Basically echoes your points: http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo/themainmessage.htm ""If You Leave Home Without A Place To Go, You Are a Refugee". 'Bug Out Bags' and 'Heading For The Hills To Live Off The Land' are popular ideas that don't work... We have Many articles about Why it doesn't work, but forget "Hunting and trapping and 'living in Remote Areas'". There is no such thing as "Remote areas" in the Lower 48 states... Africa, Asia, the Steps of Russia, etc, are Truly remote areas, and they were Always hit by waves of smallpox and other plagues carried only by humans! Nothing in the Lower 48 is "really remote", it's a false sense of security if that's what you are depending on. "Living in the Country in a small self-sustaining community is better".. but it's not the "End all Answer". It's better than living in the city.. but it's not a protection by itself, it simply gives you an edge If You Prepare Further. Remember, when city people get scared, they blindly "Head for the country".. right to where You are living. Is the cost of living in the country worth the little added extra protection? Only you can decide that.. personally I simply prefer Not living in crowded places, but at the same time, I know my little country town may Fill Up with people fleeing the cities, and I have prepared for that. "
LIving in the Adirondacks, myself.:-) But that is mostly as land was cheap (no one likes biting blackfiles and lots of snow and ice) and my wife likes living around forest.
But what will where I live be like with a million people from NYC coming here as a horde and shooting each other? The deer will also probably last about a week, if that... Then what?
Or some ideas I was working towards over two decades ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html "Self-replicating habitats could be built in space, underwater, underground, in the desert, or elsewhere. A habitat would consist of many square miles of enclosed land used for living, farming, and recreation. Examples of such enclosures are a cluster of kilometer high geodesic domes in the desert, a collection of hundred meter diameter spheres underwater, and a ten kilometer diameter dough nut-shaped O'Neill habitat rotating in space. The land area inside the habitat would have tall trees, and grassy fields. It would be designed explicitly to seem extremely open and natural to the thousands of people living inside. Each habitat would have its own power plant, running from solar, nuclear, or ocean-thermal energy. Each habitat would have attached manufacturing facilities for processing raw materials into finished goods. The raw materials would come from the area immediately surrounding the habitat, like the sea floor, the desert sands, or asteroids in space. Each manufacturing facility would have all the equipment needed to replicate itself and the attached habitat.
Why do I want to build these habitats? Most people would agree there is at least a one percent chance the human race will wipe itself out within the next century through a nuclear or biological war. The issue isn't even necessarily about our politicians making mistakes. The fallibility of the Soviet missile command computer technicians is what worries me most. Like anyone else familiar with computers, I know how easy it is to make a mistake with one. Beyond accidental warfare, expanding populations and industrial pollution threaten our lives just as much. I feel that even if there is only a one percent chance of ecological disaster over the next century, I want to do my best to ensure human survival in that case.
Most people do not think about these issues, or if they do, rapidly dismiss the problems as too large and impossible to do anything significant about. I feel I have an alternative to apathy or despair. Some habitats in space or underwater would probably survive a nuclear war. Unlike bomb shelters, they would provide an intact technological and cultural base from which to regrow our civilization. If there is not a war, they would still serve the useful function of providing more living space for expanding populations. Being a closed environmental system, they would also make people focus on recycling industrial pollution back into raw materials, leading to safer industries and a cleaner environment. "
Their balance depends on culture and technology: * Subsistence * Gift * Planned * Exchange * Theft/Parasitism
So, as Moore's Law comes to an end, having moved up and S-curve, we could see a shift between these types of economies. The exact balance somewhere would depend on the culture.
See also Marshall Brain's on-line book "Manna" for some ideas of, say, a basic income might look like.
I think an even deeper issue is that not every problem can be solved with technical cleverness. At some point, poeple in a society need to say, here are the rules (and laws) that we are choosing to constrain how we use (or refine) our technology based on social values. For example, while I think copyrights are a problem, we could say, they should be at most three years. That is a social thing. With cell phones tracking, we could pass laws or promulgate social conventions about what could be done with them. Now, RMS is aware of all that, no doubt. but ultimately it takes a sort of social change that is more interwoven with technology than is about just technology. As I suggest here, the two go together: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79
All that said, the GPL is an interesting thing when seem from the standpoint as a "constitution" for stigmergic collaboration more than a "license".
But in practice, LGPL with a linking exception is probably in practice more what people would have readily accepted as "free software" and seen wider adoption, because overall takes society (tens of thousands of people for a day each) a lot more time to learn how to use a library than to write one (one person for 100 days). So, when people can learn how to use free software libraries at work, that is a big win. I think that learning curve issue is perhaps an issue Richard Stallman has not focused on?
In general, our entire socio-economic paradigm needs to change as we embrace technological abundance, and that is a big missing part of the free software movement ideology to date, I feel. Related by me on the economics of abunance: http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"Solar and wind will never be able to reliably provide base load capacity."
Citation needed. I pointed to several technologies to smooth out wind and solar fluctuations (including compressed air in salt caves, hydrogen stored in metal hydrides, molten salt, lifting heavy weights) without even mentioning a smart grid, how wind complements solar (one often works when the other does not), or how we could rethink some heavy industries to run on intermittent power (like producing fertilizer from grinding up rock only when the wind blows or the sun shines). http://www.remineralize.org/
So, citation needed please if you just hand wave all that away.
So, it seems like Japan is struggling with issues about corruption and incomplete planning too? Even if so far, overall, they still seem to be doing better than the USA after Katrina under Bush... Or even now? Especially as the USA now is seemingly expanding its torture policies to torturing US soldiers going down a slippery slope as is suggested here (in response to someone probably concerned about wrongdoing by his country): http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/2011310153040668605.html
That last one is citing 2 to 4 years for PV, but it is out of date for thin film solar (if it was accurate back then).
Basically, the power to put in more renewables can come from other renewables in a bootstrapping way. Still, I'd agree that in practice a lot of the energy to make a lot of wind and PV systems quickly is coming from fossil fuels and nuclear. In many way, older nuclear power plants represent embodied fossil fuels used in their construction to pour concrete and mine fuel, too.
Something like 1% of the USA's surface area is already devoted to things like power line rights of ways, or areas around fossil fuel mining, or roadways, etc..
Also, a lot of land can be dual use, like farming under windmills, or PV used on roofs.
So, the amount of land being talked about to be fully renewable is not disproportionate to other activities like the US interstate highway system or especially agriculture.
I'm not saying nuclear does not have interesting applications following the Hyperion approach or similar designs like the Toshiba S4. But to flat out say renewables are not going to work is just not accurate.
At current levels of exponential growth, renewable energy will supply all our power in twenty years. Why should this exponetial growth stop before then? Short of something way better?
So, citation needed for your point.
However, sure, small modern nukes may be safer, but how risky will the centralized reprocessing plants be in an earthquake?
Learning can (and usually does) happen outside of formal schooling.
Again, the library can be a good example. Can we make better libraries where people can go when they have an issue (like child raising issues) and get lots of support in all sorts of ways?
The internet provides some of that, but not in a face-to-face or hands-on way generally. So, we still need local spaces to learn and practice in, and things like "workshops", too. Part of this learning is life-long, but the fragmentation of US families due to jobs and geographical moves makes good parenting harder to learn from relatives. And there is so much disinformation out there, and so much profit-oriented misinformation (Baby Einstein?) that it can be hard to sort through it all...
From the last, from "Mr." Fred Rogers: "Parents don't come full bloom at the birth of the first baby. In fact parenting is about growing. It's about our own growing as much as it is about our children's growing and that kind of growing happens little by little."
There is a video on that page of Mr. Rogers talking about parenthood to parents, and growing into that identity as a major life task, and requiring the help of many. It takes a village to raise a child? Maybe it takes a village to raise a parent? So, I think you are on the right theme to think about how to help parents -- it is just that the "school" model as far as compulsory school may be the wrong model for that (even as I have no objection to groups that meet regularly for convenience for people to learn together perhaps guided by someone more experienced in some way, but generally where learning is going both ways).
I had been surprised to see Fred Rogers had written books about parenting, having seen him as a kid and thinking he just made stuff for kids. But, when you think about it, the two things, kids and parents, go together. (As does then later, a living neighborhood and growing people.)
And different things work best for different personalities and histories, so I don't want to push just one agenda or style even as I feel there are some habits that are generally better in most situations than others (and even if I may struggle with them myself): http://www.motherstyles.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles
I should have added that, like schools vs. TV, organized religion also has some strengths in relation to helping people try to resist addictions and pressures of a materialistic world such as with twelve step programs (again though, that does not mean o
Good points, and thanks for the kid words about the article.
I feel lack of universal health coverage, for example, is one thing holding back more entrepreneurship in the USA. I've known several people who said they can not change jobs or try something different over health insurance worries.
But, that is in some sense by design; from "Conceptual Guerilla": http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16 "When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just âoedime-store economicsâ â" intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly donâ(TM)t. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor" Thatâ(TM)s their whole philosophy in a nutshell -- which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives"
Once you understand the general concept, you will frequently find yourself in debate over specific issues, like healthcare, social security privatization, public school vouchers, the "war on drugs" and of course the war in Iraq. What better way to put your conservative opponent on the defensive than by exposing the true motivation for his position -- "cheap labor". Can you really find the "cheap labo"â angle in every conservative policy initiative, and every conservative position on any particular issue?
Yes, you can. Here is a catalogue of some of the major issues on the national agenda. In every single one of them, the conservative position advances the cause of "cheap labor". I defy any conservative reading this to show me one single conservative position, belief, principle or policy that has any tendency to boost the earning power of labor.,,,"
Of course, the ultimate in "cheap labor" is "no labor" -- replacing labor by a machine, a computer, better design, cheap energy, or volunteers, or something else. Technology is making that all possible, and even easier. For example, cloud computing makes it easier to get rid of system administrators.
So, in general, the bargaining power of most labor is eroding, because productivity is rising but demand is limited (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Reduce, Reuse, Recycle)..
I'm not saying the bargaining power of all labor is eroding, just most labor. Some people are still in demand, generally those with certain combinations of rarer skills combined with social connections. But all that contributes to an increasing rich/poor divide. More and more people are finding that a highly automated industrial system just does not need them. And that is bad news in the absence of some sort of social safety net, or better, some sort of social security as a human right as a citizen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
People saw this was going to happen even in the 1960s, but sadly the Democrats ended up pushing for full employment rather than social equity as a right to access the fruits of the industrial commons:
And the Republicans became the party of technological progress in some ways (but co
"Most of the "decent" school districts are turning out plenty of intelligent graduates (myself and I'm sure you are included)."
That depends on what you mean by "intelligent" and "decent" as well as whether intelligence by itself, apart from wisdom, virtue, compassion, self-directedness, cooperativeness, spirituality, and so on makes for a joyful, secure, meaningful, involved life?
A lot of this has to do with being "learner-centered" and focused on creating healthy communities.
For example, we lived for a while in a "top 10" school district (Chappaqua) but it had had a high teen suicide rate, and kids who did not want to go onto college were being tracked there even if they had other aspirations (like my wife's dental hygienist who said the school system essentially forced her to go to college when what she wanted to be was a dental hygienist). Is that a "success" when you force all kids, regardless of interest, to go to college and take on college debt? Is that a "success" when a lot of kids are killing themselves, developing eating disorders, displaying a lot of aggression, are on psychoactive drugs to manage what are labeled behavior problems, and so on? It was one of the least healthy communities we have lived in, even with the most money, and with the Clintons moving in after us (the place went downhill faster then people said).
The fact is, if you came through a typical schooling process, even private school, you were in some sense intellectually and emotionally mutilated, even to the point of being indoctrinated to see that type of mutilation as a good thing. See: http://www.thewaronkids.com/ http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
As with any kind of child abuse, especially when done systematically and with claims of being helpful, such as with female genital mutilation (FGM), it may take years, or maybe never, for a mutilated individual to accept what happened in Prussian schools and how morally wrong it was.
As Gatto says: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm "Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:
"Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts."
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of i
"You're right that Bill doesn't yet seem to understand or address the root of the problem, but the real problem is coming from parents that don't care. Their children are the most in danger of getting a poor education. They are also the children most likely to become involved with crime, get pregnant, do drugs and generally have a poor shot at getting ahead in life. If you want to fix the system, you need to change the parents or the children's environment, ie food, shelter and guidance."
And if they can't be trusted with the money, what does that say about the school systems that raised the last generation?
New York State spends about US$20K per child per year on public school. For a family with two kids, that's approaching the median household income in the country. How many parents would be better parents if they did not have to work and had more time for their children and civic responsibilities? In what I propose (just give the money to the parents), parents could afford to send their children to any private school if they did not want to homeschool themselves. So, that addresses your point about changing the home environment and the parent's circumstances.
That said, schools are full of caring adults -- but the system generally grinds them down and limits their options... So, this proposal would ultimately be better for school teachers and administrators, too.
What did I say about race? I talked about US vs. Japanese culture.
Consider: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9231926/ns/nightly_news-nbc_news_investigates/ "Some 200 New Orleans school buses sit underwater in a parking lot, unused. That's enough to have evacuated at least 13,000 people. Why werenâ(TM)t those buses sent street by street to pick up people before the storm?... One huge bottleneck in the evacuation â" the New Orleans airport. Officials say flights were delayed while screeners and air marshals were flown in to comply with post-9/11 security requirements, and then further delayed because screening machines werenâ(TM)t working...."
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."
So, soon Japanese-designed household and nursing robots are going to take a lot more low paid jobs in the USA... A Japanese anime about that complex issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roujin_Z
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydrides "Metal hydrides, such as MgH2, NaAlH4, LiAlH4, LiH, LaNi5H6, and TiFeH2, with varying degrees of efficiency, can be used as a storage medium for hydrogen, often reversibly.[8] Some are easy-to-fuel liquids at ambient temperature and pressure, others are solids which could be turned into pellets. These materials have good energy density by volume, although their energy density by weight is often worse than the leading hydrocarbon fuels."
http://web.ead.anl.gov/saltcaverns/uses/compair/index.htm "Salt caverns or mines have been used to store air under high pressure.
* Compressors use off-peak electricity to fill the cavern with compressed air.
* For peaking demand, the compressed air is withdrawn from the cavern, blended with natural gas, and used to drive a gas turbine to generate electricity.
* CAES Plants of 110 â" 290 MW exist."
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2000/alert14 http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2003/update24 http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4/PB4ch5_ss2 "Europe is already tapping its off-shore wind. An assessment by the Garrad Hassan wind energy consulting group concluded that if governments aggressively develop their vast off-shore resources, wind could supply all of Europeâ(TM)s residential electricity by 2020. 13... This climate-stabilizing initiative would require the installation of 1.5 million wind turbines of 2 megawatts each. Manufacturing such a huge number of wind turbines over the next 11 years sounds intimidating until it is compared with the 70 million automobiles the world produces each year. At $3 million per installed turbine, this would mean investing $4.5 trillion by 2020, or $409 billion per year. This compares with world oil and gas capital expenditures that are projected to reach $1 trillion per year by 2016. 29 Wind turbines can be mass-produced on assembly lines, much as B-24 bombers were in World War II at Fordâ(TM)s massive Willow Run assembly plant in Michigan. Indeed, the idled capacity in the U.S. automobile industry is sufficient to produce all the wind turbines the world needs to reach the Plan B global goal. Not only do the idle plants exist, but there are skilled workers in these communities eager to return to work. The state of Michigan, for example, in the heart of the wind-rich Great Lakes region, has more than its share of idled auto assembly plants. 30"
http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2010/08/24/plan-seeks-100-pct-renewable-energy-australia-ten-years "The report, entitled Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan, "outlines a technically feasible and economically attractive way for Australia to transition to 100 percent renewable energy within ten years." The plan specifies that the 100 percent renewable grid be "based on proven technologies that are already commercially available and that have already been demonstrated in large industries.""
"The problem with CEO jobs is that corporate governance doesn't produce anything, doesn't sell anything and isn't even attempting to break even let alone turn a profit. Because of this, there is no real control on wages."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Norris "William Charles Norris (July 14, 1911 near Red Cloud, Nebraska -- August 21, 2006) was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world. He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner-cities and disadvantaged communities....
Another CDC project that Norris championed was the PLATO system, an online teaching and instruction system developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The university developed most of the system on a CDC-1604 machine driving graphics terminals of their own design. In 1974 they reached an agreement with CDC to allow CDC to sell PLATO in exchange for free machines on which to run it. PLATO was released in 1975, but saw almost no use due to its high costs and complex maintenance. In the end PLATO did see some use as an employee training tool in large companies, but was never a success in the original education market."
A relevant one from there (on education): http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/NorrisOnTechnology/Norris_2-Education.pdf "Another problem is pricing. The present method of financing most formal education with tax dollars, contributions, and tuition at lower than cost inhibits improvements in quality, productivity, and availability. It also restricts options that could otherwise be available and maintains the inequality in educational opportunity that results from uneven district-to-district financial resources."
I met my wife around then so things dropped off, but I had hoped maybe I could have been an intern for free with his foundation to help with advanced manufacturing (or something) or somehow worked with him and learned from him.
William C. Norris was an amazing person. He really is a great role model in many ways, and I'm glad I had the chance to read his biography and correspond with him. I sent him a small donation back then (just a struggling grad student at the time) and he said he used it to take a disadvantaged person to lunch. What a guy!:-) http://reddwarf.wikia.com/wiki/Ace_Rimmer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification http://fija.org/category/jury-nullification/ "This appears to be an intimidation tactic by a bully issued under color of law to circumvent the First, Fifth, and Seventh Amendments to the United States Constitution. While it may be more convenient for the court to have a jury that is easily steered by orders from the bench and selective filtering of the information it is permitted access to, it is NOT the purpose of a jury merely to rubber stamp the decision it is led to by the government. Were this the case, a jury would not be needed at all.
Rather, it is the primary function of the independent juror to protect his or her fellow citizens- both the defendant and the rest of us who will be affected by the outcome of the case and the legal precedent it will set- from abuse by government. As the only people (aside from the defendant) involved in the court proceedings who are not making a living by perpetuating the system as dictated by government officials, jurors have not only a right, but a responsibility, to act independently- to think for themselves, to consult their consciences in deliberations, to judging the fairness and applicability of the law as well as the facts of the case , and to deliver justice when rendering a verdict."
Of course, everything can be misused, as jury nullification was to prop up racism in past decade...
"Luckily for Billy, foresight and technical expertise account for very little, while marketing and image mean everything, and THAT, at least, he is very good at."
It's probably now or never for the unions to make on last big push before they are just washed away by all these changes related to AI, robotics, better design, voluntary social networks, the accumulation of infrastructure, and so on...
IMHO, as long as we have a highly capitalistic system, everyone should get social security of US $2K a month (plus health care) from birth as a basic income, which would take the GDP growth from the mid 1990s, and the rest of the GDP was enough to motivate some people to work for more back then.
But there are five interwoven economies and we need to shift the balance between them as to the subsistence economy, the gift economy, the planned economy, the exchange economy, and the theft/corruption economy.
Slashdot Mirror
See also my own comments here on putting together knowledge about self-replicating infrastructre:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
Others:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main
You might like this guy's writing starting from a charcoal furnance to make a machine shop from scrap:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery
Basically echoes your points:
http://www.alpharubicon.com/prepinfo/themainmessage.htm
""If You Leave Home Without A Place To Go, You Are a Refugee". 'Bug Out Bags' and 'Heading For The Hills To Live Off The Land' are popular ideas that don't work... We have Many articles about Why it doesn't work, but forget "Hunting and trapping and 'living in Remote Areas'". There is no such thing as "Remote areas" in the Lower 48 states... Africa, Asia, the Steps of Russia, etc, are Truly remote areas, and they were Always hit by waves of smallpox and other plagues carried only by humans! Nothing in the Lower 48 is "really remote", it's a false sense of security if that's what you are depending on. "Living in the Country in a small self-sustaining community is better".. but it's not the "End all Answer". It's better than living in the city.. but it's not a protection by itself, it simply gives you an edge If You Prepare Further. Remember, when city people get scared, they blindly "Head for the country".. right to where You are living. Is the cost of living in the country worth the little added extra protection? Only you can decide that.. personally I simply prefer Not living in crowded places, but at the same time, I know my little country town may Fill Up with people fleeing the cities, and I have prepared for that. "
LIving in the Adirondacks, myself. :-) But that is mostly as land was cheap (no one likes biting blackfiles and lots of snow and ice) and my wife likes living around forest.
But what will where I live be like with a million people from NYC coming here as a horde and shooting each other? The deer will also probably last about a week, if that... Then what?
See also, to echo your point:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110706_mcr_evolution.shtml
Better to work towards a world where our infrastructure is resilient and our security focus is on being intrinsic and mutual.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
See: http://lifeboat.com/ex/main
Or some ideas I was working towards over two decades ago:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
"Self-replicating habitats could be built in space, underwater, underground, in the desert, or elsewhere. A habitat would consist of many square miles of enclosed land used for living, farming, and recreation. Examples of such enclosures are a cluster of kilometer high geodesic domes in the desert, a collection of hundred meter diameter spheres underwater, and a ten kilometer diameter dough nut-shaped O'Neill habitat rotating in space. The land area inside the habitat would have tall trees, and grassy fields. It would be designed explicitly to seem extremely open and natural to the thousands of people living inside. Each habitat would have its own power plant, running from solar, nuclear, or ocean-thermal energy. Each habitat would have attached manufacturing facilities for processing raw materials into finished goods. The raw materials would come from the area immediately surrounding the habitat, like the sea floor, the desert sands, or asteroids in space. Each manufacturing facility would have all the equipment needed to replicate itself and the attached habitat.
Why do I want to build these habitats? Most people would agree there is at least a one percent chance the human race will wipe itself out within the next century through a nuclear or biological war. The issue isn't even necessarily about our politicians making mistakes. The fallibility of the Soviet missile command computer technicians is what worries me most. Like anyone else familiar with computers, I know how easy it is to make a mistake with one. Beyond accidental warfare, expanding populations and industrial pollution threaten our lives just as much. I feel that even if there is only a one percent chance of ecological disaster over the next century, I want to do my best to ensure human survival in that case.
Most people do not think about these issues, or if they do, rapidly dismiss the problems as too large and impossible to do anything significant about. I feel I have an alternative to apathy or despair. Some habitats in space or underwater would probably survive a nuclear war. Unlike bomb shelters, they would provide an intact technological and cultural base from which to regrow our civilization. If there is not a war, they would still serve the useful function of providing more living space for expanding populations. Being a closed environmental system, they would also make people focus on recycling industrial pollution back into raw materials, leading to safer industries and a cleaner environment. "
There are only a few, and they are not "good". Can you otherwise suggest one you think is other than a toy?
https://sourceforge.net/projects/patapata/
(My project...)
But, really, why not just use Smalltalk, which helped inspire Ruby and so on? :-) We need a good Smalltalk for the JVM...
Yes, I second Concord.org, especially as the put what they develop under free license (the LGPL):
http://www.concord.org/
Not free (except to demo):
http://www.explorelearning.com/
Other random:
http://www.miniclip.com/games/chasm/en/
http://www.missiontolearn.com/2008/03/more-than-50-web-widgets-for-your-learning-mix/
http://simulation.northwestern.edu/
Look for physics simulators; example:
http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/
There is a lot of exploration people can do with Google Maps and Google Earth.
We've collected lots of links from homeschooling; I should put them up somewhere.
Stuff by me with links about education in general:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/e59c368c3734a926
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
Their balance depends on culture and technology:
* Subsistence
* Gift
* Planned
* Exchange
* Theft/Parasitism
So, as Moore's Law comes to an end, having moved up and S-curve, we could see a shift between these types of economies. The exact balance somewhere would depend on the culture.
See also Marshall Brain's on-line book "Manna" for some ideas of, say, a basic income might look like.
Related:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I think an even deeper issue is that not every problem can be solved with technical cleverness. At some point, poeple in a society need to say, here are the rules (and laws) that we are choosing to constrain how we use (or refine) our technology based on social values. For example, while I think copyrights are a problem, we could say, they should be at most three years. That is a social thing. With cell phones tracking, we could pass laws or promulgate social conventions about what could be done with them. Now, RMS is aware of all that, no doubt. but ultimately it takes a sort of social change that is more interwoven with technology than is about just technology. As I suggest here, the two go together:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79
All that said, the GPL is an interesting thing when seem from the standpoint as a "constitution" for stigmergic collaboration more than a "license".
But in practice, LGPL with a linking exception is probably in practice more what people would have readily accepted as "free software" and seen wider adoption, because overall takes society (tens of thousands of people for a day each) a lot more time to learn how to use a library than to write one (one person for 100 days). So, when people can learn how to use free software libraries at work, that is a big win. I think that learning curve issue is perhaps an issue Richard Stallman has not focused on?
In general, our entire socio-economic paradigm needs to change as we embrace technological abundance, and that is a big missing part of the free software movement ideology to date, I feel. Related by me on the economics of abunance:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"Solar and wind will never be able to reliably provide base load capacity."
Citation needed. I pointed to several technologies to smooth out wind and solar fluctuations (including compressed air in salt caves, hydrogen stored in metal hydrides, molten salt, lifting heavy weights) without even mentioning a smart grid, how wind complements solar (one often works when the other does not), or how we could rethink some heavy industries to run on intermittent power (like producing fertilizer from grinding up rock only when the wind blows or the sun shines).
http://www.remineralize.org/
So, citation needed please if you just hand wave all that away.
Sad to see more and more comments about greed and problems in Japan, too. :-( Like this one:
"Reports: Lax oversight, 'greed' preceded Japan nuclear crisis"
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2011/0316/Reports-Lax-oversight-greed-preceded-Japan-nuclear-crisis
Or this:
"As Japan nuclear crisis unfolds, a small town questions government reassurances"
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2011/0316/As-Japan-nuclear-crisis-unfolds-a-small-town-questions-government-reassurances
Now workers are having to abandon a plant, although return:
http://www.adn.com/2011/03/16/1756438/radiation-level-soars-after-japan.html
And the plant design was said to be unsafe:
"JAPAN DISASTER: GE engineer says he quit over unsafe reactor design"
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2011/03/17/2003498413
Basically, it would seem like any reactor design that requires active cooling is unsafe and should be mothballed? Passive cooling ones like Hyperion or stuff like TRIGA is better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html
In the robot capital of the globe as Japan is, where are the robots for nuclear cleanup? I helped a tiny bit with the Workhorse project for TMI (helping make a model mockup that helped get the contract):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=three-mile-island-robots
Do they have stuff like Workhorse for nuclear disasters in Japan? If not, that is indeed lack of planning.
Other comments by me and someone else related to this thread are here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2036928&cid=35486070
So, it seems like Japan is struggling with issues about corruption and incomplete planning too? Even if so far, overall, they still seem to be doing better than the USA after Katrina under Bush... Or even now? Especially as the USA now is seemingly expanding its torture policies to torturing US soldiers going down a slippery slope as is suggested here (in response to someone probably concerned about wrongdoing by his country):
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/2011310153040668605.html
Pictures of the Japan devastation:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/powerful-quake-aftershocks-rattle-tokyo/2011/03/11/ABX65lQ_gallery.html
Very sad to see so much disaster. I can hope for the best for everyone there. "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls..."
Sigh.
Current renewables like well-sited wind and solar PV have energy payback ranging from around three to six months for wind:
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/EnergyBalanceofWindTurbines.html
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/01/wind_turbine_lca.php
Solar estimates seem to range around one to four years:
http://www.pvresources.com/en/economics.php
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/24619.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_payback_time#Sustainables
That last one is citing 2 to 4 years for PV, but it is out of date for thin film solar (if it was accurate back then).
Basically, the power to put in more renewables can come from other renewables in a bootstrapping way. Still, I'd agree that in practice a lot of the energy to make a lot of wind and PV systems quickly is coming from fossil fuels and nuclear. In many way, older nuclear power plants represent embodied fossil fuels used in their construction to pour concrete and mine fuel, too.
These pictures shows how little land or ocean surface is required to power the world entirely from wind or 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
Something like 1% of the USA's surface area is already devoted to things like power line rights of ways, or areas around fossil fuel mining, or roadways, etc..
Something like about 50% of the land in the USA is devoted to animal product production (meat, dairy, etc.) one way or another (mostly growing fodder for animals), and the animal products are actually mostly harming US Americans, so there is plenty of room for renewables from that angle, too: :-)
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
Also, a lot of land can be dual use, like farming under windmills, or PV used on roofs.
So, the amount of land being talked about to be fully renewable is not disproportionate to other activities like the US interstate highway system or especially agriculture.
I'm not saying nuclear does not have interesting applications following the Hyperion approach or similar designs like the Toshiba S4. But to flat out say renewables are not going to work is just not accurate.
"Again, I'm all for more nuke plants. It's cleaner' than coal, and going heavily into solar + wind is a pipe dream."
Citation needed on solar and wind?
Counterpoints:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/press_room/C68/2010_datarelease9
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://www.google.com/#q=no+furnace
http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog/beck-energy-and-nanosolar-complete-solar-power-plant
http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/blog/?p=1037
http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
At current levels of exponential growth, renewable energy will supply all our power in twenty years. Why should this exponetial growth stop before then? Short of something way better?
So, citation needed for your point.
However, sure, small modern nukes may be safer, but how risky will the centralized reprocessing plants be in an earthquake?
Learning can (and usually does) happen outside of formal schooling.
Again, the library can be a good example. Can we make better libraries where people can go when they have an issue (like child raising issues) and get lots of support in all sorts of ways?
The internet provides some of that, but not in a face-to-face or hands-on way generally. So, we still need local spaces to learn and practice in, and things like "workshops", too. Part of this learning is life-long, but the fragmentation of US families due to jobs and geographical moves makes good parenting harder to learn from relatives. And there is so much disinformation out there, and so much profit-oriented misinformation (Baby Einstein?) that it can be hard to sort through it all...
We can create all sorts of better parenting resources (and homeschooling/unschooling resources), but there are plenty already out there.
http://www.google.com/search?q=emotion+coaching
http://www.google.com/search?q=unschooling
http://www.fci.org/new-site/parents.html
From the last, from "Mr." Fred Rogers: "Parents don't come full bloom at the birth of the first baby. In fact parenting is about growing. It's about our own growing as much as it is about our children's growing and that kind of growing happens little by little."
There is a video on that page of Mr. Rogers talking about parenthood to parents, and growing into that identity as a major life task, and requiring the help of many. It takes a village to raise a child? Maybe it takes a village to raise a parent? So, I think you are on the right theme to think about how to help parents -- it is just that the "school" model as far as compulsory school may be the wrong model for that (even as I have no objection to groups that meet regularly for convenience for people to learn together perhaps guided by someone more experienced in some way, but generally where learning is going both ways).
I had been surprised to see Fred Rogers had written books about parenting, having seen him as a kid and thinking he just made stuff for kids. But, when you think about it, the two things, kids and parents, go together. (As does then later, a living neighborhood and growing people.)
And different things work best for different personalities and histories, so I don't want to push just one agenda or style even as I feel there are some habits that are generally better in most situations than others (and even if I may struggle with them myself):
http://www.motherstyles.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles
The biggest issue is that parents don't have much time to learn from all the resources out there with the combination of the two-income trap and falling prey to various supernormal stimuli (like mainstream media or junk food). Such stimuli in the context of a stressful society leads to addictive seeming behavior (like watching TV instead of interacting with kids or learning more about parenting). Related:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
I should have added that, like schools vs. TV, organized religion also has some strengths in relation to helping people try to resist addictions and pressures of a materialistic world such as with twelve step programs (again though, that does not mean o
Good points, and thanks for the kid words about the article.
I feel lack of universal health coverage, for example, is one thing holding back more entrepreneurship in the USA. I've known several people who said they can not change jobs or try something different over health insurance worries.
But, that is in some sense by design; from "Conceptual Guerilla": ,,,"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
"When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just âoedime-store economicsâ â" intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly donâ(TM)t. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor" Thatâ(TM)s their whole philosophy in a nutshell -- which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives"
Once you understand the general concept, you will frequently find yourself in debate over specific issues, like healthcare, social security privatization, public school vouchers, the "war on drugs" and of course the war in Iraq. What better way to put your conservative opponent on the defensive than by exposing the true motivation for his position -- "cheap labor". Can you really find the "cheap labo"â angle in every conservative policy initiative, and every conservative position on any particular issue?
Yes, you can. Here is a catalogue of some of the major issues on the national agenda. In every single one of them, the conservative position advances the cause of "cheap labor". I defy any conservative reading this to show me one single conservative position, belief, principle or policy that has any tendency to boost the earning power of labor.
Of course, the ultimate in "cheap labor" is "no labor" -- replacing labor by a machine, a computer, better design, cheap energy, or volunteers, or something else. Technology is making that all possible, and even easier. For example, cloud computing makes it easier to get rid of system administrators.
So, in general, the bargaining power of most labor is eroding, because productivity is rising but demand is limited (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Reduce, Reuse, Recycle)..
I'm not saying the bargaining power of all labor is eroding, just most labor. Some people are still in demand, generally those with certain combinations of rarer skills combined with social connections. But all that contributes to an increasing rich/poor divide. More and more people are finding that a highly automated industrial system just does not need them. And that is bad news in the absence of some sort of social safety net, or better, some sort of social security as a human right as a citizen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms
You used the word "competitive", but the fact is, cooperation is more what we need.
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
Why should US citizens have to be "competitive" with wage slavery or full automation because of an income-through-jobs link?
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
People saw this was going to happen even in the 1960s, but sadly the Democrats ended up pushing for full employment rather than social equity as a right to access the fruits of the industrial commons:
And the Republicans became the party of technological progress in some ways (but co
"Most of the "decent" school districts are turning out plenty of intelligent graduates (myself and I'm sure you are included)."
That depends on what you mean by "intelligent" and "decent" as well as whether intelligence by itself, apart from wisdom, virtue, compassion, self-directedness, cooperativeness, spirituality, and so on makes for a joyful, secure, meaningful, involved life?
A lot of this has to do with being "learner-centered" and focused on creating healthy communities.
For example, we lived for a while in a "top 10" school district (Chappaqua) but it had had a high teen suicide rate, and kids who did not want to go onto college were being tracked there even if they had other aspirations (like my wife's dental hygienist who said the school system essentially forced her to go to college when what she wanted to be was a dental hygienist). Is that a "success" when you force all kids, regardless of interest, to go to college and take on college debt? Is that a "success" when a lot of kids are killing themselves, developing eating disorders, displaying a lot of aggression, are on psychoactive drugs to manage what are labeled behavior problems, and so on? It was one of the least healthy communities we have lived in, even with the most money, and with the Clintons moving in after us (the place went downhill faster then people said).
The fact is, if you came through a typical schooling process, even private school, you were in some sense intellectually and emotionally mutilated, even to the point of being indoctrinated to see that type of mutilation as a good thing. See:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
As with any kind of child abuse, especially when done systematically and with claims of being helpful, such as with female genital mutilation (FGM), it may take years, or maybe never, for a mutilated individual to accept what happened in Prussian schools and how morally wrong it was.
As Gatto says:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm
"Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
Jacques Ellul, whose book Propaganda is a reflection on the phenomenon, warned us that prosperous children are more susceptible than others to the effects of schooling because they are promised more lifelong comfort and security for yielding wholly:
"Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment....The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts."
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of i
"You're right that Bill doesn't yet seem to understand or address the root of the problem, but the real problem is coming from parents that don't care. Their children are the most in danger of getting a poor education. They are also the children most likely to become involved with crime, get pregnant, do drugs and generally have a poor shot at getting ahead in life. If you want to fix the system, you need to change the parents or the children's environment, ie food, shelter and guidance."
The real problem is compulsory education was designed in Prussia in the 18th century to dumb down children,and then adopted int he USA later, and when you give such schools more money, they only does that dumbing-down job better; see NYS teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://thewaronkids.com/
Why not just give the money to the parents?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
And if they can't be trusted with the money, what does that say about the school systems that raised the last generation?
New York State spends about US$20K per child per year on public school. For a family with two kids, that's approaching the median household income in the country. How many parents would be better parents if they did not have to work and had more time for their children and civic responsibilities? In what I propose (just give the money to the parents), parents could afford to send their children to any private school if they did not want to homeschool themselves. So, that addresses your point about changing the home environment and the parent's circumstances.
A better, more general idea is a basic income of US$2000 per person per month in the entire country (essentially social security and medicare for all from birth).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
That said, schools are full of caring adults -- but the system generally grinds them down and limits their options... So, this proposal would ultimately be better for school teachers and administrators, too.
What did I say about race? I talked about US vs. Japanese culture.
Consider: ... One huge bottleneck in the evacuation â" the New Orleans airport. Officials say flights were delayed while screeners and air marshals were flown in to comply with post-9/11 security requirements, and then further delayed because screening machines werenâ(TM)t working. ..."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9231926/ns/nightly_news-nbc_news_investigates/
"Some 200 New Orleans school buses sit underwater in a parking lot, unused. That's enough to have evacuated at least 13,000 people. Why werenâ(TM)t those buses sent street by street to pick up people before the storm?
The AC post can be seen as another example of US cultural problems. Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign for making a speech that ironically included mentioning how racism was being created by elite-pushed policies in the USA for centuries to cause poor blacks and poor whites to be at each other's throats to keep them all divided and powerless:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0722/Shirley-Sherrod-debacle-why-Obama-stumbles-on-race
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9NcCa_KjXk
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."
That said, Japanese people can be pretty xenophobic, which is why they are creating a lot of elder care robots instead of importing "guest workers" from other countries like Western Europe or the USA.
http://www.jref.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-7650.html
http://www.globalaging.org/elderrights/world/2004/japaninvention.htm
So, soon Japanese-designed household and nursing robots are going to take a lot more low paid jobs in the USA... A Japanese anime about that complex issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roujin_Z
Have you looked?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydrides
"Metal hydrides, such as MgH2, NaAlH4, LiAlH4, LiH, LaNi5H6, and TiFeH2, with varying degrees of efficiency, can be used as a storage medium for hydrogen, often reversibly.[8] Some are easy-to-fuel liquids at ambient temperature and pressure, others are solids which could be turned into pellets. These materials have good energy density by volume, although their energy density by weight is often worse than the leading hydrocarbon fuels."
http://web.ead.anl.gov/saltcaverns/uses/compair/index.htm
"Salt caverns or mines have been used to store air under high pressure.
* Compressors use off-peak electricity to fill the cavern with compressed air.
* For peaking demand, the compressed air is withdrawn from the cavern, blended with natural gas, and used to drive a gas turbine to generate electricity.
* CAES Plants of 110 â" 290 MW exist."
http://www.saltcavernstorage.com/caes.html
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2000/alert14 ... This climate-stabilizing initiative would require the installation of 1.5 million wind turbines of 2 megawatts each. Manufacturing such a huge number of wind turbines over the next 11 years sounds intimidating until it is compared with the 70 million automobiles the world produces each year. At $3 million per installed turbine, this would mean investing $4.5 trillion by 2020, or $409 billion per year. This compares with world oil and gas capital expenditures that are projected to reach $1 trillion per year by 2016. 29 Wind turbines can be mass-produced on assembly lines, much as B-24 bombers were in World War II at Fordâ(TM)s massive Willow Run assembly plant in Michigan. Indeed, the idled capacity in the U.S. automobile industry is sufficient to produce all the wind turbines the world needs to reach the Plan B global goal. Not only do the idle plants exist, but there are skilled workers in these communities eager to return to work. The state of Michigan, for example, in the heart of the wind-rich Great Lakes region, has more than its share of idled auto assembly plants. 30"
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2003/update24
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4/PB4ch5_ss2
"Europe is already tapping its off-shore wind. An assessment by the Garrad Hassan wind energy consulting group concluded that if governments aggressively develop their vast off-shore resources, wind could supply all of Europeâ(TM)s residential electricity by 2020. 13
http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2010/08/24/plan-seeks-100-pct-renewable-energy-australia-ten-years
"The report, entitled Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan, "outlines a technically feasible and economically attractive way for Australia to transition to 100 percent renewable energy within ten years." The plan specifies that the 100 percent renewable grid be "based on proven technologies that are already commercially available and that have already been demonstrated in large industries.""
Recent:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-scientists-breakthrough-nanocomposite-high-capacity-hydrogen.html
"Those that don't study the past are doomed to repeat it."
Those who do study the past are doomed to watch others repeat it. :-)
Doug Englebart's Augment was another great thing from the 1960s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4kp9Ciy1nE
Smalltalk was a great educational and information organizing thing from the 1970s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk
"The problem with CEO jobs is that corporate governance doesn't produce anything, doesn't sell anything and isn't even attempting to break even let alone turn a profit. Because of this, there is no real control on wages."
There, fixed that for you. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Norris ...
"William Charles Norris (July 14, 1911 near Red Cloud, Nebraska -- August 21, 2006) was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world. He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner-cities and disadvantaged communities.
Another CDC project that Norris championed was the PLATO system, an online teaching and instruction system developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The university developed most of the system on a CDC-1604 machine driving graphics terminals of their own design. In 1974 they reached an agreement with CDC to allow CDC to sell PLATO in exchange for free machines on which to run it. PLATO was released in 1975, but saw almost no use due to its high costs and complex maintenance. In the end PLATO did see some use as an employee training tool in large companies, but was never a success in the original education market."
I corresponded with him for a time around 1991. He sent me a copy of his biography (by James C. Worthy):
http://www.amazon.com/William-C-Norris-Portrait-Maverick/dp/0887300871
He also sent me copies of his essays for CDC publications. I wanted to make them available in OC'd digital form but never quite got approval for that. Here are several of them put up by others though:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/NorrisOnTechnology/index.html
A relevant one from there (on education):
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/NorrisOnTechnology/Norris_2-Education.pdf
"Another problem is pricing. The present method of financing most formal education with tax dollars, contributions, and tuition at lower than cost inhibits improvements in quality, productivity, and availability. It also restricts options that could otherwise be available and maintains the inequality in educational opportunity that results from uneven district-to-district financial resources."
Although I go beyond that here: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
I met my wife around then so things dropped off, but I had hoped maybe I could have been an intern for free with his foundation to help with advanced manufacturing (or something) or somehow worked with him and learned from him.
William C. Norris was an amazing person. He really is a great role model in many ways, and I'm glad I had the chance to read his biography and correspond with him. I sent him a small donation back then (just a struggling grad student at the time) and he said he used it to take a disadvantaged person to lunch. What a guy! :-)
http://reddwarf.wikia.com/wiki/Ace_Rimmer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
http://fija.org/category/jury-nullification/
"This appears to be an intimidation tactic by a bully issued under color of law to circumvent the First, Fifth, and Seventh Amendments to the United States Constitution. While it may be more convenient for the court to have a jury that is easily steered by orders from the bench and selective filtering of the information it is permitted access to, it is NOT the purpose of a jury merely to rubber stamp the decision it is led to by the government. Were this the case, a jury would not be needed at all.
Rather, it is the primary function of the independent juror to protect his or her fellow citizens- both the defendant and the rest of us who will be affected by the outcome of the case and the legal precedent it will set- from abuse by government. As the only people (aside from the defendant) involved in the court proceedings who are not making a living by perpetuating the system as dictated by government officials, jurors have not only a right, but a responsibility, to act independently- to think for themselves, to consult their consciences in deliberations, to judging the fairness and applicability of the law as well as the facts of the case , and to deliver justice when rendering a verdict."
Of course, everything can be misused, as jury nullification was to prop up racism in past decade...
"Luckily for Billy, foresight and technical expertise account for very little, while marketing and image mean everything, and THAT, at least, he is very good at."
Being born a multi-millionaire and dumpster diving for OS listings may have helped too...
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1316287&cid=28837221
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1316287&cid=28837517
That said, Bill Gates still has been something special beyond that. I don't think those were enough. I just hope someday Bill Gates takes some time off the time pressure of financially obesity and studies stuff like Howard Zinn's writings, John Taylor Gatto's, or John Holt's or thinks hard about the future implications of technological abunance on the economy and education.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-stager/who-elected-bill-gates_b_829456.html
IMHO it's too late for unions to recreate private niche welfare states within big companies or big government agencies moving to full automation and outsourcing/offshoring, even as unions could still make a global difference, as I discuss here:
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/
It's probably now or never for the unions to make on last big push before they are just washed away by all these changes related to AI, robotics, better design, voluntary social networks, the accumulation of infrastructure, and so on...
IMHO, as long as we have a highly capitalistic system, everyone should get social security of US $2K a month (plus health care) from birth as a basic income, which would take the GDP growth from the mid 1990s, and the rest of the GDP was enough to motivate some people to work for more back then.
But there are five interwoven economies and we need to shift the balance between them as to the subsistence economy, the gift economy, the planned economy, the exchange economy, and the theft/corruption economy.
See also:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation