Which include drugging children, suspension of civil rights, terrorizing kids, fostering a climate of bullying, breaking the bonds between children and their families, damaging the teachers in other ways, destroying intrinsic motivation, boring people, keeping people from reaching their full potential by wasting years of their lives, and so on...
Do you have alternative proposals?
Anyway, after you have mulled the idea over for a while, you may get past a knee-jerk reaction. It's hard to admit how much big institutional systems have harmed us, even when we have "succeeded" in the world they have shaped.
From New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?...
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there....
A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable me -- but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."
Perhaps some would. Let's say you are right. Remember, most of these people are the product of schooling. What does that say about raising those now adults during their formative years during the 1980s in day-prisons confined in chairs doing paperwork most of their youth and then fed mainstream TV promoting consumerism the rest of the time? It might take a while for the culture to heal...
Also, why should everyone suffer because a few will mess up? There are already plenty of laws about "negect" and kids. Obviously, if parents don't provide at all for their kids, the community is probably going to step in eventually in some way. And if every family had a lot of money and free time, relatives and neighbors would be able informally to help out the kids whose parents were really messed up. Besides, if parents don't care about their kids, school or not, that kid is going to end up messed up. How many such kids already flunk out of school because they can't do their homework or have to go home to take care of an alcoholic parent? Lots. See: http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
Many times, addictive behavior comes from stress, and money stress in families with kids is a big issue in our society (about 20% of US kids are raised in poverty), and so this approach might alleviate some of that stress. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Nothing is perfect. But overall, which is more fitting with democracy, family values, individual rights, and a free market?
What do you think of this? http://mises.org/Community/forums/p/16118/325657.aspx "So I would say NO, Japan was not justified in attacking the USA over the USA refusing to sell Japan oil or steel or other stuff.
It is sad that the Rosevelt Administration refused to speak to the son of the Emperor of Japan who was carrying a deal with the USA that Japan would withdraw from China if the USA would continue the previous trade relationship. The worst part is in the opportunity cost: Mankind would have been saved 2 cities destroyed by atom bombs. Hundreds of cities destroyed by bombing and fire, 1700 Americans on the Arizona, countless innocents in the Pacific Islands and China being killed by bullets, bombs and disease, China going commie, etc."
Or this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations#Impact_on_the_German_economy "The economic problems that the payments brought, and German resentment at their imposition are usually cited as one of the more significant factors that led to the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler."
Although others disagree with that.
History is pretty complex... This is not to defend expansionist wars of conquest that both Japan and Germany engaged in. As well as the USA at various times (Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, etc.).
The bottom line -- Germany could have prospered if it had turned its ingenuity inward to make Germany work for all its people. Similarly, to use nuclear energy to fight in wars created by people fighting over a perceived scarcity of oil is very ironic.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html "New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not. "
See also: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/ http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee "A basic income guarantee (or basic income) is a proposed system[1] of social security, that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households[2], groups, or nations, in order to provide for individual basic human needs. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Network[3] emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs.""
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society... Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
"When fossil fuels are exhausted, there may be a mass die-off event within the human species, due to the massive reduction in possible food production and transportation. "
Baloney. Who is feeding this to you? Why? Who profits from your fear?
We have centuries of coal (but it is polluting). Thorium can power our civilization for thousands of years. We have an effectively infinite supply of solar energy. People are working on zero-emissions manufacturing. We can grind up rock to make fertilizer. And so on.
Who has infested your mind to what end with so much negativism so that you are less likely to have kids? Who is making money off of that? Are there much uglier imperatives at work in the people who tell you this? Example:
"The Greening of Hate" http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/09/106-greening-of-hate.html
Did the world end when we went through "Peak Whale Oil" a century or so ago? You're still here, right?
Now, we may still blow ourselves up fighting over mis-perceived scarcity. But that is a different problem.
Resources do not exist before the human imagination looks at the universe and turns things into resources. Otherwise, say, we would not have aluminum, produced because some imaginative people figured out how. We would not have solar panels without people figuring out how to make them. And so on.
Here is a quick comparison of the beliefs of say, William R. Catton (who wrote "Overshoot") and Julian L. Simon (who wrote "The Ultimate Resource").
Catton: * People are the problem * People consume resources * People take up space leading to overcrowding * There is a fixed amount of material resources on the Earth
Thus he predicts (with some glee?) a big die-off.
Simon: * People are the solution * People produce resources * People create spaces worth being in * The human imagination creates new resources
Now, there is truth to what both of these authors say. But ultimately, you can decide for yourself which path leaning more to one or the other is more likely to produce a future more worth living in, given the truth about solar power, thorium power, grinding up rock, and so on.
Our electricity and natural gas consumption might even go down if we switched to electric cars, by the way: http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm "To extract one gallon of gasoline (or equivalent distillate): 9.66 kWh (maybe not all in the form of electricity*) To refine that gallon: 2.73 kWh additional energy (maybe not all in the form of electricity*) Total: 12.39 kWh per gallon.
*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 30
There is also room for quadrillions of people in space habitats in the solar system built from asteroidal ore, even if the Earth itself might be deemed at some point by some people to have, for aesthetic reasons, too much of a crowd. So, that notion of "overpopulation" is just bunk for an advanced industrial society such as ours. We can produce lots of energy and recycle resources and prevent or clean up pollution if we want to, the problem is that our mainstream economic system does not properly account for externalities. Mainstream economics is broken, not the idea of the more the merrier.
So, since children are net producers over their lives, my your logic, should not parents be credited from society with a lot of money for having a child or raising a child?:-)
You are also pushing some notion of merit pay or punishment fines, trying to somehow turn parenting or being a child into a series of economic calculations. But for any job involving creativity, it turns out that merit pay reduces performance. That is what research really says, despite conventional wisdom that says something else. See:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
So, IMHO, your analysis and recommendations are based on two very flawed assumptions about both resources and motivation. However, your suggestions are in accord with the kind of implicit and explicit curriculum in most schools. So, your plan in itself probably a result of schooling and the ideas about "human nature" it embedded in you, like people do not do things without external motivations.
Also, as you probably believe in a "free market" based on your approach, why should money be forced to be spent through specific places that call themselves schools? Why not let parents decide how best to spend the funds, including by just having the time to spend with kids educating them? Why create and support soulless institutions to raise children instead of prosperous families and healthy neighborhoods?
Related as an alternative if you really want to follow your free market suggestions to perhaps better conclusions: http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education. I'm trying to describe a free market in schooling just exactly like the one the country had right up until the Civil War, one in which students volunteer for the kind of education that suits them, even if that means self-education. It didn't hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see."
Although as I believe in the importance of a redistributive "basic income" as a right of citizenship in our society, I still think each citizen is going to need a monthly check to make the free market work, especially as robotics, automation, better design, and voluntary social networks displace more and more paid work. That's another assumption implicit in your analysis -- that there will be "jobs" around for these kids and that productivity as citizens will be measured in monetary terms. http://en.wik
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/HeartDisease.aspx "When it comes to combating heart disease, most information sources promote drugs and surgery as the only viable lines of defense. As a result, the demand for high-tech, expensive and largely ineffective medical care is overwhelming, causing medical costs and insurance rates to skyrocket. This chase for 'cures' is both financially devastating and futile. Morbidity and premature mortality from heart disease continue to rise with no sign of abating. Interventional cardiology offers only partial benefits, since these procedures do not remove the causes of the problem. Attempts to intervene with invasive procedures or surgery after the damage already has been done have not been shown to offer a significant reduction in cardiac deaths.
We need to keep in mind that angioplasty and bypass surgery have some significant adverse outcomes, including heart attacks, stroke and death. These invasive procedures only attempt to treat a small segment of the diseased heart, usually with only temporary benefit. Patients treated with angioplasty and bypass surgery continue to experience progressive disability, and most still die prematurely as a result of their heart disease.
The average person is not aware that there are safer, more effective options available. Unfortunately, government agencies are often slow to respond to new scientific information and continue to advocate outdated recommendations. Economic and political forces also make it difficult for Americans to be clearly informed that heart disease is self-induced and totally avoidable by eating a diet of nutritional excellence.
Making significant dietary changes allows people who suffer with coronary heart disease, high cholesterol, overweight or obesity and/or high blood pressure to reduce and to eliminate their dependence on medications, avoiding major surgeries such as heart bypass and angioplasty.
You cannot expect our government or national health organizations to give effective guidance. They must offer a standard approach designed for political acceptance. For example, six of the eleven members, including the chairman of the USDA's Dietary Guidelines Committee in the year 2000, had financial ties to the meat, dairy and egg industries. Not surprisingly, the foods these industries produce figures prominently in government dietary recommendations in spite of their documented links to increased health risks. Similar problems exist in recommendations by non-profit health organizations. Sadly, even the American Heart Association (AHA) advocates a diet that actually has been shown to increase heart disease.1" ==== I wish I had know this cheap and effective advice years ago before my father had an angioplasty for a clog and then had a heart attack a few months later as it clogged bakc up again... He might still be here today. Instead, some cardiologists got to make a lot of money off of his suffering.
If the Rossi/Focardi eCat (a claimed nickel-hydrogen LENR cold fusion device) really works, maybe cold fusion also happens at the boundary of the Earth's nickel-iron crust? And maybe the core even ejects neustrons, as suggested about the sun? And the end result might be abiotic oil and other "food" that could support an underground biosphere? Could life have even started down there (if bacteria did not come from beyond the solar system)? What other scientific dogma remains to be overturned? Related comment by me: http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Denergy-catalyzer%E2%80%9D-and-the-%E2%80%9Cneutron-barometer%E2%80%9D/#comment-5891
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."
Hopefully no one will go to jail for embedding it...:-)
Compulsory school already is essentially a day prison, or, as this superintendent points out, in some ways worse.
Homschooling is becoming an option for more and more... But ultimately, we need a change like giving the funds directly to parents instead of the schools so the free market can supply the educational services (or the family), as I outline here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html "Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet": http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too:-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness): http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there.:-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology?:-( "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing....
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
Thanks for the insightful comment. I was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time a couple decades ago, and this sounds very likely.
Here are some tangential things I wrote just now in some email discussion related to this, branching out from these ideas to thinking about the evolution of human cognition in general.
===
First, some comments I wrote as I discussed this with someone else, who wrote first about women using beauty to be upwardly mobile in power and money:
Yes, women can convert beauty to cash at some point, but as is said here, physical beauty is generally a depreciating asset...
"In Economic Terms, You Are a Depreciating Asset" http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/10/in_economic_terms_you_are_a_de.html "It's an age-old question: Why, in this city jam-packed with rich, smart, pretty people, is it so hard for hot ladies to find mates? This week, the definitive answer appeared on Craigslist, where the answers to all urban koans may be found. "I'm a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl," wrote a poster who called herself an "enterprising young woman."... A businessman offers his sage advice:... So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset...."
Actually, some women can be pretty effective at manipulating social networks regardless of their looks. In fact, moderate looks may be better for that sort of manipulation because such women are less seen as a threat by other women. There is a lot of selection for aspects of human intelligence as well.
A potentially depressing aspect of that:
"Lies And Deception Led To Human Intelligence" http://www.jasonsummers.org/lies-and-deception-led-to-human-intelligence/ "The prevailing view among scientists today is that the brain size increase that occurred in great apes and was extended into hominids resulted from the premium that natural selection placed on individuals that were socially clever. This theory, often called social intelligence or Machiavellian intelligence, argues that the primary evolutionary benefit of large brain size was that it allowed apes and hominids to cope with and even exploit increasingly complex social relations. In large social groups, each individual must remember the network of alliances, rivalries, debts, and credits that exist among group members. This is not so different from the politics of our own day-to-day lives. Frans de Waal (1982) has observed that chimpanzees seem to engage in a âoeservice economyâ in which they barter alliances and other forms of support with one another. The individuals best able to exploit this web of social relationships would have reaped more mating success than their group mates.... Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten (1988b) collected examples of potential lying in nonhuman primates and concluded that this behavior showed and evolutionary trend, one that was more widespread in higher primates. Great apes seem to be skilled at deceiving one another, whereas lemurs rarely if ever engage in tactical deception...."
Much of what goes on in evolution is under the hood, so to speak.:-)
Biochemical pathways are another example of hidden evolution which is not easy to get records about, things like being able to eat a certain fruit without immediately dying, which may be totally related to some enzyme pathway somewhere.
===
And then in response to comments about male dominance in tribal societies and whether that meant getting all the most alluring women:
In some Native American societies, "chiefs" are elected by the women...
Another complexity: http://newhope360.com/food/stressed-plants-could-create-next-gen-functional-foods-say-usda-experts "Compounds extracted from plants exposed to stressful conditions could be used to create a powerful new generation of functional foods, according to scientists. Advertisement
A research team from the US Department of Agriculture said that these substances â" known as phytoalexins â" were naturally induced in plants as a defence mechanism against stress or fungal attack. They could also be prompted to appear using elicitor treatment and other stress inducing techniques.
In a paper published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the scientists said that although phytoalexins had been investigated for their possible role in plant defence, until recently they had gone unexplored as nutritional components in human foods."
It's been argued by organic farmers that somewhat chewed on plants are going to be healthier for humans to eat if we are adapted to make use of these compounds. This is a potential problem with plants grown under optimal conditions in greenhouses, too.
It comes down to budget. If the plant has been bred or genetically engineered (and much of this is just conventional breeding) to put its resources into starch and sugar then it is going to be a weaker and less generally nutritious plant. I could believe what you say, that genetic engineers are not "intentionally" crippling plants, at least not any more so than conventional breeding. But the fact remains that we are still left with breeds, conventional or GMO, that are in many ways less healthy to eat. In general, nature has already created fairly optimal plants (it seems). Messing with that can push around things like risk, but you end up making tradeoffs. That may not be completely true, because look at the wonderful crops we have now from 1000s of years of breeding, but in general, it seems there may be no way to make everything better in a plant while not losing some other essential quality we may not even appreciate yet. How many phytonutrients do we really understand yet, as Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about? http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx "Nutritional science in the last twenty years has demonstrated that colorful plant foods contain a huge assortment of protective compounds, mostly of which still remain unnamed. Only by eating an assortment of nutrient-rich natural foods can we access these protective compounds and prevent the common diseases that afflict Americans. Our modern, low-nutrient eating style has led to an overweight population, the majority of whom develop diseases of nutritional ignorance, causing our medical costs to spiral out of control. "
Monoculture agriculture (whether GMO or conventional) may produce other problems in practice, though sometimes complicated by GMO initiatives: http://www.biotech-info.net/blind_rice.html "The genetic engineering of Vitamin A rice deepens the genetic reductionism of the Green Revolution. Instead of millions of farmers breeding and growing thousands of crop varieties to adapt to diverse ecosystems and diverse food systems, the Green Revolution reduced agriculture to a few varieties of a few crops (mainly rice, wheat and maize) bred in one centralised research centre (IRRI for rice and CIMMYT for wheat and maize). The Green Revolution led to massive genetic erosion in farmers fields and knowledge, erosion among farming communities, besides leading to large scale environmental pollution due to use of toxic agrichemicals and wasteful use of water. "
Sometimes GMOs are taking the heat for a larger frustration with monoculture farming....
Conventional nuclear and "fossil" fuels only have semed cheaper becuase we have ignored their externalities in the marketplace (like health impacts, enviromental impacts, security costs, and risks); from 1982 about the USA, but probably applies to Germany as well (as big centralized money can corrupt politics anywhere): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power "According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"
That said, thorium reactors if you want ear-conventional nuclear, seems the way to go. They were not developed by the West precisely beause they are safer and you can't easily make bombs from them compared to uranium and plutonium reactors. China and India are now forging ahead with them.
"Oil is likely to run out or become very expensive during the next few decades, if plug in hybrids and electric cars is the most likely replacement for gasoline ( and it seems to be the case at the moment ) then much more electricity will be needed."
Sounds plausible, but essentially that is misleading/wrong. See: http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm "How much electricity does it take to make a gallon of gasoline? We don't know - but here's one stab at it. Ballpark figures only, and NOT a supportable conclusion. The most important message to take away is that it is not trivial! This part of gasoline is ignored by the folks who are concerned about the big impact on our electrical grid if we were to suddenly shift all transportation from gasoline to electricity. To extract one gallon of gasoline (or equivalent distillate): 9.66 kWh (maybe not all in the form of electricity*) To refine that gallon: 2.73 kWh additional energy (maybe not all in the form of electricity*) Total: 12.39 kWh per gallon. *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!"
"I don't even know how an effect like the one you describe could be produced. "
Well, at least I'm glad you are a bit curious about what you don't know yet.
Plants of a given leaf area have a fixed amount of energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil (including water). They can either invest that in plant defense compounds or they can invest that in producing filling-to-humans but unhealthy-to-humans-in-excess starch and sugar. Some of these plant defense compunds seem essential to human health as antioxidants as we have adapted to use them to our benefit, plants without them are less nutritious to eat, but this is not obvious in the short term usually, just when you get cancer etc... Plants have been altered to have less investment in plant defense compounds, which the pesticides substitute for, and invest more in starch and/or sugar which sells well in the (ignorant-by-design-and-schooling) market. Such plants may also have weaker root systems as they expect to be drenched in synthetic fertilizer. So, take away the pesticides and fertilizer from modern GMO plants (or even many no GMO hybrids) and they do much worse that heirloom varieties (even as they may outproduce them in starch and sugar under the right circumstances).
College studies don't help that much, but not having the sheepskin now hurts a lot as it is used to filter on conformity, race, parental investment, age, and some other things, many of which are now illegal to ask about on job applications...
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....
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
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") http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430 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"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Anyway, so expanding "the war on the different" and the "war on the unexpected" is just more of the same... http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html "We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats."
Of course, that link is from one person on the list in the article about people publishing things being asked to be censored... Even if just "self-censored". In the end, most censorship only works by creating a climate of self-censorship.
From Noam Chomsky on "What makes the mainstream media mainstream": http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm "The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it's generally true of
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science "From an article about a sociologist and anthropologist who studies science and technology, Bruno Latour: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy." "
and all that implies about their technological capacity to use cheap computing to create endless new resources, than what are they worried about fight over? Naturally, I could, and have, said much the same about the USA: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.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. "
Slashdot Mirror
"I am well aware of its shortcomings,"
Which include drugging children, suspension of civil rights, terrorizing kids, fostering a climate of bullying, breaking the bonds between children and their families, damaging the teachers in other ways, destroying intrinsic motivation, boring people, keeping people from reaching their full potential by wasting years of their lives, and so on...
Do you have alternative proposals?
Anyway, after you have mulled the idea over for a while, you may get past a knee-jerk reaction. It's hard to admit how much big institutional systems have harmed us, even when we have "succeeded" in the world they have shaped.
From New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto: ... ...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable me -- but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling."
Perhaps some would. Let's say you are right. Remember, most of these people are the product of schooling. What does that say about raising those now adults during their formative years during the 1980s in day-prisons confined in chairs doing paperwork most of their youth and then fed mainstream TV promoting consumerism the rest of the time? It might take a while for the culture to heal...
Also, why should everyone suffer because a few will mess up? There are already plenty of laws about "negect" and kids. Obviously, if parents don't provide at all for their kids, the community is probably going to step in eventually in some way. And if every family had a lot of money and free time, relatives and neighbors would be able informally to help out the kids whose parents were really messed up. Besides, if parents don't care about their kids, school or not, that kid is going to end up messed up. How many such kids already flunk out of school because they can't do their homework or have to go home to take care of an alcoholic parent? Lots. See:
http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
Many times, addictive behavior comes from stress, and money stress in families with kids is a big issue in our society (about 20% of US kids are raised in poverty), and so this approach might alleviate some of that stress. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Nothing is perfect. But overall, which is more fitting with democracy, family values, individual rights, and a free market?
Schooling is not education; you prefer this? http://thewaronkids.com/
"I wonder how long it would take for the population of New York State to double."
And the problem with that is?
What do you think of this?
http://mises.org/Community/forums/p/16118/325657.aspx
"So I would say NO, Japan was not justified in attacking the USA over the USA refusing to sell Japan oil or steel or other stuff.
It is sad that the Rosevelt Administration refused to speak to the son of the Emperor of Japan who was carrying a deal with the USA that Japan would withdraw from China if the USA would continue the previous trade relationship. The worst part is in the opportunity cost: Mankind would have been saved 2 cities destroyed by atom bombs. Hundreds of cities destroyed by bombing and fire, 1700 Americans on the Arizona, countless innocents in the Pacific Islands and China being killed by bullets, bombs and disease, China going commie, etc."
Or this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations#Impact_on_the_German_economy
"The economic problems that the payments brought, and German resentment at their imposition are usually cited as one of the more significant factors that led to the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler."
Although others disagree with that.
History is pretty complex... This is not to defend expansionist wars of conquest that both Japan and Germany engaged in. As well as the USA at various times (Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, etc.).
The bottom line -- Germany could have prospered if it had turned its ingenuity inward to make Germany work for all its people. Similarly, to use nuclear energy to fight in wars created by people fighting over a perceived scarcity of oil is very ironic.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not. "
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
See also:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Income_Guarantee
"A basic income guarantee (or basic income) is a proposed system[1] of social security, that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households[2], groups, or nations, in order to provide for individual basic human needs. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it. The U.S. Basic Income Network[3] emphasizes this absence of means testing in its precise definition, "The Basic Income Guarantee is an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs.""
What good is education as far as economic advancement when the robots and AIs and voluntary social networks are going to do most of the jobs inthe future?
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html ... Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
"An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society
"When fossil fuels are exhausted, there may be a mass die-off event within the human species, due to the massive reduction in possible food production and transportation. "
Baloney. Who is feeding this to you? Why? Who profits from your fear?
We have centuries of coal (but it is polluting). Thorium can power our civilization for thousands of years. We have an effectively infinite supply of solar energy. People are working on zero-emissions manufacturing. We can grind up rock to make fertilizer. And so on.
References off the top of my head:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php
http://nanosolar.com/nanosolar-technology-overview
http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/993314-thorium-reactor-talk-at-ted/
http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/dpg/slim.cfm
http://www.remineralize.org/
We may even have cold fusion thanks to one of the many people you perhaps wish was never born as he took up to many resources?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
Who has infested your mind to what end with so much negativism so that you are less likely to have kids? Who is making money off of that? Are there much uglier imperatives at work in the people who tell you this? Example:
"The Greening of Hate"
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/09/106-greening-of-hate.html
Did the world end when we went through "Peak Whale Oil" a century or so ago? You're still here, right?
Now, we may still blow ourselves up fighting over mis-perceived scarcity. But that is a different problem.
Resources do not exist before the human imagination looks at the universe and turns things into resources. Otherwise, say, we would not have aluminum, produced because some imaginative people figured out how. We would not have solar panels without people figuring out how to make them. And so on.
Here is a quick comparison of the beliefs of say, William R. Catton (who wrote "Overshoot") and Julian L. Simon (who wrote "The Ultimate Resource").
Catton:
* People are the problem
* People consume resources
* People take up space leading to overcrowding
* There is a fixed amount of material resources on the Earth
Thus he predicts (with some glee?) a big die-off.
Simon:
* People are the solution
* People produce resources
* People create spaces worth being in
* The human imagination creates new resources
Now, there is truth to what both of these authors say. But ultimately, you can decide for yourself which path leaning more to one or the other is more likely to produce a future more worth living in, given the truth about solar power, thorium power, grinding up rock, and so on.
Our electricity and natural gas consumption might even go down if we switched to electric cars, by the way:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"To extract one gallon of gasoline (or equivalent distillate): 9.66 kWh (maybe not all in the form of electricity*)
To refine that gallon: 2.73 kWh additional energy (maybe not all in the form of electricity*)
Total: 12.39 kWh per gallon.
*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 30
There is no current "overpopulation" problem. Almost every human produces more than they consume. See Julian Simon's writings, for example:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
There is also room for quadrillions of people in space habitats in the solar system built from asteroidal ore, even if the Earth itself might be deemed at some point by some people to have, for aesthetic reasons, too much of a crowd. So, that notion of "overpopulation" is just bunk for an advanced industrial society such as ours. We can produce lots of energy and recycle resources and prevent or clean up pollution if we want to, the problem is that our mainstream economic system does not properly account for externalities. Mainstream economics is broken, not the idea of the more the merrier.
So, since children are net producers over their lives, my your logic, should not parents be credited from society with a lot of money for having a child or raising a child? :-)
You are also pushing some notion of merit pay or punishment fines, trying to somehow turn parenting or being a child into a series of economic calculations. But for any job involving creativity, it turns out that merit pay reduces performance. That is what research really says, despite conventional wisdom that says something else. See:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Or:
"Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
So, IMHO, your analysis and recommendations are based on two very flawed assumptions about both resources and motivation. However, your suggestions are in accord with the kind of implicit and explicit curriculum in most schools. So, your plan in itself probably a result of schooling and the ideas about "human nature" it embedded in you, like people do not do things without external motivations.
Also, as you probably believe in a "free market" based on your approach, why should money be forced to be spent through specific places that call themselves schools? Why not let parents decide how best to spend the funds, including by just having the time to spend with kids educating them? Why create and support soulless institutions to raise children instead of prosperous families and healthy neighborhoods?
Related as an alternative if you really want to follow your free market suggestions to perhaps better conclusions:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education. I'm trying to describe a free market in schooling just exactly like the one the country had right up until the Civil War, one in which students volunteer for the kind of education that suits them, even if that means self-education. It didn't hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see."
Although as I believe in the importance of a redistributive "basic income" as a right of citizenship in our society, I still think each citizen is going to need a monthly check to make the free market work, especially as robotics, automation, better design, and voluntary social networks displace more and more paid work. That's another assumption implicit in your analysis -- that there will be "jobs" around for these kids and that productivity as citizens will be measured in monetary terms.
http://en.wik
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/HeartDisease.aspx
"When it comes to combating heart disease, most information sources promote drugs and surgery as the only viable lines of defense. As a result, the demand for high-tech, expensive and largely ineffective medical care is overwhelming, causing medical costs and insurance rates to skyrocket. This chase for 'cures' is both financially devastating and futile. Morbidity and premature mortality from heart disease continue to rise with no sign of abating. Interventional cardiology offers only partial benefits, since these procedures do not remove the causes of the problem. Attempts to intervene with invasive procedures or surgery after the damage already has been done have not been shown to offer a significant reduction in cardiac deaths.
We need to keep in mind that angioplasty and bypass surgery have some significant adverse outcomes, including heart attacks, stroke and death. These invasive procedures only attempt to treat a small segment of the diseased heart, usually with only temporary benefit. Patients treated with angioplasty and bypass surgery continue to experience progressive disability, and most still die prematurely as a result of their heart disease.
The average person is not aware that there are safer, more effective options available. Unfortunately, government agencies are often slow to respond to new scientific information and continue to advocate outdated recommendations. Economic and political forces also make it difficult for Americans to be clearly informed that heart disease is self-induced and totally avoidable by eating a diet of nutritional excellence.
Making significant dietary changes allows people who suffer with coronary heart disease, high cholesterol, overweight or obesity and/or high blood pressure to reduce and to eliminate their dependence on medications, avoiding major surgeries such as heart bypass and angioplasty.
You cannot expect our government or national health organizations to give effective guidance. They must offer a standard approach designed for political acceptance. For example, six of the eleven members, including the chairman of the USDA's Dietary Guidelines Committee in the year 2000, had financial ties to the meat, dairy and egg industries. Not surprisingly, the foods these industries produce figures prominently in government dietary recommendations in spite of their documented links to increased health risks. Similar problems exist in recommendations by non-profit health organizations. Sadly, even the American Heart Association (AHA) advocates a diet that actually has been shown to increase heart disease.1"
====
I wish I had know this cheap and effective advice years ago before my father had an angioplasty for a clog and then had a heart attack a few months later as it clogged bakc up again... He might still be here today. Instead, some cardiologists got to make a lot of money off of his suffering.
One of Iain Banks sci-fi Culture Ships called itself "Ultimate Ship The Second". :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_(The_Culture)
If the Rossi/Focardi eCat (a claimed nickel-hydrogen LENR cold fusion device) really works, maybe cold fusion also happens at the boundary of the Earth's nickel-iron crust? And maybe the core even ejects neustrons, as suggested about the sun? And the end result might be abiotic oil and other "food" that could support an underground biosphere? Could life have even started down there (if bacteria did not come from beyond the solar system)? What other scientific dogma remains to be overturned? Related comment by me:
http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Denergy-catalyzer%E2%80%9D-and-the-%E2%80%9Cneutron-barometer%E2%80%9D/#comment-5891
And:
http://www.thesunisiron.com/
http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."
Hopefully no one will go to jail for embedding it... :-)
By I am now suddenly nervous about this related knol I made that embeds many videos found on YouTube. :-(
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
http://thewaronkids.com/
Compulsory school already is essentially a day prison, or, as this superintendent points out, in some ways worse.
Homschooling is becoming an option for more and more... But ultimately, we need a change like giving the funds directly to parents instead of the schools so the free market can supply the educational services (or the family), as I outline here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
Or a more general basic income...
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html
See also:
http://the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness): :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( "
"Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ...
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
Thanks for the insightful comment. I was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time a couple decades ago, and this sounds very likely.
Here are some tangential things I wrote just now in some email discussion related to this, branching out from these ideas to thinking about the evolution of human cognition in general.
===
First, some comments I wrote as I discussed this with someone else, who wrote first about women using beauty to be upwardly mobile in power and money:
Yes, women can convert beauty to cash at some point, but as is said here, physical beauty is generally a depreciating asset... ... A businessman offers his sage advice: ... So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. ..."
"In Economic Terms, You Are a Depreciating Asset"
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/10/in_economic_terms_you_are_a_de.html
"It's an age-old question: Why, in this city jam-packed with rich, smart, pretty people, is it so hard for hot ladies to find mates? This week, the definitive answer appeared on Craigslist, where the answers to all urban koans may be found. "I'm a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl," wrote a poster who called herself an "enterprising young woman."
Actually, some women can be pretty effective at manipulating social networks regardless of their looks. In fact, moderate looks may be better for that sort of manipulation because such women are less seen as a threat by other women. There is a lot of selection for aspects of human intelligence as well.
A potentially depressing aspect of that: ... Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten (1988b) collected examples of potential lying in nonhuman primates and concluded that this behavior showed and evolutionary trend, one that was more widespread in higher primates. Great apes seem to be skilled at deceiving one another, whereas lemurs rarely if ever engage in tactical deception. ..."
"Lies And Deception Led To Human Intelligence"
http://www.jasonsummers.org/lies-and-deception-led-to-human-intelligence/
"The prevailing view among scientists today is that the brain size increase that occurred in great apes and was extended into hominids resulted from the premium that natural selection placed on individuals that were socially clever. This theory, often called social intelligence or Machiavellian intelligence, argues that the primary evolutionary benefit of large brain size was that it allowed apes and hominids to cope with and even exploit increasingly complex social relations. In large social groups, each individual must remember the network of alliances, rivalries, debts, and credits that exist among group members. This is not so different from the politics of our own day-to-day lives. Frans de Waal (1982) has observed that chimpanzees seem to engage in a âoeservice economyâ in which they barter alliances and other forms of support with one another. The individuals best able to exploit this web of social relationships would have reaped more mating success than their group mates.
Much of what goes on in evolution is under the hood, so to speak. :-)
Biochemical pathways are another example of hidden evolution which is not easy to get records about, things like being able to eat a certain fruit without immediately dying, which may be totally related to some enzyme pathway somewhere.
===
And then in response to comments about male dominance in tribal societies and whether that meant getting all the most alluring women:
In some Native American societies, "chiefs" are elected by the women...
Thanks for your reply.
Another complexity:
http://newhope360.com/food/stressed-plants-could-create-next-gen-functional-foods-say-usda-experts
"Compounds extracted from plants exposed to stressful conditions could be used to create a powerful new generation of functional foods, according to scientists.
Advertisement
A research team from the US Department of Agriculture said that these substances â" known as phytoalexins â" were naturally induced in plants as a defence mechanism against stress or fungal attack. They could also be prompted to appear using elicitor treatment and other stress inducing techniques.
In a paper published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the scientists said that although phytoalexins had been investigated for their possible role in plant defence, until recently they had gone unexplored as nutritional components in human foods."
It's been argued by organic farmers that somewhat chewed on plants are going to be healthier for humans to eat if we are adapted to make use of these compounds. This is a potential problem with plants grown under optimal conditions in greenhouses, too.
It comes down to budget. If the plant has been bred or genetically engineered (and much of this is just conventional breeding) to put its resources into starch and sugar then it is going to be a weaker and less generally nutritious plant. I could believe what you say, that genetic engineers are not "intentionally" crippling plants, at least not any more so than conventional breeding. But the fact remains that we are still left with breeds, conventional or GMO, that are in many ways less healthy to eat. In general, nature has already created fairly optimal plants (it seems). Messing with that can push around things like risk, but you end up making tradeoffs. That may not be completely true, because look at the wonderful crops we have now from 1000s of years of breeding, but in general, it seems there may be no way to make everything better in a plant while not losing some other essential quality we may not even appreciate yet. How many phytonutrients do we really understand yet, as Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
"Nutritional science in the last twenty years has demonstrated that colorful plant foods contain a huge assortment of protective compounds, mostly of which still remain unnamed. Only by eating an assortment of nutrient-rich natural foods can we access these protective compounds and prevent the common diseases that afflict Americans. Our modern, low-nutrient eating style has led to an overweight population, the majority of whom develop diseases of nutritional ignorance, causing our medical costs to spiral out of control. "
Monoculture agriculture (whether GMO or conventional) may produce other problems in practice, though sometimes complicated by GMO initiatives:
http://www.biotech-info.net/blind_rice.html
"The genetic engineering of Vitamin A rice deepens the genetic reductionism of the Green Revolution. Instead of millions of farmers breeding and growing thousands of crop varieties to adapt to diverse ecosystems and diverse food systems, the Green Revolution reduced agriculture to a few varieties of a few crops (mainly rice, wheat and maize) bred in one centralised research centre (IRRI for rice and CIMMYT for wheat and maize). The Green Revolution led to massive genetic erosion in farmers fields and knowledge, erosion among farming communities, besides leading to large scale environmental pollution due to use of toxic agrichemicals and wasteful use of water. "
Sometimes GMOs are taking the heat for a larger frustration with monoculture farming....
Humans have been co-evolv
But it is not down to coal or nuclear.
http://www.nanosolar.com/power-plants/technology-advantages
http://www.maglevwindturbine.com/
And maybe even:
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/05/swedish-skeptics-confirm-nuclear-process-in-tiny-4-7-kw-reactor
And there are other alternatives.
Conventional nuclear and "fossil" fuels only have semed cheaper becuase we have ignored their externalities in the marketplace (like health impacts, enviromental impacts, security costs, and risks); from 1982 about the USA, but probably applies to Germany as well (as big centralized money can corrupt politics anywhere):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"
That said, thorium reactors if you want ear-conventional nuclear, seems the way to go. They were not developed by the West precisely beause they are safer and you can't easily make bombs from them compared to uranium and plutonium reactors. China and India are now forging ahead with them.
"Oil is likely to run out or become very expensive during the next few decades, if plug in hybrids and electric cars is the most likely replacement for gasoline ( and it seems to be the case at the moment ) then much more electricity will be needed."
Sounds plausible, but essentially that is misleading/wrong. See:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"How much electricity does it take to make a gallon of gasoline? We don't know - but here's one stab at it. Ballpark figures only, and NOT a supportable conclusion. The most important message to take away is that it is not trivial! This part of gasoline is ignored by the folks who are concerned about the big impact on our electrical grid if we were to suddenly shift all transportation from gasoline to electricity.
To extract one gallon of gasoline (or equivalent distillate): 9.66 kWh (maybe not all in the form of electricity*)
To refine that gallon: 2.73 kWh additional energy (maybe not all in the form of electricity*)
Total: 12.39 kWh per gallon.
*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!"
This is all part of why, to lower our taxes: "Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user "
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/6cdc99eaaba91855/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en#09eb7f4c973349f2
"I don't even know how an effect like the one you describe could be produced. "
Well, at least I'm glad you are a bit curious about what you don't know yet.
Plants of a given leaf area have a fixed amount of energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil (including water). They can either invest that in plant defense compounds or they can invest that in producing filling-to-humans but unhealthy-to-humans-in-excess starch and sugar. Some of these plant defense compunds seem essential to human health as antioxidants as we have adapted to use them to our benefit, plants without them are less nutritious to eat, but this is not obvious in the short term usually, just when you get cancer etc... Plants have been altered to have less investment in plant defense compounds, which the pesticides substitute for, and invest more in starch and/or sugar which sells well in the (ignorant-by-design-and-schooling) market. Such plants may also have weaker root systems as they expect to be drenched in synthetic fertilizer. So, take away the pesticides and fertilizer from modern GMO plants (or even many no GMO hybrids) and they do much worse that heirloom varieties (even as they may outproduce them in starch and sugar under the right circumstances).
See also:
"Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach" by R.W. Widdowson
http://www.amazon.com/Towards-Holistic-Agriculture-Scientific-Approach/dp/0080342116
By the way, grinding up rock for fetilizer works well and produces healthy big plants:
http://remineralize.org/
College studies don't help that much, but not having the sheepskin now hurts a lot as it is used to filter on conformity, race, parental investment, age, and some other things, many of which are now illegal to ask about on job applications...
Lots of links here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Also, google on "college bubble".
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
From there:
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. ...
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
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")
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
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").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
There are lots of alternatives I helped organize here for helping transcend an economy based around militarism and artificial scarcity:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
===
Anyway, so expanding "the war on the different" and the "war on the unexpected" is just more of the same...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html
"We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats."
Of course, that link is from one person on the list in the article about people publishing things being asked to be censored... Even if just "self-censored". In the end, most censorship only works by creating a climate of self-censorship.
From Noam Chomsky on "What makes the mainstream media mainstream":
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
"The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it's generally true of
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"From an article about a sociologist and anthropologist who studies science and technology, Bruno Latour:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy." "
and all that implies about their technological capacity to use cheap computing to create endless new resources, than what are they worried about fight over? Naturally, I could, and have, said much the same about the USA:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.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. "