... keeps most people in line. See the new online (free) movie "Human Resources" where that is mentioned in passing. Daniel Quinn has suggested they key factor of "civilization" is that all food is under lock and key.
A basic income might change things for the better: http://www.basicincome.org/bien/ The USA already gives out US$800 a month per person on avergae for social security, schooling, and welfare -- why not just give every citizen a check for that amoutn every month. Seems fairer to me than a "needs" based or "age" based criterion for public assistance.
There is not true freedom without economic security. A lot of farmers had that basic security 200 years ago in the USA. Few people have economic security now in the USA where most people are living paycheck to paycheck, and the young are being imprisoned in school and made to fear stepping out of line or they won't get a "good" job. Other ideas: http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Sector by sector one could go through the US economy and look at the suffering and deaths caused by corporate-friendly profit-oriented social policies (mercury poisoning anyone?). It may well add up to fifty million US Americans killed at least twenty to thirty years early. It's just someone dying in a car accident from lack of sensible land use policies, or someone dying from cancer from industrial toxins, or someone dying from heart disease from eating too much subsidized meat and processed wheat is not normally seen in the USA as a victim of government policy shaped by corporate interests. But they are just as dead as if someone had shot them. And it is not a good rebuttal to say other countries do as bad in other ways when the USA could have done a lot better with all its advantages...
What about the millions of people in the US prison system? What about the tens of millions who seek out illegal drugs to escape for a time from the USA?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
Type 1 diabetics still need to take insulin, but can take less and have less complications. So, this idea from the article might eventually help them.
From that link: "John... was a 22 year old college graduate with Type 1 diabetes since the age of 6. He was five foot, eight inches tall and weighed 190 pounds. He was taking a total of 70 units of insulin daily. He was referred to my office by his family physician as he was having swings in his glucose levels, too high at times and at other times dangerously low. He also wanted to learn more about nutrition to improve his health and reduce his future risks from having diabetes. I was impressed by his intelligence and desire to change his eating habits to better his health. We spent lots of time discussing the typical problems that befall most diabetics, and I explained to him that using 70 units of insulin a day was part of the problem. I explained that if he follows my recommended diet-style he will stabilize his weight at about 145 pounds and he will only require about 30 units of insulin a day. With this lower level of insulin, to mimic the amount of insulin a non-diabetic makes in the pancreas, he can have a life without the typical health issues that befall diabetics. We cut his nighttime insulin dose down by ten units and his mealtime insulin from 10 to 6 as he began the diet. Over the next two weeks we gradually tapered his insulin and found that he only needed 20 units of Lantus insulin at bedtime and 4 units before each meal for a total of 32 units a day. Almost immediately, with my dietary recommendations, his sugars were running in the favorable range, and he no longer experienced dangerous drops in his blood sugar. He had lost 13 pounds over the first month and by month three weighed 167, a loss of 23 pounds. He was excited about what he had learned and was more hopeful about his life while living with his diabetes. I am convinced, that with the Eat To Live or Eat For Health diet-style, those with Type 1 diabetes can have a long and disease-free life. I feel it is imperative that all Type 1 diabetics learn about this life, saving approach."
Key there for type 1 diabetics is reducing complications, even if they still take diabetes.
If you have type 2 diabetes, you can most likely, within weeks under Dr. Fuhrman's plan, be throwing your insulin away forever (at least, based on what he writes). I know you may find this hard to believe. The key idea there is to lose weight to reduce insulin resistance, and to eliminate refined carbs to reduce insulin needs, and to improve your body's general health with more phytonutrients, and so bring the need for insulin within the remaining capacity of your body. In most cases of type 2 diabetes this should be enough to eliminate the need for any medications. Even if you remained on medications, the risk of complications would go way down and the quality of your life would go way up.
See also Raw For Thirty (though Dr. Fuhrman's approach is more comprehensive and not all raw for some good reasons): http://www.rawfor30days.com/
Some people think they have type 1 diabetes because they have been misdiagnosed and are really type 2 and presumably 100% curable. I guess the opposite may be true, too, sadly. In any case, you never know for sure till you try.
I am following the Eat to Live plan for other reasons (though not
My rationale for that: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en "Maybe I'm trying to make the OM list the post-scarcity social consciousness raising equivalent for global intelligence analysts of "The Funniest Joke In the World"?... Although, obviously, that is a metaphor, and my objective is analysts being reborn mentally as post-scarcity beings instead of any dying physically as depicted in that comedy sketch. The best way to deal with potential enemies is to make them into friends, a strategy idea lost on the previous US administration. That is why the USA has so many more enemies than it used to have compared to the 9/11 days of "We are all Americans"..."
I may be going down someday from some random martinet unwilling to understand about intrinsic security or mutual security or true patriotism, but I hope the message in my email sig will continue to spread, and the world will someday be a better place for all our children and relatives and friends and so on across the globe.:-) http://www.blessedunrest.com/
My sig had to be shortened for slashdot; the longer version is: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
Thanks for the reply. You make a lot of good points. Still, the availability of such tools might help more people in the general public develop better analytical skills and learn more about context for various issues, so, the fact that most of the public could not make great use of such tools now does not mean they might not change that by their availability, or that the few who could use such tools might not use them to good advantage in all sorts of areas, building on tax-funded research.
Consider, what would it be like to apply this to, say, medical information research information, first?
Here is derived from something I just posted to a (private) forum on Dr. Fuhrman's site ( http://drfuhrman.com/ ), in reply to something he wrote including a mention of limited time (in a reply to some posts I made about vitamin D issues). You can think of what I suggest here as an example of how the same sorts of tools created for intelligence analysts might be very useful in other contexts. I just joined that forum a couple of days ago (there was an offer for a free six weeks, since expired), but I feel a bit frustrated to be writing stuff that gets stuck behind paywalls (same as when I post to private mailing lists), so it is probably not a place I will keep up with that much. (I'm not necessarily opposed to private-seeming spaces for people to discuss medical issues, but it is sad to think of all the information lost from them to general knowledge. There is also potentially the issue of financial obesity being as serious a problem as physical obesity.:-)
=== Better open tools for nutritional research communities
Dr. Fuhrman, thanks for the reply, and thanks for creating so many great resources and helping so many people, including me and my family.
On having time for combing through the conflicting medical literature and conflicting models, I might suggest that addressing that issue with better tools may be even more important than doing more nutritional studies with the Nutritional Research Project [that Dr. Fuhrman is involved in http://www.nutritionalresearch.org/ ]. Sometimes we don't know what we know.:-)
Basically, in your mind you were able to integrate all these studies leading up to your books. How can you make it possible for everyone to look at the literature and come to similar conclusions for themselves, in an open way?
One possibility is with structured arguments about health topics, and also including a way people could look at the information from multiple perspectives, and so on. This vitamin D issue is an obvious starter issue, but there are many others where, without necessarily taking sides, one could encourage free form discussions like in these member forums, as well as more structured ones, and somehow have the result be like a Wikipedia of progressive medicine. Wikipedia is not the right model, but I mention it as it is well known, and it is a success to some degree, even with a lot of controversy.
Here are some other examples from SRI (my wife helped a bit with them).
From: http://www.ai.sri.com/~seas/ "EAS is a software tool developed for intelligence analysts that records analytic reasoning and methods, that supports collaborative analysis across contemporary and historical situations and analysts and has broad applicability beyond intelligence analysis."
From: http://www.ai.sri.com/~angler/ "Angler is a tool that helps intelligence/policy professionals Explore, understand, and overcome cognitive biases, and Collaboratively expand their joint cognitive vision Through use of divergent & convergent thinking techniques (such as brainstorming and clusterin
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/ It would give people free time again to be good citizens, including time for keeping up with what the government is doing.
Why should everyone not have some claim against the industrial commons, given so much is now privatized through questionable processes?
But, with all the ironies of people using these technologies of abundance to produce super fancy weapons like military robots to fight over percieved scaricty, it is worriesome. Rather than military robots to enforce a social order based on gettign peopel to worl like robots, why not just build robots to do any work people don't want to do voluntarily in the first place?
I'm not disagreeing though with your point that the potential is there for great violence -- and not just in the streets, but also abortions, domestic violence, suicides, and so on. How can we prevent that?
The USA already spends about US$800 a citizen a year between schooling, social security, and welfare. Why not just scrap all those programs and give every citizen a check for US$800 a month as a basic income? A family of four could then just about scrape by somewhere rural, and given all their spare time, and they could homeschool or purchase tutoring or private school lessons. Public school buildings could be turned into library-like learing centers. Teachers could become private tutors or just live frugally off their basic income. People would have more free time to help their elderly neighbors, too, like bringing over stuff from their gardens, even if old people got less than their current amount. And so on. Probably this would fly best with seniors if just everyone got the current social security amounts though (no one wants to get less), which might mean more taxes.
And the USA already spends more for Medicare and Medicad per capita than other countries need to cover their entire population with better results, so health care could be extended to all with some better management and a focus on better diet, curing vitamin D deficiency, and building healthier "BlueZones" infrastructure, which would all save sick care costs, making single payer he
You can have a basic income as suggested in Manna to schedule and distribute what the robots make through a sort of market demand force. http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Or, if things get so abundant, like if 3D printing gets really good, you get perhaps Star Trek where people have moved beyond money, and you get mostly a gift economy and various sorts of ad-hoc planning and organizing like, say, Debian GNU/Linux. "Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization" http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202
Typical hunter/gatherers had a gift economy and essentially collective land "ownership". "Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo
Basically, instead of giving money from increased productivity to workers as wages, as worker's collective bargaining power eroded for a variety of reasons (automation, women entering the work force, competition from China or other US states like the auto industry moving south, etc.), rich people kept all the money from productivity increases and *loaned* it to the workers instead. That eventually collapsed.
Manuel De Landa talks about how all real systems are meshworks and hierarchies. I suggest the future will be a mix of a gift economy, a basic income, stronger local economies with improved local subsistence, and democratic resource-based planning.
Markets can be good when eveyone has about equal purchasing power and when things cost their true costs, accounting for externalities like pollution or the cost of enforcement or systematic risk. But in order to do that often takes some demoncratic resource-based central planning using taxes, subsidies, income transfers, investments, and regulation.
There are four interwoven good ways forward (basic income, gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and local subsistence) and at least five bad ways to go backward (endless war, prisons, schooling, sickness, and bureaucracy). Here are some more details on these choices.
One way forward is a "basic income" where some percentage of the GDP (half?) is distributed equally to every citizen with no requirements related to age, disability, or willingness to work. That is not entirely about "need" (even as that is true for the reasons you mention that people need access to the fruits of industry -- see "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964). A basic income is IMHO mostly about the fact that every citizen has some moral claim on the industrial commons as a human right. This claim is for all sorts of reasons. Part of it is the same as people having some claim on breathing air by right of existence (and depriving people of air would be considered murder). And people have some claim in a democracy on the government to consider their interests through government programs, regulations, and taxation. And, there is the fact that any system of private property still has to begin with the arbitrariness of the original land distribution, which generally comes down to "finders keepers" or "might makes right" which are both problematical morally (like in the dispossession of any natives from the land, or in the slavery often used to work it -- whether chattel slavery or wage slavery). The USA already has aspects of a basic income with "Social Security" for the old or disabled (though it is age or needs based), and the USA has school taxes and college aid that pay a lot of money for young people (but not directly, only through a problematical public works jobs program called school).
A second positive solution is stronger local economies with local currencies and more local compassion and improved local subsistence (like using advanced robotics and advanced materials science to have cheap 3D printers that can print most of what people want, or cheap agricultural robots that allow people to easily produce food locally, or cheap solar panels printed in those 3D printers that make for cheap local power, or cheap recycling and resource extraction using nanotech). The town of Ithaca, with Ithaca HOURs and a town-wide focus on environmentalism has aspects of this.
Marshall Brain's Manna, at the end, had a solution that had aspects of both a basic income and stronger local economies (although the economy he had in Australia was still much larger than a local economy focused on a street or a village).
Maybe the whole point is to waste your time and dumb you down and keep you locked up in a mirror maze?
And failing that, to neuter you politically? See Jeff Schmidt's "Dsiciplined Minds": http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/01BRrt.html "How to survive? Well, how can captive soldiers survive what is commonly called "brainwashing"? The US Army has a manual on resisting indoctrination when a prisoner of war. As Schmidt amusingly notes, this manual wasn't written for students, but "students in graduate or professional school should be able to put such resistance techniques to good use." (p. 239). A person who maintains an independent, nonconforming outlook in any institution, including a prisoner-of-war camp, is seen as deviant and threatening. The keys to resistance are knowing what you're up against, preparing to take action, working with others (organization!), resisting at all levels, and dealing with collaborators by cutting them off from key information and attempting to win them over. Schmidt gives a revealing account of his own difficulties in graduate school and how he survived as a radical."
Undergrad is not quite as bad though. But remember, all the professors and assistants whose salaries you are paying (even by incurring debt) -- they have all gone through this brainwashing process. http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing....
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
Slashdot Mirror
Just came across:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_David_Steele
Now that I think of it, I think I have seen something by him somewhere before... Maybe the idea lodged in my unconscious?
Great point.
Related section of "Human Resources": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA
Solutions (my suggestions building mostly on what others have said):
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html#On_dealing_with_the_social_hurricane_of_the_CIA
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
... keeps most people in line. See the new online (free) movie "Human Resources" where that is mentioned in passing. Daniel Quinn has suggested they key factor of "civilization" is that all food is under lock and key.
Sure people can express their opinions, and then they can try to find jobs, which they then maybe won't...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/09/columbia-alum-castigates-_n_794380.html
A basic income might change things for the better:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
The USA already gives out US$800 a month per person on avergae for social security, schooling, and welfare -- why not just give every citizen a check for that amoutn every month. Seems fairer to me than a "needs" based or "age" based criterion for public assistance.
There is not true freedom without economic security. A lot of farmers had that basic security 200 years ago in the USA. Few people have economic security now in the USA where most people are living paycheck to paycheck, and the young are being imprisoned in school and made to fear stepping out of line or they won't get a "good" job. Other ideas:
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
probably number in the tens of millions between health care, advertising, and agriculture.
Consider how easily deaths are preventable by good diet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
And then look at what is subsidized:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/debunking-diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
Sector by sector one could go through the US economy and look at the suffering and deaths caused by corporate-friendly profit-oriented social policies (mercury poisoning anyone?). It may well add up to fifty million US Americans killed at least twenty to thirty years early. It's just someone dying in a car accident from lack of sensible land use policies, or someone dying from cancer from industrial toxins, or someone dying from heart disease from eating too much subsidized meat and processed wheat is not normally seen in the USA as a victim of government policy shaped by corporate interests. But they are just as dead as if someone had shot them. And it is not a good rebuttal to say other countries do as bad in other ways when the USA could have done a lot better with all its advantages...
What about the millions of people in the US prison system? What about the tens of millions who seek out illegal drugs to escape for a time from the USA?
And the risk still remains that we will all perish in a nuclear war or bioengineered plague, driven by a competitive war racket.
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Human Resources: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA
A big issue is, in the USA, it's hard to seperate the government from the companies at this point...
Future alternatives for making social progress:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html#On_dealing_with_the_social_hurricane_of_the_CIA
...Eat for Health: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
... is to make them into friends: http://www.bullies2buddies.com/How-to-Stop-Being-Teased-and-Bullied-Without-Really-Trying
See also my related essay:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html#On_dealing_with_the_social_hurricane_of_the_CIA
...has a section on what you say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA
But only completely for type 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU
See also: http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/diabetes.aspx
Type 1 diabetics still need to take insulin, but can take less and have less complications. So, this idea from the article might eventually help them.
From that link: "John ... was a 22 year old college graduate with Type 1 diabetes since the age of 6. He was five foot, eight inches tall and weighed 190 pounds. He was taking a total of 70 units of insulin daily. He was referred to my office by his family physician as he was having swings in his glucose levels, too high at times and at other times dangerously low. He also wanted to learn more about nutrition to improve his health and reduce his future risks from having diabetes. I was impressed by his intelligence and desire to change his eating habits to better his health. We spent lots of time discussing the typical problems that befall most diabetics, and I explained to him that using 70 units of insulin a day was part of the problem. I explained that if he follows my recommended diet-style he will stabilize his weight at about 145 pounds and he will only require about 30 units of insulin a day. With this lower level of insulin, to mimic the amount of insulin a non-diabetic makes in the pancreas, he can have a life without the typical health issues that befall diabetics. We cut his nighttime insulin dose down by ten units and his mealtime insulin from 10 to 6 as he began the diet. Over the next two weeks we gradually tapered his insulin and found that he only needed 20 units of Lantus insulin at bedtime and 4 units before each meal for a total of 32 units a day. Almost immediately, with my dietary recommendations, his sugars were running in the favorable range, and he no longer experienced dangerous drops in his blood sugar. He had lost 13 pounds over the first month and by month three weighed 167, a loss of 23 pounds. He was excited about what he had learned and was more hopeful about his life while living with his diabetes. I am convinced, that with the Eat To Live or Eat For Health diet-style, those with Type 1 diabetes can have a long and disease-free life. I feel it is imperative that all Type 1 diabetics learn about this life, saving approach."
Key there for type 1 diabetics is reducing complications, even if they still take diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes may also be related to vitamin D deficiency in utero and early life.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18846317
http://www.google.com/custom?q=diabetes&sitesearch=vitamindcouncil.org
If you have type 2 diabetes, you can most likely, within weeks under Dr. Fuhrman's plan, be throwing your insulin away forever (at least, based on what he writes). I know you may find this hard to believe. The key idea there is to lose weight to reduce insulin resistance, and to eliminate refined carbs to reduce insulin needs, and to improve your body's general health with more phytonutrients, and so bring the need for insulin within the remaining capacity of your body. In most cases of type 2 diabetes this should be enough to eliminate the need for any medications. Even if you remained on medications, the risk of complications would go way down and the quality of your life would go way up.
See also Raw For Thirty (though Dr. Fuhrman's approach is more comprehensive and not all raw for some good reasons):
http://www.rawfor30days.com/
Some people think they have type 1 diabetes because they have been misdiagnosed and are really type 2 and presumably 100% curable. I guess the opposite may be true, too, sadly. In any case, you never know for sure till you try.
I am following the Eat to Live plan for other reasons (though not
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1896936&cid=34452646
http://www.bullies2buddies.com/
Thanks for reporting me! :-)
My rationale for that: ... Although, obviously, that is a metaphor, and my objective is analysts being reborn mentally as post-scarcity beings instead of any dying physically as depicted in that comedy sketch. The best way to deal with potential enemies is to make them into friends, a strategy idea lost on the previous US administration. That is why the USA has so many more enemies than it used to have compared to the 9/11 days of "We are all Americans"..."
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/ae28e8971f8f9669?hl=en
"Maybe I'm trying to make the OM list the post-scarcity social consciousness raising equivalent for global intelligence analysts of "The Funniest Joke In the World"?
I may be going down someday from some random martinet unwilling to understand about intrinsic security or mutual security or true patriotism, but I hope the message in my email sig will continue to spread, and the world will someday be a better place for all our children and relatives and friends and so on across the globe. :-)
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
And along the way, I hope more potential enemies will be turned into friends, just like Tadodaho eventually combed the snakes from his hair in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) story:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
My sig had to be shortened for slashdot; the longer version is: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity."
Which then implies, eventually:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
Thanks for the reply. You make a lot of good points. Still, the availability of such tools might help more people in the general public develop better analytical skills and learn more about context for various issues, so, the fact that most of the public could not make great use of such tools now does not mean they might not change that by their availability, or that the few who could use such tools might not use them to good advantage in all sorts of areas, building on tax-funded research.
Consider, what would it be like to apply this to, say, medical information research information, first?
Here is derived from something I just posted to a (private) forum on Dr. Fuhrman's site ( http://drfuhrman.com/ ), in reply to something he wrote including a mention of limited time (in a reply to some posts I made about vitamin D issues). You can think of what I suggest here as an example of how the same sorts of tools created for intelligence analysts might be very useful in other contexts. I just joined that forum a couple of days ago (there was an offer for a free six weeks, since expired), but I feel a bit frustrated to be writing stuff that gets stuck behind paywalls (same as when I post to private mailing lists), so it is probably not a place I will keep up with that much. (I'm not necessarily opposed to private-seeming spaces for people to discuss medical issues, but it is sad to think of all the information lost from them to general knowledge. There is also potentially the issue of financial obesity being as serious a problem as physical obesity. :-)
=== Better open tools for nutritional research communities
Dr. Fuhrman, thanks for the reply, and thanks for creating so many great resources and helping so many people, including me and my family.
[Comments snipped on vitamin D issues, linking to: http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation ]
On having time for combing through the conflicting medical literature and conflicting models, I might suggest that addressing that issue with better tools may be even more important than doing more nutritional studies with the Nutritional Research Project [that Dr. Fuhrman is involved in http://www.nutritionalresearch.org/ ]. Sometimes we don't know what we know. :-)
Basically, in your mind you were able to integrate all these studies leading up to your books. How can you make it possible for everyone to look at the literature and come to similar conclusions for themselves, in an open way?
One possibility is with structured arguments about health topics, and also including a way people could look at the information from multiple perspectives, and so on. This vitamin D issue is an obvious starter issue, but there are many others where, without necessarily taking sides, one could encourage free form discussions like in these member forums, as well as more structured ones, and somehow have the result be like a Wikipedia of progressive medicine. Wikipedia is not the right model, but I mention it as it is well known, and it is a success to some degree, even with a lot of controversy.
Here are some other examples from SRI (my wife helped a bit with them).
From:
http://www.ai.sri.com/~seas/
"EAS is a software tool developed for intelligence analysts that records analytic reasoning and methods, that supports collaborative analysis across contemporary and historical situations and analysts and has broad applicability beyond intelligence analysis."
From:
http://www.ai.sri.com/~angler/
"Angler is a tool that helps intelligence/policy professionals Explore, understand, and overcome cognitive biases, and Collaboratively expand their joint cognitive vision Through use of divergent & convergent thinking techniques (such as brainstorming and clusterin
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
It would give people free time again to be good citizens, including time for keeping up with what the government is doing.
Why should everyone not have some claim against the industrial commons, given so much is now privatized through questionable processes?
Alaska has a bit of a basic income through the Alaska Permanent Fund distribution oil wealth periodically to all Alaska residents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
Is Sarah Palin a socialist? :-)
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false :-)
relates to this, but it would be a spoiler to tell you how...
Theodore Sturgeon at his best, predicting our mobile social computing future presciently in the 1950s. It inspired Ted Nelson's Xanadu system.
And such relationships can work both ways.
You've made an excellent argument for learning from knowledgeable other people with hands on experience about some area of interest, but, sadly, such people can only rarely be found in conventional schools...
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html
And you ignore the other baggage professional teachers come with:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
Why not just watch a video series instead, and ask questions online?
http://www.learner.org/
http://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.explorelearning.com/
Of find some other alternative arrangement, including knowledgeable mentors among family, friends, or in the community?
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
Is that really going to be that much worse than trying to learn from most "teachers" (who if you've ever been aroudn teacher training programs, you would see generally know little about math, science, and technology), as well meaning as most of them may be? The first thing most schools do is destroy a child's natural ability to learn and natural creativity:
http://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Crib-Early-Learning-Tells/dp/0688177883
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=related
Here is an alternative funding model for hiring private tutors or having neighborhoods again where people have time to share their knowledge freely, based on just giving public school funds directly to the parents:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
I'm hoping for more of a gradual non-violent evolution into these changes over the next twenty to thirty years, myself:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html
But, with all the ironies of people using these technologies of abundance to produce super fancy weapons like military robots to fight over percieved scaricty, it is worriesome. Rather than military robots to enforce a social order based on gettign peopel to worl like robots, why not just build robots to do any work people don't want to do voluntarily in the first place?
If it was a "revolution", think of it on the order of women getting the right to vote in the USA,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dPF0SGh_PQ
or the UK outlawing slavery (with compensation to the owners and little violence, prompted by the Quakers, compared to the bloodbath in the USA over that),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism#Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833
or the "computer revolution",
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521#
and so on.
I'm not disagreeing though with your point that the potential is there for great violence -- and not just in the streets, but also abortions, domestic violence, suicides, and so on. How can we prevent that?
I'm trying in my own nutty way to recruit the global intelligence community to help with a peaceful changeover. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
But ultimately, some sort of change will happen regardless:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Still, it might happen with less bloodshed if more people got involved sooner and understood the basic issues better.
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
The USA already spends about US$800 a citizen a year between schooling, social security, and welfare. Why not just scrap all those programs and give every citizen a check for US$800 a month as a basic income? A family of four could then just about scrape by somewhere rural, and given all their spare time, and they could homeschool or purchase tutoring or private school lessons. Public school buildings could be turned into library-like learing centers. Teachers could become private tutors or just live frugally off their basic income. People would have more free time to help their elderly neighbors, too, like bringing over stuff from their gardens, even if old people got less than their current amount. And so on. Probably this would fly best with seniors if just everyone got the current social security amounts though (no one wants to get less), which might mean more taxes.
And the USA already spends more for Medicare and Medicad per capita than other countries need to cover their entire population with better results, so health care could be extended to all with some better management and a focus on better diet, curing vitamin D deficiency, and building healthier "BlueZones" infrastructure, which would all save sick care costs, making single payer he
I think it will be good overall (barring things like irony killing us all)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
since it it a return to hunter/gatherer ideology with high techology, where hunter/gathers spent much of their time just rasining kids, socializing, and doing hobbies or contemplating nature and the infinite.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
The robots are like the botanical plants that people used to pick the fruits from.
It is a form of natural capitalism in the sense that the planet and its infrastructure is essentially owned by all the people, who then get dividends as citizen capitalists. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_history_lesson_pre-scarcity_times_Eden_then_scarcity_times_Dickens_then_post-scarcity_times_real_soon_now
You can have a basic income as suggested in Manna to schedule and distribute what the robots make through a sort of market demand force.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Or, if things get so abundant, like if 3D printing gets really good, you get perhaps Star Trek where people have moved beyond money, and you get mostly a gift economy and various sorts of ad-hoc planning and organizing like, say, Debian GNU/Linux.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202
Typical hunter/gatherers had a gift economy and essentially collective land "ownership".
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo
...for the credit reason you said: http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
Basically, instead of giving money from increased productivity to workers as wages, as worker's collective bargaining power eroded for a variety of reasons (automation, women entering the work force, competition from China or other US states like the auto industry moving south, etc.), rich people kept all the money from productivity increases and *loaned* it to the workers instead. That eventually collapsed.
Manuel De Landa talks about how all real systems are meshworks and hierarchies. I suggest the future will be a mix of a gift economy, a basic income, stronger local economies with improved local subsistence, and democratic resource-based planning.
Markets can be good when eveyone has about equal purchasing power and when things cost their true costs, accounting for externalities like pollution or the cost of enforcement or systematic risk. But in order to do that often takes some demoncratic resource-based central planning using taxes, subsidies, income transfers, investments, and regulation.
All economies are socially constructed thing in practice.
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Consider how false most mainstream economic assumptions are about motivation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel
We need as a society to move beyond simplistic and black/white conditioned-by-political-parties reflexive thinking on these themes.
The following is derived from what I say here:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-402
There are four interwoven good ways forward (basic income, gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, and local subsistence) and at least five bad ways to go backward (endless war, prisons, schooling, sickness, and bureaucracy). Here are some more details on these choices.
One way forward is a "basic income" where some percentage of the GDP (half?) is distributed equally to every citizen with no requirements related to age, disability, or willingness to work. That is not entirely about "need" (even as that is true for the reasons you mention that people need access to the fruits of industry -- see "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964). A basic income is IMHO mostly about the fact that every citizen has some moral claim on the industrial commons as a human right. This claim is for all sorts of reasons. Part of it is the same as people having some claim on breathing air by right of existence (and depriving people of air would be considered murder). And people have some claim in a democracy on the government to consider their interests through government programs, regulations, and taxation. And, there is the fact that any system of private property still has to begin with the arbitrariness of the original land distribution, which generally comes down to "finders keepers" or "might makes right" which are both problematical morally (like in the dispossession of any natives from the land, or in the slavery often used to work it -- whether chattel slavery or wage slavery). The USA already has aspects of a basic income with "Social Security" for the old or disabled (though it is age or needs based), and the USA has school taxes and college aid that pay a lot of money for young people (but not directly, only through a problematical public works jobs program called school).
A second positive solution is stronger local economies with local currencies and more local compassion and improved local subsistence (like using advanced robotics and advanced materials science to have cheap 3D printers that can print most of what people want, or cheap agricultural robots that allow people to easily produce food locally, or cheap solar panels printed in those 3D printers that make for cheap local power, or cheap recycling and resource extraction using nanotech). The town of Ithaca, with Ithaca HOURs and a town-wide focus on environmentalism has aspects of this.
Marshall Brain's Manna, at the end, had a solution that had aspects of both a basic income and stronger local economies (although the economy he had in Australia was still much larger than a local economy focused on a street or a village).
A third positive solut
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
Maybe the whole point is to waste your time and dumb you down and keep you locked up in a mirror maze?
And failing that, to neuter you politically? See Jeff Schmidt's "Dsiciplined Minds":
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/01BRrt.html
"How to survive? Well, how can captive soldiers survive what is commonly called "brainwashing"? The US Army has a manual on resisting indoctrination when a prisoner of war. As Schmidt amusingly notes, this manual wasn't written for students, but "students in graduate or professional school should be able to put such resistance techniques to good use." (p. 239). A person who maintains an independent, nonconforming outlook in any institution, including a prisoner-of-war camp, is seen as deviant and threatening. The keys to resistance are knowing what you're up against, preparing to take action, working with others (organization!), resisting at all levels, and dealing with collaborators by cutting them off from key information and attempting to win them over. Schmidt gives a revealing account of his own difficulties in graduate school and how he survived as a radical."
Undergrad is not quite as bad though. But remember, all the professors and assistants whose salaries you are paying (even by incurring debt) -- they have all gone through this brainwashing process.
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
Something else I wrote on this:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/browse_thread/thread/3dd2b7e6648da125/231e63e966e932df?hl=en#231e63e966e932df
And on how things may change, by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
Or by someone else:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=related
Good luck.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ...
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
Imagine these sorts of things applied to, say, medical research and trying to understand how a money trail affects research results...