Maybe someday more -- is the eCat a scam or is it real? We may know soon... 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."
In three years, all those new Android SmartPhones will be discarded for something new, and the millions of old ones can be repurposed as educational tools for people in materially poor countries. So we can write educational software for Android *now* and just assume the networkable platform will be free in three years to essentially anyone anywhere wanting education. More on that idea: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
We need to move beyond irony in our global defense community: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.... We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). "
You used the word "will" as in human psychology. You mention resources, which includes people, but command structures do not have resources when people do not cooperate with them. Human psychology is amenable to all sorts of interventions. You used the word "fully" in war but there are "rules of war" as well as public opinion. There is always a social context to human actions. In the case of Jews during WII, many (probably most) of them really did not know the details of what was going on in the camps or they (and the rest of the non-Jewish population) might not have cooperated as much in their own transport there, so there was lack of communication and cooperation which is different now in an age of cell phones. "Ruthless" is often just a matter of perspective and who is labelling the actions. Babies are being born stillborn and deformed in Fallujah now; was the USA's use of depleted uranium to contaminate that town for possibly millions of years "ruthless"? Same with US drones killing thousands or so of innocent bystanders by now. War is a racket, as is suggested by the most decorated US Marine... There are almost always other better options to prevent and resolve conflicts. http://warisaracket.org/ The problem is that so often those who get the benefits of war are not the same people who pay the costs, even within just the society paying for the war.
Sure, you picked out some problematical quotes. Thanks for checking out the page.
And it's true that when a house is on fire, you may do different things than you do to prevent fires. But, the reality is that life and property losses are way down in the USA not because we have better firefighting techniques (although we do) but mainly because we design buildings and their contents differently and we have smoke detectors, fire prevention awareness training, and things like that.
There is always a huge risk going down the path of using fire to fight fire. Look what is happening in Israel/Palestine which has become an armed state full of many militaristic people who think "never again" is about being the toughest person on the block (fighting fire with fire) and not about preventing bullying and oppression where ever you find it (fighting fire with water and fire prevention). Where does it end? What has such a place become? And how safe is such a place really in the end? And I say that as someone who had relatives die in the camps in WWII. We, as a global society, need to learn other ways of dealing with conflict than violence. One resource:
"The handbook of conflict resolution: theory and practice" by Morton Deutsch, Peter T. Coleman, Eric Colton Marcus" http://books.google.com/books?id=rw61VDID7U4C "The Handbook of Conflict Resolution, Second Edition, is written for both the seasoned professional and the student who wants to deepen their understanding of the processes involved in conflicts and their knowledge of how to manage them constructively. It provides the theoretical underpinnings that throw light on the fundamental social psychological processes involved in understanding and managing conflicts at all levels--interpersonal, intergroup, organizational, and international. The Handbook covers a broad range of topics including information on cooperation and competition, justice, trust development and repair, resolving intractable conflict, and working with culture and conflict. Comprehensive in scope, this new edition includes chapters that deal with language, emotion, gender, and personal implicit theories as they relate to conflict...."
Consider the profit-making aspects that drive so much war: 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."
Or the pyramid scheme aspects and political election winning aspects:
"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer" http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html "Financing such home front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says. Once the robberies had begun, a sort of "snowball effect" ensued and in order to stay afloat, he says Germany had to conquer and pilfer from more territory and victims. "That's why Hitler couldn't stop and glory comfortably in his role as victor after France's 1940 surrender." Peace would have meant the end of his predatory practices and would have spelled "certain bankruptcy for the Reich." "
Also, when looking back at history, sure one can pick the most pr
I'm not saying you don't make good points which echo G. Wiliam Domhoff somewhat who says much the same: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html "For current-day egalitarians, a commitment to the freedoms and democratic procedures won by past egalitarians can provide the primary foundation for the practice of nonviolence, although some of them also draw upon their religious values as well. This democratic commitment has the added virtue of narrowing the gap between egalitarians and mainstream liberals. In addition, a nonviolence orientation can be sustained by the knowledge that it helps to keep the egalitarian movement itself more democratic; it ensures that violence-prone dominators will not take over the movement and subvert its democratic aims. As many historical cases suggest, the most violent people soon rise to the top once the possibility of violence is introduced, and they often use their loyal followers to intimidate or kill rivals.
Most of the people who advocate strategic nonviolence are aware that it cannot work outside of what are at least quasi-democratic contexts. It is hard to imagine that strategic nonviolence would work for slaves in ancient empires, Jews in Nazi Germany, or critics in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It did, however, play a role in the abolition of slavery in England and the United States, and the courageous activists did have a hand in the transformation of the Soviet Union. Still, dictatorships of any kind usually only fall when there are disagreements among those at or near the top, or if external challenges to the power structure give the oppressed some new openings. There are few instances where dictatorships have been overcome internally by the oppressed majority.
But given the freedoms, civil liberties, and voting rights achieved by a long line of American egalitarians and liberals, there is no end that could be justified by violence, property destruction, or armed struggle in this country. Such actions undercut the democratic rights won by past egalitarians and play into the hands of the government, which has the power to isolate and defeat any violent movement...."
But, with that said, see also James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear", to get back to my point, amplified by another reply, about people cooperating in not cooperating: http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary "The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!
So I claim the credit. Forget all the tales you hear about the contradictions of Marxist economics, truth getting past the Iron Curtain via satellites and the Internet, Reagan's Star Wars program, and so on."
How long can most modern countries survive a general strike or even just a work slowdown? Especially one backed by local communities that look out for everyone there to see they are still fed etc.? The balance of power can shift very rapidly. But a violent opposition invites and even then is used to justify repression, as Prof. Domhoff suggests.
The "pacifist"-labelled engineer who says he will kill but then wants to not be like his enemy is probably mostly fooling himself ultimately. Much political violence starts with those words....
So much innovation there, why can it not be applied in other ways to create abundance for all? How long woudl any regime last if everyone just stops listening at once? http://the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html "A lot of the constraints on us, a lot of the ah, ah - strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own mind. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants. But there isn't any way to punish a LARGE NUMBER of deviants. There isn't any way to do that. It's too expensive to even try to do that, unless you can colonize the minds of children growing up so they become their own police. And they will report other children who are deviating."
* Subsistence ("There are some lovely berries here") * Gift ("This deer is too big to eat before it spoils, so let's share it, and others will share next time") * Exchange ("You give me some meat, and I will give you fruit"). * Planned ("You over there will hunt the meat and you over there will gather the fruit and we will divide it up") * Theft ("Give me your fruit and meat because I'm stronger or cleverer than you")
The balance shifts with technological and cultural changes.
Theft is, sadly, a form of self-employment, or even subsistence in a sense, for desperate people, even if it is illegal (although privatizing profits and socializing costs by big companies often is not, as what is theft and what is legal is relative to cultural norms).
Other options would be improved subsistence through 3D printing and solar panels and local gardening, a bigger gift economy like more of Freecycle and food banks, a basic income to soften the exchange economy, or better planning like to have quality local free-to-the-user public housing and cafeterias and workshops. Each state chooses what balance it is going to have based on culture and ideology and existing power centers.
Wow, thanks for the links. I'm going through those cut-scenes now from the game. There are echoes of Voyage From Yesteryear, but also some real differences. Two issues come up from having seen maybe four of the scenes so far.
The cabal on Island Zero could be considered "mentally ill" as far as still desiring financial/political obesity in a world of plenty for all, wishing to impose artificial scarcity on the rest of society to obtain control of people in it. Obviously something must be done if they are launching attacks on the rest of the planet. Still, you would hope an advanced civilization would have a better way to deal with mental illness than just blowing up the people on Island Zero, even if the result of the cabal's mental illness is aggression. See the Quaker story at the end here, for example, about how violence does not generally change how people see the world: http://www.jhmuseum.org/storyCPScamp.htm
With that said comes a second point. In one of the cut-scenes it is said of the fundamentalist extremists that they had decided that if the world was not going to have any churches, it would not have any people.
As Albert Einstein said, religion is needed even for scientists, since our assumptions and preferences need to come from somewhere, even secular philosophies that are essentially religions, so I think it likely such future advanced civilizations would probably indeed have "churches" of many forms. See Einstein's comments on science and religion here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
Still, it is not unreasonable to suggest that future societies will still have conflicts about issues of aesthetics, ethics, preferences, assumptions, lifestyles, and so on. The big change might be how they decide to deal with them, given various options like moving to space habitats, or creating ocean habitats (like those islands) or cyberspace worlds for alternative cultures, and so on. Why were the fundamentalists not happy just running their islands the way they wanted to? Maybe that is explained somewhere?
Consider the case of the recent Muslim fundamentalist aggression against the USA like on 09/11 in 2001 (as opposed to the other 9/11 in Chile in 1973 where the USA helped overthrow a democratic government). While the explanations told in the USA is that the answer to "Why do they hate us?" regarding a bunch of Muslim Fundamentalist young men is "Because we are free", in reality the answer that can't be talked about in the mainstream media is more like "Because we fund their oppressors, and they want to be free to to live as they see fit". Obviously, there are also other factors, but that is an essential part of the social dynamic of the current terrorism by some Muslim extremists in reaction to decades of previous US interventions. See also a point on time perspective by Zimbardo for other aspects since obviously there are other layers of complexity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
Long term though, if we expand into space, we can get plenty of soalr power using big mylar mirrors.
And consider even this for current needs (though it perhaps questions your point on increasing energy use when better design sometimes outpaces growing demand): http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm "Roughly one-third of the energy content of a gallon of gasoline produced from California wells is input from natural gas. Less than 2/3's is net energy (probably a lot less!). 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!"
Still, ironically, people have known since the 1940s or so how to make safer thorium nuclear power, but it was not developer precisely because it was safer (you can't easily make bombs with it).
As for the question you pose on moving forward socially, James P. Hogan had some ideas in "Voyage From Yesteryear": http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary "The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it! So I claim the credit. Forget all the tales you hear about the contradictions of Marxist economics, truth getting past the Iron Curtain via satellites and the Internet, Reagan's Star Wars program, and so on."
There are other ways to deal with universal surveillance. I mention some here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.:-) "
Still, even with 3D printers some things may remain scarce on Earth, like land area for solar panels. Though it is not clear how scarce land will be or if it matters relative to people's needs and wants. But there is also space, where one can set up big mirrors to collect energy.
Another natural scarcity might be a nice housing location with good views which might be "scarce" depending on how we set up our landscapes and housing. Still, one can set up an equitable system with a basic income (perhaps also with employment income for takss no one wants to volunteer to do) to somehow ration those things which remain naturally scarce.
I agree with you that issues of transition might be rough. See James P. Hogan's writings like "Voyage from Yesteryear".
Ass I see it now, there have always been a mix of five types of economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft). The balance shifts with technological and social changes. http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm "Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17, 2010. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history...."
The irony of spam is it results from having a tool of abundance (email, useful for building a better world, whether more of a gift economy or better designs or in other ways) in the hands of a few people obsessed with making money (ration units) in the current scarcity-based economic paradigm that emphasizes one-for-one exchange and privatizing profits while socializing costs. So, spammers poison the email system trying to get a bit of resources for themselves, and while doing so make it harder for the rest of us to bring abundance to everyone (including those who are the spammers).
Thanks. From that PDF file: "As Png (2006) notes, there is a lack of empirical work on copyright generally. Existing estimates of optimal term are very sparse. Boldrin and Levine (2005) calibrate a macro-oriented model and derive a figure of 7 years for optimal term in the United States. (Akerlof et al., 2002) in an examination of the US Copyright Term Extension Act argue, simply on the basis of the discount rate, that a term of life plus seventy years must be too long. By contrast, Liebowitz and Margolis (2005), argue that the current US term of life plus 70 years might not be too long â" though they too do not provide an explicit model."
This is the reference at the end of the paper: "Michele Boldrin and David Levine. IP and market size. Levineâ(TM)s Working Paper Archive 618897000000000836, UCLA Department of Economics, July 2005."
Boldrin's site, with a link there to the PDF file: http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/innovation.html http://www.micheleboldrin.com/Papers/scalenew.pdf "Intellectual property (IP) protection involves a trade-off between the undesirability of monopoly and the desirable encouragement of creation and innovation. Optimal policy depends on the quantitative strength of these two forces. We give a quantitative assessment of IP policy. We focus particularly on the scale of the market, showing that as it increases, due either to growth, or to the expansion of trade throughmtreaties, IP protection should be reduced."
There are mentions there about the high cost to future creativity of extensive copyrights, because pretty much everything people create builds on previous works.
See also my other note in this thread referencing the biggest flaw in all this economic reasoning, that science shows creativity diminishes if work is done for gain
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Thanks for the research (too bad I can't read Japanese for the first link).
I believe the seven year claim; I just would like some more studies that backed it up. About twenty years was long enough in the age of the Pony Express; why should copyrights be longer now rather than shorter? And back then, the USA ignored foreign copyrights and patents, too.
Here is part of the bigger picture, which references research supposedly by the US Federal Reserve showing that performance is worse on tasks requiring creativity if you pay for performance:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Also, at some point, even with meltdowns, we can just site new nuclear plants where the old one melted down. So, Fukushima is now a good place to site more plants, as is Chernobyl, given the evacuations and the grounds are already contaminated. We could also produce synthetic fuels in those areas and ship them elsewhere. And we could build lots of robots to do the work.
Thorium reactors are even safer and we have much more thorium (thousands of years) than uranium and plutonium (hundred years?) for reactors.. But ironically it is said that thorium technology was not developed in the 1940s and 1950s precisely because it was safer and you could not make bombs from it.
One can argue about the externalities from different nuclear options (such as who pays for the permanent evacuation around Fukushima or follow on effects like loss of agriculture or other economic problems in the area). If we do see a nuclear resurgance, it is going to look very different than today's plants (or should).
Conventional nuclear tends to be fairly centralized which has various political implications in a democracy. Yes there ideas like Hyperion, but they still probably require big central plants to make them and reprocess them. Mainstream nuclear in general requires a higher level of transparency then our society seems capable of on a sustained basis so far. Fukushima is just one more example of that lack of transparency or foresight.
Still, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, as if our society ran off of cheap thorium power, our politics might be better and less short-term if it assumed abundance instead of scarcity.
Why should people in any country have to subsidize a broken business model based on "artificial scarcity" in the 21st century? There are plenty of other ways research can be funded -- foundation, governments, private individuals, a basic income.
Or you could tax copyrights based on a small percentage of a self-assessed value, where anyone could pay the self-assessed amount to put the work into the public domain. I suggested that almost a decade ago, based on someone's slashdot sig that said something like "if it is intellectual property, why isn't it taxed?"
But in general, if about 20 years was long enough for copyright in the age of the Pony Express, why should copyrights be longer in an age of optical fiber?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe someday more -- is the eCat a scam or is it real? We may know soon...
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."
Too bad the economic development of this is so conventional; alternatives:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
In three years, all those new Android SmartPhones will be discarded for something new, and the millions of old ones can be repurposed as educational tools for people in materially poor countries. So we can write educational software for Android *now* and just assume the networkable platform will be free in three years to essentially anyone anywhere wanting education. More on that idea:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
We need to move beyond irony in our global defense community: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). "
"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.
You used the word "will" as in human psychology. You mention resources, which includes people, but command structures do not have resources when people do not cooperate with them. Human psychology is amenable to all sorts of interventions. You used the word "fully" in war but there are "rules of war" as well as public opinion. There is always a social context to human actions. In the case of Jews during WII, many (probably most) of them really did not know the details of what was going on in the camps or they (and the rest of the non-Jewish population) might not have cooperated as much in their own transport there, so there was lack of communication and cooperation which is different now in an age of cell phones. "Ruthless" is often just a matter of perspective and who is labelling the actions. Babies are being born stillborn and deformed in Fallujah now; was the USA's use of depleted uranium to contaminate that town for possibly millions of years "ruthless"? Same with US drones killing thousands or so of innocent bystanders by now. War is a racket, as is suggested by the most decorated US Marine... There are almost always other better options to prevent and resolve conflicts.
http://warisaracket.org/
The problem is that so often those who get the benefits of war are not the same people who pay the costs, even within just the society paying for the war.
Sure, you picked out some problematical quotes. Thanks for checking out the page.
And it's true that when a house is on fire, you may do different things than you do to prevent fires. But, the reality is that life and property losses are way down in the USA not because we have better firefighting techniques (although we do) but mainly because we design buildings and their contents differently and we have smoke detectors, fire prevention awareness training, and things like that.
There is always a huge risk going down the path of using fire to fight fire. Look what is happening in Israel/Palestine which has become an armed state full of many militaristic people who think "never again" is about being the toughest person on the block (fighting fire with fire) and not about preventing bullying and oppression where ever you find it (fighting fire with water and fire prevention). Where does it end? What has such a place become? And how safe is such a place really in the end? And I say that as someone who had relatives die in the camps in WWII. We, as a global society, need to learn other ways of dealing with conflict than violence. One resource: ..."
"The handbook of conflict resolution: theory and practice" by Morton Deutsch, Peter T. Coleman, Eric Colton Marcus"
http://books.google.com/books?id=rw61VDID7U4C
"The Handbook of Conflict Resolution, Second Edition, is written for both the seasoned professional and the student who wants to deepen their understanding of the processes involved in conflicts and their knowledge of how to manage them constructively. It provides the theoretical underpinnings that throw light on the fundamental social psychological processes involved in understanding and managing conflicts at all levels--interpersonal, intergroup, organizational, and international. The Handbook covers a broad range of topics including information on cooperation and competition, justice, trust development and repair, resolving intractable conflict, and working with culture and conflict. Comprehensive in scope, this new edition includes chapters that deal with language, emotion, gender, and personal implicit theories as they relate to conflict.
Consider the profit-making aspects that drive so much war:
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."
Or the pyramid scheme aspects and political election winning aspects:
"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
"Financing such home front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says. Once the robberies had begun, a sort of "snowball effect" ensued and in order to stay afloat, he says Germany had to conquer and pilfer from more territory and victims. "That's why Hitler couldn't stop and glory comfortably in his role as victor after France's 1940 surrender." Peace would have meant the end of his predatory practices and would have spelled "certain bankruptcy for the Reich." "
Also, when looking back at history, sure one can pick the most pr
I'm not saying you don't make good points which echo G. Wiliam Domhoff somewhat who says much the same: ..."
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
"For current-day egalitarians, a commitment to the freedoms and democratic procedures won by past egalitarians can provide the primary foundation for the practice of nonviolence, although some of them also draw upon their religious values as well. This democratic commitment has the added virtue of narrowing the gap between egalitarians and mainstream liberals. In addition, a nonviolence orientation can be sustained by the knowledge that it helps to keep the egalitarian movement itself more democratic; it ensures that violence-prone dominators will not take over the movement and subvert its democratic aims. As many historical cases suggest, the most violent people soon rise to the top once the possibility of violence is introduced, and they often use their loyal followers to intimidate or kill rivals.
Most of the people who advocate strategic nonviolence are aware that it cannot work outside of what are at least quasi-democratic contexts. It is hard to imagine that strategic nonviolence would work for slaves in ancient empires, Jews in Nazi Germany, or critics in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It did, however, play a role in the abolition of slavery in England and the United States, and the courageous activists did have a hand in the transformation of the Soviet Union. Still, dictatorships of any kind usually only fall when there are disagreements among those at or near the top, or if external challenges to the power structure give the oppressed some new openings. There are few instances where dictatorships have been overcome internally by the oppressed majority.
But given the freedoms, civil liberties, and voting rights achieved by a long line of American egalitarians and liberals, there is no end that could be justified by violence, property destruction, or armed struggle in this country. Such actions undercut the democratic rights won by past egalitarians and play into the hands of the government, which has the power to isolate and defeat any violent movement.
But, with that said, see also James P. Hogan's 1982 sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear", to get back to my point, amplified by another reply, about people cooperating in not cooperating:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!
So I claim the credit. Forget all the tales you hear about the contradictions of Marxist economics, truth getting past the Iron Curtain via satellites and the Internet, Reagan's Star Wars program, and so on."
How long can most modern countries survive a general strike or even just a work slowdown? Especially one backed by local communities that look out for everyone there to see they are still fed etc.? The balance of power can shift very rapidly. But a violent opposition invites and even then is used to justify repression, as Prof. Domhoff suggests.
Wow, very insightful, thanks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha
The "pacifist"-labelled engineer who says he will kill but then wants to not be like his enemy is probably mostly fooling himself ultimately. Much political violence starts with those words....
So much innovation there, why can it not be applied in other ways to create abundance for all? How long woudl any regime last if everyone just stops listening at once?
http://the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"A lot of the constraints on us, a lot of the ah, ah - strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own mind. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants. But there isn't any way to punish a LARGE NUMBER of deviants. There isn't any way to do that. It's too expensive to even try to do that, unless you can colonize the minds of children growing up so they become their own police. And they will report other children who are deviating."
* Subsistence ("There are some lovely berries here")
* Gift ("This deer is too big to eat before it spoils, so let's share it, and others will share next time")
* Exchange ("You give me some meat, and I will give you fruit").
* Planned ("You over there will hunt the meat and you over there will gather the fruit and we will divide it up")
* Theft ("Give me your fruit and meat because I'm stronger or cleverer than you")
The balance shifts with technological and cultural changes.
Theft is, sadly, a form of self-employment, or even subsistence in a sense, for desperate people, even if it is illegal (although privatizing profits and socializing costs by big companies often is not, as what is theft and what is legal is relative to cultural norms).
Other options would be improved subsistence through 3D printing and solar panels and local gardening, a bigger gift economy like more of Freecycle and food banks, a basic income to soften the exchange economy, or better planning like to have quality local free-to-the-user public housing and cafeterias and workshops. Each state chooses what balance it is going to have based on culture and ideology and existing power centers.
More on this here:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
(But the "theft" part was insightfully suggested to be added by someone else on slashdot after I wrote that.)
See also:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Wow, thanks for the links. I'm going through those cut-scenes now from the game. There are echoes of Voyage From Yesteryear, but also some real differences. Two issues come up from having seen maybe four of the scenes so far.
The cabal on Island Zero could be considered "mentally ill" as far as still desiring financial/political obesity in a world of plenty for all, wishing to impose artificial scarcity on the rest of society to obtain control of people in it. Obviously something must be done if they are launching attacks on the rest of the planet. Still, you would hope an advanced civilization would have a better way to deal with mental illness than just blowing up the people on Island Zero, even if the result of the cabal's mental illness is aggression. See the Quaker story at the end here, for example, about how violence does not generally change how people see the world:
http://www.jhmuseum.org/storyCPScamp.htm
With that said comes a second point. In one of the cut-scenes it is said of the fundamentalist extremists that they had decided that if the world was not going to have any churches, it would not have any people.
As Albert Einstein said, religion is needed even for scientists, since our assumptions and preferences need to come from somewhere, even secular philosophies that are essentially religions, so I think it likely such future advanced civilizations would probably indeed have "churches" of many forms. See Einstein's comments on science and religion here:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
Still, it is not unreasonable to suggest that future societies will still have conflicts about issues of aesthetics, ethics, preferences, assumptions, lifestyles, and so on. The big change might be how they decide to deal with them, given various options like moving to space habitats, or creating ocean habitats (like those islands) or cyberspace worlds for alternative cultures, and so on. Why were the fundamentalists not happy just running their islands the way they wanted to? Maybe that is explained somewhere?
Consider the case of the recent Muslim fundamentalist aggression against the USA like on 09/11 in 2001 (as opposed to the other 9/11 in Chile in 1973 where the USA helped overthrow a democratic government). While the explanations told in the USA is that the answer to "Why do they hate us?" regarding a bunch of Muslim Fundamentalist young men is "Because we are free", in reality the answer that can't be talked about in the mainstream media is more like "Because we fund their oppressors, and they want to be free to to live as they see fit". Obviously, there are also other factors, but that is an essential part of the social dynamic of the current terrorism by some Muslim extremists in reaction to decades of previous US interventions. See also a point on time perspective by Zimbardo for other aspects since obviously there are other layers of complexity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
So, it's not clear that you get militaristic behavior out of many people, even fundamentalists of some sort, without severe prior provocation in some ways. That can be true even if that provocation might be in ways most people are not paying attention to (like supporting repressive dictators). So, there is a historical context to the game that I can wonder about. See also points made here by "Izzy" Kalman:
http://bullies2buddies.com/component/content/article/60-student-manual/161-how-to-stop-being-teased-and-bullied-without-really-trying-intro
Including his point that physical violence rarely happens in schools without an escalating series of verbal aggression over a lo
Interesting points. You'd probably like Julian Simon's writings:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
And this:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php
Long term though, if we expand into space, we can get plenty of soalr power using big mylar mirrors.
And consider even this for current needs (though it perhaps questions your point on increasing energy use when better design sometimes outpaces growing demand):
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"Roughly one-third of the energy content of a gallon of gasoline produced from California wells is input from natural gas. Less than 2/3's is net energy (probably a lot less!). 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!"
The primary problem with our current system is externalities. If users of fossil fuels were paying the true cost of pollution, disease, defense, and risk, solar and wind would have been cheaper since the 1970s...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Still, ironically, people have known since the 1940s or so how to make safer thorium nuclear power, but it was not developer precisely because it was safer (you can't easily make bombs with it).
As for the question you pose on moving forward socially, James P. Hogan had some ideas in "Voyage From Yesteryear":
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it! So I claim the credit. Forget all the tales you hear about the contradictions of Marxist economics, truth getting past the Iron Curtain via satellites and the Internet, Reagan's Star Wars program, and so on."
Other ideas:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science.html
There are other ways to deal with universal surveillance. I mention some here: :-) "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.
Very interesting summary of the ethics surrounding dealing with artificial scarcity. Thanks.
I have a related site: http://artificialscarcity.com/
Still, even with 3D printers some things may remain scarce on Earth, like land area for solar panels. Though it is not clear how scarce land will be or if it matters relative to people's needs and wants. But there is also space, where one can set up big mirrors to collect energy.
Another natural scarcity might be a nice housing location with good views which might be "scarce" depending on how we set up our landscapes and housing. Still, one can set up an equitable system with a basic income (perhaps also with employment income for takss no one wants to volunteer to do) to somehow ration those things which remain naturally scarce.
I agree with you that issues of transition might be rough. See James P. Hogan's writings like "Voyage from Yesteryear".
Ass I see it now, there have always been a mix of five types of economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft). The balance shifts with technological and social changes.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm ..."
"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17, 2010. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
Basically, you have outlined the plot of this short video.
It is a parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income.
See also:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
That parable and video was directly inspired by this:
"Structural Unemployment: The Economists Just Don't Get It"
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/#comment-254
Great points. Somewhat related:
"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
And:
http://disciplinedminds.com/
I liked the other reply, too.
Still, it is true that worries about potential crisies can lead to innovation as responses:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
So there is a process going on, even if the media may be driven by more extreme dynamics.
The irony of spam is it results from having a tool of abundance (email, useful for building a better world, whether more of a gift economy or better designs or in other ways) in the hands of a few people obsessed with making money (ration units) in the current scarcity-based economic paradigm that emphasizes one-for-one exchange and privatizing profits while socializing costs. So, spammers poison the email system trying to get a bit of resources for themselves, and while doing so make it harder for the rest of us to bring abundance to everyone (including those who are the spammers).
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004123.html
http://pesn.com/2011/01/17/9501746_Focardi-Rossi_10_kW_cold_fusion_prepping_for_market/
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
http://www.remineralize.org/
Lots more if anyone looks..
Thanks. From that PDF file: "As Png (2006) notes, there is a lack of empirical work on copyright generally. Existing estimates of optimal term are very sparse. Boldrin and Levine (2005) calibrate a macro-oriented model and derive a figure of 7 years for optimal term in the United States. (Akerlof et al., 2002) in an examination of the US Copyright Term Extension Act argue, simply on the basis of the discount rate, that a term of life plus seventy years
must be too long. By contrast, Liebowitz and Margolis (2005), argue that the current US term of life plus
70 years might not be too long â" though they too do not provide an explicit model."
This is the reference at the end of the paper: "Michele Boldrin and David Levine. IP and market size. Levineâ(TM)s Working Paper Archive 618897000000000836, UCLA Department of Economics, July 2005."
Boldrin's site, with a link there to the PDF file:
http://www.micheleboldrin.com/research/innovation.html
http://www.micheleboldrin.com/Papers/scalenew.pdf
"Intellectual property (IP) protection involves a trade-off between the undesirability of monopoly and the desirable encouragement of creation and innovation. Optimal policy depends on the quantitative strength of these two forces. We give a quantitative assessment of IP policy. We focus particularly on the scale of the market, showing that as it increases, due either to growth, or to the expansion of trade throughmtreaties, IP protection should be reduced."
I could wonder if something like that is mentioned in here, too?
http://www.thepublicdomain.org/
There are mentions there about the high cost to future creativity of extensive copyrights, because pretty much everything people create builds on previous works.
See also my other note in this thread referencing the biggest flaw in all this economic reasoning, that science shows creativity diminishes if work is done for gain
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Thanks for the research (too bad I can't read Japanese for the first link).
I believe the seven year claim; I just would like some more studies that backed it up. About twenty years was long enough in the age of the Pony Express; why should copyrights be longer now rather than shorter? And back then, the USA ignored foreign copyrights and patents, too.
Here is part of the bigger picture, which references research supposedly by the US Federal Reserve showing that performance is worse on tasks requiring creativity if you pay for performance:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
See also:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
Could you please supply links to any of these studies?
You make a good case, and you probaby would like this book by Bernard L. Cohen that says much the same:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html
Also, at some point, even with meltdowns, we can just site new nuclear plants where the old one melted down. So, Fukushima is now a good place to site more plants, as is Chernobyl, given the evacuations and the grounds are already contaminated. We could also produce synthetic fuels in those areas and ship them elsewhere. And we could build lots of robots to do the work.
Thorium reactors are even safer and we have much more thorium (thousands of years) than uranium and plutonium (hundred years?) for reactors.. But ironically it is said that thorium technology was not developed in the 1940s and 1950s precisely because it was safer and you could not make bombs from it.
With all that said, I'm still rooting for stuff like solar roadways, maglev wind, or the Rossi/Focardi eCat.
http://www.solarroadways.com/
http://www.maglevwindturbine.com/
http://pesn.com/2011/05/31/9501837_Cold-Fusion_Number-1_Claims_NASA_Chief/
Even various forms of hot fusion are looking promising.
Although solar thermal could have done the job from the 1970s and on. Renewables IMHO have been cheaper than fossil fuels when you consider the externalities like pollution, health impacts, risks, defense costs, and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
One can argue about the externalities from different nuclear options (such as who pays for the permanent evacuation around Fukushima or follow on effects like loss of agriculture or other economic problems in the area). If we do see a nuclear resurgance, it is going to look very different than today's plants (or should).
Conventional nuclear tends to be fairly centralized which has various political implications in a democracy. Yes there ideas like Hyperion, but they still probably require big central plants to make them and reprocess them. Mainstream nuclear in general requires a higher level of transparency then our society seems capable of on a sustained basis so far. Fukushima is just one more example of that lack of transparency or foresight.
Still, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, as if our society ran off of cheap thorium power, our politics might be better and less short-term if it assumed abundance instead of scarcity.
The good news is, we have lots of energy options, and the human imagination continues to invent more of them:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR40.txt
I'd like to know if there was any more evidence for this:
http://www.thesunisiron.com/
http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_sol01.htm
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/sun.htm
http://www.electricuniverse.info/Electric_Sun_theory
Why should people in any country have to subsidize a broken business model based on "artificial scarcity" in the 21st century? There are plenty of other ways research can be funded -- foundation, governments, private individuals, a basic income.
Or you could tax copyrights based on a small percentage of a self-assessed value, where anyone could pay the self-assessed amount to put the work into the public domain. I suggested that almost a decade ago, based on someone's slashdot sig that said something like "if it is intellectual property, why isn't it taxed?"
More on that suggestion:
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html
But in general, if about 20 years was long enough for copyright in the age of the Pony Express, why should copyrights be longer in an age of optical fiber?