
More related stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Still, in general, you raise good questions. Ones that are ultimately political, even as many mainstream economists might imply they are just technical issues...
Remember, the USA helped create bin Laden by funding and training and arming him to fight against the USSR...
Yes, I agree on the need to switch to alternative energy and energy efficiency. The total US military budget is somewhere around US$1 trillion per year (or more with interest). That's a lot of solar panels and wind turbines and home insulation. Amory Lovins (IIRC) suggested decades ago that just the operating cost for two years of the US Persian Gulf deployment force would be enough to imporve US energy efficiency to the point where we did not need the oil from the Persian Gulf. So, yet more irony. On that, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
The state of the art in Germany is now to build houses without furnaces, they are so well-built, well-insulated, and have air-to-air heat exchangers for fresh air without much energy loss.
http://www.enn.com/lifestyle/article/38940
Electric cars apparently use less energy per mile then it takes just to refine the oil into gasoline to go the same distance:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
Another irony is that in the 1940s and 1950s nuclear physcisits realzied the thorium-based nuclear power would be inherently safer and more abundant than uranium and plutonium based nuclear power (you can't easily make bombs from thorium and it can't melt down easily because it is used already in the molten state and can be drained easily into cooling tanks) but thorium power was discarded precisely because it was safer (you could not make bombs from it). So, instead of cheap, abundant, safe thorium power, we got lots of nuclear bombs to fight over middle east oil fields and other resource rich areas we would not need to access if we had cheap power.
I wonder that will come out of this press conference tomorrow (still not sure if it is a scam or confusion or not):
http://pesn.com/2011/06/17/9501849_Defkalion_Announces_Energy_Catalyzer_Press_Conference/
"By now, most people following exotic energy breakthroughs have read about Andrea Rossi's E-Cat (Energy Catalyzer) cold fusion technology. It utilizes nickel powder, hydrogen gas, an undisclosed catalyst, heat, and pressure to produce large amounts of energy. The technology is capable of producing over 4 kilowatts of thermal power from a reactor vessel only fifty cubic centimeters in volume (about he size of your fist). Cold fusion research has been ongoing for two decades, and there have been thousands of successful experiments. However, Andrea Rossi's technology is the most promising cold fusion technology yet to emerge.
Andrea Rossi's company Leonardo Corporation has licensed the technology to the Greek company Defkalion Green Technologies Inc., with sole purpose to sell, license, and manufacture industrialized commercially applicable products using the Andrea Rossi Energy Catalyzer with global exclusivity rights; except the Americas. Defkalion has recently sent out invitations to certain individuals to attend a press conference about the technology on June 23, 2011. The invitation is self explanatory, and is posted below. "
But in any case, we'll probably have dirt-cheap solar panels in twenty years through nanotechnology or similar improvements in materials. We'd have had cheaper solar a lot sooner if either we had more government-funded R&D on them or if US consumers had to pay the true cost of fossil fuels up front (including defense expenditures and health costs and pollution costs and war risk).
http://www.iags.org/costofoil.html
http://www.energyandcapital.com/article
I have to admit you have a point as to up-front costs, but if the robots can build and maintain other robots, which they can do to a limited extent already, the operating cost is less of an issue (although the robots can more easily get out of control like in James P. Hogan' s "Two Faces of Tomorrow").
Plus, in general, robots are becoming cheaper than human labor for more and more jobs anyway. See Marshall Brain's presentations, like this one:
"Marshall Brain - Automation & Unemployment"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Z8TR4ToNs
Ot Martin Ford's writings:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/
Or this from 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not possess any adequate mechanisms to permit these potentials to become realities. The industrial system was designed to produce an ever-increasing quantity of goods as efficiently as possible, and it was assumed that the distribution of the power to purchase these goods would occur almost automatically. The continuance of the income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
Or related stuff on my site.
Maybe you would prefer to read this, by John Taylor Gatto, about the socioeconomic system the US drones are defending?
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprise -- no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
Why not just get the robot drones to do the work instead of using them against opponents of a rapacious short-term-empire-minded social system based around the USA? And maybe get more people to accept that the answer to "Why do they hate us?" is not so much "Because we are free" but rather more of "Because we support their oppressors"?
See also, for something written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC: ..."
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"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.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.evojazz (my app where you breed new music).
There are 200,000 apps or so out there (about half free). Even when you write something you think is good, who will try it, especially if you charge for it? I tried a model of "three years paid and then that verison goes under the GPL", but who even cares about that (except me)?
The good news is, in three years people will replace their fancy Android SmartPhones, and those old ones can go to materially poor children around the planet so they can join in the global conversation as well as have fun and learn from all the free apps out there. That's overall got to be a good thing. Something I wrote about that on the p2presearch list:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
Anyone know of a foundation job I could get making more free educational software for the Android planning for that day?
How can anyone prove they own anything digital these days, especially with lots of computers? Free software and content will win in the end, if only for that reason.
...because email is a tool of creating abundance (a better world), but spammers are still caught up with fighting over scarcity, and so they damage the system (email) that coudl bring material and social abundance to all (even the spammers).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... 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? ... 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.
(I know, I'm like a broken record on this -- for those who remember broken scratched records...)
"We need to get out of these countries. It costs too much!"
I agree, but the problem is, in general, the people paying the costs are not the same people getting the benefits from the wars...
http://warisaracket.org/
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
We won't move beyond war until we acknowledge modern warfare (like with drones) is mostly ironic.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html