Where Malthus got it wrong was in not forseeing the economics pressures that drove innovation that in turn increased crop yields so that food supplies could indeed grow exponentially.
So if enough people merely want a technical innovation, that innovation will necessarily pop into existence, regardless of physics? Economics truly is magic!
that doesn't mean that (insert name of person associated with political group or religious group that you dislike) won't create WhateverLeaks tomorrow and "leak" a bunch of bogus documents with the same freedoms.
And that would be unthinkably worse-than-a-war horrible because...?
Well sir, there's nothing on earth Like a genuine, Bona fide, Electrified Space-age Elevator! Ned Flanders: Elevator! Lyle Lanley: What's it called? Patty+Selma: Elevator! Lyle Lanley: That's right! Elevator! [crowd chants `Elevator' softly and rhythmically]
Ah, here's where it goes wrong - you don't bring it back to Earth, you park it in orbit.
Cool, so now you have a trillion dollars worth of raw material sitting in orbit, and your customers are all down on Earth, and they're never going to meet.
What exactly is this asteroid worth to them again?
and you have however many kilotons of metal you like.
... delivered directly to the unhappy city of your choice, if you skip all that tricky bit about lifting bodies.
One would assume that NORAD or its descendants would be very very interested in who gets to put rockets on asteroids and alter their trajectories, and would send up some humourless men in black spacesuits to have interviews with any 'motivated amateurs' doing unlisted things in the Belt.
The last thing Earth really needs right now is Improvised Asteroid Devices.
First we have to ask ourselves, how many people can our planet sustain? 10 billion? 15 billion? Then we have to ask, how long before we reach that many? 100 years? 200 years? Then we have to ask, what resource is going to run out first? Drinking water? Food? Air?
When we have those answers, we will be able to discuss which is best to spend money and effort on, mining the asteroid field or getting off this damn rock.
Neither: if we have an exponential population growth, going offplanet (even if we had a dozen Earthlikes with reach of chemical rockets which we do not) will not help us.
Say today we get free warp drive and all the galaxy to explore, and continue our present rate of expansion. Say we're using 1 planet's capacity today.
2110, we'll be using 4 Earths. 2210, 16 Earths. Not a bad little Federation. 2310, 64 Earths. 2410, 256 Earths. 2510, 1024 Earths. All hail the thousand-planet golden age! In the year 2525, if mankind is still alive... 2610, 4K Earths. 2710, 16K Earths. 2810, 64K Earths 2910, 256K Earths 3010, 1 bi-million Earths. All hail the million-planet golden age! uh, Emperor, sir, slight problem, our projections show...
and so about a thousand years down the track the apocalypse starts setting in, depending on how many Earthlike planets you think there are in this galaxy and that we can handwave away energy, coordination and speed-of-light problems.
A thousand years ago we were hitting each other with swords, but we have written history. If present population growth continues, we'll be devastating large chunks of the entire galaxy at a similarly close point in time in the future.
And then will come the 'uh, let's sort out our growth problems, one galaxy is enough' movement, to which the growth advocates will say 'nonsense! There are plenty of galaxies out there! Invent the transgalactic frobnosticator!' And behind us we'll leave an expanding trail of scorched, strip-mined Earths.
Perhaps there's a better way. Perhaps, in fact, we simply don't have the capacity for unlimited expansion into space even if we want to.
Simply getting there is part of what makes us human.
And several trillion dollars worth of consumables shipped out from Earth is what keeps those humans human.
At some point one has to ask 'putting half a dozen people in a hole in the sky with no oxygen, lethal radiation levels, and a 50,000 year transit time to Alpha Centauri is fun and all, but when exactly does it start turning into a road to the stars?'
The inevitable result is that sometimes an investment will appear in some indirect way to harm a charitable effort. Perhaps you can argue that each side should keep a closer eye on what the other is doing.
Yes. That's exactly what the philosophy behind 'ethical investment' is about: deliberately NOT turning a blind eye to the investment arm, and making sure to invest only in enterprises which don't philosophically conflict with the granting arm, so as to maximise the good done per dollar and minimise the harm.
You're right to note that the Gates Foundation is well within the mainstream of charities by not requiring that its investments be ethical. But it is nonetheless an issue which foundations ought to come to grips with. Gates is merely one of the biggest and highest profile targets of a much more general (and yet, IMO, well-founded) criticism.
So yes, writing is a technology, and technology is not culture.
I would agree to the first statement, but disagree with the second.
Technology shapes culture, as both Marshall McLuhan and E. F. Schumacher took pains to point out. There is no such thing as a value-free tool; every tool has a shape, an affordance, and pushes culture in a certain direction. Therefore, the tools we choose to use have a huge cultural impact.
One would think that every geek posting this website would intuitively understand this, as this realisation also underlies the FOSS and "net neutrality" movements. Why do GNU, EFF, OSI and related organisations push so hard for our technologies to be open? Because "code is law", which is another way of saying that our tools are not value-free but have consequences.
For some of us, cursive is the only writing system we have learned to write. At school block capitals and cursive were the only writing systems that were taught to us.
Really? What decade?
In the 1970s-80s, they taught us 'print' (upper and lower case) and 'writing' (cursive). Hated cursive for its deliberate illegibility, and was glad to never use it once I left school. The fact that keyboarding become more important for literacy in the early 90s helped immensely too.
But I'm surprised to hear that you were taught block capitals but not lower case. I'm sure they started us on lower case first. Was there a sea change in writing education sometime before the 1970s?
OTOH, if the speaker then went over the slide over the course of an hour, following arrows, then you might as well just shoot the audience in the face.
Which, remembering the presenters, could certainly be arranged.
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales Heard the heavens fill with thunder, and there rain'd a deadly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue
Now getting back to your comment, you mentioned usability, speed and features. They are important. To you and a very small community (weighted in size against the mass of regular users). They don't matter AT ALL to anyone else. What matters to them is design.
While your argument may be correct, I really wish that you (and the entire rest of the technical/industrial community) would stop using the word 'design' to describe superficial aesthetics.
'Design' used to (and in my opinion still does) mean exactly the things you say it doesn't mean: usability, speed, features, general technical capability. When one talks about 'the design' of an airliner or a ship or a printing press, one does NOT mean just its superstructure or the livery or paintwork, one means what is inside and how it actually works.
Nowadays I suppose we call that 'architecture' or 'engineering'? But it used to be called 'design'.
I'm not sure who is responsible for changing the word 'design' to mean the opposite of what it means, and for creating the occupation 'designer' who does everything except design - but I wish we could get back to reality.
Well, you take a double-blind test panel of psychology students, get them to sign a mental health waiver, and ask them to imagine a set of different astronomical distances.
Then you develop a graded imagination test: probably something involving Legos and crayons.
Finally you screen out the students whose minds have boggled due to failure* of imagination, remove them to a secure hardened psychiatric facility**, and continue testing. At 100% failure rate, you have a known unimaginable concept. You then put it in a sealed box with memehazard logos, affix anti-scrying tape, and dispatch to the pareidolon vault at the Department of Unthinkable Conjectures.
It's not pretty, but it's science.
* Imagination can fail in many ways, some more spectacular than others ** Do not on any account attempt this with psychology lecturers.
Instead of a human voice in real time, you have a typed message. A step backwards.
Not if you're looking for easily recordable, searchable, information. Text is a step forwards for that application - you can't Google on voice, but you can just copy/paste a chat message into a search engine. Or save it to a text file.
Not everything is better in analog.
But using SMS instead of IP-based chat, or routing your chat via SMS over HTML over a proprietary website like Twitter - yes, that seems to be a step backwards.
Nazi germany pre-1939 tried it. So they used script internationally and only allowed trading with buddies. The script inflated quickly. We sort of know how that turned out.
And pre-1939, the economy had an important slave labor component. Yah, a lot of people were immediately gassed, but for some reason the camps were next to big industrial plants, so if you were healthy, you got to work yourself to death.
Depends how you define 'pre-1939'. The Nazis didn't actually begin their work camp program as outright slavery - the Roosevelt administration was doing organised work programs during the 30s too. The Nazis did have pograms and mass arrests in the mid-30s, and ended up in an extremely nasty place, but they also had organised construction gangs which solved employment problems initially, and a lot of the worst descent into hell occurred as a result of war and in the occupied territories in Eastern Europe. At least I believe that is the contention of They Thought They Were Free.
The lesson being that war does nasty things to human morality, and total war totally so, and that if a country thinks it can control the social forces unleashed by war - especially self-initiated war, and most especially a war with fluid 'enemy' groups (like race or class) which cross over into civilian populations, it may well be making a mistake which will haunt it for generations.
And if you push self-sufficiency, then it may well be that you are pushing big time not nice.
This, however, I agree with. Self-sufficiency is not pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
Where Malthus got it wrong was in not forseeing the economics pressures that drove innovation that in turn increased crop yields so that food supplies could indeed grow exponentially.
So if enough people merely want a technical innovation, that innovation will necessarily pop into existence, regardless of physics? Economics truly is magic!
Yeah, ask me a specific structured question and I'll give you a two-dimensional array to work with as an answer.
That's fine until someone asks you an unstructured question for which a two-dimensional array cannot contain the answer.
Like, for example, 'Here's an ordered DOM tree of nodes each containing tags, subtrees and/or chunks of CDATA'.
Or 'Here is a set of objects each of which contain their own custom properties not found in others.'
Not every form of useful information in the real world is strictly typeful and represents a well-formed relation over finite domains.
You can't give everyone an exemption
It would be almost like you had to give everyone a set of clearly enumerated rights, and that would take some kind of bill.
that doesn't mean that (insert name of person associated with political group or religious group that you dislike) won't create WhateverLeaks tomorrow and "leak" a bunch of bogus documents with the same freedoms.
And that would be unthinkably worse-than-a-war horrible because...?
Well sir, there's nothing on earth
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified
Space-age
Elevator!
Ned Flanders: Elevator!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
Patty+Selma: Elevator!
Lyle Lanley: That's right! Elevator!
[crowd chants `Elevator' softly and rhythmically]
Ah, here's where it goes wrong - you don't bring it back to Earth, you park it in orbit.
Cool, so now you have a trillion dollars worth of raw material sitting in orbit, and your customers are all down on Earth, and they're never going to meet.
What exactly is this asteroid worth to them again?
--nuclear fuels (nuclear processing is alot easier when you don't have to worry about security, worker health, or gravity mucking up the process)
Last I checked gravity was quite useful for separation of isotopes, and its absence made things a lot tricker.
inkjet refills or human blood?
What do you mean, 'or'?
Now that you have guessed why those cartridges are so expensive, an associate of Hewlett-Packard will be along shortly to... award you a prize.
Please do not leave home. It will only make the... prizegiving... messier.
and you have however many kilotons of metal you like.
... delivered directly to the unhappy city of your choice, if you skip all that tricky bit about lifting bodies.
One would assume that NORAD or its descendants would be very very interested in who gets to put rockets on asteroids and alter their trajectories, and would send up some humourless men in black spacesuits to have interviews with any 'motivated amateurs' doing unlisted things in the Belt.
The last thing Earth really needs right now is Improvised Asteroid Devices.
First we have to ask ourselves, how many people can our planet sustain? 10 billion? 15 billion?
Then we have to ask, how long before we reach that many? 100 years? 200 years?
Then we have to ask, what resource is going to run out first? Drinking water? Food? Air?
When we have those answers, we will be able to discuss which is best to spend money and effort on, mining the asteroid field or getting off this damn rock.
Neither: if we have an exponential population growth, going offplanet (even if we had a dozen Earthlikes with reach of chemical rockets which we do not) will not help us.
Here's some very silly math. In 1960 the world's popuation was 3 billion. So let's say it doubles every 50 years, quadruples every century.
Say today we get free warp drive and all the galaxy to explore, and continue our present rate of expansion. Say we're using 1 planet's capacity today.
2110, we'll be using 4 Earths.
2210, 16 Earths. Not a bad little Federation.
2310, 64 Earths.
2410, 256 Earths.
2510, 1024 Earths. All hail the thousand-planet golden age! In the year 2525, if mankind is still alive...
2610, 4K Earths.
2710, 16K Earths.
2810, 64K Earths
2910, 256K Earths
3010, 1 bi-million Earths. All hail the million-planet golden age! uh, Emperor, sir, slight problem, our projections show...
and so about a thousand years down the track the apocalypse starts setting in, depending on how many Earthlike planets you think there are in this galaxy and that we can handwave away energy, coordination and speed-of-light problems.
A thousand years ago we were hitting each other with swords, but we have written history. If present population growth continues, we'll be devastating large chunks of the entire galaxy at a similarly close point in time in the future.
And then will come the 'uh, let's sort out our growth problems, one galaxy is enough' movement, to which the growth advocates will say 'nonsense! There are plenty of galaxies out there! Invent the transgalactic frobnosticator!' And behind us we'll leave an expanding trail of scorched, strip-mined Earths.
Perhaps there's a better way. Perhaps, in fact, we simply don't have the capacity for unlimited expansion into space even if we want to.
Simply getting there is part of what makes us human.
And several trillion dollars worth of consumables shipped out from Earth is what keeps those humans human.
At some point one has to ask 'putting half a dozen people in a hole in the sky with no oxygen, lethal radiation levels, and a 50,000 year transit time to Alpha Centauri is fun and all, but when exactly does it start turning into a road to the stars?'
The inevitable result is that sometimes an investment will appear in some indirect way to harm a charitable effort. Perhaps you can argue that each side should keep a closer eye on what the other is doing.
Yes. That's exactly what the philosophy behind 'ethical investment' is about: deliberately NOT turning a blind eye to the investment arm, and making sure to invest only in enterprises which don't philosophically conflict with the granting arm, so as to maximise the good done per dollar and minimise the harm.
You're right to note that the Gates Foundation is well within the mainstream of charities by not requiring that its investments be ethical. But it is nonetheless an issue which foundations ought to come to grips with. Gates is merely one of the biggest and highest profile targets of a much more general (and yet, IMO, well-founded) criticism.
I hear the same company that developed the flying car is also test-marketing musical candy for dogs. They're truly scrumptious!
So yes, writing is a technology, and technology is not culture.
I would agree to the first statement, but disagree with the second.
Technology shapes culture, as both Marshall McLuhan and E. F. Schumacher took pains to point out. There is no such thing as a value-free tool; every tool has a shape, an affordance, and pushes culture in a certain direction. Therefore, the tools we choose to use have a huge cultural impact.
One would think that every geek posting this website would intuitively understand this, as this realisation also underlies the FOSS and "net neutrality" movements. Why do GNU, EFF, OSI and related organisations push so hard for our technologies to be open? Because "code is law", which is another way of saying that our tools are not value-free but have consequences.
For some of us, cursive is the only writing system we have learned to write. At school block capitals and cursive were the only writing systems that were taught to us.
Really? What decade?
In the 1970s-80s, they taught us 'print' (upper and lower case) and 'writing' (cursive). Hated cursive for its deliberate illegibility, and was glad to never use it once I left school. The fact that keyboarding become more important for literacy in the early 90s helped immensely too.
But I'm surprised to hear that you were taught block capitals but not lower case. I'm sure they started us on lower case first. Was there a sea change in writing education sometime before the 1970s?
OTOH, if the speaker then went over the slide over the course of an hour, following arrows, then you might as well just shoot the audience in the face.
Which, remembering the presenters, could certainly be arranged.
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales
Heard the heavens fill with thunder, and there rain'd a deadly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue
That's not nerd rage, that's BOFHdom. A BOFH does not get angry, he devastates his enemies while smiling.
Now getting back to your comment, you mentioned usability, speed and features. They are important. To you and a very small community (weighted in size against the mass of regular users). They don't matter AT ALL to anyone else. What matters to them is design.
While your argument may be correct, I really wish that you (and the entire rest of the technical/industrial community) would stop using the word 'design' to describe superficial aesthetics.
'Design' used to (and in my opinion still does) mean exactly the things you say it doesn't mean: usability, speed, features, general technical capability. When one talks about 'the design' of an airliner or a ship or a printing press, one does NOT mean just its superstructure or the livery or paintwork, one means what is inside and how it actually works.
Nowadays I suppose we call that 'architecture' or 'engineering'? But it used to be called 'design'.
I'm not sure who is responsible for changing the word 'design' to mean the opposite of what it means, and for creating the occupation 'designer' who does everything except design - but I wish we could get back to reality.
Where are our values?
I don't know, but we'll find them when we find our keys.
Well, you take a double-blind test panel of psychology students, get them to sign a mental health waiver, and ask them to imagine a set of different astronomical distances.
Then you develop a graded imagination test: probably something involving Legos and crayons.
Finally you screen out the students whose minds have boggled due to failure* of imagination, remove them to a secure hardened psychiatric facility**, and continue testing. At 100% failure rate, you have a known unimaginable concept. You then put it in a sealed box with memehazard logos, affix anti-scrying tape, and dispatch to the pareidolon vault at the Department of Unthinkable Conjectures.
It's not pretty, but it's science.
* Imagination can fail in many ways, some more spectacular than others
** Do not on any account attempt this with psychology lecturers.
We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology.
Where each consumer may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing software.
Our Application Store is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one company, with one will, one resolve, one Steve.
Our competitors shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion.
We shall prevail!
Instead of a human voice in real time, you have a typed message. A step backwards.
Not if you're looking for easily recordable, searchable, information. Text is a step forwards for that application - you can't Google on voice, but you can just copy/paste a chat message into a search engine. Or save it to a text file.
Not everything is better in analog.
But using SMS instead of IP-based chat, or routing your chat via SMS over HTML over a proprietary website like Twitter - yes, that seems to be a step backwards.
Or you could do both: choose to pay to prepare America for stupid future wars!
The new Phased Plasma Clown Gun will make our forces unstoppable.
self sufficient countries
It is called autarky I think.
Nazi germany pre-1939 tried it. So they used script internationally and only allowed trading with buddies. The script inflated quickly. We sort of know how that turned out.
Your history is off by a decade. The use of scrip in interwar Germany was in 1922, during the Weimar Republic, and scrip was in fact one of the workable responses to the hyperinflation of the official currency, not one of the causes of it.
And pre-1939, the economy had an important slave labor component. Yah, a lot of people were immediately gassed, but for some reason the camps were next to big industrial plants, so if you were healthy, you got to work yourself to death.
Depends how you define 'pre-1939'. The Nazis didn't actually begin their work camp program as outright slavery - the Roosevelt administration was doing organised work programs during the 30s too. The Nazis did have pograms and mass arrests in the mid-30s, and ended up in an extremely nasty place, but they also had organised construction gangs which solved employment problems initially, and a lot of the worst descent into hell occurred as a result of war and in the occupied territories in Eastern Europe. At least I believe that is the contention of They Thought They Were Free.
The lesson being that war does nasty things to human morality, and total war totally so, and that if a country thinks it can control the social forces unleashed by war - especially self-initiated war, and most especially a war with fluid 'enemy' groups (like race or class) which cross over into civilian populations, it may well be making a mistake which will haunt it for generations.
And if you push self-sufficiency, then it may well be that you are pushing big time not nice.
This, however, I agree with. Self-sufficiency is not pretty.