Something towards a basic income was approved by one of the two parts of Congress under Nixon (extreme liberals though it was not enough, and extreme conservatives did not like it, so together they torpedoed it in I think the Senate but it passed the House, pushed by Moynihan). http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/specials/moynihan-income.html "What went wrong? Most of Moynihan's eloquent, polemical book is devoted to an exhaustively researched attack on the liberal opposition. To be sure, he does not spare the right (and is impressively blunt in recounting Nixon's own self-defeating partisanship in 1970--the year of Carswell, Cambodia, Scammon and Wattenberg). But the intriguing question--for the reader as for Moynihan--is why the left helped kill the guaranteed income. "
Instead we eventually got the psychological/sociological disaster that is "needs-based" welfare.
When you add up the cost of public school and the cost of social security and disability (ignoring medicare), the USA already spends US$800 or so a month per person. Why not just spread it out evenly as a basic income, and let parents pay for their own kids private education or homeschool? That would be US$3200 a month as a basic income for a family of four. And the US government already pays more per citizen for medical care than other industrialized countries that have better health outcomes overall. So, the US government is already paying enough out for both a basic income and universal health coverage. It is just ideology in the way of distributing that differently without conditions. In the USA, aid from the government is for the destitute (or the connected wealthy), whereas in Europe the model is more that everyone is entitled to certain basics as a citizen (like free or cheap college, access to basic health care, and, more and more, access to the internet).
As more and more gets enclosed and privatized in this world, and people can no longer hunt and gather, and where more and more work is automated or redesigned out of existence or done by volunteers, access to the fruits of the industrial commons whether you work or not is more and more a human need and a human right.
So, with a basic income, people would have the time and funds to run a printing press or the virtual equivalent.
See also, from J.D. Bernal in the 1920s(!): http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/ "Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant."
We can do this, and we can support quadrillions of people (and other beings) living in the solar system in space habitats. The only question is if we want to.
So, while there may be limits to growth, we are nowhere near them when considering the solar system.
Thanks for the reply. Putting in VItamin D and CVID into Google gets me this as a top result: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18451650 "Patients with CVID may present asymptomatic vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D and VDRs play an important role in the innate immune system and modulate Toll-like receptor-related responses. Delay in diagnosis may predispose these patients not only to irreparable bone loss but also to infections, and autoimmune and malignant disorders, thus emphasizing the importance of prompt intervention."
And of course you need the basic phytonutrients from plants (many as yet undiscovered) for your body to be at its best.
Anyway, your health may well involve other issues. Still, what people often call "genetic" is really an issue of how genes interact with an environment (including what we eat and how much sunlight we get) and if we can change the environment, sometimes we can keep our weak links from ever being exposed (Dr. Fuhrman says that in his book "Eat to Live").
If I said anything helpful to you, I'm glad, and you can pay me back by helping someone else with such information or something else someday.:-)
Yes, Bravo from me as well. I now see the light.:-)
BTW, something else satirical on this theme (by me): http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html "My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law...."
This reminds me of general issues with operant conditioning; you can't get a being to do something it won't normally do, but you can change the probabilities of different behaviors.
However, people are more complex than most other animals; it's hard to say how interventions can change the social dynamics. Just losing a war may have led to social change in Japan and German through introspection, regardless of what the USA did as an occupying force? How could one tell which was the bigger psychological issue, losing or being occupied?
I agree with the general idea in this thread that taking a strong state like in Germany or Japan and shifting its direction somewhat after a major military loss (towards making it less belligerent militarily) is different from forming a stronger cohesive system in the first place like in Afghanistan. Or, in the case of Iraq, there you had a long term civil conflict suppressed by an aparently strong state, and when destroying the state (as the USA did, although often things can be more hollow then they appear), then the civil conflict broke out (a religious minority dominating a majority leading to reprisals etc.).
On finding good situation-specific balances between meshworks and hierarchies: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm "Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
If you look at the UK, that was the world's previous (before the USA) big undisputed empire, and look at what the people are like now. That is maybe the future of the USA? http://web.archive.org/web/20080119001830/http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html ""The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we [in the UK] are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""
And part of why: 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."
You can possess markets and extraction areas without saying you are going to move your people in there...
See also: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html "How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. "
And: http://archive.uua.org/ga/ga99/238thandeka.html "First, 80 percent of the wealth in this country is owned by 20 percent of the population. The top 1 percent owns 47% of this wealth. These facts describe an American oligarchy that rules not as a right of race but as a right of class. "
Your sig: "Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure."
Rewritten for the topic::-) "Robotic warfare may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea, elevated blood pressure, or massive casualties of all sorts."
All this robotic warfare is just ironic, as are, ultimately, all arms races that lead to the destruction of all parties (except maybe the robots). See also: http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Minosian "The Minosians were a thriving, technologically-advanced humanoid civilization from the planet Minos. The Minosians gained notoriety as arms merchants during the Erselrope Wars, providing advanced weaponry such as the Echo Papa 607 which were sold under the banner "Peace through superior firepower." It was discovered in 2364 that the Minosians were subsequently eradicated by their own weapon system when it went out of control. One of the few Minosian artifacts surviving, the Echo Papa 607 system was responsible for the destruction of the USS Drake and attempted to destroy the USS Enterprise-D. (TNG: "The Arsenal of Freedom") "
"January 23, 2009 -- President Obama 'orders Pakistan drone attacks'" http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece "Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven "foreigners" - a term that usually means al-Qaeda - but locals also said that three children lost their lives. "
Let's see, you reply for free to Slashdot as a gift (and maybe used Wikipedia recently), you (if a typical US American) had the country spend about US$150,000 on your K-12 education, you are using an internet and roads created in large part initially by government planning, and you are probably accessing slashdot from a privately owned device you can configure how you wish. So, you are already essentially living the life that you say I want to impose on you as "top down".:-)
Really, it is just a matter of degree and a matter of accepting where we are already and making the best use of our resources other than by pretending everything is based on exchange.
You assume the exchange economy is working, but obviously one can look at many areas where it is not, especially related to external costs (see Fukishima risk or coal pollution ignored in calling such things cheap energy) and also the creation of artificial scarcity backed by police violence as a main business model (see RIAA) which creates all sorts of chilling effects on 99% of artists who might like to easily copy and remix existing stuff but can't.
It is more the exchange economy that is becoming obsolete. If nothing of much importance is scarce, exchange becomes less important. If there is little need for human labor, you can't sensibly tie rewards to effort. If creativity diminished if done for gain, you're actively harming the future by financial incentives. If the rich/poor divide increase more and more from rent seeking through copyrights, patents, and other monopolies, then the whole notion of an exchange economy falls apart (as laborers are too desperate to ask for and get reasonable compensation, which means they can not spend it to buy goods).
Prussian schooling may be obsolete too, but it still governs so many things about current US society. The problems in Germany leading up to WWII were much broader and deeper than just imposing democracy somewhere, and by the way, for current events, is that not what the USA has been trying to do in the Middle East in some countries, while propping up dictatorships in others? All just racketeering (in the "war is a racket" sense) linked to some people gaining more wealth and power in a broken exchanges-based socioeconomic system.
However, I'm not saying all the economic transactions don't have their strengths and weaknesses. Gifts may not be what you want. Localism can be parochial and inefficient and divisive in various ways. Government planners can be captured by industry or ignore basic needs. A basic income may just prop up a status quo:
"RSA Animate - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
But my main point is there is some balance of all of those in our society right now, and that balance shifts with changes to culture and technology. It is shifting now, but RIAA is fighting it with everything they have -- but ultimately, to what end?
Essentially, Google needs to decide whether it wants to be a post-scarcity institution or an artificial-scarcity-based institution. One approach has a long term future, although it is challenging to surf that wave moving from scarcity to abundance... Google is doing a pretty good job of it in a lot of ways intuitively, but maybe they need to reflect on that issue more deeply?
He can create any test environment there for Windows or GNU/Linux, and then he will get more consistent testing results from a virtual machine which can be restored to a checkpoint easily than trying to test directly on his development laptop. VirtualBox is even free.
There are other choices as well like VMWare and Parallels.
Plus he can use BootCamp to set up a native install of software in another partition if he really must run directly against the hardware.
Having been around people who did financial engineering in grad school and work, and thought and read about it some afterwards (IBM Research), here is what I have learned: * Much paper money now is in the casino economy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s * Much of "financial engineering" goes into a financial arms race in that casino, where the net result is essentially just stasis. * Much financial engineering is based on picking up "nickels in front of steam rollers" (Warren Buffet, and others, have used that phrase) where, as you imply, you get regular returns investing other people's money, with some small chance of catastrophe, and when the catastrophe (black swan) happens, you don't have to give back years of salary and bonuses (at worst the company, not you as an employee/partner, goes bankrupt). * There are several types of economic transactions in our society, of which exchange is only one: 1. Subsistence gathering from the environment and home production 2. Pollution (dumping back to the environment) 3. Gifts to friends and the community (including volunteerism online) 4. Planning at multiple levels (home, neighborhood, government, UN) 5. Exchange by roughly equal partners 6. Theft or some other form of parasitism The balance between those shifts based on cultural change and technological change. * It's been said (Mark Twain?) the hardest thing to do is to get someone to see something that goes against his or her financial interests.
* Subsistence (taking from the environment) * Pollution (putting back to the land in a harmful way) * Gift giving (to individuals or a group, like free software and personal blogging, or the environment at an improvement) * Theft (compelling as an individual) * Planning authority (compels action by force or reasonable persuasion usually from above to some purportedly good social end) * Exchange (non-compelled interchange)
The balance of all these changes depending on the technology and culture. We are seeing the balance change as the internet makes possible stigmergic cooperation on a huge scale (like Wikipedia and GNU/Linux).
Using a paywall and copyright laws backed ultimately by state violence to create "artificial scarcity" to force an exchange for otherwise easily copied goods is just a more and more problematical business model in an age more and more dominated by subsistence, gift giving, and planning. This is especially problematical when copyrights have been extended to be effectively infinite, when in the age of the pony express and sailing ships they were about twenty years, since if anything, they should be shorter now by the logic of faster times to recoup investments in fast moving media. So, the old social bargain for copyright feels like it has been broken by the publishers (see Richard Stallman for more on the social bargain issue). http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html
If we had twenty year copyright (or much less) so much would be in the public domain we would have a much freer society and creators would have a lot more in the public domain to draw from. One way to get there would be to put an annual tax on all copyrights as some small percentage of what owners say they are worth (where anyone could buy the copyright into the public domain for that full amount).
Your comment is tremendously insightful, and I can't disagree with it as a comment on social dynamics, although I might ask, "Better for whom?" and how should we interpret that in a supposed "democracy"? Also, human psychology is complex; the need for relative social status is only one of many potential motivators (see Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs).
Freeman Dyson says something related in one of his books about a daughter who went to Africa and was frustrated by how the local community would rather send women miles each day for water than hire a local well digger, in part because it was more prestigious to ask the central government for help by a petition that they knew would never be granted. But the people making that decision were men, and they were not the ones carrying jugs of water on their heads every day. So, that's another angle on the status issue you raise. Why did those men not have low status by not doing what they could to ensure their community was more prosperous? There are cultural aspects to that (including the legacy of a disruptive colonialism that may have harmed those areas and created "learned helplessness" in some regions in a way similar to your story with the doctor).
But we squander a lot of abundance fighting each other.
But the problem is, when something really big comes along like a tsunami, or supervolcano, or asteroid strike, then like the dinosaurs, we may not have the resources to deal with it...
Still, I think culture can make a difference, as can technology. It is getting more and more obvious that so much of the scarcity we see these days is "artificial".
See also my essay here, in response to someone making a similar point to the one you did:
"Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)" http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en "One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.:-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points.
So, 50 * 2 = 100. Or, 2 * 50 = 100. or, 10 * 10 = 100.
Social points might be things like learning to share better, or learning to get along with each other better in resolving conflicts with less damage, or in general, even eventually a global mindshift:
"Global Mindshift: The Wombat" http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
Technical points are like the ones we are usually talking about here, how to make things efficiently and effectively.
Let us consider three scenarios for these points, with the numbers as above...."
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2 "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
So, let me see if I understand this. You say there are plenty of talented programmers you could hire, but you are not willing to pay what they want (50% or so more than what you are willing to pay)? So, you turn to H1-Bs to get qualified people at a lower rate? Then you say the H1-B program does not depress wage rates? And maybe you also wonder why more people aren't going into programming as a career move?
Well, thankfully that economic nonsense will mostly be over in a decade or two, anyway as our economy transitions to a material abundance model and a basic income, gift economy, etc..:-) http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
See also: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
On a basic income:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
"In 1968, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document calling for the US Congress to introduce in that year a system of income guarantees and supplements.[28]"
Something towards a basic income was approved by one of the two parts of Congress under Nixon (extreme liberals though it was not enough, and extreme conservatives did not like it, so together they torpedoed it in I think the Senate but it passed the House, pushed by Moynihan).
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/specials/moynihan-income.html
"What went wrong? Most of Moynihan's eloquent, polemical book is devoted to an exhaustively researched attack on the liberal opposition. To be sure, he does not spare the right (and is impressively blunt in recounting Nixon's own self-defeating partisanship in 1970--the year of Carswell, Cambodia, Scammon and Wattenberg). But the intriguing question--for the reader as for Moynihan--is why the left helped kill the guaranteed income. "
Instead we eventually got the psychological/sociological disaster that is "needs-based" welfare.
When you add up the cost of public school and the cost of social security and disability (ignoring medicare), the USA already spends US$800 or so a month per person. Why not just spread it out evenly as a basic income, and let parents pay for their own kids private education or homeschool? That would be US$3200 a month as a basic income for a family of four. And the US government already pays more per citizen for medical care than other industrialized countries that have better health outcomes overall. So, the US government is already paying enough out for both a basic income and universal health coverage. It is just ideology in the way of distributing that differently without conditions. In the USA, aid from the government is for the destitute (or the connected wealthy), whereas in Europe the model is more that everyone is entitled to certain basics as a citizen (like free or cheap college, access to basic health care, and, more and more, access to the internet).
As more and more gets enclosed and privatized in this world, and people can no longer hunt and gather, and where more and more work is automated or redesigned out of existence or done by volunteers, access to the fruits of the industrial commons whether you work or not is more and more a human need and a human right.
So, with a basic income, people would have the time and funds to run a printing press or the virtual equivalent.
Someone liberal who opposes the basic income as something that just props up capitalism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
And why incentive-based labor is problematical in the information age:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
An I wrote about on Slashdot was it approaching a decade ago?
"Both CATS and DOGS are needed... (Score:2)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=5821178&sid=62113
See also, from J.D. Bernal in the 1920s(!):
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant."
We can do this, and we can support quadrillions of people (and other beings) living in the solar system in space habitats. The only question is if we want to.
So, while there may be limits to growth, we are nowhere near them when considering the solar system.
That article is just ignorant in part because it ignores things like laser launched craft or possibly the new cold fusion ideas (by Rossi, if they work out):
http://pesn.com/2011/04/07/9501805_Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Validated_by_Swedish_Skeptics_Society/
Also, it says resources are not concentrated, but that is what energy and robots are for.
So, it is a pretty ignorant and defeatist article.
A better thing:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
My hopes:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
Thanks for the reply. Putting in VItamin D and CVID into Google gets me this as a top result:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18451650
"Patients with CVID may present asymptomatic vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D and VDRs play an important role in the innate immune system and modulate Toll-like receptor-related responses. Delay in diagnosis may predispose these patients not only to irreparable bone loss but also to infections, and autoimmune and malignant disorders, thus emphasizing the importance of prompt intervention."
As a start, be sure to get your Vitamin D level checked, and get the actual number, and compare it against these two suggestions (the 40-60 ng/mL range):
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.heartscanblog.org/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html
A slightly lower target:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx
Basically, your immune system needs vitamin D to "trigger and arm" the immune system:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7379094/Vitamin-D-triggers-and-arms-the-immune-system.html
But, it also needs vitamin D to shut down an excessive immune response too (thus it can be involved in both too little and too much immune response). More on that:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/h1n1-flu-and-vitamin-d.shtml
And of course you need the basic phytonutrients from plants (many as yet undiscovered) for your body to be at its best.
Anyway, your health may well involve other issues. Still, what people often call "genetic" is really an issue of how genes interact with an environment (including what we eat and how much sunlight we get) and if we can change the environment, sometimes we can keep our weak links from ever being exposed (Dr. Fuhrman says that in his book "Eat to Live").
If I said anything helpful to you, I'm glad, and you can pay me back by helping someone else with such information or something else someday. :-)
Yes, Bravo from me as well. I now see the light. :-)
BTW, something else satirical on this theme (by me): ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
"My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
...as a business model: http://artificialscarcity.com/
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
(my writings)
For both of you:
http://www.google.com/search?q=ALS+vitamin+d
http://www.alsforums.com/forum/general-discussion-about-als-mnd/9472-vitamin-d.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/als-aka-lou-gehrigs-disease/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
And good fats like Algal-based Omega-3s (also avocado, and nuts and seeds if not allergic):
http://www.alsforums.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-5979.html
Good luck.
This reminds me of general issues with operant conditioning; you can't get a being to do something it won't normally do, but you can change the probabilities of different behaviors.
However, people are more complex than most other animals; it's hard to say how interventions can change the social dynamics. Just losing a war may have led to social change in Japan and German through introspection, regardless of what the USA did as an occupying force? How could one tell which was the bigger psychological issue, losing or being occupied?
I agree with the general idea in this thread that taking a strong state like in Germany or Japan and shifting its direction somewhat after a major military loss (towards making it less belligerent militarily) is different from forming a stronger cohesive system in the first place like in Afghanistan. Or, in the case of Iraq, there you had a long term civil conflict suppressed by an aparently strong state, and when destroying the state (as the USA did, although often things can be more hollow then they appear), then the civil conflict broke out (a religious minority dominating a majority leading to reprisals etc.).
On finding good situation-specific balances between meshworks and hierarchies:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
By the way, this says Rikyu was seventy at the time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sen_no_Riky%C5%AB
If you look at the UK, that was the world's previous (before the USA) big undisputed empire, and look at what the people are like now. That is maybe the future of the USA?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080119001830/http://www.adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html
""The reason our children's lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we [in the UK] are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""
And part of why:
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."
Thus the war on kids (through schools, originating in Prussia for military reasons) to turn them into soldiers and workers for a military-industrial complex, which is its own form of secular religion:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"We have invaded places, but always with the idea of reforming that nation and giving it back to its RICH people."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States
FTFY. :-)
You can possess markets and extraction areas without saying you are going to move your people in there...
See also:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished schools, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. How ingenious to meet the demands of blacks and women for equality by giving them small special benefits, and setting them in competition with everyone else for jobs made scarce by an irrational, wasteful system. How wise to turn the fear and anger of the majority toward a class of criminals bred-by economic inequity-faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention from the huge thefts of national resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices. "
And:
http://archive.uua.org/ga/ga99/238thandeka.html
"First, 80 percent of the wealth in this country is owned by 20 percent of the population. The top 1 percent owns 47% of this wealth. These facts describe an American oligarchy that rules not as a right of race but as a right of class. "
And:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
Your sig: "Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure."
Rewritten for the topic: :-) "Robotic warfare may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea, elevated blood pressure, or massive casualties of all sorts."
See also my essay:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? "
I read somewhere, around the 1980s, probably by Amory Lovins, that if we spent a year or so of the cost of maintaining the US Persian Gulf deployment force on insulating US homes and other energy efficiency improvements, that we would not need any imported oil. Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
All this robotic warfare is just ironic, as are, ultimately, all arms races that lead to the destruction of all parties (except maybe the robots). See also:
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Minosian
"The Minosians were a thriving, technologically-advanced humanoid civilization from the planet Minos. The Minosians gained notoriety as arms merchants during the Erselrope Wars, providing advanced weaponry such as the Echo Papa 607 which were sold under the banner "Peace through superior firepower." It was discovered in 2364 that the Minosians were subsequently eradicated by their own weapon system when it went out of control. One of the few Minosian artifacts surviving, the Echo Papa 607 system was responsible for the destruction of the USS Drake and attempted to destroy the USS Enterprise-D. (TNG: "The Arsenal of Freedom") "
Thus:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"January 23, 2009 -- President Obama 'orders Pakistan drone attacks'"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece
"Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven "foreigners" - a term that usually means al-Qaeda - but locals also said that three children lost their lives. "
See also, my comments:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=254000146591&topic=16411
That is a copy of this site that seems to have gone offline recently:
http://www.suppressedscience.net/
Suppressed? :-) At the very least by marketplace forces? :-(
See also:
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090308132014/http://suppressedscience.net/physics.html
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090309114648/http://suppressedscience.net/
Stuff I wrote building on those ideas:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html
I helped a tiny bit with the WorkHorse version a quarter century ago as a volunteer hanging out in his lab back then:
http://www.new.ans.org/pubs/magazines/download/a_671
Let's see, you reply for free to Slashdot as a gift (and maybe used Wikipedia recently), you (if a typical US American) had the country spend about US$150,000 on your K-12 education, you are using an internet and roads created in large part initially by government planning, and you are probably accessing slashdot from a privately owned device you can configure how you wish. So, you are already essentially living the life that you say I want to impose on you as "top down". :-)
Really, it is just a matter of degree and a matter of accepting where we are already and making the best use of our resources other than by pretending everything is based on exchange.
You assume the exchange economy is working, but obviously one can look at many areas where it is not, especially related to external costs (see Fukishima risk or coal pollution ignored in calling such things cheap energy) and also the creation of artificial scarcity backed by police violence as a main business model (see RIAA) which creates all sorts of chilling effects on 99% of artists who might like to easily copy and remix existing stuff but can't.
It is more the exchange economy that is becoming obsolete. If nothing of much importance is scarce, exchange becomes less important. If there is little need for human labor, you can't sensibly tie rewards to effort. If creativity diminished if done for gain, you're actively harming the future by financial incentives. If the rich/poor divide increase more and more from rent seeking through copyrights, patents, and other monopolies, then the whole notion of an exchange economy falls apart (as laborers are too desperate to ask for and get reasonable compensation, which means they can not spend it to buy goods).
See also:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Prussian schooling may be obsolete too, but it still governs so many things about current US society. The problems in Germany leading up to WWII were much broader and deeper than just imposing democracy somewhere, and by the way, for current events, is that not what the USA has been trying to do in the Middle East in some countries, while propping up dictatorships in others? All just racketeering (in the "war is a racket" sense) linked to some people gaining more wealth and power in a broken exchanges-based socioeconomic system.
However, I'm not saying all the economic transactions don't have their strengths and weaknesses. Gifts may not be what you want. Localism can be parochial and inefficient and divisive in various ways. Government planners can be captured by industry or ignore basic needs. A basic income may just prop up a status quo:
"RSA Animate - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g
But my main point is there is some balance of all of those in our society right now, and that balance shifts with changes to culture and technology. It is shifting now, but RIAA is fighting it with everything they have -- but ultimately, to what end?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
Essentially, Google needs to decide whether it wants to be a post-scarcity institution or an artificial-scarcity-based institution. One approach has a long term future, although it is challenging to surf that wave moving from scarcity to abundance... Google is doing a pretty good job of it in a lot of ways intuitively, but maybe they need to reflect on that issue more deeply?
See also, for related ideas about Princeton University:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
Problems: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Solutions?
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://www.virtualbox.org/
He can create any test environment there for Windows or GNU/Linux, and then he will get more consistent testing results from a virtual machine which can be restored to a checkpoint easily than trying to test directly on his development laptop. VirtualBox is even free.
There are other choices as well like VMWare and Parallels.
Plus he can use BootCamp to set up a native install of software in another partition if he really must run directly against the hardware.
On agriculture using about 50% of the land in the USA (mostly to grow fodder to grow too much factory-farmed animal products that are killing us with health problems especially when combined with too much sugar and refined grains):
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
Note also how much land already goes to roads and mining. But agriculture is the biggest user.
Here are pictures of the area needed for off-shore wind and solar:
http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/AreaRequiredWindOnly.jpg
http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/AreaRequired1000.jpg
Having been around people who did financial engineering in grad school and work, and thought and read about it some afterwards (IBM Research), here is what I have learned:
* Much paper money now is in the casino economy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxo_XPdpI_s
* Much of "financial engineering" goes into a financial arms race in that casino, where the net result is essentially just stasis.
* Much financial engineering is based on picking up "nickels in front of steam rollers" (Warren Buffet, and others, have used that phrase) where, as you imply, you get regular returns investing other people's money, with some small chance of catastrophe, and when the catastrophe (black swan) happens, you don't have to give back years of salary and bonuses (at worst the company, not you as an employee/partner, goes bankrupt).
* There are several types of economic transactions in our society, of which exchange is only one:
1. Subsistence gathering from the environment and home production
2. Pollution (dumping back to the environment)
3. Gifts to friends and the community (including volunteerism online)
4. Planning at multiple levels (home, neighborhood, government, UN)
5. Exchange by roughly equal partners
6. Theft or some other form of parasitism
The balance between those shifts based on cultural change and technological change.
* It's been said (Mark Twain?) the hardest thing to do is to get someone to see something that goes against his or her financial interests.
Of course, being the kind of person who thinks about such things, it did not bode well for a PhD in Operations Research at Princeton 20+ years ago. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
* Subsistence (taking from the environment)
* Pollution (putting back to the land in a harmful way)
* Gift giving (to individuals or a group, like free software and personal blogging, or the environment at an improvement)
* Theft (compelling as an individual)
* Planning authority (compels action by force or reasonable persuasion usually from above to some purportedly good social end)
* Exchange (non-compelled interchange)
The balance of all these changes depending on the technology and culture. We are seeing the balance change as the internet makes possible stigmergic cooperation on a huge scale (like Wikipedia and GNU/Linux).
Using a paywall and copyright laws backed ultimately by state violence to create "artificial scarcity" to force an exchange for otherwise easily copied goods is just a more and more problematical business model in an age more and more dominated by subsistence, gift giving, and planning. This is especially problematical when copyrights have been extended to be effectively infinite, when in the age of the pony express and sailing ships they were about twenty years, since if anything, they should be shorter now by the logic of faster times to recoup investments in fast moving media. So, the old social bargain for copyright feels like it has been broken by the publishers (see Richard Stallman for more on the social bargain issue).
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html
If we had twenty year copyright (or much less) so much would be in the public domain we would have a much freer society and creators would have a lot more in the public domain to draw from. One way to get there would be to put an annual tax on all copyrights as some small percentage of what owners say they are worth (where anyone could buy the copyright into the public domain for that full amount).
Your comment is tremendously insightful, and I can't disagree with it as a comment on social dynamics, although I might ask, "Better for whom?" and how should we interpret that in a supposed "democracy"? Also, human psychology is complex; the need for relative social status is only one of many potential motivators (see Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs).
Freeman Dyson says something related in one of his books about a daughter who went to Africa and was frustrated by how the local community would rather send women miles each day for water than hire a local well digger, in part because it was more prestigious to ask the central government for help by a petition that they knew would never be granted. But the people making that decision were men, and they were not the ones carrying jugs of water on their heads every day. So, that's another angle on the status issue you raise. Why did those men not have low status by not doing what they could to ensure their community was more prosperous? There are cultural aspects to that (including the legacy of a disruptive colonialism that may have harmed those areas and created "learned helplessness" in some regions in a way similar to your story with the doctor).
See also James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear sci-fi novel though for an alternative -- a society where social status comes from displaying competence in something.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
Anyway, yes, I think you are right that since the plow (or before) we can have a lot of abundance. Also related:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
But we squander a lot of abundance fighting each other.
But the problem is, when something really big comes along like a tsunami, or supervolcano, or asteroid strike, then like the dinosaurs, we may not have the resources to deal with it...
Still, I think culture can make a difference, as can technology. It is getting more and more obvious that so much of the scarcity we see these days is "artificial".
See also my essay here, in response to someone making a similar point to the one you did: :-) These points come from the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points. ..."
"Getting to 100 social-technical points (was Re: a Change)"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en
"One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a society earning 100 "social-technical" points.
So, 50 * 2 = 100.
Or, 2 * 50 = 100.
or, 10 * 10 = 100.
Social points might be things like learning to share better, or learning to get along with each other better in resolving conflicts with less damage, or in general, even eventually a global mindshift:
"Global Mindshift: The Wombat"
http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
Technical points are like the ones we are usually talking about here, how to
make things efficiently and effectively.
Let us consider three scenarios for these points, with the numbers as above.
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/3871142153864194
So, let me see if I understand this. You say there are plenty of talented programmers you could hire, but you are not willing to pay what they want (50% or so more than what you are willing to pay)? So, you turn to H1-Bs to get qualified people at a lower rate? Then you say the H1-B program does not depress wage rates? And maybe you also wonder why more people aren't going into programming as a career move?
Well, thankfully that economic nonsense will mostly be over in a decade or two, anyway as our economy transitions to a material abundance model and a basic income, gift economy, etc.. :-)
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
See also: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."