"In more recent news, the author of one of the big studies which suggested massive Vitamin D deficiencies recently said that he was wrong, and that there's no worldwide Vitamin D deficiency crisis."
Citation?
Toxins include heavy metals (including lead in paint and gasoline, and mercury from burning coal), synthetic pesticides, estrogen mimics, arsenic, food additives, dioxin and other pollutants, and more. Now, people have always been exposed to some toxins. What is different for humans in the last century is the amount of human-produced toxins we are not well adapted to deal with going up and the amount of vegetables, fruits, and vitamin D, and so on we need to deal with toxins going down in our diet and from less sun exposure.
I'll hope to see your handwaving citation:-) and raise you Harvard med school people (not that Harvard doesn't have problems) ; see also:
"Environmental risk factors for autism: do they help cause de novo genetic mutations that contribute to the disorder?" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19699591 And comments: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/new-harvard-paper-on-autism.shtml "Last month, Dr. Dennis Kinney and four of his colleagues at Harvard University accepted the Vitamin D theory of autism and then expanded it by adding five usual suspects. While I was thrilled to see the Vitamin D theory accepted, appreciate them crediting the theory to me, and loved seeing their paper in the same journal that published the original theory, Medical Hypotheses, their five additions are all toxins, the usual suspects. The authors imply these toxins are delivered to our genome by air or water pollution, such as mercury-contaminated seafood, where these toxins selectively damage the genome of those silly enough to be Vitamin D deficient. My problem with the paper is the same problem I have with any of the air and water pollution autism theories, why now? Certainly, if a toxin was causing autism, evidence exists that exposure to that toxin has increased part and parcel with the epidemic of autism...."
It probably is a combination of both factors, IMHO. But, if I had to emphasize one, I think dietary changes to eat less vegetables and lack of vitamin D duet to fears about the sun might be more important.
I for one appreciate the same 3 - 4 ideas and sentences to every damn story posted to slashdot. I for one am capable of seeing it in the context either old or new in which it occurs. If you OTOH have a "better" way to say it in your own posts go for it. It is meaningful for me, each time I see it, for one, re scarcity.
"Gates spends the money on the root of the problem, population control, then you won't have so many babies to die from disease, seriously there are 7 billion people on the planet and we aren't addressing population control but rather keeping more of them alive. We are in need of a 4 or 5 billion deaths from a super virus."
One can make arguments for an "occupancy limit" for the Earth based on aesthetics or some other issues, but the carrying capacity of the solar system is easily in the quadrillions of humans living in space habitats, and we have the general technology to do that (see Gerry O'Neill's work, for a start). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill#Space_colonization
PV power is expected to reach widespread grid parity real soon now, even with all the negative externalities of fossil fuels (pollution, war, sickenss) being ignored. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
(A recent earthquake in Indonesia released more power than all the planet's known fossil fuel and uranium reserves combined also, but we don't know how to harness that power yet.:-)
Would you be around, using a computer, and posting on slashdot if people a couple of centuries ago has said that we should keep the Earth's population at a hundred million to make sure we did not run out of wood for cooking fires and to avoid the problems posed by Peak Whale Oil? Or if ten thousand years before that, people had said we should keep the Earth's population at around a million indefinitely to avoid using up the readily available flint supplies too soon?
I'm not saying limits do not exist at any given time based on our knowledge and infrastructure. But, we are no where near those limits as fare as the solar system. I just did a calculation that the recend SN 2011b supernova released enough energy in a month to power a trillion trillion human intellects for 10 billion years. There are 100 billion such stars in a typical galaxy, and a 100 billion or more such galaxies in the visible universe. That's a lot of energy, even if we can harness only a tiny fraction of it someday.
"I think overall it's probably the best defense we have against a pandemic."
For some strains of the flu, ensuring the right amount of vitamin D may work better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza "A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study published in the March 2010 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported that children taking 1,200 international units of vitamin D3 supplements daily in winter were 42% less likely to get infected with seasonal flu than those who were given a placebo.[6][7]"
Add better nutrition to that (like eating more vegetables and fruits and cutting out the junk food and processed food and most animal products) and a pandemic of the flu is not so big a worry. http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cold-flu-flu-and-nutrition-dr-fuhrman-responds-to-comments.html "The idea that a person eating a nutrient-rich diet is just as likely to develop and suffer the dangerous consequences from an influenza virus as a cheese burgers and soda eating American is simply wrong. Moe importantly such opinions are dangerous as they may lead to tragic outcomes for those mistaking authority for knowledge. Let's review just a few articles from the scientific literature that further support this concept that nutritional.excellence can offer protection from viral attacks. I will show the reference and post some explanatory comments below each reference....
The touted concept that the pandemic flu of 1918 target the "young and healthy" is not quite accurate. First of all, like today the diet in Western Europe in those days was largely meat, bread, potato, lard, butter and cheese with minimal fresh produce. The so-called, "young and healthy" back then, like today could not be used as an example of those eating a diet to assure nutritional adequacy. The diets of yore were grossly deficient. Today most industrialized nations eat less than five percent of total calories from fresh produce: fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts and beans. In spite of the fact that we have new science pointing to the impressive disease protection against heart disease, strokes, dementia, cancer and yes, serous infections, our society still consumes a diet assuring nutritional compromise and tragic medical outcomes.. Those of you naysayers who would like to stay on your chicken and pasta "low fat diet" or your cheeseburger and cokes with your heads buried deeply in the French fries, I say that is your prerogative. As for me, I will use and apply the science of today that shows the protection offered by cruciferous vegetables, raw vegetables and fruits, nuts and seeds and beans to give myself, my family and my patients the greatest potential to live a live a long, healthy life. This is not alternative medicine, it is good medicine...."
Bill Gates means well, but just like he never really addressed the roots causes of problems (including computer viruses) with Windows for decades, an emphasis on vaccination is a way to ignore the roots causes of human health issues globally (which include income disparities and a culture that celebrates financial obesity). How about seeing Bill Gates call for a gift economy or a global basic income as a way to fight for global wellness?
Is an antivirus program useful on Windows? Sure. But people who use Mac or Linux or FreeBSD, or who use Windows and practice safer computing practices (including not having their main login have administrator/superuser rights, running FireFox instead of IE, having a hardware firewall, and not opening attachments willy-nilly), tend not to need them quite as much. So too for nutritional excellence, which offers better general protection against all disease, includign cancer and heart disease and diabates and dementia and arthritis, which are the
"Given that autism has spiked all around the world, and it's unlikely to be solely due to just increased detection, the logical question is to ask what caused it."
There are lots of ways to promote wellness; I guess it should be no suprise the slashdot crowd is mostly interested in the magic bullet approach to health (vaccines) instead of holistic basics -- vegetable and fruit heavy diet, exercise, sleep, community, meditation, laughter, sunlight, fasting, two+ years nursing for infants, avoiding crowds, avoiding compulsory group labor in small (class) rooms, avoiding most junk food and most animal products, etc..
Anyway, given the logic you are using to encourage peopel to get vaccinated, it seems you might want to encourage people to move towards wellness in all these other areas, too?
Essentially, his approach entails resensitizing your taste buds (see the book "The Pleasure Trap") to enjoy eating a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains, and a few supplements with a multivitamin, vitamin D, and sometimes some others).
Also, make sure you have your vitamin D and iodine levels checked, as both can relate to cancer. (Look up iodine 4 health and the vitamin D council).
Best of look keeping cancer and other illness at bay. If you do a good job at that with good nutrition (and some exercise, getting enough sleep, having good social interactions, and so on), your doctor may not recognize you.:-)
Sure, I know I'm interpreting the myth towards a point I want to make.:-) But that is the value of broad myths about eternal issues. In this case though, it seems suprisingly apt though in at least some ways. And why do people try to build empires instead of just having a nice life on a farm or in a city somewhere, raising a handful of kids? Is not part of it some sort of inner psychological fear about inadequacy?
Or as Alfie Kohn suggests:
"No Contest: The Case Against Competition" By Alfie Kohn http://books.google.com/books?id=bLudHIk3gsMC "If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete. The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with "immense character strengths who don't make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport." Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down those activities.... Each culture provides its own mechanisms for dealing with self-doubt.... Low self-esteem, then, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of competition. The ingredients include an aching need to prove oneself and the approved mechanism for doing so at other people's expense.... I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low self-esteem, to argue that our "state religion" is a sign of psychological ill-health -- this will not sit well with many people.(Page 103)"
Consider, from the Wikipedia link you supplied, where the very first thing Medea supplies is medical biotechnology: "Presented with the tasks, Jason became discouraged and fell into depression. However, Hera had persuaded Aphrodite to convince her son Eros to make Aeetes's daughter, Medea, fall in love with Jason. As a result, Medea aided Jason in his tasks. First, Jason had to plow a field with fire-breathing oxen, the Khalkotauroi, that he had to yoke himself. Medea provided an ointment that protected him from the oxen's flames. Then, Jason sowed the teeth of a dragon into a field. The teeth sprouted into an army of warriors. Medea had previously warned Jason of this and told him how to defeat this foe.... In Corinth, Jason became engaged to marry Creusa (sometimes referred to as Glauce), a daughter of the King of Corinth, to strengthen his political ties. When Medea confronted Jason about the engagement and cited all the help she had given him, he retorted that it was not she that he should thank, but Aphrodite who made Medea fall in love with him.... Because he broke his vow to love Medea forever, Jason lost his favor with Hera and died lonely and unhappy. He was asleep under the stern of the rotting Argo when it fell on him, killing him instantly. The manner of his death was due to the deities cursing him for breaking his promise to Medea."
Sure, Medea was vindictive in awful ways, but what if we see Medea not as a person but as a representation of all of technology used for social ends (so, say, biotech, useful to cure disease)? In the myth, Jason abandons Medea who had brought him success in life with her technical powers, to ally himself with someone just for political gain. Why should he abandon Medea, if not out of some inner fear of her powers not being eno
See my other comment too, but this is from some stuff I sent Freeman Dyson, people won't get some of the references without having read his books, but seem my point on a new defense directorate.:-)
=== Beginning...
In "The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet", which I'm currently reading aloud to my kid, you talk about how those three tools can bring about a revolution in global abundance, which I have no doubt has truth to it. But, the fact is that we have known for a century how to harness the power of the sun for unlimited energy. Through thousands of years of selective breeding we have created a diversity of abundant agricultural crops like hundreds of flavors of apples including ice cream flavor and loyal dogs to be our playmates and guardians (all currently being lost to monocultures of MacIntosh apples and Golden Retrievers). And we put in place postal services, telegraph lines, printing presses, and rail lines that were in many ways better than the internet because they had less spam and you had to be less of a stegnographic expert to wade through the junk. So, why was the 20th century full of war, whether two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, ethnic wars, and so on? Why did we not use all that potential to create universal abundance? Why did people in Prussia instead invent compulsory schooling to turn humans into factor drones and mindless soldiers, and try twice to take over the world? Why is the USA still obsessed about having an empire? I'd suggest that the missing piece of all that is the idea that we now had the tools of abundance (even bureaucracy that efficiently gassed the Jews while it schooled the Hitler Youth Corps was a potential tool for abundance), but we were using those tools of abundance still from a scarcity perspective. And when misused, such tools of abundance could make terrible weapons, like nuclear bombs instead of nuclear batteries, and weaponized plagues instead of cures for malaria, and killer robots instead of factor robots making food and goods for all.
I guess, if you wanted to be charitable and not consider this complete lunacy, you could see this as some sort of wacky PhD thesis resulting from the times we talked in your office and you gave me a physical design for a sustainable community (Ted Taylor's Micropolis). This is sort of a thesis on the ideological and social design of such a place, or the larger network of such communities and larger entities that it might be part of. Either that or it is a heap of autobiographical creative writing.:-)
Anyway, maybe I should bill it as a sort of Christmas present?:-) At a risk of getting this reply::-)
"You Shouldn’t Have. I Mean It. (Worst Gift Ever.)" http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/you-shouldnt-have-i-mean-it-worst-gift-ever/?partner=rss&emc=rss "This week, City Room’s James Barron asked readers to recall the worst Christmas gifts they had ever received. Here is a selection, lightly edited. Merry, um, Christmas."...
=== A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene
Albert Einstein's said: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
When I first heard that (really just the first part, as people rarely quote the last, I thought what he was saying was, essentially, we should learn to be nice to each other and stop being warlike by an act of will. I don't know if that is what he really meant, or not. But, I now have a somewhat different generalization of his suggestion.
My generalization of Einstein's insight is to suggest "the biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those th
But many others have said similar things before, from Albert Einstein to James P. Hogan. Although Einstein also said nuclear weapons did not create a new problem as much as make an old one much worse.
While I did repeat a general theme, it was JASON specific here. I actually sent a longer essay on this topic of abundance ideology to someone involved with JASON a couple of weeks ago, and developed that mythological issue in some detail.:-) No response to that... So I could not resist a chance to make that point here as summary, too, assuming JASON types or their associates/students might read this.
Are you saying this point on rethinking society so it works better for everyone and avoids self-destructive ironies does not relate to exactly the fundamental problem of technology allowing us to soon create an internet archive where anyone with a grudge can create a designer plague (given the spread of cheap DIY Bio)? The benefits and risks are presumably very different depending on what social structure exists around the archives. See also my suggestion here:
"Getting to 100 social-technical points" http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79
So, it seems to me you are taking some solutions off the table? Why are we willing to imagine that the advance of technology will soon produce a situation where a teenager can download a file from the internet, mess with it in their computer, print out something with a DNA sequencer, and wipe out the human race with a designer plague (same as teens make compuetr viruses), but then it is sci-fi, off-topic, or out of bounds to think we might actually upgrade our social technology to help teenagers and others not be so alienated or competitive or violence-prone? Many pre-scarcity cultures don't have as many alienated teens and young adults, so alternatives are possible.
Sure, there are a lot of complex things that need to be considered. But, we'll never get to the point of working out the details if we miss the big picture.
I'm not saying you don't have some valid points (and frankly I'd rather someone else put in the time to raise these issues). But as I see it, so much slashdot discussions these days are about adding technological epicycles on epicycles, and I'm trying to get people to consider a different model involving more fundamental conceptual change.
One thing I disagree with though -- we are not living in a post-scarcity society, though. The problem is we are living in a scarcity-paradigm society with post-scarcity capable technology -- sort of like handling blinding-power-level laser pointers to a room full of five year olds wound up on sugar and trained by their teachers to hate each other.
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/03/press.htm "Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies"
I know of situations where the push to patent has delayed publication and caused academics to be secretive. We ideally need a basic income, a gift economy, and other social innovations to rethink how those who want to work in the public interest are supported.
The original mythological Jason was undone when he left the alliance that had supported him for another alliance, hoping for a better deal, out of a presumable fear of scarcity in not having enough political power. It is the engineers, scientists, artists, farmers, machinists, and so on who have brought great wealth to our society, while others then have tried to forge that wealth into power, often through creating artificial scarcity through war and commercial competition and passing laws against cooperation (endless copyrights, broad patents, centralizing corporate control, barriers to entry, etc.). The scientists and engineers making up JASON needs to help our society transition to a post-scarcity economic model in order to ensure true security (with mutual security and intrinsic security). But they can only do that by realizing that we need to build a society based on the idea of abundance based on their original alliance to learning and knowledge sharing and not get so caught up in an outdated "war is a racket" kind of economic-driven militarism inappropriate for our exponentially increasing technical powers. In such a society based on the paradigm of abundance, widespread knowledge about pathogens will not be as much of a problem as it might be in today's society that emphasizes competition, unilateral security, and extrinsic soldier-defended security, where such biotech information might be used to build ethically-targeted plagues as opposed to just enabling people change their skin color at will.:-) Social movements towards a basic income, a gift economy, local subsistence, and democratic resource-based planning are all ways to encourage an abundance paradigm. JASON needs to see those sorts of social innovations as part of their mandate to accompany technicla progress.
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm "The great bulk of agricultural production goes toward forage production used primarily by livestock. A small shift in our diet away from meat could have a tremendous impact on the ground in terms of freeing up lands for restoration and wildlife habitat. It would also reduce the poisoning of our streams and groundwater with pesticides and other residue of modern agricultural practices.... The U.S. has 2.3 billion acres of land. However, 375 million acres are in Alaska and not suitable for agricultural production. The land area of the lower 48 states is approximately 1.9 billion acres.... About 349 million acres in the U.S. are planted for crops. This is the equivalent of about four states the size of Montana. Four crops -- feeder corn (80 million acres), soybeans (75 million acres), alfalfa hay (61 million acres) and wheat (62 million acres) -- make up 80 percent of total crop acreage. All but wheat are primarily used to feed livestock. The amount of land used to produce all vegetables in the U.S. is less than 3 million acres.... Range and Pasture Land- Some 788 million acres, or 41.4 percent of the U. S. excluding Alaska, are grazed by livestock. This is an area the size of 8.3 states the size of Montana. Grazed lands include rangeland, pasture and cropland pasture. More than 309 million acres of federal, state and other public lands are grazed by domestic livestock. Another 140 million acres are forested lands that are grazed.... Despite all the hand wringing over sprawl and urbanization, only 66 million acres are considered developed lands. This amounts to 3 percent of the land area in the U.S., yet this small land base is home to 75 percent of the population.... "
Similar to suggested above, when you include grain production for animal feed to grazing land, literally half the land in the USA is devoted to animal product production, according to the movie this is a preview of: http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
Note that, overall, people in the USA would be healthier if they ate a lot less animal products and processed foods (including sugar and refined grains) and a lot more vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains, and a few key supplements like vitamin D, B12, iodine, etc.). But the agricultural subsidies are the opposite of what we need for good health in the USA.
I disclosed this sort-of-cogeneration idea before on the open manufacturing list so that no one could patent it, but for years I've been thinking that the electric heaters in my home should be supercomputer nodes (or doing other industrial process work), controlled by thermostats (or controlled by some algorithm related to expectations of heat needs).
When we want heat, the processors click on and do some computing and we get the waste heat to heat our home. When the house is warm enough, they shut down. They would use the network to talk to the rest of the nodes in neighbor's homes, or homes across the globe, to form a supercomputing cloud. Basically, any place in the country that has an electric heater (or similar thing) could have a processing node instead (this includes water heating, too, and even things like kilns). (Hydroponic agriculture would be another example use as well instead of computing, growing plants in winter where the grow lights were controlled by thermostats or heating algorithms or timers.)
For reference, for those who don't know much physics, essentially all use of electricity produces waste heat eventually, so if you run a computer that takes 100 watts, it heats the room as much as running a 100 watt heater. The same goes for a 100 watt incandescent lightbulb, which also doubles as a 100 watt heater. For those who live in homes in cold climates (heating somewhat most of the time) and who do not have very well insulated homes, paying more for energy efficient appliance may not pay well, because your electric heaters just have to pick up the slack left by the the more efficient lights.
I don't know the industrial figures, but for residential electric heating use in 2001: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/reps/enduse/er01_us.html "Electric space heating accounted for an additional 116 billion kWh (10 percent of the total)... Electric water heating accounted for over 100 billion kWh (9 percent) in 2001."
So that is about 200 billion kWh per year, or about 23 gigawatts continuously. It is "free" power to use for computing in a sense. (I know, it would need to be networked -- maybe with integrated wireless of some sort?) So, that would be enough power for about 46 of the 500 MW computers they mention in the article. The cost savings would be (at US$0.10 per kWh) 20 billion dollars a year in energy costs. Looking around, commercial buildings use about the same amount of electric heating. Electric use has increased over the past decade, as well. So potentially 100 or so of these exaflops machines could be powered by residential and commercial heating needs alone.
I don't know what the figure would be for industrial process heat. If we shift way from fossil fuels and towards more energy from PV, wind, nuclear, and cold fusion, there might be terawatts of power available to use for computing in this way, where the waste heat (on demand) then drove industrial processes like making plastic or refining ore. Waste heat could also drive heat engines for mechanical action. So, industrial processes might be able to power (for "free") thousands of these supercomputers.
Large datacenters could also be located in places that wanted the heat, like near big buildings. Power plants sometimes have industrial plants near them that want their waste heat already, so this would be a similar thing. The datacenter waste heat could also be concentrated by heat-pumps and used for industrial processes (like melting silicon to make solar cells or IC chips).
I guess with cold fusion in the air (with the Italy demo claim) I should disclose the idea of integrating cold fusion power production (such as without limitation nickel/hydrogen fusion) directly into, or adjacent to, computing nodes that somehow directly use the energy, either electricity generated someway or even running directly off any generated radiation. These too could also be thermostat controlled (or controlled by some algorithm related to exp
Then I spent part of the afternoon, along with some others, watching the video replays of it and the unfolding tragedy in a conference room by Hans Moravec's Mobile Robot Lab, all the time hoping it was just a misunderstanding, and the astronauts were all right or something.
That Challenger tragedy was doubly sad with a school teacher on board, considering all the school kids who had been encouraged to watch it. I can wonder if that was part of the further collapse of the US space program?
Still, as much as such tragedies are awful, I later wrote that a big problem with the US space program is that not enough people are taking risks and dying from the consequences. If you think of how many people have died in ocean voyages in the early day of sailing, an active space program seriously oriented to extending human life into the cosmos should be willing to accept hundreds or thousands of deaths a year by astronauts taking calculated and reasonable risks (as in, a 80% chance of success).
The obsession with perfection and zero risk by NASA ultimately seems to have grounded the US space program. That, and an acceptance of overly complicated designs. If astronauts are willing to accept a 20% chance of disaster so they can fly more often (or at all), I say let them. If current astronauts don't want those odds, find new astronauts.
I'm not saying take foolish risks, or 99% risks of death, or risks not worth risking death for. I'm just saying, we probably could be launching 100X as many cheaper rockets and having a lot more success, and having thousands of people going into space every year, if we accepted more causalties (on the order of 20% of launches failing like this shuttle did 25 years ago). Obviously, such a program should be voluntary and people should understand the risks as best as they can. Ideally, over time, the risks would be reduced by better engineering to that of the current risks for air travel in commercial aircraft. But it is just too early to have that expectation.
Besides, and maybe I should not say this, but TV ratings would go up for the space program if NASA did not go out of its way to make everything look so boring with astronauts who have been training for years because there are so few launches and they are so expensive. The most interesting thing I ever saw on NASA TV was when that NASA astronaut lost her bag of tools while fiddling with a grease gun.:-) http://www.space.com/6131-astronaut-laments
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2 "This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. "
And that is even without considering the value of electric cars to balancing loads on a smart grid...
http://james-boyle.com/http://www.thepublicdomain.org/ "Chapter 7: The Enclosure of Science and Technology: Two Case Studies" http://yupnet.org/boyle/archives/162 "Think of the reaction of the synthetic biologists at MIT. They feared that the basic building blocks of their new discipline could be locked up, slowing the progress of science and research by inserting intellectual property rights at the wrong point in the research cycle. To solve the problem they were led seriously to consider claiming copyright over the products of synthetic biology -- to fight overly broad patent rights with a privately constructed copyright commons, to ride the process of legal expansion and turn it to their own ends. As I pointed out earlier, I think the tactic would not fare well in this particular case. But it is an example of a new move in the debate over intellectual property, a new tactic: the attempt to create a privately constructed commons where the public domain created by the state does not give you the freedom that you believe creativity needs in order to thrive. It is to that tactic, and the distributed creativity that it enables, that I will turn to now."
The USA had no net new jobs during the past decade, but the GDP grew 40%. What is the country going to be like after another decade of that? That's what being "competitive" has brought us already.
How is the average worker going to compere with tireless robots with artificial retinas balancing pencils all day, or IBM supercomputers that can play Jeopardy, or voluntary social networks ont he internet, or just better design and better materials for longer lasting products that are easier to assemble? And compete at that all while demand is limited by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and by an emerging environmental ethic of Reduce, Resuse, Recycle? And still hope to have adequate wages with 10% or more unemployment for years leaving people desperate to take jobs that pay anything at all, even without benefits?
In short, they can't. Obama's economic advisors are fighting the economic battles of the 1930s, but in the early part of the 21st century. His speech just completely ignores the current unique situation. To survive as a democratic society, we need a mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democtratic resource-based planning, and improved local subsistence production.
First posters are probably present-hedonistic oriented, as opposed to past-positive, past-negative, present-fatalistic, future or future/transcendent.
Philip Zimbardo talks about a similar study he did with kids and marshmallows they could eat now or get two instead if they waited ten minutes. Kids who were willing to wait did better in general in life in our society. Of course, one may ask, were they happier overall? Zimbardo suggests each culture may have an optimum mix of time perspectives, like perhaps for our culture, guessing, he suggests an exact figure somewhere, about 20% past positive, 30% present hedonistic, and 50% future oriented.
Thanks for the David Drake suggestion. I don't especially recall reading anything by him, though I have "The World Turned Upside Down" which he helped edit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drake
Anyway, I'll have to look through my sci-fi collection. I can guess I've read similar things though. Maybe his stuff might be similar to themes in the Bolo (honor) or Beserker (survival) series? Or stuff like by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, like in The Mote in God's Eye (and the sequel someone mentioned to me recently, where biogenetic change of the Mote's was a theme)? Jack L. Chalker's Well World series also talks about the interplay of genetics, environment, and culture.
Anyway, how we express our genes is still related to environment and mind. So, even if there is a potential for violence, we have options as to what we do with out feelings.
Gregory Clark has a theory of evolution related to capitalism, btw (I'm not saying I agree, but it relates to your point): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?pagewanted=print http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Clark_(economist)#A_Farewell_to_Alms "A Farewell to Alms (the book's title is a non-rhotic pun on Ernest Hemingway's novel, A Farewell to Arms) discusses the divide between rich and poor nations that came about as a result of the Industrial Revolution in terms of the evolution of particular behaviors originating in Britain. Prior to 1790, Clark asserts, man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations. In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy, who were less violent, more literate, and more productive. This process of "downward social mobility" eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap."
However, that does not explain the Haudenosaunee. In general, "sexual selection" can drive a lot of evolution, as can just random changes, or other non-obvious things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
Do whales and dolphins kill each other off? Still, I'm not saying humans don't have various different proclivities. But even then, environment and culture can shape how they are expressed. James P. Hogan's Voyage from Y
I agree that the USA in general might have been a lot better place if it had borrowed more sooner from the Haudenosaunee, whether economics and common land/infrastructure ownership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Iroquois or more aspects of their democracy and culture: http://www.tuscaroras.com/graydeer/influenc/page1.htm "In order to accept the premise that the Haudenosaunee had a profound influence on the founding fathers' thoughts on what would later become the United States Constitution, two important steps need to be taken. First, one needs to step back in time and examine what was influencing the founding fathers during their era. Secondly, one must relinquish ethnocentric prejudices of native peoples being "uncivilized" and in need of assimilation because of the stereotypical belief that they were "too simpleminded to engage in effective social and political organization." (2)
In this paper, the Great Law of Peace (also known as the Iroquois Constitution) will be discussed through the perspective of a Haudenosaunee to show how the Confederacy functions. The influence that the Great Law of Peace had on the founding fathers and on the United States Constitution, as well as the interaction between the great Mohawk orators and the founding fathers, will be discussed. This paper will add an Haudenosaunee perspective, and will hopefully make suspect the judicial framework on which federal-Indian policy and Indian law is built, which in an ethnocentric way falsely stereotypes native peoples as savage, uncivilized, and in need of assimilation."
That said, no one is perfect (and a standard of perfection itself is in the eye of the beholder). The book "The Walking People: A Native American Oral History" http://www.amazon.com/Walking-People-Native-American-History/dp/1879678101 talks about the eventual decision by the People (some of whom become the Oneida) near the end of the book to study both diplomacy and war. I had never really understood before the notion of there being a "war path" (as in, "going on the war path" when I was growing up was lampooning native anger), as a "path", and as a choice compared to a path of peace and diplomacy. Anyway, you might find that book (at least the last parts) of some interest.
I quote Leon Shenandoah here, in my trying to give thanks for the many positive forces in my own life (and his book was one of them): http://www.oscomak.net/giving_thanks.html
===
So the new quote [related to the OSCOMAK project I am doing on and off] is from Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah (from the book To Become A Human Being by Steve Wall, pg. 24).
"The thing wrong with the world is that people don't have instructions." -- Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah
He might be called "Iroquois" but the term people with those roots used for themselves was "Haudenosaunee" which simply in a sense means "human beings", like us all. (Even those sentient AIs reading this in the future.:-) The Haudenosaunee ideals informed the better parts of the US Constitution, which might have been a better document IMHO if even more had been borrowed.:-)
I include the beginning... here, and also to make clear that, as with "adult education", "have instructions" is not about being told what to do, but in finding help in the human quest for meaning. At your own pace.
The thing wrong with the world is that people don't have instructions. We were told almost three hundred years ago that people would be coming to us and asking for our instructions, We were told that back in the 1700s that there'd be a day whe
Slashdot Mirror
"In more recent news, the author of one of the big studies which suggested massive Vitamin D deficiencies recently said that he was wrong, and that there's no worldwide Vitamin D deficiency crisis."
Citation?
Toxins include heavy metals (including lead in paint and gasoline, and mercury from burning coal), synthetic pesticides, estrogen mimics, arsenic, food additives, dioxin and other pollutants, and more. Now, people have always been exposed to some toxins. What is different for humans in the last century is the amount of human-produced toxins we are not well adapted to deal with going up and the amount of vegetables, fruits, and vitamin D, and so on we need to deal with toxins going down in our diet and from less sun exposure.
I'll hope to see your handwaving citation :-) and raise you Harvard med school people (not that Harvard doesn't have problems) ; see also: ..."
"Environmental risk factors for autism: do they help cause de novo genetic mutations that contribute to the disorder?"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19699591
And comments:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/new-harvard-paper-on-autism.shtml
"Last month, Dr. Dennis Kinney and four of his colleagues at Harvard University accepted the Vitamin D theory of autism and then expanded it by adding five usual suspects. While I was thrilled to see the Vitamin D theory accepted, appreciate them crediting the theory to me, and loved seeing their paper in the same journal that published the original theory, Medical Hypotheses, their five additions are all toxins, the usual suspects. The authors imply these toxins are delivered to our genome by air or water pollution, such as mercury-contaminated seafood, where these toxins selectively damage the genome of those silly enough to be Vitamin D deficient. My problem with the paper is the same problem I have with any of the air and water pollution autism theories, why now? Certainly, if a toxin was causing autism, evidence exists that exposure to that toxin has increased part and parcel with the epidemic of autism.
It probably is a combination of both factors, IMHO. But, if I had to emphasize one, I think dietary changes to eat less vegetables and lack of vitamin D duet to fears about the sun might be more important.
I for one appreciate the same 3 - 4 ideas and sentences to every damn story posted to slashdot. I for one am capable of seeing it in the context either old or new in which it occurs. If you OTOH have a "better" way to say it in your own posts go for it. It is meaningful for me, each time I see it, for one, re scarcity.
IF _your_ mileage varies so be it :)
Thanks, AC. :-)
Please see my point earlier in this thread, suggesting how there is room for quadrillions of humans in the solar system in space habitats.
You make some good points. Please also look into these links for approaches to improving autism situations to build on the dietary interventions you are already doing:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/vit-D-theory-autism.shtml
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
You wrote:
"Gates spends the money on the root of the problem, population control, then you won't have so many babies to die from disease, seriously there are 7 billion people on the planet and we aren't addressing population control but rather keeping more of them alive. We are in need of a 4 or 5 billion deaths from a super virus."
One can make arguments for an "occupancy limit" for the Earth based on aesthetics or some other issues, but the carrying capacity of the solar system is easily in the quadrillions of humans living in space habitats, and we have the general technology to do that (see Gerry O'Neill's work, for a start).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill#Space_colonization
See also this Wikipedia page to see how the sun shines more power on the Earth each day also than all those reserves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)
PV power is expected to reach widespread grid parity real soon now, even with all the negative externalities of fossil fuels (pollution, war, sickenss) being ignored.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
(A recent earthquake in Indonesia released more power than all the planet's known fossil fuel and uranium reserves combined also, but we don't know how to harness that power yet. :-)
The empowered human imagination is the ultimate resource.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
Would you be around, using a computer, and posting on slashdot if people a couple of centuries ago has said that we should keep the Earth's population at a hundred million to make sure we did not run out of wood for cooking fires and to avoid the problems posed by Peak Whale Oil? Or if ten thousand years before that, people had said we should keep the Earth's population at around a million indefinitely to avoid using up the readily available flint supplies too soon?
I'm not saying limits do not exist at any given time based on our knowledge and infrastructure. But, we are no where near those limits as fare as the solar system. I just did a calculation that the recend SN 2011b supernova released enough energy in a month to power a trillion trillion human intellects for 10 billion years. There are 100 billion such stars in a typical galaxy, and a 100 billion or more such galaxies in the visible universe. That's a lot of energy, even if we can harness only a tiny fraction of it someday.
We could easily support tens of billions of humans on Earth, with plenty of room for wildlife, if we used solar power and ate a healthier diet with a lot less animal products.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Ask yourself, who might be making money off of selling you despair leading to your advocating for supergerms and a massive die-off of humanity?
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"I think overall it's probably the best defense we have against a pandemic."
For some strains of the flu, ensuring the right amount of vitamin D may work better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza
"A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study published in the March 2010 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported that children taking 1,200 international units of vitamin D3 supplements daily in winter were 42% less likely to get infected with seasonal flu than those who were given a placebo.[6][7]"
Add better nutrition to that (like eating more vegetables and fruits and cutting out the junk food and processed food and most animal products) and a pandemic of the flu is not so big a worry. ... ..."
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cold-flu-flu-and-nutrition-dr-fuhrman-responds-to-comments.html
"The idea that a person eating a nutrient-rich diet is just as likely to develop and suffer the dangerous consequences from an influenza virus as a cheese burgers and soda eating American is simply wrong. Moe importantly such opinions are dangerous as they may lead to tragic outcomes for those mistaking authority for knowledge. Let's review just a few articles from the scientific literature that further support this concept that nutritional.excellence can offer protection from viral attacks. I will show the reference and post some explanatory comments below each reference.
The touted concept that the pandemic flu of 1918 target the "young and healthy" is not quite accurate. First of all, like today the diet in Western Europe in those days was largely meat, bread, potato, lard, butter and cheese with minimal fresh produce. The so-called, "young and healthy" back then, like today could not be used as an example of those eating a diet to assure nutritional adequacy. The diets of yore were grossly deficient. Today most industrialized nations eat less than five percent of total calories from fresh produce: fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts and beans. In spite of the fact that we have new science pointing to the impressive disease protection against heart disease, strokes, dementia, cancer and yes, serous infections, our society still consumes a diet assuring nutritional compromise and tragic medical outcomes.. Those of you naysayers who would like to stay on your chicken and pasta "low fat diet" or your cheeseburger and cokes with your heads buried deeply in the French fries, I say that is your prerogative. As for me, I will use and apply the science of today that shows the protection offered by cruciferous vegetables, raw vegetables and fruits, nuts and seeds and beans to give myself, my family and my patients the greatest potential to live a live a long, healthy life. This is not alternative medicine, it is good medicine.
Bill Gates means well, but just like he never really addressed the roots causes of problems (including computer viruses) with Windows for decades, an emphasis on vaccination is a way to ignore the roots causes of human health issues globally (which include income disparities and a culture that celebrates financial obesity). How about seeing Bill Gates call for a gift economy or a global basic income as a way to fight for global wellness?
Is an antivirus program useful on Windows? Sure. But people who use Mac or Linux or FreeBSD, or who use Windows and practice safer computing practices (including not having their main login have administrator/superuser rights, running FireFox instead of IE, having a hardware firewall, and not opening attachments willy-nilly), tend not to need them quite as much. So too for nutritional excellence, which offers better general protection against all disease, includign cancer and heart disease and diabates and dementia and arthritis, which are the
"Given that autism has spiked all around the world, and it's unlikely to be solely due to just increased detection, the logical question is to ask what caused it."
Vitamin D defiency as well as some broader metabolic problems related to the modern diet and environmental exposure to toxins?
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/vit-D-theory-autism.shtml
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
To reduce allergies, please look into eating more vegetables and fruits (Dr. Fuhrman) and getting the right amount of vitamin D (Vitamin D Council) -- worked for me.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
There are lots of ways to promote wellness; I guess it should be no suprise the slashdot crowd is mostly interested in the magic bullet approach to health (vaccines) instead of holistic basics -- vegetable and fruit heavy diet, exercise, sleep, community, meditation, laughter, sunlight, fasting, two+ years nursing for infants, avoiding crowds, avoiding compulsory group labor in small (class) rooms, avoiding most junk food and most animal products, etc..
Anyway, given the logic you are using to encourage peopel to get vaccinated, it seems you might want to encourage people to move towards wellness in all these other areas, too?
Check out Dr. Fuhrman's nutritional approach to boost your immunity (the immune system both deals with infeciton diseases and also kills cancer cells where adults have been said to get one cancer cell a day that the immune system needs to zap):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-dr-fuhrmans-anticancer-solution.html
Essentially, his approach entails resensitizing your taste buds (see the book "The Pleasure Trap") to enjoy eating a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains, and a few supplements with a multivitamin, vitamin D, and sometimes some others).
Also, make sure you have your vitamin D and iodine levels checked, as both can relate to cancer. (Look up iodine 4 health and the vitamin D council).
Best of look keeping cancer and other illness at bay. If you do a good job at that with good nutrition (and some exercise, getting enough sleep, having good social interactions, and so on), your doctor may not recognize you. :-)
See also:
http://www.ravediet.com/caResources.html
Sure, I know I'm interpreting the myth towards a point I want to make. :-) But that is the value of broad myths about eternal issues. In this case though, it seems suprisingly apt though in at least some ways. And why do people try to build empires instead of just having a nice life on a farm or in a city somewhere, raising a handful of kids? Is not part of it some sort of inner psychological fear about inadequacy?
Or as Alfie Kohn suggests: ... Each culture provides its own mechanisms for dealing with self-doubt. ... Low self-esteem, then, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of competition. The ingredients include an aching need to prove oneself and the approved mechanism for doing so at other people's expense. ... I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low self-esteem, to argue that our "state religion" is a sign of psychological ill-health -- this will not sit well with many people.(Page 103)"
"No Contest: The Case Against Competition" By Alfie Kohn
http://books.google.com/books?id=bLudHIk3gsMC
"If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete. The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with "immense character strengths who don't make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport." Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down those activities.
Consider, from the Wikipedia link you supplied, where the very first thing Medea supplies is medical biotechnology: "Presented with the tasks, Jason became discouraged and fell into depression. However, Hera had persuaded Aphrodite to convince her son Eros to make Aeetes's daughter, Medea, fall in love with Jason. As a result, Medea aided Jason in his tasks. First, Jason had to plow a field with fire-breathing oxen, the Khalkotauroi, that he had to yoke himself. Medea provided an ointment that protected him from the oxen's flames. Then, Jason sowed the teeth of a dragon into a field. The teeth sprouted into an army of warriors. Medea had previously warned Jason of this and told him how to defeat this foe. ... In Corinth, Jason became engaged to marry Creusa (sometimes referred to as Glauce), a daughter of the King of Corinth, to strengthen his political ties. When Medea confronted Jason about the engagement and cited all the help she had given him, he retorted that it was not she that he should thank, but Aphrodite who made Medea fall in love with him. ... Because he broke his vow to love Medea forever, Jason lost his favor with Hera and died lonely and unhappy. He was asleep under the stern of the rotting Argo when it fell on him, killing him instantly. The manner of his death was due to the deities cursing him for breaking his promise to Medea."
Sure, Medea was vindictive in awful ways, but what if we see Medea not as a person but as a representation of all of technology used for social ends (so, say, biotech, useful to cure disease)? In the myth, Jason abandons Medea who had brought him success in life with her technical powers, to ally himself with someone just for political gain. Why should he abandon Medea, if not out of some inner fear of her powers not being eno
See my other comment too, but this is from some stuff I sent Freeman Dyson, people won't get some of the references without having read his books, but seem my point on a new defense directorate. :-)
=== Beginning ...
In "The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet", which I'm currently reading aloud to my kid, you talk about how those three tools can bring about a revolution in global abundance, which I have no doubt has truth to it. But, the fact is that we have known for a century how to harness the power of the sun for unlimited energy. Through thousands of years of selective breeding we have created a diversity of abundant agricultural crops like hundreds of flavors of apples including ice cream flavor and loyal dogs to be our playmates and guardians (all currently being lost to monocultures of MacIntosh apples and Golden Retrievers). And we put in place postal services, telegraph lines, printing presses, and rail lines that were in many ways better than the internet because they had less spam and you had to be less of a stegnographic expert to wade through the junk. So, why was the 20th century full of war, whether two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, ethnic wars, and so on? Why did we not use all that potential to create universal abundance? Why did people in Prussia instead invent compulsory schooling to turn humans into factor drones and mindless soldiers, and try twice to take over the world? Why is the USA still obsessed about having an empire? I'd suggest that the missing piece of all that is the idea that we now had the tools of abundance (even bureaucracy that efficiently gassed the Jews while it schooled the Hitler Youth Corps was a potential tool for abundance), but we were using those tools of abundance still from a scarcity perspective. And when misused, such tools of abundance could make terrible weapons, like nuclear bombs instead of nuclear batteries, and weaponized plagues instead of cures for malaria, and killer robots instead of factor robots making food and goods for all.
I guess, if you wanted to be charitable and not consider this complete lunacy, you could see this as some sort of wacky PhD thesis resulting from the times we talked in your office and you gave me a physical design for a sustainable community (Ted Taylor's Micropolis). This is sort of a thesis on the ideological and social design of such a place, or the larger network of such communities and larger entities that it might be part of. Either that or it is a heap of autobiographical creative writing. :-)
Anyway, maybe I should bill it as a sort of Christmas present? :-) At a risk of getting this reply: :-) ...
"You Shouldn’t Have. I Mean It. (Worst Gift Ever.)"
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/you-shouldnt-have-i-mean-it-worst-gift-ever/?partner=rss&emc=rss
"This week, City Room’s James Barron asked readers to recall the worst Christmas gifts they had ever received. Here is a selection, lightly edited. Merry, um, Christmas."
=== A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene
Albert Einstein's said: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
When I first heard that (really just the first part, as people rarely quote the last, I thought what he was saying was, essentially, we should learn to be nice to each other and stop being warlike by an act of will. I don't know if that is what he really meant, or not. But, I now have a somewhat different generalization of his suggestion.
My generalization of Einstein's insight is to suggest "the biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those th
"I get that you read a book..."
Wrote a (free, online) book, actually. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
And other stuff, example:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
But many others have said similar things before, from Albert Einstein to James P. Hogan. Although Einstein also said nuclear weapons did not create a new problem as much as make an old one much worse.
While I did repeat a general theme, it was JASON specific here. I actually sent a longer essay on this topic of abundance ideology to someone involved with JASON a couple of weeks ago, and developed that mythological issue in some detail. :-) No response to that... So I could not resist a chance to make that point here as summary, too, assuming JASON types or their associates/students might read this.
Are you saying this point on rethinking society so it works better for everyone and avoids self-destructive ironies does not relate to exactly the fundamental problem of technology allowing us to soon create an internet archive where anyone with a grudge can create a designer plague (given the spread of cheap DIY Bio)? The benefits and risks are presumably very different depending on what social structure exists around the archives. See also my suggestion here:
"Getting to 100 social-technical points"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79
So, it seems to me you are taking some solutions off the table? Why are we willing to imagine that the advance of technology will soon produce a situation where a teenager can download a file from the internet, mess with it in their computer, print out something with a DNA sequencer, and wipe out the human race with a designer plague (same as teens make compuetr viruses), but then it is sci-fi, off-topic, or out of bounds to think we might actually upgrade our social technology to help teenagers and others not be so alienated or competitive or violence-prone? Many pre-scarcity cultures don't have as many alienated teens and young adults, so alternatives are possible.
Sure, there are a lot of complex things that need to be considered. But, we'll never get to the point of working out the details if we miss the big picture.
I'm not saying you don't have some valid points (and frankly I'd rather someone else put in the time to raise these issues). But as I see it, so much slashdot discussions these days are about adding technological epicycles on epicycles, and I'm trying to get people to consider a different model involving more fundamental conceptual change.
One thing I disagree with though -- we are not living in a post-scarcity society, though. The problem is we are living in a scarcity-paradigm society with post-scarcity capable technology -- sort of like handling blinding-power-level laser pointers to a room full of five year olds wound up on sugar and trained by their teachers to hate each other.
So, what are your alternative solutions?
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/03/press.htm
"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies"
I know of situations where the push to patent has delayed publication and caused academics to be secretive. We ideally need a basic income, a gift economy, and other social innovations to rethink how those who want to work in the public interest are supported.
The original mythological Jason was undone when he left the alliance that had supported him for another alliance, hoping for a better deal, out of a presumable fear of scarcity in not having enough political power. It is the engineers, scientists, artists, farmers, machinists, and so on who have brought great wealth to our society, while others then have tried to forge that wealth into power, often through creating artificial scarcity through war and commercial competition and passing laws against cooperation (endless copyrights, broad patents, centralizing corporate control, barriers to entry, etc.). The scientists and engineers making up JASON needs to help our society transition to a post-scarcity economic model in order to ensure true security (with mutual security and intrinsic security). But they can only do that by realizing that we need to build a society based on the idea of abundance based on their original alliance to learning and knowledge sharing and not get so caught up in an outdated "war is a racket" kind of economic-driven militarism inappropriate for our exponentially increasing technical powers. In such a society based on the paradigm of abundance, widespread knowledge about pathogens will not be as much of a problem as it might be in today's society that emphasizes competition, unilateral security, and extrinsic soldier-defended security, where such biotech information might be used to build ethically-targeted plagues as opposed to just enabling people change their skin color at will. :-) Social movements towards a basic income, a gift economy, local subsistence, and democratic resource-based planning are all ways to encourage an abundance paradigm. JASON needs to see those sorts of social innovations as part of their mandate to accompany technicla progress.
Interesting. With I had mod points. Some of those pictures:
"Opponents and supporters join hands in protecting the library"
http://www.bibalex.org/imagegallery/BA_Gallery_EN.aspx?ID=54&Name=Opponents%20and%20supporters%20join%20hands%20in%20protecting%20the%20library
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.healthpromoting.com/article/breaking-free-dietary-pleasure-trap
And also: "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://books.google.com/books?id=HQlg3rQquUoC
All to support your concern...
Another aspect, that animals may turn to addictive-seeming behavior under stress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
See also Larry Niven's fictional "Droud":
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=207
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm ... The U.S. has 2.3 billion acres of land. However, 375 million acres are in Alaska and not suitable for agricultural production. The land area of the lower 48 states is approximately 1.9 billion acres. ... About 349 million acres in the U.S. are planted for crops. This is the equivalent of about four states the size of Montana. Four crops -- feeder corn (80 million acres), soybeans (75 million acres), alfalfa hay (61 million acres) and wheat (62 million acres) -- make up 80 percent of total crop acreage. All but wheat are primarily used to feed livestock. The amount of land used to produce all vegetables in the U.S. is less than 3 million acres. ... Range and Pasture Land- Some 788 million acres, or 41.4 percent of the U. S. excluding Alaska, are grazed by livestock. This is an area the size of 8.3 states the size of Montana. Grazed lands include rangeland, pasture and cropland pasture. More than 309 million acres of federal, state and other public lands are grazed by domestic livestock. Another 140 million acres are forested lands that are grazed. ... Despite all the hand wringing over sprawl and urbanization, only 66 million acres are considered developed lands. This amounts to 3 percent of the land area in the U.S., yet this small land base is home to 75 percent of the population. ... "
"The great bulk of agricultural production goes toward forage production used primarily by livestock. A small shift in our diet away from meat could have a tremendous impact on the ground in terms of freeing up lands for restoration and wildlife habitat. It would also reduce the poisoning of our streams and groundwater with pesticides and other residue of modern agricultural practices.
Similar to suggested above, when you include grain production for animal feed to grazing land, literally half the land in the USA is devoted to animal product production, according to the movie this is a preview of:
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
Note that, overall, people in the USA would be healthier if they ate a lot less animal products and processed foods (including sugar and refined grains) and a lot more vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains, and a few key supplements like vitamin D, B12, iodine, etc.). But the agricultural subsidies are the opposite of what we need for good health in the USA.
See also:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
I disclosed this sort-of-cogeneration idea before on the open manufacturing list so that no one could patent it, but for years I've been thinking that the electric heaters in my home should be supercomputer nodes (or doing other industrial process work), controlled by thermostats (or controlled by some algorithm related to expectations of heat needs).
When we want heat, the processors click on and do some computing and we get the waste heat to heat our home. When the house is warm enough, they shut down. They would use the network to talk to the rest of the nodes in neighbor's homes, or homes across the globe, to form a supercomputing cloud. Basically, any place in the country that has an electric heater (or similar thing) could have a processing node instead (this includes water heating, too, and even things like kilns). (Hydroponic agriculture would be another example use as well instead of computing, growing plants in winter where the grow lights were controlled by thermostats or heating algorithms or timers.)
For reference, for those who don't know much physics, essentially all use of electricity produces waste heat eventually, so if you run a computer that takes 100 watts, it heats the room as much as running a 100 watt heater. The same goes for a 100 watt incandescent lightbulb, which also doubles as a 100 watt heater. For those who live in homes in cold climates (heating somewhat most of the time) and who do not have very well insulated homes, paying more for energy efficient appliance may not pay well, because your electric heaters just have to pick up the slack left by the the more efficient lights.
I don't know the industrial figures, but for residential electric heating use in 2001:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/reps/enduse/er01_us.html
"Electric space heating accounted for an additional 116 billion kWh (10 percent of the total)... Electric water heating accounted for over 100 billion kWh (9 percent) in 2001."
So that is about 200 billion kWh per year, or about 23 gigawatts continuously. It is "free" power to use for computing in a sense. (I know, it would need to be networked -- maybe with integrated wireless of some sort?) So, that would be enough power for about 46 of the 500 MW computers they mention in the article. The cost savings would be (at US$0.10 per kWh) 20 billion dollars a year in energy costs. Looking around, commercial buildings use about the same amount of electric heating. Electric use has increased over the past decade, as well. So potentially 100 or so of these exaflops machines could be powered by residential and commercial heating needs alone.
I don't know what the figure would be for industrial process heat. If we shift way from fossil fuels and towards more energy from PV, wind, nuclear, and cold fusion, there might be terawatts of power available to use for computing in this way, where the waste heat (on demand) then drove industrial processes like making plastic or refining ore. Waste heat could also drive heat engines for mechanical action. So, industrial processes might be able to power (for "free") thousands of these supercomputers.
Large datacenters could also be located in places that wanted the heat, like near big buildings. Power plants sometimes have industrial plants near them that want their waste heat already, so this would be a similar thing. The datacenter waste heat could also be concentrated by heat-pumps and used for industrial processes (like melting silicon to make solar cells or IC chips).
I guess with cold fusion in the air (with the Italy demo claim) I should disclose the idea of integrating cold fusion power production (such as without limitation nickel/hydrogen fusion) directly into, or adjacent to, computing nodes that somehow directly use the energy, either electricity generated someway or even running directly off any generated radiation. These too could also be thermostat controlled (or controlled by some algorithm related to exp
Then I spent part of the afternoon, along with some others, watching the video replays of it and the unfolding tragedy in a conference room by Hans Moravec's Mobile Robot Lab, all the time hoping it was just a misunderstanding, and the astronauts were all right or something.
One of the hopes of some at the Robotics Institute was that robots could do more of the space exploration more safely, including preparing the way for humans. Was that really a quarter century ago? :-) Well, the robots are finally starting to be here:
http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/pr2/overview
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
Or in some cases, even come and gone, sadly:
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_center_detail.html?type=publications¢er_id=7&menu_id=262
"Space Robotics Initiative (SRI)
This center is no longer active."
Always wanted to work there and make Hewey, Dewey, and Louie from Silent Running, and the space habitat biospheres they maintain. :-) But that was not exactly their focus.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
That Challenger tragedy was doubly sad with a school teacher on board, considering all the school kids who had been encouraged to watch it. I can wonder if that was part of the further collapse of the US space program?
Still, as much as such tragedies are awful, I later wrote that a big problem with the US space program is that not enough people are taking risks and dying from the consequences. If you think of how many people have died in ocean voyages in the early day of sailing, an active space program seriously oriented to extending human life into the cosmos should be willing to accept hundreds or thousands of deaths a year by astronauts taking calculated and reasonable risks (as in, a 80% chance of success).
The obsession with perfection and zero risk by NASA ultimately seems to have grounded the US space program. That, and an acceptance of overly complicated designs. If astronauts are willing to accept a 20% chance of disaster so they can fly more often (or at all), I say let them. If current astronauts don't want those odds, find new astronauts.
I'm not saying take foolish risks, or 99% risks of death, or risks not worth risking death for. I'm just saying, we probably could be launching 100X as many cheaper rockets and having a lot more success, and having thousands of people going into space every year, if we accepted more causalties (on the order of 20% of launches failing like this shuttle did 25 years ago). Obviously, such a program should be voluntary and people should understand the risks as best as they can. Ideally, over time, the risks would be reduced by better engineering to that of the current risks for air travel in commercial aircraft. But it is just too early to have that expectation.
Besides, and maybe I should not say this, but TV ratings would go up for the space program if NASA did not go out of its way to make everything look so boring with astronauts who have been training for years because there are so few launches and they are so expensive. The most interesting thing I ever saw on NASA TV was when that NASA astronaut lost her bag of tools while fiddling with a grease gun. :-)
http://www.space.com/6131-astronaut-laments
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity. "
And that is even without considering the value of electric cars to balancing loads on a smart grid...
http://james-boyle.com/ http://www.thepublicdomain.org/
"Chapter 7: The Enclosure of Science and Technology: Two Case Studies"
http://yupnet.org/boyle/archives/162
"Think of the reaction of the synthetic biologists at MIT. They feared that the basic building blocks of their new discipline could be locked up, slowing the progress of science and research by inserting intellectual property rights at the wrong point in the research cycle. To solve the problem they were led seriously to consider claiming copyright over the products of synthetic biology -- to fight overly broad patent rights with a privately constructed copyright commons, to ride the process of legal expansion and turn it to their own ends. As I pointed out earlier, I think the tactic would not fare well in this particular case. But it is an example of a new move in the debate over intellectual property, a new tactic: the attempt to create a privately constructed commons where the public domain created by the state does not give you the freedom that you believe creativity needs in order to thrive. It is to that tactic, and the distributed creativity that it enables, that I will turn to now."
The USA had no net new jobs during the past decade, but the GDP grew 40%. What is the country going to be like after another decade of that? That's what being "competitive" has brought us already.
How is the average worker going to compere with tireless robots with artificial retinas balancing pencils all day, or IBM supercomputers that can play Jeopardy, or voluntary social networks ont he internet, or just better design and better materials for longer lasting products that are easier to assemble? And compete at that all while demand is limited by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and by an emerging environmental ethic of Reduce, Resuse, Recycle? And still hope to have adequate wages with 10% or more unemployment for years leaving people desperate to take jobs that pay anything at all, even without benefits?
In short, they can't. Obama's economic advisors are fighting the economic battles of the 1930s, but in the early part of the 21st century. His speech just completely ignores the current unique situation. To survive as a democratic society, we need a mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democtratic resource-based planning, and improved local subsistence production.
See my post here for a summary of alternatives: http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
Or see this knol I put together for more on that theme at length: http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
Or see Marshall Brain's story "Manna".
See the Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJybVxUiy2U
http://www.thetimeparadox.com/
First posters are probably present-hedonistic oriented, as opposed to past-positive, past-negative, present-fatalistic, future or future/transcendent.
Philip Zimbardo talks about a similar study he did with kids and marshmallows they could eat now or get two instead if they waited ten minutes. Kids who were willing to wait did better in general in life in our society. Of course, one may ask, were they happier overall? Zimbardo suggests each culture may have an optimum mix of time perspectives, like perhaps for our culture, guessing, he suggests an exact figure somewhere, about 20% past positive, 30% present hedonistic, and 50% future oriented.
Thanks for the David Drake suggestion. I don't especially recall reading anything by him, though I have "The World Turned Upside Down" which he helped edit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Drake
Anyway, I'll have to look through my sci-fi collection. I can guess I've read similar things though. Maybe his stuff might be similar to themes in the Bolo (honor) or Beserker (survival) series? Or stuff like by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, like in The Mote in God's Eye (and the sequel someone mentioned to me recently, where biogenetic change of the Mote's was a theme)? Jack L. Chalker's Well World series also talks about the interplay of genetics, environment, and culture.
The non-fiction book (and DVD) called "The Pleasure Trap" by Doug Lisle (and a coauthor) talk about a human brain adapted for scarcity and not abundance (and the obesity epidemic being an example of things going wrong).
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happines"
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Another similar book (but with less good advice, but more general):
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpos"
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
Also related on how people may turn to compulsive addictive-seeming behaviors in stressful environments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Anyway, how we express our genes is still related to environment and mind. So, even if there is a potential for violence, we have options as to what we do with out feelings.
Gregory Clark has a theory of evolution related to capitalism, btw (I'm not saying I agree, but it relates to your point):
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?pagewanted=print
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Clark_(economist)#A_Farewell_to_Alms
"A Farewell to Alms (the book's title is a non-rhotic pun on Ernest Hemingway's novel, A Farewell to Arms) discusses the divide between rich and poor nations that came about as a result of the Industrial Revolution in terms of the evolution of particular behaviors originating in Britain. Prior to 1790, Clark asserts, man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations. In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy, who were less violent, more literate, and more productive. This process of "downward social mobility" eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap."
However, that does not explain the Haudenosaunee. In general, "sexual selection" can drive a lot of evolution, as can just random changes, or other non-obvious things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
Do whales and dolphins kill each other off? Still, I'm not saying humans don't have various different proclivities. But even then, environment and culture can shape how they are expressed. James P. Hogan's Voyage from Y
Glad you liked that part.
I agree that the USA in general might have been a lot better place if it had borrowed more sooner from the Haudenosaunee, whether economics and common land/infrastructure ownership:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Iroquois
or more aspects of their democracy and culture:
http://www.tuscaroras.com/graydeer/influenc/page1.htm
"In order to accept the premise that the Haudenosaunee had a profound influence on the founding fathers' thoughts on what would later become the United States Constitution, two important steps need to be taken. First, one needs to step back in time and examine what was influencing the founding fathers during their era. Secondly, one must relinquish ethnocentric prejudices of native peoples being "uncivilized" and in need of assimilation because of the stereotypical belief that they were "too simpleminded to engage in effective social and political organization." (2)
In this paper, the Great Law of Peace (also known as the Iroquois Constitution) will be discussed through the perspective of a Haudenosaunee to show how the Confederacy functions. The influence that the Great Law of Peace had on the founding fathers and on the United States Constitution, as well as the interaction between the great Mohawk orators and the founding fathers, will be discussed. This paper will add an Haudenosaunee perspective, and will hopefully make suspect the judicial framework on which federal-Indian policy and Indian law is built, which in an ethnocentric way falsely stereotypes native peoples as savage, uncivilized, and in need of assimilation."
That said, no one is perfect (and a standard of perfection itself is in the eye of the beholder). The book "The Walking People: A Native American Oral History"
http://www.amazon.com/Walking-People-Native-American-History/dp/1879678101
talks about the eventual decision by the People (some of whom become the Oneida) near the end of the book to study both diplomacy and war. I had never really understood before the notion of there being a "war path" (as in, "going on the war path" when I was growing up was lampooning native anger), as a "path", and as a choice compared to a path of peace and diplomacy. Anyway, you might find that book (at least the last parts) of some interest.
I quote Leon Shenandoah here, in my trying to give thanks for the many positive forces in my own life (and his book was one of them):
http://www.oscomak.net/giving_thanks.html
===
So the new quote [related to the OSCOMAK project I am doing on and off] is from Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah (from the book To Become A Human Being by Steve Wall, pg. 24).
"The thing wrong with the world is that people don't have instructions." -- Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah
He might be called "Iroquois" but the term people with those roots used for themselves was "Haudenosaunee" which simply in a sense means "human beings", like us all. (Even those sentient AIs reading this in the future. :-) The Haudenosaunee ideals informed the better parts of the US Constitution, which might have been a better document IMHO if even more had been borrowed. :-)
I include the beginning ... here, and also to make clear that, as with "adult education", "have instructions" is not about being told what to do, but in finding help in the human quest for meaning. At your own pace.
The thing wrong with the world
is that people don't have instructions.
We were told almost three hundred years ago
that people would be coming to us and asking for our instructions,
We were told that back in the 1700s
that there'd be a day whe