That is why I wrote: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
Many worries are "you will never get a job with previous posts on the internet around". How about we just abolish work instead, like Bob Black suggested? Or have a "basic income"? We can use high tech in other ways to address this problem than destroy our history, given robots and AIs can so more and more of the "work" these days anyway -- made possible by the same sorts of technology that makes privacy such an issue.
That said, making our networks function more like human brains as far as forgetting is an interesting idea.
See also my comment here that got modded "troll".:-)
"Mother Nature can still really kick ass... (Score:2, Troll)" http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2033910&cid=35464554 "Like with Hurricane Katrina where the USA lost a city, this event will be a test of the Japanese character. The good news is, you can see in Japan aspects of what a healthy society looks like (unlike the USA during Katrina or before). Japan prepared a lot for this (good building codes, to begin with). Their leadership has responded immediately. People are helping each other. News is being posted right away through their advanced social networks. (Many individuals wanted to help with Katrina, and were turned back, and parts of the New Orleans area descended into violence and fear...) You can be sure, as a society, Japan will come through this even stronger and healthier and better prepared for the next event. I wish I could say stuff like that about the USA these days? I don't know, even as I have a lot of faith in US individuals in a crisis. But in the USA, government is painted as the enemy. We don't know what good government would feel like anymore, sadly -- government that is accountable, or plans well, or prioritizes human needs over short-term profits to a few."
Although, with that said, there was stuff in the news about the towns around the nuclear plants not having planned for this specific sort of nuclear incident, so we'll see what future reports say about all that. And no doubt one can point to incidents of corruption in any government.
"wind is unreliable with bursts capable of damaging power transmission and occasional lulls that cover vast regions at a time."
Wind can be used in large offshore chains with high guarantees of predictable amounts of energy. Wind energy can also be used to produce hydrogen (nd hydrogen can in turn be used to produce carbonaceous liquid fuels using CO2 from the air). Wind energy can also be used intermittenlty to crush rock for fertilizer (see remineralize.org). Wind energy can also be used to compress air in salt caves. Wind energy can also be used to molten salt as a form of energy storage. Wind energy can be used to cool masses intermittently. Wind can lift weights which are later lowered to produce energy. And so on.
That said, I think solar will win out because it will be easiest to produce and useful just about anywhere, probably backed by some kind of superbatteries or using hydrogen stored in metal hydrides. (Short of cold fusion, maybe from Rossi from Italy with Nickel?)
I also agree next geenration nuclear (like Hyperion) is interesting. But big central nuclear reprocessing plants may still be at risk of earthquakes, terrorism, etc.
This calamity shows Mother Nature can still really kick ass...
And that's why we should cooperate more globally and not worry so much about fighting each other with all the advanced technology we have been creating. While this tragedy is horrible, just horrible, something like an asteroid strike on the Earth, a supervolcano eruption like in Yellostone, or a massive plague could kill billions. So, this should be a warning to our global society that we should cooperate more to prepare together for what Mother Nature can still dish out at random times.
Like with Hurricane Katrina where the USA lost a city, this event will be a test of the Japanese character. The good news is, you can see in Japan aspects of what a healthy society looks like (unlike the USA during Katrina or before). Japan prepared a lot for this (good building codes, to begin with). Their leadership has responded immediately. People are helping each other. News is being posted right away through their advanced social networks. (Many individuals wanted to help with Katrina, and were turned back, and parts of the New Orleans area descended into violence and fear...) You can be sure, as a society, Japan will come through this even stronger and healthier and better prepared for the next event. I wish I could say stuff like that about the USA these days? I don't know, even as I have a lot of faith in US individuals in a crisis. But in the USA, government is painted as the enemy. We don't know what good government would feel like anymore, sadly -- government that is accountable, or plans well, or prioritizes human needs over short-term profits to a few.
With that said, more money put into solar energy research in Japan is probably a good idea... And if you are going to have nuclear power plants, designs like Hyperion power might make more sense (ignoring how you still need reprocessing facilities that might be at earthquake risk). That plant design was 40 years old. This book explains why old nuclear power plant designs are riskier: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html "The nuclear power plants in service today were conceptually designed and developed during the 1960s. At that time, it was deemed necessary to achieve maximum efficiency and minimum cost in order to compete successfully with coal- or oil-burning plants. The latter were priced at 15% of their present cost and used fuel that was very cheap by current standards. In order to maximize efficiencies in the nuclear plants, temperatures, pressures, and power densities were pushed up to their highest practical limits. Safety features were exemplary for that era, and even for current safety practices in other industries. But they were not up to present-day demands for super-super safety in the nuclear industry.
As the public became more concerned with nuclear safety, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission required that new safety equipment and procedures be added on, in the process discussed in Chapter 9 as "regulatory ratcheting." The amount of labor and materials for these add-ons exceeded that for the plant as originally conceived. With this added complexity, the plants became difficult and expensive to construct, operate, and maintain. Moreover, the level of safety was still limited by the original conceptual design.
By the early 1980s it became apparent that a new conceptual design of nuclear reactors was called for. The cost of electricity from coal- and oil-burning plants had escalated to the point where their competition did not require maximum efficiency from nuclear plants. Furthermore, the added efficiency achieved by pushing temp
But, with all that said, the same sorts of reasons solar energy is getting better (better materials, better designs, better discussions, better insights into physics) is the same reason small scale nuclear is getting better (even as I would agree solar is safer and more decentralized than conventional nuclear). And example of small nuclear: http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
Let's say, in a moderate worse case in Japan that 100,000 people die from some nuclear radiation accident and the clean up cost a couple trillion dollars. Nuclear power still might have been cheaper in Japan, all things considered, than coal which causes a lot of pollution and related illness.
Would it have been cheaper in that sense than solar and wind? Probably not...
Still, given this is the worst quake to have hit Japan in a century, and the nuclear plants are not being talked about as having total meltdowns, this event itself might prove how safe they can be in some situations.
Of course, dealing with direct terrorism intended to cause them to malfunction may be a different issue, but many major industrial facilities, like at Bhopal, have that risk. And ideas like Hyperion help reduce that risk. Ultimately, if we try harder to make our global economy work for everyone, we might have less fears that people will commit terrorism because the hate us because we support their oppressors for various reasons...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society (From around 2001)... Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
I wish I could go there though, but I'm a poor open source developer...:-) It does say something about virtual participation, so maybe I can try that. Virtual is cheaper and also avoids the strip scans and/or groping required to go to CA from NY these days via "aeronautics" technology.
It is unfortunate that more people don't take the implications of abundance made possible by NASA-type technology more seriously (see also Julian Simon), or we might be able to get full body scans when we want them at the doctor's office and also not get them at airports when we don't want them (like when we are no longer worried that people hate us because we support their oppressors because everyoen is afraid there is not enough stuff or energy to go around...) See also, thanks to space age technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
Here are some heterodox economic solutions for our society to embrance as it transitions to greater material abundance by the sort of positive future-oriented thinking NASA does (or did?):
"As a consequence these MPAA/RIAA lobbyists go to him claiming that they are loosing billions and millions of jobs in an industry that "can't" be off-shored--nothing like American movies and music."
My prediction/satire from 2002 sent to the US DOJ::-) 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...."
From one of those links: "Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax payments."
I got the idea from someone's slashdot sig back around; the sig asked something like, if it is intellectual property, why is it not taxed?
Anonymous Coward wrote: "The US economy ("What's yours is mine. What's mine is mine.");"
Thanks, AC, as that is insightful. I've thought on and off about related issues, but you put it very succinctly.
In general, the issue you raise is the economy of "imperialism", or "theft", or "parasitism", or perhaps, to some degree depending on the circumstances, "rent".
For example on "rent" being tricky, the "enclosure" acts in the past take land away from native people and then sometimes rent it or other land back to them, and feudal estates and castles also had aspects of that (where castles were used as military fortresses to enforce "rents" from the locals). Much (but not all) of the way material wealth is distributed in our post-industrial society still links back to a degree to feudalism and who was a (land) lord or child of a lord back then. Still, rent in a slippery issue because it gets at the issue of "ownership", and ultimately ownership of the land or materials taken from it has a strong component of "finders keepers" and "might makes right" (beyond any other social negotiation). There is a degree of exchange in rental transactions too, for the upkeep of property, or for taking on risk related to the market. A lot of it has to do with the social consequences and who got privileged access to resources and why and what other options there are in terms of a level playing field. See also: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/ http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated/
One can fit imperialism, theft, and parasitism into the other four categories, but it is a stretch. For example: * Imperialism includes subsisting off of other people's land and other people's labor (including through both physical slavery and wage slavery), rather than taking resources from the land around you and doing the work yourself. * Imperialism gives gifts of stolen or misappropriated goods (including misdirected taxes) to the friends and enforcers of empire. * Imperialism generally has a strong planning component (like the US "Defense" budget is up to around $1,2 trillion dollars annually or more when you include everything including interest and future obligations, which is approaching 10% of the US economy, and it sets the tone for economies around the globe). * Imperialism generally offers an "exchange" in terms of "protection", like the Mafia, so, if you give imperialists what they demand, they promise to not hurt you very much in other ways.
Now, there are shades of gray in all this (one reason I tend to say these economies are "interwoven"). For example, planning is often backed up by some kind of penalty, such as imprisonment for not paying taxes or social ostracism for not cooperating. Gift economies have some aspect of exchange, in the sense that those why give a lot in them tend to get social status. Often what is exchanges is something that someone collected from the environment in a subsistence way. And so on.
So, I might add a fifth item then that is more like:
* The theft economy ("What is yours is mine because I can take it with relative impunity because I am more powerful in some important way.")
Or maybe it needs some pithy example ("Give me that or I'll break your legs.") Although that misuses the notion of "giving" and a "gift".
Where more "powerful" may mean bigger, stronger, faster, cleverer, more informed, more socially connected, sneakier, more deceptive, meaner, better at propaganda, readier access to weapons, and so on. However, power in a society can still shift as what matters shifts (being personally bigger and stronger does not mean as much now as it did in the past, where the bankers and speculators are able to hire armed guards as they have a strong control of propaganda apparatus). Related:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
Or at least, that's what my wife and I like to tell ourselves about our GPL'd garden simulator (a six person-year labor of love around the same time period): http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
There have always been four different economies throughout human history:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");
Their relative balance shifts with changes to culture, technology, and other circumstances.
So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income.
But ultimately, is the solution to bullying to create a all-pervasive police state where no one ever says something someone else might potentially find offensive without immediately being labelled and disciplined? Because that is the way public schools in general are heading with conventional anti-bullying approaches based on similar stuff to what you are talking about ("telling is not tattling", etc.) however well it might work sometimes for some individuals.
It's actually quite true that beating up bullies or getting someone else to do it for you (physically, verbally, socially) like a parent or principal may make them stop, but the appeal to authority is fraught with its own issues (a police state, and then what happens when the police are not there, or if the police themselves become bullies?).
Again, no one is suggesting a child suffer significant physical injury, and Izzy Kalman says his techniques only work when the kids doing the bullying are reasonably emotionally stable without a history of serious violence. Also, yes, other approaches may indeed sometimes work.
But see also: http://www.bullies2buddies.com/sites/default/files/'10-B2BFinalManusciptForSubmission.pdf "A meta-analysis by Smith, Schneider, Smith, & Ananiadou (2004) concluded that the majority of whole-school programs yielded nonsignificant outcomes on measures of self-reported victimization and bullying.... Children who are victims of bullying typically believe that teacher intervention will be effective in countering bullying behavior, and such intervention is a component of most bullying prevention programs. However, research suggests that teachers underidentify bullying behavior, and that, when students report bullying events to teachers, bullying may increase (Smith & Shu, 2000). Although teacher intervention has been shown to reduce bullying in some studies, such intervention must be timely and consistent, and requires close supervision of students. Moreover, teachersâ(TM) attitudes about bullying have been shown to influence their willingness to intervene, as well as the skill with which they do so (Kochendorfer-Ladd, & Pelletier, 2008). Thus, it is not always possible â" and, in some instances, may not be advisable â" to rely on teacher intervention as a means of managing the problem of bullying. [Exactly what you say happened when you asked a teacher for help...]"
Izzy Kalman's approach goes beyond telling kids to "ignore it". He teaches active strategies to respond to events, and also new ways to think about situations. His work is truly applied psychology in action.
Ultimately, beyond the value of asking others for help when you needed it, which is indeed an admirable quality, did you have a chance to learn those other strategies as well? When you asked for help, what kind of help was given?
If a kid breaks a leg, and asks for help, to use your example, do parents respond by putting the kid and all their friends in a straight jacket in a padded room so that it can never happen again?
Well, what is the difference these days in classrooms and our larger society where there is now a move towards "zero tolerance" for "different" and "zero tolerance" for any off-hand or inappropriate comment, where such a thing results in immediate discipline, arrest, or job loss? Is that the kind of society we really want to have? Have we not just shifted around the problem somewhere else, and maybe made it worse overall?
Izzy Kalman says what is going on with stuff labelled bullying is for the most part issues of "dominance" and they are part of how humans interact, for good or bad. Example:
"Study links teenage bullying to social status" http://articles.latimes.com/201
"I just read the articles in this series, and I have to say most of it truely is terrible advice. It takes the mindset of blaming the victim. It puts the onus on the victim to resolve the issue, when time after time, we see that the victim has less control over the situation than any outsider that chooses to get involved. And then it gives the classic advice (paraphrasing) "stop getting upset and you'll stop being teased/bullied."'
You are just presenting the conventional wisdom on this. Izzy Kalman at Bullies to Buddies says the conventional wisdom is wrong about this (except in very rare cases where the bully is emotionally unstable or has a history of violence). He has many testimonials by school staff who say his approach is the only thing that really worked and a strategy based on the conventional wisdom just makes things worse. Where is your evidence that what you say will work well and not make the problem worse, both socially, and for the individual who may never be able to grow past seeing themselves as a needy victim?
CouchDB is a document-oriented database that supports easy replication between databases (with some indirect ideas from Lotus Notes). But I don't know of its use as an email client? Maybe a new niche there to write one...
CouchDB does not send or recieve email directly though -- one missing feature IMHO, although you could build some sort of relay to it using web standard (and maybe someone has). Basiclaly, you'd need a gateway to and from CouchDB as a server somewhere to translate between mail protocols and the http protocols CouchDB likes.
From an Amazon review of that book: "The one lesson is simply this: economic planning should take into account the effects of economic policies on all groups, not just some groups, and what those effects will be in the long run, not just the short run. That's it. That's the lesson. Fallacious economic policies almost invariably seek to benefit one group at the expense of all others, or to bring about short-term benefits at the expense of long-term benefits. With this as his thesis, Hazlitt examines the numerous manifestations of such fallacies in different situations."
That sounds sensible to me. I'd agree that a lot of problems in the USA are from the way powerful interests have used the government to get preferences in their direction (like the US meat, dairy, and grain industries, which is destroying US health, or like the US war industry, see "War is a Racket" by Major General Smedly Butler).
However, and not having read the book,does Hazlitt talk about how mainstream economist assume demand is infinite as a way to keep up with exponentially rising productivity and still keep most people employed in the mainstream system so they have purchasing power to buy the necessities of life? See also the essay "The Triple Revolution" from 1964 about a breaking "income-through-jobs" link even then, and the last thirty plus years of stagnant real wages in the USA has proved that out to some degree, and now we see declining real wages and those economic trends are really taking hold. http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
I feel demand for more physical stuff is not infinite among healthy humans (even given status competition) for at least four reasons. One is a spreading ethics like "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" that suggests "voluntary simplicity". A second is because of the idea of Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" which suggests that after basic material aspirations are fulfilled, humans tend to focus on higher, generally non-material, ones. A third reason is the simple accumulation of stuff in our environment, where it becomes easier to find what you need as someone else's discarded or underutilized infrastructure at little incremental cost (thus Freecycle and too-cheap-to-matter internet services). A fourth reason is that for more creative and intellectual tasks, it turns out, reward is not much of a motivator and may even reduce performance by interfering with intrinsic motivation:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
While the original article makes it seem like cell phones are not being replaced due to limited finances, could it be that we are also reaching some point of saturation in some area of basic communications technology?
While it is true, all things being equal, "more" in some sense might be nicer in some ways (like a faster cell phone or a prettier display), it is also true that the law of diminishing returns sets in at some point, where "more" starts to impose huge costs, including non-monetary ones like confusion and hassles and time costs of constant upgrades and learning new stuff. What would Hazlitt say are the implications of a law of diminishing returns for more goods and services across our entire society? That is not the kind of thing free market economists usually want to think about...
Then there is the fact that people without jobs due to rising productivity and limited demand would have no means to pay for more stuff, which then leads to another set of problems. Think about the implication of IBM's Watson winning at Jeopardy, or, for another case, this dexterous robot hand: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-han
Yes, I agree, and your example is something to think about.
Marshall Brain wrote some about this in "Manna", but ultimately people were more passive there, and there were also a lot of police robots to enforce "the law" related to mainstream economics: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
As I see it, the economy has always been a mix of four types (subsistence economy, gift economy, planned economy, and exchange economy). Even in the USA right now, we still have all four types (examples: Gardening, Debian, Roads, Walmart). But the balance can shift, and we can also put in place things like a basic income to intentionally shift the balance. Between what is spent on education and what is spent on social security, the USA already spends about US$800 per month per person on social programs. If that money just went directly to each person (or their parents for kids), then that would be a basic income at no increase in taxes (and likewise, universal health coverage would be possible based on just what is spent now by the US government for health care if done similar to other industrialized countries). Now, seniors who currently get more that US$800 per month would be worse off financially in that sense, however, they would be living in a world where their children and neighbors would suddenly have a lot more free time, which might be a very good thing for their health and happiness. Plus, to keep their benefits at current levels (an extra three hundred dollars a month or so?) would probably just require a relatively small change in taxes, probably not more that our current war spending.
However, even as $800 a month per person is just enough to live on in the USA (when coupled with medical coverage), I think it might make more sense to devote at least half the US GDP to a basic income (which leaves the level of the GDP from around 1997 to motivate people to work, and it was enough back then) and that level would be more like US$2000 per month.
But, as we get better 3D printers and they eventually can print solar cells and more 3D printers (as well as tools to recycle materials or collect them from nature), we will see a diminishing need for exchange for material things acquired by exchange, so a basic income would become less important except about control of land. Likewise, in countries that plan better, they could create an infrastructure of hostels or universities that people wanted to spend time around. And as the gift economy expands in the digital realm, there is less need to pay for digital files, and as abundance spreads, there are more people with extra things to give away (like old cell phones), again reducing the need to buy things.
So, there is a very complex dynamics going on that relates to production and consumption of stuff, but it is, for the most part, totally ignored by mainstream economists lost in the beauty of their elegantly beautiful but woefully incomplete and even sometimes deadly equations.
When I was a young child decades ago, Fred Rogers had the woman who played the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz on his program. She explained how they did the scene where she melted. But she also tried to get kids to think about what things looked like from the Wicked Witch's perspective. Her sister was killed. The one keepsake was stolen. Her home was invaded. Finally, she is attacked just for defending herself and trying to get back her sister's property. And so on. It really shocked me in a good way, to think that things looked different from her point of view.
Here is a FOSS project (Rakontu) my wife developed (I helped a small bit) to help people see situations from multiple perspectives. http://www.rakontu.org/
Slashdot Mirror
There are at least five interwoven types of economies:
* Subsistence,
* Gift,
* Planned,
* Exchange, and
* Theft (not recommended).
So, there are various other directions you can move than switching from exchanging currency to bartering.
More on this here by me:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
Or see this video by someone else:
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo
That is why I wrote: http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Many worries are "you will never get a job with previous posts on the internet around". How about we just abolish work instead, like Bob Black suggested? Or have a "basic income"? We can use high tech in other ways to address this problem than destroy our history, given robots and AIs can so more and more of the "work" these days anyway -- made possible by the same sorts of technology that makes privacy such an issue.
That said, making our networks function more like human brains as far as forgetting is an interesting idea.
See also my comment here that got modded "troll". :-)
"Mother Nature can still really kick ass... (Score:2, Troll)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2033910&cid=35464554
"Like with Hurricane Katrina where the USA lost a city, this event will be a test of the Japanese character. The good news is, you can see in Japan aspects of what a healthy society looks like (unlike the USA during Katrina or before). Japan prepared a lot for this (good building codes, to begin with). Their leadership has responded immediately. People are helping each other. News is being posted right away through their advanced social networks. (Many individuals wanted to help with Katrina, and were turned back, and parts of the New Orleans area descended into violence and fear...) You can be sure, as a society, Japan will come through this even stronger and healthier and better prepared for the next event. I wish I could say stuff like that about the USA these days? I don't know, even as I have a lot of faith in US individuals in a crisis. But in the USA, government is painted as the enemy. We don't know what good government would feel like anymore, sadly -- government that is accountable, or plans well, or prioritizes human needs over short-term profits to a few."
Although, with that said, there was stuff in the news about the towns around the nuclear plants not having planned for this specific sort of nuclear incident, so we'll see what future reports say about all that. And no doubt one can point to incidents of corruption in any government.
"The bureaucrat on the other hand is only interested in making it as expensive and labour-intensive as possible"
Until we transition our economy to some better balance between subsistence/gift/planned/exchange/theft more appropriate for a high-tech civilization.
See also my comments here:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"wind is unreliable with bursts capable of damaging power transmission and occasional lulls that cover vast regions at a time."
Wind can be used in large offshore chains with high guarantees of predictable amounts of energy. Wind energy can also be used to produce hydrogen (nd hydrogen can in turn be used to produce carbonaceous liquid fuels using CO2 from the air). Wind energy can also be used intermittenlty to crush rock for fertilizer (see remineralize.org). Wind energy can also be used to compress air in salt caves. Wind energy can also be used to molten salt as a form of energy storage. Wind energy can be used to cool masses intermittently. Wind can lift weights which are later lowered to produce energy. And so on.
That said, I think solar will win out because it will be easiest to produce and useful just about anywhere, probably backed by some kind of superbatteries or using hydrogen stored in metal hydrides. (Short of cold fusion, maybe from Rossi from Italy with Nickel?)
I also agree next geenration nuclear (like Hyperion) is interesting. But big central nuclear reprocessing plants may still be at risk of earthquakes, terrorism, etc.
This calamity shows Mother Nature can still really kick ass...
And that's why we should cooperate more globally and not worry so much about fighting each other with all the advanced technology we have been creating. While this tragedy is horrible, just horrible, something like an asteroid strike on the Earth, a supervolcano eruption like in Yellostone, or a massive plague could kill billions. So, this should be a warning to our global society that we should cooperate more to prepare together for what Mother Nature can still dish out at random times.
See also:
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main
And by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Like with Hurricane Katrina where the USA lost a city, this event will be a test of the Japanese character. The good news is, you can see in Japan aspects of what a healthy society looks like (unlike the USA during Katrina or before). Japan prepared a lot for this (good building codes, to begin with). Their leadership has responded immediately. People are helping each other. News is being posted right away through their advanced social networks. (Many individuals wanted to help with Katrina, and were turned back, and parts of the New Orleans area descended into violence and fear...) You can be sure, as a society, Japan will come through this even stronger and healthier and better prepared for the next event. I wish I could say stuff like that about the USA these days? I don't know, even as I have a lot of faith in US individuals in a crisis. But in the USA, government is painted as the enemy. We don't know what good government would feel like anymore, sadly -- government that is accountable, or plans well, or prioritizes human needs over short-term profits to a few.
With that said, more money put into solar energy research in Japan is probably a good idea... And if you are going to have nuclear power plants, designs like Hyperion power might make more sense (ignoring how you still need reprocessing facilities that might be at earthquake risk). That plant design was 40 years old. This book explains why old nuclear power plant designs are riskier:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html
"The nuclear power plants in service today were conceptually designed and developed during the 1960s. At that time, it was deemed necessary to achieve maximum efficiency and minimum cost in order to compete successfully with coal- or oil-burning plants. The latter were priced at 15% of their present cost and used fuel that was very cheap by current standards. In order to maximize efficiencies in the nuclear plants, temperatures, pressures, and power densities were pushed up to their highest practical limits. Safety features were exemplary for that era, and even for current safety practices in other industries. But they were not up to present-day demands for super-super safety in the nuclear industry.
As the public became more concerned with nuclear safety, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission required that new safety equipment and procedures be added on, in the process discussed in Chapter 9 as "regulatory ratcheting." The amount of labor and materials for these add-ons exceeded that for the plant as originally conceived. With this added complexity, the plants became difficult and expensive to construct, operate, and maintain. Moreover, the level of safety was still limited by the original conceptual design.
By the early 1980s it became apparent that a new conceptual design of nuclear reactors was called for. The cost of electricity from coal- and oil-burning plants had escalated to the point where their competition did not require maximum efficiency from nuclear plants. Furthermore, the added efficiency achieved by pushing temp
Well said!
See also:
Plans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Cars:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
Agriculture:
http://www.remineralize.org/
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
But, with all that said, the same sorts of reasons solar energy is getting better (better materials, better designs, better discussions, better insights into physics) is the same reason small scale nuclear is getting better (even as I would agree solar is safer and more decentralized than conventional nuclear). And example of small nuclear:
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
Related case for nuclear power:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/
Let's say, in a moderate worse case in Japan that 100,000 people die from some nuclear radiation accident and the clean up cost a couple trillion dollars. Nuclear power still might have been cheaper in Japan, all things considered, than coal which causes a lot of pollution and related illness.
Would it have been cheaper in that sense than solar and wind? Probably not...
Still, given this is the worst quake to have hit Japan in a century, and the nuclear plants are not being talked about as having total meltdowns, this event itself might prove how safe they can be in some situations.
Of course, dealing with direct terrorism intended to cause them to malfunction may be a different issue, but many major industrial facilities, like at Bhopal, have that risk. And ideas like Hyperion help reduce that risk. Ultimately, if we try harder to make our global economy work for everyone, we might have less fears that people will commit terrorism because the hate us because we support their oppressors for various reasons...
On economic transformation, see:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
BTW, an example of perhaps cold fusion (still needs more confirmation):
http://pesn.com/2011/03/07/9501782_Cold_Fusion_Steams_Ahead_at_Worlds_Oldest_University/
Personally, I want to be able to print solar panels in a solar-powered 3D printer. :-)
"Is fusion available yet?" http://pesn.com/2011/03/07/9501782_Cold_Fusion_Steams_Ahead_at_Worlds_Oldest_University/
The real deal?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html ... Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
"An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society (From around 2001)
I wish I could go there though, but I'm a poor open source developer... :-) It does say something about virtual participation, so maybe I can try that. Virtual is cheaper and also avoids the strip scans and/or groping required to go to CA from NY these days via "aeronautics" technology.
It is unfortunate that more people don't take the implications of abundance made possible by NASA-type technology more seriously (see also Julian Simon), or we might be able to get full body scans when we want them at the doctor's office and also not get them at airports when we don't want them (like when we are no longer worried that people hate us because we support their oppressors because everyoen is afraid there is not enough stuff or energy to go around...) See also, thanks to space age technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
Or 21st century enlightenment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
http://johncr8on.com/projects/21st-century-institutions/
See also the late James P. Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
I guess no amount of fancy technology by itself can transcend irony or stupidity:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Here are some heterodox economic solutions for our society to embrance as it transitions to greater material abundance by the sort of positive future-oriented thinking NASA does (or did?):
"As a consequence these MPAA/RIAA lobbyists go to him claiming that they are loosing billions and millions of jobs in an industry that "can't" be off-shored--nothing like American movies and music."
My prediction/satire from 2002 sent to the US DOJ: :-) ..."
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.
Better solutions:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
Buy him a MakerBot to print his own Thunderbirds vehicles. I just did that for my somewhat somewhat older kid: :-)
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/4ce4ae8f1b60c810
How about a self-assessed buyout value taxed at 3% annually for copyrights, maybe less for shorter patents?
Some little progress documented on IP taxes is at: http://www.ip-tax.com/
Then (2003, by me):
http://p2pfoundation.net/Copyright_Tax
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000763.html
From one of those links: "Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax payments."
I got the idea from someone's slashdot sig back around; the sig asked something like, if it is intellectual property, why is it not taxed?
Ultimately we need to move beyond an economic system more-and-more built around "artificial scarcity". See also:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
Anonymous Coward wrote: "The US economy ("What's yours is mine. What's mine is mine.");"
Thanks, AC, as that is insightful. I've thought on and off about related issues, but you put it very succinctly.
In general, the issue you raise is the economy of "imperialism", or "theft", or "parasitism", or perhaps, to some degree depending on the circumstances, "rent".
For example on "rent" being tricky, the "enclosure" acts in the past take land away from native people and then sometimes rent it or other land back to them, and feudal estates and castles also had aspects of that (where castles were used as military fortresses to enforce "rents" from the locals). Much (but not all) of the way material wealth is distributed in our post-industrial society still links back to a degree to feudalism and who was a (land) lord or child of a lord back then. Still, rent in a slippery issue because it gets at the issue of "ownership", and ultimately ownership of the land or materials taken from it has a strong component of "finders keepers" and "might makes right" (beyond any other social negotiation). There is a degree of exchange in rental transactions too, for the upkeep of property, or for taking on risk related to the market. A lot of it has to do with the social consequences and who got privileged access to resources and why and what other options there are in terms of a level playing field. See also:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/
http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated/
One can fit imperialism, theft, and parasitism into the other four categories, but it is a stretch. For example:
* Imperialism includes subsisting off of other people's land and other people's labor (including through both physical slavery and wage slavery), rather than taking resources from the land around you and doing the work yourself.
* Imperialism gives gifts of stolen or misappropriated goods (including misdirected taxes) to the friends and enforcers of empire.
* Imperialism generally has a strong planning component (like the US "Defense" budget is up to around $1,2 trillion dollars annually or more when you include everything including interest and future obligations, which is approaching 10% of the US economy, and it sets the tone for economies around the globe).
* Imperialism generally offers an "exchange" in terms of "protection", like the Mafia, so, if you give imperialists what they demand, they promise to not hurt you very much in other ways.
Now, there are shades of gray in all this (one reason I tend to say these economies are "interwoven"). For example, planning is often backed up by some kind of penalty, such as imprisonment for not paying taxes or social ostracism for not cooperating. Gift economies have some aspect of exchange, in the sense that those why give a lot in them tend to get social status. Often what is exchanges is something that someone collected from the environment in a subsistence way. And so on.
So, I might add a fifth item then that is more like:
* The theft economy ("What is yours is mine because I can take it with relative impunity because I am more powerful in some important way.")
Or maybe it needs some pithy example ("Give me that or I'll break your legs.") Although that misuses the notion of "giving" and a "gift".
Where more "powerful" may mean bigger, stronger, faster, cleverer, more informed, more socially connected, sneakier, more deceptive, meaner, better at propaganda, readier access to weapons, and so on. However, power in a society can still shift as what matters shifts (being personally bigger and stronger does not mean as much now as it did in the past, where the bankers and speculators are able to hire armed guards as they have a strong control of propaganda apparatus). Related:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
Seems like a more than fair deal. :-)
Or at least, that's what my wife and I like to tell ourselves about our GPL'd garden simulator (a six person-year labor of love around the same time period):
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
There have always been four different economies throughout human history:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");
Their relative balance shifts with changes to culture, technology, and other circumstances.
See also the comment I made here:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income.
I'm glad you found something that worked for you.
But ultimately, is the solution to bullying to create a all-pervasive police state where no one ever says something someone else might potentially find offensive without immediately being labelled and disciplined? Because that is the way public schools in general are heading with conventional anti-bullying approaches based on similar stuff to what you are talking about ("telling is not tattling", etc.) however well it might work sometimes for some individuals.
It's actually quite true that beating up bullies or getting someone else to do it for you (physically, verbally, socially) like a parent or principal may make them stop, but the appeal to authority is fraught with its own issues (a police state, and then what happens when the police are not there, or if the police themselves become bullies?).
Again, no one is suggesting a child suffer significant physical injury, and Izzy Kalman says his techniques only work when the kids doing the bullying are reasonably emotionally stable without a history of serious violence. Also, yes, other approaches may indeed sometimes work.
But see also: ... Children who are victims of bullying typically believe that teacher intervention will be effective in countering bullying behavior, and such intervention is a component of most bullying prevention programs. However, research suggests that teachers underidentify bullying behavior, and that, when students report bullying events to teachers, bullying may increase (Smith & Shu, 2000). Although teacher intervention has been shown to reduce bullying in some studies, such intervention must be timely and consistent, and requires close supervision of students. Moreover, teachersâ(TM) attitudes about bullying have been shown to influence their willingness to intervene, as well as the skill with which they do so (Kochendorfer-Ladd, & Pelletier, 2008). Thus, it is not always possible â" and, in some instances, may not be advisable â" to rely on teacher intervention as a means of managing the problem of bullying. [Exactly what you say happened when you asked a teacher for help...]"
http://www.bullies2buddies.com/sites/default/files/'10-B2BFinalManusciptForSubmission.pdf
"A meta-analysis by Smith, Schneider, Smith, & Ananiadou (2004) concluded that the majority of whole-school programs yielded nonsignificant outcomes on measures of self-reported victimization and bullying.
Izzy Kalman's approach goes beyond telling kids to "ignore it". He teaches active strategies to respond to events, and also new ways to think about situations. His work is truly applied psychology in action.
Ultimately, beyond the value of asking others for help when you needed it, which is indeed an admirable quality, did you have a chance to learn those other strategies as well? When you asked for help, what kind of help was given?
If a kid breaks a leg, and asks for help, to use your example, do parents respond by putting the kid and all their friends in a straight jacket in a padded room so that it can never happen again?
Well, what is the difference these days in classrooms and our larger society where there is now a move towards "zero tolerance" for "different" and "zero tolerance" for any off-hand or inappropriate comment, where such a thing results in immediate discipline, arrest, or job loss? Is that the kind of society we really want to have? Have we not just shifted around the problem somewhere else, and maybe made it worse overall?
Izzy Kalman says what is going on with stuff labelled bullying is for the most part issues of "dominance" and they are part of how humans interact, for good or bad. Example:
"Study links teenage bullying to social status"
http://articles.latimes.com/201
"I just read the articles in this series, and I have to say most of it truely is terrible advice. It takes the mindset of blaming the victim. It puts the onus on the victim to resolve the issue, when time after time, we see that the victim has less control over the situation than any outsider that chooses to get involved. And then it gives the classic advice (paraphrasing) "stop getting upset and you'll stop being teased/bullied."'
You are just presenting the conventional wisdom on this. Izzy Kalman at Bullies to Buddies says the conventional wisdom is wrong about this (except in very rare cases where the bully is emotionally unstable or has a history of violence). He has many testimonials by school staff who say his approach is the only thing that really worked and a strategy based on the conventional wisdom just makes things worse. Where is your evidence that what you say will work well and not make the problem worse, both socially, and for the individual who may never be able to grow past seeing themselves as a needy victim?
I do think his approach has its limits by ignoring things like the connection between junk food and bad behavior, or the problem of compulsory schooling as bullying by the state, like I commented on here:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psychological-solution-bullying/201011/rational-alternative-the-national-school-anti-bullying-p/comments#comment-134733
http://www.bullies2buddies.com/How-to-Stop-Being-Teased-and-Bullied-Without-Really-Trying
http://couchdb.apache.org/
You can host stuff in the cloud like with one fo these providers:
http://www.couchone.com/
https://cloudant.com/
and then easily backup to a desktop or even another cloud service you run yourself:
http://osdir.com/ml/db.couchdb.devel/2008-01/msg00222.html
CouchDB is a document-oriented database that supports easy replication between databases (with some indirect ideas from Lotus Notes). But I don't know of its use as an email client? Maybe a new niche there to write one...
CouchDB does not send or recieve email directly though -- one missing feature IMHO, although you could build some sort of relay to it using web standard (and maybe someone has). Basiclaly, you'd need a gateway to and from CouchDB as a server somewhere to translate between mail protocols and the http protocols CouchDB likes.
In the long term, we need a semantic desktop though...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop
My own fumbling attempts in that direction:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
From an Amazon review of that book: "The one lesson is simply this: economic planning should take into account the effects of economic policies on all groups, not just some groups, and what those effects will be in the long run, not just the short run. That's it. That's the lesson. Fallacious economic policies almost invariably seek to benefit one group at the expense of all others, or to bring about short-term benefits at the expense of long-term benefits. With this as his thesis, Hazlitt examines the numerous manifestations of such fallacies in different situations."
That sounds sensible to me. I'd agree that a lot of problems in the USA are from the way powerful interests have used the government to get preferences in their direction (like the US meat, dairy, and grain industries, which is destroying US health, or like the US war industry, see "War is a Racket" by Major General Smedly Butler).
However, and not having read the book,does Hazlitt talk about how mainstream economist assume demand is infinite as a way to keep up with exponentially rising productivity and still keep most people employed in the mainstream system so they have purchasing power to buy the necessities of life? See also the essay "The Triple Revolution" from 1964 about a breaking "income-through-jobs" link even then, and the last thirty plus years of stagnant real wages in the USA has proved that out to some degree, and now we see declining real wages and those economic trends are really taking hold.
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
I feel demand for more physical stuff is not infinite among healthy humans (even given status competition) for at least four reasons. One is a spreading ethics like "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" that suggests "voluntary simplicity". A second is because of the idea of Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" which suggests that after basic material aspirations are fulfilled, humans tend to focus on higher, generally non-material, ones. A third reason is the simple accumulation of stuff in our environment, where it becomes easier to find what you need as someone else's discarded or underutilized infrastructure at little incremental cost (thus Freecycle and too-cheap-to-matter internet services). A fourth reason is that for more creative and intellectual tasks, it turns out, reward is not much of a motivator and may even reduce performance by interfering with intrinsic motivation:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
While the original article makes it seem like cell phones are not being replaced due to limited finances, could it be that we are also reaching some point of saturation in some area of basic communications technology?
While it is true, all things being equal, "more" in some sense might be nicer in some ways (like a faster cell phone or a prettier display), it is also true that the law of diminishing returns sets in at some point, where "more" starts to impose huge costs, including non-monetary ones like confusion and hassles and time costs of constant upgrades and learning new stuff. What would Hazlitt say are the implications of a law of diminishing returns for more goods and services across our entire society? That is not the kind of thing free market economists usually want to think about...
Then there is the fact that people without jobs due to rising productivity and limited demand would have no means to pay for more stuff, which then leads to another set of problems. Think about the implication of IBM's Watson winning at Jeopardy, or, for another case, this dexterous robot hand:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-han
Yes, I agree, and your example is something to think about.
Marshall Brain wrote some about this in "Manna", but ultimately people were more passive there, and there were also a lot of police robots to enforce "the law" related to mainstream economics:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
As I see it, the economy has always been a mix of four types (subsistence economy, gift economy, planned economy, and exchange economy). Even in the USA right now, we still have all four types (examples: Gardening, Debian, Roads, Walmart). But the balance can shift, and we can also put in place things like a basic income to intentionally shift the balance. Between what is spent on education and what is spent on social security, the USA already spends about US$800 per month per person on social programs. If that money just went directly to each person (or their parents for kids), then that would be a basic income at no increase in taxes (and likewise, universal health coverage would be possible based on just what is spent now by the US government for health care if done similar to other industrialized countries). Now, seniors who currently get more that US$800 per month would be worse off financially in that sense, however, they would be living in a world where their children and neighbors would suddenly have a lot more free time, which might be a very good thing for their health and happiness. Plus, to keep their benefits at current levels (an extra three hundred dollars a month or so?) would probably just require a relatively small change in taxes, probably not more that our current war spending.
However, even as $800 a month per person is just enough to live on in the USA (when coupled with medical coverage), I think it might make more sense to devote at least half the US GDP to a basic income (which leaves the level of the GDP from around 1997 to motivate people to work, and it was enough back then) and that level would be more like US$2000 per month.
But, as we get better 3D printers and they eventually can print solar cells and more 3D printers (as well as tools to recycle materials or collect them from nature), we will see a diminishing need for exchange for material things acquired by exchange, so a basic income would become less important except about control of land. Likewise, in countries that plan better, they could create an infrastructure of hostels or universities that people wanted to spend time around. And as the gift economy expands in the digital realm, there is less need to pay for digital files, and as abundance spreads, there are more people with extra things to give away (like old cell phones), again reducing the need to buy things.
So, there is a very complex dynamics going on that relates to production and consumption of stuff, but it is, for the most part, totally ignored by mainstream economists lost in the beauty of their elegantly beautiful but woefully incomplete and even sometimes deadly equations.
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/more-on-the-future-implications-ibm-watson-technology/#comment-534
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
(Philip Zimbardo on the secret powers of time.)
When I was a young child decades ago, Fred Rogers had the woman who played the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz on his program. She explained how they did the scene where she melted. But she also tried to get kids to think about what things looked like from the Wicked Witch's perspective. Her sister was killed. The one keepsake was stolen. Her home was invaded. Finally, she is attacked just for defending herself and trying to get back her sister's property. And so on. It really shocked me in a good way, to think that things looked different from her point of view.
Here is a FOSS project (Rakontu) my wife developed (I helped a small bit) to help people see situations from multiple perspectives.
http://www.rakontu.org/
Thanks for the finite game. :-)
And the addition of yet more stones to a hopefully infinite community. :-)